Word: underground
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Telltale Warmth. A trained intelligence expert can extract all sorts of information from an infra-red photograph. He can follow traffic along the roads and into underground hiding places. He can tell by the temperature of its winches whether a ship is handling cargo. He can decide at a glance whether an airfield is in use. Infra-red camouflage is theoretically possible, but even if a plant or missile station is put deep underground, it will have trouble dumping its heat in a way that will not show...
...last year sample plants were sent to North Carolina State College, where plant pathologists could find no bacterium, virus, fungus or other malefactor to account for the trouble. Then a graduate student from India took a careful look at the sick corn and recognized among its roots the underground stems of witchweed, which had never before invaded the Western Hemisphere...
...mysterious substance that the root secretes, the seed wakes up. Out of it pokes a root that snakes through the soil, attaches itself to the host, and thrusts sucking tubes into its juicy tissues. Then life begins for the parasite; it quickly generates a network of roots and underground stems. Sometimes hundreds of witchweeds compete to strangle a single host plant...
After a month of underground parasitic life, the witchweed makes a partial reform, like a successful mobster who buys a legitimate business and joins the church. It sends a shoot above the ground, unfolds green leaves in the sunlight, and manufactures its food by photosynthesis like any respectable plant, while still getting its water and minerals from the host's roots. Soon its little red flowers bloom and its myriad dustlike seeds poison the soil around...
...under eaves or porches, in barns or garages; a hornet (Dolichovespula arenaria), which is distinguished from the typical yellow jacket by having an extra black plate between the eye and the lower jaw, and by building football-shaped nests well above ground; a yellow jacket (V. pennsylvanica), which nests underground or in crevices in rocks or walls; and the domestic honeybee (Apis mellifera...