An angry rustling in the branches. Alcibiades had pulled his limbs away disdainfully. Hector, straight and true, was ready to take his medicine. Socrates, lumpy and malformed, seemed prepared also. Hemlock or fire, what did it matter? Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Caesar seemed enraged; Plato was actually cringing. They understood, all of them. He moved among them, patting them, comforting them. He had begun his plantation with this grove. He had expected these trees to outlive him.
He said, “I won’t make a long speech. All I can say is good-bye. You’ve been good fellows, you’ve lived useful lives, and now your time is up, and I’m sorry as hell about it. That’s all. I wish this wasn’t necessary.” He cast his glance up and down the grove. “End of speech. So long.”
Turning away, he walked slowly back to the spray truck. He punched for contact with the info center and said to Leitfried, “Do you know where the girl is?”
“One sector over from you to the south. She’s feeding the trees.” He flashed the picture on Holbrook’s screen.
“Give me an audio line, will you?”
Through his speakers Holbrook said, “Naomi? It’s me, Zen.”
She looked around, halting just as she was about to toss a chunk of meat. “Wait a second,” she said. “Catherine the Great is hungry, and she won’t let me forget it.” The meat soared upward, was snared, disappeared into the mouth of a tree. “Okay,” Naomi said. “What is it, now?”
“I think you’d better go back to the plantation house.”
“I’ve still got lots of trees to feed.”
“Do it this afternoon.”
“Zen, what’s going on?”
“I’ve got some work to do, and I’d rather not have you in the groves when I’m doing it.”
“Where are you now?”
“C.”
“Maybe I can help you, Zen. I’m only in the next sector down the line. I’ll come right over.”
“No. Go back to the house.” The words came out as a cold order. He had never spoken to her like that before. She looked shaken and startled; but she got obediently into her bug and drove off. Holbrook followed her on his screen until she was out of sight. “Where is she now?” he asked Leitfried.
“She’s coming back. I can see her on the access track.”
“Okay,” Holbrook said. “Keep her busy until this is over. I’m going to get started.”
He swung the fusion gun around, aiming its stubby barrel into the heart of the grove. In the squat core of the gun a tiny pinch of sun-stuff was hanging suspended in a magnetic pinch, available infinitely for an energy tap more than ample for his power needs today. The gun had no sight, for it was not intended as a weapon; he thought he could manage things, though. He was shooting at big targets. Sighting by eye, he picked out Socrates at the edge of the grove, fiddled with the gun-mounting for a couple of moments of deliberate hesitation, considered the best way of doing this thing that awaited him, and put his hand to the firing control. The tree’s neural nexus was in its crown, back of the mouth. One quick blast there—
Yes.
An arc of white flame hissed through the air. Socrates’ misshapen crown was bathed for an instant in brilliance. A quick death, a clean death, better than rotting with rust. Now Holbrook drew his line of fire down from the top of the dead tree, along the trunk. The wood was sturdy stuff; he fired again and again, and limbs and branches and leaves shriveled and dropped away, while the trunk itself remained intact, and great oily gouts of smoke rose above the grove. Against the brightness of the fusion beam Holbrook saw the darkness of the naked trunk outlined, and it surprised him how straight the old philosopher’s trunk had been, under the branches. Now the trunk was nothing more than a pillar of ash; and now it collapsed and was gone.
From the other trees of the grove came a terrible low moaning.
They knew that death was among them; and they felt the pain of Socrates’ absence through the network of root-nerves in the ground. They were crying out in fear and anguish and rage.
Doggedly Holbrook turned the fusion gun on Hector.
Hector was a big tree, impassive, stoic, neither a complainer nor a preener. Holbrook wanted to give him the good death he deserved, but his aim went awry; the first bolt struck at least eight feet below the tree’s brain center, and the echoing shriek that went up from the surrounding trees revealed what Hector must be feeling. Holbrook saw the limbs waving frantically, the mouth opening and closing in a horrifying rictus of torment. The second bolt put an end to Hector’s agony. Almost calmly, now, Holbrook finished the job of extirpating that noble tree.
He was nearly done before he became aware that a bug had pulled up beside his truck and Naomi had erupted from it, flushed, wide-eyed, close to hysteria. “Stop!” she cried. “Stop it, Uncle Zen! Don’t burn them!”
As she leaped into the cab of the spraying truck she caught his wrists with surprising strength and pulled herself up against him. She was gasping, panicky, her breasts heaving, her nostrils wide.
“I told you to go to the plantation house,” he snapped.
“I did. But then I saw the flames.”
“Will you get out of here?”
“Why are you burning the trees?”
“Because they’re infected with rust,” he said. “They’ve got to be burned out before it spreads to the others.”
“That’s murder.”
“Naomi, look, will you get back to—”
“You killed Socrates!” she muttered, looking into the grove. “And—and Caesar? No. Hector. Hector’s gone too. You burned them right out!”
“They aren’t people. They’re trees. Sick trees that are going to die soon anyway. I want to save the others.”
“But why kill them? There’s got to be some kind of drug you can use, Zen. Some kind of spray. There’s a drug to cure everything now.”
“Not this.”
“There has to be.”
“Only the fire,” Holbrook said. Sweat rolled coldly down his chest, and he felt a quiver in a thigh muscle. It was hard enough doing this without her around. He said as calmly as he could manage it, “Naomi, this is something that must be done, and fast. There’s no choice about it. I love these trees as much as you do, but I’ve got to burn them out. It’s like the little leggy thing with the sting in its taiclass="underline" I couldn’t afford to be sentimental about it, simply because it looked cute. It was a menace. And right now Plato and Caesar and the others are menaces to everything I own. They’re plague-bearers. Go back to the house and lock yourself up somewhere until it’s over.”
“I won’t let you kill them!” Tearfully. Defiantly.
Exasperated, he grabbed her shoulders, shook her two or three times, pushed her from the truck cab. She tumbled backward but landed lithely. Jumping down beside her, Holbrook said, “Dammit, don’t make me hit you, Naomi. This is none of your business. I’ve got to burn out those trees, and if you don’t stop interfering—”
“There’s got to be some other way. You let those other men panic you, didn’t you, Zen? They’re afraid the infection will spread, so they told you to burn the trees fast, and you aren’t even stopping to think, to get other opinions, you’re just coming in here with your gun and killing intelligent, sensitive, lovable—”
“Trees,” he said. “This is incredible, Naomi. For the last time—”
Her reply was to leap up on the truck and press herself to the snout of the fusion gun, breasts close against the metal. “If you fire, you’ll have to shoot through me!”
Nothing he could say would make her come down. She was lost in some romantic fantasy, Joan of Arc of the juice-trees, defending the grove against his barbaric assault. Once more he tried to reason with her; once more she denied the need to extirpate the trees. He explained with all the force he could summon the total impossibility of saving these trees; she replied with the power of sheer irrationality that there must be some way. He cursed. He called her a stupid hysterical adolescent. He begged. He wheedled. He commanded. She clung to the gun.