Copernick's Rebellion

said.

“The subway at this hour?” Patricia said. “But they’re so dangerous after dark!”

“There is a couple of things good about weighing three hundred pounds, Patty. One is that most people don’t bother you,” Guibedo said. “So what do you think of Laurel, who I give to Burty here?”

“It’s lovely, Dr. Guibedo. And it’s so huge!” Patricia said.

“It might make a decent warehouse, if you could get a forklift through the front door,” Scratchon said.

“Don’t do that, Burty. The carpets couldn’t take the weight. Anyway, we’re going to have plenty of warehouses pretty soon.”

“Do you mean that you are working on a tree-house warehouse, Dr. Guibedo?” Patricia asked.

“No. I just mean that a lot of warehouses are used up for storing things like lumber and food. With my tree houses, we’re not going to do that much any more, so we’re gong to have more warehouses than we need.” Guibedo sat down on one of the oversized chairs in the tree house’s living room.

“My God!” Scratchon said. “You mean that you’re deliberately wrecking the economy?”

“What wrecking? I’m just saying that we’re going to have extra, so we don’t have to build any more for a while.”

Scratchon was about to erupt, so Patricia cut in. “Dr. Guibedo, you were going to explain about the care and feeding of tree houses to us.”

“Sure. There isn’t really that much to tell, Patty. The tree house is six months old now, so it can mostly take care of itself.”

“Dr. Guibedo, I just can’t get over how fast they grow.”

“Nothing to it, Patty. Do the arithmetic. On an acre of land you have falling seventeen million calories of solar power every minute. A pound of my wood takes three thousand calories to make, and my tree houses are about ten percent efficient. So if a tree house isn’t doing anything else but making wood, you have maybe five hundred pounds of wood per acre per minute.”

Patricia was trying to take notes, but she always had problems with large numbers. “But it is doing other things, isn’t it, Dr. Guibedo?”

“Sure. It keeps you cool in the summer and warm in the winter and it makes food and beer for you. And it has to use some of what it makes to keep itself alive. And then, when it was little, it didn’t have an acre of photosynthetic area to work with.”

“Doesn’t it give you the creeps to live in something that’s alive?” Scratchon said.

“You like better maybe living in something’s that dead?”

“Dr. Guibedo, you were going to tell us about how to take care of them,” Patricia said, working hard to keep them from fighting.

“Nothing much to tell. The floors and walls absorb foreign material, so you don’t have to clean them. The wastebaskets and toliets work about the same way, only a lot faster, of course. The closets and cupboards you gotta dust out. You should maybe mark on the kitchen cupboards what food grows where, unless you like surprises.”

“But what about watering it and fertilizer, Dr. Guibedo?”

“Well, Patty, once it’s this big, the roots go down pretty far, so you don’t have to worry about watering it. The toliet gives it all the fertilizer it needs,” Guibedo said.

“Then there’s nothing to do but live in it?”

“That’s right, Patty, but you got to use it. A tree house will die if there is nobody living there. I made them that way so that we won’t have a bunch of empty slums some day. And talk to your tree, Burty. They like that.”

“Thank you, Dr. Guibedo,” Patricia said.

“So thank you, Patty. If you don’t need me any more, I got to run. I have three more tree houses here in Forest Hills and I want to look in on them.”

Guibedo left before Scratchon could say any more to him; he said it to Patricia. “So my own damned neighbors are growing these things! That jelly belly is using me for advertising.”

“You’re not being fair, Mr. Scratchon. After all, he gave you this house!”

“And now I’ve got to live in the thing. He’s a sneaky S.O.B.”

“Nonsense. He’s a very nice old man, and he’s trying to do something nice for people. These tree houses are only toys in this part of Queens, but think about what they’ll mean to the people starving in India,” Patricia said.

“Yeah. They’ll be able to raise more cannon fodder for the Neo-Krishnas to throw at us. And when they do, our economy will be in such bad shape that this time we’ll have trouble defeating them.”

“I don’t think that Dr. Guibedo looks at it that way.”

“What he thinks he’s doing doesn’t make much difference. What he is doing is destroying the free world.”

A knock sounded at the front door.

“Now who the hell?…” Scratchon opened the massive front door.

“I guess I got the right place, Burt.” Major General George Hastings was in uniform, smartly tailored class —A blues. He had the small, compact build of a fighter pilot.

“George! It’s been months! What brings you to New York?”

“Just passing through La Guardia with a little time on my hands.”

“Hey, you got your second star! Looks like somebody in the old squadron made good.”

“You haven’t done so badly yourself, Burt.” Hastings noticed Patricia. “Oh. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Not in the least. George Hastings, Patricia Cambridge. George and I were in the Twenty Third Interceptor Wing over Sri Lanka. Now he’s the commander of Air Force Intelligence. Ms. Cambridge is with NBC, so watch what you say, George.”

“Here I was hoping that you would be a foreign spy and try to seduce military secrets out of me.” Hastings smiled at Patricia.

“Maybe I could take a night course and train for the job.” Patricia smiled back.

“How’s the wife and kids, George?” Scratchon wasn’t smiling.

“Fine. Actually, Margaret is one of the reasons I dropped by. She got a tree-house seed—a Laurel, I think— in the mail with a Burpee’s catalog, and she wanted me to get an idea of what the floor plan would be like.”

“My God! You, too? Don’t you realize the danger to the economy that the damned things represent?”

“Come off it, Burt. Quit trying to make your job into a holy war. Anyway, the kids planted the damned thing on our property along Lake George. On An O-8’s pay I couldn’t afford to build a house up there, so planting a tree house won’t set the economy back any.”

“But in the long run—”

“In the long run we’ll all be dead. For right now, there are more important things to worry about.”

“Like what? Is there something going on that they don’t tell us civilians?” Patricia said.

“Nothing that you don’t read in the papers. But the human race is outgrowing this little planet, and there is no place else to go,” Hastings said.

“But I heard that the moon project and L-Five were going all right.”

“There are less than ten thousand people up there. What’s that to the ten billion people on Earth? Don’t get me wrong. I support those projects. But they won’t help us out much down here,” Hastings said.

“And you think that these tree houses will?” Scratchon asked.

“They might, Burt. They just might.”

“I wish that you could have gotten here ten minutes sooner,” Patricia said. “Dr. Guibedo could have used some encouragement.”

“Guibedo was here?” Hastings said. “I’m sorry that I missed him. But how did you meet him? I’d heard that he was something of a recluse.”

“A news girl gets around. Actually, I met him through a friend of his nephew, Heinrich Copernick.”

“The same guy who raised the stink about rejuvenation a few years back?” Scratchon asked.