for them and finally found them playing under those big Venusian trees with the orange leaves. You know, the same kind of trees we saw with flames shooting out of their pods to melt that metal? Well, take a guess what my kids were doing?"

"What was it?" Ellery said irritably. "Don't make us play guessing games."

"Among the foodstock my wife and I brought to Venus," Spaak said, "was a package of marshmallows. The kids had the marshmallows on the ends of sticks and there were little tiny flames coming out of the tree pods, roasting them. If you remember those trees at all, you'll remember the nearest pods were at least fifteen feet from the ground—which means the tree had to bend its limbs down to reach the marshmallows the children were holding."

"But how did your children control the flames?" Stokes asked. "Those flames we saw this morning would have blasted them to ashes within twenty feet."

"The children weren't controlling the flame," Spaak said. "The tree was controlling the flame for the benefit of the children."

"I have a feeling," said Jean-Paul Monet, "that the colonists were right the other night. We should leave this planet."

"How?" Wang Chin Kwang murmured.

"A minute, gentlemen," Alexandre Spaak broke in. "I believe I have solved the mystery of our hosts." He paused and looked around at the others. "Gentlemen, the intelligent life which invited us to this planet is the plant life of Venus."

"Impossible!" exclaimed Stokes. "The intelligent life which invited us here is one capable of building space ships—an engineering feet beyond even the highly advanced technical skill of Earth. You don't mean to say a plant could do that!"

"You forget," said Spaak, "that all of us stood in a field this morning and watched a plant dig ore out of the ground, another plant smelt the ore, a third plant flatten it into sheets of metal, using a fourth plant as an anvil. After seeing that flame tree in action, there can be no doubt that the flame trees also deliberately destroyed the space ships when some of us were about to use them to leave Venus. No, gentlemen, I tell you that the intelligent and dominant life on this planet consists of trees, bushes, vines, and so on down to the smallest plant. That, incidentally, must be the reason we were told to bring our own plants and not to touch any of the plant life here."

"You are 

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