slowly, as a long minute passed,
one of the roots made an uncertain step, then another and another, until
it was walking unsteadily across the surface of the table!

Henderson, his face--even his lips--white with excitement, now reached
for another switch. Before turning it on he adjusted a tiny microphone
on the edge of the table. Then he turned the screw switch ...

Instantaneously the laboratory was filled with a rustling. Then there
came a series of tiny squeaks that sounded strangely like a voice
speaking. Henderson sat spellbound, watching, listening ...

The door bell rang again, but this time he didn't even hear it. Nothing
could break the spell which held him in his seat before the first
talking and walking plant the world had ever known.

He picked up an alternate phase microphone and spoke into it. His voice
issued from a tiny speaker beside the plant as a small whisper of
itself.

"Man!" his voice whispered, "Man!" He nearly yelled his delight as the
small green thing echoed the word!

He shut off the mike, then, and got busy. He sat down and began to plan
a vocabulary to educate his plant. When that was done he would stun the
world with a demonstration of his genius ...

It was some time before he realized there was a ghost of a voice coming
from someplace in the room. He looked at the plant on the table, but it
was standing quiescent.

Henderson stared around the laboratory, frowning. Then a movement at the
window caught his eye.

His mother's prize geranium was struggling to free itself from the soil
in the window box! And it was muttering! Henderson blushed as he made
out some of the words the flower was muttering. That plant had been in
the room with him during some of his most dismal scientific failures,
and it evidently had a good memory. He watched wild-eyed as the plant
struggled to lift its roots from the earth ...

One root finally came loose with an audible POP, accompanied by a
squeaking streak of profanity. Another and another root worked free, and
suddenly the geranium was standing on the edge of the box. Its bright
red blossom turned from side to side. There were no eyes visible but
Henderson had the chilly feeling that the flower was surveying the room.
Then, after a moment, the plant jumped to the sill of the window, from
there to the seat of a chair. Then it slid down one of the legs of the
chair to the floor.

It shook its leaves, lifted its blossom upward at the amazed Hende