I made a noncommittal noise.
"It's true," Alex said. "While I was here I needed quarters and nobody wanted me in with them. They have some custom about not letting strangers in their houses after sunset. So they took a sapling and sprayed it with some sort of stuff and by the next afternoon I had a one-room house."
"Where did you stay that first night?" I demanded.
Alex shrugged. "In one of the trees down the street," he said, pointing through the door. "It was some sort of a storage warehouse. No air conditioning and blacker than the inside of the Coal Sack. It rains pretty bad at night and they had to give me some shelter."
He was right on time with his last statement, because the skies opened up and started to pour. The four-hour evening rain had begun. It had fascinated us at first, the regularity with which the evening showers arrived and left, but our meteorologist assured us that it was a perfectly natural phenomenon in a planet with no axial tilt.
"But growing a tree in a day is fantastic," I said. "What's more, it's unbelievable, a downright—"
"Not so fantastic," Allardyce interrupted. "This really isn't a tree. It's a cycad—related to the horsetail ferns back on Earth. They grow pretty fast anyway and they might grow faster here. Besides, the Lyranians could have some really potent growth stimulants. In our hydroponics stations we use delta-gibberelin. That'll grow tomatoes from seed in a week, and forage crops in three days. It could be that they have something better that'll do the job in hours."
"And one that makes a tree grow rooms?" I scoffed.
Allardyce nodded. "It's possible, but I hate to think of the science behind it—it makes me feel like a blind baby fumbling in the dark—and I'm supposed to be a good biologist." He shivered. "Their science'll be centuries ahead of ours if that is true."