"You forget," said Spaak, "that all of us stood in a field this morning and watched a plant dig ore out of the ground, another plant smelt the ore, a third plant flatten it into sheets of metal, using a fourth plant as an anvil. After seeing that flame tree in action, there can be no doubt that the flame trees also deliberately destroyed the space ships when some of us were about to use them to leave Venus. No, gentlemen, I tell you that the intelligent and dominant life on this planet consists of trees, bushes, vines, and so on down to the smallest plant. That, incidentally, must be the reason we were told to bring our own plants and not to touch any of the plant life here."
"You are right, Earth-Man."
For a moment, the thirteen men in the room sat, frozen, not daring to look at each other. It had not been a voice speaking this time, yet each had heard the thought within his head. As each of them realized that all had heard it, that the thought had not been a personal hallucination, they relaxed. Quickly, they looked around the room. But there was no one there except themselves.
"I have been expecting this," Alexandre Spaak said. "I knew that my theory was right—and I thought that once it was out, they might communicate with us."
"But who—where?" gasped Stokes. "There's no one else in this room—I mean, there isn't even a plant."
"No, but look out of the window," Spaak said. "Look at the trees lining both sides of the street—the trees with those curling leaves which look almost like heads—with tendrils waving from them, like antennae!"
They looked from the window, and it was true that the leaves on the trees did look like heads. They noticed that the antennae on the leaves of the nearest tree were all bent in the direction of their building, even though the wind was blowing away from it.
"Ih dien buh tso!" exclaimed Wang Chin Kwang.
"But it's impossible, really!" said Stokes. "That space ship, all of those records in the various languages, the clearing of the land here, everything!"