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I emerged at a run, screaming, “Wippett!”

I had no knowledge of the whereabouts of the man. For all I knew, the vegetables had absconded with him to some distant star. If so, there would be hell to pay at the Holograph. If not, likewise. For I had managed neither the interview nor the heroic gesture, which meant my pork was cooked with A. Jones, for I had failed to appease the unappeasable Wire. The Special Edition was hamstrung. The pig of doom had squealed.

As I flung myself out the farmhouse I tumbled into Wipp.

He picked himself back up and stood calmly, a stalk of wheatgrass in his mouth—the picture of a hayseed.

“Wipp,” I managed. “You’re OK!”

He nodded at my outfit. “You’re OK, too.”

“Where were you?” I cried. “You weren’t on the roof!”

“It looked on the unsteady side. I went around the other way.”

“But when they saw you, didn’t they—?”

He shook his head. “I guess you didn’t understand them well enough, Benny. I gave it a little thought before I went near. You see, they’re vegetables. You know that. Moreover they’re hive-like. You might think of ants, or bees. You saw how they all moved together, in formation.”

“Line dancing, I thought.”

“It’s a function of their being so interconnected. Must be their antennae. They radio-broadcast or something to each other. Social plants, you know.”

“Anti-social enough to gas me. Even after I told them I was the leader.”

“I think they already knew you weren’t. That interconnectedness, you know. That one Extwizl told the rest, so of course they didn’t believe you. But that’s just as well, because if they’d thought you were the leader, you wouldn’t have been too happy. The Extols want our queen, actually.”

“Extwizls? They all called themselves that? But wait a minute. Queen?”

“Group-identity, Benny. These are hive plants. They’re all worker-plants, or drone-plants, whatever you want to call them. They have some individuality, but mostly they’re subservient to the hive. Or to their king, in this case.”

I considered this, and gave my reasoned opinion, “Ah,” I said.

“They’re an interstellar species, Benny, spread out over a godawful number of worlds. They set up colonies here and there. But that means the kings have to do a lot of traveling, to ferry pollen. It’s your usual act of insuring genetic variability in the species, just on a galactic scale.”

“But if this was all a chummy, perpetuation-of-the-species type social visit, then why did Extwizl draw his departicularizer?”

“That was a spore-bearer,” said Wippett. “Sure, it works like a gun, in case they have to do a run on cell chambers and force the pollen in. The politics of sex—well, it’s pretty screwy in our own species, too. But anyway, that departicularizer was—”

“I got it,” I said, the light switching on. “I thought it was a pistol, but really it was a stamen.”

“And that Extwizl,” Wipp said, “was just an expendable pollen-bearer. You weren’t reacting right, and the plants here were beginning to wonder if they hadn’t landed on another king-hive instead of a queen-hive. So they gave him a cease-and-desist order. They were practicing their military formations here, and taking on local disguise as they could, in case they were getting into a territorial scuffle.”

“You know, Wipp, I still don’t know how you kept from getting gassed. You’re holding out on me.”

I detected a certain hesitancy as he said, “Well, as I said, or maybe I didn’t, I saw you get gassed, and thought maybe I’d get around it somehow. Because what did they want? They seemed to want your clothes. So I just went buck-naked, and they weren’t bothered a bit and let me go up and talk to them.”

“Naked? You?”

“Might have a little sunburn in odd places. But don’t you want to know why they left?”

“They left!”

“They did. I convinced them it was no use, this effort of theirs. Not on this planet. We’re animals, and we’re individuals. We do it individually. I had to draw pictures in the sand, because after all I only had me, naked, for a sample. I didn’t have, say, Addy Jones along.”

“Wipp!”

“Well, they looked at my pictures. Seems they recognized the images of man and woman from an old metal plate their king picked up at some interstellar swap-shop. Plus it helped them understand what you’d told that first Extwizl. When I pointed out that one, the man, was Farmer Hock, and the other, the woman, was Mrs. Hock, why, they all understood. Turns out one of those pairs of overalls—”

“No wonder Farmer Hock was so mad.”

“So, anyway, they believed me, and they left,” said Wippett. “It was kind of like spoiling someone’s date.”

We headed for the Holograph full of confidence. I sent story and sidebars ahead, while Wipp told me he sent some stunner pics. I felt the kind of triumph my Grandpa Beezer must have felt after tripping over his shoelaces in the Ardennes and shooting himself in the foot, while within spitting distance of enemy fire: the triumph of going home to medals.

Then a vision swam into my mind.

“Wipp,” I said. “What exactly did you find in that holo-cam of yours? I mean, what were these stunner pics you sent Wire?”

“Oh, I found a few good ones,” he said. He pointedly gazed out his side window, even while driving.

“Nothing—revealing, I suppose?”

“Oh, I suppose not.”

“Nothing that might strike a—say, a personal note? Nothing to which we might attach the sensitive adjective of ‘naked’?”

“Oh, no, Benny. No skin. Not a bit.”

I mean it as a tribute to Wippett Snolligan when I say I trusted him. Since he said the tender adjective could not be attached, I shelved fears of said adj. with confidence.

“Fogg!” called a voice from the newsroom. “Snolligan!”

Jerome H. Wire’s voice bellowed out genially and nearly within normal decibels.

There, on the large screen to one side of the newsroom, where blowups of the latest edition were projected for final proofing, loomed the lead screen of our latest, the Special, the issue for which we two, Fogg and Snolligan, had risked necks. And there—

There, on the wall, just below a huge two-word headline that burst out:

“DESPERATE MEASURES!”

There, there, in the middle where even the most accidentally slipping eye, meandering aimlessly across the page, would stumble upon it:

There, there, even I saw that there was the picture of one reporter of personal note.

“Wippett!” I squeaked.

“You aren’t naked,” he said.

“Not in the exactly naked sense, no. But underneath! I’m wholly naked there!”

“Not so as you’d notice.”

Jerome Wire stood beaming at this uncomfortable revelation flaring upon the wall. “Fogg and Snolligan, you guys are geniuses! This will sell! We’ve got an edition with ‘Special’ all over it!”

“But boss,” I said, “that’s me up there.”

“No modesty now, Fogg.” He smiled and waved his hand over the image. Knowledge dawned on me as to what exactly Wippett had sent: an audio-holo. “As Wipp says down here in the caption, the aliens wouldn’t have gone, despite good reason, if you hadn’t resorted to this desperate scare tactic! Way to think, Fogg. I’ll have to stop saying your brains live up to your name!”

At the wave of his hand, the monster out of the trough-muck, with rotten-apple eyes and a glistening skin of festering, oil-streaked goop, opened what seemed to be a mouth and bellowed—Aaoooough!—with a moan and a sound of deep-seated disgust and anger. It scared the bazeezus out of me, even!