Now what the hell did that mean?

  Louise called at six. Penn had gone to the community health clinic several hours earlier, where he was told he had a nasty strain of flu and wasn’t taking care of himself. Fearful of waiting messages, he had disconnected both fax and phone machine before venturing out. Now he snatched up the receiver from the bedside table where it stood warbling like a singing shrunken head.

  “Get down here,” she said. “Take a cab; you don’t sound like you’d survive the subway.”

  “I don’t think I could afford it, either.”

  “Save the receipt. I think Grossmere can spring for this.” Penn rode in muffled to the ears, like Proust in the back of his limousine. Louise met him at the elevator. Arms folded, she studied him speculatively, as though musing on more than his pallor.

  “Show you something.” She conducted him to her cubicle, where dozens of Alert covers—NAZI SUB FOUND IN LOCH NESS; BIGFOOT TURNS VAMPIRE—lined the fabric partitions. The monitor glowed green with the office system’s main menu.

  “I was noodling through some of the format categories—not my usual pastime, but any writer might have occasion to do it—when this popped up.” Louise tapped a series of keys, entering a possible combination of options, and a box suddenly appeared at the center of the screen.

  DO YOU HATE CLIFFORD PENN?

  Would You Like to Fuck Him Over?

  If So, Hit Alt D!

  Penn stared at this, eyes goggling. After a moment he reached out his hand, then drew it back. “What does Alt D get you?” he whispered.

  Louise shrugged. “Nothing. Maybe whatever treasures it offered also contained instruction on how to delete it afterward. A text file could include that, yes?”

  Penn nodded, ashen. He reached out and depressed Alt D. The box disappeared.

  “I don’t think your software likes you,” Louise said.

  He sank into the chair, unable to speak. From behind the monitor, a 90-year-old Hitler seemed to be leering.

  “Anyway, I talked to Bert, who took it to Grossmere.” Louise exited the system and turned off her machine. “Blew his top—he’s putting a stop to it. Not out of concern for your feelings, of course, but because such abuses could really get him sued someday.”

  “I could sue,” said Penn in a small voice.

  “I wouldn’t advise it. Take what leverage this gives you—Grossmere wants you to add security measures now—and keep the rest to yourself. If you brought a legal action, they would find out about that little message, which must have been in the software you brought from your last job. You wouldn’t want that to come out, would you?”

  He shuddered.

  Louise stood and took him by the elbow. “Let’s get you out of here,” she said. “You won’t get the new job done if you’re on the critical list.”

  Leaning against her, Penn was conducted back to the elevator. Plastic day-glo dinosaurs perched atop the office partitions snarled as they passed, and an abominable snowman Halloween mask, hung on the wall like a hunting trophy, seemed to follow him with its eyeless gaze as he left Editorial.

  “You’re not really a bad sort,” Louise was saying, “just not right for this kind of place.” She put him into the elevator and waved as it closed. “Keep watching the skies,” she said.

  Snow was blowing against the lobby’s glass door as Penn pushed through into the night. Bigfoot, take me now, he thought as the wind stung his face. Lead me to your eyrie atop the Sears Tower, where the light of your fire will call down the saucer people to take me to the land of rum coladas with paper parasols.

  The cab that found him was playing “Werewolves of London” over the roar of the heater. Louise had a story in production about werewolves, Penn remembered woozily. Doubtless his software would be used in preparing the photo. Manning would search his image library for a picture of Lon Chaney or some circus freak to use as a rough model. Would Penn’s ID photo ever be tracked down and purged from this digitized Devil’s Island?

  “My software is full of devils,” he told the cabbie.

  MAN TRAPPED IN TABLOID’S COMPUTER!

  Distorted Image Peers from Pages, Crying “Help!”

  “Sympathy for the devil,” the cabbie said. And immediately the song came on.

  Cannibal Plants From Heck

  By David Drake

  Even though he’s written many different kinds of fantasy and SF very well, David Drake is perhaps best known for his military SF, such as the excellent Hammer’s Slammers series. “Cannibal Plants from Heck” is a bit of a departure for him, which he claims he wrote because he had to do my bidding. Ha! While getting my name legally changed to She Who Must Be Obeyed, I recommend you read and enjoy this, and be careful where you shop.

  Note: this story owes a debt of sorts to my mother; and of another sort to Carl Barks, who in WDC&S #214 made the situation more amusing than it had seemed when I was living it.

  Betsy Moffett stood beside her father in the gravel driveway, judging the house with nine-year-old eyes. Behind them the real estate agent rummaged in the trunk of her BMW.

  It wasn’t a large house: one story and forty feet wide by twenty-four deep. There were only two of them now, so that was all right. The three dogwood trees in front had gnarled, low-branching trunks four to six inches in diameter. Betsy had never before been close to a tree she thought she could climb.

  In back were a rusty swing set and a length of old telephone pole. The bare, trampled soil around the pole showed that it once had mounted a net and backboard. A new set couldn’t cost very much, and Betsy had a birthday coming in July.

  The agent found what she wanted, a thin cap reading under contract in blue letters on white. She walked over to the realty company’s white-on-blue sign, careful because of the soil’s March squishiness, and clipped the cap into place to hide for sale.

  There were children playing down the street. Betsy couldn’t see them from where she stood, but voices rose and fell in shrill enthusiasm.

  The other houses in the subdivision were pretty much like this one. Some had brick facades, some had decks; but none of them were very large, and Mr. Moffett’s four-year-old Ford fit in much better than the agent’s sparkling BMW. The agent had mentioned the well and septic tank in a hurried voice quite different from that in which she described the house as so cute, a little jewelbox!

  A horse-drawn wagon turned the comer at the end of the block and plodded down the street. The driver was a shabby-looking black man; a large dog walked beside the horse with its head down. Betsy had never seen a real horse-drawn wagon before. She was surprised to notice that it had rubber tires like a car instead of the wooden wheels like the ones on TV.

  Neighborhood dogs barked. Several kids appeared on fluorescent bicycles and swooped around the wagon. The driver waved to them.

  The agent returned to the Moffetts. For a moment as she glanced toward the wagon her face had been without expression, but the professional smile returned an instant later. “Charles,” she said, extending her hand to Betsy’s father, “I’m sure you’ll be very happy here. Let me know when you’ve decided on the lender and we’ll set up the closing.”

  She shook hands firmly. Her fingernails were the same shade as the cuffs and collar of the blouse she wore beneath the jacket of her gray suit.

  “And, Betsy,” the agent added as she took Betsy’s hand in turn, “you’re going to have a wonderful time, too. Look at all the children to play with!”

  The bicycles now lay on their sides in the front yard of a house three doors down. A group had coalesced there to chalk markers on the concrete driveway. The kids ranged from older than Betsy to an infant whose elder brother pushed the stroller.

  “I’ll be talking to you soon!” the agent said brightly as she got into her car. The BMW’s door thunked with a dull finality.

  The black man guided his horse to the side of the road, out of the way. The agent backed with verve, then chirped her tires as she took off toward town.

  Mr. Moffett put an arm around Betsy’s shoulders. “This is my chance to garden,” he said. He gestured with the glossy catalogs in his other hand. Those on top read White Flower Farm and Thompson & Morgan, but there were several more in the sheaf.

  “Your mother would never let me garden, you know,” Mr. Moffett went on, surveying the yard with his eyes. “She ridiculed the whole idea. Well, I’m going to prove how wrong she was.”

  “Whoa, Bobo,” murmured the black man.

  The Moffetts turned. The wagon halted directly in front of the house. It was full of live plants. Instead of pots, the root balls were wrapped in burlap. Most of the plants were in flower, and the blooms were gorgeous.

  “Dad, can I play with the horse?” Betsy asked as she skipped toward the animal without waiting for what might have been a negative answer.

  “The mule, missie,” the driver said. “Bobo’s a mule, and just the stubbomest mule there ever was—”

  He winked toward Mr. Moffett.

  “—but he’s on company manners right this moment.” Bobo eyed Betsy over the traces. The mule’s head was huge, but he looked friendly in a solemn, reserved fashion.

  “That’s Harbie,” the black man said, nodding toward the dog who sniffed the mailbox post meaningfully, “and I’m Jake.”

  “Can I touch Bobo?” Betsy asked, her hand half extended. “You surely can, missie,” Jake said. To Betsy’s father he went on, “Might I interest you in some plants, sir? A new house ought to have flowers around it, don’t you think?” Betsy rubbed the white blaze on the mule’s forehead. One of Bobo’s long ears twitched and caressed her wrist. Harbie trotted over, sat at Betsy’s feet, and raised a paw for attention.

  “Well, I’m going to be gardening, yes,” Mr. Moffett said. He waved the catalogs. “But I’ll be getting my stock only from the best nurseries. I—what are these plants? I don’t think I recognize any of them.”

  “They’s flowers, sir,” Jake said. Betsy couldn’t tell how old he was. Older than her father, anyway. “I grows them because they’s pretty, is all. I’ve got bushes up to the house, if you’d like something bigger.”

  “No, I . . .” Mr. Moffett said. He glanced doubtfully at his catalogs, then back to the wagonload of plants. “Are those Hemerocallis so early?”

  “There’s daylilies, yessir,” Jake agreed. “The tall ones, there, and they’s some smaller ones around back as would make a nice bed along the street here.”

  Harbie rolled over on her back and kicked her legs in the air. Her weight pinned Betsy’s right toes warmly. Betsy squatted to rub the dog’s belly. The mule snorted.

  “Those are eight feet tall” Mr. Moffett said, staring at the dark green stems from which brilliant red flowers spread.

  “Yessir,” Jake agreed. “But they’s short ones, too. Would you like something for the new house, then?”

  Mr. Moffett looked again at the catalogs. To Betsy, the illustrated plants seemed dim and uninteresting compared to the variegated richness in the back of the wagon.

  “No thank you,” Mr. Moffett said abruptly. “I prefer to trust certified species. Betsy, come along. We need to get back to the apartment.”

  He reached decisively for her hand. Harbie rolled to her feet and wagged her tail as Betsy straightened.

  “Good day to you, then, sir,” Jake said. He touched his cap and clucked to his mule.

  Mr. Moffett didn’t get into the car immediately after all. Instead, he continued to watch the wagon clopping down the street.

  “What an odd man,” he said.

  The lustrous flowers nodded from the back of the wagon.

  When Betsy ran up at the head of a delegation of five children, Mr. Moffett was loading a cart with washed stone from the pile the truck had deposited at the end of the driveway.

  It was a clear day; even at ten in the morning the June sun was hot. Mr. Moffett nonetheless wore his new gardening apron. The pockets glittered with tools: clippers, hedge trimmers, a planting dibble, and a set of cast-aluminum trowels with a matching spading fork.

  “Dad!” Betsy cried. “Stepan’s mom says we can take the backboard off their garage and bring it over to our pole so it can be regulation height!”

  The rest of the children waited behind Betsy, viewing with interest the work Mr. Moffett had already done in the yard. Except for the driveway itself and a narrow walk, the area between the house and the street was now a flowerbed. Irises, tulips, and the daylilies which Mr. Moffett always called Hemerocallis predominated, but there were many more bulb plants that Betsy didn’t recognize. Perhaps some of them would have been familiar under other names, but as Acidanthia, Zantedeschia, and similar sounds they could have been tribes of the Amazon.

  The climbable dogwoods were gone, chain-sawed off flush with the ground. Near where they stood, Mr. Moffett had planted what he called Comus Alba Elegantissima—which looked like dogwoods to Betsy, only very spindly. The saplings had to be guyed in three directions to hold them straight.

  “Pole?” Mr. Moffett said. He looked doubtfully at the group of children.

  Betsy glanced over her shoulder to make sure the other children were staying in the driveway as she’d warned them to do so that they didn’t threaten the plantings. Everybody was fine.

  Jake and his wagon clopped down the street. Harbie walked ahead of Bobo with head up, stepping in a sprightly fashion. Jake raised his cap in salute when he saw Betsy.

  Mr. Moffett noticed the wagon also. “Does that man live around here?” he asked with an edge in his voice. His eyes were on Stepan, the only black in the present group.

  “No, sir,” Stepan said, holding himself stiff. “But my mom, she buys his flowers sometimes.”

  “We buy flowers, too!” said Muriel, who was only six.

  “You know the pole, Dad,” said Betsy, determined to get the discussion back on course. “In the back yard. The people who lived here before took the backboard when they moved, but Stepan’s mom says we can move theirs and have it regulation height!”

  “Oh, that pole,” Mr. Moffett said. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand, looking serious. “Ah.”

  The car was parked in the street because the driveway was full of gardening supplies. Besides the peanut-sized washed stone for drainage at the bottom of pots and flower beds, there were pallets of bagged topsoil and other bags marked organic peat moss—but with a stenciled cow to indicate the real contents more delicately than dried cow-flop would have done.

  Mr. Moffett had said he would carry the temporary excess to the metal storage shed he’d built at the back of the property, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. The five-horsepower rototiller that had dug the front lawn into flowerbeds was in the shed already, parked beside the powerful chipper/shredder that had ground up all but the lower trunks of the dogwood trees with an amazing amount of racket.

  Betsy was a little concerned that her father hadn’t bought a lawn mower among all the other new equipment. She was afraid he’d decided that there wouldn’t be any lawn left when he was done with the yard.

  “We can get it right now, Dad,” Betsy pressed. “You don’t have to help. The bolts are still up in the pole, and we can borrow Lee’s father’s ladder. You can go on digging.”

  “I’m sorry, darling,” Mr. Moffett said. He sounded at least uncomfortable if not exactly sorry. “That pole is part of my plan for the garden. I’m going—I’m preparing right now—to plant Ipomoea around it. So that the vines can climb properly.”

  “Whoa, Bobo,” Jake muttered out in the street.

  Betsy glanced sideways so that she didn’t have to look at her father for the moment. He wouldn’t meet her eyes anyway. He never did at times like these.

  Roses twined up the wrought iron posts which supported the rain-shield over the front door. The window to Betsy’s bedroom was a green blur from the potted fern which Mr. Moffett had hung there to catch the natural light.

  “Good day, sir,” Jake called. “I guess you’re going to raise some tomatoes.”

  Harbie snuffled the back of Betsy’s knees. Betsy turned quickly and bent to pet the dog. Harbie’s tail waggled enthusiastically, whopping all the children as they crowded around her.

  “No sir, I don’t intend to raise vegetables,” Mr. Moffett said stiffly. “I’m concentrating on flowers and flowering shrubs, so if you’re selling tomato plants—”

  “Not me, sir,” Jake said with a chuckle. “But if you don’t plan to raise tomatoes—”

  He nodded toward the bags of ‘organic peat moss.’

  “—then did you tell the cows?”

  “Can we get the backboard, now?” Muriel demanded. “Yeah, what did he say?” Stepan said.

  Mr. Moffett grunted angrily. “I don’t care to buy any of your plants,” he said. “Good day.”

  “You said,” Jake said from the seat of his wagon, “that you were going to plant morning glories around the pole in the back, sir. I’ve got some fine morning glories here myself.”

  “I’m quite satisfied with my Purpurea Splendens, thank you,” Mr. Moffett said, taking a brightly colored seed packet from an apron pocket. “They have a delicate lavender—”

  He stopped. Even the children gaped at the size of the trumpet-shaped blooms Jake held up for approval. They were pure white and at least eight inches across.

  Mr. Moffett swallowed. “Lavender picotee, I was saying,” he concluded weakly.

  “If you want purple edges, sir,” Jake said agreeably as he leaned farther back into the loaded wagon, “then I got them, too.”

  The flower he raised on a vine trailing back into the mass of root balls and foliage was ten inches in diameter. As Jake had said, the edges of the broad bell were faintly lavender.