Free Welcome to the Greenhouse by Gordon Van Gelder

within the confines of the massive seawall that had been one of Canada’s bicentennial projects. But instead of looking down at the place where he had made his wealth, he looked up and saw the stars.
    That’s when he got the idea. “We need help,” he said. “It’s gotta be out there, somewhere.”
    Bunker Hill Sansom—though he told everyone to call him Bunky, and God help any who didn’t—had made his billions by finding new ways to do old things. Inarguably, his ways were better ways, provided your definition of “better” was “more fashionable.” He had pioneered the genetic redesign of key elements of the human genome—well, not the actual redesign, but the marketing of the application, through a worldwide string of franchise clinics that sold the fruits of other people’s genius to the eager masses.
    So while others were eliminating hereditary disease or enhancing intelligence, Sansom was making it possible for parents to bear children with huge, dark eyes the size of silver dollars—you couldn’t look at them without saying, “Aw,”—or with the silky blue hair that, this year, was all the rage in Japan. He was already taking preorders for next year’s sensation: feathers!
    As soon as he received his inspiration about help from the stars, Bunky put some people on it. They reported back that scientists had been scanning the stars for intelligent signals for about a century. “And what have they got?” he said.
    “Well, nothing,” said his number-one baby-strangler. Actually, Bunky had never happened to need a baby strangled, but if he ever did, Number-One was there to take care of it.
    “Nothing? A hundred years and they’ve got nothing?”
    “They don’t have much money.”
    “How much is not much?” Bunky said. He didn’t believe the number his people gave him. It was less than he’d spent on media alone when he’d launched the modification that let people have babies that produced excrement in about the same quantity and conformation as a rabbit’s. “Chicken feed,” he said. “Put a coupla billion into it.”
    His people went away and put a couple of billion into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Every month, he got reports; every month, progress was skimpy. Like the time his team reported that they’d overheard signals from deeper in the galaxy that were definitely coherent, but the scientists decoding the transmissions concluded that the senders were insectoids.
    “Insectoids?” Bunky said. “You mean, like, bugs?”
    “Yes, sir,” said Number-One.
    “Big bugs?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Bunky shivered. “Give ‘em another billion but tell ‘em they gotta look somewheres else. Bugs ain’t gonna help us.”
    More months went by. The sea barriers protecting lower Manhattan cracked then collapsed under the continuous battering from Atlantic waves. “I told ‘em they shouldn’ta let the mob finesse those construction contracts,” Bunky said. He called Number-One and said, “Whatta we hear from space?”
    The man had just been about to call the boss. “Something good,” he said.
    “Not bugs?”
    “Not bugs. More like slugs, but smart slugs.”
    “What’s good about smart slugs?” Bunky said.
    “They sent through the schematics for a different kind of communicator. We can talk to them in real time, no more waiting years for messages to go out and come back.”
    “That sounds good.”
    A week went by. Number-One called back. “We made contact.”
    “Excellent. Can they help us?”
    “There’s a problem.”
    “What problem?”
    “Well, we established communication, but the only thing they wanted to know is did we have any
fafashertzz
we wanted to get rid of?”
    “Fafashertzz?”
Bunky said. “What’s
fafashertzz?”
    “They sent another schematic. It appears to be what our scientists call a transuranic element, but way heavier than anything we’ve ever conceived of. You’d need a cyclotron the size of the moon to make it.”
    “So our guys