THE PLANT REVOLT
BY EDMOND HAMILTON
IT IS WHEN I begin this record of the terror that descended upon man and the world of man that I comprehend best the impossibility of ever completely recording that terror. It is when I begin this account of the doom that threatened all our race that I understand best how little our race, of itself, was able to oppose that doom. There is, in the whole story, none of that dramatic sequence of threat and attack and reply that might be expected in such an epic of struggling species. Rather it seems, now, hardly more than a blind welter of giant forces in which is emphasized nothing but the unimportance and helplessness of those who were the final victors.
It is only, therefore, because I, Edward Harley, saw as much of the action of that terror as was seen by any man, that I have taken it upon me to write this record. Two years ago, when there came the first reports of that which was to crumble our world, I was chief morphologist of the botany department of the University of Philadelphia. At the time, of course, there was no thought of the real meaning and importance of those reports. Even I, who by reason of my chosen science could comprehend their strangeness better than most men, had surely no thought of any danger connected with them.
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