The zips were pretty things, something like Terrestrial tiger-lilies—brilliant orange cups on tall green stems. They grew very thickly and had been named because of their incredibly swift life-cycle. In five seconds they would zip up from the ground as sprouts, attain full green growth, blossom, produce seed, fall withering and scatter the seed which in another five seconds would do the same thing over again.
Nobody possibly could wedge through their rank masses. If anyone tried, and were somehow to reach their midst, he would find himself being tossed up and down at five-second intervals as though being hazed on a blanket.
The zips traveled whichever way the wind carried their seeds—which happened right now to be away from Saturday. If the salt plains and chains of vertical peaks had not checked them, they might have choked the whole of Venus centuries ago.
Horseface blinked at them, dismayed. The other men also blinked, since the continual change from bare earth to green stems to orange blooms and back to bare earth again took place in five snaps of the fingers, like the winking of an illuminated sign.
Elmer helpfully tried to eat them, but they vanished in decay even as his beak closed over them. And they stretched for miles and miles.
"Awrk!" He spat them out and shrugged discouragedly, almost hurling Horseface off the saddle.
"Guess we got to detour," Horseface sighed. They skirted the encroaching zips and ran smack into a sheerly perpendicular cliff. While they were wondering what to do next, Candy purred up on his vacuum-cup bicycle.
"At least I can ride up and over," he said, switching gear. He shot up the cliff and out of sight, the suction-cups popping like a string of fire-crackers.
"You fool, come back here!" Horseface bawled, but Candy was out of earshot by then. "He's forgot there's nothing but rock-spires for miles and miles on the other side. He'll ride up and down for hours and get no farther forward than a hundred yards!"
He thumped his heels on Elmer's sides. "Gee-jup, Elmer—we'll have to try the other end of the zips."