The Pollinators of Eden Read Free

gripes me,” Captain Barron said, “is that this breach of discipline will put Flora off limits, and I wanted to recommend the planet for Navy Rest and Recreation.”
    “If Paul Theaston breaches discipline, Freda,” the Commodore said, “I’m putting my chit in as a substitute for the deserter.”
    “Flora isn’t that attractive,” the Captain demurred.
    Freda appreciated their banter, but she wanted to set the record straight. “We scientists have a different discipline from the military, gentlemen. To us, Flora is an object, not a subject. We are as indifferent as a surgeon would be to the body of a beautiful woman he was operating on.”
    “Now, Freda, I’m sure Paul didn’t feed your profile to a computer before he proposed, so he’s not completely indifferent to beauty. He even timed the flower to arrive during its blooming period.”
    Age had not weakened the Commodore’s perceptiveness. She chided herself that she had not been first to recognize Paul’s consideration, and she, too, was sure that he had not fed her profile to a computer. She had not matched her profile with his, either, although she had secretly matched his with someone else’s—proving a compatibility which had assured her “Yes” to his proposal.
    With relief, she welcomed Captain Barron’s remark, “But the blooms are permanent on the flowers of Flora.”
    Analyzing her sense of relief, Freda reasoned that remorse was allied to fear, and fear was allied to doubt. Somehow Captain Barron’s words restored her belief in Paul’s insensitivity, which bolstered her confidence that he would never defect from earth to the planet Flora.
    After Doctor Gaynor, in his official capacity as Bureau Chief, had welcomed the audience to the briefing, and after Doctor Hector had commenced with the films taken on the planet, Captain Barron’s remark kept running through Freda’s mind. If the blooms were permanent on the flowers of Flora, were the plants pollinated even as they were germinating? There was a logic to plant fertilization: a permanent bloom deviated from that logic as completely as human behavior on earth deviated from the logic of the reproduction patterns of other animals. She had to force herself to concentrate on Doctor Hector’s voice.
    Concentrating on Hector’s voice was difficult. “Oohs” and “Ahs” arose from the audience when a new scene flashed on the screen, and the photography was distracting. Colors were far too exaggerated, either from poor camerawork or the quality of Flora’s sunlight. Freda suspected the former. The cameraman was running amok. He would sweep a full circle around the horizon to show the parklike landscape, tilt the camera up to catch a cloudscape, swing down to a grove of trees lining some valley brook in the distance, then zoom in to focus on a particular tree bole, as if conducting a seminar in the texture of tree bark. He did not show details of flowers, he composed still lifes of flower arrangements, shooting the same bed four or five times from different angles. His alternation of panoramic sweeps with static pauses was enough to give one a headache, and she made a note to herself to ask questions from the floor concerning camerawork at the next administrative meeting. She was not one to quibble with other departments, but Personnel should be restrained from employing cameramen who were obviously refugees from underground movie productions.
    But she was too tactful to raise a question about her strangest and strongest distraction—Doctor Hector himself. In the classroom, his voice rustled with a flow of data so precise, valid, and constant that, when studying under him, she had developed the agility of her writing hand by taking notes. Now his remarks were as passionate and as irrelevant as a lovers. When she found a fact in the flow of his poetry, she pounced on it.
    One fact came with startling abruptness during a peroration on swimming in the streams of Flora. “… floating down