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'It's not just Millville, then.'
'Maybe a whole lot more than Millville.'
'What are you going to do now, Brad?'
'Go down into my garden and have a hard look at some flowers.'
'Flowers?'
'Alf,' I told him, 'it's a long, long story. I'll tell you later. Are
you staying on?'
'Of course I am,' said All 'The greatest show on earth and me with a
ringside seat.'
'I'll call you back in an hour or so.'
'I'll stay close,' he promised. 'I'll be waiting for your call.'
I put down the phone and stood there, trying to make some head or tail
of it. The flowers, somehow, were important, and so was Tupper Tyler, but
they were all mixed up together and there was no place one could start.
I went out of the house and down into the garden by the greenhouse. The
trail that Tupper had left was still plain and I was considerably relieved,
for I had been afraid that the wind that brought the seeds might have blown
it away, that the flowers might have been so beaten and so twisted that the
trail could well be lost.
I stood at the edge of the garden and looked around, as if I were
seeing the place for the first time in my life. It wasn't really a garden.
At one time it had been land on which we'd grown the stuff we sold, but when
I quit the greenhouse business I'd simply let it go wild and the flowers had
taken over. To one side stood the greenhouse, with its door hanging on the
broken hinges and most of the panes gone from the windows. And at one corner
of it stood the elm tree that had grown from seed - the one I'd been about
to pull up when my father stopped me.
Tupper had talked wildly about flowers growing by the acre. All of
them, he said, had been purple flowers and he had been most emphatic that my
father should be told of them. The mystery voice, or one of the mystery
voices on the phone had been well informed about my father's greenhouse and
had asked if I still ran it. And there had been, less than an hour ago, a
perfect storm of seeds.
All the little purple flower-heads with their monkey faces seemed to be
nodding at me as if at a secret joke and I jerked my gaze away from them to
stare up at the sky. Broken clouds still streamed across it, shutting out
the sun. Although, once the clouds were gone, the day would be a scorcher.
One could smell the heat in the very air.
I moved out into the garden, following Tupper's trail. At the end of
the trail I stopped and told myself that it had been a witless thing - this
belief of mine that I would find something in this flower patch that would
make some sense.
Tupper Tyler had disappeared ten years ago and he'd disappeared today
and how he'd managed it no man might ever know.
And yet the idea still went on banging in my skull that Tupper was the
key to all this screwy business.
Yet I couldn't, for the life of me, explain the logic of my thinking.
For Tupper wasn't the only one involved - if he was, in fact, involved.
There was Stiffy Grant as well. And I realized, with a start, that I had not
asked anyone how Stiffy might be doing.
Doc Fabian's house was on the hill just above the greenhouse and I
could go up there and ask. Doc might not be home, of course, but I could
wait around a while and eventually he'd show up. At the moment there was
nothing else to do. And with Hiram and Tom Preston shooting off their
mouths, it might be a good idea not to be found at home.
I had been standing at the end of Tupper's trail and now I took a step
beyond it, setting out for Doc's. But I never got to Doc's. I took that
single step and the sun came out and the houses went away. Doc's house and
all the other houses, and the trees as well, and the bushes and the grass.
Everything disappeared and there was nothing left but the purple flowers,
which covered everything, and a sun that was blazing out of a cloudless sky.
I had taken that one step and everything had happened. So now I took
another one to bring my feet together and I stood there, stiff and scared,
afraid to turn around afraid, perhaps, of what I'd see behind me. Although I
think I knew what I would see behind me. Just more purple flowers.
For this, I knew, in one dim corner of my curdled mind, was the place
that Tupper had been telling me about.
Tupper had come out of this place and he'd gone back to this place and
now I'd followed him.
Nothing happened.
And that was right, of course. For it seemed to me, somehow, that this
would be the sort of place where nothing ever happened.
There were just the flowers and the sun blazing in the sky and there
was nothing else. There wasn't a breath of wind and there was no sound. But
there was a fragrance, the almost overpowering, cloying fragrance of all
those little blossoms with their monkey faces.
At last I dared to move and I slowly turned around. And there was
nothing but the flowers.
Millville had gone away somewhere, into some other world.
Although that was wrong, I told myself. For somewhere, in its same old
world, there yet must be a Millville. It had not been Millville, but myself,
that had gone away. I had taken just one step and had walked clear out of
Millville into another place.
Yet, while it was a different place, the terrain seemed to be identical
with the old terrain. I still was standing in the dip of ground that lay
behind my house and back of me the hill rose steeply to the now non-existent
street where Doc's house had stood and a half a mile away loomed the hill
where the Sherwood house should be.
This, then, was Tupper's world. It was the world into which he had gone
ten years ago and again this morning. Which meant that, at this very moment,
he must still be here.
And that meant, I told myself with a sudden rush of hope, that there
was a chance of getting out, of getting back to Millvile. For Tupper had
gotten back again and thus must know the way. Although, I realized, one
never could be sure. You never could be sure of anything with a dope like
Tupper Tyler.
The first thing to do, of course, was find him. He could not be far
off. It might take a while, but I was fairly confident that I could track
him down.
I walked slowly up the hill that, back in my home village, would have
taken me to Doc Fabian's place.
I reached the top of the hill and stopped and there, below me, lay the
far sweep of land clothed by the purple flowers.
The land looked strange, robbed of all its landmarks, naked of its
trees and roads and houses. But it lay, I saw, as it had lain. If there were
any differences, they were minor ones.
There, to the east, was the wet and swampy land below the little knoll
where Stiffy's shack had stood - where Stiffy's shack still stood in another
time or place.
What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step
from one world to another.
I stood, a stranger in an unknown land, with the perfume of the flowers
dogging not my nostrils only, but every pore of me, pressing in upon me, as
if the flowers themselves were rolling in great purple waves to bear me down
and bury me for all eternity. The world was quiet; it was the quietest place
I had ever been. There was no sound at all. And I realized that perhaps at
no time in my life had I ever known silence. Always there had been something
that had made some sort of noise - the chirring of a lone insect in the
quiet of a summer noon, or the rustle of a leaf. Even in the dead of night
there would have been the creaking of the timbers in the house, the murmur
of the furnace, the slight keening of a wind that ran along the eaves.
But there was silence here. There was no sound at all. There was no
sound, I knew, because there was nothing that could make a sound. There were
no trees or bushes; there were no birds or insects. There was nothing here
but the flowers and the soil in which they grew.
A silence and the emptiness that held the silence in its hand, and the
purpleness that ran to the far horizon to meet the burnished, pale-blue
brightness of a summer sky.
Now, for the first time, I felt panic stalking me - not a big and burly
panic that would send one fleeing, howling as he fled, but a little, sneaky
panic that circled all about me, like a pesky, yapping dog, bouncing on its
pipestem legs, waiting for a chance to sink its needle teeth in me. Nothing
one could fight, nothing one could stand against - a little yapping panic
that set the nerves on edge.
There was no fear of danger, for there was no danger. One could see
with half an eye that there was no danger. But there was, perhaps worse than
any danger, the silence and the loneliness and the sameness and the not
knowing where you were.
Down the slope was the wet and swampy area where Stiffy's shack should
be, and there, a little farther off, the silver track of river that ran at
the edge of town. And at the place where the river bent toward the south, a
plume of smoke rose daintily against the blue wash of the sky - so faint and
far a trickle that one could barely make it out.
'Tupper!' I shouted, running down the slope, glad of a chance to run,
of some reason I should run, for I had been standing, determined not to run,
determined not to allow the little yapping panic to force me into running,
and all the time I'd stood there I had ached to run.
I crossed the little ridge that hid the river and the camp lay there
before me - a tiny hut of crudely woven branches, a garden full of growing
things, and all along the river bank little straggling, dying trees, with
most of their branches dead and bearing only a few tassels of green leaves
at their very tops.
A small campfire burned in front of the hut and squatting by the fire
was Tupper. He wore the shirt and trousers I had given him and he still had
the outrageous hat perched on his head.
'Tupper!' I shouted and he rose and came gravely up the slope to meet
me. He wiped off his chin and held out his hand in greeting. It still was
wet with slobber, but I didn't mind.
Tupper wasn't much, but he was another human.
'Glad you could make it, Brad,' he said. 'Glad you could drop over.'
As if I'd been dropping over every day, for years.
'Nice place you have,' I said.
'They did it all for me,' he said, with a show of pride. 'The Flowers
fixed it up for me. It wasn't like this to start with, but they fixed it up
for me. They have been good to me.'
'Yes, they have,' I said.
I didn't know what it was all about, but I went along. I had to go
along. There was just a chance that Tupper could get me back to Millville.
'They're the best friends I have,' said Tupper, slobbering in his
happiness. 'That is, except for you and your papa. Until I found the
Flowers, you and your papa were the only friends I had. All the rest of them
just made fun of me. I let on I didn't know that they were making fun, but I
knew they were and I didn't like it.'
'They weren't really unkind,' I assured him. 'They really didn't mean
what they said or did. They were only being thoughtless.'
'They shouldn't have done it,' Tupper insisted. 'You never made any fun
of me. I like you because you never made any fun of me.'
And he was right, of course. I'd not made fun of him. But not because I
hadn't wanted to at times; there were times when I could have killed him.
But my father had taken me off to the side one day and warned me that if he
ever caught me making fun of Tupper, like the other kids, he would warm my
bottom.'
'This is the place you were telling me about,' I said. 'The place with
all the flowers.'
He grinned delightedly, drooling from both corners of his mouth 'Ain't
it nice?' he said.
We had been walking down the slope together and now we reached the
fire. A crude clay pot was standing in the ashes and there was something
bubbling in it.
'You'll stay and eat with me,' invited Tupper. 'Please, Brad, say
you'll stay and eat with me. It's been so long since I've had anyone who
would eat with me.'
Weak tears were running down his cheeks at the thought of how long it
had been since he'd had someone who would stay and eat with him.
'I got corn and potatoes roasting in the coals,' he said, 'and I got
peas and beans and carrots all cooked up together. That's them in the pot.
There isn't any meat. You don't mind, do you, if there isn't any meat?'
'Not at all,' I told him.
'I miss meat something dreadful,' he confided. 'But they can't do
anything about it. They can't turn themselves into animals.'
'They?' I asked.
'The Flowers,' he said, and the way he said it, he made them a proper
noun. 'They can turn themselves into anything at all - plant things, that
is. But they can't make themselves into things like pigs or rabbits. I never
asked them to. That is, I mean I never asked them twice. I asked them once
and they explained to me. I never asked again, for they've done a lot of
things for me and I am grateful to them.'
'They explained to you? You mean you talk with them.'
'All the time,' said Tupper.
He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hut, scrabbling
around for something, with his back end sticking out, like a busy dog
digging out a woodchuck.
He backed out and he brought with him a couple of crude pottery plates,
lopsided and uneven. He put them down upon the ground and laid on each of
them a spoon carved out of wood.
'Made them myself,' he told me. 'Found some clay down in the river bank
and at first I couldn't seem to do it, but then they found out for me
and...'
'The Flowers found out for you?'
'Sure, the Flowers. They do everything for me.'
'And the spoons?'
'Used a piece of stone. Flint, I guess. Had a sharp edge on it. Nothing
like a knife, but it did the job. Took a long time, though.'
I nodded.
'But that's all right,' he said. 'I had a lot of time.'
He did a mopping job and wiped his hands meticulously on his trouser
seat.
'They grew flax for me,' he said, 'so I could make some clothes. But I
couldn't get the hang of it. They told me and they told me, but I couldn't
do it. So they finally quit. I went around without no clothes for quite a
spell. Except for this hat,' he said. 'I did that myself, without no help at
all. They didn't even tell me, I figured it all out and did it by myself.
Afterwards they told me that I'd done real good.'
'They were right,' I said. 'It's magnificent.' 'You really think so,
Brad?'
'Of course I do,' I said.
'I'm glad to hear you say so, Brad. I'm kind of proud of it. It's the
first thing in my life I ever did alone, without no one telling me.'
'These flowers of yours...'
'They ain't my flowers,' said Tupper, sharply.
'You say these flowers can turn themselves into anything they want to.
You mean they turned themselves into garden stuff for you.'
'They can turn themselves into any kind of plants. All I do is ask
them.'
'Then, if they can be anything they want to be, why are they all
flowers?'
'They have to be something, don't they?' Tupper demanded, rather
heatedly. 'They might as well be flowers.'
'Well, yes,' I said. 'I suppose they might.'
He raked two ears of corn out of the coals and a couple of potatoes. He
used a pot-lifter that looked as if it were fashioned out of bark to get the
pot off the fire. He dumped the cooked vegetables that were in it out onto
the plates.
'And the trees?' I asked.
'Oh, them are things they changed themselves into. I needed them for
wood. There wasn't any wood to start with and I couldn't do no cooking and I
told them how it was. So they made the trees and they made them special for
me. They grow fast and die so that I can break branches off and have dry
wood for fire. Slow burning, though, not like ordinary dry wood. And that's
good, for I have to keep a fire burning all the time. I had a pocket full of
matches when I came here, but I haven't had any for a long, long time.'
I remembered when he spoke about the pocket full of matches how
entranced he had always been with fire. He always carried matches with him
and he'd sit quietly by himself and light match after match, letting each
burn down until it scorched his fingers, happy with the sight of flame. A
lot of people had been afraid that he might bunt some building down, but he
never did. He was just a little jerk who liked the sight of fire.
'I haven't any salt; said Tupper. 'The stuff may taste funny to you.
I've got used to it.'
'But you eat vegetables all the time. You need salt for that kind of
stuff'
'The Flowers say I don't. They say they put things into the vegetables
that takes the place of salt. Not that you can taste it, but it gives you
the things you need just the same as salt. They studied me to find out what
my body needed and they put in a lot of stuff they said I needed. And just
down the river I have an orchard full of fruit. And I have raspberries and
strawberries that bear almost all the time.'
I couldn't rightly understand what fruit had to do with the problem of
nutrition if the Flowers could do all he said they could, but I let the
matter stand. One never got anywhere trying to get Tupper straightened out.
If you tried to reason with him, you just made matters worse.
'We might as well sit down,' said Tupper, 'and get started on this.'
I sat down on the ground and he handed me a plate, then sat down
opposite me and took the other plate.
I was hungry and the saltless food didn't go so badly. Flat, of course,
and tasting just a little strange, but it was all right. It took away the
hunger.
'You like it here? I asked.
'It is home to me,' said Tupper, solemnly. 'It is where my friends
are.'
'You don't have anything,' I said. 'You don't have an axe or knife. You
don't have a pot or pan. And there is no one you can turn to. What if you
got sick?'
Tupper quit wolfing down his food and stared at me, as if I were the
crazy one.
'I don't need any of those things,' he said. 'I make my dishes out of
clay. I can break off the branches with my hands and I don't need an axe. I
don't need to hoe the garden. There aren't ever any weeds. I don't even need
to plant it. It's always there. While I use up one row of stuff, another row
is growing. And if I got sick, the Flowers would take care of me. They told
me they would.'
'OK,' I said. 'OK.'
He went back to his eating. It was a terrible sight to watch. But he
was right about the garden. Now that he had mentioned it, I could see that
it wasn't cultivated. There were rows of growing vegetables - long, neat
rows without the sign of ever being hoed and without a single weed. And
that, of course, was the way it would be, for no weed would dare to grow
here. There was nothing that could grow here except the Flowers themselves,
or the things into which the Flowers had turned themselves, like the
vegetables and trees.
The garden was a perfect garden. There were no stunted plants and no
disease or blight. The tomatoes, hanging on the vines, were an even red and
all were perfect globes. The corn stood straight and tall.
'You cooked enough for two,' I said. 'Did you know that I was coming?'
For I was fast reaching the point where I'd have believed almost
anything. It was just possible, I told myself that he (or the Flowers) had
known that I was coming.
'I always cook enough for two,' he told me. 'There never is no telling
when someone might drop in.'
'But no one ever has?'
'You're the first,' he said. 'I'm glad that you could come.'
I wondered if time had any meaning for him. Sometimes it seemed it
didn't. And yet he had wept weak tears because it had been so long since
anyone had broken bread with him.
We ate in silence for a while and then I took a chance. I'd humoured
him long enough and it was time to ask some questions.
'Where is this place?' I asked. 'What kind of place is it? And if you
want to get out of it, to get back home, how do you go about it?
I didn't mention the fact that he had gotten out of it and returned to
Millville. I sensed it might be something he would resent, for he'd been in
a hurry to get back again - as if he'd broken some sort of rule or
regulation and was anxious to return before anyone found out.
Carefully Tupper laid his plate on the ground and 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.'
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
'Maybe a whole lot more than Millville.'
'What are you going to do now, Brad?'
'Go down into my garden and have a hard look at some flowers.'
'Flowers?'
'Alf,' I told him, 'it's a long, long story. I'll tell you later. Are
you staying on?'
'Of course I am,' said All 'The greatest show on earth and me with a
ringside seat.'
'I'll call you back in an hour or so.'
'I'll stay close,' he promised. 'I'll be waiting for your call.'
I put down the phone and stood there, trying to make some head or tail
of it. The flowers, somehow, were important, and so was Tupper Tyler, but
they were all mixed up together and there was no place one could start.
I went out of the house and down into the garden by the greenhouse. The
trail that Tupper had left was still plain and I was considerably relieved,
for I had been afraid that the wind that brought the seeds might have blown
it away, that the flowers might have been so beaten and so twisted that the
trail could well be lost.
I stood at the edge of the garden and looked around, as if I were
seeing the place for the first time in my life. It wasn't really a garden.
At one time it had been land on which we'd grown the stuff we sold, but when
I quit the greenhouse business I'd simply let it go wild and the flowers had
taken over. To one side stood the greenhouse, with its door hanging on the
broken hinges and most of the panes gone from the windows. And at one corner
of it stood the elm tree that had grown from seed - the one I'd been about
to pull up when my father stopped me.
Tupper had talked wildly about flowers growing by the acre. All of
them, he said, had been purple flowers and he had been most emphatic that my
father should be told of them. The mystery voice, or one of the mystery
voices on the phone had been well informed about my father's greenhouse and
had asked if I still ran it. And there had been, less than an hour ago, a
perfect storm of seeds.
All the little purple flower-heads with their monkey faces seemed to be
nodding at me as if at a secret joke and I jerked my gaze away from them to
stare up at the sky. Broken clouds still streamed across it, shutting out
the sun. Although, once the clouds were gone, the day would be a scorcher.
One could smell the heat in the very air.
I moved out into the garden, following Tupper's trail. At the end of
the trail I stopped and told myself that it had been a witless thing - this
belief of mine that I would find something in this flower patch that would
make some sense.
Tupper Tyler had disappeared ten years ago and he'd disappeared today
and how he'd managed it no man might ever know.
And yet the idea still went on banging in my skull that Tupper was the
key to all this screwy business.
Yet I couldn't, for the life of me, explain the logic of my thinking.
For Tupper wasn't the only one involved - if he was, in fact, involved.
There was Stiffy Grant as well. And I realized, with a start, that I had not
asked anyone how Stiffy might be doing.
Doc Fabian's house was on the hill just above the greenhouse and I
could go up there and ask. Doc might not be home, of course, but I could
wait around a while and eventually he'd show up. At the moment there was
nothing else to do. And with Hiram and Tom Preston shooting off their
mouths, it might be a good idea not to be found at home.
I had been standing at the end of Tupper's trail and now I took a step
beyond it, setting out for Doc's. But I never got to Doc's. I took that
single step and the sun came out and the houses went away. Doc's house and
all the other houses, and the trees as well, and the bushes and the grass.
Everything disappeared and there was nothing left but the purple flowers,
which covered everything, and a sun that was blazing out of a cloudless sky.
I had taken that one step and everything had happened. So now I took
another one to bring my feet together and I stood there, stiff and scared,
afraid to turn around afraid, perhaps, of what I'd see behind me. Although I
think I knew what I would see behind me. Just more purple flowers.
For this, I knew, in one dim corner of my curdled mind, was the place
that Tupper had been telling me about.
Tupper had come out of this place and he'd gone back to this place and
now I'd followed him.
Nothing happened.
And that was right, of course. For it seemed to me, somehow, that this
would be the sort of place where nothing ever happened.
There were just the flowers and the sun blazing in the sky and there
was nothing else. There wasn't a breath of wind and there was no sound. But
there was a fragrance, the almost overpowering, cloying fragrance of all
those little blossoms with their monkey faces.
At last I dared to move and I slowly turned around. And there was
nothing but the flowers.
Millville had gone away somewhere, into some other world.
Although that was wrong, I told myself. For somewhere, in its same old
world, there yet must be a Millville. It had not been Millville, but myself,
that had gone away. I had taken just one step and had walked clear out of
Millville into another place.
Yet, while it was a different place, the terrain seemed to be identical
with the old terrain. I still was standing in the dip of ground that lay
behind my house and back of me the hill rose steeply to the now non-existent
street where Doc's house had stood and a half a mile away loomed the hill
where the Sherwood house should be.
This, then, was Tupper's world. It was the world into which he had gone
ten years ago and again this morning. Which meant that, at this very moment,
he must still be here.
And that meant, I told myself with a sudden rush of hope, that there
was a chance of getting out, of getting back to Millvile. For Tupper had
gotten back again and thus must know the way. Although, I realized, one
never could be sure. You never could be sure of anything with a dope like
Tupper Tyler.
The first thing to do, of course, was find him. He could not be far
off. It might take a while, but I was fairly confident that I could track
him down.
I walked slowly up the hill that, back in my home village, would have
taken me to Doc Fabian's place.
I reached the top of the hill and stopped and there, below me, lay the
far sweep of land clothed by the purple flowers.
The land looked strange, robbed of all its landmarks, naked of its
trees and roads and houses. But it lay, I saw, as it had lain. If there were
any differences, they were minor ones.
There, to the east, was the wet and swampy land below the little knoll
where Stiffy's shack had stood - where Stiffy's shack still stood in another
time or place.
What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step
from one world to another.
I stood, a stranger in an unknown land, with the perfume of the flowers
dogging not my nostrils only, but every pore of me, pressing in upon me, as
if the flowers themselves were rolling in great purple waves to bear me down
and bury me for all eternity. The world was quiet; it was the quietest place
I had ever been. There was no sound at all. And I realized that perhaps at
no time in my life had I ever known silence. Always there had been something
that had made some sort of noise - the chirring of a lone insect in the
quiet of a summer noon, or the rustle of a leaf. Even in the dead of night
there would have been the creaking of the timbers in the house, the murmur
of the furnace, the slight keening of a wind that ran along the eaves.
But there was silence here. There was no sound at all. There was no
sound, I knew, because there was nothing that could make a sound. There were
no trees or bushes; there were no birds or insects. There was nothing here
but the flowers and the soil in which they grew.
A silence and the emptiness that held the silence in its hand, and the
purpleness that ran to the far horizon to meet the burnished, pale-blue
brightness of a summer sky.
Now, for the first time, I felt panic stalking me - not a big and burly
panic that would send one fleeing, howling as he fled, but a little, sneaky
panic that circled all about me, like a pesky, yapping dog, bouncing on its
pipestem legs, waiting for a chance to sink its needle teeth in me. Nothing
one could fight, nothing one could stand against - a little yapping panic
that set the nerves on edge.
There was no fear of danger, for there was no danger. One could see
with half an eye that there was no danger. But there was, perhaps worse than
any danger, the silence and the loneliness and the sameness and the not
knowing where you were.
Down the slope was the wet and swampy area where Stiffy's shack should
be, and there, a little farther off, the silver track of river that ran at
the edge of town. And at the place where the river bent toward the south, a
plume of smoke rose daintily against the blue wash of the sky - so faint and
far a trickle that one could barely make it out.
'Tupper!' I shouted, running down the slope, glad of a chance to run,
of some reason I should run, for I had been standing, determined not to run,
determined not to allow the little yapping panic to force me into running,
and all the time I'd stood there I had ached to run.
I crossed the little ridge that hid the river and the camp lay there
before me - a tiny hut of crudely woven branches, a garden full of growing
things, and all along the river bank little straggling, dying trees, with
most of their branches dead and bearing only a few tassels of green leaves
at their very tops.
A small campfire burned in front of the hut and squatting by the fire
was Tupper. He wore the shirt and trousers I had given him and he still had
the outrageous hat perched on his head.
'Tupper!' I shouted and he rose and came gravely up the slope to meet
me. He wiped off his chin and held out his hand in greeting. It still was
wet with slobber, but I didn't mind.
Tupper wasn't much, but he was another human.
'Glad you could make it, Brad,' he said. 'Glad you could drop over.'
As if I'd been dropping over every day, for years.
'Nice place you have,' I said.
'They did it all for me,' he said, with a show of pride. 'The Flowers
fixed it up for me. It wasn't like this to start with, but they fixed it up
for me. They have been good to me.'
'Yes, they have,' I said.
I didn't know what it was all about, but I went along. I had to go
along. There was just a chance that Tupper could get me back to Millville.
'They're the best friends I have,' said Tupper, slobbering in his
happiness. 'That is, except for you and your papa. Until I found the
Flowers, you and your papa were the only friends I had. All the rest of them
just made fun of me. I let on I didn't know that they were making fun, but I
knew they were and I didn't like it.'
'They weren't really unkind,' I assured him. 'They really didn't mean
what they said or did. They were only being thoughtless.'
'They shouldn't have done it,' Tupper insisted. 'You never made any fun
of me. I like you because you never made any fun of me.'
And he was right, of course. I'd not made fun of him. But not because I
hadn't wanted to at times; there were times when I could have killed him.
But my father had taken me off to the side one day and warned me that if he
ever caught me making fun of Tupper, like the other kids, he would warm my
bottom.'
'This is the place you were telling me about,' I said. 'The place with
all the flowers.'
He grinned delightedly, drooling from both corners of his mouth 'Ain't
it nice?' he said.
We had been walking down the slope together and now we reached the
fire. A crude clay pot was standing in the ashes and there was something
bubbling in it.
'You'll stay and eat with me,' invited Tupper. 'Please, Brad, say
you'll stay and eat with me. It's been so long since I've had anyone who
would eat with me.'
Weak tears were running down his cheeks at the thought of how long it
had been since he'd had someone who would stay and eat with him.
'I got corn and potatoes roasting in the coals,' he said, 'and I got
peas and beans and carrots all cooked up together. That's them in the pot.
There isn't any meat. You don't mind, do you, if there isn't any meat?'
'Not at all,' I told him.
'I miss meat something dreadful,' he confided. 'But they can't do
anything about it. They can't turn themselves into animals.'
'They?' I asked.
'The Flowers,' he said, and the way he said it, he made them a proper
noun. 'They can turn themselves into anything at all - plant things, that
is. But they can't make themselves into things like pigs or rabbits. I never
asked them to. That is, I mean I never asked them twice. I asked them once
and they explained to me. I never asked again, for they've done a lot of
things for me and I am grateful to them.'
'They explained to you? You mean you talk with them.'
'All the time,' said Tupper.
He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hut, scrabbling
around for something, with his back end sticking out, like a busy dog
digging out a woodchuck.
He backed out and he brought with him a couple of crude pottery plates,
lopsided and uneven. He put them down upon the ground and laid on each of
them a spoon carved out of wood.
'Made them myself,' he told me. 'Found some clay down in the river bank
and at first I couldn't seem to do it, but then they found out for me
and...'
'The Flowers found out for you?'
'Sure, the Flowers. They do everything for me.'
'And the spoons?'
'Used a piece of stone. Flint, I guess. Had a sharp edge on it. Nothing
like a knife, but it did the job. Took a long time, though.'
I nodded.
'But that's all right,' he said. 'I had a lot of time.'
He did a mopping job and wiped his hands meticulously on his trouser
seat.
'They grew flax for me,' he said, 'so I could make some clothes. But I
couldn't get the hang of it. They told me and they told me, but I couldn't
do it. So they finally quit. I went around without no clothes for quite a
spell. Except for this hat,' he said. 'I did that myself, without no help at
all. They didn't even tell me, I figured it all out and did it by myself.
Afterwards they told me that I'd done real good.'
'They were right,' I said. 'It's magnificent.' 'You really think so,
Brad?'
'Of course I do,' I said.
'I'm glad to hear you say so, Brad. I'm kind of proud of it. It's the
first thing in my life I ever did alone, without no one telling me.'
'These flowers of yours...'
'They ain't my flowers,' said Tupper, sharply.
'You say these flowers can turn themselves into anything they want to.
You mean they turned themselves into garden stuff for you.'
'They can turn themselves into any kind of plants. All I do is ask
them.'
'Then, if they can be anything they want to be, why are they all
flowers?'
'They have to be something, don't they?' Tupper demanded, rather
heatedly. 'They might as well be flowers.'
'Well, yes,' I said. 'I suppose they might.'
He raked two ears of corn out of the coals and a couple of potatoes. He
used a pot-lifter that looked as if it were fashioned out of bark to get the
pot off the fire. He dumped the cooked vegetables that were in it out onto
the plates.
'And the trees?' I asked.
'Oh, them are things they changed themselves into. I needed them for
wood. There wasn't any wood to start with and I couldn't do no cooking and I
told them how it was. So they made the trees and they made them special for
me. They grow fast and die so that I can break branches off and have dry
wood for fire. Slow burning, though, not like ordinary dry wood. And that's
good, for I have to keep a fire burning all the time. I had a pocket full of
matches when I came here, but I haven't had any for a long, long time.'
I remembered when he spoke about the pocket full of matches how
entranced he had always been with fire. He always carried matches with him
and he'd sit quietly by himself and light match after match, letting each
burn down until it scorched his fingers, happy with the sight of flame. A
lot of people had been afraid that he might bunt some building down, but he
never did. He was just a little jerk who liked the sight of fire.
'I haven't any salt; said Tupper. 'The stuff may taste funny to you.
I've got used to it.'
'But you eat vegetables all the time. You need salt for that kind of
stuff'
'The Flowers say I don't. They say they put things into the vegetables
that takes the place of salt. Not that you can taste it, but it gives you
the things you need just the same as salt. They studied me to find out what
my body needed and they put in a lot of stuff they said I needed. And just
down the river I have an orchard full of fruit. And I have raspberries and
strawberries that bear almost all the time.'
I couldn't rightly understand what fruit had to do with the problem of
nutrition if the Flowers could do all he said they could, but I let the
matter stand. One never got anywhere trying to get Tupper straightened out.
If you tried to reason with him, you just made matters worse.
'We might as well sit down,' said Tupper, 'and get started on this.'
I sat down on the ground and he handed me a plate, then sat down
opposite me and took the other plate.
I was hungry and the saltless food didn't go so badly. Flat, of course,
and tasting just a little strange, but it was all right. It took away the
hunger.
'You like it here? I asked.
'It is home to me,' said Tupper, solemnly. 'It is where my friends
are.'
'You don't have anything,' I said. 'You don't have an axe or knife. You
don't have a pot or pan. And there is no one you can turn to. What if you
got sick?'
Tupper quit wolfing down his food and stared at me, as if I were the
crazy one.
'I don't need any of those things,' he said. 'I make my dishes out of
clay. I can break off the branches with my hands and I don't need an axe. I
don't need to hoe the garden. There aren't ever any weeds. I don't even need
to plant it. It's always there. While I use up one row of stuff, another row
is growing. And if I got sick, the Flowers would take care of me. They told
me they would.'
'OK,' I said. 'OK.'
He went back to his eating. It was a terrible sight to watch. But he
was right about the garden. Now that he had mentioned it, I could see that
it wasn't cultivated. There were rows of growing vegetables - long, neat
rows without the sign of ever being hoed and without a single weed. And
that, of course, was the way it would be, for no weed would dare to grow
here. There was nothing that could grow here except the Flowers themselves,
or the things into which the Flowers had turned themselves, like the
vegetables and trees.
The garden was a perfect garden. There were no stunted plants and no
disease or blight. The tomatoes, hanging on the vines, were an even red and
all were perfect globes. The corn stood straight and tall.
'You cooked enough for two,' I said. 'Did you know that I was coming?'
For I was fast reaching the point where I'd have believed almost
anything. It was just possible, I told myself that he (or the Flowers) had
known that I was coming.
'I always cook enough for two,' he told me. 'There never is no telling
when someone might drop in.'
'But no one ever has?'
'You're the first,' he said. 'I'm glad that you could come.'
I wondered if time had any meaning for him. Sometimes it seemed it
didn't. And yet he had wept weak tears because it had been so long since
anyone had broken bread with him.
We ate in silence for a while and then I took a chance. I'd humoured
him long enough and it was time to ask some questions.
'Where is this place?' I asked. 'What kind of place is it? And if you
want to get out of it, to get back home, how do you go about it?
I didn't mention the fact that he had gotten out of it and returned to
Millville. I sensed it might be something he would resent, for he'd been in
a hurry to get back again - as if he'd broken some sort of rule or
regulation and was anxious to return before anyone found out.
Carefully Tupper laid his plate on the ground and 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.'
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