Do you?”
“They’re going to die for sure if we don’t do something,” I said solemnly. “What can I do?”
“Oh, Carl,” said Joan, and she kissed me again, only this time I kissed back and managed to hold it for half a second until she pulled away and smiled at me. “Syringes in that left drawer. Help me fill them.” She mixed and measured, her face flushed again with excitement. I helped her fill five syringes with the stuff she brewed, and handed them to her in sick bay when she shot it into her five patients. She sat down, and sighed. “I can see my whole career going down the drain for this. I just might have murdered five people.”
* * * *
But it didn’t work out that way.
Harry was the first to feel better, I guess because the bugs hadn’t been in him quite as long as for the others. Joan shot them up four times a day until Roosevelt arrived and it was another fourteen days before we were out of quarantine. The stuff in those syringes looked like swamp water, but in five days everyone was screaming for food and Joan started them on a liquid protein diet. None of us found it amusing when Harry asked for eggs.
We all felt bad about Sally and Ono. Another probe took them out for a deep space burial with a trajectory taking them into the furnace of Procyon C. It was a good way for a spacer to end it. There was relief when we discovered the bugs hadn’t come in with anyone. There were clusters of peppercorns around the stove’s vent to the outside, and the flue was full of them. That meant redesign before another probe landed on Emerald three years later.
When we climbed aboard Roosevelt, Joan and I were both sneezing from colds, giving each other sly looks and glad that nobody asked why we had the sniffles and the others didn’t. We’d already decided we’d ship out together again if even the smallest opportunity arose.
And it did.
MILDRED’S GARDEN
The little children in the neighborhood called her the flower lady. Her real name was Mildred Hanson, and she lived alone in a white frame house surrounded by a short picket fence separating concrete from a world of beauty and sweet smells. It was a world of flowers.
Narrow dirt paths lined with creeping vines provided the only access to mounds of earth covered with roses, anchusas, purple delphiniums, iris, daffodils, daisies, and phlox. Mats of glowing pink petunias and scarlet zinnias were arranged in curving rows like toy soldiers keeping watch over the place. In a hollow at the center of the colorful jungle, and surrounded by tall bulb plants from Africa, a small shed was filled with tools and sacks of peat and exotic foods. There were no insecticides or other poisons there. Mildred Hanson did not believe in using them. Her garden was curiously free of insects.
The ladies of the neighborhood thought well of Mildred Hanson. A good woman, though somewhat eccentric, they said. Never a cross word for anyone, including that horrid little Davidson boy who periodically invaded her garden to damage plants and make noises that terrified the poor woman in the darkness.
The plants had become the focus of Mildred’s life since Fred had died. She still missed her husband terribly. Her two children had left home long ago to raise families of their own, and they lived far away. Mildred rarely heard from them, and often wished they would visit so she could meet her grandchildren. That had not happened, so her plants had become her children, and she had something to love and care for again.
She arose early, when the eastern sky was colored orange with the promise of a new day. As the red disk of the sun appeared on the horizon she ate slowly at an oil-cloth-covered table by a window overlooking the garden. Each morning she watched her children awake sleepily, some of them opening up petal-lined faces to seek out the light and the warmth. She washed morning dishes in the kitchen sink, and dressed herself slowly and painfully with knuckle-swollen hands. The pain bothered her, but she didn’t resent it; there was a purpose for everything, she thought. She stood before a mirror to put a fine net over thinning white hair, and then added a broad-brimmed hat to protect her sensitive skin from another long day in the sunlight. Straightening her hunched frame, after studying its image in the mirror, she shuffled to the door and stepped out into the morning cold.
“Good morning,” she said aloud, listening for the faint rustling sounds from the garden.
It is a new day.
Mildred Hanson talked to her plants, imagined their responses in her mind. She knew it was foolish, knew the neighbors thought her eccentric because of it. But it caused no harm, and made her feel happy. She threaded her way slowly through the garden and out to the street, pausing to inspect the picket fence. It was intact.
There has been new mischief here.
“I know,” said Mildred. “I heard a loud crash in the night.”
No injuries this time
“I will tend to the problem when I find it.” She walked back slowly along the narrow path until she came to the rose bed. The roses were her favorites, standing majestically in the morning light. She knelt painfully in front of them, reached out a hand to touch a petal.
“How are my darlings this morning?”
We are well, mother.
She ran stiff fingers through the rich soil, loosening it at the base of each plant, and picked off some dead petals. “Some of you have dirty faces today,” she said, then cupped a withered rose in both hands.
I grow old.
“I know, dear. We all grow old; it is natural. Try to live each day as best you can, and think only about today.” She carefully released the aging flower, watched it droop over on its long stem.
I will try.
“Good,” she said, arose slowly and shuffled along the path to continue her morning rounds. She pulled a rare weed here and there, and an occasional flower that had withered and died after a full life. She stopped before a large snapdragon ensnarled by a neighboring vine, and bent over to touch it.
He will not leave me alone. His intrusion is constant.
“Naughty vine,” said Mildred, and gently unraveled fragile vine from the flowering stalk.
I seek only space in which to grow properly.
“Then I will give it to you.” She found an abandoned pole nearby, pushed it into the ground and carefully wound the vine around its base three times. “Now climb towards the sky,” she said, and away from me, she imagined the snapdragon saying.
She reached the center of the garden and the tool shed, where plants towered above her head. Huge flowers like mutant daisies gone wild peered down at her from thick stalks thrust up from round trunks the size of a large man’s waist. Other stalks drooped below the flowers, ending in closed pods, fist-like, covered with soft green fur resembling fine moss. Exotic plants, from Africa, the advertisement had said. Trifulus nunculadus. She had grown them with loving care from bulbs received by mail order from a company that had soon disappeared. She had nursed them through infancy, and agonized through times when it seemed they might die. But now they stood tall, proud and fresh looking, hovering around her protectively like giant sons. She loved them all, and their response to her left little to the imagination. When she touched these plants, they moved.
She stepped up to the largest plant, put an arm around its trunk and rubbed the velvet-like tissue with her hand. The plant shuddered; pods moved slightly, then relaxed. She spoke to it softly. “You’re such a big boy, now. I wonder how much more you will grow, how much food you will need.”
The blood meal has helped much, little mother. I’m doing well, now, as are my brothers and sisters.
She touched a pod, felt it recoil and relax again as she petted it. There was a buzzing sensation in her head, and the giant plant seemed to be humming to her. “You must be an adult by now. Are you hiding babies in these pods?”
There was no answer, and the plant continued to hum.
She stroked the pod, and suddenly noticed the tool shed door ajar. She hurried