Although he was willing to coerce his children by force, Penny always stood up for them, having been indoctrinated with the extreme educational progressivism of the followers of Dewey and Watson. And in these days of easy divorce, there was no question of using force on one's wife.
Penny was not as gorgeous as Converse made her out with his leering compliments, being short and rather squarish of build, though still fairly pretty in a round-faced floral way. But that wasn't the point. He longed to be the power in the household and he didn't stand a chance.
NEXT morning at breakfast, Vanderhoff put on his firmest face and said: "I shall plant some new things today. There will be wire guards around them and anyone who steps on one gets the derrière beat off him. Je suis tout à fait sérieux."
There was a condescending chorus of affirmative grunts and vocables filtered through corn flakes.
"And, Dan," continued Vanderhoff, "you left your baseball equipment all over the floor again. Either you clean it up or there'll be no allowance."
After breakfast, Vanderhoff went out to plant his seeds. The neighborhood was waking into its usual Sunday-morning racket. The roar of power mowers was joined by the screech of the power saw in Mr. Hort's basement and the chatter of Mr. Zanziger's electric hedge trimmer. Mr. O'Ryan, hammering something in his garage, furnished the percussion effect.
Carl Vanderhoff walked about, wondering where to plant. If the bushes really bit, it would not do to plant them near the walks; they might grab guests or men delivering things.
He had had a qualm about accepting the seeds for fear they would endanger his children. But since his youngest, Peter, was four and active, he thought he was not running much risk, especially if he put up a guard heavy enough to keep plant and youngster apart.
Besides, if Peter did get nipped, it would teach him to obey orders.
Vanderhoff decided to plant the seeds outside his picture window, in place of a mass of old jonquils that had practically ceased to flower and that he had been thinking of throwing away.
He put on his rubbers, got out shovel and garden cart and went to work. When the jonquils were out of the way, he dug a hole for each of the six seeds, filled it with a mixture of mushroom soil and fertilizer, trod the earth hard, and finished off the surface with a slight bowl-shaped depression to catch the water.
He watered the six places, stuck a flat stake beside each site with a notation, and put cylindrical wire guards over the spots.
THREE weeks after Vanderhoff had planted his seeds, five little yellow shoots appeared. Vanderhoff naturally did not know that the sixth had just germinated when a beetle grub, inching its sluggish way through the soft earth, had come upon it and devoured it.
Vanderhoff diligently watered his plants. The clouds of Venus had turned out to be ordinary clouds of water droplets, not of formaldehyde as had been feared, and the surface of the planet was quite as rainy as fictional speculators had portrayed it.
At the next session at Sydney Devore's house, Vanderhoff asked Devore and Converse how their Venerian plants were coming along. Devore, who not only lived alone but further fractured convention by never speaking about his past or personal affairs, had a habit of throwing small penny-ante poker parties for the men of the neighborhood. Vanderhoff was the most regular guest. As a thinking man, he found Devore's company congenial. Converse was the next most regular, not because he was a thinking man, but to get away from his wife. Very little poker was played, for they found more pleasure in drinking and talking.
Converse answered: "Only one of my three seeds sprouted, but the thing's a foot high already. Take a look next time you go by my place, Professor." Converse always called Vanderhoff "Professor" with a kind of annoying tolerance, as if being a professor were a disgrace or at least an embarrassing state to admit and he was big enough to disregard it.
"How about yours, Syd?" asked Vanderhoff.
"They all came up, but I can't tell what they'll look like. I planted them down both sides of my front walk."
"You mean those little pink things we passed on the way in?"
"Yes. I moved the cactus to make room for them."
THE azaleas went. The iris came and went. The peonies bloomed briefly and the tiger lilies for a longer time. Vanderhoff's bulldog bushes grew with extraterrestrial speed until, one Saturday, Penny said: "Carl, what on Earth are those things? They look like a Venus' fly-trap, but they're such a funny color and so big."
"Those are the plants I bought from Oakley."
"Who? Oh, you mean Mrs, Hort's brother, who went to Venus. Are those Venus plants, then?"
"That's what he said. Tell the children not to poke their fingers at them or they'll get bitten."
"Why, Carl, I won't have such dangerous plants on the place!"
"We're going to have these. Nobody'll get hurt if he does as he's told. I'm going to put heavier guards around the plants and if they get out of hand, I'll cut them down."
"What's that?" said Penny, turning her head. There was a sound like songbirds."It's funny, but it always sounds as if a lot of birds were singing at Devore's place, even when you can't see any."
"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?"
"If you start that again, I'll grow a beard and wear a beret. Then you'll really 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 terri. le 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 bladderlike 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?" asked 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 have any eyes, of course. Are your bushes doing any 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, but it didn't break the skin."
"What do you feed them?" asked Devore.