Free The Pollinators of Eden by John Boyd

beauty of earth’s flora if those plants adapt.”
    “Then, Doctor, you’d better correct my attitudes now.” He was almost truculent. “If those beasts adapt, I won’t have time to have any attitudes corrected.”
    “Number one, I want a log recording every fact relative to the Caron tulips, the time of each observation, and a record of barometric pressures, thermometer readings, or any climatic change that affects the flowers.” He was gazing down on her with his hurt fawn eyes, and she relented slightly. “And I don’t want the entries recorded in blank verse!”
    He grinned at her sally and whirled away, singing:
He’s as busy as a bee!
    Who’s as busy as a bee?
    That little old pollinator, me!
    To handle him, she thought, would take firmness and authority. And she would not tolerate any familiarity from a student who had twice been drunk in her presence.
    “One other item, Mr. Polino,” she said, and he turned. “This telephone is for business use only.”
    “Aye, aye, ma am.”
    Freda’s visit to Washington began on a pleasant note, principally because Doctor Hans Clayborg joined the group at Bakersfield for the flight to Washington. He was a dynamic little man with a brain so charged with wit and ideas that his hair stuck out at right angles from the static electricity his brain generated. It was his Swedish-Watusi hairstyle, he told her, immediately after introductions, worn to distract attention from his beautiful teeth. When she commented on the perfection of his teeth, he took them out to give her a closer view. She was reassured and amused by his gesture: he wasn’t stuffy, and he was too old to be a menace to her health and welfare.
    She was pleased also that Doctor Berkeley had recanted from his previous position, despite the fact that he had filed only a neutral report on Flora’s psychological effects on human beings. “I have reservations about the planet,” he said to her during the flight, “but little stronger than my reservations about earth. Young Doctor Youngblood filed such an enthusiastic opinion in the other direction that he convinced me. Far from decrying the danger of earth-alienation on the planet, he said that the gorgeous scenery—his words, not mine—might straighten out the kinks in the necks of the stargazers. As a matter of fact, he recommended Flora as a sanatorium for neck-snappers… I’ll let you read his report.”
    Freda was surprised to find reporters waiting at the Washington airport, and they were bustled immediately to the Senate Hearings Chamber to meet the members of the committee, with the press in attendance. She was charmed by Senator Heyburn, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Planet Classification. “I would recommend that the young lady adviser for the Athenians be kept in the background,” he told all present, who were mostly newspapermen, “because I function on this committee as the devil’s advocate, and I fear my duties might be imperiled with an angel in the house.”
    Senator Heyburn exuded an aura of benignity. His large gentle eyes, his slow hand movements, his massive head with its lion’s mane of hair, were fitting backdrops for his voice. She had never heard another voice quite like it: though low-pitched, it rolled with a gravelly resonance that filled the chamber. Afterward Doctor Clayborg said it reminded him of a foghorn sounding through velvet, but Berkeley said it sounded like he was talking with a mouthful of mush.
    Press reaction startled Freda. Heyburn’s remark about the Athenians insinuated that there were Spartans somewhere. The Spartans, she learned from the newspaper, were the southern senators on the committee who opposed opening any new planet to human colonization, since the manpower drain affected their section of the country more than others. Essentially, they were fighting to keep down the wages of their kitchen help, and Freda thought such a stand untenable; but the newspaper columnists were split down the