Free Death Qualified by Kate Wilhelm Page A

it.
     
        He had taught her to shoot up here, shooting across the waterfall at another fallen tree trunk on the opposite side.
     
        She would bring the rifle up and practice, she decided.
     
        Tomorrow. She hadn't done any shooting since before Carol was born, and now it appeared that she might need to keep in practice.
     
        SEVEN
     
        saturday morning Doc called, and she snapped at him.
     
        "I'll call you," she said and hung up. She talked to the children, now at the ranch east of Pendleton, three hundred miles away. She felt they were as distant as the moon.
     
        When she could not stand the house any longer she walked out to the walnut grove. The trees were tall and straight, the canopy so thick that no sunlight penetrated, the ground beneath them resilient with leaf mold. The air always smelled astringent under the walnut trees; it was always cool and damp. The squirrel population was high;
     
        jays and thrashers were everywhere, chickadees and warblers darted. Grampa's father had planted the grove, planning for the future, now; in three years the first of the trees would be cut. But already the saplings she had planted were growing tall, reaching for the sky. Each new planting consisted of three young trees in a triangle, one to stay for the next seventy or eighty years, two nurse trees to be thinned out at twenty-year intervals. They grew better, faster, and stronger if they had company. She touched a tree trunk here, walked on, touched another. The squirrels chattered at her, flicked their tails in warning, raced madly along branches overhead watching her every motion.
     
        When Lucas came home the last time, they had walked hand in hand among the trees, and then a few days later he had brought Clive Belloc out.
     
        "Talk to the old man," Lucas had said.
     
        "Just talk to him. Clive says it won't matter that much if you start cutting now or wait a few more years. You're both sitting on a couple of million, just waiting for the saw. They were planted to be cut, damn it!"
     
        While they fought over the trees, Clive had stood in the driveway looking mortified. Clive had never mentioned the grove again. She never had learned the exact number he had quoted to Lucas, but it was a lot, she knew. An awful lot.
     
        That night, after Grampa had gone to bed and Travis was sleeping, they had sat down on the little beach.
     
        "You never used to want money like this," she had said slowly.
     
        "Why now? What for?"
     
        "Not for me. No fancy cars, no boats. It's the project.
     
        Emil's grant is running out, and he doubts he can get another one. He just can't show the kind of progress they expect."
     
        Emil, she thought with icy fury. Emil Frobisher had taken Lucas away, had changed him, made him a stranger, and now sent him begging. "I thought he was all set up with the famous Dr. Schumaker. I thought someone like that could get all the money in the world."
     
        "He could, if Emil could just produce some real results.
     
        Emil is bringing in another scientist, a psychiatrist, a specialist in perceptions, something like that. She'll swing some weight, too, but they still need something concrete to show."
     
        Nell had thrown rocks into the river as hard as she could.
     
        "And your degree? How much closer are you to it now?"
     
        He had muttered something.
     
        "Nowhere near it. Isn't that what you mean?" Her arm ached with a fiery pain, and she dropped the rock she was holding. Not looking at him, watching the play of moonlight on the flowing water, she had said, "They're using you. Don't you understand that yet? Have you even got the bachelor's degree yet?"
     
        He was silent.
     
        "I thought not. And now a psychiatrist. Maybe they'll give you a degree in psychology and you can become a shrink. Or is it still