“At any rate, whatever message is in this mysterious packet is intended for me, and I intend to take receipt of it. We will not reach our next port of call any sooner by having it opened prematurely.” “I hope you’re right,” said Charlotte, grimly and insincerely. She was annoyed by her utter helplessness in the face of what now seemed certain to be a series of murders quite without parallel, in this or any other century—so annoyed, in fact, that she now did not know whether to hope that Oscar Wilde would turn out to be the murderer or Walter Czastka’s dupe.

When the three travelers arrived at the Majestic they found, as promised, that the mysterious package had been set upon a polished table in the reception room of the Green Carnation Suite. It was, as Hal had told them, a broad and shallow cylinder, but it was somewhat larger than the vague description had led Charlotte to expect. It was about a hundred centimeters in diameter and twenty deep. The box itself was emerald green, but it was secured by a cross of black ribbon neady knotted in a bow.

Charlotte went straight to the table, but Oscar Wilde paused in the doorway.

Michael Lowenthal, bringing up the rear of the party, had no alternative but to pause with him.

“The walls are not blooming as they should,” Wilde said in a vexed tone. “The buds are browning at the edges before they have even opened—there must be a fault in the circulatory system within the walls of the hotel. I’ve never really trusted the Majestic; its staff have no flair for aesthetic detail.” Charlotte stared at him, making every attempt to display her exasperation.

Eventually, he condescended to join her.

Charlotte was taking no chances, in case the box did contain dangerously illegal products of macabre genetic engineering. The policeman stationed at the door of the apartment had passed her a spray gun loaded with a polymer which, on discharge, would form itself into a bimolecular membrane and cling to anything it touched. She also had a plastic bladder of solvent ready. Her hands were gloved.

Another officer had followed them in—a uniformed inspector named Reginald Quan, who had been assigned by the local force to the Urashima murder. “You’d better let me open that with a knife,” he volunteered as soon as Oscar Wilde reached out to take hold of the knot in the black ribbon which secured the box.

“It is addressed,” said Wilde with heavy dignity, “to me.” Charlotte met Quan’s eye, raising her own eyebrows as if to say: “What can we do? Let him have his way.” Although the local man outranked Charlotte, she was operating under the technical authority of Hal Watson, and Quan had to defer to her. The inspector shrugged his shoulders and took a step back. Michael Lowenthal immediately moved into the gap, craning his neck to get a better view.

Charlotte held the spray gun ready, her finger on the trigger.

The ribbon yielded easily to Wilde’s quick fingers, and he drew it away. The lid lifted quite easily, and Wilde laid it to one side while he, Lowenthal, and Charlotte looked down at what was in the box.

It was, as Charlotte had half expected since she had first seen the shape and size of the container, a Rappaccini wreath. Its base was a very intricate tangle of dark green stalks and leaves. The stalks were thorny, the leaves slender and curly. There was an envelope in the middle of the display, and around the perimeter were thirteen black flowers like none she had ever seen before. They looked rather like black daisies—but there was something about them that struck Charlotte as being not quite right.

Oscar Wilde extended an inquisitive forefinger and was just about to touch one of the flowers when it moved.

“Look out!” said Michael Lowenthal and Reginald Quan, in unison.

As if the first movement had been a kind of signal, all the “flowers” began to move. It was a most alarming effect, and Wilde reflexively snatched back his hand as Charlotte pressed the trigger of the spray gun and let fly.

When the polymer hit them, the creatures’ movements became suddenly jerky. They had been moving fairly slowly, in random directions, but now they thrashed and squirmed in obvious distress. The limbs which had mimicked sepals struggled vainly for purchase upon the thorny green rings on which they had been mounted.

Now that Charlotte could count them she was able to see that each of the creatures had eight excessively hairy legs. What had seemed to be a cluster of florets was a much embellished thorax.

They were not perfectly camouflaged; it was simply that she had been expecting to see flowers, not spiders, and Charlotte’s expectation had enabled them to get away with their masquerade for a few seconds. She was perversely gratified to notice that Michael Lowenthal’s eagerness to get in on the act had evaporated; he had taken a big stride backward and now appeared to be awkwardly caught between conflicting desires. Now that the man from the MegaMall had a hypothesis at stake, he was desperately anxious to keep up with the data flow, but he was clearly arachnophobic. Either he had undergone some unfortunate formative experience while in the care of his foster parents or the Zaman transformation had not tidied every last vestige of deficiency from the human genome.

“Poor things,” said Oscar Wilde as he watched the spiders writhe in desperate distress. “They’ll asphyxiate, you know, with that awful stuff all over them.” “I may have just saved your life,” observed Charlotte dryly. “Those things are probably poisonous.” “My dear Charlotte,” said the geneticist tiredly, “the last human being to die of a spider bite did so more than five hundred years ago—and that was the result of a totally unexpected allergic reaction.” “It was a perfectly ordinary spider too,” Charlotte retorted. “Those aren’t. If this murderer can make man-eating plants, he can make deadly spiders.” “Perhaps,” Wilde conceded. “But this little performance was no attempted murder.

It’s a work of art—presumably an exercise in symbolism.” “According to you,” she said, “the two are not incompatible.” “Not even the most reckless of dramatists,” said Wilde, affecting a terrible weariness, “would destroy his audience at the end of act two of a play that is clearly intended to extend over twice or three times that number. I am quite certain that I am safe from any direct threat to my well-being, at least until the final curtain falls. I am almost certain that the same immunity will extend to anyone accompanying me on my journey of discovery. Even when the final act is done, I assume that Rappaccini will want us alive and well. He surely would not take the risk of interrupting a standing ovation and cutting short the cries of Encore!—and he surely will not want my obituary to appear before my review of his work.” While the man Gabriel King had described as a “posturing ape” was making this speech, and because he showed no inclination to do so himself, Charlotte reached out a gloved hand to pick up the sticky envelope which still sat on its dark green bed at the center of the ruined display.

The envelope had been splashed by the polymer, but it was not sealed. Although the gloves made her dumsy, Charlotte contrived to open it and to take out the piece of paper which it contained. She took what precautions she could to screen its contents from the inquisitive eyes of Lowenthal and Quan. For once, she wanted to have the advantage, if only for half a minute It was a car-hire receipt. The invoice stated that the car in question was ready and waiting in a bay beneath the hotel, and was stamped with a warning note in garish red ink: ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERROGATE THE PROGRAMMING OF THIS VEHICLE WILL ACTIVATE A VIRUS THAT WILL DESTROY ALL THE DATA IN ITS MEMORY.

It was probably a bluff, but Charlotte had a strong suspicion that Oscar Wilde wasn’t about to let her call it—and Hal still didn’t have any legal authority to take over the trail of clues. He couldn’t commandeer the car unless and until he could get a warrant. By that time, Charlotte suspected, the car would be en route, with Oscar Wilde in it. She had every intention of being in it with him.