Leitfried turned to him. “You know what you have to do now, Zen?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want help?”
“I’d rather do it myself.” “We can get you ten men.”
“It’s just one sector, isn’t it?” he asked. “I can do it. I ought to do it. They’re my trees.”
“How soon will you start?” asked Borden, the grower whose plantation adjoined Holbrook’s on the east. There was fifty miles of brush country between Holbrook’s land and Borden’s, but it wasn’t hard to see why the man would be impatient about getting the protective measures under way.
Holbrook said, “Within an hour, I guess. I’ve got to calculate a little, first. Fred, suppose you come upstairs with me and help me check the infected area on the screens?”
“Right.”
The insurance man stepped forward. “Before you go, Mr. Holbrook—”
“Eh?”
“I just want you to know, we’re in complete approval. We’ll back you all the way.”
Damn nice of you, Holbrook thought sourly. What was insurance for, if not to back you all the way? But he managed an amiable grin and a quick murmur of thanks.
The man from the bank said nothing. Holbrook was grateful for that. There was time later to talk about refurbishing the collateral, renegotiation of notes, things like that. First it was necessary to see how much of the plantation would be left after Holbrook had taken the required protective measures.
In the info center, he and Leitfried got all the screens going at once. Holbrook indicated Sector C and tapped out a grove simulation on the computer. He fed in the data from the lab report. “There are the infected trees,” he said, using a light-pen to circle them on the output screen. “Maybe fifty of them altogether.” He drew a larger circle. “This is the zone of possible incubation. Another eighty or a hundred trees. What do you say, Fred?”
The district governor took the light-pen from Holbrook and touched the stylus tip to the screen. He drew a wider circle that reached almost to the periphery of the sector.
“These are the ones to go, Zen.”
“That’s four hundred trees.”
“How many do you have altogether?”
Holbrook shrugged. “Maybe seven, eight thousand.”
“You want to lose them all?”
“Okay,” Holbrook said. “You want a protective moat around the infection zone, then. A sterile area.”
“Yes.”
“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.”