It's hard to describe what that room looked like. Imagine a Gauguin painting come to life ... a tropical hothouse gone berserk. That gives you some idea.
The original tank wherein Biggs had sprinkled the rose seeds was completely invisible, submerged beneath a crawling octopus of greenery. Writhing fronds spewed from the container to twist in tumultuous entanglement beneath our feet ... up the walls ... across the ceiling. Twining and spiraling around every piece of furniture, every bracket, any support to which suckered tendrils could cling. A heady perfume thickened the air; perfume from monstrous growths that no more resembled a rose than I look like a wasteland Martian.
Cap Hanson had been right. The action of cosmic rays had done weird things to those original germ cells.[4] Rosa rugosa had—figuratively and literally—gone crazy with the heat waves. Here triple-headed roses with spiny petals reared themselves awkwardly out of thick spongy, palmate foliage ... there a pinkish, cactus-like rose-thing clung tenaciously to a table leg ... elsewhere gossamer-fine, lavender petals, propelled by stirring gusts of air, drifted lazily across the room toward us, dangling epiphytic roots.
It was a startling exhibition of Mama Nature gone nuts! Only in two respects did these fantastic creations resemble the roses from which they were mutant. Each variation had thorns—as we discovered painfully when we tried to walk amongst them—and all had some shade or tint or hue of the fundamental red rose whence they had sprung.
Cap Hanson groaned, "Oh, my golly, what a mess! Of all the—Hey, let me out of here! Whatever's goin' on, it's gettin' us, too! Your faces!"
Biggs cracked indigo lips in what was supposed to be a placating grin but looked more like a hungry pitcher-plant licking its chops. He said, "The color means nothing, Captain. It's just a matter of light refraction."
"Which doesn't alter the fact," I reminded him, "that the experiment's a flop, Lanse, old boy. I—I guess we might as well call it quits. Clean this mess up and throw it away. We can't show this stuff to the Iapetus board. They'd toss us out on our necks."
Biggs nodded dolefully. "I guess you're right, Sparks. This is a bitter disappointment. I did so want to surprise her."
"Her?" grunted Hanson. "The Board's made up of hims."