The Fangs of 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.”