Cap Hanson choked, "But—but a blue rose! I never seen such a thing before!"
"Neither," crowed Biggs, "has anyone else. But flower-lovers have dreamed of them for centuries.[5] Hundreds of thousands of dollars—perhaps millions—have been spent by botanists in an effort to create that rare, often wished for but never accomplished example of beauty, the blue rose. A fortune awaits the first man to put such a thing on the market. And by luck we have done it!"
"You—you mean people will buy this thing?"
"From now," declared Biggs, "until the end of time! This single mutant will parent a whole new breed of blue roses, and botanists throughout the entire solar system will mortgage their hothouses to buy slips from this parent plant.
"Now you see why I couldn't show it to the governor, I couldn't risk letting the secret get out until we had taken the bud back to Earth, patented it in the name of the IPS.
"Incidentally—" He coughed delicately—"our Company should be very pleased. I think we may anticipate a considerable bonus for our part in creating this new species."
I said, "But, hey—wait a minute! There's something wrong somewhere. I seen that bud before. But when I did, it wasn't blue! It was as red as an old maid's face at a strip-tease!"
"Looked red, you mean," corrected Biggs. "Not was red. That was a matter of color reflection, Sparks, caused by the Hertzian ray lamp I had installed in the laboratory. You will remember our faces were green, our lips purplish. You see, color is a tricky thing. For instance, when you see a green leaf, what color is that leaf?"
"Why, you just said. Green, of course."