"It's true," Alex said. "While I was here I needed quarters and nobody
wanted me in with them. They have some custom about not letting
strangers in their houses after sunset. So they took a sapling and
sprayed it with some sort of stuff and by the next afternoon I had a
one-room house."
"Where did you stay that first night?" I demanded.
Alex shrugged. "In one of the trees down the street," he said, pointing
through the door. "It was some sort of a storage warehouse. No air
conditioning and blacker than the inside of the Coal Sack. It rains
pretty bad at night and they had to give me some shelter."
He was right on time with his last statement, because the skies opened
up and started to pour. The four-hour evening rain had begun. It had
fascinated us at first, the regularity with which the evening showers
arrived and left, but our meteorologist assured us that it was a
perfectly natural phenomenon in a planet with no axial tilt.
"But growing a tree in a day is fantastic," I said. "What's more, it's
unbelievable, a downright--"
"Not so fantastic," Allardyce interrupted. "This really isn't a tree.
It's a cycad--related to the horsetail ferns back on Earth. They grow
pretty fast anyway and they might grow faster here. Besides, the
Lyranians could have some really potent growth stimulants. In our
hydroponics stations we use delta-gibberelin. That'll grow tomatoes
from seed in a week, and forage crops in three days. It could be that
they have something better that'll do the job in hours."
"And one that makes a tree grow _rooms_?" I scoffed.
* * * * *
Allardyce nodded. "It's possible, but I hate to think of the science
behind it--it makes me feel like a blind baby fumbling in the
dark--and I'm supposed to be a good biologist." He shivered. "Their
science'll be centuries ahead of ours if that is true."
"Not necessarily," Barger said. "They could be good biologists or
botanists and nothing much else. We've run into that sort of uneven
culture before."
"Ha!" Allardyce snorted. "That shows how little you know about
experimental biology. Anybody able to do with plants what these people
do would have to know genetics and growth principles, biochemistry,
mathematics, engineering and physics."
"Maybe they had it once and lost most of it," I suggested. "They
wouldn't be the first culture that's gone retrograde. We did it after
the Atomic Wars and we were several thousand years recovering. But we
hadn't lost the skills--they just degenerated into rituals administered
by witch doctors who handed the formulas and techniques down from
father to son. Maybe it's like that here. Certainly these people give
no evidence of an advanced civilization other than these trees and
their native intelligence. Civilized people don't hunt with spears or
live in tribal groups."