Plato rustled uneasily.
“What is it, old fellow?” Holbrook murmured. “You’ve got it, don’t you? There’s something funny swimming in your guts, eh? I know. I know. I feel it in my guts too. We have to be philosophers, now. Both of us.” He tossed the leaf sample to the ground and moved the ladder up the row to Alcibiades. “Now, my beauty, now. Let me look. I won’t cut any leaves off you.” He could picture the proud tree snorting, stamping in irritation. “A little bit speckled under there, no? You have it too. Right?” The tree’s outer branches clamped tight, as though Alcibiades were huddling into himself in anguish. Holbrook rolled onward, down the row. The rust spots were far more pronounced than the day before. No imagination, then. Sector C had it. He did not need to wait for the lab report. He felt oddly calm at this confirmation, even though it announced his own ruin.
“Zen?”
He looked down. Naomi stood at the foot of the ladder, holding a nearly ripened fruit in her hand. There was something grotesque about that; the fruits were botany’s joke, explicitly phallic, so that a tree in ripeness with a hundred or more jutting fruits looked like some archetype of the ultimate male, and all visitors found it hugely amusing. But the sight of a fifteen-year-old girl’s hand so thoroughly filled with such an object was obscene, not funny. Naomi had never remarked on the shape of the fruits, nor did she show any embarrassment now. At first he had ascribed it to innocence or shyness, but as he came to know her better, he began to suspect that she was deliberately pretending to ignore that wildly comic biological coincidence to spare his feelings. Since he clearly thought of her as a child, she was tactfully behaving in a childlike way, he supposed; and the fascinating complexity of his interpretation of her attitudes had kept him occupied for days.
“Where did you find that?” he asked.
“Right here, Alcibiades dropped it.”
The dirty-minded joker, Holbrook thought. He said, “What of it?”
“It’s ripe. It’s time to harvest the grove now, isn’t it?” She squeezed the fruit; Holbrook felt his face flaring. “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.