"It's these damn trees," Betz said. "Some of them are higher than the towers. I don't see how the Sexton expects us to do a good job of guarding when we can't see what we're trying to guard."
"It helps if you keep your eyes open," I said, and walked away.
But whether I liked it or not, his objection was valid. While the Cadillac Cemetery had none of the sprawling vastness of Ford Acres, its decorative landscaping made the deployment of a limited guard detail a difficult proposition. The ancient automakers anticipated neither the future value of their enshrined products nor the sacrilegious exhumings that were to begin a century later, and when they laid out their car cemeteries, they stressed beauty rather than practicality. I could not feel any kindness toward a long dead manufacturer with a penchant for lombardy poplars, weeping willows, and arborvitae; who, seemingly, had done everything in his power to make it easy for twenty-second century ghouls to dig up car-corpses right under sentries' noses and whisk them away in swift cargo 'copters.
As I made my way toward the ganglion tower, I thought of what I would say to the Cadillac Sexton in the morning. I prepared my words carefully, then memorized them so that I could deliver them without faltering: The time has come for the authorities to decide which is the more important—the scenic beauty of the ground itself, or the security of the sacred corpses beneath the ground. No sentry, however alert he may be, can be expected to see through trees, and now that the rains are over and the new foliage has reached maximum growth, the situation is crucial and will remain so until fall—
I went all out. The more responsibility I could foist on the time of the year, the less I would have to assume myself. The Ford Acres Sexton had given me a glowing recommendation when I'd applied for the post at Cadillac several years back, and I hated to lose face in the Cadillac Sexton's eyes. The money was good, much better than at Ford, and with a wife on the way I couldn't afford the cut in salary that relegation to an inferior cemetery would entail. Anyway, the time of the year was to blame. What other reason could there possibly be for my losing so many car-corpses?
But the Cadillac Sexton took a dim view of my suggestion when he showed up the next morning. He glowered at me from behind his desk in the caretaker's office and I could tell from the deepening of the creases in his bulbous forehead that I was in for a lecture.
"Trees are rare enough on Earth as it is without wantonly destroying them," he said, when I had finished talking. "And these particular trees are the rarest of the rare."
He shook his head deploringly. "I'm afraid you don't quite understand the finer points of our mission, Bartlett. The scenic beauty which you would have me devastate is an essential part of the mechanistic beauty, the memory of which we are trying to perpetuate. There is a higher purpose behind the automobile trust funds than the mere preservation of twentieth century vehicles. In setting those funds aside, the ancient automakers were endeavoring to return, symbolically and in a different form, the elements they had taken from the Earth. It was a noble gesture, Bartlett, a very noble gesture, and the fact that we today disapprove of the Age of Wanton Waste does not obviate the fact that the Age of Wanton Waste could—and did—produce art. The symbolic immortality of that art is our responsibility, our mission.
"No, Bartlett, we can never resort to the sacrilegious leveling of trees and shrubbery in an attempt to solve our problem. Its solution lies in greater vigilance on the part of sentries, particularly senior sentries. Our mission is a noble one, one not lightly to be regarded. It behooves us—"