Warren Murphy: Timber Line

"How do you do it?" Remo asked.

Joey walked back to the fire. Behind him Pierre was still not rocking, Remo noticed.

"I'm not sure I should tell you," Joey said.

"I think you should. It might help us figure out what's going on around here," Remo said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that people didn't start dying until your breakthrough with getting seeds to sprout or whatever."

Joey hesitated for a moment. "Maybe," she said. "Anyway, all I do is soak the seeds in this special mixture I've developed. And it works. It really works."

"And who else knew about this mixture besides you?"

"Knows it exists?" asked Joey.

"Yes."

"A hundred people at Tulsa Torrent," she said.

"Who knew what was in it?" asked Remo.

"Just Danny and Oscar and me."

"And now they're dead and somebody's trying to kill you," Remo said.

"It looks that way," she said.

"Why is this so important?" Remo asked. "So who cares if seeds whatchamacallit in weeks or years?"

"It speeds up research. Look. Suppose we grow a hundred trees and two of them seem to have a special resistance to cold. Well, we can take those trees and cross-fertilize them and plant them and get a lot more trees and maybe if you're lucky a lot of them will be more resistant to the cold. And you keep doing it. But if you can only get seeds every thirty years, it's going to take you centuries to make a dent. That's why my breakthrough was so important; now we can speed up the research program."

"I see. Now what does Chiun have to do with all this marvelous wisdom?" Remo said.

"Black silk and spacing," she said. "It's just so obvious none of us ever thought of it."

"You should have asked me," Remo said. "The first thing I think about in the morning is black silk and spacing."

Chiun snorted. Joey laughed.

"What are you talking about, black silk and spacing?" Remo asked.

"The bottom line here is to get these trees growing in this northern climate. We know with enough time we're going to build a super-tree that can thrive up here. But what about in the meantime? All we've been able to figure out is this dumb heating system that uses fifty gallons of oil to make maybe a quart in a tree. Chain's found a better way to grow the trees."

"It was easy," Chiun said. "In my village of Sinanju, everybody knows things like that. Except white people who visit occasionally. They don't know anything."

"What Chiun said was this," Joey explained. "Thin out the copa-ibas. Then in the spaces between and around them, plant pine trees. Cover the ground under the trees with black silk with vents cut in it. Now, what happens is that the needles fall off the pine trees, through the vents in the silk, and pile up on the ground. With a watering system, you keep them wet. The black silk absorbs sunlight and heat, and helps build a giant compost heap under all the trees. Then the vents let out heat and moisture. This keeps the copa-iba trees warm and wet, just as they are in Brazil. What it does is to use the pine trees to create artificial environment that can keep the copa-ibas alive anywhere in the world."

"Will it work?" Remo said.

"I think so," she said. "I'm sure it will. As soon as the winter breaks, we're going to give it a try. It's a brilliant idea."

"I could have thought of that," Remo said. "It was just that no one ever explained the problem to me. It's obvious. The first thing to do would have been to use black silk. Anybody knows that."

"Well, Chiun told me. He's so wise," Joey said.

"He is something, that's for sure," Remo said.

Behind him, he heard Pierre LaRue get to his feet, yawn elaborately, and walk toward them.

"Peer turn in," he said. "A long night last night."

Joey wished him good night, Remo nodded, and Chiun ignored the big Frenchman as he stomped heavily out the front door.

But sleep was not on Pierre LaRue's mind.

Once outside the bunkhouse, he started through the woods, down the hillside to the road, and along the road toward the Mountain High group's encampment and the luxuriously appointed trailer of Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright. It was Thursday night and he had made the trip every Thursday night for the past three months, ever since the Mountain Highs had arrived to harass this station of the Tulsa Torrent company.

He remembered that first night. He was too bone-tired to do anything except chug down a few beers and collapse into bed, and she had come up to him in the little tavern in the village down below and asked him to dance.

He asked her who she was, and she replied that she was the enemy. She had come to put him and his company out of business. She was a lady, a very important lady — no doubt about it — and he had not even had time to put on a clean shirt after his day's work, much less shower and splash himself with cologne. But it didn't matter to her. They danced, and he tried to reason with her. He explained why Tulsa Torrent was a good company that actually improved the land, by making it more fertile, and growing more trees than they cut down. But she ground her body against his and said she had heard all the arguments, and she was still against the company.

Then she took him back to her trailer and did things to his body that he had only read about in books, and then he spent the rest of the night acting like a battering ram. In the morning, he could barely move; he was so stiff and tired he slept-walked through his day's work. But she had told him she wanted him back the following Thursday.

And she insisted that he not shower first. So he came to her without washing the sweat from his body and never once would she let him out of her arms while they were together. If they even snacked at night, they did it while their loins were still locked, one into the other.

But tonight, Pierre LaRue was not looking forward to lovemaking. The things that Joey had said about being the last one alive who knew how to make the copa-iba seeds grow faster made him uncomfortable, particularly with the growing craziness of the Mountain Highs.

He would reason with Mrs. Winston-Alright tonight and ask her to pack up her band of followers and go home, and the first one she should send away was that oily little assistant of hers. The man's name was Ararat, and the woman always called him Ari. But to Pierre, the man was Arat. As he walked through the moonlight and the snow, Pierre laughed aloud. Arat was a good name for the man, he thought, because that was what the little fellow was: a rat.

When LaRue got to Mrs. Winston-Alright's trailer and knocked on the back door, he was surprised to see Arat open the door. The little man smiled at him; he looked so greasy that Pierre thought if he gave him one good squeeze, the man would ooze juice.

"Ah, Pierre," the small man said. "How nice to see you again."

LaRue mumbled an acknowledgment.

"Cicely's waiting for you in the back room," the man said.

Pierre stepped inside the trailer and walked toward the small bedroom in the back. He heard the steps of the small man behind him. The door to the bedroom was closed. Pierre opened it, then stopped short, in horror, as the butchered pieces of Cicely Winston-Alright's body, strewn onto the bedspread, filled him with fear and shock.

He wheeled to face the little man.

Ararat Carpathian raised Mrs. Winston-Alright's little silver-plated revolver and shot the big Frenchman in the chest twice.

Pierre fell like one of his beloved trees.

The small man took the double-bladed axe from behind the door and carefully fitted it into the dead lumberjack's huge hands.

Then he searched carefully to find Mrs. Winstpn-Alright's right hand, put the gun in it and dropped it onto the floor.

Having completed his mission, Ararat Carpathian fled from the trailer.