Leo Frankowski

and I want to look in on them.”
    Guibedo left before
Scratchon could say any more to him; he said it to Patricia. “So my own
damned neighbors are growing these things! That jelly belly is using me for
advertising.”
    “You’re not
being fair, Mr. Scratchon. After all, he gave you this house!”
    “And now I’ve
got to live in the thing. He’s a sneaky S.O.B.”
    “Nonsense. He’s
a very nice old man, and he’s trying to do something nice for people. These
tree houses are only toys in this part of Queens, but think about what they’ll mean to the
people starving in India,” Patricia said.
    “Yeah. They’ll
be able to raise more cannon fodder for the Neo-Krishnas to throw at us. And
when they do, our economy will be in such bad shape that this time we’ll have trouble
defeating them.”
    “I don’t think
that Dr. Guibedo looks at it that way.”
    “What he thinks he’s doing doesn’t make much difference. What he is doing is
destroying the free world.”
    A knock sounded at
the front door.
    “Now who the
hell?…” Scratchon opened the massive front door.
    “I guess I got
the right place, Burt.” Major General George Hastings was in uniform, smartly
tailored class— A blues. He had the small, compact build of a fighter pilot.
    “George! It’s
been months! What brings you to New York?”
    “Just passing
through La Guardia with a little time on my hands.”
    “Hey, you got
your second star! Looks like somebody in the old squadron made good.”
    “You haven’t
done so badly yourself, Burt.” Hastings noticed Patricia. “Oh. I hope I’m
not interrupting anything.”
    “Not in the
least. George Hastings, Patricia Cambridge. George and I were in the Twenty
Third Interceptor Wing over Sri Lanka. Now he’s the commander of Air Force
Intelligence. Ms. Cambridge is with NBC, so watch what you say, George.”
    “Here I was
hoping that you would be a foreign spy and try to seduce military secrets out of
me.” Hastings smiled at Patricia.
    “Maybe I could
take a night course and train for the job.” Patricia smiled back.
    “How’s the wife
and kids, George?” Scratchon wasn’t smiling.
    “Fine.
Actually, Margaret is one of the reasons I dropped by. She got a tree-house seed—a
Laurel, I think—in the mail
with a Burpee’s catalog, and she wanted me
to get an idea of what the floor plan would be like.”
    “My God! You,
too? Don’t you realize the danger to the economy that the damned things
represent?”
    “Come off it,
Burt. Quit trying to make your job into a holy war. Anyway, the kids planted
the damned thing on our property along Lake George. On An O-8’s pay I
couldn’t afford to build a house up there, so planting a tree house won’t set
the economy back any.”
    “But in the long
run—”
    “In the long run
we’ll all be dead. For right now, there are more important things to worry
about.”
    “Like what? Is
there something going on that they don’t tell us civilians?” Patricia
said.
    “Nothing that
you don’t read in the papers. But the human race is outgrowing this little
planet, and there is no place else to go,” Hastings said.
    “But I heard
that the moon project and L-Five were going all right.”
    “There are less
than ten thousand people up there. What’s that to the ten billion people on
Earth? Don’t get me wrong. I support those projects. But they won’t help us out
much down here,” Hastings said.
    “And you think
that these tree houses will?” Scratchon asked.
    “They might, Burt.
They just might.”
    “I wish that
you could have gotten here ten minutes sooner,” Patricia said. “Dr.
Guibedo could have used some encouragement.”
    “Guibedo was
here?” Hastings said. “I’m sorry that I missed him. But how
did you meet him? I’d heard that he was something of a recluse.”
    “A news girl
gets around. Actually, I met him through a friend of his nephew, Heinrich
Copernick.”
    “The same guy
who raised the stink about rejuvenation a few years back?” Scratchon
asked.
    “Oh, yes.
Genius often runs in a family.” Patricia steered the conversation to a topic
that she knew something about. “Take the Bach family, for example…”
     
    Seven months later,
the fashions demanded that women wear a padded turtleneck bra with wide transparent sleeves. Keeping
to the letter of the decree, Patricia’s midriff was bare to three inches below her
belly button, where a black bikini bottom and transparent pantaloons began.
    “This