Leo Frankowski

sadness into horror.
    “Ach! Nails in
your walls! Cutting loose your furniture! And not using your toilet! Laurel,
you’re starving to death!”
    Guibedo invested in
a cab and arrived at Scratchon’s tree house at the same time that Patricia
did.
    “Dr. Guibedo!
What are you doing here?”
    “On your
program, Scratchon he said that my Laurel here is dying, so I came right over. But he
must have used
the toilet, she looks pretty good now.”
    “It has perked
up quite a bit since yesterday, Dr. Guibedo. You really care about these trees,
don’t you?”
    “Sure. They’re
like my children. And the Laurel series is special. We mailed out one hundred
thousand of her seeds to people.”
    “I heard about that—every VIP in the
country got one. That was quite an
advertising effort.”
    “A lot of kids
volunteered to help me. Friends of my nephew. We sent a Laurel to every big shot
in the world! Pretty soon everybody’ll want one.”
    “Dr. Guibedo,
have you seen Burt? I tried to call him but his phone was out of order.”
    “That
figures.” Guibedo pointed to the phone wire lying on the ground. “The
telephone people haven’t learned how to wire a tree house yet.”
    “But still, he
should have called if he wasn’t going to be here. We had a date. I’ve knocked
at both houses and no one’s home.”
    “Well, you check
his regular house again. I’m going to look Laurel over.”
    “Uh. I guess he
could be sick.” Patricia went to the big Tudor brick house facing onto 169th
Street.
    Guibedo pulled the
door branch and called inside, “Hey! Scratchon! You home?”
    He walked inside. The
lights were on, the furniture had regrown in its proper place, and everything was as neat as a mausoleum.
    “Scratchon! It’s Guibedo!”
    The kitchen cupboards were
full. The bathroom was in order except that where the toilet area should have been was just smooth wood.
    “So where did
Laurel put the new toilet?” Guibedo muttered. “Anybody home?” He turned toward the bedroom. No one there, either.
    Puzzled by the
Laurel’s missing toilet, Guibedo walked slowly out of the tree house, sealing
the door behind
him. “No one home, Patty.”
    “He wasn’t in
the old house, either,” Patricia said. “And we had a dinner date.”
    “So come with me.
I could use maybe some schnapps.”
    “Uh, okay. Why
not?” Patricia followed him to the car.

Chapter Four
    JUNE 12,2000
     
    A LL OF our realities are
painted thinly on the void of our own preconceptions.
    The problem of
training intelligent engineered life forms is a case in point. I designed them
with almost no internal motivational structure, except for a certain
dog-like desire to please.
    I
made the major error of assuming that tabula rasa meant the same as carte blanche. It
never occurred to me
to explain to them things that I assumed were “intuitively obvious.”
Things like kindness and decency and respect
for life.
    —Heinrich Copernick
    From his log tape, on finding the tombstones
of eighty-five families
     
    Major General George
Hastings, Commander, Air Force Intelligence, sat in his office in the Pentagon.
He hadn’t slept in thirty hours. His face was haggard.
    His wife and
children had been missing for two days. They had gone off to spend a week in their
new tree house
at Lake George and had vanished.
    Hastings had TDYed
one of his best security teams to Lake George and now the report was back.
    Nothing.
    The car was parked,
no unusual fingerprints on it. The soft path to the house showed only the
footprints of Margaret and Jimmy and Beth. There was no ransom note. Nothing. They
had vanished from the world just as Scratchon had.
    Scratchon? Scratchon
and Margaret both had tree houses!
    Hastings hit the
button on his intercom. “Pendelton!”
    “Yes, sir,”
a sleepy, obedient voice replied.
    “Get Research
out of bed.”
    “The whole
staff, sir?”
    “Hell, yes!
They are to determine the correlation between currently missing persons and Laurel
series tree houses.”
    Tree houses at four
o’clock on a Sunday morning! “Yes, sir. Full Research staff, tree
houses and missing persons.”
    Nine hours and half
a bottle of amphetamines later the answer came in. Correlation—32 percent.
    Thirty-two percent
of the people in the sample who owned Laurels were either officially missing
or could not be contacted.
    Hastings was making
up a list of military and governmental officials to be informed of the
correlation when Pendelton knocked and