Leo Frankowski

people,” Jimmy repeated, for lack of
anything better to say.
    “Maybe fifty
thousand. Ach! My poor Laurels! Them big shots is chopping you down faster than
you can grow!”
    “You really love those trees, huh,
Professor?”
    “It wasn’t really their fault. They
shouldn’t have done it, but when you’re
lonely and hungry and nobody cares…”
    “I know what you mean, Professor.
Man, do I know what you mean! But how do I
get one?”
    “Well, first
you got to get out of this jail.”
    “That’s easy. They always throw me
out in the morning.”
    “Ach! I should
be so lucky. What’s that scratching sound?”
    “Rats. We’re in
the basement here. The place is crawling with them. How long you in for anyway, Pro fessor?”
    “Who knows?
This lawyer my nephew Heiny sent, he says they got maybe twenty thousand warrants
out on me.
Everything from transporting vegetable matter across state lines without a permit, to premeditated rape.
He did some plea bargaining and got most of them reduced to murder in the
first degree.”
    “Murder one? You
know, with a good lawyer, you can beat that one.”
    “Sure. The
trouble is I got to keep on beating it twenty thousand times! The lawyer figures,
if everything goes right, we can do it in maybe three hundred and twenty-five years.”
    “Three hundred
and… You should live so long!”
    “I know. I’m ninety already. It just
isn’t fair! Did they throw the Wright brothers in jail every time an airplane crashed? Did Henry Ford get locked up every time somebody
got killed in a car wreck? Ach. But that’s my problem,
and you can’t do nothing to help me with it. But I can do a lot to help
you with yours.”
    “My problem, Professor? I told ya,
they throw me out in the morning.”
    “Sure. And you gonna be panhandling
for drinks and sleeping in alleys and back in here tomorrow night.”
    “So you think
I’m just a bum, huh? Well, let me tell you, Professor, I wasn’t always a bum! I
have a college degree, and I
had my own business before… well, just before!”
    “Ach, Jimmy, I
ain’t calling you names, and I ain’t telling you how to run your life. Hah! Sitting here in jail, it
looks like I ain’t run my own life so good.
    “But you, Jimmy, you got better
things coming. Like maybe a ten-room house,
with gardens and fountains and plenty
of good food and beer all the time in the cupboards.”
    “Hey, don’t forget the twenty nude
women around my swimming pool.”
    “Well, the
Ashley series has got forty-foot pools. You gotta get the women on your own.”
    “And where am I
supposed to get that kind of money?”
    “What money? I
told you. Eat and make shit!”
    “You mean your
tree houses are like that! I was thinking of maybe a cubbyhole where I could stay warm.”
    “Once you got a
DNA string in a microscalpel, Jimmy,you might as well do it up right. You’re
thinking in term-fashioned economics, when to build a house twice as big, you had to pay twice as much
money. And to make two houses, it
costs twice as much again. But with
engineered life forms, they build themselves as big as you want, once you’ve designed them. The same thing goes with
numbers, since they reproduce themselves. You can make a thousand things, or a
million things, just as easy as you
can make one. Why, I could have made my tree houses grow millions of
seeds and covered the world with them in a year, only I didn’t want to wreck the forests and drive away the animals.
Life is best when there is enough, but not too much.
    “So anyway, what you got to do is
find a nice place to put your tree house.
Your best bet is in a state park, maybe.
Get way back, maybe a coupla miles from a road, so the big shots won’t bother you. Find a pretty place, with a nice view, near a creek or maybe a
waterfall.”
    The scratching sound
got louder. Guibedo said, “Them
must be some damn big rats, Jimmy.”
    “The size of
dogs, some of them,” Jimmy said. “Go on with what you were saying.”
    “So all you got
to do is dig a hole, maybe a foot down, and use it for a toilet. Put the seed in it with the point on the seed toward where you want the front door to
be. Cover it up and water it every
day for three months. You can move
into it then, but it won’t be full growed for at least six months.”
    “Six months!
They grow that fast?” Jimmy said.
    “Sure.
Engineered life forms are a lot more efficient than natural ones. Or maybe I should
say they’re a lot less inefficient. Let me give