“You’d be surprised. Can you give me some specifics? Like who got cured of what and when?” Hastings said.
“No. I can’t. That’s privileged information, George.”
“Well, you’ve gotten my curiosity up, Doc. Don’t be surprised if somebody with a warrant comes over to pick up your medical records.”
“And don’t be surprised if I tell your process server to go to hell,” Cranford said.
“Here is the analysis of those medical records, sir,” Pendelton said.
“Give it to me verbally, Sergeant.” Hastings leaned back in his padded chair.
“Yes, sir. In the past two years, eighteen U.S. senators and fifty-seven members of the House have had spontaneous remissions of major diseases. The spectrum of the diseases is typical for American males in their age group. In all cases, their internal organs now test out as being equal to those of twenty-year-olds.”
“It almost makes me want to get into politics,” Hastings said. “What else do these particular congressmen have in common?”
“Nothing that’s indicated, sir. The sample seems to be random.”
“Pendelton, I want a very discreet analysis run on these men. Their voting records. The places they visit. The people they know.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll get a few men on it.”
“But discreetly. I don’t have to remind you that the Congress has to approve all promotions of general officers.”
Martin Guibedo drove a battered two-ton truck across Death Valley toward five acres of lush greenery growing out of the surrounding desolation. Death Valley had been one of the public parks that had been sold to private interests in the early ‘90s to “distribute the nation’s wealth to the poor” and make a lot of politicians rich.
He parked next to the fountain and waddled, smiling, to the five-story tree house in the center of the garden. “Ach! Pinecroft!” he said to the tree. “So beautiful you’ve grown! You have got to be the prettiest tree my microscalpel ever made!”
The door opened for him, and he went through the huge living room, noting pleasantly that the waterfalls both worked and the cleaning apparatus was doing its job. In the kitchen, an incredibly beautiful woman rose to greet him, smiling.
“Uncle Martin!” she gushed. “It’s so good to see you!”
“Hi, Mona,” Guibedo said uncomfortably. Is this an animal or a people? “Where’s Heiny?”
“Heinrich is in the communications lab, fourth level down on your right.”
“Thanks.” Guibedo stepped into the elevator and thought, Uncle, yet! I guess Heiny married her legal. None of my business, I suppose. But sometimes Heiny goes too far.
Heinrich Copernick sat back, talking to two hemispherical mounds on his workbench. One was a meter across, the other a third of that.
“You both realize that, though parts of a multinodal communications net, you are really a single multiperson—ality organism. Refusing to talk to each other is extremely adolescent behavior. Now go on with what happened.”
“Yes, my lord,” the larger mound said. “So I said to myself, ‘What is your conception of spaciotemporal reality?’ And I answered me, ‘What?’ Now, how can I communicate with myself when my mental facilities are so different from my own?”
“Just keep working on it,” Heinrich said. “Oh, Uncle Martin! So good to see you. What do you think of my latest?”
“Well, he is schmarter than the other one what you made, Heiny.”
“Which other one?”
“You know. That big dummy what all the time dragged his knuckles in his shit.”
“You must mean the simian-variation labor and defense unit,” Heinrich said. “I’ve pretty much given up on that whole series. Redesigning existing bioforms turned out to be considerably more difficult than I had originally estimated.”
“Yah. Told you so. Putzing around with natural—growed life forms is like trying to build a wristwatch in a junkyard. You is better off in a machine shop. It takes maybe a little bit longer, but you know what you got.”
“It was just that my initial experiments with existing bioforms were so successful, Uncle Martin.”
“Well, if you want to call making yourself look like a gladiator in an Italian movie a successful experiment, you go ahead.”
“I can see nothing wrong with increasing my own strength and stamina.”
“Sure. That’s fine. But the green eyes and the wavy black hair and the baby-smooth complexion, Heiny? Kid stuff! You’re seventy years old and you oughta be above that kind of thing.”
“I’m entitled to a little fun.”
“And what do you need with being seven feet tall for, anyway?”
“For one thing, it hides the size of my head,” Copernick said. “How is your end of it going, Uncle Martin?”
“Just fine and ahead of schedule. My tree houses are getting real popular. Eleven separate species are in public use, with nine more in the advanced experimental stage. My best estimates are one point five million inhabited tree houses and eight million more growing up. Seven million people are living in them right now!” Guibedo glowed with pride.
“Excellent! That’s almost one tenth of one percent of the world’s population.”
“The progression is a geometrical one,” Guibedo said. “We’re almost there, in a coupla years.”
“I wasn’t being facetious, Uncle Martin. I’m genuinely proud of you. How about the heavy-metal extraction project?”
“That’s what I came over here to tell you about. Those kidney trees we planted over the old mines are all growed up.”
“Kidney trees?”
“Yah. I call them that because the extraction glands work just like a human kidney, getting rid of poisonous substances.”
“Like gold, silver, and platinum.” Heinrich laughed. “But are they working?”
“So-so. I think maybe I should have made the mercury come inside of cherries instead of grapefruits. When they fall off the tree, they go schpritzing all over the place. And the mercury gets absorbed by the roots and goes up to the top of the tree, and comes schpritzing down again. Son of a gun, shit. If that mercury was orange paint, I’d look like a pumpkin.”
“You know, Uncle Martin, I could take care of your weight problem pretty easily.”
“What problem? I like being me. And the ground is covered with grapefruit rinds.”
“Nothing serious, we can rig nets or something. But what about the other metals?”
“Oh, that’s pretty good, even if the trees are overworked with the mercury. I got a lot of golden apples and platinum pears out in the truck. I didn’t have room for the silver pinecones or the osmium cherries.”
“Blade! Attention! Central Coordination Unit here.”
A multicolor LDU laid aside the history text that he was reading and trotted over to the CCU’s Input/Output unit in his barracks. “Sir!”
“Blade, take your platoon and unload Lord Guibedo’s truck. Assay the contents and report. Build a smelter and convert the gold into standard twenty-pound bars. Store the platinum for the time being.”
“Sir!”
“A truckload of gold and platinum!” Heinrich said. “Great! Now we can afford to exercise our option to purchase on the land we planted the trees on.”
“And you better do it in a hurry, kid,” Guibedo said. “And get a big fence around it. I saw a troop of boys out hiking, maybe two miles from the main grove.”
“Vintovka! Attention! Central Coordination Unit here.”
“Sir!”
“Vintovka, a troop of boys is on the march two miles north of the heavy-metal extraction grove. I want them under continuous observation. Launch four observation birds, different species, rotation at ten-minute intervals. If the boys come within one mile of the grove, notify me.”