They had emerged from the locks of the ship and they were moving down the gulley. Ghor walked in his usual stiff-legged stride and clad as he was in a spacesuit, he appeared to be some sort of mechanical monster.
As they emerged from the gulley and came to the place where Mick had slashed down the budded stalk with his ray gun, Ghor halted. The shriveled burned bud lay on the ground, but the stalk had disappeared.
The earphones in Mick's spacesuit caught Ghor's startled gasp:
"Ngye!"
"It attacked us yesterday after we jumped out of the corn patch," Alf was explaining. "Mick knocked it over with his ray gun."
"It is the first one that has ventured on this side of the planet in several years," Ghor explained. "It's one of the mobile plants I was speaking of. You see, the stem has regenerated a new bud and has moved on."
"We saw several of them—"
"Several!" Ghor seemed to stiffen. "Gentlemen. It is not safe here. We must go back to my cabin. The Ngye is one plant that is deadly."
"I thought your father made trees out of them," Mick said.
"At first they were docile. My father developed many kinds of plants from them and I myself created the corn from hybrid Ngye plants, but the process of survival played a curious prank by developing in the untouched plants a sense of hatred for these new variations, as well as an everlasting enmity for my father and myself. It was as if these plants resented being made over into alien forms. My father developed a poisonous substance which he spread on the soil which drove the Ngye plants to the other side of the planet. Apparently they have come back. It means, my friends, that mankind must go to war to save himself and his products."