"Arbitrary! Those shapeless leaves, twisted stalk, that sterile seed. The copper and arsenic in those needless links. Too many genes had no function. No use at all! "I'd just got the key, when that thing screamed. The copper and arsenic atoms are not genetic instructions to the plant. They're a message to us--words replicated a trillion times, and concealed in every cell of the plant!" "Words?" someone whispered blankly. "Words in the atoms?" "Written in binary code." His scowl was bleakly triumphant. "That weed's a mutant, you see. The real Lilith formed the first cell with her micro-probe. She left it--I suppose in her own body--as a message that no pseudo-Lilith could intercept." Outside that something screamed again. "Call each copper atom a dot," he whispered. "Call each arsenic a dash. Taken in order along the chains of DNA, they do encode a message. The computer's decoding it now." He punched a button, and the printer whirred. TO WHOEVER COMES.... GIVE NO AID TO ANYONE.... GET OFF THIS PLANET.... ITS LIFE IS PSEUDOMORPHIC.... DON'T LET IT LEAVE.... JUST TAKE MY LOVE TO LANCE LLANDARK.... FROM LILITH, HIS WIFE.... AND GET OFF THIS PLANET, FAST.... Outside, it uttered a frantic, bubbling screech. We did get off the planet, and we expect to stay away. END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Masked World, by Jack Williamson