The public, though, was not satisfied with the finding of a name for the disturbance, and insisted that it be brought to a halt somehow. Naturally, the International Society of Botanists, Biologists and Biochemists raised one hell of a fuss about this, but on a democratic planet they were summarily outvoted, and all spirally little green Peter W. Merrill Moonplants were—well, not uprooted; that would be impossible—But they were all cropped flush with the earth wherever found, and salt, acid, and all manner of nasty things poured into the stumps.
However, nothing happened at all to the vibrations.
People began to get fidgety, and started petitioning their representatives in government to Do Something. A lot of speeches were then made, all over Earth, about the noise and general disturbance of the moonplant roots, but none of them offered a solution to the increasing racket.
It was about this time that plumblines started hanging crooked. Oh, it wasn't detected at first. How could it be, at first? Because you judge things by plumblines, not vice-versa. However, in a month, when everything was about five degrees off the vertical, notice began to be taken.
When oranges began rolling off the ground in the California and Florida groves, and huddling in a mound here and there upon the countryside, the Spirit of Worry injected itself into the public consciousness. Niagara Falls' spectacular skew-wise splashing toward the Canadian side didn't set many hearts at ease, either.
And then someone remembered the moonplants, and saw that each new apparent gravity-tug was coming from the stump of one of the plants, and a leading scientist figured out the answer, after getting a snipped-off segment of moonplant root and testing the hell out of it.
"It seems," he announced to the world, or that portion of the world that was watching his appearance on TV; there being considerable competition with a new series of NBC Specials on another channel, "It seems that this Peter W. Merrill Moonplant is—er—magnetic, to a certain degree. Though not magnetism as we know it. It's more as though each plant, through the positioning of its roots, and the coiling of same, plus a heavy concentration of iron in its physical makeup, has managed to make itself—or, rather, the stump of itself, since all such plants were cut down, a short while back—to make itself the center of an artificial gravity field. This field seems to grow—Rather, these many fields seem to grow in strength by the hour, and they have a tendency to topple things, the gravitational 'tug' being most disastrous near the centers of the fields. The rims, though the angle of gravity is sharper there, are safer for stability only because they are balanced by more 'tugs' from adjoining fields...."
Well, he went on this way for an hour or so, and soon his listeners—those who stayed tuned in—knew what the problem was: "Down" wasn't going to be "down" much longer. It was going to depend on which moonplant stump you happened to be near.