A little chill of horror raced down Helen's spine. Could these odd girls really be telling the truth? Were they from Venus, as they insisted? She could just imagine them coming to Earth--on a Flying Saucer, maybe--listening to the radio to learn the language. Spying on us, but not learning as much as they thought they did. She choked off a giggle, an incipient hysteria, as another thought struck her. "Will _I_ have one of those--those--?" "You already have baby," Patricia said. "Can't see how you have baby before we come with faneweed to make you green." Helen and Dora stared at her. "You mean," Helen finally was able to ask, "that that weed caused all this? That little weed?" "But that is what we tell you all along, only you always walk away angry." * * * * * All those scientists working so hard, Helen realized bitterly, and all the time what they were looking for was literally under their feet! How could anyone have thought that the faneweed was responsible for anything but the bad smell they had finally become accustomed to? "Why didn't I listen to these girls, pay more attention to what they said?" Helen asked herself. She might have been able to prevent a lot of things that had happened. She got up from her chair and walked nervously about. Well, she couldn't change the past, but she could stop further evil from the faneweed. "I'll bet they don't have men on Venus," she said to Dora, "judging from the way they act. Then they'd have to have parthenogenetic births." She turned to Patricia. "Why did you come to Earth? And why just to Mimosa Beach?" "We try little place, what you call sample, before we change whole world," Patricia explained. And then she added sadly, "So many of our babies die. Not enough people left on Venus. We think maybe you like to come to Venus with us, so we make you as us." "That was very, very wicked of you!" Dora said severely. The four Venusians shrugged resignedly. "Might as well go home," Mary Maroon said. "They don't like it our way." "And leave me like this?" Dora demanded shrilly. "Get rid of faneweed, be as before," Patricia assured her. "With a baby I'll have trouble accounting for," Dora said bitterly. "Oh, no, you don't. You stay right here. And, Helen, don't you tell anybody that it's the faneweed. Then people from other places won't know about my baby, and it won't matter here as long as things are the way they are." "You come with us," Clara suggested wheedlingly. "You'll like Venus. Venus so pretty! No work, all happiness!" "No work? No wonder the babies die!" Dora exclaimed. Helen could see the yeast of reform beginning to work in Dora. The four Venusians looked puzzled. "They do that all the time," Helen thought irritably. Aloud, she said, "Dora, of course I have to tell about the faneweed. There are others involved, you know."