nd placed his spoon upon
it, then he answered me. But he answered me in a different voice, in the
measured voice of the businessman who had talked to me on the mystery phone.
     'This,' said Tupper, in the voice of the businessman, 'is not Tupper
Tyler speaking. This is Tupper speaking for the Flowers. What shall we talk
about?'
     'You're kidding me,' I said, but it wasn't that I really thought I was
being kidded. What I said I said almost instinctively, to gain a little
time.
     'I can assure you,' said the voice, 'that we are very much in earnest.
We are the Flowers and you want to talk with us and we want to talk with
you. This is the only way to do it.'
     Tupper wasn't looking at me; he didn't seem to be looking at anything
at all. His eyes had gone all bleak and vacant and he had an indrawn look.
He sat stiff and straight, with his hands dangling in his lap. He didn't
look human, any more; he looked like a telephone.
     'I've talked to you before,' I said.
     'Oh, yes,' said the Flowers, 'but only very briefly. You did not
believe in us.'
     'I have some questions that I want to ask.'
      'And we shall answer you. We'll do the best we can. We'll reply to you
as concisely as we know.'
     'What is this place?' I asked.
     'This is an alternate Earth,' said the Flowers. 'It's no more than a
clock-tick away from yours.'
     'An alternate Earth?'
     'Yes, there are many Earths. You did not know that, did you?'
     'No,' I said, 'I didn't.'
     'But you can believe it?'
     'With a little practice, maybe.'
     'There are billions of Earths,' the Flowers told me. 'We don't know how
many, but there are many billions of them. There may be no end to them.
There are some who think so.'
     'One behind the other?'
     'No. That's not the way to think of it. We don't know how to tell it.
It becomes confused in telling.'
     'So let's say there are a lot of Earths. It's a little hard to
understand. If there were a lot of Earths, we'd see them.'
     'You could not see them,' said the Flowers, 'unless you could see in
time. The alternate Earths exist in a time matrix...'
     'A time matrix? You mean...'
     'The simplest way to say it is that time divides the many Earths. Each
one is distinguished by its time-location. All that exists for you is the
present moment. You cannot see into the past or future...'
     'Then to get here I travelled into time.'
     'Yes,' said the Flowers. 'That is exactly what you did.' Tupper still
was sitting there with the blank look on his face, but I'd forgotten him. It
was his lips and tongue and larynx that formed the words I heard, but it was
not Tupper speaking. I knew that I was talking with the Flowers; that,
insane as it might seem, I was talking with the purpleness that flowed all
around the camp.
     'Your silence tells us,' said the Flowers, 'that you find it hard to
digest what we are telling you.'
     'I choke on it,' I told them.
     'Let's try to say it another way. Earth is a basic structure but it
progresses along the time path by a process of discontinuity.'
     'Thanks,' I said, 'for trying, but it doesn't help too much.'
     We have known it for a long time,' said the Flowers. 'We discovered it
many years ago. To us it is a natural law, but to you it's not. It'll take
you a little time. You cannot swallow at a single gulp what it took us
centuries to know.'
     'But I walked through time,' I said. 'That's what's hard to take. How
could I walk through time?'
     'You walked through a very thin spot.'
     'Thin spot?'
     'A place where time was not so thick.'
     'And you made this thin spot?'
     'Let's say that we exploited it.'
     'To try to reach our Earth?'
     'Please, sir,' said the Flowers, 'not that tone of horror. For some
years now, you people have been going into space.'
     'We've been trying to,' I said.
     'You're thinking of invasion. In that we are alike. You are trying to
invade space; we're trying to invade time.'
     'Let's just go back a ways,' I pleaded. 'There are boundaries between
these many Earths?'
     'That is right.'
      'Boundaries in time? The worlds are separated by time phases?'
     'That is indeed correct. You catch on very neatly.'
     'And you are trying to break through this time barrier so you can reach
my Earth?'
     'To reach your Earth,' they told me.
     'But why?'
     'To co-operate with you. To form a partnership. We need living space
and if you give us living space, we'll give our knowledge; we need
technology, for we have no hands, and with our knowledge you can shape new
technologies and those technologies can be used for the benefit of each of
us. We can go together into other worlds. Eventually a long chain of many
Earths will be linked together and the races in them linked, as well, in a
common aim and purpose.'
     A cold lump of lead blossomed in my guts, and despite the lump of lead
I felt that I was empty and there was a vile metallic taste that coated
tongue and mouth. A partnership, and who would be in charge? Living space,
and how much would they leave for us? Other worlds, and what would happen in
those other worlds?
     'You have a lot of knowledge?'
     'Very much,' they said. 'It is a thing we pay much attention to - the
absorption of all knowledge.'
     'And you're very busy collecting it from us. You are the people who are
hiring all the readers?'
     'It is so much more efficient,' they explained, 'than the way we used
to do it, with results indifferent at best. This way is more certain and a
great deal more selective.'
     'Ever since the time,' I said, 'that you got Gerald Sherwood to make
the telephones.'
     'The telephones,' they told me, 'provide direct communication. All we
had before was the tapping of the mind.'
     'You mean you had mental contact with people of our Earth?
     Perhaps for a good long time?'
     'Oh, yes,' they said, most cheerfully. 'With very many people, for
many, many years. But the sad part of it was that it was a one-way business.
We had contact with them, but by and large, they had none with us. Most of
them were not aware of us at all and others, who were more sensitive, were
aware of us only in a vague and fumbling way.'
     'But you picked those minds.'
     'Of course we did,' they said. 'But we had to content ourselves with
what was in the minds. We could not manage to direct them to specific areas
of interest.'
     'You tried nudging them, of course.'
     'There were some we nudged with fair success. There were others we
could nudge, but they moved in wrong directions.
     And there were many, most of them perhaps, who stubbornly remained
unaware of us, no matter what we did. It was discouraging.
     'You contact these minds through certain thin spots, I suppose. You
could not have done it through the normal boundaries.'
     'No, we had to make maximum usage of the thin spots that we found.'
     'It was, I gather, somewhat unsatisfactory.'
     'You are perceptive, sir. We were getting nowhere.'
     'Then you made a breakthrough.'
     'We are not quite sure we understand.'
     'You tried a new approach. You concentrated on actually sending
something physical through the boundary. A handful of seeds, perhaps.'
     'You are right, of course. You follow us so closely and you understand
so well. But even that would have failed if it had not been for your father.
Only a very few of the seeds germinated and the resultant plants would have
died out eventually if he'd not found them and taken care of them. You must
understand that is why we want you to act as our emissary...'
     'Now, just a minute there,' I told them. 'Before we get into that,
there are a few more points I want cleared up. The barrier, for instance,
that you've thrown around Millville.'
     'The barrier,' said the Flowers, 'is a rather simple thing. It is a
time bubble we managed to project outward from the thin spot in the boundary
that separates our worlds. That one slight area of space it occupies is out
of phase both with Millville and with the rest of your Earth. The smallest
imaginable fraction of a second in the past, running that fraction of a
second of time behind the time of Earth. So slight a fraction of a second,
perhaps, that it would be difficult, we should imagine, for the most
sophisticated of your instruments to take a measurement. A very little thing
and yet, we imagine you'll agree, it is quite effective.'
     'Yes,' I said, 'effective.'
     And, of course, it would be - by the very nature of it, it would be
strong beyond imagination. For it would represent the past, a filmy soap
bubble of the past encapsulating Millville, so slight a thing that it did
not interfere with either sight or sound, and yet was something no human
could hope to penetrate.
     'But sticks and stones,' I said. 'And raindrops...'
     'Only life,' they said. 'Life at a certain level of sentience, of
awareness of its surroundings, of feeling - how do you say it?'
     'You've said it well enough,' I told them. 'And the inanimate...'
     'There are many rules of time,' they told me, 'of the natural
phenomenon which you call time. That is a part, a small part, of the
knowledge we would share with you.'
     'Anything at all,' I said, 'in that direction would be new knowledge
for us. We have not studied time. We haven't even thought of it as a force
that we could study. We haven't made a start. A lot of metaphysical
mutterings, of course, but no real study of it. We have never found a place
where we could start a study of it.'
     'We know all that,' they said.
     And was there a note of triumph in the way they said it? I could not be
entirely sure.
     A new sort of weapon, I thought. A devilish sort of weapon. It wouldn't
kill you and it wouldn't hurt you! It would shove you along, herding you
along, out of the way, crowding you together, and there wouldn't be a thing
you could do about it.
     What, Nancy had asked, if it swept all life from Earth, leaving only
Millville? And that, perhaps, was possible, although it need not go that
far. If it was living space alone that the Flowers were looking for, then
they already had the instrument to get that living space. They could expand
the bubble, gaining all the space they needed, holding the human race at bay
while they settled down in that living space. The weapon was at once a
weapon to be used against the people of the Earth and a protection for the
Flowers against such reprisals as mankind might attempt.
     The way was open to them if they wanted Earth. For Tupper had travelled
the way that they must go and so had I and there was nothing now to stop
them. They could simply move into the Earth, shielded by that wall of time.
     'So,' I asked, 'what are you waiting for?'
     'You are, on certain points, so slow to reach an understanding of what
we intend,' they said. 'We do not plan invasion. We want co-operation. We
want to come as friends in perfect understanding.'
     'Well, that's fine,' I said. 'You are asking to be friends. First we
must know our friends. What sort of things are you?'
     'You are being rude,' they said.
     'I am not being rude. I want to know about you. You speak of yourselves
as plural, or perhaps collective.'
     'Collective,' they said. 'You probably would describe us as an
organism. Our root system is planet-wide and interconnected and you might
want to think of it as our nervous system. At regular intervals there are
great masses of our root material and these masses serve - we suppose you'd
call them brains. Many, many brains and all of them connected by a common
nervous system.'
     'But it's all wrong,' I protested. 'It goes against all reason. Plants
can't be intelligent. No plant could experience the survival pressure or the
motivation to achieve intelligence.'
     'Your reasoning,' they told me calmly, 'is beyond reproach.'
     'So it is beyond reproach,' I said. 'Yet I am talking with you.' 'You
have an animal on your Earth that you call a dog.' 'That is right. An animal
of great intelligence.' 'Adopted by you humans as a pet and a companion. An
animal that has associated with you people since before the dawning of your
history. And, perhaps, the more intelligent because of that association. An
animal that is capable of a great degree of training.'
     'What has the dog to do with it?' I asked.
     'Consider,' they said. 'If the humans of your Earth had devoted all
their energies, through all their history, to the training of the dog, what
might have been achieved?'
     'Why, I don't know,' I said. 'Perhaps, by now, we'd have a dog that
might be our equal in intelligence. Perhaps not intelligent in the same
manner that we're intelligent, but...'
     'There once was another race,' the Flowers told me, 'that did that very
thing with us. It all began more than a billion years ago.'
     'This other race deliberately made a plant intelligent?'
     'There was a reason for it. They were a different kind of life than
you. They developed us for one specific purpose. They needed a system of
some sort that would keep the data they had collected continually correlated
and classified and ready for their use.'
     'They could have kept their records. They could have written it all
down.'
     'There were certain physical restrictions and, perhaps more important,
certain mental blocks.'
     'You mean they couldn't write.'
     'They never thought of writing. It was an idea that did not occur to
them. Not even speech, the way you speak. And even if they had had speech or
writing, it would not have done the job they wanted.'
     'The classification and the correlation?'
     'That is part of it, of course. But how much ancient human knowledge,
written down and committed to what seemed at that time to be safe keeping,
is still alive today?'
     'Not much of it. It has been lost or destroyed. Time has washed it
out.'
     'We still hold the knowledge of that other race,' they said. 'We proved
better than the written record - although this other race, of course, did
not consider written records.'
     'This other race,' I said. 'The knowledge of this other race and how
many other races?'
     They did not answer me. 'If we had the time,' they said, 'we'd explain
it all to you. There are many factors and considerations you'd find
incomprehensible. Believe us when we say that the decision of this other
race, to develop us into a data storage system, was the most reasonable and
workable of the many alternatives they had under study'
     'But the time it took,' I said, dismayed 'My God, how much time would
it take to make a plant intelligent! And how could they even start? What do
you do to make a plant intelligent?'
     'Time,' they said, 'was no great consideration. It wasn't any problem.
They knew how to deal with time. They could handle time as you can handle
matter. And that was a part of it. They compressed many centuries of our
lives into seconds of their own. They had all the time they needed. They
made the time they needed.'
     'They made time?'
     'Certainly. Is that so hard to understand?'
     'For me, it is,' I told them. 'Time is a river. It flows on and on.
There is nothing you can do about it.'
     'It is nothing like a river,' said the Flowers, 'and it doesn't flow,
and there's much that can be done with it. And, furthermore, we ignore the
insult that you offer us.'
     'The insult?'
     'Your feeling that it would be so difficult for a plant to acquire
intelligence.'
     'No insult was intended. I was thinking of the plants of Earth. I can't
imagine a dandelion...'
     'A dandelion?'
     'A very common plant.'
     'You may be right,' they said. 'We may have been different, originally,
than the plants of Earth.'
     'You remember nothing of it all, of course.'
     'You mean ancestral memory?'
     'I suppose that's what I mean.'
     'It was so long ago,' they said. 'We have the record of it. Not a myth,
you understand, not a legend. But the actual record of how we became
intelligent.'
     'Which,' I said, 'is far more than the human race has got.'
     'And now,' said the Flowers, 'we must say goodbye. Our enunciator is
becoming quite fatigued and we must not abuse his strength, for he has
served us long and faithfully and we have affection for him. We will talk
with you again.'
     'Whew!' said Tupper.
     He wiped the slobber off his chin.
     'That's the longest,' he said, 'I have ever talked for them. What did
you talk about?'
     'You mean you don't know?'
     'Of course I don't,' snapped Tupper. 'I never listen in.'
     He was human once again. His eyes had returned to normal and his face
had become unstuck.
     'But the readers,' I said. 'They read longer than we talked.'
     'I don't have nothing to do with the reading that is done,' said
Tupper. 'That ain't two-way talk. That's all mental contact stuff.'
     'But the phones,' I said.
     'The phones are just to tell them the things they should read.'
     'Don't they read into the phones?'
     'Sure they do,' said Tupper. 'I hat's so they'll read aloud. It's
easier for the Flowers to pick it up if they read aloud. It's sharper in the
reader's brain or something.'
     He got up slowly.
     'Going to take a nap,' he said.
     He headed for the hut.
     Halfway there, he stopped and turned back to face me. 'I forgot,' he
said. 'Thanks for the pants and shirt.'

        12

     My hunch had been correct. Tupper was a key, or at least one of the
keys, to what was happening. And the place to look for clues, crazy as it
had sounded, had been the patch of flowers in the garden down below the
greenhouse.
     For the flower patch had led, not alone to Tupper, but to all the rest
of it - to that second self that had helped out Gerald Sherwood, to the
phone set-up and the reader service, to the ones who employed Stiffy Grant
and probably to the backers of that weird project down in Mississippi. And
to how many other projects and endeavours I had no idea.
      It was not only now, I knew, that this was happening, but it had been
happening for years. For many years, they'd told me, the Flowers had been in
contact with many minds of Earth, had been stealing the ideas and the
attitudes and knowledge which had existed in those minds, and even in those
instances in which the minds were unaware of the prowlers in them, had
persisted in the nudging of those minds, as they had nudged the mind of
Sherwood.
     For many years, they'd said, and I had not thought to ask them for a
better estimate. For several centuries, perhaps, and that seemed entirely
likely, for when they spoke of the lifetime of their intelligence they spoke
of a billion years.
     For several hundred years, perhaps, and could those centuries, I
wondered, have dated from the Renaissance? Was it possible, I asked myself,
that the credit for the flowering of man's culture, that the reason for his
advancement might be due, at least in part, to the nudging of the Flowers?
Not, of course, that they themselves would have placed their imprint upon
the ways of man, but theirs could have been the nagging force which had
driven man to much of his achievement.
     In the case of Gerald Sherwood, the busybody nudging had resulted in
constructive action. Was it too much to think, I wondered, that in many
other instances the result had been the same - although perhaps not as
pronounced as it had been in Sherwood's case? For Sherwood had recognized
the otherness that had come to live with him and had learned that it was to
his benefit to co-operate. In many other cases there would not have been
awareness, but even with no awareness, the drive and urge were there and, in
part, there would have been response.
     In those hundreds of years, the Flowers must have learned a great deal
of humanity and have squirrelled away much human knowledge. For that had
been their original purpose, to serve as knowledge storage units. During the
last several years man's knowledge had flowed to them in a steady stream,
with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of readers busily engaged in pouring down
their mental gullets the accumulated literary efforts of all of humankind.
     I got off the ground where I was sitting and found that I was stiff and
cramped. I stretched and slowly turned and there, on every side, reaching to
the near horizons of the ridges that paralleled the river, swept the purple
tide.
      It could not be right, I told myself. I could not have talked with
flowers. For of all the things on Earth, plants were the one thing that
could never talk.
     And yet this was not the Earth. This was another Earth - only one,
they'd said, of many billion earths.
     Could one measure, I asked myself, one earth by another? And the answer
seemed to be one couldn't. The terrain appeared to be almost identical with
the terrain I had known back on my own Earth, and the terrain itself might
remain the same for all those multi-billion earths. For what was it they had
said - that earth was a basic structure?
     But when one considered life and evolution, then all the bets were off.
For even if the life of my own Earth and this other Earth on which I stood
had started out identically (and they might well have started out
identically) there still would be, along the way, millions of little
deviations, no one of which perhaps, by itself, would be significant, but
the cumulative effects of all these deviations eventually would result in a
life and culture that would bear no resemblance to any other Earth.
     Tupper had begun to snore - great wet, slobbering snores, the very kind
of snores that one might guess he'd make. He was lying on his back inside
the hut, on a bed of leaves, but the hut was so small that his feet stuck
out the doorway. They rested on his calloused heels and his spraddled toes
pointed at the sky and they had a raw and vulgar look about them.
     I picked up the plates and spoons from where they rested on the ground
and tucked the bowl in which Tupper had cooked our meal underneath my arm. I
found the trail that led down to the water's edge and followed it. Tupper
had cooked the food; the least I could do, I told myself; was to wash the
dishes.
     I squatted by the river's edge and washed the awkward plates and pot,
sluiced off the spoons and rubbed them clean between my fingers. I was
careful with the plates, for I had the feeling they'd not survive much
wetting. On both of them and on the pot there still were the marks of
Tupper's great splayed fingers, where he had pressed them into shape.
     For ten years he had lived and been happy here, happy with the purple
flowers that had become his friends, secure at last from the unkindness and
the cruelty of the world into which he was born. The world that had been
unkind and cruel because he had been different, but which was capable of
unkindness and of cruelty even when there was no difference.
     To Tupper, I knew, this must seem a fairyland, for real. Here was the
beauty and the simplicity to which his simple soul responded. Here he could
live the uncomplicated and undisturbed sort of life for which he'd always
yearned, perhaps not knowing that he yearned for it.
     I set the plates and pot on the river bank and stooped above the water,
scooping it up in my two hands, clasped together, drinking it. It had a
smooth, clean taste and despite the heat of the summer sun, it had a touch
of coldness.
     As I straightened up, I heard the faint sound of crinkling paper and,
with a sinking heart, suddenly remembered. I put my hand into my inside
jacket pocket and pulled out the long, white envelope. I flipped back the
flap and there was the sheaf of money, the fifteen hundred dollars that
Sherwood had put on the desk for me.
     I squatted there, with the envelope in my hand and I thought what a
damn fool thing to do. I had meant to hide it somewhere in the house, since
I intended leaving on the fishing trip with Alf before the bank had opened,
and then, in the rush of events, had forgotten it. How in the world, I
wondered, could one forget fifteen hundred dollars!
     With a cold sweat breaking out on me, I ran through my mind all the
things that could have happened to that envelope. Except for plain fool
luck, I'd have lost it a dozen times or more. And yet, aghast as I might be
that I should so utterly forget such a handsome sum of cash, as I sat there
and looked at it, it seemed to have lost some of its significance.
     Perhaps it was, I thought, a condition of Tupper's fairyland that I
should not think so highly of it as I had at one time. Although I knew that
if it were possible to get back into my world again it would assume its old
importance. But here, for this little moment, a crude piece of pottery made
out of river day was an important thing, a hut made out of sticks and a bed
made out of leaves. And more important than all the money in the world, the
necessity to keep a little campfire burning once the matches were gone.
     Although, I told myself, this was not my world. This was Tupper's
world, his soft, short-sighted world - and tied in with it was his utter
failure to grasp the overwhelming implications of this world of his.
     For this was the day about which there had been speculation - although
far too little speculation and too little done about it because it seemed so
distant and so improbable. This was the day that the human race had come
into contact (or perhaps, collision) with an alien race.
     All the speculation, of course, had concerned an alien out of space, an
alien on, or from, some other world in space. But here was the alien, not
out of space, but time or at least from behind a barrier in time.
     It made no difference, I told myseIf. Out of either space or time, the
involvement was the same. Man at this moment finally faced his greatest
test, and one he could not fail.
     I gathered up the pottery and went back up the trail again.
     Tupper was still sleeping, but no longer snoring. He had not changed
position and his toes still pointed at the sky.
     The sun had moved far down the west, but the heat still held and there
was no hint of breeze. The purple of the flowers lay unstirring on the
hillsides.
     I stood and looked at them and they were innocent and pretty and they
held no promise and no threat. They were just a field of flowers, like a
field of daisies or of daffodils. They were the sort of thing that we had
taken for granted all our years on earth. They had no personality and they
stood for nothing except a splotch of colour that was pleasing to the eye.
     That was the hard thing about all this, I thought - the utter
impossibility of thinking of the Flowers as anything but flowers. It was
impossible to think of them as beings, as anything that had even a symbol of
importance. One could not take them seriously and yet they must be taken
seriously, for in their right they were as intelligent, perhaps more
intelligent than the human race.
     I put the dishes down beside the fire and slowly climbed the hill. My
moving feet brushed the flowers aside and I crushed some of them, but there
was no chance of walking without crushing some of them.
     I'd have to talk to them again, I told myself. As soon as Tupper could
get rested, I'd talk to them again. There were a lot of things that must be
clarified, much to be explained. If the Flowers and the human race were to
live together, there must be understanding. I ran through the conversation
I'd had with them, trying to find the gentle threat that I knew was there.
But from what I could remember, there had been no threat.
     I reached the top of the hill and stopped there, gazing out across the
undulating purple swales. At the bottom of the slope, a small creek ran
between the hills to reach the river. From where I was I could hear the
silver babble of it as it ran across the stones.
     Slowly I made my way down the hill toward it and as I moved down the
slope I saw the mound that lay across the creek, at the foot of the opposite
slope. I had not seen it before and I supposed that my failure to see it was
because it had been masked by the slant of light across the land.
     There was nothing special about it except that it appeared slightly out
of character. Here, in this place of flowing swales, it stood by itself,
like a hump-backed monstrosity left over from another time.
     I came down to the creek and waded across a shallow place where the
water ran no deeper than three inches over a shining gravel bar.
     At the water's edge a large block of stone lay half-buried in the sharp
rise of the bank. It offered a ready seat and I sat down upon it, looking
down the stream. The sun glanced off the water, making diamonds out of every
ripple, and the air was sprayed with the silver tinkle of the singing brook.
     There was no creek here in the world where Millville lay, although
there was a dry run in Jack Dickson's pasture, through which the swamp that
lay back of Stiffy's shack sometimes drained. Perhaps there had been such a
creek as this, I thought, in Millville's world before the farmer's plough
and resultant erosion had reshaped the terrain.
     I sat entranced by the flashing diamonds of the water and the tinkle of
the stream. It seemed that a man could sit there forever, warm in the last
rays of the sun and guarded by the hills.
     I had put my hands on either side of me and had been idly rubbing them
back and forth across the surface of the stone on which I sat. My hands must
have told me almost instantly that there was something strange about the
surface, but I was so engrossed with the sensations of sun and water that it
took some minutes before the strangeness broke its way into my
consciousness.
     When it did, I still remained sitting there, still rubbing the surface
of the stone with the tips of my fingers, but not looking at it, making sure
that I had not been wrong, that the stone had the feel of artificial
shaping.
     When I got up and examined the block, there was no doubt of it. The
stone had been squared into a block and there were places where the chisel
marks could still be seen upon it. Around one corner of it still clung a
brittle substance that could be nothing else than some sort of mortar in
which the block had once been set.
     I straightened up from my examination and stepped away, back into the
stream, with the water tugging at my ankles.
     Not a simple boulder, but a block of stone! A block of stone bearing
chisel marks and with a bit of mortar still sticking to one edge.
     The Flowers, then, were not the only ones upon this planet. There were
others - or there had been others. Creatures that knew the use of stone and
had the tools to chip the stone into convenient form and size.
      My eyes travelled from the block of stone up the mound that stood at
the water's edge, and there were other blocks of stone protruding from its
face. Standing frozen, with the glint of water and the silver song
forgotten, I traced out the blocks and could see that once upon a time they
had formed a wall.
     This mound, then, was no vagary of nature. It was the evidence of a
work that at one time had been erected by beings that knew the use of tools.
     I left the stream and clambered up the mound. None of the stones was
large, none was ornamented; there were just the chisel marks and here and
there the bits of mortar that had lain between the blocks. Perhaps, a
building had stood here at one time. Or it may have been a wall. Or a
monument.
     I started down the mound, choosing a path a short way downstream from
where I had crossed the creek, working my way along slowly and carefully,
for the slope was steep, using my hands as brakes to keep myself from
sliding or from fal1ing.
     And it was then, hugged close against the slope, that I found the piece
of bone. It had weathered out of the ground, perhaps not too long ago, and
it lay hidden there among the purple flowers. Under ordinary circumstances,
I probably would have missed it. I could not see it well at first, just the
dull whiteness of it lying on the ground. I had slid past it before I saw it
and crawled back to pick it up.
     The surface of it powdered slightly at the pressure of my fingers, but
it did not break. It was slightly curved and white, a ghostly, chalky white.
Turning it over in my hand, I made out that it was a rib bone and the shape
and size of it was such that it could be human, although my knowledge was
too slight to be absolutely sure. If it were really humanoid, I told myself,
then it meant that at one time a thing like man had lived here. And could it
mean that something very similar to the human race still resided here?
     A planet full of flowers with nothing living on it except the purple
flowers, and more lately Tupper Tyler. That was what I'd thought when I had
seen the flowers spreading to the far horizons, but it had been supposition
only. It was a conclusion I had jumped to without too much evidence.
Although it was in part supported by the seeming fact that nothing else
existed in this particular place - no birds, no insects or animals, not a
thing at all, except perhaps some bacteria and viruses and even these, I
thought, might be essential to the well-being of the Flowers.
     Although the outer surface of the bone had chalked off when I picked it
up, it seemed sound in structure. Not too long ago, I knew, it had been a
part of a living thing. Its age probably would depend to a large extent upon
the composition and the moistness of the soil and probably many other
factors. It was a problem for an expert and I was no expert.
     Now I saw something else, a little spot of whiteness just to the right
of me. It could have been a white stone lying on the ground, but even as I
looked at it I didn't think it was. It had that same chalky whiteness of the
rib I had picked up.
     I moved over to it and as I bent above it I could see it was no stone.
I let the rib drop from my fingers and began to dig.
     The soil was loose and sandy and although I had no tools, my fingers
served the purpose.
     As I dug, the bone began to reveal its shape and in a moment I knew it
was a skull - and only a little later that it was a human skull.
     I dug it loose and lifted it and while I might have failed to identify
the rib, there was no mistaking this.
     I hunkered on the slope and felt pity well inside of me, pity for this
creature that once had lived and died - and a growing fear, as well.
     For by the evidence of the skull I held within my hands, I knew for a
certainty that this was not the home world of the Flowers. This was - this
must be a world that they had conquered, or at least had taken over. They
might, indeed, I thought, be very far in time from that old home where
another race (by their description of it, a non-human race) had trained them
to intelligence.
     How far back, I wondered, lay the homeland of the Flowers? How many
conquered earths lay between this world and the one where they had risen?
How many other earths lay empty, swept clean of any life that might compete
with the Flowers?
     And that other race, the race that had raised and elevated them above
their vegetable existence where was that old race today?
     I put the skull back into the hole from which I'd taken it. Carefully,
I brushed back the sand and dirt until it was covered once again, this time
entirely covered, with no part of it showing. I would have liked to take it
back to camp with me so I could have a better look at it. But I knew I
couldn't, for Tupper must not know what I had found. His mind was an open
book to his friends the Flowers, and I was sure mine wasn't, for they had
had to use the telephone to get in touch with me. So long as I told Tupper
nothing, the Flowers would never know that I had found the skull. There was
the possibility, of course, that they already knew, that they had the sense
of sight, or perhaps some other sense that was as good as sight. But I
doubted that they had; there was so far no evidence they had. The best bet
was that they were mental symbionts, that they had no awareness beyond the
awareness they shared with minds in other kinds of life.
     I worked my way around and down the mound and along the way I found
other blocks of stone. It was becoming evident to me that at some other time
a building had stood upon this site. A city, I wondered, or a town? Although
whatever form it might have taken, it had been a dwelling place.
     I reached the creek at the far end of the mound, where it ran close
against the cutbank it had chewed out of the mound, and started wading back
to the place where I had crossed.
     The sun had set and with it had gone the diamond sparkle of the water.
The creek ran dark and tawny in the shadow of the first twilight.
     Teeth grinned at me out of the blackness of the bank that rose above
the stream, and I stopped dead, staring at that row of snaggled teeth and
the whiteness of the bone that arched above them. The water, tugging at my
ankles, growled a little at me and I shivered in the chill that swept down
from the darkening hills.
     For, staring at that second skull, grinning at me out of the darkness
of the soil that stood poised above the water, I knew that the human race
faced the greatest danger it had ever known. Except for man himself, there
had been, up to this moment, no threat against the continuity of humanity.
But here, finally, that threat lay before my eyes.

        13

     I sighted the small glowing of the fire before I reached the camp. When
I stumbled down the hillside, I could see that Tupper had finished with his
nap and was cooking supper.
     'Out for a walk?' he asked.
     'Just a look around,' I said. 'There isn't much to see.'
     'The Flowers is all,' said Tupper.
     He wiped his chin and counted the fingers on one hand, then counted
them again to be sure he'd made no mistake.
     'Tupper?'
     'What is it, Brad?'
     'Is it all like this? All over this Earth, I mean? Nothing but the
Flowers?'
     'There are others come sometimes.'
     'Others?'
     'From other worlds,' he said. 'But they go away.'
     'What kind of others?'
     'Fun people. Looking for some fun.' 'What kind of fun?'
     'I don't know,' he said. 'Just fun, is all.'
     He was surly and evasive.
     'But other than that,' I said, 'there's nothing but the Flowers?'
     'That's all,' he said.
     'But you haven't seen it all.'
     'They tell me,' Tupper said. 'And they wouldn't lie. They aren't like
people back in Millville. They don't need to lie.'
     He used two sticks to move the earthen pot off the hot part of the
fire.
     'Tomatoes,' he said. 'I hope you like tomatoes.'
     I nodded that I did and he squatted down beside the fire to watch the
supper better.
     'They don't tell nothing but the truth,' be said, going back to the
question I had asked. 'They couldn't tell nothing but the truth. That's the
way they're made. They got all this truth wrapped up in them and that's what
they live by. And they don't need to tell nothing but the truth. It's afraid
of being hurt that makes people lie and there is nothing that can hurt
them.'
     He lifted his face to stare at me, daring me to disagree with him.
     'I didn't say they lied,' I told him. 'I never for a moment questioned
anything they said. By this truth they're wrapped up in, you mean their
knowledge, don't you?'
     'I guess that's what I mean. They know a lot of things no one back in
Millville knows.'
     I let it go at that. Millville was Tupper's former world. By saying
Millville, he meant the human world.
     Tupper was off on his finger-counting routine once again. I watched him
as he squatted there, so happy and content, in a world where he had nothing,
but was happy and content.
     I wondered once again at his strange ability to communicate with the
Flowers, to know them so well and so intimately that he could speak for
them. Was it possible, I asked myself, that this slobbering, finger-counting
village idiot possessed some sensory perception that the common run of
mankind did not have? That this extra ability of his might be a form of
compensation, to make up in some measure for what he did not have?
     After all, I reminded myself, man was singularly limited in his
perception, not knowing what he lacked, not missing what he lacked by the
very virtue of not being able to imagine himself as anything other than he
was. It was entirely possible that Tupper, by some strange quirk of genetic
combination, might have abilities that no other human had, all unaware that
he was gifted in any special way, never guessing that other men might lack
what seemed entirely normal to himself. And could these extra-human
abilities match certain un-guessed abilities that lay within the Flowers
themselves?
     The voice on the telephone, in mentioning the diplomatic job, had said
that I came highly recommended. And was it this man across the fire who had
recommended me? I wanted very much to ask him, but I didn't dare.
     'Meow,' said Tupper. 'Meow, meow, meow.'
     I'll say this much for him. He sounded like a cat. He could sound like
anything at all. He was always making funny noises, practising his mimicry
until he had it pat.
     I paid no attention to him. He had pulled himself back into his private
world and the chances were he'd forgotten I was there.
     The pot upon the fire was steaming and the smell of cooking stole upon
the evening air. Just above the eastern horizon the first star came into
being and once again I was conscious of the little silences, so deep they
made me dizzy when I tried to listen to them, that fell into the chinks
between the crackling of the coals and the sounds that Tupper made.
     It was a land of silence, a great eternal globe of silence, broken only
by the water and the wind and the little feeble noises that came from
intruders like Tupper and myself. Although, by now, Tupper might be no
intruder.
     I sat alone, for the man across the fire had withdrawn himself from me,
from everything around him, retreating into a room he had fashioned for
himself; a place that was his alone, locked behind a door that could be
opened by no one but himself, for there was no other who had a key to it or,
indeed, any idea as to what kind of key was needed.
     Alone and in the silence, I sensed the purpleness - the formless,
subtle personality of the things that owned this planet. There was a
friendliness, I thought, but a repulsive friendliness, the fawning
friendliness of some monstrous beast. And I was afraid.
     Such a silly thing, I thought. To be afraid of flowers.
     Tupper's cat was lone and lost. It prowled the dark and dripping woods
of some other ogre-land and it mewed softly to itself; sobbing as it padded
on and on, along a confusing world-line of uncertainties.
     The fear had moved away a little beyond the circle of the firelight.
But the purpleness still was there, hunched upon the hilltop.
     An enemy, I wondered. Or just something strange?
     If it were an enemy, it would be a terrible enemy, implacable and
efficient.
     For the plant world was the sole source of energy by which the anima1
world was able to survive.
     Only plants could trap and convert and store the vital stuff of life.
It was only by making use of the energy provided by the vegetable world that
the animal kingdom could exist. Plants, by wilfully becoming dormant or by
making themselves somehow inedible, could doom all other life.
     And the Flowers were versatile, in a very nasty way. They could, as
witness Tupper's garden and the trees that grew to supply him wood, be any
kind of plant at all. They could be tree or grass, vine or bush or grain.
They could not only masquerade as another plant, they could become that
plant.
     Suppose they were allowed into the human Earth and should offer to
replace the native trees for a better tree, or perhaps the same old trees we
had always known, only that they would grow faster and straighter and
taller, for better shade or lumber. Or to replace wheat for a better wheat,
with a higher yield and a fuller kernel, and a wheat that was resistant to
drought and other causes that made a wheat crop fail. Suppose they made a
deal to become all vegetables, all grass, all grain, all trees, replacing
the native plants of Earth, giving men more food per acre, more lumber per
tree, an improved productivity in everything that grew.
     There would be no hunger in the world, no shortages of any kind at all,
for the Flowers could adapt themselves to every human need.
     And once man had come to rely upon them, once he had his entire economy
based upon them, and his very life staked upon their carrying out their
bargain, then they would have man at their mercy. Overnight they could cease
being wheat and corn and grass; they could rob the entire Earth of its food
supply. Or they might turn poisonous and thus kill more quickly and more
mercifully. Or, if by that time, they had come to hate man sufficiently,
they could develop certain types of pollen to which all Earthly life would
be so allergic that death, when it came, would be a welcome thing.
     Or let us say, I thought, playing with the thought, that man did not
let them in, but they came in all the same, that man made no bargain with
them, but they became the wheat and grass and all the other plants of Earth
surreptitiously, killing off the native plants of Earth and replacing them
with an identical plant life, in all its variations. In such a case, I
thought, the result could be the same.
     If we let them in, or if we didn't let them in (but couldn't keep them
out), we were in their hands. They might kill us, or they might not kill us,
but even if they didn't kill us, there'd still remain the fact they could at
any time they wished.
     But if the Flowers were bent on infiltrating Earth, if they planned to
conquer Earth by wiping out all life, then why had they contacted me? They
could have infiltrated without us knowing it. It would have taken longer,
but the road was clear. There was nothing that would stop them, for we would
not know. If certain purple flowers should begin escaping Millville gardens,
spreading year by year, in fence corners and in ditches, in the little
out-of-the-way places of the land, no one would pay attention to them. Year
by year the flowers could have crept out and out and in a hundred years have
been so well established that nothing could deny them.
     And there was another thought that, underneath my thinking and my
speculation, had kept hammering at me, pleading to be heard. And now I let
it in: even if we could, should we keep them out? Even in the face of
potential danger, should we bar the way to them? For here was an alien life,
the first alien life we'd met. Here was the chance for the human race, if it
would take the chance, to gain new knowledge, to find new attitudes, to fill
in the gaps of knowing and to span the bridge of thought, to understand a
non-human viewpoint, to sample new emotion, to face new motivation, to
investigate new logic. Was this something we could shy away from? Could we
afford to fail to meet this first alien life halfway and work out the
differences that might exist between the two of us? For if we failed here,
the first time, then we'd fail the second time, and perhaps forever.
     Tupper made a noise like a ringing telephone and I wondered how a
telephone had gotten in there with that lone, lost cat of his. Perhaps, I
thought, the cat had found a telephone, maybe in a booth out in the dark and
dripping woods, and would find out where it was and how it might get home.
     The telephone rang again and there was a little wait. Then Tupper said
to me, most impatiently, 'Go ahead and talk. This call is for you.'
     'What's that?' I asked, astonished.
     'Say hello,' said Tupper. 'Go ahead and answer.'
     'All right,' I said, just to humour him. 'Hello.'
     His voice changed to Nancy's voice, so perfect an imitation that I felt
the presence of her.
     'Brad !' she cried. 'Brad, where are you?'
     Her voice was high and gasping, almost hysterical.
     'Where are you, Brad?' she asked. 'Where did you disappear to?'
     'I don't know,' I said, 'that I can explain. You see...'
     'I've looked everywhere,' she said, in a rush of words. 'We've looked
everywhere. The whole town was looking for you. And then I remembered the
phone in Father's study, the one without a dial, you know. I knew that it
was there, but I'd never paid attention to it. I thought it was a model of
some sort, or maybe just a decoration for the desk or a gag of some sort.
But there was a lot of talk about the phones in Stiffy's shack, and Ed Adler
told me about the phone that was in your office. And it finally dawned on me
that maybe this phone that Father had was the same as those other phones.
But it took an awful long time for it to dawn on me. So I went into his
study and I saw the phone and I just stood and looked at it - because I was
scared, you see. I was afraid of it and I was afraid to use it because of
what I might find out. But I screwed my courage up and I lifted the receiver
and there was an open line and I asked for you. I knew it was a crazy thing
to do, but. . . What did you say, Brad?'
     'I said I don't know if I can explain exactly where I am. I know where
I am, of course, but I can't explain it so I'll be believed.'
     'Tell me. Don't you fool around. Just tell me where you are.'
     'I'm in another world. I walked out of the garden...' 'You walked
where!'
     'I was just walking in the garden, following Tupper's tracks and...'
     'Whatkind of track is that?'
     'Tupper Tyler,' I said. 'I guess I forgot to tell you that he had come
back.'
     'But he couldn't,' she told me. 'I remember him. That was ten years
ago.'
     'He did come back,' I said. 'He came back this morning. And then he
left again. I was following his tracks...'
     'You told me,' she said. 'You were following him and you wound up in
another world. Where is this other world?'
     She was like any other woman. She asked the damndest questions.
     'I don't know exactly, except that it's in time. Perhaps only a second
away in time.'
     'Can you get back?'
     'I'm going to try,' I said. 'I don't know if I can.'
     'Is there anything I can do to help - that the town can do to help?'
     'Listen, Nancy, this isn't getting us anywhere. Tell me, where is your
father?'
     'He's down at your place. There are a lot of people there. Hoping that
you will come back.'
     'Waiting for me?'
     Well, yes. You see, they looked everywhere and they know you aren't in
the village, and there are a lot of them convinced that you know all about
this...'
     'About the barrier, you mean.'
     'Yes, that's what I mean.' 'And they are pretty sore? 'Some of them,'
she said. 'Listen, Nancy...'
     'Don't say that again. I am listening.' 'Can you go down and see your
father?' 'Of course I can,' she said.
     'All right. Go down and tell him that when I can get back - if I can
get back - I'll need to talk with someone. Someone in authority. Someone
high in authority. The President, perhaps, or someone who's close to the
President. Maybe someone from the United Nations...'
     'But, Brad, you can't ask to see the President!' 'Maybe not,' I said.
'But as high as I can get. I have something our government has to know. Not
only ours, but all the governments. Your father must know someone he can
talk to. Tell him I'm not fooling. Tell him it's important.' 'Brad,' she
said. 'Brad, you're sure you 'aren't kidding? Because if you are, this could
be an awful mess.' 'Cross my heart,' I said. 'I mean it, Nancy, it's exactly
as I've said. I'm in another world, an alternate world...' 'Is it a nice
world, Brad?'
     'It's nice enough,' I said. 'There's nothing here but flowers.'
     'What kind of flowers?'
     'Purple flowers. My father's flowers. The same kind that are back in
Millville. The flowers are people, Nancy. They're the ones that put up the
barrier.'
     'But flowers can't be people, Brad.'
     Like I was a kid. Like she had to humour me. Asking me if it was a nice
world and telling me that flowers never could be people. All sweet
reasonableness.
     I held in my anger and my desperation.
     'I know they can't,' I said. 'But just the same as people. They are
intelligent and they can communicate.'
     'You have talked with them?'
     'Tupper talks for them. He's their interpreter.' 'But Tupper was a
drip.'
     'Not back here he isn't. He's got things we haven't.' 'What kind of
things? Brad, you have to be...' 'You will tell your father?'
     'Right away,' she said. 'I'll go down to your place...' 'And, Nancy...'
     'Yes.'
     'Maybe it would be just as well if you didn't tell where I am or how
you got in touch. I imagine the village is pretty well upset.'
     'They are wild,' said Nancy.
     'Tell your father anything you want. Tell him everything. But not the
rest of them. He'll know what to tell them. There's no use in giving the
village something more to talk about.'
     'All right,' she said. 'Take care of yourself. Come back safe and
sound.'
     'Sure,' I said.
     'You can get back?'
     'I think I can. I hope I can.'
     'I'll tell Father what you said. Exactly what you said. He'll get busy
on it.'
     'Nancy. Don't worry. It'll be all right.'
     'Of course I won't. I'll be seeing you.'
     'So long, Nancy. Thanks for calling.'
     'I said to Tupper, 'Thank you, telephone.'
     He lifted a hand and stretched out a finger at me, stroking it with the
finger of the other hand, making the sign for shame.
     'Brad has got a girl,' he chanted in a sing-song voice. 'Brad has got a
girl.'
     'I thought you never listened in,' I said, just a little nettled. 'Brad
has got a girl! Brad has got a girl! Brad has got a girl!' He was getting
excited about it and the slobber was flying all about his face.
     'Cut it out,' I yelled at him. 'If you don't cut it out, I'll break
your God damn neck.'
     He knew I wasn't fooling, so he cut it out.

        14

     I woke in a blue and silver night and wondered, even as I woke, what
had wakened me. I was lying on my back and above me the sky was glimmering
with stars. I was not confused. I knew where I was. There was no blind
groping back to an old reality. I heard the faint chuckling of the river as
it ran between its banks and I smelled the wood smoke that drifted from the
campfire.
     Something had awakened me. I lay still, for it seemed important that
whatever had wakened me, if it were close at hand, should not know that I
was awake. There was a sense of fear, or perhaps of expectation. But if it
were a sense of fear, it was neither deep nor sharp.
     Slowly I twisted my head a bit and when I did I could see the moon,
bright and seeming very near, swimming just above the line of scrubby trees
that grew on the river bank.
     1 was lying flat upon the ground, with nothing under me but the
hard-packed earth. Tupper had crawled into his hut to sleep, curling up so
his feet did not stick out. And if he were still there and sleeping, he was
very quiet about it, for I heard no sound from him.
     Having turned my head, I lay quietly for a time, listening for a sound
to tell me that something prowled the camp. But there was no sound and
finally I sat up.
     The slope of ground above the camp, silvered by the floodlight of the
moon, ran up to touch the night-blue sky - a balanced piece of beauty
hanging in the silence, so fragile that one was careful not to speak nor to
make any sudden motion, for fear that one might break that beauty and that
silence and bring it down, sky and slope together, in a shower of shards.
     Carefully I got to my feet, standing in the midst of that fragile
world, still wondering what had wakened me.
     But there was nothing. The land and sky were poised, as if they stood
on tiptoe in a single instant of retarded time. Here, it seemed, was the
present frozen, with no past or future, a place where no clock would ever
tick nor any word be spoken.
     Then something moved upon the hilltop, a man or a manlike thing,
running on the ridge crest, black against the sky, lithe and tall and
graceful, running with abandon.
     I was running, too. Without reason, without purpose, simply running up
the slope. Simply knowing there was a man or a man1ike thing up there and
that I must stand face to face with it, hoping, perhaps, that in this land
of emptiness and flowers, in this land of silence and of fragile beauty, it
might make some sense, might lend to this strange dimension of space and
time some sort of perspective that I could understand.
     The manlike thing was still running on the hilltop and I tried to shout
to it, but my throat would make no sound and so I kept on running.
     The figure must have seen me, for suddenly it stopped and swung around
to face me and stood there on the hilltop, looking down at me. And now I saw
that while it undoubtedly was of human form, it had a crest of some sort
above its head, giving it a birdlike look as if the head of a cockatoo had
been grafted on a human body.
     I ran, panting, toward it, and now it moved down the hill to meet me,
walking slowly and deliberately and with unconscious grace.
     I stopped running and stood still, fighting to regain my breath. There
was no need of running any more. I need not run to catch it.
     It continued walking down the hill toward me and while its body still
stayed black and featureless, I could see that the crest was white, or
silver. In the moonlight it was hard to tell if it were white or silver.
     My breath came more easily now and I climbed up the hill to meet it. We
approached one another slowly, each of us, I suppose, afraid that any other
manner of approach might give the other fright.
     The manlike thing stopped ten feet or so away and I stopped as well,
and now I saw that indeed it was humanoid and that it was a woman, either a
naked or an almost naked woman. In the moonlight, the crest upon her head
was a thing of shining wonder, but I could not make out if it were a natural
appendage or some sort of eccentric hairdo, or perhaps a hat.
     The crest was white, but the rest of her was black, a jet black with
blue highlights that glinted in the moonlight. And there was about her body
an alertness and an awareness and a sense of bubbling life that took my
breath away.
     She spoke to me in music. It must have been a music, for there seemed
to be no words.
     'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I do not understand.'
     She spoke again and the trilling of the voice ran across the blue and
silver world like a spray of crystal thought, but there was no
understanding. I wondered, in despair, if any man of my race could ever
understand a language that expressed itself in music, or if, in fact, it was
meant to be understood as were the words we used.
     I shook my head and she laughed, the laughter making her without any
doubt a human - a low and tinkling laugh that was happy and excited.
     She held out her hand and took a few quick steps toward me and I took
the outstretched hand. And as I took her hand, she turned and ran lightly up
the hill and I went running with her. We reached the top of the ridge and
continued running, hand in hand, down the other slope, a wild, ecstatic
running that was sheer youth and craziness - a running into nothing, for the
utter joy of being alive in that heady moonlight.
     We were young and drunk with a strange happiness for which there seemed
no reason or accounting - drunk with, at least for me, a wild exuberance.
     Her grip upon my hand was hard, with a lithe, young strength, and we
ran together as if we were one person running - and it seemed to me, indeed,
that in some awesome manner I had become a part of her, and that somehow I
knew where we were going and why we were going there, but my brain was so
seething with this strange happiness that it could not translate the
knowledge into terms I understood.
     We came down to the creek and splashed across, then ran around the
mound where I had found the skulls and on up the second ridge and there, at
the top of it, we came upon the picnic.
     There were other people there, at this midnight picnic, a half a dozen
of them, all like this alien girl who had run with me. Scattered on the
ground were hampers, or things that looked like hampers, and bottles, and
these bottles and the hampers were arranged in a sort of circle. In the
centre of the circle was a small, silvery contraption that was just slightly
larger than a basketball.
     We stopped at the edge of the circle and all the rest of them turned to
look at us - but to look without surprise, as if it were not unusual at all
for one of them to lead in an alien creature such as I.
     The woman who was with me spoke in her singing voice and they answered
back with music. All of them were watching me, but it was friendly watching.
     Then all of them except one sat down in the circle and the one who
remained standing stepped toward me, making a motion inviting me to join the
circle with them.
     I sat down, with the running woman on one side of me and the one who
made the invitation sitting on the other.
     It was, I gathered, some sort of holiday, although there was something
in that circle which made it more than a holiday.
     There was a sense of anticipation in the faces and the bodies of these
people sitting in the circle, as if they might be waiting for an event of
great importance. They were happy and excited and vibrant with the sense of
life to their fingertips.
     Except for their crests, they were humanoid, and I could see now that
they wore no clothing. I found time to wonder where they might have come
from, for Tupper would have told me if there were people such as they. But
he had told me that the Flowers were the only things which existed on this
planet, although he had said sometimes there were others who came visiting.
     Were these people, then, the ones who came visiting, or was it possible
that they were the descendants of those people whose bones I had found down
on the mound, now finally emerged from some secret hiding place? Although
there was no sign in them of ever having hidden, of ever having skulked.
     The strange contraption lay in the centre of the circle. At a picnic
back in Millville it would have been a record player or a radio that someone
had brought along. But these people had no need of music, for they talked in
music, and the thing looked like nothing I had ever seen. It was round and
seemed to be fashioned of many lenses, all tilted at different angles so
that the surfaces caught the moonlight, reflecting it to make the ball
itself a sphere of shining glory.
     Some of the people sitting in the circle began an unpacking of the
hampers and an uncorking of the bottles and I knew that more than likely
they'd ask me to eat with them. It worried me to think of it, for since
they'd been so kind I could not very well refuse, and yet it might be
dangerous to eat the food they had. For although they were humanoid, there
easily could be differences in their metabolism and what might be food for
them could be poisonous for me.
     It was a little thing, of course, but it seemed a big decision, and I
sat there in mental agony, trying to make up my mind.
     The food might be a loathsome and nauseating mess, but that I could
have managed; for the friendship of these people I would have choked it
down. It was the thought that it might be deadly that made me hesitate.
     A while ago, I remembered, I had convinced myself that no matter how
great a threat the Flowers might be, we still must let them in, must strive
to find a common ground upon which any differences that might exist between
us could somehow be adjusted. I had told myself that the future of the human
race might easily hang upon our ability to meet and to get along with an
alien race, for the time was coming, in a hundred years from now, or a
thousand years from now, when we'd be encountering other alien races, and we
could not fail this first time.
     And here, I realized, was another alien race, sitting in this circle,
and there could be no double standard as between myself and the world at
large. I, in my own right, must act as I'd decided the human race must act -
I must eat the food when it was offered me.
     Perhaps I was not thinking very clearly. Events were happening much too
fast and I had too little time. It was a snap decision at best and I hoped I
was not wrong.
     I never had a chance to know, for before the food could be passed
around, the contraption in the centre of the circle began a little ticking -
no more than the ticking of a clock in an empty room, but at the first tick
it gave they all jumped to their feet and stood watching it.
     I jumped up, too, and stood watching with them, and I could sense that
they'd forgotten I was with them. All of their attentions were fastened on
that shining basketball.
     As it ticked, the glow of it became a shining mistiness and the
mistiness spread out, like a fog creeping up the land from a river bottom.
     The mistiness enveloped us and out of that mistiness strange shapes
began to form. At first they were wavering and unstable forms, but in a
while they steadied and became more substantial, although never quite
substantial; there was about them a touch of fairyland, of a shape and time
that one might see, but that was forever out of reach.
     And now the mistiness went away - or perhaps it still remained and we
did not notice it, for with the creation of the forms it had supplied
another world, of which we were observers, if not an actual part.
     It appeared that we were standing on the terrace of what on Earth might
have been called a villa. Beneath our feet were rough-hewn flagstones, with
thin lines of grass growing in the cracks between the stones, and back of us
rose rough walls of masonry. But the walls had a misty texture, as if they
were some sort of simulated backdrop that one was not supposed to inspect
too closely.
     In front of us spread a city, an ugly city with no beauty in it. It was
utilitarian in its every aspect, a geometric mass of stone, reared without
imagination, with no architectural concept beyond the principle that one
stone piled atop another would achieve a place of shelter. The city was the
drab colour of dried mud and it spread as far as the eye could see, a
disorderly mass of rectilinear structures thrust together, cheek by jowl,
with no breathing space provided.
     And yet there was an insubstantiality about it; never for an instant
did that massive city become solid masonry. Nor were the flagstones
underneath our feet an actual flagstone terrace.
     Rather it was as though we floated, a fraction of an inch above the
flagstones, never touching them.
     We stood, it seemed, in the middle of a three-dimensional movie. And
all around us the movie moved and went about its business and we knew that
we were there, for we could see it on every side of us, but the actors in
the movie were unaware of us and while we knew that we were there, there
also was the knowledge that we were not a part of it, that we somehow stood
aside from this magic world in which we were engulfed.
     At first I'd seen only the city, but now I saw there was terror in the
city. People were running madly in the streets, and from far off I could
hear the screaming, the thin and frantic wailing of a lost and hopeless
people.
     Then the city and the screaming were blotted out in a searing flash of
light, a blossoming whiteness that became so intense it suddenly went black.
The blackness covered us and we stood in a world that had nothing in it
except the darkness and the cataract of thunder that poured out of that
place where the flash of light had blossomed.
     I took a short step forward, groping as I went. My hands met emptiness
and the feeling flooded over me that I stood in an emptiness that stretched
on forever, that what I'd known before had been nothing but illusion and the
illusion now was gone, leaving me to grope eternally through black
nothingness.
     I took no other step, but stood stiff and straight, afraid to move a
muscle, sensing in all irrationality that I stood upon a platform and might
fall from it into a great emptiness which would have no bottom.
     As I stood there the blackness turned to grey and through the greyness
I could see the city, flattened and sharded, swept by tornadic winds, with
gouts of flame and ash twisting in the monstrous whirlwind of destruction.
Above the city was a rolling cloud, as if a million thunderstorms had been
rolled all into one. And from this maelstrom of fury came a deepthroated
growling of death and fear and fate, a savage terrible sound that made one
think of evil.
     Around me I saw the others - the black-skinned people with the silver
crests - standing transfixed and frozen, fascinated by the sight that lay
before them, rigid as if with fear, but something more than just plain fear
- superstitious fear, perhaps.
     I stood there, rooted with them, and the growling died away. Thin wisps
of smoke curled up above the rubble, and in the silence that came as the
growling ceased I could hear the little cracklings and groanings and the
tiny crashes as the splintered stone that still remained settled more firmly
into place. But there was no sound of crying now, none of the thin, high
screaming. There were no people and the only movements were the little
ripples of settling rubble that lay beyond the bare and blackened and
entirely featureless area where the light had blossomed.
     The greyness faded and the city began to dim. Out in the centre of the
picnic circle I could make out the glimmer of the lens-covered basketball.
There were no signs of my fellow picnickers; they had disappeared. And from
the thinning greyness came another screaming - but a different kind of
screaming, not the kind I'd heard from the city before the bomb had struck.
     For now I knew that I had seen a city destroyed by a nuclear explosion
- as one might have watched it on a TV set. And the TV set, if one could
call it that, could have been nothing other than the basketball. By some
strange magic mechanism it had invaded time and brought back from the past a
moment of high crisis.
     The greyness faded out and the night came back again, with the golden
moon and the dust of stars and the silver slopes that curved to meet the
quicksilver of the creek.
     Down the farther slope I could see the scurrying figures, with their
silver topknots gleaming in the moonlight, running wildly through the night
and screaming in simulated terror. I stood looking after them and shivered,
for there was something here, I knew, that had a sickness in it, a sickness
of the mind, an illness of the soul.
     Slowly I turned back to the basketball. It was, once again, just a
thing of lenses. I walked over to it and knelt beside it and had a look at
it. It was made of many lenses and in the interstices between the tilted
lenses, I could catch glimpses of some sort of mechanism, although all the
details of it were lost in the weakness of the moonlight.
     I reached out a hand and touched it gingerly. It seemed fragile and I
feared that I might break it, but I couldn't leave it here. It was something
that I wanted and I told myself that if I could get it back to Earth, it
would help to back up the story I had to tell.
     I took off my jacket and spread it on the ground, and then carefully
picked up the basketball, using both my hands to cradle it, and put it on
the jacket. I gathered up the ends of the cloth and wrapped them all around
the ball, then tied the sleeves together to help hold the folds in place.
     I picked it up and tucked it securely underneath an arm, then got to my
feet.
     The hampers and the bottles lay scattered all about and it occurred to
me that I should get away as quickly as I could, for these other people
would be coming back to get the basketball and to gather up their picnic.
But there was as yet no sign of them. Listening intently, it seemed to me
that I could hear the faint sounds of their screaming receding in the
distance.
     I turned and went down the hill and crossed the creek. Halfway up the
other slope I met Tupper coming out to hunt me.
     'Thought you had got lost,' he said.
     'I met a group of people. I had a picnic with them.'
     'They have funny topknots?'
     'They had that,' I said.
     'Friends of mine,' said Tupper. 'They come here many times. They come
here to be scared.'
     'Scared?'
     'Sure. It's fun for them. They like being scared.'
     I nodded to myself. So that was it, I thought. Like a bunch of kids
creeping on a haunted house and peeking through the windows so that they
might run, shrieking from imagined horror at imagined stirrings they'd seen
inside the house. And doing it time after time, never getting tired of the
good time that they had, gaining some strange pleasure from their very
fright.
     'They have more fun,' said Tupper, 'than anyone I know.'
     'You've seen them often?'
     'Lots of times,' said Tupper.
     'You didn't tell me.'
     'I never had the time,' said Tupper. 'I never got around to.'
     'And they live close by?'
     'No,' said Tupper. 'Very far away.'
     'But on this planet.'
     'Planet?' Tupper asked.
     'On this world,' I said.
     'No. On another world. In another place. But that don't make no
difference. They go everywhere for fun.'
     So they went everywhere for fun, I thought. And everywhen, perhaps.
They were temporal ghouls, feeding on the past, getting their vicarious
kicks out of catastrophe and disaster of an ancient age, seeking out those
historic moments that were horrible and foul. Coming back again and yet
again to one such scene that had a high appeal to their perverted minds.
     A decadent race, I wondered, from some world conquered by the Flowers,
free now to use the many gateways that led from world to world?
     Conquered, in the light of what I knew, might not be the proper word.
For I had seen this night what had happened to this world. Not depopulated
by the Flowers, but by the mad suicide of the humans who had been native to
it. More than likely it had been an empty and a dead world for years before
the Flowers had battered down the time-phase boundary that let them into it.
The skulls I had found had been those of the survivors - perhaps a
relatively few survivors - who had managed to live on for a little time, but
who had been foredoomed by the poisoned soil and air and water.
     So the Flowers had not really conquered; they had merely taken over a
world that had gone forfeit by the madness of its owners.
     'How long ago,' I asked, 'did the Flowers come here?'
     'What makes you think,' asked Tupper, 'that they weren't always here?'
     'Nothing. Just a thought. They never talked to you about it?'
     'I never asked,' said Tupper.
     Of course he wouldn't ask; he'd have no curiosity. He would be simply
glad that he had found this place, where he had friends who talked with him
and provided for his simple needs, where there were no humans to mock or
pester him.
     We came down to the camping place and I saw that the moon had moved far
into the west. The fire was burning low and Tupper fed it with some sticks,
then sat down beside it.
     I sat down across from him and placed the wrapped basketball beside me.
     'What you got there?' asked Tupper.
     I unwrapped it for him.
     He said, 'It's the thing my friends had. You stole it from my friends.'
     'They ran away' and left it. I want a look at it.'
     'You see other times with it,' said Tupper.
     'You know about this, Tupper?'
     He nodded. 'They show me many times - not often, I don't mean that, but
many other times. Time not like we're in.'
     'You don't know how it works?'
     'They told me,' Tupper said, 'but I didn't understand.'
     He wiped his chin, but failed to do the job, so wiped it a second time.
     They told me, he had said. So he could talk with them. He could talk
with Flowers and with a race that conversed by music. There was no use, I
knew, in asking him about it, because he couldn't tell me. Perhaps there was
no one who could explain an ability of that sort - not to a human being.
     For more than likely there'd be no common terms in which an explanation
could be made.
     The basketball glowed softly, lying on the jacket.
     'Maybe,' Tupper said, 'we should go back to bed.'
     'In a little while,' I said. Anytime I wanted, it would be no trouble
going back to bed, for the ground was bed.
     I put out a hand and touched the basketball.
     A mechanism that extended back in time and recorded for the viewer the
sight and sound of happenings that lay deep in the memory of the space-time
continuum. It would have, I thought, very many uses. It would be an
invaluable tool in historical research. It would make crime impossible, for
it could dig out of the past the details of any crime. And it would be a
terrible device if it fell into unscrupulous hands or became the property of
a government.
     I'd take it back to Millville, if I could take it back, if I could get
back myself. It would help to support the story I had to tell, but after I
had told the story and had offered it as proof; what would I do with it?
Lock it in a vault and destroy the combination? Take a sledge and smash it
into smithereens? Turn it over to the scientists? What could one do with
it'?
     'You messed up your coat,' said Tupper, 'carrying that thing.'
     I said, 'It wasn't much to start with.'
     And then I remembered that envelope with the fifteen hundred dollars in
it. It had been in the breast pocket of the jacket and I could have lost it
in the wild running I had done or when I used the jacket to wrap up the time
contraption.
     What a damn fool thing to do, I thought. What a chance to take. I
should have pinned it in my pocket or put it in my shoe or something of the
sort. It wasn't every day a man got fifteen hundred dollars.
     1 bent over and put my hand into the pocket and the envelope was there
and I felt a great relief as my fingers touched it. But almost immediately I
knew there was something wrong.
     My groping fingers told me the envelope was thin and it should have
been bulging with thirty fifty-dollar bills.
     I jerked it from my pocket and flipped up the flap. The envelope was
empty.
     I didn't have to ask. I didn't have to wonder. I knew just what had
happened. That dirty, slobbering, finger-counting bum - I'd choke it out of
him, I'd beat him to a pulp, I'd make him cough it up!
     I was halfway up to nail him when he spoke to me and the voice that he
spoke with was that of the TV glamour gal.
     'This is Tupper speaking for the Flowers,' the voice said. 'And you sit
back down and behave yourself.'
     'Don't give me that,' I snarled. 'You can't sneak out of this by
pretending...'
     'But this is the Flowers,' the voice insisted sharply and even as it
said the words, I saw that Tupper's face had taken on that wall-eyed, vacant
look.
     'But he took my roll,' I said. 'He sneaked it out of the envelope when
I was asleep.'
     'Keep quiet,' said the honeyed voice. 'Just keep quiet and listen.'
     'Not until I get my fifteen hundred back.'
     'You'll get it back. You'll get much more than your fifteen hundred
back.'
     'You can guarantee that?'
     'We'll guarantee it.'
     I sat down again.
     'Look,' I said, 'you don't know what that money meant to me. It's part
my fault, of course. I should have waited until the bank was open or I
should have found a good safe place to hide it. But there was so much going
on...'
     'Don't worry for a moment,' said the Flowers. 'We'll get it back to
you.'
     'OK,' I said, "and does he have to use that voice?'
     'What's the matter with the voice?'
     'Oh, hell,' I said, 'go ahead and use it. I want to talk to you, maybe
even argue with you, and it's unfair, but I'll remember who is speaking.'
     'We'll use another voice, then,' said the Flowers, changing in the
middle of the sentence to the voice of the businessman.
     'Thanks very much,' I said.
     'You remember,' said the Flowers, 'the time we spoke to you on the
phone and suggested that you might represent us?
     'Certainly I remember. But as for representing you...'
     'We need someone very badly. Someone we can trust.'
     'But you can't be certain I'm the man to trust.'
     'Yes, we can,' they said. 'Because we know you love us.'
     'Now, look here,' I said. 'I don't know what gives you that idea. I
don't know if...'
     'Your father found those of us who languished in your world. He took us
home and cared for us. He protected us and tended us and he loved us and we
flourished.'
     'Yes, I know all that.'
     'You're an extension of your father.'
     'Well, not necessarily. Not the way you mean.'
     'Yes,' they insisted. 'We have knowledge of your biology. We know about
inherited characteristics. Like father, like son is a saying that you have.'
     It was no use, I saw. You couldn't argue with them. From the logic of
their race, from the half-assimilated, half-digested facts they had obtained
in some manner in their contact with our Earth, they had it figured out. And
it probably made good sense in their plant world, for an offspring plant
would differ very little from the parents. It would be, I suspected, a
fruitless battle to try to make them see that an assumption that was valid
in their case need not extend its validity into the human race.
     'All right,' I said, 'we'll let you have it your way. You're sure that
you can trust me and probably you can. But in all fairness I must tell you I
can't do the job.'
     'Can't?' they asked.
     'You want me to represent you back on Earth. To be your ambassador.
Your negotiator.'
     'That was the thought we had in mind.'
     'I have no training for a job of that sort. I'm not qualified. I
wouldn't know how to do it. I wouldn't even know how to make a start.'
     'You have started,' said the Flowers. 'We are very pleased with the
start you've made.'
     I stiffened and jerked upright. 'The start I've made?' I asked.
     'Why, yes, of course,' they told me. 'Surely you remember. You asked
that Gerald Sherwood get in touch with someone. Someone, you stressed, in
high authority.'
     'I wasn't representing you.'
     'But you could,' they said. 'We want someone to explain us.'
     'Let's be honest,' I told them. 'How can I explain you? I know scarcely
anything about you.'
     We would tell you anything you want to know.'
     'For openers,' I said, 'this is not your native world.'
     'No, it's not. We've advanced through many worlds.'
     'And the people - no, not the people, the intelligences - what happened
to the intelligences of those other worlds?'
     'We do not understand.'
     'When you get into a world, what do you do with the intelligence you
find there?
     'It is not often we find intelligence - not meaningful intelligence,
not cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence does not develop on all
worlds. When it does, we co-operate. We work with it. That is, when we can.'
     'There are times when you can't?'
     'Please do not misunderstand,' they pleaded. 'There has been a case or
two where we could not contact a world's intelligence. It would not become
aware of us. We were just another life form, another - what do you call it?
- another weed, perhaps.'
     What do you do, then?'
     'What can we do?' they asked.
     It was not, it seemed to me, an entirely honest answer.
     There were a lot of things that they could do.
     'And you keep on going.'
     'Keep on going?'
     'From world to world,' I said. 'From one world to another.'
     When do you intend to stop?
     'We do not know,' they said.
     'What is your goal? What are you aiming at? 'We do not know,' they
said.
     'Now, just wait a minute. That's the second time you've said that. You
must know...'
     'Sir,' they asked, 'does your race have a goal - a conscious goal?'
     'I guess we don't,' I said.
     'So that would make us even.'
     'I suppose it would.'
     'You have on your world things you call computers.'
     'Yes,' I said, 'but very recently.'
     'And the function of computers is the storage of data and the
correlation of that data and making it available whenever it is needed.'
     'There still are a lot of problems. The retrieval of the data...'
     'That is beside the point. What would you say is the goal of your
computers?
     'Our computers have no purpose. They are not alive.'
     'But if they were alive?'
     'Well, in that case, I suppose the ultimate purpose would be the
storage of a universal data and its correlation.'
     'That perhaps is right,' they said. 'We are living computers.'
     'Then there is no end for you. You'll keep on forever.' 'We are not
sure,' they said.
     'But...'
     'Data,' they told me, pontifically, 'is the means to one end only
arrival at the truth. Perhaps we do not need a universal data to arrive at
truth.'
     'How do you know when you have arrived?'
     'We will know,' they said. I gave up. We were getting nowhere. 'So you
want our Earth,' I said.
     'You state it awkwardly and unfairly. We do not want your Earth. We
want to be let in, we want some living space, we want to work with you. You
give us your knowledge and we will give you ours.'
     'We'd make quite a team,' I said. 'We would, indeed,' they said. 'And
then?'
     'What do you mean?' they asked.
     'After we've swapped knowledge, what do we do then?'
     'Why, we go on,' they said. 'Into other worlds. The two of us
together.'
     'Seeking other cultures? After other knowledge?'
     'That is right,' they said.
     They made it sound so simple. And it wasn't simple; it couldn't be that
simple. There was nothing ever simple.
     A man could talk with them for days and still be asking questions,
getting no more than a bare outline of the situation.
     'There is one thing you must realize,' I said. 'The people of my Earth
will not accept you on blind faith alone. They must know what you expect of
us and what we can expect of you. They must have some assurance that we can
work together.'
     'We can help,' they said, 'in many different ways. We need not be as
you see us now. We can turn ourselves into any kind of plant you need. We
can provide a great reservoir of economic resources. We can be the old
things that you have relied upon for years, but better than the old things
ever were. We can be better foodstuff and better building material; better
fibre. Name anything you need from plants and we can be that thing.'
     'You mean you'd let us eat you and saw you up for lumber and weave you
into cloth? And you would not mind?'
     They came very close to sighing. 'How can we make you understand? Eat
one of us and we still remain. Saw one of us and we still remain. The life
of us is one life - you could never kill us all, never eat us all. Our life
is in our brains and our nervous systems, in our roots and bulbs and tubers.
We would not mind your eating us if we knew that we were helping.'
     'And we would not only be the old forms of economic plant life to which
you are accustomed. We could be different kinds of grain, different kinds of
trees - ones you have never heard of. We could adapt ourselves to any soils
or climates. We could grow anywhere you wanted. You want medicines or drugs.
Let your chemists tell us what you want and we'll be that for you. We'll be
made-to-order plants.'
     'All this,' I said, 'and your knowledge, too.'
     'That is right,' they said.
     'And in return, what do we do?'
     'You give your knowledge to us. You work with us to utilize all
knowledge, the pooled knowledge that we have. You give us an expression we
cannot give ourselves. We have knowledge, but knowledge in itself is
worthless unless it can be used. We want it used, we want so badly to work
with a race that can use what we have to offer, so that we can feel a sense
of accomplishment that is denied us now. And, also, of course, we would hope
that together we could develop a better way to open the time-phase
boundaries into other worlds.'
     'And the time dome that you put over Millville - why did you do that?
     'To gain your world's attention. To let you know that we were here and
waiting.'
     'But you could have told some of your contacts and your contacts could
have told the world. You probably did tell some of them. Stiffy Grant, for
instance.'
     'Yes, Stiffy Grant. And there were others, too.'
     'They could have told the world.'
     'Who would have believed them? They would have been thought of as how
do you say it - crackpots?'
     'Yes, I know,' I said. 'No one would pay attention to anything Stiffy
said. But surely there were others.'
     'Only certain types of minds,' they told me, 'can make contact with us.
We can reach many minds, but they can't reach back to us. And to believe in
us, to know us, you must reach back to us.'
     'You mean only the screwballs...'
     'We're afraid that's what we mean,' they said.
     It made sense when you thought about it. The most successful contact
they could find had been Tupper Tyler and while there was nothing wrong with
Stuffy as a human being, he certainly was not what one would call a solid
citizen.
     I sat there for a moment, wondering why they'd contacted me and Gerald
Sherwood. Although that was a little different. They'd contacted Sherwood
because he was valuable to them; he could make the telephones for them and
he could set up a system that would give them working capital. And me?
Because my father had taken care of them? I hoped to heaven that was all it
was.
     'So, OK,' I said. 'I guess I understand. How about the storm of seeds?'
     'We planted a demonstration plot,' they told me. 'So your people could
realize, by looking at it, how versatile we are.'
     You never won, I thought. They had an answer for everything you asked.
     I wondered if I ever had expected to get anywhere with them or really
wanted to get anywhere with them. Maybe, subconsciously, all I wanted was to
get back to Millville.
     And maybe it was all Tupper. Maybe there weren't any Flowers. Maybe it
was simply a big practical joke that Tupper had dreamed up in his so-called
mind, sitting here ten years and dreaming up the joke and getting it
rehearsed so he could pull it off.
     But, I argued with myself it couldn't be just Tupper, for Tupper wasn't
bright enough. His mind was not given to a concept of this sort. He couldn't
dream it up and he couldn't pull it off. And besides, there was the matter
of his being here and of my being here, and that was something a joke would
not explain.
     I came slowly to my feet and turned so that I faced the slope above the
camp and there in the bright moonlight lay the darkness of the purple
flowers. Tupper still sat where he had been sitting, but now he was hunched
forward, almost doubled up, fallen fast asleep and snoring very softly.
     The perfume seemed stronger now and the moonlight had taken on a
trembling and there was a Presence out there somewhere on the slope. I
strained my eyes to see it, and once I thought I saw it, but it faded out
again, although I still knew that it was there.
     There was a purpleness in the very night and the feel of an
intelligence that waited for a word to come stalking down the hill to talk
with me, as two friends might talk, with no need of an interpreter, to squat
about the campfire and yarn the night away.
     Ready? asked the Presence.
     A word, I wondered, or simply something stirring in my brain -
something born of the purpleness and moonlight?
     'Yes,' I said, 'I'm ready. I will do the best I can.'
     I bent and wrapped the time contraption in my jacket and tucked it
underneath my arm and then went up the slope. I knew the Presence was up
there, waiting for me, and there were quivers running up and down my spine.
It was fear, perhaps, but it didn't feel like fear.
     I came up to where the Presence waited and I could not see it, but I
knew that it had fallen into step with me and was walking there beside me.
     'I am not afraid of you,' I told it.
     It didn't say a word. It just kept walking with me. We went across the
ridge and down the slope into the dip where in another world the greenhouse
and garden were.
     A little to your left, said the thing that walked the night with me,
and then go straight ahead.
     I turned a little to my left and then went straight ahead.
     A few more feet, it said.
     I stopped and turned my head to face it and there was nothing there. If
there had been anything, it was gone from there.
     The moon was a golden gargoyle in the west. The world was lone and
empty; the silvered slope had a hungry look. The blue-black sky was filled
with many little eyes with a hard sharp glitter to them, a predatory glitter
and the remoteness of uncaring.
     Beyond the ridge a man of my own race drowsed beside a dying campfire,
and it was all right for him, for he had a talent that I did not have, that
I knew now I did not have - the talent for reaching out to grasp an alien
hand (or paw or claw or pad) and being able in his twisted mind to translate
that alien touch into a commonplace.
     I shuddered at the gargoyle moon and took two steps forward and walked
out of that hungry world straight into my garden.

        15

     Ragged clouds still raced across the sky, blotting out the moon. A
faint lighting in the east gave notice of the dawn. The windows of my house
were filled with lamplight and I knew that Gerald Sherwood and the rest of
them were waiting there for me. And just to my left the greenhouse with the
tree growing at its corner loomed ghostly against the rise of ground behind
it.
     I started to walk forward and fingers were scratching at my trouser
leg. Startled, I looked down and saw that I had walked into a bush.
     There had been no bush in the garden the last time I had seen it; there
had been only the purple flowers. But I think I guessed what might have
happened even before I stooped to have a look.
     Squatting there, I squinted along the ground and in the first grey
light of the coming day, I saw there were no flowers. Instead of a patch of
flowers there was a patch of little bushes, perhaps a little larger, but not
much larger than the flowers.
     I hunkered there, with a coldness growing in me - for there was no
explanation other than the fact that the bushes were the flowers, that
somehow the Flowers had changed the flowers that once had grown there into
little bushes. And, I wondered wildly, what could their purpose be?
     Even here, I thought - even here they reach out for us. Even here they
play their tricks on us and lay their traps for us. And they could do
anything they wanted, I supposed, for if they did not own, at least they
manipulated this corner of the Earth entrapped beneath the dome.
     I put out a hand and felt along a branch and the branch had
soft-swelling buds all along its length. Springtime buds, that in a day or
so would be breaking into leaf. Springtime buds in the depth of summer!
     I had believed in them, I thought. In that little space of time toward
the very end, when Tupper had ceased his talking and had dozed before the
fire and there had been something on the hillside that had spoken to me and
had walked me home, I had believed in them.
     Had there been something on that hillside? Had something walked with
me? I sweated, thinking of it.
     I felt the bulk of the wrapped time contraption underneath my arm, and
that, I realized, was a talisman of the actuality of that other world. With
that, I must believe.
     They had told me, I remembered, that I'd get my money back - they had
guaranteed it. And here I was, back home again, without my fifteen hundred.
     I got to my feet and started for the house, then changed my mind. I
turned around and went up the slope toward Doc Fabian's house. It might be a
good idea, I told myself, to see what was going on outside the barrier. The
people who were waiting at the house could wait a little longer.
     I reached the top of the slope and turned around, looking toward the
east. There, beyond the village, blazed a line of campfires and the lights
of many cars running back and forth.
     A searchlight swung a thin blue finger of light up into the sky, slowly
sweeping back and forth. And at one spot that seemed a little closer was a
greater blob of light. A great deal of activity seemed to be going on around
it.
     Watching it, I made out a steam shovel and great black mounds of earth
piled up on either side of it. I could hear, faintly, the metallic clanging
of the mighty scoop as it dumped a load and then reached down into the hole
to take another bite. Trying, I told myself, to dig beneath the barrier.
     A car came rattling down the street and turned into the driveway of the
house behind me. Doc, I thought - Doc coming home after being routed out of
bed on an early morning call. I walked across the lawn and around the house.
The car was parked on the concrete strip of driveway and Doc was getting
out.
     'Doc,' I said, 'it's Brad.' He turned and peered at me.
     'Oh,' he said, and his voice sounded tired, 'so you are back again.
There are people waiting at the house, you know.'
     Too tired to be surprised that I was back again; too all beat out to
care.
     He shuffled forward and I saw, quite suddenly, that Doc was old. Of
course I had thought of him as old, but never before had he actually seemed
old. Now I could see that he was - the slightly stooped shoulders, his feet
barely lifting off the ground as he walked toward me, the loose, old-man
hang of his trousers, the deep lines in his face.
     'Floyd Caidwell,' he said. 'I was out to Floyd's. He had a heart attack
- a strong, tough man like him and he has a heart attack.'
     'How is he?'
     'As well as I can manage. He should be in a hospital, getting complete
rest. But I can't get him there. With that thing out there, I can't get him
where he should be.
     'I don't know, Brad. I just don't know what will happen to us. Mrs
Jensen was supposed to go in this morning for surgery. Cancer. She'll die,
anyhow, but surgery would give her months, maybe a year or two, of life. And
there's no way to get her there. The little Hopkins girl has been going
regularly to a specialist and he's been helping her a lot. Decker - perhaps
you've heard of him. He's a top-notch man. We interned together.'
     He stopped in front of me. 'Can't you see,' he said. 'I can't help
these people. I can do a little, but I can't do enough. I can't handle
things like this - I can't do it all alone. Other times I could send them
somewhere else, to someone who could help them. And now I can't do that. For
the first time in my life, I can't help my people.'
     'You're taking it too hard,' I said.
     He looked at me with a beaten look, a tired and beaten look.
     'I can't take it any other way,' he said. 'All these years, they've
depended on me.'
     'How's Stuffy?' I asked. 'You have heard, of course.'
     Doc snorted angrily. 'The damn fool ran away.'
     'From the hospital?'
     'Where else would he run from? Got dressed when their backs were turned
and snuck away. He always was a sneaky old goat and he never had good sense.
They're looking for him, but no one's found him yet.'
     'He'd head back here,' I said.
     'I suppose he would,' said Doc. 'What about this story I heard about;
some telephone he had?'
     I shook my head. 'Hiram said he found one.'
     Doc peered sharply at me. 'You don't know anything about it?'
     'Not very much,' I said.
     'Nancy said you were in some other world or something. What kind of
talk is that?'
     'Did Nancy tell you that?'
     He shook his head. 'No, Gerald told me. He asked me what to do. He was
afraid that if he mentioned it, he would stir up the village.'
     'And?'
     'I told him not to. The folks are stirred up enough. He told them what
you said about the flowers. He had to tell them something.'
     'Doc,' I said, 'it's a funny business. I don't rightly know myself.
Let's not talk about it. Tell me what's going on. What are those fires out
there?'
     'Those are soldier fires,' he told me. 'There are state troops out
there. They've got the town ringed in. Brad, it's crazier than hell. We
can't get out and no one can get in, but they got troops out there. I don't
know what they think they're doing. They evacuated everybody for ten miles
outside the barrier and there are planes patrolling and they have some
tanks. They tried to dynamite the barrier this morning and they didn't do a
thing except blow a hole in Jake Fisher's pasture. They could have saved
that dynamite.'
     'They're trying to dig under the barrier,' I said.
     'They've done a lot of things,' said Doe. 'They had some helicopters
that flew above the town, then tried to come straight down. Figuring, I
guess, that there are only walls out there, without any top to them. But
they found there was a top. They fooled around all afternoon and they
wrecked two 'copters, but they found out, I guess, that it's a sort of dome.
It curves all the way above us. A kind of bubble, you might say.'
     'And there are all those fool newspapermen out there. I tell you, Brad,
there's an army of them. There isn't anything but Millville on the TV and
radio, or in the papers either.'
     'It's big news,' I said.
     'Yes, I suppose so. But I'm worried, Brad. This village is getting
ready to blow up. The people are on edge. They're scared and touc