“I shouldn’t think,” Farris said incredulously, “that chlorophyll could have any effect on an animal organism.”
“Your saying that,” Berreau retorted, “shows that your biochemical knowledge is out of date. Back in March of Nineteen Forty-Eight, two Chicago chemists engaged in mass production or extraction of chlorophyll, announced that their injection of it into dogs and rats seemed to prolong life greatly by altering the oxidation capacity of the cells.
“Prolong life greatly — yes! But it prolongs it, by slowing it down! A tree lives longer than a man, because it doesn’t live so fast. You can make a man live as long— and as slowly —as a tree, by injecting the right chlorophyll compound into his blood.”
Farris said, “That’s what you meant, by saying that primitive peoples sometimes anticipate modern scientific discoveries?”
Berreau nodded. “This chlorophyll hunati solution may be an age-old secret. I believe it’s always been known to a few among the primitive forest-folk of the world.”
He looked somberly past the American. “Tree-worship is as old as the human race. The Sacred Tree of Sumeria, the groves of Dodona, the oaks of the Druids, the tree Ygdrasil of the Norse, even our own Christmas Tree — they all stem from primitive worship of that other, alien kind of life with which we share Earth.
“I think that a few secret worshippers have always known how to prepare the chlorophyll drug that enabled them to attain complete communion with that other kind of life, by living at the same slow rate for a time.”
Farris stared. “But how did you get taken into this queer secret worship?”
The other man shrugged. “The worshippers were grateful to me, because I had saved the forests here from possible death.”
He walked across to the corner of the room that was fitted as a botanical laboratory, and took down a test-tube. It was filled with dusty, tiny spores of a leprous, gray-green color.