It simply was, and knew that it was, and was satisfied.
Such a tiny organism can have only the most rudimentary of memories, but it remembered. Once—Once long before, there had been ... more.
Life had been the same, but somehow fuller. When it tried to recall exactly in what this fullness lay, the memory just was not there; only a vague recollection of comfort, motion, satiation.
When the men landed upon the moon in the twentieth century, they did not find it at first. Locating it would have been comparable to stumbling upon a solitary blade of grass, imbedded in ice at the South Pole. Men came to the moon, though, and began to settle there. The first homes they knew were mere metal shacks, filled with life-giving gases of their planetary atmosphere, and devoid of all comforts save those necessary for maintenance of life.
But men have a way of rising above the status quo, and so, within half a pulsebeat of the plant, the surface of the moon became dotted with these iglooic shacks, then pressurized tunnels radiated out in a unifying network, and soon the Domes began to grow; immense translucent light-weight structures of enormous strength bubbled up on the moon, and soon cities were being built beneath them, strange towering fairyland cities on this satellite where people and architecture alike boasted six times the power possessed on Earth. The cities soared upward in glinting, stalagmitic pinnacles whose tapering ends seemed to threaten the fabric of the Domes themselves, but were in reality still far below the blue-white curving surface.
Machines lay buried now in the grey pumice that was the surface of the moon; machines that drained gases from the oxides and nitrates within the planetoid and filled the Domes for the people with the life-giving gases. And still the moon grew more Domes, and more.
And then, three motions of the tiny plant after the primal landing of men on the moon, three half-cycles later, a pulse-and-a-half—It was found.
The man who found it was an engineer, a man of high intelligence. For, building on the moon was a perilous undertaking. A man had to know stresses and strains, had to be able to read gauges that warned of vacuum pockets beneath the crust of the moon that—if broken into—could suck the life-giving gases from the metal caissons within which the men laid the foundations of new Domes. Had it been on Earth, and the workman unionized and possibly unlettered, it would have had the fate of a dandelion that stands in the path of a growing subway tube.
Unfortunately, the man—as mentioned—had intelligence.