“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 hesitation, 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
