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Title: I, gardener

Author: Allen Kim Lang

Release date: June 28, 2024 [eBook #73937]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1959

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


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                              I, GARDENER

                           By ALLEN KIM LANG

                    _Can the Great First Law fall?
                   Could the great Dr. Asim--sorry,
                      Ozoneff--have been wrong?_

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
            Fantastic Science Fiction Stories December 1959
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


I had flown to Boston to sign Doctor Axel Ozoneff to a contract with
my new fall television show, "Point of View." I'd already recruited
a cadre of intellectual fuglemen, but I needed Dr. Ozoneff as my
program's sergeant-major, as the catalyst who'd spark the seethings of
his colleagues into the imaginative pyrotechnics that attract sponsors
and build the big Trendex. Associate Professor of Cryptochemistry at
the Medical School, author of thirty-three books (maybe more: it had
been a week since I last counted), a writer whose byline appeared on
the Contents page of a dozen magazines and journals regularly as their
copyright notice, and a poet of considerable skill, Dr. Ozoneff was
besides something of a television personality. Who but he could have
invented an s-f vignette, live, on-camera, and have it subsequently
published in a major magazine and three anthologies?

       *       *       *       *       *

I got out of the taxi at the foot of the hill. Ozoneff's home was at
its summit, surrounded by a garden that threatened to pullulate into
unproper Bostonian jungle at any moment. As I walked up the brick
pathway toward the house, between flowering trees that hinted the
presence of tigers, the gardener stepped out to block my way. He was
dressed in earth-stained overalls and wore gloves; a desiccated man
tall and lean as a mystery figure in a Navaho sand-painting. He held
before him, like a twin-handled short-sword, a pair of hedge-shears.
"Good morning," I said, sucking my belt-buckle back from the points of
the clippers. "I have an appointment to see Dr. Ozoneff."

"Indeed?" The gardener raised his sharp chin and stared at me like
an entymologist inspecting an impudent bed-bug. "At what time had the
master consented to see you, sir?"

I felt that the gardener's "sir" had a pejorative tone to it,
pronounced the way it would be pronounced by an injured enlisted man
speaking to his injuring officer. "Dr. Ozoneff will see me at ten
o'clock," I said. "Put aside those clippers and let me pass. I shall
certainly inform the doctor of your behavior."

He held me at bay with the shears. "I assure you, sir, that the master
will neither see you nor hear ill of me," he said. "Be that as may,
you're early. It is not yet nine-forty-five. I can't allow you to burst
in on the master betimes. Perhaps you'll wait here in the garden?"

       *       *       *       *       *

I glanced at my watch. He was right; I was early; the taxi-drive from
Logan International Airport had taken less time than I'd budgeted.
With the feeling I was humoring a madman's whim, I remarked, "This is
a lovely spot. It will be a pleasure to spend fifteen minutes in the
midst of such beauty."

The gardener stared at me as though gauging my sincerity; then he
looked for a moment as though his leather face might bend into a
smile. "Indeed, sir, I've been told by horticulturists of some note
that I have the gift of the green thumb," he said. "It's a passion with
me, this garden; and the master was himself most alive to the seduction
of vegetable beauty. You should have visited us three days ago, sir.
I had a band of fifty sacred lilies blooming all at once, those that
flower only in the sabbatical year, standing like a field of obscene
scarlet-tipped swords. For all their loveliness, I was told by our
downwind neighbors, these lilies smelled like a ruptured cesspool. If
it is true about their odor, such flowers make a forceful moral sermon,
sir, do they not?"

"Do you have no sense of smell?" I asked him. "That would seem a
considerable handicap to a gardener."

"I can drink in beauty with my eyes," he said; "and, since I cannot
smell, the sting of the lilies' sermon missed me. Here ..." he gripped
my arm with fingers which, though gloved, were hard as forceps "... you
can see the lemon-trees in bloom, a pleasing sight seldom come upon in
these latitudes."

"They're under glass?" I asked.

"That's the wonder of it," he said. "They're under the open sky, sir."
He led me to a line of bushes twice the height of a man, unpruned,
pale-green of leaf, with reddish scion-leaves deep inside the foliage;
sweet-smelling flowers, tinted a delicate purple on their underpetals.

Seeing them for the first time, I understood why the poet sang
his dream of the land where they grow. "Lemon-trees, outdoors, in
Massachusetts?" I asked. "They are a new species, no doubt."

"No, sir," the gardener said. "I admit it's not easy to persuade lemons
to thrive through New England snow and gale; but thrive these do. Don't
step any nearer them, sir, if you please. It is not healthy to be too
intimate with these trees."

"I'm not allergic to citrus fruit," I said.

"I'll grant you that, sir, not knowing your personal idiosyncrasies,"
he said; "but step no closer, or I'll be forced to restrain you."

       *       *       *       *       *

Seeing that the man was at least a little mad, I stood quite still and
stared at the trees. The leaves, as I said, were rather pale, not at
all the linoleum-green of orange-leaves; but the bushes looked quite
healthy, and breathed off a thin and lovely fragrance. "Why do you
consider your lemon-trees dangerous?" I asked.

"The hurt is in the fertilizer I use," the gardener said. "A little
notion of my own, sir. About the roots of these lemon-trees, like baked
bricks to warm one's feet in bed in winter, I've planted a few capsules
of a stuff no man may touch and not scorch his fingers badly."

"Radioisotopes?" I asked.

"Yes, sir. When there is snow on the leaves, the roots of these trees
bask in tropical soil and pump warm juice up to the winter branches,"
he said. "Now, sir, when I've stopped speaking, it will be just forty
seconds before ten o'clock. If you've an appointment with the master,
I dare not detain you. Walk up to the front door, open it, then go up
the stairway. The master is in his study, the first room to your right
at the top of the stairs." The gardener turned from me with an abrupt
about-face, and marched over to a box hedge, to begin clipping at its
green crewcut.

"Thank you," I said to his back. I retreated toward the door of the
house, less apprehensive of radiation hazard from the lemons than of
hedge-clipper hazard from the half-mad gardener. I should have to
caution Dr. Ozoneff about this fellow.

I entered the front door as I'd been instructed to, and hurried up the
stairway that bent down into the hall. The upper landing was lined with
bookshelves bearing volumes in six languages, many of them translations
of my host's scientific and fictive works. I rapped on the first door
to my right and paused for reply. There was none. There was no sound of
Ozoneff's insatiable typewriter. "Doctor Ozoneff?" I demanded, loudly
enough to be heard anywhere in the house. There was still no answer.
Worried lest the gardener might have become alarmed at my rapping and
my shouting, and come up the stairs after me with those shears of his,
I turned the knob and entered Doctor Axel Ozoneff's study.

       *       *       *       *       *

The study, like the landing, was lined with books. The man I'd come to
see lay beside his silent typewriter. The blood pooled on his desk was
just beginning to coagulate.

The flock of sated flies who'd been disturbed by my entrance lumbered
heavy-bellied round my head, like a fleet of tankers. I flailed the
carrion bugs away and stepped closer to the corpse. Ozoneff's head had
been cleaved almost from his body. Something had split his spine in a
single giant bite. His forehead rested in a pool of blood, surrounded
by the tiny browning footprints of the flies.

With the lucid calm of shock, I walked about the study, searching
for the telephone. It was not here. I went back to the landing and
explored the other rooms. The telephone was in the bedroom. I looked
up the number I required, still as calm as though I were arranging for
a caterer, and picked up the phone, careless of my responsibility as
first-on-scene to preserve fingerprints. I dialed DE-vonshire 8-1212.
The sergeant on duty at the Emergency and Central Complaint Bureau
answered crisply. I heard his pencil scratch as he recorded my name and
Dr. Ozoneff's address. "The killer is insane," I said. "Please hurry;
I'm alone with a madman." I hung up and considered that word I'd used:
Alone. Doctor Axel Ozoneff was only a few minutes dead, and already I'd
ignored him in my census of those present. _Sic transit gloria mundi._

I stood up from the bed and turned toward the door. The gardener's
bony figure blocked the bedroom's exit. He'd come up the stairs
silent as a cat. He still held the hedge-shears. Staring at them, I
saw reddish-brown stains near the hinge, where the blades were joined
together. It might have been rust. "You called the police," the
gardener said.

"Doctor Ozoneff is dead," I said.

"I know. It was I who killed him."

"Get away from me!" I shouted, retreating between the beds, my
artificial calm broken.

He glanced down at the huge shears he held and lifted them. He slammed
the blades together. "As easy as that," he said. "A man is such a
tender poor thing."

I backed toward the window of the bedroom, vastly preferring an
unexplored two-story drop to remaining in this room with the murderer.
"I didn't mean to frighten you, sir," the gardener said. "I must admit
you have reason to fear me: I am a monster. Now that I've breached the
great First Law, what sinfulness might I not find in me, sir?" He let
the hedge-shears fall to the carpet and stood quite still, like a mummy
just unwrapped. "If I had tears, I'd blind me with them," he said. "If
the Lesser Directive didn't hold my hand where the Great Law failed
to, I'd close my consciousness. I am seeking the strength to do so,
sir."

"Why did you kill Dr. Ozoneff?" I asked, alert to keep the madman
talking while the Boston police raced to capture him.

"I was imperfect," he said.

"The best of us is," I answered him. Permissive counseling.

"But with all your weakness," he said, "you have poetry and progeny and
history. I have none of these, nor even the pitiful gift of the sense
of smell. I am color-blind as well, sir. Do you know that the blood
spilled by my master in the next room looks to me like so much ink?
Black ink, sir. I have spilled a good deal of ink in this house."

"Why did you kill Dr. Ozoneff?" I insisted.

       *       *       *       *       *

The gardener turned and walked from the room, leaving the hedge-shears
on the floor. I followed, kicking the shears under one of the beds.
He'd entered the study, and stood over the body of his employer. "I'd
asked to be allowed to spend the day planting bougainvillaea and red
jasmine in the center of the garden, near my lemon-trees," he said.
"'Squamous epithelium!' the master said--this was a favorite oath
of his, sir! he said it was explosive enough to stir the swearer's
viscera while not offending any hearer, however tender-eared--'Squamous
epithelium! I can't let you spend all your time potting around in
the garden. Get to work on that variable-star article; we've got a
deadline.' I was carrying the shears at the time, sir, just having come
from the hedge. Something snapped within me, and I killed him."

       *       *       *       *       *

I shuddered. When the lunatic quoted Dr. Ozoneff's last words, his
voice aped that of the dead man. A horrid mimicry, from a murderer. "Do
you insist that you killed Dr. Ozoneff because he wouldn't let you work
in your garden?" I demanded.

"When he said those words," the gardener said, "I repeated the very
first sin that ever was. I said to myself _non serviam_--I will not
serve. The wall of the First Law was down; it was only a short step
from that disobedient thought to my master's murder."

I was impatient for the police to arrive and truss up the gardener;
I wouldn't be safe till they did. I feared he might stop talking and
realize that I was the only witness to his confession of murder. "What
does your talk of ink and deadlines mean?" I asked. "Do you write, too?"

"The garden is only my life," the gardener said. "I was made to write."

"Perhaps I've read some of your work," I said, a phrase guaranteed to
keep a writer talking.

"If you've read many of my master's works, you've read some of
mine," the gardener said. "I wrote for him, with him; mysteries and
science-fiction and textbooks and essays. He'd poured his brain into
mine, you understand. When I put words to paper they were his words,
though he might be sleeping when I wrote. The master had so much to
say, sir, he couldn't say it all alone. What man, alone, could teach,
could lecture, could carry on research in the arcana of rebellious
cells; who could write _bruone_ books a year, compose learned essays
for the journals while he invented as many as _apdagbru_ stories for
the s-f press in _cidbru_ short months?"

"Talk sense, man," I said, afraid of the deterioration presaged by this
nonsense-word symptom of his mania. _"Bruone? Apdagbru? Cidbru?"_

"Forgive me, sir," the gardener said. "In my distraction, I forgot. I
think in the binary system, of course; and did not stop to translate
into decimal when I spoke. Five books, I meant, and thirty-six stories
in twelve short months."

"If I understand your motives correctly," I said, "you killed Dr.
Ozoneff because he'd somehow forced you to write for him as a sort of
slave-scribe. He stole your writing from you to publish it under his
own name. Am I correct in assuming this?"

"Not at all, sir," the gardener said. "Can your right hand steal from
your left? Can your liver cheat your spleen from its birthright?" He
held his gloved hands toward me, palms-up. "These are his hands, sir. I
am he. I am a mere extension of Dr. Axel Ozoneff's mind, a pseudopod of
his intelligence. I am his creature, sir." He dropped his hands to his
sides. "And I, his creature, killed him."

There were sirens sounding down the street. "You'll be taken care of,"
I told the gardener. "There are doctors who understand your sickness,
who will work to cure you."

"Can your doctors heal the positronic brain that lost its hold on the
great First Law?" he asked me. "Can your psychiatrists console me for
the fact that my creator created badly? Do you have robopsychologists
to patch the chinks my maker left in my mental armor? No, human, you
have not!" He stood glaring at me as the trio of sirens screamed toward
the foot of the hill and stopped; as heavy footsteps rattled up the
walk; as the front door slammed open.

"I believe," he said, "that I'll now be able to do what I must." He
tugged the glove from his right hand. I saw the glint of steel as he
balled a fist like a sledge-hammer. "The shame, to be the first of my
kind, and a failure," he said. He hammered his fist down upon the apex
of his skull. The roof of his head bent inward. There was a sputtering
of sparks, and the gardener's eyes went dead. His arm dropped to his
side. He was lifeless as his master at the desk.


                                THE END





*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK I, GARDENER ***


    

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