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on each other’s stanchion, and Hal said, “Ciao!”
    Still hooked to her arm, he added, “Your eyes are pools of blue water. I’d like to take off my clothes and dive in.”
    “I’ll drink to that,” she said, and did so, adding, “Chow chow!”
    Her expression unhooked him. “What the hell’s chow chow?”
    “Chopped green tomatoes. But we’re not here to discuss recipes. Paul needs our help. The problem is: how are we going to smuggle a maximum-care psychiatric ward to Flora without letting the National Space Agency know what we’re up to?”
    “He isn’t crazy yet, Freda,” Hal reassured her. “He’s just beginning to flip. If he could solve the one problem—how the orchids pollinate—he might be as normal as you and me, unless the orchids do walk. Then we’re crazy and he’s sane, and he could be right.”
    “He wanted me to relieve him on Tropica,” she pointed out.
    “I couldn’t think of a better place!” Hal said.
    “If it weren’t for our confounded wedding, I’d like to go to Flora. I think I could show Paul a thing or two about pollination.”
    “I don’t know.” Hal shook his head dubiously. “Paul’s so damned pure. Why don’t we both go to Flora and show him how it’s pulled off?”
    “No, Hal. You haven’t got your Ph.D. yet, and Paul and I aren’t married.”
    “In my circles, both of those problems are purely academic.”
    “But you don’t understand, Hal. I’m a virgin.”
    “If you’re bragging, I’ll go along with your little joke. If you’re complaining, I’d like to assure you that there’s no conflict between sex and morality—one girl’s defloration is another girl’s efflorescence.”
    “You still don’t understand, Hal. It’s not ethics. My analyst tells me I have a deep-seated phobia for human contact.”
    “Freda, I hate to make generalities, but anything a psychiatrist tells you is probably moonshine. I can prove you have no such phobia. Drink that bottle of wine, and wait.”
    “No, we’ll split it,” she protested. “After all, you’re driving.”
    Leaning back while Hal poured, her mind was acutely clear and functioning at the highest level. She knew, for instance, why Italian restaurants always had red-checked tablecloths: volatile Italians were always spilling their wine.
    Considering the problem of the tulips with the omniscience she now owned, Freda realized that the vein patterns she had seen on the fluoro screen could have been exactly that. If so, the plants were little animals. Little animals had animal instincts. Paul said the tulip males mixed with the females. It might be possible to train the tulips to pollinate directly—stamen to oviduct—as the sun trained sunflowers to follow the sun. Her ideas needed refining, admittedly, but they sparked her with inspiration, and the course she must take lay suddenly as clear before her as the Great Circle route from Fresno to the Witwatersrand.
    Lowering her voice, she leaned forward. “We’ve been assuming too much here, with too little information. I’m going to hand-pollinate those tulips, get me a bed started, and give them controlled opportunities to breed. If they could do it with koala-shrews on Flora, they can do it with Freda Caron on earth! Then, I’m going to insert their solution on a seven-foot level into the computers, and solve all of Paul’s problems right here on earth. When he lands, I’m going to present him with a typed and bound thesis, Methods of Pollination Used by the Orchids of Flora . My thesis will serve two purposes—to restore his sanity and to show him who’s the boss.”
    She was waving her fork at Hal, an act that indicated to her that she was coming under the influence of Chianti. “Dinners over, Polino,” she snapped. “Let’s go.”
    Riding home with the top down diminished Freda’s euphoria and restored her wariness. By the time he pulled the car up into the circle before the Bachelor Ladies’ Quarters, she had readied a