Copernick's Rebellion Page 4

  Patricia was trying to take notes, but she always had problems with large numbers. “But it is doing other things, isn’t it, Dr. Guibedo?”

  “Sure. It keeps you cool in the summer and warm in the winter and it makes food and beer for you. And it has to use some of what it makes to keep itself alive. And then, when it was little, it didn’t have an acre of photosynthetic area to work with.”

  “Doesn’t it give you the creeps to live in something that’s alive?” Scratchon said.

  “You like better maybe living in something’s that dead?”

  “Dr. Guibedo, you were going to tell us about how to take care of them,” Patricia said, working hard to keep them from fighting.

  “Nothing much to tell. The floors and walls absorb foreign material, so you don’t have to clean them. The wastebaskets and toliets work about the same way, only a lot faster, of course. The closets and cupboards you gotta dust out. You should maybe mark on the kitchen cupboards what food grows where, unless you like surprises.”

  “But what about watering it and fertilizer, Dr. Guibedo?”

  “Well, Patty, once it’s this big, the roots go down pretty far, so you don’t have to worry about watering it. The toliet gives it all the fertilizer it needs,” Guibedo said.

  “Then there’s nothing to do but live in it?”

  “That’s right, Patty, but you got to use it. A tree house will die if there is nobody living there. I made them that way so that we won’t have a bunch of empty slums some day. And talk to your tree, Burty. They like that.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Guibedo,” Patricia said.

  “So thank you, Patty. If you don’t need me any more, I got to run. I have three more tree houses here in Forest Hills and I want to look in on them.”

  Guibedo left before Scratchon could say any more to him; he said it to Patricia. “So my own damned neighbors are growing these things! That jelly belly is using me for advertising.”

  “You’re not being fair, Mr. Scratchon. After all, he gave you this house!”

  “And now I’ve got to live in the thing. He’s a sneaky S.O.B.”

  “Nonsense. He’s a very nice old man, and he’s trying to do something nice for people. These tree houses are only toys in this part of Queens, but think about what they’ll mean to the people starving in India,” Patricia said.

  “Yeah. They’ll be able to raise more cannon fodder for the Neo-Krishnas to throw at us. And when they do, our economy will be in such bad shape that this time we’ll have trouble defeating them.”

  “I don’t think that Dr. Guibedo looks at it that way.”

  “What he thinks he’s doing doesn’t make much difference. What he is doing is destroying the free world.”

  A knock sounded at the front door.

  “Now who the hell?…” Scratchon opened the massive front door.

  “I guess I got the right place, Burt.” Major General George Hastings was in uniform, smartly tailored class—A blues. He had the small, compact build of a fighter pilot.

  “George! It’s been months! What brings you to New York?”

  “Just passing through La Guardia with a little time on my hands.”

  “Hey, you got your second star! Looks like somebody in the old squadron made good.”

  “You haven’t done so badly yourself, Burt.” Hastings noticed Patricia. “Oh. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

  “Not in the least. George Hastings, Patricia Cambridge. George and I were in the Twenty Third Interceptor Wing over Sri Lanka. Now he’s the commander of Air Force Intelligence. Ms. Cambridge is with NBC, so watch what you say, George.”

  “Here I was hoping that you would be a foreign spy and try to seduce military secrets out of me.” Hastings smiled at Patricia.

  “Maybe I could take a night course and train for the job.” Patricia smiled back.

  “How’s the wife and kids, George?” Scratchon wasn’t smiling.

  “Fine. Actually, Margaret is one of the reasons I dropped by. She got a tree-house seed—a Laurel, I think—in the mail with a Burpee’s catalog, and she wanted me to get an idea of what the floor plan would be like.”

  “My God! You, too? Don’t you realize the danger to the economy that the damned things represent?”

  “Come off it, Burt. Quit trying to make your job into a holy war. Anyway, the kids planted the damned thing on our property along Lake George. On An O-8’s pay I couldn’t afford to build a house up there, so planting a tree house won’t set the economy back any.”

  “But in the long run—”

  “In the long run we’ll all be dead. For right now, there are more important things to worry about.”

  “Like what? Is there something going on that they don’t tell us civilians?” Patricia said.

  “Nothing that you don’t read in the papers. But the human race is outgrowing this little planet, and there is no place else to go,” Hastings said.

  “But I heard that the moon project and L-Five were going all right.”

  “There are less than ten thousand people up there. What’s that to the ten billion people on Earth? Don’t get me wrong. I support those projects. But they won’t help us out much down here,” Hastings said.

  “And you think that these tree houses will?” Scratchon asked.

  “They might, Burt. They just might.”

  “I wish that you could have gotten here ten minutes sooner,” Patricia said. “Dr. Guibedo could have used some encouragement.”

  “Guibedo was here?” Hastings said. “I’m sorry that I missed him. But how did you meet him? I’d heard that he was something of a recluse.”

  “A news girl gets around. Actually, I met him through a friend of his nephew, Heinrich Copernick.”

  “The same guy who raised the stink about rejuvenation a few years back?” Scratchon asked.

  “Oh, yes. Genius often runs in a family.” Patricia steered the conversation to a topic that she knew something about. “Take the Bach family, for example…”

  Seven months later, the fashions demanded that women wear a padded turtleneck bra with wide transparent sleeves. Keeping to the letter of the decree, Patricia’s midriff was bare to three inches below her belly button, where a black bikini bottom and transparent pantaloons began.

  “This is Patricia Cambridge with The World at Large. We’re on location today in Forest Hills, Queens, doing a follow-up on an experiment initiated a year ago on this program.

  “The huge tree house you see behind me is Laurel, grown incredibly from the potted plant we saw in Dr. Guibedo’s window just a year ago.

  “Mr. Burt Scratchon has been living here for six months, and he will be giving us the grand tour. Tell me, Mr. Scratchon, what is living in a tree house really like?”

  “Ms. Cambridge, it’s pure hell. Only my sense of duty to the American public has kept me living in this green slum. I’ll be happy when this experiment is over and I can move back into my solid brick home.

  “Look at that phone line. Tight as a guitar string. What with its incredible growth, this ‘house’ has ripped off its own telephone wire twice since I’ve been here!”

  “It can’t be all that serious, Mr. Scratchon.” Patricia led the way into the house.

  “Serious enough when you are trying to run a business. And look at this damned stuff!” His face reddened. Control, man! Mustn’t alienate the public. Sell!

  “Uh, this is being taped, Mr. Scratchon. The technicians have all night to edit out anything improper. Just go on,” said Patricia.

  “This flooring material, for example.” Scratchon kicked loose a piece of the carpeting. “Totally unsanitary. It can’t be cleaned. My housekeeper filled four vacuum bags on the hall floor alone before she gave up. A bachelor has a hard enough time keeping good help without this!”

  “Didn’t Dr. Guibedo say something about it absorbing foreign matter so that cleaning was unnecessary?” Patricia asked.

  “Tell that to my housekeeper. She quit! And look at the
floor itself. That floor is five degrees out of plumb! Not a building inspector in the country would accept that in a real house. But BOCA hasn’t even passed codes on these trees.”

  “But Dr. Guibedo sent the seeds for one of these Laurel trees to every public official in the country, Mr. Scratchon. I haven’t heard any complaints yet.”

  “You will. Take a look at this food. It’s supposed to be hot, but it’s really only lukewarm. This mess is supposed to be pancakes with maple syrup. The darned stuff grows with the syrup already on! Can you imagine trying to start out a day with a plate of this sloppy gruel?”

  “Well, it is unsightly.” Patricia put a dainty fingertip to her tongue. “But it is real maple syrup.”

  “This ‘dishwasher’ actually eats the scraps off the plates. The first time I watched it, I was so disgusted I almost tossed the meal I had just eaten. Not that that would have been any great loss.”

  “A dishwasher?” Patricia asked, delighted.

  “And the toilet works the same way. The stuff just lays there until—”

  “Isn’t the living room this way?” Toilets again!

  “Anyway, I gave up on the bathroom entirely. I’ve been using the one in my real house in front,” said Scratchon, following Patricia into the living room.

  “You can’t get a picture to hang straight on these curving walls. And when you cut loose the furniture to rearrange it, a new set grows back in a week. I’ve had to pay to have two sofas hauled away.” Scratchon gave a fatherly smile to the camera. “So my advice to the viewing audience is to stay with their fine, modern, man-made homes.”

  “So you feel that there is nothing of value to be had from a tree house, Mr. Scratchon?”

  “Well, Ms. Cambridge, I have one piece of good news. The place is showing definite signs of dying. I knew these things wouldn’t last. In a month or so, if any of your viewers need firewood, tell them to bring an ax.”

  “Now let me show you what a real house is like.”

  As the cameras were being moved around an in-ground pool to Scratchon’s conventional dark-brown—brick house, he said, “Ms. Cambridge?”

  “Call me Patty.”

  “What would you say to having dinner with me tonight, Patty?”

  “I’d love to, but I can’t. I don’t know how late I’ll be up getting this show ready for tomorrow.”

  “That makes you free tomorrow afternoon, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess it does.” Patricia smiled.

  “Can I pick you up at four?”

  “Let me drop by here.” Patricia was embarrassed about her apartment.

  “You’ve got a date.”

  Guibedo had borrowed a television set from a neighbor especially to watch the program about his tree house. As he watched, anticipation turned through sadness into horror.

  “Ach! Nails in your walls! Cutting loose your furniture! And not using your toilet! Laurel, you’re starving to death!”

  Guibedo invested in a cab and arrived at Scratchon’s tree house at the same time that Patricia did.

  “Dr. Guibedo! What are you doing here?”

  “On your program, Scratchon he said that my Laurel here is dying, so I came right over. But he must have used the toilet, she looks pretty good now.”

  “It has perked up quite a bit since yesterday, Dr. Guibedo. You really care about these trees, don’t you?”

  “Sure. They’re like my children. And the Laurel series is special. We mailed out one hundred thousand of her seeds to people.”

  “I heard about that—every VIP in the country got one. That was quite an advertising effort.”

  “A lot of kids volunteered to help me. Friends of my nephew. We sent a Laurel to every big shot in the world! Pretty soon everybody’ll want one.”

  “Dr. Guibedo, have you seen Burt? I tried to call him but his phone was out of order.”

  “That figures.” Guibedo pointed to the phone wire lying on the ground. “The telephone people haven’t learned how to wire a tree house yet.”

  “But still, he should have called if he wasn’t going to be here. We had a date. I’ve knocked at both houses and no one’s home.”

  “Well, you check his regular house again. I’m going to look Laurel over.”

  “Uh. I guess he could be sick.” Patricia went to the big Tudor brick house facing onto 169th Street.

  Guibedo pulled the door branch and called inside, “Hey! Scratchon! You home?”

  He walked inside. The lights were on, the furniture had regrown in its proper place, and everything was as neat as a mausoleum.

  “Scratchon! It’s Guibedo!”

  The kitchen cupboards were full. The bathroom was in order except that where the toilet area should have been was just smooth wood.

  “So where did Laurel put the new toilet?” Guibedo muttered. “Anybody home?” He turned toward the bedroom. No one there, either.

  Puzzled by the Laurel’s missing toilet, Guibedo walked slowly out of the tree house, sealing the door behind him. “No one home, Patty.”

  “He wasn’t in the old house, either,” Patricia said. “And we had a dinner date.”

  “So come with me. I could use maybe some schnapps.”

  “Uh, okay. Why not?” Patricia followed him to the car.

  Chapter Four

  JUNE 12, 2000

  ALL OF our realities are painted thinly on the void of our own preconceptions.

  The problem of training intelligent engineered life forms is a case in point. I designed them with almost no internal motivational structure, except for a certain dog-like desire to please.

  I made the major error of assuming that tabula rasa meant the same as carte blanche. It never occurred to me to explain to them things that I assumed were “intuitively obvious.” Things like kindness and decency and respect for life.

  —Heinrich Copernick

  From his log tape, on finding the tombstones of eighty-five families

  Major General George Hastings, Commander, Air Force Intelligence, sat in his office in the Pentagon. He hadn’t slept in thirty hours. His face was haggard.

  His wife and children had been missing for two days. They had gone off to spend a week in their new tree house at Lake George and had vanished.

  Hastings had TDYed one of his best security teams to Lake George and now the report was back.

  Nothing.

  The car was parked, no unusual fingerprints on it. The soft path to the house showed only the footprints of Margaret and Jimmy and Beth. There was no ransom note. Nothing. They had vanished from the world just as Scratchon had.

  Scratchon? Scratchon and Margaret both had tree houses!

  Hastings hit the button on his intercom. “Pendelton!”

  “Yes, sir,” a sleepy, obedient voice replied.

  “Get Research out of bed.”

  “The whole staff, sir?”

  “Hell, yes! They are to determine the correlation between currently missing persons and Laurel series tree houses.”

  Tree houses at four o’clock on a Sunday morning! “Yes, sir. Full Research staff, tree houses and missing persons.”

  Nine hours and half a bottle of amphetamines later the answer came in. Correlation—32 percent.

  Thirty-two percent of the people in the sample who owned Laurels were either officially missing or could not be contacted.

  Hastings was making up a list of military and governmental officials to be informed of the correlation when Pendelton knocked and entered.

  “Thought you should see this, sir.”

  It was a day-old National Enquirer. On the front page was a color photograph of a desiccated female corpse half absorbed by a tree-house bed. From a delicate web of roots, a wedding band gleamed.

  It was out of his hands now; Hastings went to his empty apartment to sleep and to cry.

  A week later Hastings was back at his desk. He felt neither grief nor anger. Only a deadly emptiness that would never leave him.

  A knock at the door was
immediately followed by Sergeant Pendelton. “They got him, sir.”

  “Got who?”

  “Martin Guibedo, sir. The Michigan State Police picked him up north of Kalamazoo.”

  “It took them long enough.”

  “These people with tree houses rarely need to use credit cards, sir. It makes them hard to find. Here’s the report on tree-house occupation, sir.”

  “Give it to me verbally.”

  “Yes, sir. Basically, people have abandoned the Laurel series houses. But three other species are in common use, and the people in them generally intend to continue using them.”

  “Idiots.”

  “Yes, sir. The consensus is that it was a technical malfunction in a single product line, and that it does not cast discredit on the entire concept of bioengineering. It’s rather like the public reaction to the Hindenburg disaster seventy years ago, when people ceased using airships but continued to use airplanes.”

  “Huh. Anything else?”

  “Yes sir. Section Six requests that you visit them.”

  “What is it, Ben?” Hastings said.

  “We’re out of business, George. Nobody but Mike can pick up anything but a loud roar. It gives you a headache.”

  “Somebody is jamming you?”

  “We don’t know, George. But if so, they’re jamming everybody. We just got a phone call—a phone call, mind you—from Dolokov’s group at Minsk. Looks like the whole fraternity of telepaths is out of work.”

  “Anything like this ever happen before?”

  “We’ve picked up tiny spurts of interference before, George. The sort of unintelligible stuff you sometimes pick up near an unborn child, only much louder and more abrupt. There has always been a lot of static on the line, but nothing like this.”

  “What about Mike?”

  “He’s gone insane, George. He keeps yelling about lords and alpha numbers and digging in the ground and similar drivel. Nothing that makes sense.”

  “Have you sedated him yet?”

  “No point to it, George. With this racket going on, he can’t possibly affect the rest of us, and the transcribers might find something of interest in his babble.”