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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."
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I believe that the first appearance of the sunflowers is in World of Ptavvs, but Niven's Ringworld has more details.
Here's a longer quote from Ringworld:
He landed and dismounted beside one of the
plants. The plant stood a foot high on a knobbly green
stalk. Its single blossom was as big as a large man's
face. The back of that blossom was stringy, as if laced
with veins or tendons; and the inner surface was a
smooth concave mirror. From its center protruded a
short stalk ending in a dark green bulb.
All the flowers in sight watched him. He was
bathed in the glare. Louis knew they were trying to
kill bun, and he looked up somewhat uneasily; but
the cloud cover held.
"You were right," he said, speaking into the
intercom. "They're Slaver sunflowers. If the cloud
cover hadn't come up, we'd have been dead the
instant we rose over the mountains..."
There was no alien
survivor anywhere in the domain of the sunflowers.
No smaller plant grew between the stalks. Nothing
flew. Nothing burrowed beneath the ashy-looking
soil. On the plants themselves there were no blights,
fungus growths, disease spots. If disease struck one of
their own, the sunflowers would destroy it.
The mirror-blossom was a terrible weapon. Its
primary purpose was to focus sunlight on the green
photosynthetic node at its center. But it could also
focus to destroy a plant-eating animal or insect. The
sunflowers burned all enemies. Everything that lives
is the enemy of a photosynthesis-using plant; and
everything that lived became fertilizer for the
sunflowers.
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