“I only made it so that the tree would grow a new absorption toilet when the old one got plugged up. The trouble was that a lot of them new toilets grew in the beds,” Guibedo said.
“Yeah, somebody was saying that your trees ate a lot of people,” Jimmy repeated, for lack of anything better to say.
“Maybe fifty thousand. Ach! My poor Laurels! Them big shots is chopping you down faster than you can grow!”
“You really love those trees, huh, Professor?”
“It wasn’t really their fault. They shouldn’t have done it, but when you’re lonely and hungry and nobody cares…”
“I know what you mean, Professor. Man, do I know what you mean! But how do I get one?”
“Well, first you got to get out of this jail.”
“That’s easy. They always throw me out in the morning.”
“Ach! I should be so lucky. What’s that scratching sound?”
“Rats. We’re in the basement here. The place is crawling with them. How long you in for anyway, Professor?”
“Who knows? This lawyer my nephew Heiny sent, he says they got maybe twenty thousand warrants out on me. Everything from transporting vegetable matter across state lines without a permit, to premeditated rape. He did some plea bargaining and got most of them reduced to murder in the first degree.”
“Murder one? You know, with a good lawyer, you can beat that one.”
“Sure. The trouble is I got to keep on beating it twenty thousand times! The lawyer figures, if everything goes right, we can do it in maybe three hundred and twenty-five years.”
“Three hundred and… You should live so long!”
“I know. I’m ninety already. It just isn’t fair! Did they throw the Wright brothers in jail every time an airplane crashed? Did Henry Ford get locked up every time somebody got killed in a car wreck? Ach. But that’s my problem, and you can’t do nothing to help me with it. But I can do a lot to help you with yours.”
“My problem, Professor? I told ya, they throw me out in the morning.”
“Sure. And you gonna be panhandling for drinks and sleeping in alleys and back in here tomorrow night.”
“So you think I’m just a bum, huh? Well, let me tell you, Professor, I wasn’t always a bum! I have a college degree, and I had my own business before… well, just before!”
“Ach, Jimmy, I ain’t calling you names, and I ain’t telling you how to run your life. Hah! Sitting here in jail, it looks like I ain’t run my own life so good.
“But you, Jimmy, you got better things coming. Like maybe a ten-room house, with gardens and fountains and plenty of good food and beer all the time in the cupboards.”
“Hey, don’t forget the twenty nude women around my swimming pool.”
“Well, the Ashley series has got forty-foot pools. You gotta get the women on your own.”
“And where am I supposed to get that kind of money?”
“What money? I told you. Eat and make shit!”
“You mean your tree houses are like that! I was thinking of maybe a cubbyhole where I could stay warm.”
“Once you got a DNA string in a microscalpel, Jimmy,you might as well do it up right. You’re thinking in term-fashioned economics, when to build a house twice as big, you had to pay twice as much money. And to make two houses, it costs twice as much again. But with engineered life forms, they build themselves as big as you want, once you’ve designed them. The same thing goes with numbers, since they reproduce themselves. You can make a thousand things, or a million things, just as easy as you can make one. Why, I could have made my tree houses grow millions of seeds and covered the world with them in a year, only I didn’t want to wreck the forests and drive away the animals. Life is best when there is enough, but not too much.
“So anyway, what you got to do is find a nice place to put your tree house. Your best bet is in a state park, maybe. Get way back, maybe a coupla miles from a road, so the big shots won’t bother you. Find a pretty place, with a nice view, near a creek or maybe a waterfall.”
The scratching sound got louder. Guibedo said, “Them must be some damn big rats, Jimmy.”
“The size of dogs, some of them,” Jimmy said. “Go on with what you were saying.”
“So all you got to do is dig a hole, maybe a foot down, and use it for a toilet. Put the seed in it with the point on the seed toward where you want the front door to be. Cover it up and water it every day for three months. You can move into it then, but it won’t be full growed for at least six months.”
“Six months! They grow that fast?” Jimmy said.
“Sure. Engineered life forms are a lot more efficient than natural ones. Or maybe I should say they’re a lot less inefficient. Let me give you some ‘for instances.’
“To get a pound of wood, a natural tree has got to soak up fifteen hundred pounds of water with its roots, run it through its trunk, and evaporate it in its leaves. The only good that all that water did was to haul up a few ounces of trace elements that were dissolved in it. The tree has to do this because transpiration is the only mechanism it has to get those trace elements to the leaves. A simple pump, like your heart, is a million times more efficient.”
“Heh. So all your trees got hearts?”
“Sure. In more ways than one. Another ‘for instance.’ At high noon in the desert, you get about a hundred watts of solar power on each square foot of land. Now just sitting there, Jimmy, your body is burning up a hundred watts to keep you alive. If you were a hundred percent efficient, you could survive without eating just by lying in the sun. But the way nature does it, it takes more than one hundred thousand square feet of land to support a human being.
“Now, I’ve managed to make my tree houses ten percent efficient, about as good as a car engine.”
“You sold me, Professor. Where do I buy a seed?”
“Well, you used to be able to buy one from me for five dollars, but that’s all over now.”
“A house for five dollars?”
“I had to pay for the postage and the advertising. And I had to get some people to help me with the mail. And the boxes cost me twenty-eight cents each! But now I guess you got to get somebody to give you one.”
“I got to panhandle a house? Professor, if you had any idea how hard it is to come up with a fifth of Gallo port…”
“No, no. They promised to give you one. That was the deal when I sold the seed. Once their house was grown up, they had to give a seed to anybody who asked for one. And they had to make that person promise to do the same thing when their house was growed up. Just be sure you pick a model you really like. It ain’t nice to abandon a tree house.”
The scratching got progressively louder until an oval hairline crack, perhaps seven feet by four, suddenly formed on the concrete floor. One end of the slab rose five inches and a snakelike tentacle a yard long slid out. There was an eyeball at the end of it.
“Oh, sweet Jesus, Professor, I never should have touched that sterno! You can’t imagine what I think I see!”
A second eyeballed tentacle joined the first. In unison, they made a 360-degree scan.
“Take it easy, Jimmy, I ain’t had a drink in three weeks, and I’m seeing it, too!”
“My Lord Guibedo,” a voice said from below the concrete. “I am a friend. Please speak softly. May I come up?”
“Nobody up here but us scaredy-cats,” Guibedo whispered. “Come on up and make yourself at home.”
The concrete slab slid to one side. A black creature ascended. It had a rigid oval body six feet long by three wide, but only six inches thick. The eyeballed tentacles extended from the front of its body. It walked on four skinny, muscular legs and held two long humanoid arms close to its body. As it rose from the pit, it changed color like a chameleon, from black to the gray of the prison walls.
“Oh, sweet Mother of Mercy!” Jimmy was cowering in a corner. “I’ve seen orange crocodiles even, but nothing like this!”
“Son of a gun, shit!” Guibedo muttered. “Who are you?”
“My lord, I am Labor and Defense Unit Alpha 001723.”
