The Fangs of the Trees

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.

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.