Brice Schumar didn't move. He just stood there on the greenhouse floor, an idiot's grin plastered across his face.

"Look closer," he suggested.

Nose crinkling, St. Clair peered more carefully at the cluster of abandoned hives clinging together on the underside of an overhanging branch. When he realized what he was looking at, he nearly fell off the raised plant bed.

It was the sheer number of them that had thrown him. But he saw now that they were all identical to the one he'd seen just a few minutes before in Schumar's lab. Seeds. Tons of them.

"Are these all seeds?" Hubert St. Clair croaked.

"They came with the latest growth spurt," Schumar said. "Thousands on each tree. It was in my report."

St. Clair slipped around the far side of the tree. Another cluster of seeds clutched a branch on the other side. Still others were visible higher up.

A second tree grew a few feet away in the same bed. St. Clair saw more of the teardrop-shaped blue seedlets clinging all over the branches.

Numbly, he climbed down from the bed. His mind was reeling.

"What about the seed coats?" St. Clair asked. "They look like leather."

"Not a problem," Schumar said excitedly. "They're tough-looking but easily penetrated by water. We had a lingering of some chemical inhibitors prior to germination, but that's been eliminated. Now the growth inhibitors are easily bleached away by the introduction of water."

"Just regular water?" St. Clair asked.

"Tap water, rainwater. It's all the same," Schumar said. "Of course, that's not going to be good enough for all alien climates. And at this point it wouldn't even work for some of Jupiter's moons or Mars, since we've got ice to contend with there. The next generations of the plants will have to be weaned from water."

"Weaned?" St. Clair asked, coming back around.