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.
“I told you to go to the plantation house,” he snapped.
“I did. But then I saw the flames.”
“Will you get out of here?”
“Why are you burning the trees?”
“Because they’re infected with rust,” he said. “They’ve got to be burned out before it spreads to the others.”
“That’s murder.”
“Naomi, look, will you get back to—”
“You killed Socrates!” she muttered, looking into the grove. “And—and Caesar? No. Hector. Hector’s gone too. You burned them right out!”
“They aren’t people. They’re trees. Sick trees that are going to die soon anyway. I want to save the others.”
“But why kill them? There’s got to be some kind of drug you can use, Zen. Some kind of spray. There’s a drug to cure everything now.”
“Not this.”
“There has to be.”
“Only the fire,” Holbrook said. Sweat rolled coldly down his chest, and he felt a quiver in a thigh muscle. It was hard enough doing this without her around. He said as calmly as he could manage it, “Naomi, this is something that must be done, and fast. There’s no choice about it. I love these trees as much as you do, but I’ve got to burn them out. It’s like the little leggy thing with the sting in its tail: I couldn’t afford to be sentimental about it, simply because it looked cute. It was a menace. And right now Plato and Caesar and the others are menaces to everything I own. They’re plague-bearers. Go back to the house and lock yourself up somewhere until it’s over.”
“I won’t let you kill them!” Tearfully. Defiantly.
Exasperated, he grabbed her shoulders, shook her two or three times, pushed her from the truck cab. She tumbled backward but landed lithely. Jumping down beside her, Holbrook said, “Dammit, don’t make me hit you, Naomi. This is none of your business. I’ve got to burn out those trees, and if you don’t stop interfering—”
“There’s got to be some other way. You let those other men panic you, didn’t you, Zen? They’re afraid the infection will spread, so they told you to burn the trees fast, and you aren’t even stopping to think, to get other opinions, you’re just coming in here with your gun and killing intelligent, sensitive, lovable—”
“Trees,” he said. “This is incredible, Naomi. For the last time—”
Her reply was to leap up on the truck and press herself to the snout of the fusion gun, breasts close against the metal. “If you fire, you’ll have to shoot through me!”
Nothing he could say would make her come down. She was lost in some romantic fantasy, Joan of Arc of the juice-trees, defending the grove against his barbaric assault. Once more he tried to reason with her; once more she denied the need to extirpate the trees. He explained with all the force he could summon the total impossibility of saving these trees; she replied with the power of sheer irrationality that there must be some way. He cursed. He called her a stupid hysterical adolescent. He begged. He wheedled. He commanded. She clung to the gun.
“I can’t waste any more time,” he said finally. “This has to be done in a matter of hours or the whole plantation will go.” Drawing his needier from its holster, he dislodged the safety and gestured at her with the weapon. “Get down from there,” he said icily.
She laughed. “You expect me to think you’d shoot me?”
Of course, she was right. He stood there sputtering impotently, red-faced, baffled. The lunacy was spreading: his threat had been completely empty, as she had seen at once. Holbrook vaulted up beside her on the truck, seized her, tried to pull her down.
She was strong, and his perch was precarious. He succeeded in pulling her away from the gun but had surprisingly little luck in getting her off the truck itself. He didn’t want to hurt her, and in his solicitousness he found himself getting second best in the struggle. A kind of hysterical strength was at her command; she was all elbows, knees, clawing fingers. He got a grip on her at one point, found with horror that he was clutching her breasts, and let go in embarrassment and confusion. She hopped away from him. He came after her, seized her again, and this time was able to push her to the edge of the truck. She leaped off, landed easily, turned, ran into the grove.
So she was still outthinking him. He followed her in; it took him a moment to discover where she was. He found her hugging Caesar’s base and staring in shock at the charred places where Socrates and Hector had been.
“Go on,” she said. “Burn up the whole grove! But you’ll burn me with it!”
Holbrook lunged at her. She stepped to one side and began to dart past him, across to Alcibiades. He pivoted and tried to grab her, lost his balance, and went sprawling, clutching at the air for purchase. He started to fall.
Something wiry and tough and long slammed around his shoulders.
“Zen!” Naomi yelled. The tree—Alcibiades—”
He was off the ground now. Alcibiades had snared him with a grasping tendril and was lifting him toward his crown. The tree was struggling with the burden; but then a second tendril gripped him too and Alcibiades had an easier time. Holbrook thrashed about a dozen feet off the ground.
Cases of trees attacking humans were rare. It had happened perhaps five times altogether, in the generations that men had been cultivating juice-trees here. In each instance the victim had been doing something that the grove regarded as hostile—such as removing a diseased tree.
A man was a big mouthful for a juice-tree. But not beyond its appetite.
Naomi screamed and Alcibiades continued to lift. Holbrook could hear the clashing of fangs above; the tree’s mouth was getting ready to receive him. Alcibiades the vain, Alcibiades the mercurial, Alcibiades the unpredictable—well named, indeed. But was it treachery to act in self-defense? Alcibiades had a strong will to survive. He had seen the fates of Hector and Socrates. Holbrook looked up at the ever closer fangs. So this is how it happens, he thought. Eaten by one of my own trees. My friends. My pets. Serves me right for sentimentalizing them. They’re carnivores. Tigers with roots.
Alcibiades screamed.
In the same instant one of the tendrils wrapped about Holbrook’s body lost its grip. He dropped about twenty feet in a single dizzying plunge before the remaining tendril steadied itself, leaving him dangling a few yards above the floor of the grove. When he could breathe again, Holbrook looked down and saw what had happened. Naomi had picked up the needier that he had dropped when he had been seized by the tree, and had burned away one tendril. She was taking aim again. There was another scream from Alcibiades; Holbrook was aware of a great commotion in the branches above him; he tumbled the rest of the way to the ground and landed hard in a pile of mulched leaves. After a moment he rolled over and sat up. Nothing broken. Naomi stood above him, arms dangling, the needier still in her hand.
“Are you all right?” she asked soberly.
