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leathery leaves like wings; and even up in the balloon, a thousand feet overhead, that’s a threatening sight.
    â€˜Christ,’ shouts the man, ‘look at that thing grow!’
    Look indeed; the plant is twenty feet high and still growing. Fissures run along the desert floor, marking the swift passage of the roots underground like lightning forking across a black sky.
    â€˜That,’ the girl agreed, ‘is one hell of a primrose.’
    â€˜Sorry?’
    â€˜I said that’s one hell of a -’
    â€˜Speak up, I can’t quite hear what you’re -’
    â€˜I SAID, THAT’S ONE HELL OF A PRIMROSE.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    No longer growing; instead, consolidating. The stem swells, to support the weight of the flower. The petals fan out, snatching photons out of the air like a spider’s web. Hot chlorophyll pumps through the swelling veins. The roots tear into the dead ground like miners’ drills. And stop.
    â€˜Hey up,’ says the man, ‘I think it’s on its way.’
    The primrose is rocking and bouncing up and down, for
all the world as if it’s on a trampoline. Now it’s swaying backwards and forwards, using all the leverage of its already phenomenal bulk to rip its roots free. In this particular part of the desert, nothing has stirred the ground since the seas evaporated and the wind ground down the rock and stamped it flat as a car park and hard as tarmac; fifty million years or thereabouts of patient landscaping, contouring, making good. A few more millennia, God might be saying, and we’ll have a decent tennis court. Unless, of course, some bugger of a psychotic giant primula comes along and starts carving it up . . .
    With a crack like bones breaking and much spraying of sand into the air, the roots come free; and for a few seconds they grope frantically in empty air until they touch ground, and -
    - like a monster spider with wings and a huge yellow wind-up gramophone on its back, the plant begins to shuffle, on tip-root, sideways across the sand towards the distant shade of the outcrops.
    â€˜Gaw,’ mutters the man, as well he might. For the Thing scuttling across the sand below him was his idea, and it was his genius (or his fault) that turned a little yellow wildflower commonly found in the fields and hedgerows of Old England into this: Primula dinodontica , the Ninja Primrose; or, to put it another way, one of the three components of the ultimate Green Bomb.
    â€˜Well,’ says the girl, ‘looks like that one works OK. Let’s try the others.’
    â€˜I’m not absolutely sure about this . . .’
    â€˜Don’t be so bloody wet. Here goes.’
    From a second flask she takes another seed: flat, bean-like, about the size and shape of a small sycamore pod. Before the man can do anything, she’s let it go.

    WHUMP!
    â€˜. . . serious misgivings,’ the man is saying, ‘about the whole project. I mean, I never actually imagined for one moment -’
    The primrose stops in its tracks. The tips of its roots, as sensitive as the nose of a bat, have felt the thump of the second seed landing, the explosion as the incredible potential energy contained in its brittle husk is released, the shivering of the earth as another set of iron-hard roots is driven deep under the surface. Like you, Mother Earth has this thing about needles . . .
    â€˜That,’ remarks the man, rolling back the frontiers of statement of the stunningly obvious, ‘is disgusting.’
    A savage flashback into the racial memory - the myth of the hydra, the hundred-headed serpentine guardian of Hell’s gate - except that instead of heads, this thing has pale blue flowers. Pale blue flowers writhing and twisting on their stems, petals snapping frenziedly at the empty air. The first Devil’s Forget-Me-Not has been spawned.
    â€˜Two down,’ yells the girl cheerfully, ‘one to go. I’m really pleased, aren’t