Дэймон Найт - Orbit 13

Lance was third-or fourth-generation Japanese. I said, “Hello, Yellow Peril!” and he said, “Harry Watson! Banzai, charge!” and we shook hands. He would not enter the house. “Are you out of your stupid gourd?” I asked. “I got spooky lady clients up and down the street,” he said, and mowed the lawn and trimmed the hedges and pinched chrysanthemums for half an hour. Then I made him drive over to a bar with me and I plied him with beer. “Have you got an acute attack of race prejudice?” I asked.

“It’s the mystique, you plick.”

“And flied lice up your gunny-budger.”

“It’s this way,” said Lance. “I am an inscrutable Oriental and I want to keep it that way. I knock back eighteen thousand dollars by not fraternizing with you bleached Americans. Harry, old buddy, I went to UC Davis and got a bachelor’s degree in agronomy. I saved all my pennies and went farming. I lost my ass. And then it occurred to me I was being stupid. I will tell you what my wise old father said. ‘Kid,’ he said, ‘what you want to be selling is what people want to be buying.’ Now goddammit, that’s wisdom.”

“So where’s the mystique?”

“Go along with it, I told myself. You got a ready-made role to fill, you got the world by the short hair on a downhill pull. I practiced grunting—ugh—and how to insuck a hiss politely. I practiced holding my hands over my stomach and saying, ‘Ten dollah a week, Missy,’ and I got fifty-two customers with more waiting to press sawbucks into my hand. I put in a nice eight-hour day outdoors. The overhead is small except for tax purposes. I got it made, Harry.”

“That’s more than eighteen thousand a year.”

“And up your gunny-budger. Some pay cash—I mean ugh! No sprick Engrish velly good.”

“Mr. Moto or Dr. Fu Manchu?”

“But many man smoke—I learned to talk like this from television. Cherchez la femme, but catch the mystique!”

Ugh! That’s how I became a gardener.

Fortunately my eyes are dark brown. With a short hair-cut and a dye job, and suitable skin coloring I made quite a tolerable Japanese. When I bought a narrow-brim straw hat with a bright Paisley band, I had no trouble establishing a clientele in the Fletcher Hills area. I developed a nice additional income with exotics, such as jujube trees and peento peaches, the bitterish-sweet saucer peach from southern China, conversationally sophisticated if not gastronomic ally so, and they do have a low chilling requirement.

Well, my first year in business under the nom de guerre of Haru Watsonabe I equaled my former income as an organic chemist. Marian and I bought an isolated old house and ten acres near Spring Valley. I built yards of bookcases, because she comes from a family of collectors, and began my experimental garden to gratify my interest in insecticides of plant origin, such as nicotine, nornicotine, anabasine, rotenone, deguelin and related rotenoids, quassin and the pyrethrins. Marian did her crewel work, read books, threw pots, read books, and we took an extension course at UCSD and another at San Diego State. The next year we put in the swimming pool and became involved with ZPG, Zero Population Growth. Like-minded people were our friends and we lived an intellectually satisfying, ordered life.

Then the beetles came.

They were about three feet tall and obviously intelligent. I am a chemist, not an entomologist. Marian described them as half-size Professor Wogglebugs, an imaginary creature from her childhood reading. They stood on their hind legs and dipped water from the swimming pool with buckets and carried them to the spaceship. It was beetle-shaped. There was a pullout spout and they poured water into this until I showed them how the hose worked. They had no trouble understanding the hose bib. They filled their tanks while we stood around and gawped at each other.

Marian started off to make sandwiches but I called her back, pointing out that while hospitality was in order, our new friends were better equipped to sample foliage than feast on peanut butter. I picked a dozen leaves from the garden and offered them on the redwood picnic table—geranium, olive, avocado, ginger, all the common plantings around the house.

They showed interest in coreopsis and cosmos, and one of the beetles lifted his antennae and walked to my experimental garden and brought back a dried Chrysanthemum cinerariaefolium, which is also called pyrethrum. It contains Pyrethrins I and II, and cinerins I and II. Pyrethrin acts directly on the central nervous system; the paralysis is a result of blocking of transmission of nerve impulses. It is nontoxic to warm-blooded animals.

Another beetle picked seedheads, of Sesamum indicum, from which sesame oil is extracted. It is a powerful synergist for pyrethrum, acting essentially in the same relationship as a sound system to an electric guitar. Others sampled Schoenocaulan officinale, which is sabadilla, and Tephrosia virginiana, devil’s shoestring. It is a pretty little plant at the top of my garden, preferring dry, open sandy places. Marian brought out Coca-Cola and our new friends enjoyed dipping their beaks in that, so we had quite a nice social gathering.

“But aren’t all those plants insecticidal?” Marian whispered. “Are we truly being friendly?”

Marian and I can talk together about anything, and too often that’s all we do. We subscribe to journals of opinion, such as The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly and we take the Sunday New York Times. If there is one thing on which we and these publications agree, it is good interracial relationships. With the beetles gathered about us at the picnic table (it is not polite to stare at others eating) I pointed out that freedom and liberty imply an assumption that the other person (or beetle) knows what he is doing.

“I am happy to share the fruits of my garden,” I said calmly. “The analogy occurs to me of the famous temperance lecture. You fill a glass with water and another with whisky, and drop a worm into each. After the demise of the worm in the booze, the lecturer asks, what does this prove? And the voice from the rear says, ‘If you don’t want worms, drink whisky!’ My dear, a question of size is involved. If a thirty-foot anaconda drank the whisky, how could you say whisky is bad for worms?” Perhaps I was more excited by our visitors than I knew at the time.

But I grew alarmed when they lay on their backs with all six legs in the air. Their aristae, the feathery projections of the antennae, curled and uncurled briskly. For mankind to poison his intellectual peers upon meeting would be rather a blot on history. Then they began to rock back and forth, turned affectionate, and toward morning began mating like mad. This made Marian blush and she excused herself and went into the house. Our guests recovered from their frenzy before dawn. They were obviously pooped as they clambered into their ship. One of them returned to the door and handed me a packet of seeds. Then the ship lifted, caught sunlight a thousand feet up, diminished to a twinkle and was gone in the sky.

It was not exactly a packet of seeds. It was more like a bulb of transparent plastic the size of a golf ball. The seeds were ordinary in appearance, round and dark brown with a matte finish, somewhat larger than ordinary brassdcas, such as cabbage or kale or broccoli.

While I believe in friendship and reciprocity, I wouldn’t want my sister to marry a beetle if I had a sister. Nor would I want beetles for neighbors. Not because of property values, but neighbors should have some common standards, and Marian and I do not approve of orgies beside our swimming pool. Under a microscope the seeds were seeds and not beetle eggs—the thought had crossed my mind—and Marian mentioned a frivolous story by H. G. Wells about a carnivorous orchid, so I took reasonable care.