Zinnia

completely forgotten about her appointment with Professor DeForest until she had awakened an hour ago. In her rush to make the meeting on time she had missed breakfast, coff-tea, and the morning paper-all the little rituals that got the day started.

Newton was a plump, jovial, red-cheeked elf of a man with a neatly trimmed beard and a comfortable paunch. He wore a leather gardener's apron festooned with tool and implement pockets over his plaid shirt and denim trousers. Tiny round glasses perched on his nose. A cap covered his balding head.

He was obviously enamored of his subject, the legendary Third Chastain Expedition. From the way in which he was holding forth, Zinnia suspected that Newton missed the captive audience he had once enjoyed in the classroom. She did not mind his chattiness in the least. She was prepared to listen.

The journal was now safely in Nick's hands, but Morris Fenwick's killer was still at large. If she stuck to her suspicion that Morris had not been murdered for dope money, then the journal was the only other lead she had. She needed to know more about the Third Expedition.

'Ah, yes. Why aren't there any official records of the Lost Expedition?' Newton gave her a sly approving glance as he clipped another vine. 'Your question is an excellent one, indeed. I spent years looking for documents and papers that would prove my theories.'

Zinnia watched, fascinated, as more blood-red juice dripped from the cut vine. 'Did you find any hard evidence?'

'Nothing that satisfied the naysayers and the scoffers.' Newton sighed as he surveyed an ugly purple flower. 'There was some early paperwork indicating that a Third Chastain Expedition had been planned at one time. But official records state that it was never carried out because Chastain wandered off into the jungle and killed himself a few days before the team was scheduled to depart.'

'But you believe that the expedition did take place?'

'Oh, yes.' Newton said. 'I'm quite sure of it. Twenty years ago I managed to find a couple of old jelly-ice miners who happened to be in Serendipity the week the team gathered there. They remembered the five men of the Chastain Expedition.'

'Serendipity?'

'That was the jumping-off point. The last outpost of civilization, you might say. It was just a small mining camp located on one of the outer islands. It was later abandoned by the company. The jungle grew back very quickly. There's nothing left there today. I made a trip out to the Western Islands several years ago to take a look for myself.'

'What happened to your two witnesses? Why didn't they ever come forward?'

'Another good question.' Newton prodded the closed petals of a sickly yellow flower with the tip of his shears. The bloom opened with a snap to reveal a nest of sharp spines at the center. 'The answer is that by the time I was ready to publish my work, they were both dead.'

'Killed, do you mean?'

Newton looked sly. 'Oh, the authorities claimed the deaths were not mysterious. One man was an alcoholic. He wound up facedown in a gutter in Founders' Square. The other had a drug problem. He was killed by another addict whom he apparently tried to rob. Utter nonsense.'

'What do you think happened to them?'

'The were killed by the aliens.' Newton gave her a knowing look. 'Not directly, of course. The creatures most likely placed some poor dupe under mind control and then ordered him to get rid of the witnesses.'

Zinnia winced. 'I see.' She thought about asking Newton why the aliens hadn't had him killed, too, since he was the one who was onto their nefarious scheme, but she refrained. He might not want to continue talking to her if she confronted him with too much logic. 'There must have been other people who recalled the expedition.'

'I managed to find a few others who recalled that it had been planned, but as far as they know, it was canceled at the last minute because of Chastain's suicide. Everyone I talked to who was involved, from the university officials to the folks who lived in the islands, believes the expedition never left Serendipity.'

'What about the families of the five men who formed the expedition team? They must have been a bit suspicious when their relatives failed to return.'

'Chastain was written off as a suicide by his family. The other four men had no close relatives. No one noticed that they had simply disappeared.'

Zinnia frowned. 'Isn't that a little strange?'

'Not really. Chastain handpicked his teams, himself. His first requirement was that every individual be experienced in jungle survival. That limited his pool of potential candidates to the usual assortment of loners, bastards, and riffraff who tend to wind up in the islands and who are willing to sign on for expedition work. Not many would take that sort of job, in those days.'

'Why not? It sounds rather exciting.'

Newton chuckled. 'Not nearly as exciting as prospecting for jelly-ice. After all, a man can get rich if he locates a deposit of ice. Expedition work, on the other hand, is a salaried job. Anything valuable that is discovered becomes the property of whoever has funded the venture.'

'In this case that would have been the University of New Portland, right?'

'Correct. And, as I said, their records show they canceled the expedition after Chastain disappeared.'

'Hmm.' Zinnia bent closer to a severed vine to examine the red juice that dripped from it.

'No, no, Miss Spring, you don't want to touch that little blood-creeper.' Newton batted her hand away with a playful pat. 'Not until the wound has sealed.'

Zinnia glanced at him. 'Wound?'

'Figure of speech.' Newton's merry eyes danced behind his round spectacles. 'As you can see, the vine appears to bleed when it's cut. The liquid is rather toxic. Leaves a nasty burn.'

'Oh.' Zinnia quickly shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she followed Newton down another green passageway. 'So, you're convinced that the expedition team was abducted by aliens?'

'It's the only reasonable explanation for the disappearance of those five men together with all of the records that would have proven that the team left on schedule,' Newton said. 'I admit that my work has caught the attention of one or two kooks over the years, thanks to the tabloids. Some of the fools have come up with their own theories, but they're all nonsense.'

'What are some of the other theories?'

'Several years ago one of the tabloids published a fanciful piece which claimed that the last Chastain expedition had discovered a treasure of some kind. Perhaps a huge deposit of fire crystal. The author suggested that the five members of the team had made a pact to conceal the location of the crystal and then faked their own disappearance.'

'So that they wouldn't have to turn the discovery over to the university officials?'

'Yes.' Newton chuckled. 'Ridiculous theory, of course. If those five men had been secretly mining a vast quantity of fire crystal all these years, someone would have noticed. Fire crystal is so rare that if a lot of it suddenly came on the market, it would cause quite a stir.'

'True.' Zinnia could not argue that point. 'Still, the idea that the team found a treasure worth hiding is intriguing.'

'Bah. Five men could not have kept such a secret for long.' Newton waved his shears at her. 'Those men were abducted by aliens, Miss Spring. And then those same aliens plotted to remove all traces of the Third Expedition so that no one would figure out what had happened.'

'It seems a little unlikely,' Zinnia suggested as gently as possible.

'Not unlikely at all. Don't forget, we have proof that aliens have visited this planet in the past.'

'You're talking about the relics Lucas Trent found.'

'Indeed,' Newton said.

'But the experts say they're extremely ancient. Whoever left them behind has been gone for a thousand years or more.'

'That doesn't mean they didn't come back thirty-five years ago to kidnap Chastain and his men.'

'But why would they choose those five people?' Zinnia asked.

'We may never know the answer to that, my dear. They are aliens, after all. Who can tell how their minds work?' Newton frowned. 'You may want to stand back from that snap-tongue.'

'Snap-tongue?' Zinnia glanced down at a large, fleshy, throat-shaped leaf.