I, gardener

By ALLEN KIM LANG
Can the Great First Law fall? Could the great Dr. Asim—sorry, Ozoneff—have been wrong?
I had flown to Boston to sign Doctor Axel Ozoneff to a contract with my new fall television show, Point of View. I'd already recruited a cadre of intellectual fuglemen, but I needed Dr. Ozoneff as my program's sergeant-major, as the catalyst who'd spark the seethings of his colleagues into the imaginative pyrotechnics that attract sponsors and build the big Trendex. Associate Professor of Cryptochemistry at the Medical School, author of thirty-three books (maybe more: it had been a week since I last counted), a writer whose byline appeared on the Contents page of a dozen magazines and journals regularly as their
copyright notice, and a poet of considerable skill, Dr. Ozoneff was besides something of a television personality. Who but he could have invented an s-f vignette, live, on-camera, and have it subsequently published in a major magazine and three anthologies?
I got out of the taxi at the foot of the hill. Ozoneff's home was at its summit, surrounded by a garden that threatened to pullulate into unproper Bostonian jungle at any moment. As I walked up the brick pathway toward the house, between flowering trees that hinted the presence of tigers, the gardener stepped out to block my way. He was dressed in earth-stained overalls and wore gloves; a desiccated man tall and lean as a mystery figure in a Navaho sand-painting. He held before him, like a twin-handled short-sword, a pair of hedge-shears. Good morning, I said, sucking my belt-buckle back from the points of the clippers. I have an appointment to see Dr. Ozoneff.
Indeed? The gardener raised his sharp chin and stared at me like an entymologist inspecting an impudent bed-bug. At what time had the master consented to see you, sir?
I felt that the gardener's sir had a pejorative tone to it, pronounced the way it would be pronounced by an injured enlisted man speaking to his injuring officer. Dr. Ozoneff will see me at ten o'clock, I said. Put aside those clippers and let me pass. I shall certainly inform the doctor of your behavior.