"That must be his Venerian plants," said Vanderhoff.
"Well, I should think you could at least have taken the singing plants and given him the biting ones. It would have been more appropriate, if you must have these weird things. Why don't you do like other people, instead of always trying to be smart and different? Last year when all the crowd bought Fords, you had to go buy a Chevrolet —"
"If you start that again, I'll grow a beard and wear a beret. Then you'll have something to complain of."
Penny went off in a huff, leaving Vanderhoff to work on his plants. He had long tried, with some success, to impress his family with the belief that, though a mild man in most respects, he was inflexible about his plants and terrible in his wrath if one was hurt.
When he had finished gardening, Vanderhoff walked down the street to Devore's house, from which the birdsongs issued. He found Devore squatting before one of the little pink bushes that had grown from his Venerian seeds.
At the apex of each shrub grew a brown convoluted structure something like a flower; beneath it the stem swelled out into a bladder-like bag. As he looked more closely, Vanderhoff saw that these structures were making the birdsongs. The bladders swelled and shrank while the "flowers" on top quivered and contracted.
"What are you doing, Syd?" said Vanderhoff. "Teaching these to say 'good-morning.'"
"They can be taught?"
"Within limits. They're imitative, which is why they've been copying the local birds."
"How do you train them?"
Devore held up a can of X-53-D, the latest super-fertilizer. "They love this, and I give 'em a spoonful when they say something right. An article in the Botanical Gazette says they use these songs the way our flowers use color and perfumes, to attract Venerian flying things for pollenization." Devore addressed the plant. "Good-morning, Mr. Devore!"
"G'morning, Mis' Dwore!"
"Good plant!" said Devore. He sprinkled a spoonful of X-53-D around the base of the bush and wetted it down with his watering-can. "Reward of merit."
"I suppose you'd call that speaking with a Venerian accent," said Vanderhoff. "I must make a phonetic transcription of it some time. How do they know you from anybody else?"
Devore shrugged. "Sound or smell, I suppose. They don't seem to have any eyes. Are your bushes biting yet?"
"They try to. Each pair of jaws has a sort of antenna sticking up above it, like a radar antenna. That seems to be how they sight on their prey."
"Can they draw blood?"
"I don't know. One got my finger the other day; quite a pinch, though it didn't break the skin."
"What do you feed them?" said Devore.
"They seem to like tuna fish best. Steak and ham they find indigestible."
"Hi, Professor!" came the loud voice of Bill Converse. "Hello, Syd. How's your crab grass this morning?"
"It's beginning to show up as usual," said Devore. "How's your bouncing betty?" For Converse, despite his noise about his expert gardening, had never extirpated all the soapwort or bouncing betty with which his flower beds had been overrun when he bought his house.
"You needn't kid me," said Converse. "After all, bouncing betty does have a flower."
"Yeah," said Devore. "That miserable weed. You're just lazy." He lowered his voice. "How's the tree-of-Eden doing?"
Converse rolled his eyes. "It's as tall as I am. C'mon over and look at it."
Presently they did. The tree-of-Eden, over six feet high, was a plant of curious shape. A stubby trunk, about three feet tall and four or five inches thick, ended abruptly in an organ that hung down in front of the trunk and, spraying up and out behind it, a fan of slender stems of finger-thickness, each bearing a double row of small orange leaves. Vanderhoff had a fleeting impression of a sort of vegetable peacock with its tail spread.
The organ front had a pitcher shape, rather like that of an earthly pitcher plant only larger, complete with lid. This vessel was now as big as a bucket. The lid was grown fast to the top of the vessel so it could not be raised.
"The funniest thing," said Converse in the same low voice, "is not only how fast it grows, but that it has such hard wood. Normally you expect anything that grows that fast to be soft and squashy."
He bent down one of the stems for the others to feel. It did seem to be made of strong hard wood. Vanderhoff said:
"Maybe these little berries are going to be that wonderful fruit Oakley told us about."
"Uh-huh," said Converse. "At this rate they ought to be ready to eat by September."
Devore said: "Let me suggest that you fence the tree off, or the kids will have eaten all the fruits before we old dodderers get a chance at them."
"Good idea, pal," said Converse. "Tell you what! When they're ripe I'll throw a neighborhood party, and we'll all eat them."
William Converse did fence off his tree, which continued to grow like Jack's beanstalk. The neighborhood's beds of phlox came out in crimson and white. Vanderhoff's bulldog bushes grew larger and more voracious. Penny Vanderhoff got a gashed finger feeding one and had a row with her husband about getting rid of them.
Curiously, neither the bulldog bushes nor the tree-of-Eden aroused comment. Vanderhoff's picture window was at right angles to the street, and the bushes, planted beneath this window, could not be seen from the street. Vanderhoff had threatened his children with dire penalties if they told outsiders about his marvelous plants, and apparently they had obeyed him.
The tree-of-Eden was in plain sight. But, while its strange shape caused many to ask Converse about it, they accepted his casual word that "Oh, that's just a South African stein plant."
Sydney Devore, however, could not be overlooked. First his singing shrubs twittered in imitation of the birds they heard. One, in fact, took to hooting like a screech owl, except that the plant hooted all day instead of at night like a proper owl.
Then Devore taught them to greet him with "Good-morning, Mr. Devore" as he came down his walk. When his neighbors asked him what was happening, he made jocular or enigmatic remarks, saying that he had wired the plants for sound. The plants' behavior, however, was so egregious that the explanations were not believed. As the plants grew, their tonal range and intelligibility increased.
Devore then taught them a more elaborate repertory. First he hopped up the morning greeting from a mere "Good-morning, Mr. Devore!" to such phrases as "O King, live forever!" and "All hail, your imperial highness!"
When their greetings were as magniloquent as the most egotistical paranoid could desire, he started teaching them to sing Clementine. He had trouble getting them to sing in unison, but persevered. Evening after evening the neighborhood gathered to see Devore striding up and down his walk, tapping a little Indian drum and exhorting his plants.
"Just wait," said Penny Vanderhoff to her husband. "Any day now a swarm of F.B.I, men and newspaper reporters will come down on us. They'll take you three to jail, and the reporters will write stories that'll cost you your job."
But that was the summer that so much else happened — the near-war between India and China over Nepal, the death of President Tringstad in an airplane crash, and the return of the Bergerac from Mars — that the newspapers had their attention elsewhere. At any rate, the mums and gladioli were out and nothing had yet happened when Bill Converse, after tasting a fruit of his tree-of-Eden, pronounced it ripe and invited the neighborhood to a Saturday evening party to eat the whole crop.
This was the week-end after Labor Day. On this week-end the International Council of Language Teachers' Associations, operating under the auspices of UNESCO, met in New York City. Carl Vanderhoff went to New York as a delegate, intending to return Sunday evening.