THEFORBIDDENGARDEN Read online

  THE FORBIDDEN GARDEN

  By

  JOHN TAINE

  A Renaissance E Books publication

  ISBN 1-58873-196-0

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2003 by Renaissance E Books

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

  For information contact:

  [email protected]

  PageTurner Editions

  A Futures-Past Classic

  Selected and introduced by Jean Marie Stine

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1: A LOCKED DOOR

  CHAPTER 2: OFF

  CHAPTER 3: MARJORIE

  CHAPTER 4: THEIR HERITAGE

  CHAPTER 5: A DUEL

  CHAPTER 6: RED LEAVES

  CHAPTER 7: BLACK ICE

  CHAPTER 8: BARREN FLOWERS

  CHAPTER 9: BUTTERFLIES AND BEETLES

  CHAPTER 10: MUTINY

  CHAPTER 11: FORWARD

  CHAPTER 12: SPORES

  CHAPTER 13: VARTAN'S DISCOVERY

  CHAPTER 14: STRIPPED

  CHAPTER 15: THE RIVER

  CHAPTER 16: THE PIT

  CHAPTER 17: THE LIBERATOR

  CHAPTER 18: UNMASKED

  CHAPTER 19: GUILTY, OR NOT GUILTY?

  CHAPTER 20: SETTLED

  CHAPTER 21: LISTENING

  CHAPTER 22: THE INSPECTOR'S THEORY

  CHAPTER 23: THE MOTIVE

  INTRODUCTION

  John Taine was a bestselling author who mixed feminism, romance and the hard sciences into a unique blend of science fiction – before the appearance of the first SF magazine,Amazing Stories , in 1926. In fact, Taine's imminence was such that one ofAmazing's publisher's, the visionary Hugo Gernsback, first act was to secure the right to reprint Taine's novels in his magazine. No wonderAnalog said, "Few American science fiction writers of [that] quarter of the century … have achieved the standing or left the impression of … John Taine."

  In real life, John Taine was Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960), a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, and as well-known under that name for books likeMathematics: Servant of the Sciences andMen of Mathematics , as he was under his pseudonym for science fiction. Taine's "best and most interesting work," according toThe Encyclopedia of Science Fiction , "is a long sequence of mutational romances involving rapid and uncontrolled evolution" that have remained unparalleled until John Baxter's award winning "Origins" trilogy. Taine's series of evolutionary fantasies includesThe Greatest Adventure, The Seeds of Life, The Iron Star, The Crystal Horde, Before the Dawn, The Time Stream , and the present volume,The Forbidden Garden .

  Taine's work is unique in another way, as well. In a time when most "visionary" science fiction could see no further than its strictly and traditionally defined contemporary gender roles, the science fiction novels of Eric Temple Bell were consciously feminist. His heroines were no swooning wives or girlfriends, or even the oh-so convenient professor's daughter, whose sole purpose was to provide romantic interest and someone for the hero to rescue in a triumph of male pulp writing. Instead, they were explorers, aviatrix, scientists in their on right, or dynamic, talented professional women, like publicist, author, and even documentary filmmaker, Marjorie Driscott in The Forbidden Garden.

  Here is how science critic and writer P. Schuyler Miller described this book when it first appeared: "A strange blue delphinium, like no other known plant on earth, is the bait which tolls a party of explorers into the hinterland of the great Karakorum range. Mystery is piled on mystery as they progress – the mystery of tangled purposes and of masked personalities which is the surface pattern of the plot, but also the basic scientific mystery to which all the rest are secondary, of the source of the unearthly flowers out of nowhere, and of the strange and powerful forces behind their origin.

  "John Taine's books have all been science mysteries … riddles in which there is a fundamental scientific problem to be solved at the same time that the complications in which the characters have managed to entangle themselves are worked out. This, of course, is a basic criterion of true science fiction – the science is the reason for the story. In a Taine novel the reader who has some knowledge of the forward edges of scientific thought and research can usually guess at these clues and fit them together to solve the author's science puzzle a jump or two ahead, of the hero. … Taine has shown a greater and greater interest in that ultimate among biological and physical mysteries, the nature and origin of life and the way in which life forces are shaped by the chemical and physical forces of the universe … and now inThe Forbidden Garden … a facet of this great question is the mystery to be unraveled by characters and reader alike."

  Add romance, perilous adventure in exotic, remote regions of the earth, a prize worth millions of dollars, family secrets, and sabotage, and you will understand whyThe Science Fiction Encyclopedia wrote that John Taine's "best work shows an admirable imaginative flair … on the grand scale." You will find all that, and more, inThe Forbidden Garden.

  Jean Marie Stine

  CHAPTER 1

  A LOCKED DOOR

  Your only obligation to us, Mr. Vartan, will be to deliver to me a shovelful, say four pounds, of the soil in which this larkspur grows in the wild state. Provided, of course, that you succeed in discovering a specimen in bloom. If you find none of this variety, the loss is ours."

  It was Charles Brassey, President of the famous seed firm, speaking in his private office of the London establishment. The interview had been brief in the extreme.

  Brassey, a stoutish, clean shaven man slightly past middle age, more like a prime minister than a business man in appearance and manner, had gone to the root of the matter in the first thirty seconds.

  "We have enquired about you," he began, "and find your record as an oil explorer and later as an associate of the Geological Exploration Society of America satisfactory. Your work in Ecuador and Chile, particularly in the Andes, will be sufficient preparation, we hope, for our own undertaking. You have read Miss Driscott's articles, and doubtless you have guessed that she is our publicity agent. This plant," he indicated the superb specimen growing in a bamboo tub on a low table at his left, "is the delphinium of which she wrote."

  These preliminaries disposed of, Brassey at once stated what the firm wanted of Vartan.

  Rather overwhelmed by the abrupt success of the first stage of his adventure, Vartan glanced at the flower mechanically, did not see it, pushed back his chair and, without a word, strolled over to the bleak north window, and stood staring down at the string of busses and motor cabs cutting their lugubrious way through the cheesy drizzle. The prospect was as depressing as the weather. Although the seed firm's great headquarters had come through the blitz with nothing more serious than shattered glass, the building across the street had taken a direct hit, and now loomed up black and gaunt.

  It was less than six hours since he had got off the boat at Liverpool. Used to reasonable efficiency in business matters, and quite unprepared for super-American methods in a London business house, he was swept off his balance by the dizzy speed of it all. He vaguely wondered whether Brassey had not carefully rehearsed the scene in order to impress a New Yorker. The Marjorie Driscott incident, now boldly revealed in its true colors as a piece of bald advertising, strengthened his suspicions. On arriving at Paddington, he had taken a cab at once to Brassey House – as the firm somewhat audaciously styled their establishment 'founded in I776'. He did not lose his head.

  "Before looking into this further," he announced, wheeling about and facing Brassey, "I should like to talk to a friend."

  "May we call him for you?"

  "If it is
not too much trouble. Pardon me, but I presume we may confer in private?"

  "Certainly. Your friend's name and address?"

  "William Shane, 16 Adelaide Square, Bloomsbury. The same Shane as you quoted in your cablegram.'

  Brassey permitted a smile to flicker over his diplomatic lips. He pressed a button.

  "I anticipated your request, Mr. Vartan. In fact I suggested that Mr. Shane meet your boat, but he was too busy."

  "He is associated with you?"

  "Temporarily. We hope to induce him to stay permanently as a member of our scientific staff."

  "But what on earth–? Shane is a paleobotanist."

  "Precisely," Brassey confirmed. "An expert in fossil plants."

  "You can't sell fossil seeds," Vartan blurted out before he realized what he was saying. Brassey relaxed for a moment.

  "Have you never heard of the resurrection of the dead, Mr. Vartan?" he asked with an enigmatic smile.

  "No, and neither have you," Vartan retorted, "because it hasn't happened yet. If this–"

  His expostulations were cut short by the entrance of a prim secretary.

  "Please ask Mr. Shane to join us as soon as convenient to him, Miss West. You may tell him that Mr. Vartan is here."

  Miss West withdrew, and Brassey rose to follow her.

  "You may talk here," he said. "I shall have some light refreshments sent in. Do you care for port? Sherry?"

  The bewildered Vartan absently shook his head, and Brassey, with a stiff bow, withdrew. The door had all but closed when an afterthought opened it again. "May I suggest, while you are waiting for Mr. Shane, that you inspect that delphinium? It is unique. And, I may say," he added with a faint recurrence of his diplomatic smile, it has not risen from the dead."

  Dazed for a moment, Vartan quickly recovered his equilibrium.

  "Brassey must be crazy," he muttered, running his hand through his flaming hair. To his surprise he discovered that he was perspiring. Ashamed of his repressed excitement, he walked resolutely over to the low table with its bamboo tub.

  Vartan was by no means of a poetical nature. Yet, as his eyes took in for the first time the perfect beauty of the growing thing before him, an involuntary ejaculation burst from his lips. It meant nothing, and it meant everything. It was a distant echo of the shrill cry of astonishment, uttered by the low-browed brute that fathered our human kind, when first it recognized that the blotches of crimson and yellow, of purple and gold in the steaming jungles were something better than fruit to fill its belly – flowers, to feed its eyes.

  To perhaps eighty out of a hundred human beings, the living thing in the bamboo tub would have been only so much vegetable matter with a purplish blue spike growing out of its indistinct green middle. To Vartan, who had trained himself to recognize beauty in at least one of nature's many kingdoms, it blazed forth as a vision of the perfect flower.

  He did not hear the door open, or Miss West's crisp announcement, "Mr. Shane." Not until Shane had repeated his amused query did Vartan realize that he was not alone.

  "Pretty good, isn't it?" he repeated, shaking his fellow adventurer's hand. "Just like you, I thought Brassey was crazy when I first talked to him. Oh, yes; I'm hired, whether I go with you or not. The stuff at this end is pretty interesting as it is. I'll show you what I'm doing after we've had lunch. Did Brassey tell you what he wants?"

  "A shovelful of dirt. And you say he isn't crazy. All right; I'll take your word for it, pro tem."

  "Crazy? No more than you are. Look at that plant! What's it worth? Commercially, I mean? Why, man, if that strain were propagated for the market, it would net this firm a cool million. Pounds, not dollars. Did you ever see anything like it? This beats an azure blue rose, if you get what I mean. It's rarer, much. Even a blind man would want one of these in his garden."

  Shane's enthusiasm was partly aesthetic, partly professional. As a specialist in fossil plants, he had mastered a considerable range of living botany, in order to give his stone seeds and sandy fern spores – dusted out a grain at a time from singularly stubborn rocks – their true perspectives in the limitless vistas of life. By nature he was an enthusiast of the explosive type, wiry, lean as a whippet, dark as a Celt, and always eager to be off somewhere, provided it was indeed somewhere and not a mere nowhere not worth going to.

  "Well, what about it?" he repeated, impatient at the lingering doubt on the less easily fired Vartan's perplexed features.

  "Of course," Vartan hesitated. "That's why I came, isn't it?"

  "You don't seem too enthusiastic," Shane remarked acidly. "Wait till you've seen my slides."

  "Slides? Of what?"

  "Ah," Shane responded mysteriously, "don't you wish you knew? Millions – billions – of them, and they all came out of a speck of dust I whiffed off a seed no bigger than a grain of mustard. Teeming with them, I tell you. Alive with them, positively alive! Only," he added as an afterthought, "they're all dead. Unless," he flung out half defiantly, "you believe with Brassey that they can rise from the dead."

  Vartan shot his excited friend an appraising glance.

  "You seem to be affected, too," he remarked. "By the way, you haven't said what all these miraculous 'they' and 'them' are."

  "Wait and see," Shane snapped. "Here's lunch. Don't overdo it, even if they do go out of their way to do one rather well in this clattering old fog hole. Better sit with your back to that flower. You won't feel decent eating steak and kidney pudding right in its face. I know. Brassey fed me in here the morning I applied for a job. Sit down. Damn it! That pest's back again. He's always forgetting something."

  The nondescript servitor who had brought in the 'light refreshments' and laid them out on the teak table by the window, humbly deposited a jar of chutney beside the steaming steak and kidney pudding and withdrew, this time permanently. The incident seemed to throw a wet blanket over Shane's blazing enthusiasm'

  "I don't like that broken down old white horse," Shane muttered under his breath. "He looks like a fool, and isn't. No man who isn't an idiot has a right to look like one. Sometimes–"

  "Sometimes what?" Vartan encouraged.

  "Oh, nothing. Only I sometimes wish I were back in Ecuador, with nothing to worry about except those red mites that get under your toe nails and gnaw your leg off to the hip. Have some stout? No? Then neither will I. Brassey is all right, of course, but I prefer to talk business on a comparatively empty stomach. This pie must have been designed for the Lord Mayor of London. I wouldn't take too much of it, if I were you. They'll want you to meet Marjorie after lunch."

  "What has she to do with it?"

  "Everything. You probably will think she's a raving beauty. Better not be drowsy when you meet her."

  "Why not? What is more beautiful than a lovely woman seen through a haze?"

  "Don't try to be epigrammatic on steak and kidney pudding plus stout. You'll be sick, if you do. Marjorie? She is publicity, plus brains, plus looks. Her facile pen is to finance this little jaunt to the back of beyond. You didn't suppose a conservative business house like Brassey's would fling away a small fortune for nothing, did you? Why spend your own money to finance your business when the public is clamoring for the chance to do it for you?"

  "I see," said Vartan. "Brassey is out to make this expedition pay on publicity. Marjorie will come along as press agent?"

  "Just that. They have already sold the exclusive press and movie rights to Northfield's news agency to be syndicated in the British Empire and the United States. Brassey remarked that the firm will stand the loss if you come back empty handed? I thought so. Just what he told me. Loss? There won't be any loss. Brasseys' Limited stand to make a fortune out of this whichever way it goes. We'll take along a high powered radio outfit. The excited public will know before we do when we are about to be executed, or buried by an avalanche, or whatnot. Then they'll organize a relief expedition and make more publicity. Snowball effect."

  "So you have really made up your mind to leave your slides and
come along?"

  "Oh, I suppose so. Fresh air, intimate insects, mountain blizzards, blistered feet, bleeding hands, and all that sort of thing. I need them again."

  Vartan sighed his relief.

  "Then you can take care of the charming Marjorie."

  "Don't you believe it," Shane retorted. "Wait till you've chatted with her for fifteen minutes. She'll take care of me. And of you too. Marjorie wants copy, and lots of it. Unless one of us breaks his neck at least every other day, she will see to it that we do something more exciting. Had enough? What about dessert?"

  "I don't believe I care for any," Vartan began, and stopped abruptly. The colorless waiter, or whatever he was, had materialized from empty space.

  "Will you try this jam tart, Sir?" he humbly suggested, proffering an enormous thick circular disk of crimson, crisscrossed by stout bars of undercooked pastry. Shane took the situation in hand.

  "How the devil did you get in here?" he demanded.

  "By the door, Sir," the tart-bearer replied with exasperating meekness.

  "Then you get to hell out of here by the door," Shane snapped, " and take that damned carbuncle with you."

  "Yes, Sir."

  Vartan waited till the door had closed noiselessly behind the old white horse and his rejected tart.

  "Better keep your temper, Bill, " he advised, "no matter what you suspect."

  "I know, " Shane admitted grudgingly. "It's the Irish in me, I suppose."

  "You do suspect something?" Vartan queried.

  Shane filled his pipe – a short, ancient clay – and lit it before replying.

  "As I said," he began, "that old horse is no fool. He's Mr. Brassey's personal bodyguard, or something of the sort. Probably a retired butler who has been with the family since 1776. Does all Brassey's chores for him. General factotum about the offices and seed laboratories. Always sticking his long bald nose in where and when it's least expected. Seems to have taken a particular fancy to me and my high powered ultra microscope.

  "Spying, as it were?"

  "It looks that way. The long and the short of it is this. Brassey's know they can be trusted, but believe nobody else can. I'm watched every move I make, as if they thought I was going to steal the safe."