The Fangs of the Trees Read online

  She was right: harvest time was about to begin in Sector C, five days early. He took no joy of it; it was a sign of the disease that he now knew infested these trees.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He jumped down beside her and held out the bundle of leaves he had cut from Plato. “You see these spots? It’s rust. A blight that strikes juice-trees.”

  “No!”

  “It’s been going through one system after another for the past fifty years. And now it’s here despite all quarantines.”

  “What happens to the trees?”

  “A metabolic speedup,” Holbrook said. “That’s why the fruit is starting to drop. They accelerate their cycles until they’re going through a year in a couple of weeks. They become sterile. They defoliate. Six months after the onset, they’re dead.” Holbrook’s shoulders sagged. “I’ve suspected it for two or three days. Now I know.”

  She looked interested but not really concerned. “What causes it, Zen?”

  “Ultimately, a virus. Which passes through so many hosts that I can’t tell you the sequence. It’s an interchange-vector deal, where the virus occupies plants and gets into their seeds, is eaten by rodents, gets into their blood, gets picked up by stinging insects, passed along to a mammal, then—oh, hell, what do the details matter? It took eighty years just to trace the whole sequence. You can’t quarantine your world against everything, either. The rust is bound to slip in, piggybacking on some kind of living thing. And here it is.”

  “I guess you’ll be spraying the plantation, then.”

  “No.”

  To kill the rust? What’s the treatment?”

  “There isn’t any,” Holbrook said.

  “But—”

  “Look, I’ve got to go back to the plantation house. You can keep yourself busy without me, can’t you?”

  “Sure.” She pointed to the meat. “I haven’t even finished feeding them yet. And they’re especially hungry this morning.”

  He started to tell her that there was no point in feeding them now, that all the trees in this sector would be dead by nightfall. But an instinct warned him that it would be too complicated to start explaining that to her now. He flashed a quick sunless smile and trotted to the bug. When he looked back at her, she was hurling a huge slab of meat toward Henry the Eighth, who seized it expertly and stuffed it in his mouth.

  The lab report came sliding from the wall output around two hours later, and it confirmed what Holbrook already knew: rust. At least half the planet had heard the news by then, and Holbrook had had a dozen visitors so far. On a planet with a human population of slightly under four hundred, that was plenty. The district governor, Fred Leitfried, showed up first, and so did the local agricultural commissioner, who also happened to be Fred Leitfried. A two-man delegation from the Juice-Growers’ Guild arrived next. Then came Mortensen, the rubbery-faced little man who ran the processing plant, and Heemskerck of the export line, and somebody from the bank, along with a representative of the insurance company. A couple of neighboring growers dropped over a little later; they offered sympathetic smiles and comradely graspings of the shoulder, but not very far beneath their commiserations lay potential hostility. They wouldn’t come right out and say it, but Holbrook didn’t need to be a telepath to know what they were thinking: Get rid of those rusty trees before they infect the whole damned planet.

  In their position he’d think the same. Even though the rust vectors had reached this world, the thing wasn’t all that contagious. It could be confined; neighboring plantations could be saved, and even the unharmed groves of his own place—if he moved swiftly enough. If the man next door had rust on his trees, Holbrook would be as itchy as these fellows were about getting it taken care of quickly.

  Fred Leitfried, who was tall and bland-faced and blue-eyed and depressingly somber even on a cheerful occasion, looked about ready to burst into tears now. He said, “Zen, I’ve ordered a planetwide rust alert. The biologicals will be out within thirty minutes to break the carrier chain. We’ll begin on your property and work in a widening radius until we’ve isolated this entire quadrant. After that we’ll trust to luck.”

  “Which vector are you going after?” Mortensen asked, tugging tensely at his lower lip.

  “Hoppers,” said Leitfried. “They’re biggest and easiest to knock off, and we know that they’re potential rust carriers. If the virus hasn’t been transmitted to them yet, we can interrupt the sequence there and maybe we’ll get out of this intact.”

  Holbrook said hollowly, “You know that you’re talking about exterminating maybe a million animals.”

  “I know, Zen.”

  “You think you can do it?”

  “We have to do it. Besides,” Leitfried added, “the contingency plans were drawn a long time ago, and everything’s ready to go. We’ll have a fine mist of hopperlethals covering half the continent before nightfall.”

  “A damned shame,” muttered the man from the bank. “They’re such peaceful animals.”

  “But now they’re threats,” said one of the growers. “They’ve got to go.”

  Holbrook scowled. He liked hoppers himself; they were big rabbity things, almost the size of bears, that grazed on worthless scrub and did no harm to humans. But they had been identified as susceptible to infection by the rust virus, and it had been shown on other worlds that by knocking out one basic stage in the transmission sequence the spread of rust could be halted, since the viruses would die if they were unable to find an adequate host of the next stage in their life cycle. Naomi is fond of hoppers, he thought. She’ll think we’re bastards for wiping them out. But we have our trees to save. And if we were real bastards, we’d have wiped them out before the rust ever got here, just to make things a little safer for ourselves.

  Leitfried turned to him. “You know what you have to do now, Zen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want help?”

  “I’d rather do it myself.” “We can get you ten men.”

  “It’s just one sector, isn’t it?” he asked. “I can do it. I ought to do it. They’re my trees.”

  “How soon will you start?” asked Borden, the grower whose plantation adjoined Holbrook’s on the east. There was fifty miles of brush country between Holbrook’s land and Borden’s, but it wasn’t hard to see why the man would be impatient about getting the protective measures under way.

  Holbrook said, “Within an hour, I guess. I’ve got to calculate a little, first. Fred, suppose you come upstairs with me and help me check the infected area on the screens?”

  “Right.”

  The insurance man stepped forward. “Before you go, Mr. Holbrook—”

  “Eh?”

  “I just want you to know, we’re in complete approval. We’ll back you all the way.”

  Damn nice of you, Holbrook thought sourly. What was insurance for, if not to back you all the way? But he managed an amiable grin and a quick murmur of thanks.

  The man from the bank said nothing. Holbrook was grateful for that. There was time later to talk about refurbishing the collateral, renegotiation of notes, things like that. First it was necessary to see how much of the plantation would be left after Holbrook had taken the required protective measures.

  In the info center, he and Leitfried got all the screens going at once. Holbrook indicated Sector C and tapped out a grove simulation on the computer. He fed in the data from the lab report. “There are the infected trees,” he said, using a light-pen to circle them on the output screen. “Maybe fifty of them altogether.” He drew a larger circle. “This is the zone of possible incubation. Another eighty or a hundred trees. What do you say, Fred?”

  The district governor took the light-pen from Holbrook and touched the stylus tip to the screen. He drew a wider circle that reached almost to the periphery of the sector.

  “These are the ones to go, Zen.”

  “That’s four hundred trees.”

  “How many do you have altogether?”
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br />   Holbrook shrugged. “Maybe seven, eight thousand.”

  “You want to lose them all?”

  “Okay,” Holbrook said. “You want a protective moat around the infection zone, then. A sterile area.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the use? If the virus can come down out of the sky, why bother to—”

  “Don’t talk that way,” Leitfried said. His face grew longer and longer, the embodiment of all the sadness and frustration and despair in the universe. He looked the way Holbrook felt. But his tone was incisive as he said, “Zen, you’ve got just two choices here. You can get out into the groves and start burning, or you can give up and let the rust grab everything. If you do the first, you’ve got a chance to save most of what you own. If you give up, well burn you out anyway, for our own protection. And we won’t stop just with four hundred trees.”

  “I’m going,” Holbrook said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “I wasn’t worried. Not really.”

  Leitfried slid behind the command nodes to monitor the entire plantation while Holbrook gave his orders to the robots and requisitioned the equipment he would need. Within ten minutes he was organized and ready to go.

  “There’s a girl in the infected sector,” Leitfried said. “That niece of yours, huh?”

  “Naomi, yes.”

  “Beautiful. What is she, eighteen, nineteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Quite a figure on her, Zen,”

  “What’s she doing now?” Holbrook asked. “Still feeding the trees?”

  “No, she’s sprawled out underneath one of them. I think she’s talking to them. Telling them a story, maybe? Should I cut in the audio?”

  “Don’t bother. She likes to play games with the trees. You know, give them names and imagine that they have personalities. Kid stuff.”

  “Sure,” said Leitfried. Their eyes met briefly and evasively. Holbrook looked down. The trees did have personalities, and every man in the juice business knew it, and probably there weren’t many growers who didn’t have a much closer relationship to their groves than they’d ever admit to another man. Kid stuff. It was something you didn’t talk about.

  Poor Naomi, he thought.

  He left Leitfried in the info center and went out the back way. The robots had set everything up just as he had programmed: the spray truck with the fusion gun mounted in place of the chemical tank. Two or three of the gleaming little mechanicals hovered around, waiting to be asked to hop aboard, but he shook them off and slipped behind the steering panel. He activated the data output and the small dashboard screen lit up; from the info center above, Leitfried greeted him and threw him the simulated pattern of the infection zone, with the three concentric circles glowing to indicate the trees with rust, those that might be incubating, and the safety-margin belt that Leitfried had insisted on his creating around the entire sector.

  The truck rolled off toward the groves.

  It was midday, now, of what seemed to be the longest day he had ever known. The sun, bigger and a little more deeply tinged with orange than the sun under which he had been born, lolled lazily overhead, not quite ready to begin its tumble into the distant plains. The day was hot, but as soon as he entered the groves, where the tight canopy of the adjoining trees shielded the ground from the worst of the sun’s radiation, he felt a welcome coolness seeping into the cab of the truck. His lips were dry. There was an ugly throbbing just back of his left eyeball. He guided the truck manually, taking it on the access track around Sectors A, D, and G. The trees, seeing him, flapped their limbs a little. They were eager to have him get out and walk among them, slap their trunks, tell them what good fellows they were. He had no time for that now.

  In fifteen minutes he was at the north end of his property, at the edge of Sector C. He parked the spray truck on the approach lip overlooking the grove; from here he could reach any tree in the area with the fusion gun. Not quite yet, though.

  He walked into the doomed grove.

  Naomi was nowhere in sight. He would have to find her before he could begin firing. And even before that, he had some farewells to make. Holbrook trotted down the main avenue of the sector. How cool it was here, even at noon! How sweet the loamy air smelled! The floor of the grove was littered with fruit; dozens had come down in the past couple of hours. He picked one up. Ripe: he split it with an expert snap of his wrist and touched the pulpy interior to his lips. The juice, rich and sweet, trickled into his mouth. He tasted just enough of it to know that the product was first-class. His intake was far from a hallucinogenic dose, but it would give him a mild euphoria, sufficient to see him through the ugliness ahead.

  He looked up at the trees. They were tightly drawn in, suspicious, uneasy.

  “We have troubles, fellows,” Holbrook said. “You, Hector, you know it. There’s a sickness here. You can feel it inside you. There’s no way to save you. All I can hope to do is save the other trees, the ones that don’t have the rust yet. Okay? Do you understand? Plato? Caesar? I’ve got to do this. It’ll cost you only a few weeks of life, but it may save thousands of other trees.”

  An angry rustling in the branches. Alcibiades had pulled his limbs away disdainfully. Hector, straight and true, was ready to take his medicine. Socrates, lumpy and malformed, seemed prepared also. Hemlock or fire, what did it matter? Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Caesar seemed enraged; Plato was actually cringing. They understood, all of them. He moved among them, patting them, comforting them. He had begun his plantation with this grove. He had expected these trees to outlive him.

  He said, “I won’t make a long speech. All I can say is good-bye. You’ve been good fellows, you’ve lived useful lives, and now your time is up, and I’m sorry as hell about it. That’s all. I wish this wasn’t necessary.” He cast his glance up and down the grove. “End of speech. So long.”

  Turning away, he walked slowly back to the spray truck. He punched for contact with the info center and said to Leitfried, “Do you know where the girl is?”

  “One sector over from you to the south. She’s feeding the trees.” He flashed the picture on Holbrook’s screen.

  “Give me an audio line, will you?”

  Through his speakers Holbrook said, “Naomi? It’s me, Zen.”

  She looked around, halting just as she was about to toss a chunk of meat. “Wait a second,” she said. “Catherine the Great is hungry, and she won’t let me forget it.” The meat soared upward, was snared, disappeared into the mouth of a tree. “Okay,” Naomi said. “What is it, now?”

  “I think you’d better go back to the plantation house.”

  “I’ve still got lots of trees to feed.”

  “Do it this afternoon.”

  “Zen, what’s going on?”

  “I’ve got some work to do, and I’d rather not have you in the groves when I’m doing it.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “C.”

  “Maybe I can help you, Zen. I’m only in the next sector down the line. I’ll come right over.”

  “No. Go back to the house.” The words came out as a cold order. He had never spoken to her like that before. She looked shaken and startled; but she got obediently into her bug and drove off. Holbrook followed her on his screen until she was out of sight. “Where is she now?” he asked Leitfried.

  “She’s coming back. I can see her on the access track.”

  “Okay,” Holbrook said. “Keep her busy until this is over. I’m going to get started.”

  He swung the fusion gun around, aiming its stubby barrel into the heart of the grove. In the squat core of the gun a tiny pinch of sun-stuff was hanging suspended in a magnetic pinch, available infinitely for an energy tap more than ample for his power needs today. The gun had no sight, for it was not intended as a weapon; he thought he could manage things, though. He was shooting at big targets. Sighting by eye, he picked out Socrates at the edge of the grove, fiddled with the gun-mounting for a couple of moments of deliberate hesita
tion, considered the best way of doing this thing that awaited him, and put his hand to the firing control. The tree’s neural nexus was in its crown, back of the mouth. One quick blast there—

  Yes.

  An arc of white flame hissed through the air. Socrates’ misshapen crown was bathed for an instant in brilliance. A quick death, a clean death, better than rotting with rust. Now Holbrook drew his line of fire down from the top of the dead tree, along the trunk. The wood was sturdy stuff; he fired again and again, and limbs and branches and leaves shriveled and dropped away, while the trunk itself remained intact, and great oily gouts of smoke rose above the grove. Against the brightness of the fusion beam Holbrook saw the darkness of the naked trunk outlined, and it surprised him how straight the old philosopher’s trunk had been, under the branches. Now the trunk was nothing more than a pillar of ash; and now it collapsed and was gone.

  From the other trees of the grove came a terrible low moaning.

  They knew that death was among them; and they felt the pain of Socrates’ absence through the network of root-nerves in the ground. They were crying out in fear and anguish and rage.

  Doggedly Holbrook turned the fusion gun on Hector.

  Hector was a big tree, impassive, stoic, neither a complainer nor a preener. Holbrook wanted to give him the good death he deserved, but his aim went awry; the first bolt struck at least eight feet below the tree’s brain center, and the echoing shriek that went up from the surrounding trees revealed what Hector must be feeling. Holbrook saw the limbs waving frantically, the mouth opening and closing in a horrifying rictus of torment. The second bolt put an end to Hector’s agony. Almost calmly, now, Holbrook finished the job of extirpating that noble tree.

  He was nearly done before he became aware that a bug had pulled up beside his truck and Naomi had erupted from it, flushed, wide-eyed, close to hysteria. “Stop!” she cried. “Stop it, Uncle Zen! Don’t burn them!”

  As she leaped into the cab of the spraying truck she caught his wrists with surprising strength and pulled herself up against him. She was gasping, panicky, her breasts heaving, her nostrils wide.