neighbor—Phyllis seemed unappreciative. She had hardly looked at the inside of the cottage, when he had shown her through, and now was staring at the outside in a blank sort of way.
The indoctrination courses had not, he reflected, reconciled her to the frontiersman’s necessarily simple mode of living—which was ironic, considering that one of her original attractions for him had been her apparent suitability for the pioneer life. She was a big girl, radiantly healthy, even though a little green at the moment.
He just managed to keep his voice steady. “You don’t like the house—is that it?
“But I do like it. Honestly I do.” She touched his arm diffidently. “Everything would be perfect if only—”
“If only what? Is it the curtains? I’m sorry if you don’t like them. I brought them all the way from Earth in case the planet turned out to be habitable. I thought blue was your favorite color.”
“Oh, it is, it is! I’m mad about the curtains.”
Perhaps it wasn’t the house that disappointed her; perhaps it was he himself who hadn’t lived up to dim memory and ardent expectation.
“If you want to know what is bothering me—” she glanced up apprehensively, lowering her voice as she did —“it’s that tree. It’s stuck on you; I just know it is.”
He laughed. “Now where did you get a preposterous idea like that, Phyl? You’ve been on the planet exactly twenty-four hours and—”
“—and I have, in my luggage, one hundred and thirty-two ethergrams talking about practically nothing but Magnolia this, Magnolia that. Oh, I had my suspicions even before I landed, James. The only thing I didn’t suspect was that she was a tree!”
“What are you talking about, honey? Magnolia and I—we’re just friends.”
“Purely a platonic relationship, I assure you,” the tree herself agreed. It would have been silly for her to pretend not to have overheard, since the two were still standing almost directly underneath her. “Purely platonic.”
“She’s more like a sister to me,” James tried to explain.
Phyllis stiffened. “Frankly, if I had imagined I was going to have a tree for a sister-in-law, I would have thought before I married you, James.” Bursting into tears, she ran inside the cottage.
“Sorry,” he said miserably to Magnolia. “It’s a long trip out from Earth and an uncomfortable one. I don’t suppose the other women were especially nice to her, either. Faculty wives mostly and you know how they are…. No, I don’t suppose you would. But she shouldn’t have acted that way toward you.”
“Not your fault,” Magnolia told him, sighing with such intensity that he could feel the humidity rise. “I know how you’ve been looking forward to her arrival. Rather a letdown, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be all right.” He tried to sound confident. “And I know you’ll like Phyllis when you get to know her.”
“Possibly, but so far I’m afraid I must admit—since there never has been any pretense between us—that she is a bit of a disappointment. I—and my sisters also—had expected your females, when they came, to be as upright and true blue as you. Instead, what are they? Shrubs.”
The door to the cottage flew open. “A shrub, am I!” Phyllis brandished an axe which, James winced to recall, was an item of the equipment he had ordered from Earth before the scout team had learned that the trees were intelligent. “I’ll shrub you!”
“Phyllis!” He wrested the axe from her grip. “That would be murder!”
“’Woodman,’ as the Terrestrial poem goes,” the tree remarked, “’spare that tree! Touch not a single bough! In youth it sheltered me and I’ll protect it now!’”
Good of her to take the whole thing so calmly—rather, to pretend to take it so calmly, for he knew how sensitive Magnolia really was—but he was afraid this show of moral courage would not diminish Phyllis’s dislike for her; those without self-control seldom appreciate those who have it.
“If you’ll excuse us,” he said, putting his arm around his wife’s heaving shoulders, “I’d better see to Phyllis; she’s a little upset. Holdover from spacesickness, I expect. Poor girl, she’s a long way from home and frightened.”
“I understand, Jim,” Magnolia told him, “and, remember, whatever happens, you can always count on me.”
“I must say you’re not a very admirable representative of Terrestrial womanhood!” James snapped, as soon as the door had slammed behind him and his wife, leaving them alone together in the principal room of the cottage. “Insulting the very first native you meet!”
“I did not either insult her. All I said was, ‘What beautiful flowers—do you suppose the fruit is edible?’ How was I to know it—she could understand? Naturally I wouldn’t dream of eating her fruit now. It would probably taste nasty anyway. And how do you think I felt when a tree answered me back? You don’t care that I fainted dead away, and I’ve never fainted before in my life. All you care about is that old vegetable’s feelings! It was bad enough, feeling for five months that someone had come between us, but to find out it wasn’t someone but something —!”
“Phyllis,” he said coldly, “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head.”
Dropping into the overstuffed chair, his wife dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “She wasn’t so very polite to me!”
“Look, Phyllis—” he strove to make his voice calm, adult, reasonable—“you happened to have hit on rather a touchy point with her. Those trees are dioecious, you know, like us, and she isn’t mated. And, well, she has rather a lot of xylem zones—rings, you know.”
“Are you trying to tell me she’s old?”
“Well, she’s no sapling any more. And, consideration aside, you know it’s government’s policy for us to establish good relations with any intelligent life-form we have to share a planet with. You weren’t in there trying.”
Phyllis put away her handkerchief with what he hoped would be a final sniff. “I suppose I shouldn’t have acted that way,” she conceded.
“Now you’re talking like my own dear Phyllis,” James said tenderly, though, as a matter of fact, he had a very remote idea of what his own dear Phyllis was like. He had met her only a couple of months before the scout mission was scheduled, and so their courtship had been brief, and the actual weeks of marriage even briefer. He had remembered Phyllis as beautiful—and she was beautiful. He had not, however, remembered her as pig-headed—and pig-headed she was, too.
“How come she hasn’t a mate? I didn’t think trees were choosy.”
He wouldn’t take exception to that statement, uncharitable though it was; after all, someone whose only acquaintance with trees had been with the Terrestrial variety would naturally be incapable of appreciating the total tree at its highest development.
“It’s a great tragedy,” he told her in a hushed tone. “There was a blight some years back and most of the male trees died off, except for a few on the other side of the planet—well out of bee-shot, even if the females there would let the females here have any pollen, which they absolutely won’t.”
“I don’t blame them,” Phyllis said coldly. Of course she would identify at once with the trees whose domestic lives seemed to be threatened.
“It’s not that so much. It’s that the male trees produce so little pollen.”
“This would be a good place for people with hay fever then, wouldn’t it?”
“And even when there is fruit, so much of it tends to be parthenocarpous—no seeds.” He sighed. “The entire race is dying out.”
“How is it you know so much about botany?” she asked suspiciously. “It’s not your field.”
“I don’t know so very much, really,” he smiled. “I had to learn a little, if I wanted to work the land, so I borrowed an elementary text from Cutler.” Had he been a trifle idealistic in quitting his snug, if uninspiring, job on the faculty to join in this Utopian venture? So many of the other men at the university had enrolled, it had seemed a splendid idea until Phyllis’s arrival.
“Daddy never had any trouble working his land and he doesn’t know a thing about botany. You’ve been
