[Footnote 5: "Although the attempt has often been made to produce a blue rose, no one has ever succeeded.... The reason a blue rose has never been produced is that blue has never arisen spontaneously in the Genus _Rosa_, and no blue flower of another genus has ever been found that will ... transfer its blue color to the latter. A breeder who could do this would ... make a fortune." Gager: _The Plant World_.--ED.] "You--you mean people will _buy_ this thing?" "From now," declared Biggs, "until the end of time! This single mutant will parent a whole new breed of blue roses, and botanists throughout the entire solar system will mortgage their hothouses to buy slips from this parent plant. "Now you see why I couldn't show it to the governor, I couldn't risk letting the secret get out until we had taken the bud back to Earth, patented it in the name of the IPS. "Incidentally--" He coughed delicately--"our Company should be very pleased. I think we may anticipate a considerable bonus for our part in creating this new species." * * * * * I said, "But, hey--wait a minute! There's something wrong somewhere. I seen that bud before. But when I did, it wasn't blue! It was as red as an old maid's face at a strip-tease!" "_Looked_ red, you mean," corrected Biggs. "Not _was_ red. That was a matter of color reflection, Sparks, caused by the Hertzian ray lamp I had installed in the laboratory. You will remember our faces were green, our lips purplish. You see, color is a tricky thing. For instance, when you see a green leaf, what color is that leaf?" "Why, you just said. Green, of course." "Ah, no!" said Biggs. "It is _every color but green_! Colors by which we designate objects are _not_ their true colors. Quite the reverse. They are the colors those objects reflect.[6] Under the Hertzian wave this precious bud--" He caressed it fondly--"apparently reflected all colors save red. We therefore thought it a normal red rose. But now that we see it under ordinary light, we realize it absorbs the red range as well as all others save the blue." [Footnote 6: "Sunlight, as Sir Isaac Newton discovered, is a combination of the seven colors that compose the spectrum. An object is red because it is so constituted that it reflects the red rays of a beam of sunlight but absorbs all others ... a lily is white because it reflects all the rays ... a buttercup is yellow because it reflects only the yellow rays, absorbing all others ... an object is black because it absorbs all the colors of the spectrum." Gager: _The Plant World_.--ED.] He shrugged. "So--there you are! And now, darling, if you will allow me, I would like to give you a little anniversary present. The first blue rose ever to be grown--" But Cap Hanson snatched the bud from his hand feverishly.