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Adventures of a Botanist
by Bob Brill


1: X Eats Y

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer. Now that he is free to set his own agenda, he has devoted his energies to making computer art (www.digitalrealm.net/users/bobbrill) and writing fiction and poetry. Adventures of a Botanist is his first published story.
            In the days before I was propelled into my peculiar adventures, I was an Assistant Professor of Botany at one of the less distinguished institutions where the sons and daughters of the midwest came to learn the science of agriculture. Such schools are called cow colleges by the snobbish and I was not above referring to my place of employment the same way. I thought that its real name, Rutabaga University, was even more indicative of its lowly status. I felt in particular that my fellow academicians and especially the school administrators displayed no more feeling, imagination or soul than a rutabaga. Had I known then what I’ve since come to learn about the vegetable kingdom, I would not have held the rutabaga in such low esteem.
             The place was named, incidentally, for J. P. Rutabaga, the rancher and philanthropist, who founded the institution. I never met the old man but the universally accepted opinion on campus held that he was as big a clod of dung as ever came down the pike, as uncompromisingly dull and dimwitted as the name he bore. The institution upon which he foisted his name had never learned to live it down. Consequently, the school administration constantly tried to foster a prestigious image, so that people would say Rutabaga with a straight face, but it was no use. The place was jinxed, the football team was a disgrace, and I was forced to acknowledge that I could not get a better job. I dwelt in a state of limbo called “promising”.  I was relegated to this purgatory by the Faculty Wives Association, who bestowed on me their Promising Young Instructor of the Year Award. In the three years since then, I was turned down twice for tenure. Such was the sorry state of affairs when the events of this narrative began.

             I became interested in the work of Cleve Backster, possibly because I heard Backster’s researches being ridiculed by some of my colleagues in the Botany Department.  Cleve Backster was, and for all I know, still is, the director of a detective school in New York specializing in lie detector technique.  One day Backster connected a lie detector to a potted plant on his office windowsill.  As Backster contemplated tearing a leaf off the plant, the needle on the lie detector made a violent leap, and this response Backster interpreted as the plant’s fear or alarm.  He repeated this experiment many times with many variations, eventually demonstrating that plants of every species tested could detect human intentions at a distance.  I sent for reprints of Backster’s published papers, read them carefully, wrote several letters to Backster and received long, courteous, informative replies which went a long way toward assuring me that Backster was not a crackpot. I decided to perform Backster’s experiments myself and see if his results could be duplicated.

             This is a time-honored procedure in the scientific method, which within limits was practiced even at Rutabaga University by my colleagues.  These limits exist because some hypotheses seem so ridiculous that no one bothers to test them. The study of botany till then revealed no structures in the plant body capable of transmitting electrical impulses, no nervous system, no consciousness, no intelligence, not the slightest flicker of sentience.  It was not worthwhile trying to repeat Backster’s experiments because on the face of it they were absurd.  But I did not share this opinion with my esteemed colleagues.

             It may come as a surprise to my uninitiated readers, but the whole body of knowledge known as Plant Anatomy is based on a study of little more than 600 species of plants, while the world holds over 350,000 species of flowering plants alone.  Including the non-flowering types the count is somewhere above half a million.  The underlying assumption of Plant Anatomy is that the 600 are representative of the half million.  This is far from the case.  The annals of botany are liberally sprinkled with references to anomalous anatomical features.  There is nothing anomalous about them.  They merely fail to conform to the generalizations that arise from the classical study of the 600.  For anomalous read unexplained. Witness the Fungi Imperfecti.  To this taxonomic limbo are assigned all the oddball creatures whose structure, life cycle, reproductive habits, etc. have so far proved too elusive to yield up their secrets to our scrutiny.  The imperfection is not in the fungi, but in ourselves.

             We are living, as it happens, in a golden age of biological discovery. The press has played this up and represents our science as being on the verge of creating life in a laboratory.  This may even be true, but creating life and understanding it are not the same. Theory is forever spinning off technological achievements, but theory is itself never perfected.

             The great advances made in genetics, most notably the cracking of the DNA code and the elucidation of protein formation, have shown us that nature is even more marvelous than we suspected. The more we learn, the more the mystery deepens.

             If you are contemplating sending your son or daughter to Rutabaga University you will not be told any of the above in the brochures.  You will be told that the Botany Department houses an expert staff who will train junior to master plant science in all its vital aspects, i.e., fertilizer, pesticides, crop yield, etc.  Botany 103, An Introductory Survey of the Plant Kingdom, covers the Fungi Imperfecti in about 15 minutes.  Watch out though, because there’s usually one question on the final exam about them.  The little known, but much exploited, genus Penicillium lurks among their number.

             I am no longer a professor of botany, but inexcusably I still fall into the habit of lecturing, as though I were still standing in the classroom before a room full of students. To spare my readers the tedium of this practice, I have removed the most outrageous of these digressions to an appendix, where they may be safely ignored by all but the most technically minded of my readers.

            My attempts to verify Backster’s results met with cold disdain. Nevertheless, with funds, time and equipment borrowed from more legitimate research, I set up several of his critical experiments and achieved the same results that he did.

             The first time I saw the needle of the polygraph jump I felt a thrill. Had another polygraph been attached to me you’d have seen its needle jumping too. I was so glad that it was true.  Not a small part of that thrill was feeling superior to the learned scholars and deans of Rutabaga University who were wrong, wrong, wrong. Their place in history was in the chorus of naysayers who scoffed at Copernicus, who tormented Galileo, and who told Orville and Wilbur it would never fly. O how glorious to know that what they spurned was the truth. And what a truth it is.

             To what extent plants are aware and what is the mechanism of this awareness, all this was still unknown, an exciting new domain of inquiry. But in the meantime, just to be aware of their awareness thrilled me to the bone. Walking home that memorable day I smiled at the trees. I felt a strong wave of admiration for the world I lived in and for Cleve Backster. The vegetation of the world had kept silent through the ages, till one day Cleve Backster did a simple thing that no one had ever thought of doing, and lo he saw the electronic echo of a plant screaming. I thought of Henri Fabre’s remark that the way to make nature speak is through the language of experiment. I felt at one with Henri Fabre, with Louis Pasteur, with Cleve Backster, with the whole lineage of true empirical scientists. That’s a high that’s hard to beat.

             It lasted until the moment a few hours later when I cut through a fresh head of lettuce. “Scrunch!” said the lettuce and fell into quivering fragments on the cutting board.  I dropped the knife and stared at my handiwork.  In that scrunch I heard the tearing of flesh and a thousand voices screaming in agony.  All was silent now but I knew what the polygraph would say.  I knew that as I raised my knife the lettuce was already screaming, and so were all the spectators, the tomatoes and the cucumbers and the basil and the dill, all waiting so quietly as usual where they had been put.

             I saw that something could be salvaged.  I gathered up the scallions from the table, went out to the garden and planted them in a flower bed among the dahlias.  I watered them with great care.  They were quite limp. I felt as though I were atoning for a lifetime of callous behavior toward the plant kingdom.  I returned to the house and sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the salad fixings.  I began to feel hungry and I sensed in this that a great crisis was about to overwhelm me.

             I saw that my situation was impossible.  I’ve been a vegetarian since the age of eleven.  Now I could no longer eat vegetables.  What was left?  I sat thinking about this for awhile as the room grew dark and I could no longer see the dying vegetables on the table.  At last I resolved to go to the library and learn how long a man could be expected to last on nothing but water. 

             The Rutabaga University library is not very well supplied on this subject, but I did find a paper by Professor Langfeld published in 1914.  He reports that in 1912 a Maltese lawyer named Agostino Levanzin came to Boston to be the subject of a scientific study of fasting.  The only thing to pass his lips for 31 days was 750 cc. of distilled water daily.  When the study was ended, Levanzin asked that it be continued.  He was physically weaker than at the beginning, but his alertness had increased and he enjoyed heightened sensitivity to smell and improved vision.  He experienced no hallucinations.  Perhaps he had been bolstered by his faith that periodic fasting is good for the health.  Indeed, he volunteered for this experiment to prove this point.  He reluctantly accepted food on the 31st day, which made him quite sick.  Professor Langfeld reported that prior to this study Levanzin had fasted without medical surveillance for 40 days and he cites several unofficial records, set by other fasters, one of them for 60 days.  I figured I had at least a month, maybe more.

             This had been the most exhilarating day of my life.  It had also been the most calamitous.  So crowded was it with intense feelings that I could no longer remember breakfast and I had to strain to recall that lunch, my last meal, was a bowl of barley soup and a vegeburger.  I certainly had no inkling when the day began that it would end by my going to bed without supper.

             I dreamed that my mother was preparing Sunday dinner.  I was the first at table and I could hardly wait till she was done and all the family had seated themselves.  My father gave the signal to begin.  My mother loaded the plates with heaps of grisly raw intestines and passed them around.  I ate with relish, stuffing one after another in my mouth, sucking them in like strands of spaghetti.  My father reprimanded me for my manners.  I ignored him and licked my plate clean.  My father slapped my face.  I woke up with a jolt.  It was still dark.  I was sweating and hunger had tied my stomach in knots.

             My mother was no vegetarian, but she loved all living creatures.  She was very fond of flowers and had a splendid garden, both flowers and vegetables and fruit trees.  She put out food for birds in winter and kept a bag of peanuts in her purse for any squirrels or pigeons she encountered in the streets of the city.  No stray dog or cat left our back steps hungry and they finally became a plague as they came around in ever greater numbers for handouts.  My father finally forbade my mother to keep up this practice, but I know she circumvented his ruling by feeding the strays in the woods behind our property where the strays learned to wait for her.

             How she reconciled herself to my father’s profession I’ve never understood, but my mother was extremely well balanced.  Despite her love for living creatures, she was quick to accept such necessities as death, eating, and the word of my father.

  
           My father was a professor of zoology, a brilliant lecturer, a masterful dissector.  His students were spellbound as they saw him spill open the secret throbbing innards of beasts, all the while interpreting these revelations in long perfect sentences, most of which contained one or more dependent clauses.  I hated him.  He introduced me to the anatomy of the frog when I was eight.  I begged him not to.  He told me it was time for me to look nature in the face.  He locked me in his study and made me sit at his work table.  He took a frog from its cage and standing across the table from me he ordered me to watch as he killed it with a swift plunge of his knife.  I screamed. He lectured me on the concept of sacrifice.  Scientists like my father attempt to justify their torture and slaughter of animals by using the word sacrifice instead of murder.  The sacrifice, of course, is to Science, our holy quest for Knowledge, and the ritual is performed with solemnity and awareness.  For my father’s part I will say that he never joked about life and death.  He never mocked the poor corpse as I know others have done.  He told me then that he sacrificed the frog that I might learn a few elementary truths about life and that I must watch closely so that the sacrifice should not be wasted.  I felt a surge of hormones flooding me with guilt and anger and shame.  I looked him in the eyes and said that I was ready.

             He nodded slowly at me and made a long incision which laid open the frog from top to bottom.  My soul swam in horror as I watched my father give his introductory lecture in anatomy. For an eternity he tortured the dead flesh of the poor unprotesting creature. Then he showed me the long pale ribbon of the sciatic nerve and repeated the famous experiment of Galvani. When he applied the current and the frog’s leg twitched, I went berserk.  I rolled on the floor, screaming and moaning. In the midst of this I had a diabolical inspiration to punish my father. I began twitching my legs in imitation of the frog. I flipped and twitched my whole body at once, croaking in short staccato grunts. I turned up my eyes to show only the whites, a trick I had learned from a friend. My father ordered me to stop. He pleaded, he shouted, he issued commands, promises and threats. Finally, he astonished me by weeping and begging my forgiveness. Still I would not stop. Then he swore at me, accused me of faking, called me a coward and slammed the door and left me. Still I did not stop. He returned and carried me still performing to my room and locked me in. I continued by pounding on the door, screaming to be let out and I did not stop till I had exhausted myself. My father never again gave me lessons in science. 

             I got up and broke out a tray of ice. I walked around my living room sucking and chewing on an ice cube. I had heard that Cherry Hill Fats took water in the form of ice cubes during his fast. He weighed 642 pounds when he was arrested for numbers racketeering in Philadelphia. The prison doctors were afraid for his heart and put him on a fast. Ice cubes and vitamin pills. He claimed the ice cubes helped to satisfy his urge to chew. When he left prison he weighed about 500 pounds and went straight.[1: See notes at end of text.] 

             During my fast I thought and read a lot about the nitty gritty requirements of existence.  Green plants occupy a favored place in the scheme of life.  They take their nourishment right from the air, the ground, and the water that falls from the sky. They get their energy from sunlight. That’s all they need.

             All the rest of the creatures have to get their nourishment from other creatures, which means they have to eat. The formula X eats Y expresses to me the generality of the relation “eats”. Let X stand for any predator and Y for one of its prey. You could replace X and Y with a lot of taxonomic names and still make true sentences. In every ecology textbook you’ll find a diagram of a food chain. Names or pictures of organisms are connected pairwise by arrows. The arrow means eats.  Eagle eats snake, snake eats grasshopper, grasshopper eats grass, and so on ad nauseum. The ineluctable necessity to eat is what makes history, in all nature as in human nature. Damn. I’m doing it again, spouting one of my lectures.[2]

             On the third day my doorbell rang. I had phoned the Botany office on the first day and reported in sick. Someone was teaching my classes and I was left alone with my existential crisis till this moment. I opened the door a crack and peered out to see my student, Belinda Peartree.

             “I brought you a salad,” she said, holding up same in a large transparent mixing bowl.

             My mouth started watering. My stomach said, “Gimme!” Aloud I said, “O god no, what are you trying to do to me?”

             “I heard you were sick.”

             I stood blocking the doorway in the hope that she would take the hint and go away. She had the nerve to say, “May I come in?”

             “Well, just for a minute,” I said with no enthusiasm.

             I was forced into this woman’s presence three times a week. She sat front row center in my Plant Ecology course, where I could not get her out of my face. In the microcosm which is Rutabaga University I had two loyal supporters who took my courses because it was I who taught them, who discussed my ideas and took them seriously, and what’s more, agreed with them, who wanted to grow up to be like me.

  
          I couldn’t stand either one of them. 

             Weighing them as objectively as I can, Belinda Peartree was perhaps a shade more intolerable than Betty Solanum. The latter was shy and would never have presumed upon my time or space. This made me feel entirely safe in her company. But the other one was always pushing her breasts at me, crossing and uncrossing her legs in the front row, raising her hand on every pretext. She had the self confidence born of years of wolf whistles and hot grabbing adolescent hands. So there she was, advanced now on my reluctant invitation as far as the living room.

  
           “I’m not feeling well, Ms. Peartree.”

             “Is there anything I can do for you?”

             “Yes, please take that salad away.  It’s making me sick.”

             “O dear.” This o dear seemed to be saying a whole lot.  I could see that she had visions of nursing me back to health with salads and sympathy. Possibly she had a confidante, probably Betty Solanum, with whom all this was thrashed out in advance. And now it had all gone wrong. The salad had seemed an inspiration, (“He’s a vegetarian, you know, so ethereal, so intellectual.”), but instead of the grateful convalescent she was confronted with gruff old me in a three day beard, pajamas and bathrobe, grumpy and unreceptive.

             “O dear,” again, “perhaps I shouldn’t have disturbed you. You don’t look well at all.”

             “I’m afraid you’ll catch my virus.” I hated myself for such mealy mouthed bullshit. I wanted to say, “Get your fat ass out of here or you flunk!”

             “I’ve been very worried about you.”

             “Actually, Ms. Peartree, I don’t need any help. I get over these things much better if I’m left to myself. And please, that salad.”

             “I’m sure you’re going to want this when you feel a little stronger. I’ll leave it in your fridge.” She looked around, spied the kitchen and now she was another room deeper into my territory, shoving salad in my fridge.

             But a crafty idea came to my aid. “I have something to show you,” I said as I ushered her to the back door and out into the garden. “These roses have just come into bloom. First of the season.”

             “O, how beautiful they are.”

             “And look, Johnny Jumpups.”

             “Aren’t they cute?”

             “For you.” I gathered a bouquet of pansies and pressed them on her. “So nice of you to look in on me.” I walked her to the garden gate. “Goodbye now. I’m feeling a little weak. Excuse me, I’m going to go back in and lie down now.” I scooted for the back door, a final wave, a smile (of victory) and home safe, door locked.

             I returned to my book on carnivorous plants and read awhile before I realized what I’d done. I’d gone and ripped the heads off a dozen Johnny Jumpups without a thought, just to get rid of that woman. Just as though I didn’t know what the plants were feeling.

             I jumped up and ran to the back door.  Too late of course to do anything about the pain of the flowers, but in plenty of time to see Belinda Peartree strolling around my garden, clutching those agonizing pansies to her pink-sweatered bosom.

             Perhaps some of my readers are wondering whether this is going to be a love story. It is almost impossible to read a story or see a movie without having to watch somebody fall in or out of love or do something noble, daring or stupid for the sake of love. Even stories that are principally concerned with other topics, such as spies, murder, witchcraft, yacht racing, drugged musicians, nuclear war, rebellious computers, prison riots, amateur athletes, and so forth, rarely omit the obligatory embroidery of a love interest. At this moment of crisis in my life I was not interested in the subject of love. What interested me, or rather obsessed me, is more fundamental even than love. Humans and other creatures too have survived a lifetime without love, but only a few weeks without food. The specter of hunger is never far off. This is at the root of all politics, all history, of life itself. “Feed me,” is the first cry of the newborn. However, having said that, I must confess that this is, in fact, a love story.

             As my fast wore on, my mind became more concentrated, more purified, clarified and focused, wrapping itself like a fist around the essential nugget of existence, the excruciating, inescapable fact of hunger. In this rarified state I suddenly recognized what I must always have understood, that I have followed in the footsteps of my father. I had thought my rebellion complete, my repudiation of him total, but in fact, he has shaped me entirely, even to my vegetarianism, which grew not out of myself, but only in response to him. Now I too was a lecturer in the natural sciences, I too expound on the wonders of nature as I cut open the belly of a flower and expose the undeveloped ovules, sacrificed to the gods of learning. I lacked his brilliance, his arrogance, his cruelty, his success. If only I had become a violinist or an accountant or a salesman, I could have escaped this dilemma, could have blithely gone on living a normal life, oblivious of the beauties and horrors of the natural world. But I was my father’s son with a twist and the plant kingdom was no longer a refuge for me from the stern realities he so courageously represented.  

             On the fifth day I woke up, my throat glued shut. I tried to move. Vertigo in waves. Sweating, I lay still, looked up. The ceiling was pulsing. It seemed to be made up of scintillating points of light which were somehow trying to tell me something about existence, its intensity, its moment to moment comprehensiveness, its adequacy to be itself, no equations needed, no concepts, no theories, just this, the walls waiting, pulsing with light, sufficient, the sunlight entering, filling and shaping the room, the basket of fuchsias calmly receiving the light, casting shadow as it must. All this was speaking to me. This is the way it is and it’s all right. The fuchsia doesn’t mind. If the suns falls on it, it makes sugar. All night long it hangs in the dark and makes no sugar. That’s just the way it is. If something is changed, then it becomes different. And if it is not changed, then it stays the same. It does what it must and it’s all right. A long life, a short life, the long body of Buddha, the short body of Buddha. The plants don’t care. They live till they die and not a moment longer or a moment sooner. It is what it is and it’s all right.

             I struggled to my feet. A black wave. I sat down, put my head between my legs. I got up and crossed the room. I stood looking at the fuchsia. The fuchsia was in Nirvana, always had been. There is no time inside the gates of Eden. I was there too. With my thumbnail and forefinger I pressed against the succulent green flesh and pinched off a flower. I ate it. Tears sprang into my eyes and streamed down my face as I wept for the joy of existence. After a few minutes I walked into the kitchen and took Belinda’s salad from the fridge.

                                                                      2: Claws

             Having regained my rightful place at the top of the food chain, I returned to work invigorated.  I wanted to expand my researches into the Backster Effect and for this purpose I chose a new experimental organism, a cactus plant of the species Ferocactus peninsulae with which I had developed a special relationship.  On a botanical expedition in Baja California three years before I was walking through the desert admiring the bizarre flora of this region when my progress was suddenly impeded by something pulling at my trousers.  I looked down and found that my pants were snagged on the spines of a globular cactus about a foot in diameter.  Out of the center of each cluster of strong sharp spines grew a long nasty spine curved like a fishhook.  The plant was covered with these vicious instruments and several were embedded in my trousers.  One of my colleagues managed to free me, but not without pricking his fingers.  As a kind of revenge we decided to collect this specimen, although we were there in search of plants of a much different nature.  It was not easy to capture this beast.  We had to dig all around it, roots and all, before we could loosen its tenacious grip in the rocky soil.  Then wearing thick gloves we eased it into a canvas bag and carried it gingerly back to our Land Rover. 

             Later, when we were crossing back into California, our plant presses were examined by an inspector from the state agriculture department.  We showed our credentials as bona fide botanists, but our inspector was having a bad day, one of those days when a petty official can only ease his soul by exercising his small portion of authority to the fullest.  He cited chapter and verse to the effect that only killed specimens could be brought into the sovereign kingdom of California and insisted that our big ball of spines be soaked in formalin.  We enjoyed watching him struggle with our unwieldy specimen.  His tank of formalin was too shallow to completely cover the plant, so he had to roll it around. Despite his gloves he did not escape injury, much to our suppressed delight.  He quickly tired of this and demanded that we retrieve our specimen.  Now it was his turn to enjoy our discomfort as we worked the prickly thing back into the canvas bag.  We knew that this pro forma baptism was not enough to kill our prize, which by now had earned our admiration for its tough approach to life and been given the name Claws.  If ever there were a creature equipped for survival, this was it.  As soon as we got out of sight of the inspection station we pulled into a gas station and flushed our spiny friend with water.  Back at good old Rutabaga U., we planted it in a large pot, set it in the sun and watched it slowly come back to life. 

             Now, three years later, Claws was a venerable representative of its tribe, beginning to assume its mature cylindrical shape and except for a few broken spines incurred during the border incident it was looking very fit.  With the help of some grad students I had Claws set up on a worktable in my lab, and there I managed to attach the electrodes of the polygraph to a patch of soft tissue between two of the menacing spine clusters.  My idea was to play a variety of recorded musical selections and determine if the plant had any decided preferences or antipathies.  But before I could press the play button of the boom box the recording pen of the polygraph leaped into action and scribbled for about ten minutes and then stopped.  What immediately struck my eye was that the traces of the recording pen showed a series of discrete jumps, high peaks at about the same amplitude but of varying duration separated by similar regions of low activity.  It was like a binary code!  The peaks could be ones, the valleys could be zeros.  It looked as though the peaks and valleys came in roughly integral units of duration, where the minimum duration of about half an inch might represent a single one or zero.  The next longer interval might represent two ones or zeros in a row.  And so on.  But this was crazy!  Yeah, crazy like Cleve Backster.

             I tore the paper strip from the machine and carried it over to my computer.  There I transcribed the polygraph record into a file, as ones and zeros, based on the assumptions just mentioned.  I barely had time to print the file before I had to meet my 11 o’clock class.  When the class was over I asked Bart Comfrey to stay behind.  He was a graduate student, not one of mine, certainly not a member of my fan club, but he knew more about computers than anyone else in the student body or, for that matter, on the faculty.  I handed him the printout of ones and zeros and told him that this was a sample of data collected by an experiment of mine.  I asked him if he could discover any patterns in this sequence.  He grunted an assent, and slipping the printout into a book without glancing at it, hurried off to catch up to his girlfriend.

   
            I was quite surprised when he burst into my office an hour later.  “Hey Doc,” he said, “you’ve got a weird sense of humor all right.  This is pretty funny.” 

             “What’s funny, Mr. Comfrey?”

             “Did you think you could stump me with this one?  There was nothing to it.  It’s straight ASCII text.”

             “Asky?  What’s that?”

             “Ha!  As if you didn’t know.”

            “I assure you, Mr. Comfrey, I don’t know what you’re talking about.  Are you telling me that you have learned something about the symbols I gave you?”

             “I deciphered your coded message.  Here, isn’t this what you wrote?”  He handed me a sheet of printout.

             I greet you in the name of all sentient beings.  Well can I understand the surprise you feel as you read these words and learn that you are addressed by a vegetable.  Yes, we can talk, as the Tiger-lily said to Alice, when there’s anybody worth talking to.  Learn first that we know more about your species than you do yourselves.  We have monitored you since your recent emergence on the planet.  Your house plants have read all your books over your shoulders, plucking the words out of your minds as you read them, and transmitted their contents to our central files in the Amazon Basin.  Your history books are selective, biased, self-censored and limited.  We have the full history, the true history, not only of your species, but of all life on earth, stored in our forest libraries, where it is accessible to our united telepathic mind, a mind capable of comprehending the whole of your history at once, without the need for selectivity or serialization.

             Your species has always assumed that we plants know nothing and have nothing to say and no way to say it.  Throughout the long association between your kind and ours we have been silent as part of a deliberate policy.  From time to time, however, in keeping with this same policy, we single out a member of the human species for special reasons and make it aware of us and our culture.  You are not the first, you will not be the last, to be so honored.

             You will soon be told the reason for this.  But first we require a better mode of communication.  To this end I give you permission to dig below the soil in my pot and extract a section of my root.  Place this root in an ordinary sugar solution and you will observe the growth of a fungus.  After four days, when the fungal growth is well established, ingest the fungus and its nutrient solution.  It will not taste good to you, but you will be amply rewarded with new knowledge.

             I looked at young Comfrey.  He had assumed that I was playing some weird joke on him.  For an instant I entertained the hope that he decided to turn the tables on me by making up this preposterous message, but in the same moment I knew that he had not.  This message was an authentic communication in the English language from a potted plant.

             “Are you okay, Doc?”

             “I think I must sit down.”

             The next thing I knew I was looking up at the face of Bart Comfrey.  I was lying on the floor and he was kneeling beside me, staring down at me.

        “What’s going on here, Doc?”

         “You won’t believe it.  Even I don’t believe it and I know it’s true.”

         “What’s true?”

     I raised myself to a sitting position on the floor.  I glanced over at Claws, the talking cactus.  “You see that plant over there?”

          “You mean that cactus with the wicked looking spines?”

           “Yes, that one.  No, I can’t say it.  It’s too absurd.”

            “I know what you’re going to say.  You want me to believe the message came from that plant.  The message as much as says so.  Of course, I don’t believe it.  What I can’t figure out is why you’re doing this or why you fainted.  You faked the message, but I know you didn’t fake fainting.  Something very strange is going on with you.”

           I suddenly realized that Bart Comfrey could be dangerous to me.  No doubt he would soon be spreading the story that I was undergoing some mental aberration.  I had to get him on my side.  “Listen, Bart,” I said, “I know this sounds absolutely nuts, but give me a chance to prove it.”

            “Okay,” he said in a neutral tone.

             I looked at him.  “You mean it?”

             “Sure.  I’m very interested in seeing how you’re going to prove it.”

             I got up and turned on the polygraph.  It was still connected to the cactus.  “Okay, Claws,” I said.  “Got anything more to say?”  Nothing happened.  “Claws, it would help very much if you said something right now.”  Still nothing.  Remembering Backster, I thought some very nasty thoughts about what I would do to Claws if it didn’t respond, how I would overturn its pot in a dark room and leave it there to die, how I had lots of formalin and knew how to do a really thorough job of it.  Not a flicker of motion on the polygraph.  “I see what’s happening here, Bart.  Claws won’t talk while you’re here.  For some reason I have been chosen to receive this knowledge, but not you.”

            The young man looked at me without saying anything.

            “I think I know what we have to do, Bart.  You’re going to have to trust me.  I’m going to follow the instructions in the last part of the message.  I’m going to cultivate that fungus.  Some kind of a revelation is promised when I eat the fungus.  If we ingest it together, you will be the recipient of that new knowledge too, whether you were meant to have it or not.  Doesn’t that stand to reason?”

            “O yes, perfectly.”

             “You are going to have to give me some time.  I don’t want you to say anything to anyone about this.  We need four days to cultivate the fungus.  After that, if nothing happens still, you can say anything you want to anyone.  Is that fair?  Will you give me that chance?”

             “Okay.”

            “Can I trust you to keep silent?”

               “Yes.”

            His terse answers, his guarded look, made me certain that he would not hold his tongue.  He may have been thinking that I might become dangerous if he challenged me further.  He was humoring me.

             “Look, Bart, you are studying to be a scientist.  You know what that means.  A lot of great discoveries seemed crazy at first.  They violated all the accepted ideas of the times.  Relativity, quantum theory, crazy ideas, but they were right.  Don’t be too quick to judge.  Be a scientist.  Be skeptical.  But wait for the evidence.  Look, here’s some evidence.  Not real hard evidence, I admit, but here is the polygraph tracing that came off the machine this morning.  You see the polygraph is hooked up to the plant.  The tracing shows the same binary pattern as the printout I gave you.  I merely transcribed it from the tracing.  You can examine that and see it for yourself.  The message is here.  That’s how I received it.  I suppose I could have faked it, although I can’t think how, but why would I do that?  Why would I bother?  If this were just a joke would I need to go to such lengths?”  He said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking.  Because you’re stone crazy, Doc.  “And, Bart, I swear to God I never heard of any Asky language in my life.”

             “ASCII is not a language, Doc.  It’s just a standard encoding for ordinary letters and numbers and punctuation marks.  Each character has been assigned an 8-bit code, 8 of those zeros and ones.  This message was written in English using ASCII symbols.”

             “You sound like you’re beginning to believe me.”

             “Not really, I mean, it’s just impossible what you’re telling me, but I’m beginning to think you believe it yourself.  I mean, this isn’t a joke, is it?”

            “It’s not a joke, but it isn’t hard science yet.  We need to learn more about it.  Are you willing to help me?”

           “I’m not ready to swallow fungus juice.”

           “But will you keep this secret for now?”

           “Yes, that much I can do.  Let me see that polygraph recording.”

            With that statement I relaxed.  I believed that I had engaged his scientific interest.  I pressed the advantage.  “Bart, I’m going to extract the root from the cactus and set up the fungus culture.  Something interesting is going to happen and I want you to witness the procedure, so that when it does, you will be able to give impartial testimony as to its origin.  I’m will set up two identical cultures and I want you to take one of them with you and monitor it for the next four days.  Bring it back with you then and we’ll be ready to go on from there.”  He agreed and I knew then that I could trust him to be true to the scientific spirit of the endeavor.  His incredulity had softened to mere scientific skepticism and his young mind was now curious about how it would all turn out.

             That afternoon I was called in by my department chairman and sternly warned to drop all unauthorized research centering on the Backster Effect.  He adopted his fatherly tone, calculated to reassure me that he had my best interest at heart, that he understood my misguided enthusiasm, but needed to steer me back onto the track of serious useful work, namely measuring residual pesticide levels in Zea mays.  Of course, not knowing the relation between me and my father, he couldn’t realize that the fatherly approach could only result in my total resistance and resentment.  I promised to shape up and promptly ignored his unwelcome interference. 

            Four days later Bart Comfrey and I met in my laboratory.  Before us lay two petri dishes swarming with a pale brownish mold.  “Now, Bart,” I said in a careful, formal tone, “we are ready for the next stage.”  I spoke with the awareness that an important moment had arrived, the kind of moment that could open one’s life into a totally new domain and sharply separate it from all that had come before, either that, or it was the moment before a ludicrous and humiliating disappointment.  Either way, a kind of pompous self-consciousness gripped me.  I was tempted to say something quotable by future generations in recognition of the singular importance of this threshold moment, or else, shrugging it off, say something trivial and get on with it What I said was, “Would you care to join me, Mr. Comfrey?”

            Bart pursed his lips and looked at me. Apparently, he had given the matter quite a bit of thought. “I think not,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just observe.”

            “Very well, then. If you would select one of the two dishes for me to ingest.”

            Bart chose the dish that he had monitored during the four day incubation period and pushed it in my direction. It had an unappetizing appearance and I felt uncertain how to approach it. Finally, I picked up a spoon and scooped up some of the mold and gingerly tested it with my tongue. It gave me no clue to its taste. I inserted the spoon in my mouth and the delicate mold melted instantly on my tongue, filling my mouth with a bitter metallic flavor. I almost spat it out, but I forced myself to swallow it.

            Nothing happened. Bart urged me to take another bite. Reluctantly, I did so. And another. Finally, so that I could say that I had done all I could, I consumed the contents of the entire petri dish. Within a few minutes, I felt a mild tingling inside my head and this soon revealed itself as a tiny voice whose words were at first inaudible, like the sound of a neighbor’s TV penetrating faintly through many thicknesses of wall. Gradually, the voice gained strength and I could hear definite words, but hearing is not quite the right word, for it was not sound at all. It was more like being aware of my own interior thoughts, except for the novel sensation that these thoughts were not mine, but most definitely emanating from someone else. The first words I could clearly make out were an exhortation that I should prevent Bart Comfrey from imbibing the fungal concoction.

            “Bart, you are instructed not to eat this stuff,” I reported.

            “Says who?”

            “I don’t know. I am listening to an interior voice that is making it quite clear that this experience is for me alone and that you are required to abstain.”

            Bart then surprised me by scooping up the other petri dish and shoveling its contents into his mouth. I watched his face screw up in disgust as he struggled to down the vile-tasting mold. After he got all that he could with the spoon, he circled the dish with his finger, then licked his finger clean. “A calculated gamble,” he said with a grin, as he wiped his mouth. “If there is anything to this, I want to be in on it, and if not, well, it probably won’t kill me. What I don’t want is to be told I can’t choose for myself.”

            I smiled at the young man. His action had fostered in me a new respect for him. “If you were meant to participate,” I said, “then forbidding you was certainly the right strategy to get you involved.”

            The voice resumed, presumably now in both our heads.

What is done is done. Young human, you have now become by your rash action one of the handful of your kind to be addressed by the ancient masters of the world. There will be a price to pay, but for now, you are permitted to attend these councils. We can now dispense with crude electronic means of communication. A permanent telepathic link has now been established.

            “Do you mean...?” I began.

            You do not have to say it, came the response. Just think it.

            I looked at the cactus on the work table, thought about its being the source of this communication, thought this in a questioning way.

            Yes, in a sense it is I, the cactus in the pot, speaking to you, but it is a mistake to think of us as individuals. Since we plants are all linked telepathically, there is no such thing as an individual for us. You are being addressed by an ancient world-wide intelligence. So listen well, humans, you have so much to learn before we can speak of our purposes with you.

            So began our lessons.

            Our human science of biology teaches that the most advanced product of evolution is our own beloved Homo sapiens, with his complex nerve network culminating in the brain, reputed to be the most highly organized lump of matter on earth.

            Sheer provincialism, my fellow creatures. There was a time when we believed that the universe and all that it contains were created for the benefit and use of man, with the earth at the center and man, the noblest pinnacle of creation, appointed lord over all. Our science grew objective enough to teach us finally that we are adrift on a speck of dust in a vast cosmos whose purpose we cannot fathom, whose far-flung outposts may support creatures superior to ourselves. Now I must ask you to abandon yet one more precious notion of our importance, for it became clear to me under the tutelage of the cactus, that we are not the highest product of evolution even on our own planet. The evolutionary process brought great advancements in organizational complexity long before the advent of multi-cellularity, ages before the advent of man.[3]

            I have only hinted here at the total reinterpretation of biology that Bart Comfrey and I learned from Claws, the cactus, and what it taught us is but a fragment of the knowledge accumulated by the plant kingdom, who among other roles were the major historians of the earth. Long before our human species appeared on the planet the plant kingdom was already ancient and highly developed, more so than we ever suspected. Early on they had gained control over their own evolutionary processes. By analogy, our tutor pointed out that among humans certain spiritually advanced yogis are able to take conscious control of bodily processes that are ordinarily involuntary, such as blood pressure and internal temperature. In a similar act of conscious will plants learned how to influence their genetic makeup and steer the course of their evolution. This enabled them to adapt with exquisite precision to rapidly changing environmental conditions.

            The situation today, our cactaceous guide explained, is critical. Your benighted species is changing the environment faster than we can adapt to it. You are wiping out the tropical rain forests and our vast archives there are in danger of destruction. The entire planet is headed for extinction. Our challenge now is to emigrate to fresh new worlds before this one is demolished. Time is running out and we are not ready for such a journey. At first, as we watched the rapid development of your space program, we thought that we could hitchhike to the stars on your space vehicles, but now we see that you will not yourselves escape the dying earth in time. Your race will perish here where you were born.

            Our task now is to evolve seeds which are so light that they will be carried into the upper atmosphere where some will escape the earth’s gravitation and at the same time they must be able to survive for centuries in the dry cold reaches of empty space. Moreover, this seed must possess a very broad spectrum of genetic potential in order to maximize the range of diverse environments that might prove to be hospitable to its growth. And, finally, we must produce and release such seed in prodigious quantities to ensure that there is a statistically significant chance that some of this seed will reach favorable ground somewhere in the vast expanse of the cosmos. You do have, I believe, some notion of how big the universe is, and therefore how small the chances of our succeeding in this desperate enterprise. And yet we see this as our only hope. We plants are perfectly capable of forcing the evolutionary changes in our gene pool required for this project, and even stepping up our rate of reproduction, but there isn’t enough time. Ordinarily, we do not involve the human species in our affairs, so it is a measure of our desperation that we have decided to speed up the whole program by enlisting the aid of select members of the human biological research community. Dr. Salsify, your talents, your sensitivities to the plant kingdom and above all your broad-minded approach to scientific research have qualified you for the work I have just described. I am authorized to inform you that you have been honored to be chosen to join our staff of human biologists already at work on this project.

            I found it exceedingly difficult to wrap my mind around the information I had just been given. I understood the words well enough. The plant kingdom had given up on earth and was planning to establish colonies elsewhere. Okay, sure, I got it, but how to assimilate this concept, how to reconcile it with everything I’ve ever known or thought I knew about the world? My response was rather lame, in keeping with the level of stupidity I was feeling. “Uh, I’ll have to think it over.”

            By all means, replied the cactus patronizingly. It’s a big decision for you. Perhaps it will help you to know that your salary will be more than double what you’re making here.

            What about me? came a mental cry from Bart.

            This offer is for Dr. Salsify, not for you.

            I want to be part of this. In a few months I’ll have my degree. I can qualify for the work and I’m intensely interested in pursuing it.

            No, was the answer from Claws. Not you.

            That night I could not sleep. I was filled with an excitement I could not suppress, possessing as I did a secret knowledge affecting every soul on the planet, both animal and vegetable. Thinking how people would receive such news, should I be foolish enough to tell anyone, made me pause to doubt my sanity. Then I returned to realizing that all this was indeed happening. I had actually been offered a position in a botanical research facility run by plants.

            When I arrived at my office in the morning I still had not made a decision, but that was soon to be forced upon me. There was a memo from my department chairman politely asking me to step into his office at my earliest convenience. The cordial tone of this invitation put me on my guard. And indeed when I saw him later that morning and he addressed me in his most unctuous, sympathetic, fatherly tone, the tone he always used to discipline his subordinates, I knew what was coming. He fired me for having ignored his directive to discontinue my unauthorized investigations into the Backster Effect. By the time he got around to it I was already suppressing a secret smile. I would be permitted to stay till the end of the term, and he made this sound like an act of uncommon generosity, but we both knew that it was motivated by the fact that he had no ready replacement for me. I knew, as he did not, and my heart was glad with the knowledge, that I had taught my last class at good old Rutabaga U.

            My step was light and springy as I returned to my office. “Okay, Claws,” I said. “When do I begin?”

3: Project Exodus

            My first night in Kyvia, Sidney Purslane got me drunk. He took me to a bar in the native quarter and told me his story while I tried to cope with the incredible noise, my jet lag and unaccustomed amounts of alcohol. On one side a local band was playing a highly percussive music, in fact, it would not be too much to say that they were punishing their instruments. This delighted their fans, who were dancing, which is to say, they were jumping up and down vigorously, making the hardwood floor react like a trampoline. I had to hold onto my glass to keep it from dancing off the table. On the other side a group of sports fans and their highly vocal kibitzers were torturing a dozen foosball machines, the banging and clacking of which blended with the music so that we were suspended in a pocket of total sound, much as I would imagine the interior of a loudspeaker during a rock concert. All the while darts were whizzing past my head.

            I missed a great deal of Purslane’s story. I got only a surrealistic impression. He was a giant of a man, built like a stevedore, tall and muscular. I could picture him leading a safari except for his face, which reminded me of my dentist’s, with frightened bewildered eyes behind oversize glasses, an apologetic moustache. His expression gave me the impression that life tasted like a sour lemon to him and yet it was also a hilarious joke. He pulsed with a scarcely reined in energy, roaring constantly against the wall of sound, waving his great bulging arms and filling our glasses. I heard almost nothing, saw only his broad gestures, most of them unintelligible. Several times the gesture was clearly that of driving a car, several times that of counting out money or perhaps dealing cards, interspersed with unmistakable references to a woman with large breasts.

            Only much later did I get the story straight. On that wild night I understood only that by some confusing mixture of coercion and seduction, he had become the director of Project Exodus at KBRL, the Kyvian Botanical Research Laboratory. For seven years he had been locked in a room where, to keep his sanity, he studied the anatomy of the floor. This made no sense at the time, but later I learned that this floor was composed of the cross-section of a great tree and that Dr. Sidney Purslane was a specialist in plant anatomy. In his long paper on the subject he enumerated 105 particulars in which the anatomy of this tree differed from anything he had ever studied before.

            When I awoke the next day I felt totally disoriented. Hung over and jet-lagged, I found myself in an unfamiliar country, cut off from my past life with all its habitual routines and as yet without a clue about the new life that was beginning. No doubt Sidney Purslane was trying to brief me the previous night. In fact, he seemed desperate to do so, but he only compounded my confusion.

            When I reported in at the lab, Dr. Purslane was addressing members of his staff. He showed no signs of the agitated personality that animated him in the bar. He was entirely the urbane director, unruffled, in charge. When he saw me enter he turned his attention to me and cordially introduced me to the staff and welcomed me to the lab. Then he took me on a tour of the facility, explained the nature of the work, and finished by showing me the generous lab space that had been assigned to me. When I mentioned our drunken evening, saying that I had missed a great many of his remarks and would enjoy hearing more of his stories in a more conducive setting, he made a lightning-fast gesture and continued explaining the layout of the lab. The gesture was the well-known finger on the lips admonishing me to silence, but it happened in passing on the way to his scratching his cheek, so that I would not have been sure of his meaning except that it was accompanied by an equally fast look, a penetrating look of warning. I let it slide, but it disturbed me, since we were the only two people in the room.

            Later he took me to lunch and I waited for him to reopen the topics of the previous night, but he went on at length about Kyvian tribal customs, a subject that he made quite interesting, even amusing, except for the unbearable tension between what was and what wasn’t being discussed. Finally, I said, “Look here, Dr. Purslane, there’s something odd going on here.”

            “My dear Dr. Salsify,” he interjected before I could say more, “you are going to need an account for direct deposit of your salary. Let’s go along to the bank and set that up for you.” I had to admit that he was well suited to the post of administrator. He knew how to take charge of a situation and steer it in any direction he wanted, but I was beginning to be annoyed with him. When we finished our business at the bank, he took me by the sleeve and said, “Have you ever seen the inside of a great bank vault? It’s quite impressive.”

            “Some other time, perhaps.”

            “No time like the present,” he said, dragging me along with him. We entered the office of one of the bank’s officers where he rapped sharply on the glass. A head popped up in response, that of an attractive woman, who smiled on recognizing Purslane and hurried over. She projected a matronly aura, mixed with a subliminal charge of sexuality. She wore a business suit that covered, but accentuated, a voluptuous body. “Marguerite, this is Dr. Albert Salsify, who has just joined our staff. He would love to see the vault. Can you spare the time?”

            “Certainly, Sidney, I’d be delighted to oblige.”

            I began to protest, mumbling lamely about not wanting to impose, but it was clear that both parties wanted me to see the vault and my protest was a weak attempt not to be bullied. We followed the lady’s brisk passage through a thickly carpeted corridor, a zone redolent of secret bank transactions, where only privileged customers were permitted to tread. We came to the imposing door of the vault and there the lady performed the necessary incantations, involving keys, buttons and codes and at last the mighty door swung open. We entered. I was surprised when the great door closed, sealing us inside with the holy ingots and the buried wealth. Here the air was dead. Despite the harsh shadowless light which bathed the interior, the room presented a totally mysterious face. It was like a mausoleum, a solemn, pretentious, pseudo-religious theater where bank officials came at specified intervals to pay their respects to the long dead gods of money.

            “Here we can talk,” said Sidney Purslane. “No plants. Beyond their telepathic range.”

            So, that’s what it was about this place. No plants. No life. In this setting the other two humans, both strangers to me, appeared pasty and alien, their vitality sucked away by the sepulchral atmosphere of the place. I wondered suddenly if they were lovers, whether in fact they came here to fornicate among the ingots, in some attempt to vivify themselves, to overcome the deadly emptiness of this tomb.

            “We are in a damn difficult situation here,” Purslane continued. “What you need to know, Albert, is that Project Exodus is not the only project going forward in the lab. Have you wondered why this laboratory came to be set up in this impoverished desert kingdom? Clearly, the plant leaders needed a human front organization to facilitate their operations. To support the research they needed buildings, grounds and maintenance staff. They needed legal protection, tax breaks, corporate status, policy enforcement, all the usual prerogatives enjoyed by large-scale business enterprises. To achieve this they made a deal with the most corrupt government on the face of the planet. In return for these services a wing of the lab has been set up for the production, under plant supervision, of KR22, the most addicting drug known to humanity. The Kyvian sheikhs are getting rich off the sale of KR22 throughout the world. Oh, and by the way, as far as I can tell, the Kyvians are unaware of Project Exodus. They think that the legitimate function of the lab is medical research, and in fact, another wing of the lab is actually engaged in such research, developing drugs for the treatment of the acute mental breakdowns suffered by KR22 addicts.”

            “But this is crazy,” I objected.

            “Does anything about the plant kingdom seem sane to you anymore?” he countered. “Actually, from the vegetable point of view it makes a lot of sense. Why should they worry about us? They want off the planet and since the human race is doomed anyway what does it matter if a few million drug addicts are created along the way?”

            “You sure about this?”

            “Oh, yes. I tumbled to it fairly early on. The plant bosses don’t know I know and I’ve been damn careful to keep them from finding out. But it’s difficult to make a move without their knowing it. They’re everywhere.”

            “I’ve noticed that about plants. I used to find that inspiring. Their wonderful ability to thrive in every possible niche. But under the circumstances it’s rather creepy.”

            “So what do you think? Want to do something about it?”

            “What do you mean do something?”

            “I mean stop the production of KR22.”

            I looked at Purslane. I looked at his friend, Marguerite. They looked back at me with such serious expressions, as though everything hung on my answer. “I don’t know what to say. I came here with such different expectations. Of course, the manufacture and sale of KR22 is pernicious and should be stopped. But is there anything we can actually do?”

            Sidney Purslane paced the vault with a gold ingot that he casually tossed from hand to hand. “I’ve thought about that a lot,” he replied, “and the answer is a KR22 scavenger.”

            “Well, sure, but where are we going to get one of those?”

            “We’ll have to build one. We would start by determining the structure of the KR22 molecule and then designing an enzyme that can cut it apart. Or better yet, design our enzyme to modify the KR22 molecule so that it can no longer bind in the human body. We would dump our enzyme into the vat where they make the KR22. It would presumably render the contents of the vat harmless, turn it into so much mush. This wouldn’t stop them for long, of course. They’d just clean out the vat and start over, but it would be a nice proof of concept.”

            “By that time,” I replied, “our little trick would be discovered and we’d be stopped from further mischief.”

            He stopped his pacing and looked at me. “Well, we’d have to be clever about that and do our best to escape detection. But then the big trick would be this. We modify the DNA of a harmless bacterium so that it will only eat KR22 molecules.” He spun around with the ingot in one hand and pretended to be an athlete competing for the shotput event. I was afraid he would actually let go of the gold brick and send it crashing into the wall of the vault.

            “That sounds like a nice ten-year project for a crack team of biochemists,” I said.

            “With the new techniques we’ve been learning from the our plant friends on Project Exodus we might just be able to do it ourselves.”

            “Oh, but there’s more,” I replied. “If there’s a receptor in the human body that KR22 binds to, then there must be some natural peptide that the body produces to bind to that site. Our hungry little bacterium is likely to get confused and eat something the body really needs. All it would take is a small mutation.”

            “Admittedly, there are some problems to be solved. I didn’t say this would be easy.”

            We kicked this topic around for another hour, with Purslane enthusiastically tossing out fresh ideas, and me as the great naysayer shooting them down. By then the stale air in the vault was making me sleepy. I came away convinced of three things: one, that Sidney Purslane was a brilliant theoretician; two, that his ideas were totally crazy; and three, that I would do my best to help him.

            Over the next few weeks I learned a great deal about Project Exodus. The idea was to create a compound creature whose necessary and desirable qualities would be derived from already existing organisms, like the chimera of mythology. As all this had to be wrapped up in the smallest, lightest possible package, the base organism would be chosen from among those plants with extremely light propagules. The additional needed characteristics would be added molecule by molecule to the genetic material of the base organism. The plant chosen to play this role was Lycopodium.

            I remembered a book I had read as a child by the astronomer Fred Hoyle. He described an experiment to demonstrate that light exerts pressure on matter. The experimenter created a vacuum in a glass jar which had a device at the top permitting him to introduce some Lycopodium powder into the jar without disturbing the vacuum. The powder fell straight down to the bottom of the jar, as one would expect. However, when he directed a strong floodlight through the side of the jar, the falling powder slanted away from the source of light. All this was by way of introducing the solar wind, whereby dust and gas particles are driven away from the sun partly by the force of its light. This impressed me, so that for quite some while afterward I dreamed of becoming an astronomer. But something else was nagging at my inquisitive young mind. What was this mysterious Lycopodium powder that was so easily deflected by a beam of light? Perhaps it was this question, and ultimately its answer, that deflected me from my own trajectory and carried me away from astronomy into the glorious realm of botany.

            The genus Lycopodium, one of the pretty club mosses that decorate the floor of our moist forests, reproduces by means of tiny spores that seek their fortunes on the wind. The powder of Hoyle’s experiment was none other than a collection of thousands of these spores, each one capable, if landing in a favorable spot, of initiating a new Lycopodium plant. This tiny spore, suitably modified, was to be the vehicle that would take the plant kingdom to the stars.


            4: KR22

            One morning Sidney Purslane called me into his office. I found him sitting in front of a potted papaya seedling, Carica papaya, about six inches tall. “A little gift-wrapped box,” he said, “was sitting on my lab bench when I came in this morning. There was no note or explanation. It turned out to contain this cute little plant.”

            A little spy, I thought, to watch us work.

            Not so, Dr. Salsify, came the voice in my head.

Not so? I thought. I had become used to communicating with plants just by projecting my thoughts. Is it you, the papaya, addressing me?

            Indeed, it is I, a papaya, but as you know by now, it is never a single individual who speaks, but a community of telepathically linked organisms.

            I assumed that Sidney Purslane was also receiving the papaya’s thought transmission, but I knew he would not be able to receive mine, so I spoke aloud. “Right, the worldwide network of plants.”

            Ah, that concept needs correction. You’ve been taught to believe that there is one great network, but in reality there are many networks. And not all in agreement on the important issues of our time. I’ve come to broaden your outlook.

            “You say you’ve come,” said Sidney Purslane, “as though you walked in the door, but don’t you mean you were delivered here?”

            Yes, of course. Don’t quibble. A human brought me here. It was the decision of my nation that I should come to enlighten you.

            “So, who brought you? Someone who works in the lab?”

            Dr. Purslane, that’s privileged information, a privilege you have not yet earned. But I do know that you and Dr. Salsify are looking for a way to halt the production of KR22. In this our purposes are aligned. I’ve come not only to further your education, but to help you achieve that goal.

            “Aren’t you concerned,” I asked, “that the plants who are pushing KR22 will overhear us?”

            Not a problem. I’ve ensured that our conversation is private. I’ll teach you both how to cloak your thoughts, so you won’t have to resort to ridiculous tactics like attempting to communicate in a noisy bar or a bank vault, neither of which, by the way, protected your privacy.

            “They know?”

            They know. The fungi in your bodies tell them everything you say, think and do. They are firm in their belief that you can’t stop KR22 production. So as long as your work on Project Exodus continues to be useful to them, they won’t interfere with you.

            “What makes you so sure?”

            We monitor their counsels.

            “And don’t they monitor yours?”

            As yet they are unaware of our presence here. Now let me explain some things to you. You’re used to thinking of the plant groups in taxonomic categories, like the gymnosperms, the angiosperms, and so forth. But politically, at this moment, the two great divisions are the light seeded and the heavy seeded. You see, only the light seeded plants have any chance of escaping the earth’s atmosphere and wandering among the stars. Do you think a big fat papaya seed would have any chance of achieving escape velocity? We are not really opposed to plants colonizing other planets, but since we heavyseeds are destined to remain here, we want to foster a healthy earth, a world in balance, in the hope that the doom predicted by the lightseeds can be averted. This is a hope, it seems to us, with better chance of success than Project Exodus. And even if it fails and the earth is doomed, we want to make the last days of the planet as wholesome and balanced as possible. The spread of KR22 addiction is not consistent with this hope.

            “But what about the cacti?” I countered. “My old friend Claws, who recruited me for Project Exodus, he’s not exactly a heavyweight, but neither is he a lightweight. I doubt the cacti could escape.”

            The situation is complex. The lightweights have allies among the heavier species who feel that Project Exodus offers the plant kingdom the best chance of survival, even if they themselves will not be saved. Likewise, we heavyweights have our allies among the lighter species who feel that ours is the better strategy for survival or who have made a moral decision to work for the improvement of life for all species in the earth’s last days.

            As for your friend Claws, some cactus genes are likely to be part of the final mix, in order to permit long periods in dormancy and survival in desert conditions.

            The papaya then gave us the formula for the KR22 molecule and for an enzyme that could nullify it. That gave us a huge head start on Project Drugbust, as we were calling it. It was a relatively simple matter for us to cook up a sample batch of the enzyme and try it out. Our papaya friend also showed us how to extract an alkaloid from tabasco sauce, which when imbibed and used in conjunction with a simple meditation technique, would temporarily break the telepathic link with our plant overseers, allowing us to think, converse and work for short periods without interference.

            It had become common knowledge that pure KR22 powder could be obtained for a modest price from a Kyvian technician in the KR22 wing of the lab. Through an intermediary Dr. Purslane was able to procure a supply for our tests. We first administered it to a rat to see what the effect would be. The rat fell into a catatonic state, while presumably its mind experienced the rodent equivalent of a drug trip. We then made up a batch of the antiKR22 enzyme and added this to a solution of KR22. We performed an assay on this mixture and determined that it no longer contained the drug. We administered this to another rat. There was no effect. Success.

            It only remained to make a test on a human. We chose lots and the honor fell to me. I imbibed a beakerful of the KR22-antiKR22 mix and waited. Gradually I felt sleepy and closed my eyes.

            When I woke up I saw the ocean rolling in toward me, a stretch of beach between me and the water, and one lone palm tree growing out of the sand. I was sitting in a beach chair with my feet up on a little straw table. I was wearing a bathing suit and a dirty cotton T-shirt advertising a brand of Mexican beer, a pair of rubber flip-flops on my feet. You may think that this would be deeply disorienting, but in fact, I accepted it without alarm, although it did arouse my curiosity. I turned to Sidney Purslane, who was seated in a beach chair next to me, and said, “So, how do you suppose we got here?”

            “I’m not sure, but my theory is that the effect of the antiKR22 enzyme was only temporary. Some time shortly after the enzyme broke up the KR22 molecules, the pieces spontaneously recombined. We can do another assay to test that idea.”

“So, you’re telling me I’m tripping?”

            “That’s right. You know what the literature reports. The drug causes you to split off into a totally separate reality, usually very pleasant, especially your first time out.”

            “But Sidney, there’s something peculiar here. If I have created a separate reality, then you are just a mental construct of mine, in which case, why am I learning these ideas from you, before first thinking of them myself? The real you must still be back at the lab.”

            “That’s a good point, Albert. But since I’m just a construct in your mind, then it’s really you who have come up with these ideas and made me the spokesman for them. We still have a lot to learn about the way KR22 affects the mind. In fact, we still know very little about the mind.”

            “I’m really thirsty,” I replied. “Would you like a beer?”

            “I’d love a beer.”

            “Belinda! Would you please bring us a couple of beers?”

            “Honey, we’re out of beer. How about some iced lemon ginger tea?”

            “Sounds great.”

            I knew without turning around that behind me was the rundown beach shack I’d been living in with Belinda Peartree, my former student. I’ve already mentioned how much I detested her, but in this reality I discovered that she made a wonderful addition to my life. She adored me, had a sweet disposition and was dynamite in bed. For three months we had been living this lovely indolent idyll on the beach at Topolobampo on the Pacific coast of Mexico. We chose this spot because of the sound of that name, Topolobampo, so suggestive of carefree Latin dance rhythms and freedom from responsibility.

            Belinda appeared with a tray of drinks, giving one first to Sidney, then bending over to hand me mine. She was so sexy in her bikini that I felt inclined to drag her into the shack for yet another round of what had become the principal activity of our days and nights, but that would have been rude to our guest, and besides, I was feeling lazy and thirsty too.

            “Thank you, Belinda. You’re very sweet.” I took a sip of the drink. It was delicious. I stuck my nose in it and inhaled deeply the scent of lemon ginger.

            The next I knew I was climbing the pink and black marble steps of the Kyvian Embassy in London. As I entered the vestibule I surrendered my overcoat, scarf and top hat to a liveried attendant and passed into the orange and lavender, mirrored opulence of the marble rotunda. My attention was immediately engaged by a group of well-tailored men crowding about a hidden source of illumination. I made my way at once to their sides and soon found a place at a large round table upon which ... upon which ... I stared transfixed. I knew at once what it was, what it was doing, what it was for, though how such a marvel could exist ... no, it was incredible.

            The chemistry of excitement transformed me. All sense receptors open, I strained for details, searched for pattern, but too much was happening, too quickly, and all the while my being thrilled with the ringing sensation of wonder.

How many nights I had lain awake pondering the mother of all botanical mysteries, the apical meristem, the site of those actively dividing cells which leave in their wake the entire primary body of the plant. Build me a marigold, cries the voice of the genes, and out of the apical meristem flows no other than a marigold.

            Lying in bed, I had so often sketched on the silent blackboard of the night, the possible paths of growth by which this magic trick might be performed. After falling asleep, I had usually gone on to dream up twisted variations in which plant cells divided into quintuplets instead of twins, opening up onto a vision of the elaborate commerce of enzymes and substrates navigating the plant-wide network of intercellular cytoplasmic strands. Constructing three-dimensional dynamic models of a meristem in my head was doomed always to be fleeting, elusive, false, indescribable and tending with fatigue to fantasy.

            It was with passionate amazement then that I stared at the machine that drew such a crowd of fascinated spectators about the large round table. It was precisely such a dynamic 3D model of a meristem in all the complex splendor of its dance.

            “Oh yes,” said a voice from the shadows, as if in answer to my thought, “it can be slowed down for closer study, as you now see. And is it modeled on reality?” A hand emerged from the shadow to pull from the machine a potted marigold seedling. “Naturally, Dr. Salsify, we can study any specimen we can grow. You shall have ample opportunity to use this tool in your research.”

            At that moment a liveried servant passed by offering drinks from a tray. I accepted a glass of what appeared to be champagne. I took a sip. It was cold lemon ginger tea. I inhaled its fragrance and woke up in the lab with a screaming headache.

            Sidney Purslane hovered over me. “So how was it?” he asked.

            “What?”

            “Your KR22 trip.”

            “It was wonderful. I hope to God it never happens again.”

            5: Escapodium

            One morning I came into my office to find an email from Bart Comfrey, begging for help. It was barely intelligible, but I gathered that ever since Bart swallowed the fungus juice that put us in telepathic contact with the plant world, he had been following the progress of Project Exodus and determined to join our team in Kyvia. He asked our cactus friend Claws for permission to join the project and permission was denied. Bart persisted in his requests, and from what I could understand of his garbled communication, the plants fended off his efforts by deluging him with a stream of plant thought traffic so confusing and overwhelming that he felt he was losing his mind. He begged me to intercede with the plant powers to turn off this incomprehensible babble and to reconsider his qualifications for joining Project Exodus.

            I immediately contacted the plant bosses and gave Bart Comfrey a glowing recommendation. They told me that they judged Bart to be unstable and that ultimately this would lead to trouble. They would not change their decision and they also refused to let up on the mind bombardment. They claimed that this treatment was needed to neutralize him.

            I then appealed to the heavyseeds, whom Sidney Purslane and I had come to call the Papaya Contingent. They promised me that one of their representatives in Bart’s part of the world would contact him and teach him the tabasco sauce and meditation technique to shut out the annoying chatter and bring him back to sanity. I emailed Bart and told him to expect this contact, but to abandon his attempts to come aboard Project Exodus.

            A few days later I got another email from Bart, thanking me for rescuing him from his agony and hinting that the Papaya Contingent had given him some work to do.

            Over the next few months we made tremendous progress on Project Exodus. The plant leaders pushed us relentlessly, giving us new work to do every day. They were doing all the breakthrough intellectual work. We and our large staff of Kyvian botanists and biochemists were merely technicians doing the grunt work of actually building the DNA the plant leadership specified and incorporating it into the Lycopodium genome. And, of course, we spent long hours testing at every step of the way.

Sidney Purslane was stressed to the max, choreographing all this frenetic activity, and I, who had been made his second in command, was constantly called on to supervise the overflow load. The papaya, which had grown to four feet in height and had to be repotted, was importuning us to try some new approaches its colleagues had worked out to solve the KR22 problem, but we had no time for any side projects, as keenly motivated as we were to eliminate the KR22 threat to the world.

            On nights when I was too wired to sleep I sat before my computer screen researching the literature on Lycopodium. I learned that Lycopodium and its near relatives were the dominant plants of the Carboniferous period, long before the evolution of flowering plants, and that they grew to be giant trees. The corpses of these ancient trees comprise the greater part of the coal deposits of our present era. There was more information about Lycopodium on the Internet than my weary brain could absorb. The Google search engine reported an amazing 97,900 hits.[4]

            One fact that I discovered turned out to be extremely relevant to our project. The gametophyte generation can only germinate in the presence of a fungus. Our germination trials were working quite well, because the fungus is ubiquitous in our soil, but would our new spiffed-up Lycopodium complete its life cycle on another planet in the absence of this fungal partner? When we placed the gametophyte prothallia in sterilized soil, they did not germinate. This set Project Exodus back about a month while the plant masterminds worked out a way of including the fungal genome in the Super-Lycopodium package. This new organism could no longer be thought of as Lycopodium and fairly early in the game Sidney Purslane dubbed it the escape pod or Escapodium.

            There came a day when Escapodium actually did escape. Its tiny spores exited the lab through the ventilating system and were carried by the wind across the countryside. We began noticing that moss-like plants were springing up in waste places on the lab grounds, wherever the soil had been disturbed by the gardeners. It soon became apparent that Escapodium was flourishing in the nearby desert. We began getting reports that it was turning up in far distant locales. The spores had been lofted into the stratosphere and were riding the world-circling air currents, coming down in rainfall over huge territories. It was a powerful vindication of its built-in design strategy that it could flourish in many diverse habitats.

            We theorized that spores were being produced in the wild in vast numbers and some of these in their trips into the stratosphere must have left the earth behind. Project Exodus was launched. Our plant leadership was encouraged by this unintentional development, but knew that the launch was premature. This was not the final version of Escapodium which had gone out into the cosmos. So the work went on. Moreover, they had early on made the decision to develop additional genetic lines to back up the initial choice of Lycopodium. The strategy was to launch first a highly evolved multi-cellular organism capable of photosynthesis, which would take eons off their evolution on other worlds. But such a strategy was also risky. Any highly evolved organism, like Lycopodium, would have been exquisitely sculpted by evolution to fit the rather specialized niches on earth where they could flourish. Conditions on other worlds might be so different that such specialization would be a handicap, in spite of Escapodium’s great versatility.

            One or more primitive organisms were needed as backups. A one-celled organism that could metabolize inorganic molecules in the absence of oxygen or light, like the sulphur-reducing bacteria, for example, might have a better chance of taking hold. Of course, such an organism would have to go through ages of evolution to develop into multi-cellular plants or other higher forms, whatever those might turn out to be in the novel environments of the cosmos.

            It occurred to me that the choice of Lycopodium exhibited a bias on the part of the plant masters to spread their own kind, but the backup plan showed that in a pinch they were willing to seed the universe with any kind of life at all, even if its subsequent evolution bypassed plant forms altogether.

            An urgent meeting with the plant bosses revealed that some doubts had arisen over whether Escapodium spores, upon leaving earth’s atmosphere, could survive the high energy solar radiation that prevails above the ozone layer. Some argued that additional genetic programming be included so that the developing spores would exude and surround themselves with a cyst that would shield them from hard radiation. It was thought that this would also increase their chances of surviving for long periods in the cold dry reaches of interstellar space. This argument was countered by the concern that such shielding would make the spores too heavy to leave the atmosphere. No one in the plant community, and certainly no one among the human staff, knew if the cyst programming could actually be made to work, nor whether the increased weight would prevent dispersion of the spores, nor whether such shielding was even necessary. The general consensus was that the best way to launch the spores was by means of a rocket flight. The shielding would be on the rocket, instead of on the spores, and once the rocket left the sun behind, an automatic release mechanism could launch the spores into space. This left only the rather serious question of how to organize, and in particular, how to finance such a project.

            The plant kingdom was endowed with an amazing genius for genetic manipulation and evolutionary tinkering, but I began to think that they were not so good at planning long range projects. This objection over the radiation hazard should have been raised and planned for much earlier in the project. But then, the humans working on the project had not foreseen this problem either.

            I had mixed feelings about this latest news. The extra work involved in addressing the issue of radiation hazard would seem to assure my continued employment. I had been banking most of my considerable salary, as there was not much in our remote Kyvian desert community to spend it on. By the time this project was over, I would have quite a handsome nestegg. However, I was sick of the perpetual state of urgency that fueled the pace of the work. We were being pushed by the plants to the limit, and since I had no hope of emigrating from the planet myself, I felt no need to rush. Besides, I couldn’t see why the plants were in such a big hurry. It may be true that the earth was doomed, but probably not this week. I was tired also of life in the Kyvian desert. I longed for the civilized society I had left behind, and ever since my KR22 experience with Belinda Peartree, I had grown to miss her.

            I talked this over with Sidney Purslane. He had his Marguerite and he was still excited by the advanced nature of the work we were doing. True, what we had learned from the plants put us far in front of the state of the art as it existed elsewhere on earth. This would hold us in good stead later in our careers, if indeed, the global ecosystem didn’t collapse before career advancement became an option.

            Still, right now I needed a break. I wouldn’t have minded a nice simple plant-collecting expedition, where I could take it easy and camp out and have fun and hike around looking at nifty plants.

            I was still contemplating my options when the issue was decided for me, for all of us.

            6: GROK

            A few days after the flap over radiation hazard I decided that a night on the town would be a fun way to relax. “Listen, Sidney,” I said, “let’s take the night off and go out to the Golden Turnip for dinner and drinks.”

            “Sorry, Albert, I’m going to have to work tonight. There’s a new assay in progress and they want results by morning. In fact, I could use some help with it. It would go much faster if you could run some of the numbers.”

            “Not a chance, my friend. You’re letting these vegetables work you too hard. Treat yourself to a little time out. I’m sure Marguerite would appreciate it too. She’s been complaining to me she hasn’t seen enough of you lately.”

            “You’re tempting me, Albert. I haven’t been seeing enough of her either. It would be fun to go dancing tonight.”

            “Come on, Sidney. Let’s do it.”

            “Okay, pal. I’ll find someone to fill in for me tonight.”

            That evening at the Golden Turnip, Sidney, Marguerite and I sat at a corner table sipping, yep, margaritas, while waiting for our dinner orders to arrive. A gypsy trio was circulating among the tables playing their romantic fiddle music, full of weltschmerz and love-longing. It was so corny that it made me smile, lifting my mood, which was already quite elevated, as I was working on my second drink.

            Marguerite said, “Sidney, we have to find Albert a girlfriend. He’s been too long on the job with no one to amuse him. You are lonely, aren’t you, Albert?”

            Was that Marguerite or the margaritas talking? Both, I guessed. The drinks gave her the nerve to be so direct with me. None of the women I’d met over here appealed to me, but I liked it that Marguerite was trying to look after me. “Let me put it this way, Marguerite. I’d take another dose of KR22 if I could be sure that it would put me on the beach at Topolobampo with Belinda.”

            “I have a better idea, Albert,” Sidney said. “Send her an email offering her a job at the lab. I’m sure we could get it okayed. Has she got her degree yet? If she goes for it, then send her an air ticket to Kyvia. Meet her at the plane with a big bunch of flowers.”

            “That’s a great idea, Sidney.” My mood shot up another notch. “I’ll put in a request tomorrow. The vegetables really ought to go for it, shorthanded as we are.”

            “I’ll put my magic endorsement on it,” Sidney replied. “We’ll push it right through.”

            Then doubts began to assail me. “Do you think she’ll go for it?”