right, Earth-Man."

For a moment, the thirteen men in the room sat, frozen, not daring to look at each other. It had not been a voice speaking this time, yet each had heard the thought within his head. As each of them realized that all had heard it, that the thought had not been a personal hallucination, they relaxed. Quickly, they looked around the room. But there was no one there except themselves.

"I have been expecting this," Alexandre Spaak said. "I knew that my theory was right—and I thought that once it was out, they might communicate with us."

"But who—where?" gasped Stokes. "There's no one else in this room—I mean, there isn't even a plant."

"No, but look out of the window," Spaak said. "Look at the trees lining both sides of the street—the trees with those curling leaves which look almost like heads—with tendrils waving from them, like antennae!"

They looked from the window, and it was true that the leaves on the trees did look like heads. They noticed that the antennae on the leaves of the nearest tree were all bent in the direction of their building, even though the wind was blowing away from it.

"Ih dien buh tso!" exclaimed Wang Chin Kwang.

"But it's impossible, really!" said Stokes. "That space ship, all of those records in the various languages, the clearing of the land here, everything!"

"Even if one does accept the idea of intelligent plants," Clyde Ellery said, "it does seem that some of the things which have happened would be beyond the ability of—say—a tree."

You are wrong, Earth-Man, came the thought. We have been the dominant life on this planet for many thousands of years, by your reckoning of time. Long ago, we knew there was intelligent life on the third planet of our sun, for we could catch an occasional thought, and we knew that your science was less advanced than our own. But we didn't realize until much later that it was animal life which was dominant there. At first, we found it hard to believe our senses.

"Then you did build the space ships?" Spaak asked.

Of course. It was not difficult. The Scarlet Diggers among us dug up the Llantl ore, even as you saw it done this morning. The Flame Tree processed it, and the Great Pounder hammered the hull into shape.

"But how 

 Prev. P 20/23 next