Life Force, page 13
But something was different. She'd seen the devastation of which an elephant was capable. Their progress through dense country could be traced by the broken limbs, the uprooted small trees, the stripped foliage. The area where they were feeding now didn't look devastated at all. She picked out an individual, the female with calf, and watched as she looped her trunk around a small sapling and began to strip tender bark. She took only a few bites and released the sapling. The bark had been stripped away on only one side of the sapling. Then the elephant moved to another small tree and repeated the process. The other animals seemed to be eating with equal care. When a plant or a small tree got in the way, they did not simply trample it or uproot it. They moved around it to get to the tasty ones.
"Well, you've seen one elephant you've seen them all," Golding said, motioning to his cameramen to cut it off.
The next day, Golding's crew recorded the antics of some of Cassie's monkeys, a growing termite colony in the jungle, a few brightly colored, fruit-eating birds, an anteater gorged with termites, and the friendly chipmunks near Africa House. Toward evening, Andy Reznor's yacht lifted off and Beauty belonged, once again, to those who loved her. The Ark landed with a new load, with new species of small animals to be distributed on two continents. Jack Frost, as Director, called a conference of specific people. Kerry Hertz made a quick trip to the foothills to confirm Teddy's impression that something had changed the feeding habits of the elephants.
Chapter Sixteen
"I want you all to hear a tape I made the other day, immediately after the lion incident," Jack Frost said. He waited for the expected chuckles and got a couple. He pushed a button and his amplified voice filled the conference room, which was not very full of people, those present being Matt and Teddy Tinker, Cassie, Kerry Hertz, Sandy Moore and Earl Fabre. They were the department heads. Jack and Cassie had decided, in view of the odd contents of the tape that Jack was playing, to get an opinion from a few responsible people.
Jack's voice droned on, but everyone listened with interest. When Jack described his feelings, his awareness of not being alone, Kerry looked quickly toward Earl Fabre to see him looking at Jack attentively.
"Okay," Jack said, turning off the player. "The quick and easy answer is that I went a little nuts, and—" he laughed, "—that is not entirely possible. If it weren't for some of the reports Dr. Hertz has made, I might just dismiss it as maybe a temporary dose of sun or something."
"Cassie, does he eat his meat raw at home?" Sandy Moore asked, with a chuckle.
"The only things he eats raw are carrots and me," Cassie said, with a sweet little smile. She had a way of using shock, at times, to show that some things were serious and not subject to jokes.
"What I want is a discussion," Jack said. "Let's consider a few things. One, the incident on the river on America. Two, Dr. Hertz's tests that showed that the trees along the river were capable of learning and could distinguish a real danger from a simulated threat. First you have apparently intelligent behavior from trees. Then we have Dr. Hertz's tests on the method of pollination in the shrubs of the foothills. Are you all familiar with that information?"
"I'm not," Sandy Moore said.
"Kerry?" Jack said.
Kerry cleared her throat and cast a quick glance at Earl. "Dr. Fabre set up an electronic screen to my specifications," she said. "I wanted to measure wind-borne pollination. We got some very interesting readings. Even when the wind was blowing the wrong way, or not at all, pollen passed from plant to plant over a distance of some feet, even yards in some cases. The most intriguing point was that it seemed to move in clumps. Not in great concentrations, as at the river where it totally covered a man and was taken into his lungs, but with hundreds of grains in a small area, not concentrated enough to be visible."
"The question being," Jack said, "what is the motive force that moves grains of pollen without wind, or against the wind?"
Kerry looked again at Earl. She had, of course, left out in her reports any mention of that odd occurrence between them. That bothered her. Jack's experience on the plain, his feeling of not being alone in his own body and mind, concerned her, for she had had the same feeling. She remembered all too well how she'd said, "They wanted to know how it felt."
Now Jack had said, "We wanted to know why."
"There's something else, too," Teddy said. "I'm sure Kerry hasn't had the time to study it or draw any conclusions, but the elephants seem to have become conservationists. You know how they normally tear up things? Well, now they don't damage any plant they're not going to eat, and they don't kill the trees they eat. They leave enough leaves on the trees to allow them to survive. They don't strip away enough bark from a single tree to kill it."
Kerry nodded. "Admittedly, we've only observed this for a couple of hours. It may be a temporary condition. It could have something to do with the way the plants taste. We can't draw any conclusions as yet."
"Except that there's something damned eerie going on," Sandy said.
"Kerry has a theory," Cassie said.
"Not a theory," Kerry said quickly. "Nothing even as positive as a theory. Just a thought."
"You stated it pretty strongly to me," Earl Fabre said, he, too, feeling a bit guilty for not telling the group about his peculiar experience. He had his wife to think of, however. "You said, Kerry, that we just might have encountered our first intelligent alien species."
"Intelligent plants?" Sandy asked.
"They communicate," Jack said.
"They seem to communicate," Kerry corrected.
"Whatever they do, they get the job done," Jack said. "One tree is damaged and trees two hundred miles away know and recognize the same danger when they're approached by a man with a cutter in his hand."
"Is someone trying to tell me that plants are talking to elephants, saying, 'Hey, big boy, I don't mind giving you a little, but don't eat enough of me to kill me'?"
"I don't know," Jack said. "I'm open to opinion." He spread his hands. "I'm open to a theory of divine intervention if someone will give me a bit of documentation."
"I think we should put the entire project on hold until we have some answers," Kerry said.
There was a silence. Cassie broke it. "I don't think you'd get approval on that from the old man, and I don't think it's necessary, not yet."
"I think we're hinting at an assumption that the vegetation on Beauty is more advanced than we might think," Earl said. "Since there's not much to study on Beauty but vegetation, we've got a bunch of botanists running around all over the place cataloging plants. Is there anything in their reports to make us think that there might be thinking plants?"
"In form and in individual adaptations the flora here is different, but the same life processes go on here as on Earth. My people aren't even close to observing all the varieties of plant life on the planet, not even in the near vicinity of the houses, but nothing has turned up yet to indicate anything in any plant that might function as a brain or as an originator of anything resembling thought."
"Here's something else that's been bothering me," Earl said. "When a man tried to cut down a tree, things happened. When the elephants first started ripping and tearing at trees, they were attacked by clouds of pollen. But there are a few thousand hoofed animals continually eating grass and there's never been any reaction."
"Unless grass is overgrazed," Jack said, "grazing doesn't really harm it. In fact, the grass is improved. Cropping encourages deeper and thicker root systems. Animal manure enriches the soil."
"So the grass eaters are left alone because the grass is intelligent enough to know that it's being cropped for its own good?" Earl asked.
"There's an alternative explanation," Cassie said.
"For example, Earl, you pushed up some rough vegetation when you cleared the sites for the houses here and on America and nothing happened. Perhaps there are lower and higher forms of life in Beauty's vegetable biosphere."
"Or, if you're a science fiction reader," Matt said, "you might add the possibility of the hive mind concept."
"Meaning?" Kerry, who was not a science fiction reader, asked.
"Each plant, or at least every individual of some, or many species, is one cell of awareness in a community brain. That would account for the apparent communication."
"Well, I don't think we should reject any idea, however wild," Jack said, with a wink at Matt.
"I think we need to get to work," Kerry said.
"I agree," Earl said.
"And where do we start?" Teddy asked.
"With the plants," Kerry said. "Dr. Fabre, if you agree, I'd like to borrow a few of your technicians and equipment."
"Sure," Earl said.
"Do you have an idea?" Jack asked Kerry.
"For the moment I'd like to keep it to myself," Kerry said. She frowned. "I hate being laughed at."
"No one's laughing," Teddy said.
The rains had come to the African plains in earnest. New green changed the tone of the landscape. A ground blizzard of flowers covered all. There was good, sweet, new green for every herbivore. The elephant herd moved down from the wooded foothills into the fringe of the plain to feast on new growth among a variety of low bush that seemed to especially please them and often they were seen mixing with the smaller grass eaters.
Kerry was in the process of turning everyone into amateur botanists. Any field team that went out brought back samples. Kerry, herself, roamed the countryside far and wide with a team of technicians—Earl Fabre was not among them. The rains hampered the work, but some tests were possible between showers. They were measuring the minute electrical currents generated within plants. Kerry dissected smaller plants, studied various trees with x-ray scanners. Digging machines bored far into the earth to search for anything unusual in the root systems of various plants. The only positive result of the digging was the discovery of a fungus that, after testing, proved edible and tasted much like a truffle.
There were no incidents, no pollen attacks, even when core samples were taken from larger trees with a pulse auger.
The communications sector recorded a transed relay of Peter Golding's featured piece on Beauty. There was no editorializing. The assembled audience clapped and whistled when Teddy's face appeared on the screen and, in about ten seconds, she told how she and Matt had discovered Beauty. There were excellent scenes of the herds, a brief look at the elephants and a frisky chipmunk, and the piece closed with Jack's attack on the zebra colt, with only one statement from the narrator, Golding.
"Dr. Frost said that the purpose of his experiment was to reinstill the zebra colt that which has been lost by animals bred only in captivity, the natural fear of the predator."
Definitely not an editorial opinion, just the facts, ma'am. But one cameraman, using one of those marvelous long lenses, had managed to shoot directly down into Jack's face while he was fruitlessly worrying the little zebra's neck skin. In silence, the camera moved even closer, and the screen was filled with the eyes of a madman, nose buried in zebra skin, saliva showing white at the corners of Jack's lips as he chewed wildly. Then there was a freeze frame with those wild, madman's eyes left on the screen for a full ten seconds to fade out.
"Damnit," Teddy yelled, leaping to her feet.
"Overall it was very positive," Matt said.
"Oh?" Teddy demanded. "Tell me one thing you remember better than that last freeze frame."
Jack had sunk down in his seat, looking glum. "I see what you mean," he said. "When anyone who saw that program hears about Beauty, they're going to see a mad scientist, eyes flaming, trying to chew on a defenseless little animal."
For the next two weeks, Peter Golding ran pieces on the colonized planets. He showed peaceful scenes of fruitful agriculture and growing cities. He showed scenes where prospectors, or simply loners, had penetrated into hostile environs in search of precious metals or jewels or just solitude. On the last program of the series he featured the planet Coldemhell. That frozen world, locked in an ice age that left only a small band of brief summer at the equator, was not— and Golding carefully said so—an official colonization planet. It was inhabited—and Golding carefully said so—by a few thousand miners and their families. Golding's cameras followed one mining team, showing how surface deposits of heavy metals, gouged from the crust by glacial action, were located by electronic means through the dense ice. Sun generators were used to melt the glacial overburden and the process seemed hellish on screen, with fur-bundled men hidden by clouds of steam. A thin, scruffy woman, wife of one of the miners, spoke sadly about the hardships of living on Coldemhell. Golding carefully pointed out that the miners were on the planet by their own choice, that the purpose was profit, and that Coldemhell received no settlers under Bureau auspices. However, to end the week-long series, the cameras did a slow flyover of paradisaical islands in the balmy south seas of Beauty, empty and inviting, of the lush, green plains devoid of life, of tree-green, temperate zones.
"These views of the planet so aptly named Beauty conclude our look at the populated planets," Golding said. Period. No editorializing. No reprimand from the Board. No fines. Just, in the minds of billions of people on Earth and the other populated planets, the stark contrast between the hardscrabble minors on Coldernhell and the vast, empty, fertile expanses of Beauty, which were peopled only by animals and their keepers.
Teddy sat through a second showing of the compiled features by Golding in Andrew Reznor's quarters. When the last scene had faded, she said, "I think it was quite deliberate, sir, to save Beauty for last, to contrast her with that ice planet."
"Quite skillfully done," Reznor admitted. "But, I think, with no malice. That young man seemed to be very nice when he was here. What does he have to gain by turning public opinion against the project?"
"Audience. Ratings."
"Well," Reznor said, "let's not worry about it at the moment." But when Teddy was gone, he sat down in front of his communicator and had himself patched through to a scrambled trans line to Reznor headquarters on Earth. Andy Reznor had just arrived at work to start a new day when the call came through.
"Good morning, Junior," the old man said. "You're looking bright and chipper."
In fact, Andy did not look bright and chipper. He looked even more glum than usual.
"What do our public opinion polls show regarding Peter Golding's series on populated planets?" Reznor asked.
"We have only the preliminary data," Andy said. "Ratings were high. Media reviewers praised the series. In our questionnaires we didn't single out Beauty directly, but a great deal of sympathy was shown not only for the miners on Coldemhell but for the people of other planets still undergoing the terraforming process. Still, I don't see any ground swell of popular opinion against the project. At least, not yet."
"I think you'd better give the good senator a call," the old man said. "Tell him to be on the alert for any change of mood in Congress. We're too far along to have to fight now."
"Yes, I'd made myself a note to do that," Andy said. "I think I'd better sign off now, Dad. I'm due to leave for Rome in half an hour. General Igor Milyukov is going to address the Pax Five Council this afternoon."
"Bit unusual for him, isn't it?"
"Quite," Andy said. "That's why I want to be there. As you well know, Milyukov is the Kremlin's hatchet man. He's the one who breaks the news of any new Soviet policy."
"All right, my boy," the old man said. "Keep your eyes and ears open."
"By the way," Andy said, with a wry smile, "the rest of Reznor Enterprises is thriving."
Reznor laughed. He was used to getting a little bit of needling from his son about his project. "With you in charge I expected nothing less," he said, reaching for the switch.
Reznor was preparing for bed when the trans call came from Earth and for the second time in a day he was looking at the face of his son. "Back from Rome so soon?" he asked.
"General Milyukov showed the last segment of the Golding series to the council," Andy said, his face grim. "He was eloquent regarding the hardships of the miners on Coldemhell. He didn't go quite so far as to call for Pax Five reconsideration of the treaty provisions that allowed us to have Beauty, but he did ask if it were sound policy to devote such a splendid world to animals when humanity was suffering so on other, much less desirable planets."
"I would hope that our people countered by saying that the miners on Coldernhell, if they work at all, can retire in some luxury in two or three years," Reznor said.
"We pointed out that Coldernhell is not an official colony planet, that those who go there do so of their own free choice. We didn't make a lengthy rebuttal because it was felt that to do so would place too much importance on Milyukov's speech."
"I suppose that was wise," Reznor said.
"I had a chat with Gravel just before I called you," Andy said. "He was a little upset. There's been a series of incidents. The home of the congressman from California was broken into last week. Some hacker managed to tap into the computer in the office of the senator from Georgia. And Gravel's personal accounts and computer records have been subpoenaed by the Gestapo."
Reznor frowned for two reasons, because of the news, and because he did not approve of his son applying the popular name to the Internal Revenue Service.
"A series of coincidences?" he asked.
"Probably," Andy said. "Nothing to worry about. Gravel's records are perfect and clean."
But Andrew Reznor had food for thought. First there'd been Peter Golding's skillful attack on the project, then Milyukov's attack at the Pax Five. Now three of his pet politicians had been victims of the incidents. Perhaps, he thought, the breakin, the computer tampering, the IRS audit of Gravel's books were coincidental. Perhaps Gravel's records were perfect and clean. But he'd learned long ago never, never to underestimate the greed and stupidity of a politician. It was time to make a countermove. He placed a call.
