“Take a look,” she said, and tossed it up to him.
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?”
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.”
