The Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd Read Free Book Online

counteroperation to forestall Hal’s Operation Anaconda.
    When he inquired with a veiled threat, “Is it merely ‘Good night, Doctor Caron,’ or has Galatea come alive?” she answered promptly, “Keep your seat.”
    She slid out, snapped the door shut smartly, and swung around in front of the car to come and stand beside and above him. “First, you’re not a Greek. You’re a Latin, and Latins are lousy lovers. I don’t say this from personal experience—I read the graffiti in the ladies’ lounge… Now, keep your hands beneath the dashboard.”
    Dazed, he followed her instructions. She reached down, clamped his head top and bottom, then bent and kissed him with a succulence that left him rigid with shock. Quickly she released him and said, “Good night.”
    He almost yelped, “Good night.”
    She ran up the steps, turned, and waved at the boy, who still sat dazed, and entered the building. She was amused at his reaction and amazed by her own. In a spirit of playfulness she had acted the wanton, but she had not expected to send him into adrenalin shock, and she had certainly not expected his shock waves to ripple back and shiver her own musculature.
    Tomorrow she might regret her coltishness, but tonight she had given the lie to a psychiatrist who had once said, “Miss Caron, you abhor physical contact. This fits you ideally for the plant sciences; but it will make a marriage difficult for you, unless you find a man as austere and as self-disciplined as your father.”
    But maybe he had not lied, she reconsidered. Paul’s profile had matched her father’s precisely, and she was genuinely fond of Paul.
    Smiling to herself, she brushed her teeth. She had discovered nothing about Hal Polino at the dinner that she didn’t know already. She liked the boy, but he was a bad influence, and not merely on Paul’s methodology. Another six months in the student’s company might find Paul sneaking off to Old Town with the boy on field trips to prove there was no conflict between sex and morality. Hal Polino had been given his trial, he had been condemned, and her conscience was assuaged by judicial procedure. Crawling aboard her bed, Freda muttered aloud, “Hell, I didn’t even violate his constitutional rights!”
    After three cups of black coffee for breakfast, Freda went to her office and carried out two searches for the missing seeds. Her first search was logical, figured from the recalled trajectory of the other seeds and from the possibility of ricochets from the fluoro screen. Her second search was general, section by section of the floor, and Mr. Hokada, her field foreman, reporting for duty, found her on hands and knees. She rose to tell him she wanted the two acres between the greenhouse and the fence plowed and gave him the dead tulip to take to the laboratory for chemical analysis. The two seeds must have stuck to the bottoms of Polino’s shoes, she concluded, as he retrieved their podmates.
    Next she sat down and carefully phrased her recommendation that student assistants be rotated on a semester rather than a term basis. The reason: “To give them a broader and more general overall view of the interrelationships existing among and between the various departments of the Bureau of Exotic Plants, from an administrative point of view, and to achieve an in-depth awareness of the function of the plant sciences as an integral but distinct subphylum of the full spectrum of the biological sciences, their methodology, procedurology, and history in the development of the technological society, from an educational point of view.”
    That should rid Paul of Hal Polino! She was a success at the suggestion box, and most of her success, she felt, came from the clarity of her wording.
    She wrote an additional memo suggesting that noise dampers be placed over compressors in the greenhouse air-conditioning units, since the noise was distracting. Doctor Gaynor had a tally sheet in his office which listed the number of