“Er—excuse me,” said the Doctor. “I don’t quite understand. What council?”
“Well, you see,” said the vines, “some hundreds of years ago—that is of course well within the memory of most of us, we—”
“Excuse me again,” the Doctor interrupted. “Do you mean that most of the plants and insects and birds here have been living several centuries already?”
“Why, certainly,” said the Whispering Vines. “Some of course are older than others. But here on the Moon we consider a plant or a bird or a moth quite young if he has seen no more than two hundred years. And there are several trees, and a few members of the Animal Kingdom too, whose memories go back to over a thousand years.”
“You don’t say!” murmured the Doctor. “I realized of course that your lives were much longer than ours on the Earth. But I had no idea you went as far back as that. Goodness me!—Well, please go on.”
“In the old days, then, before we instituted the Council,” the vines continued, “there was a terrible lot of waste and slaughter. They tell of one time when a species of big lizard overran the whole Moon. They grew so enormous that they ate up almost all the green stuff there was. No tree or bush or plant got a chance to bring itself to seeding-time because as soon as it put out a leaf it was gobbled up by those hungry brutes. Then the rest of us got together to see what we could do.”
“A species of big lizard overran the Moon”
“Er—pardon,” said the Doctor. “But how do you mean, got together? You plants could not move, could you?”
“Oh, no,” said the vines. “We couldn’t move. But we could communicate with the rest—take part in conferences, as it were, by means of messengers—birds and insects, you know.”