He sat in his room, thinking. He wished he knew more about the crew. Six months was enough to give him wide acquaintance, but not the deep kind. They were a clannish lot on the ship. His own assistant he knew well enough, and the doctor. The captain he hardly ever saw. The rest of them he knew by sight and name, but not much else: the few married couples, the legally unattached girls, and the larger number of male technicians. None of them, as far as he could see, had any incentive to engineer the mixup which had nearly caused him to miss the ship. Of course he might be reading into it more than was there. It could have happened that way accidentally. And then maybe it didn't. His thoughts were interrupted by a knock. "Who's there?" he called. Larienne walked in. "Nobody asks _who_," she said. "It's always _come in_. Even I know that, and I've been on this traveling isolation ward a mere three years." She dropped into a chair and draped her legs, long legs that were worth showing off. She had a certain air of impartiality that attracted attention. She was smart, though, and knew when to discard impartiality. She eyed him curiously. "I'm trying to discover the secret of your popularity. That damn plant is pining for you." "It's not me," he said. "You have to know how to handle it." "Thanks," she said dryly. "I don't know how. But Richel Alsint, boy plant psychologist, does. He knows when to increase the circulation, when to give it an extra shot of minerals, and when, on the other hand, to scare the damn thing out of its wits, which I sometimes believe it actually has." "Don't personalize it," he warned. "It's partly plant and partly a machine. Your mistake is that you treat it as if it were wholly a machine." "Seems to me I've heard that before. What should I do that I don't?" "Cycles," he said. "Rhythm. A machine doesn't need that kind of treatment, but a plant does. Normally it starts as a seed, grows to maturity, produces more seeds, and eventually dies. Our plant isn't like that, of course. It never produces seeds, and, if we're careful, doesn't die. Yet it does have something that faintly corresponds to the original cycles." She sighed. "It might help if I knew what it was--geranium, or sunflower, or whatever." He had told her, but apparently she didn't want to remember. "It isn't one plant. It's been made from hundreds; even I don't know what they were. One best feature from this, another strong feature from something else. We've taken plants apart and recombined them into something new. This is just--plant." * * * * * Larienne dropped her legs to a more comfortable if less esthetic position. "Hydroponics was simpler," she objected. "It was," he said. "And if you want to know, old-fashioned dirt farming was even simpler. Our combination plant and machine is merely a step and a half ahead of hydroponics." "Suppose you come out and tell me what I've done wrong," she said, getting up.