It took Lacey a little longer than that to get in, because instead of picking the lock he summoned Wilhoit’s live-in house staff to admit him.
There were two of them, both men in their forties. One wore the livery Silvers had died in, a burly, smooth-stepping man, obviously a human watchdog and obviously angry. Lacey had announced his presence by having the CS Net override every sound unit in the suite, ordering the occupants to unlock immediately or face arrest. As the door swung open the guard snarled a quick curse, but he backed off from Lacey’s lifted brow and the threat in the eyes beneath it.
The other man was the one Lacey had come to see. He had thin hair and a worn tunic whose loops and pockets held a score of scrupulously clean tools. The light reflected from the myriad plants filling the suite gave the man’s pale complexion a greenish cast, and it seemed to fit. He blinked at Lacey with the same mild interest that he might have displayed toward a cafeteria server.
“You’re Charles Dornier, Citizen Wilhoit’s gardener?” Lacey asked, as an opening rather than because the matter was in doubt.
“Why yes, do you have a delivery for us?” the wispy man responded.
Lacey grinned with something close to humor. “Not exactly,” he said. “I’d like to see Citizen Wilhoit’s plants, but I’m a Crime Service agent.” He turned back to the guard. “You can wait outside in the hall,” he said. “And I mean wait. Take three steps away from the door and there’ll be a Red Team on you.”
Dornier had ignored the words, ignored also the glowering and slammed door with which his companion exited. “It’s really a splendid collection,” he was saying, “and though I must admit it lacks a certain . . . focus, I suppose, I think the variety makes it far more interesting. Don’t you?”
Lacey had already found what interested him. Amid the waist-high rows of foliage were six geraniums with gray boxes like the one in the Coeltrans Building clipped to them. “What’re these?” he asked.
Dornier knelt beside Lacey, warming with pride. He traced a circuit with his index finger. “It was my own idea,” he said, “but Robert has gotten very deep in it himself and that’s—well, he’s a very brilliant man, you know, very brilliant. I’ve attached electrodes to different portions of the same plant to measure the resistance across the current path. That depends on the number of ions in the veins and the volume of fluid—and that can depend on outside stimuli, including thoughts the plant’s owner directs at it.”
“Oh, god have mercy!” Lacey spat. It had been a rough search already and he didn’t need a load of silly dreck to fuzz the edges further. “You’re telling me that plants think?”
“No, I’m not telling you that, Citizen, and you’re not listening to what I am saying,” Dornier snapped back. The gardener’s eyes flashed with anger and an affronted dignity that Lacey could appreciate. He suddenly realized that there was a core of ability in Dornier as real as that within him—that there had to be, or Wilhoit would never have hired him in so personal a capacity.
“I’m sorry,” Lacey apologized. “Please explain.” He squatted, his rump just above the floor and his face close to the geraniums. The blooms were odorless but the leaves themselves had a bitter, unexpected tang.
“I’ve never heard anyone insist that encephalographs think,” Dormer said, not wholly mollified, “just because they register brain waves.”
“But not thoughts.”
“Well, Psycomps then; though perhaps you’ll say they do think?” The gardener shrugged, then continued, “But machinery is Robert’s field, not mine. And mind you, I’m not saying that my friends here”—he stroked the furry edge of a leaf with a finger that was stained, calloused, and very gentle—”don’t think. It doesn’t particularly matter to me at the moment. What does matter is that I can make any of these six raise or lower the resistance of their leaves, just by thinking at them from across the room.”
For a moment the suite was so still that the drip of moisture from the plant-watering conduits was audible. Lacey rested like a mottled gray stone until he asked, “What would happen then?”