The Doomsday Conspiracy   ::   Sheldon Sidney

SuddenlyProfessor Rachman screamed at the plant, “You are ugly! You are going to die! Do you hear me? You are going to die!”

The needle began to quiver, then it moved sharply upward.

“My God,” Janus said. “I can’t believe it.”

“What you see,” Rachman said, “is the equivalent of a human being screaming. National magazines have published articles about these experiments. One of the most interesting was a blind experiment conducted by six students. One of them, unknown to the others, was chosen to walk into a room with two plants, one of them wired to a polygraph. He completely destroyed the other plant. Later, one by one, the students were sent into the room to pass by the plants. When the innocent students walked in, the polygraph registered nothing. But the moment the guilty one appeared, the needle on the polygraph shot up.”

“That’s incredible.”

“But true. We’ve also learned that plants respond to different kinds of music.”

“Different kinds?”

“Yes. They did an experiment at Temple Buell College in Denver where healthy flowers were put in three separate glass cases. Acid rock music was piped into one case, soft East Indian sitar music was piped into the second case, and the third had no music. A CBS camera crew recorded the experiment, using time-lapse photography. At the end of two weeks, the flowers exposed to the rock music were dead, the group with no music was growing normally, and the ones that heard the sitar music had turned into beautiful blooms, with stems and flowers reaching toward the source of the sound. Walter Cronkite ran the film on his news show. If you wish to check it, it was on October 26, 1970.”

“Are you saying plants have an intelligence?”

“They breathe, and eat, and reproduce. They can feel pain, and they can utilize defences against their enemies. For example, ter-penes are used by certain plants to poison the soil around them and to discourage competitors. Other plants exude alkaloids to make them unpalatable to insects. We’ve proved that plants communicate with one another by pheromones.”

“Yes, I’ve heard of that,” Janus said.

“Some plants are meat eaters. The Venus flytrap, for example. Certain orchids look and smell like female bees, to decoy male bees. Others resemble female wasps to attract the males to visit them and pick up pollen. Another type of orchid has an aroma like rotting meat to coax carrion flies in the neighbourhood to come to them.”

Janus was listening to every word.