madhouse. I might be involved and so might Gerald Sherwood - and Stiffy,
too, if he were here.
I ran off the street and plunged down the slope back of the Fabian
house, heading for the little swale where the money crop was growing. It was
not until I was halfway down the slope that I thought of Hiram. Earlier in
the day he had been guarding the money bushes and he might still be there. I
skidded to a halt and crouched against the ground. Quickly I surveyed the
area below me, then went slowly over it, looking for any hunch of darkness,
any movement that might betray a watcher.
From far away I heard a shout and on the Street above someone ran, feet
pounding on the pavement. A door banged and somewhere, several blocks away,
a car was started and the driver gunned the engine. The excited voice of a
news commentator floated thinly through an open window, but I could not make
out the words.
There was no sign of Hiram.
I rose from my crouch and went slowly down the slope. I reached the
garden and made my way across it. Ahead of me loomed the shattered
greenhouse, and growing at its corner the seedling elm tree.
I came up to the greenhouse and stood beside it for a moment, taking
one last look for Hiram, to make sure he wasn't sneaking up on me. Then I
started to move on, but a voice spoke to me and the sound of the voice froze
me.
Although, even as I stood frozen, I realized there'd been no sound.
Bradshaw Carter, said the voice once again, speaking with no sound.
And there was a smell of purpleness - perhaps not a smell, exactly, but
a sense of purpleness. It lay heavy in the air and it took me back in sharp
and crystal memory to Tupper Tyler's camp where the Presence had waited on
the hillside to walk me back to Earth.
'Yes,' I said. 'Where are you?'
The seedling elm at the corner of the greenhouse seemed to sway,
although there was not breeze enough to sway it.
I am here, it said. I have been here all the years. I have been looking
forward to this time when I could talk with you.
'You know?' I asked, and it was a foolish question, for somehow I was
sure it knew about the bomb and all the rest of it.
We know, said the elm tree, but there can be no despair.
'No despair?' I asked, aghast.
If we fail this time, it said, we will try again. Another place,
perhaps. Or we may have to wait the - what do you call it?
'The radiation,' I said. 'That is what you call it.'
Until, said the purpleness, the radiations leave.
'That will be years,' I said.
We have the years, it said. We have all the time there is. There is no
end of us. There is no end of time.
'But there is an end of time for us,' I said, with a gush of pity for
all humanity, but mostly for myself. 'There is an end for me.'
Yes, we know, said the purpleness. We feel much sorrow for you.
And now, I knew, was the time to ask for help, to point out that we
were in this situation through no choice and no action of our own, and that
those who had placed us in it should help to get us out.
But when I tried to say the words, I couldn't make them come. I
couldn't admit to this alien thing our complete helplessness.
It was, I suppose, stubbornness and pride. But I had not known until I
tried to speak the words that I had the stubborness and pride.
We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of
sorrow - a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow
of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?
I would be bone and dust and eventually neither bone nor dust but
forgetfulness and clay, and these things would live on and on, forever.
And it would be more important, I knew, for us who would be bone and
dust to have a stubborn pride than it would be for a thing of strength and
surety. It was the one thing we had, the one thing we could cling to.
A purpleness, I thought, and what was the purpleness? It was not a
colour; it was something more than that. It was, perhaps, the odour of
immortality, the effluvium of that great uncaring which could not afford to
care since anything it cared for could only last a day, while it went on
into an eternal future toward other things and other lives for which it
could not allow itself to care.
And this was loneliness, I thought, a never-ending and hopeless
loneliness such as the human race would never be called upon to face.
Standing there, touching the hard, cold edge of that loneliness, I felt
pity stir in me and it seemed strange that one should feel pity for a tree.
Although, I knew, it was not the tree nor the purple flowers but the
Presence that had walked me home and that was here as well - the same life
stuff of which I myself was made - that I felt pity for.
'I am sorry for you, too,' I said, but even as I spoke I knew it would
not understand the pity any more than it would have understood the pride if
it had known about the pride.
A car came screeching around the curve on the street above the swale
and the illumination of its headlights slashed across the greenhouse. I
flinched away, but the lights were gone before the flinch had finished.
Somewhere out in the darkness someone was calling me, speaking softly,
almost fearfully.
Another car came around the curve, turning fast, its tires howling on
the turn. The first car was stopping at my house, skidding on the pavement
as the brakes spun it to a halt.
'Brad!' said the soft and fearful voice. 'Are you out there, Brad?'
'Nancy,' I said. 'Nancy, over here.'
There was something wrong, I knew, something terribly wrong. There was
a tenseness in her voice, as if she were speaking through a haze of terror.
And there was a wrongness, too, about those speeding cars stopping at the
house.
'I thought I heard you talking,' Nancy said, 'but I couldn't see you.
You weren't in the house and...'
A man was running around the back of the house, a dark shadow outlined
briefly by the street lamp at the corner. Out in front were other men; I
could hear their running and the angry mumble of them.
'Brad,' said Nancy.
'Hold it,' I cautioned. 'There's something wrong.'
I could see her now. She was stumbling toward me through the darkness.
Up by the house a voice yelled: 'We know you're in there, Carter! We're
coming in to get you if you don't come out!'
I turned and ran toward Nancy and caught her in my arms. She was
shivering.
'Those men,' she said.
'Hiram and his pals,' I said.
Glass crashed and a streak of fire went arcing through the night.
'Now, damn it,' someone yelled, triumphantly, 'maybe you'll come out.'
'Run,' I said to Nancy. 'Up the hill. Get in among the trees...'
'It's Stiffy,' she whispered back. 'I saw him and he sent me...'
A sudden glow of fire leaped up inside the house. The windows in the
dining-room flared like gleaming eyes. And in the light cast by the flame I
saw the dark figures gambolling, screaming now in a mindless frenzy.
Nancy turned and ran and I pelted after her, and behind us a voice
boomed above the bawling of the mob.
'There he goes!' the voice shouted. 'Down there in the garden!'
Something caught my foot and tripped me and I fell, sprawling among the
money bushes. The scraggly branches raked across my face and clawed at my
clothes as I struggled to my feet.
A tongue of whipping flame leaped above the house, funnelled through
the hole the time machine had punched in the roof, and the windows all were
glowing now. In the sudden silence I could hear the sucking roar of fire
eating through the structure.
They were running down the slope toward the garden a silent group of
men. The pounding of their feet and the ugly gasping of their breath came
across the space between us.
I stooped and ran my hand along the ground and in the darkness found
the thing that tripped me. My fingers closed about it and I brought it up, a
four foot length of two-by-four, old and beginning to rot along its edges,
but still sound in the core.
A club, I thought, and this was the end of it. But one of them would
die perhaps two of them while they were killing me.
'Run!' I screamed at Nancy, knowing she was out there somewhere,
although I could not see her.
There was just one thing left, I told myself one thing more that I must
do. And that was to get Hiram Martin with the club before the mob closed
over me.
They had reached the bottom of the slope and were charging across the
flat ground of the garden, with Hiram in the lead. I stood and waited for
them, with the club half raised, watching Hiram run toward me, with the
white gash of his teeth shining in the darkness of his face.
Right between the eyes, I told myself, and split his skull wide open.
And after that get another of them if there were time to do it.
The fire was roaring now, racing through the dryness of the house, and
even where I stood the heat reached out to touch me.
The men were closing in and I raised the club a little higher, working
my fingers to get a better grip upon it.
But in that last instant before they came within my reach, they skidded
to a milling halt, some of them half turning to run back up the slope, the
others simply staring, with their mouths wide open in astonishment and
horror. Staring, not at me, but at something that was beyond me.
Then they broke and ran, back toward the slope, and above the roaring
of the burning house, I could hear their bellowing - like stampeded cattle
racing before a prairie fire, bawling out their terror as they ran.
I swung around to look behind me and there stood those other things
from that other world, their ebon hides gleaming in the flicker of the
firelight, their silver plumes stirring gently in the breeze. And as they
moved toward me, they twittered in their weird bird-song.
My God, I thought, they couldn't wait! They came a little early so they
wouldn't miss a single tremor of this terror-stricken place.
And not only on this night, but on other nights to come, rolling back
the time to this present instant. A new place for them to stand and wait for
it to commence, a new ghost house with gaping windows through which they'd
glimpse the awfulness of another earth.
They were moving toward me and I was standing there with the club
gripped in my hands and there was the smell of purpleness again and a
soundless voice I recognized.
Go back, the voice said. Go back. You've come too soon. This world
isn't open.
Someone was calling from far away, the call lest in the thundering and
the crackling of the fire and the high, excited, liquid trilling of these
ghouls from the purple world of Tupper Tyler.
Go back, said the elm tree, and its voiceless words cracked like a
snapped whiplash.
And they were going back - or, at least, they were disappearing,
melting into some strange darkness that was blacker than the night.
One elm tree that talked, I thought, and how many other trees? How much
of this place still was Millville and how much purple world? I lifted my
head so that I could see the treetops that rimmed the garden and they were
there, ghosts against the sky, fluttering in some strange wind that blew
from an unknown quarter. Fluttering - or were they talking, too? The old,
dumb, stupid trees of earth, or a different kind of tree from a different
earth?
We'd never know, I told myself, and perhaps it did not matter, for from
the very start we'd never had a chance. We were licked before we started. We
had been lost on that long-gone day when my father brought home the purple
flowers.
From far off someone was calling and the name was mine.
I dropped the two-by-four and started across the garden, wondering who
it was. Not Nancy, but someone that I knew.
Nancy came running down the hill. 'Hurry, Brad,' she called.
'Where were you?' I asked. 'What's going on?'
'It's Stuffy. I told you it was Stuffy. He's waiting at the barrier. He
sneaked through the guards. He says he has to see you.'
'But Stiffy...'
'He's here, I tell you. And he wants to talk with you. No one else will
do.'
She turned and trotted up the hill and I lumbered after her. We went
through Doc's yard and across the street and through another yard and there,
just ahead of us, I knew, was the barrier.
A gnome-like figure rose from the ground.
'That you, lad?' he asked.
I hunkered down at the edge of the barrier and stared across at him.
'Yes, it's me,' I said, 'but you...'
'Later. We haven't got much time. The guards know I got through the
lines. They're hunting for me.'
'What do you want?' I asked.
'Not what I want,' he said. What everybody wants. Something that you
need. You're in a jam.'
'Everyone's in a jam,' I said.
'That's what I mean,' said Stuffy. 'Some damn fool in the Pentagon is
set to drop a bomb. I heard some of the ruckus on a car radio when I was
sneaking through. Just a snatch of it,
'So, all right,' I said. 'The human race is sunk.'
'Not sunk,' insisted Stuffy. 'I tell you there's a way. If Washington
just understood, if...'
'If you know a way,' I asked, 'why waste time in reaching me? You could
have told...'
'Who would I tell?' asked Stuffy. 'Who would believe me, even if I
told? I'm just a lousy bum and I ran off from that hospital and...'
'All right,' I said. 'All right.'
'You were the man to tell,' said Stiffy. 'You're accredited, it seems
like. Someone will listen to you. You can get in touch with someone and
they'll listen to you.'
'If it was good enough,' I said.
'This is good enough,' said Stuffy. We have something that the aliens
want. We're the only people who can give it to them.'
'Give to them!' I shouted. 'Anything they want, they can take away from
us.'
'Not this, they can't,' said Stuffy.
I shook my head. 'You make it sound too easy. They already have us
hooked. The people want them in, although they'd come in anyhow, even if the
people didn't. They hit us in our weak spot . . .'
'The Flowers have a weak spot, too,' said Stuffy.
'Don't make me laugh,' I said.
'You're just upset,' said Stiffy.
'You're damned right I am.'
And I had a right to be. The world had gone to pot. Nuclear
annihilation was poised above our heads and the village, wild before, would
be running frantic when Hiram told what he'd seen down in the garden. Hiram
and his hoodlum pals had burned down my house and I didn't have a home - no
one had a home, for the earth was home no longer. It was just another in a
long, long chain of worlds that was being taken over by another kind of life
that mankind had no chance of fighting.
'The Flowers are an ancient race,' said Stuffy. 'How ancient, I don't
know. A billion years, two billion, it's anybody's guess. They've gone into
a lot of worlds and they've known a lot of races - intelligent races, that
is. And they've worked with these races and gone hand in hand with them. But
no other race has ever loved them. No other race has ever grown them in
their gardens and tended them for the beauty that they gave and no . . .'
'You're crazy!' I yelled. 'You're stark, raving mad.'
'Brad,' said Nancy, breathlessly, 'he could be right, you know.
Realization of natural beauty is something the human race developed in the
last two thousand years or so. No caveman ever thought a flower was
beautiful or...'
'You're right,' said Stuffy. 'No other race, none of the other races,
ever developed the concept of beauty. Only a man of Earth would have dug up
a clump of flowers growing in the woods and brought them home and tended
them for the beauty that the Flowers had never known they had until that
very moment. No one had ever loved them before, for any reason, or cared for
them before. Like a lovely woman who had never known she was beautiful until
someone told her that she was. Like an orphan that never had a home and
finally found a home.'
It was simple, I told myself. It couldn't be that simple. There was
nothing ever simple. Yet, when one thought of it, it seemed to make some
sense. And it was the only thing that made any sense.
'The Flowers made one condition,' Stuffy said. 'Let us make another.
Let us insist that a certain percentage of them, when we invite them, must
remain as flowers.'
'So that the people of the earth,' said Nancy, 'can cultivate them and
lavish care on them and admire them for themselves.'
Stuffy chuckled softly. 'I've thought on it a lot,' he said. 'I could
write that clause myself...'
Would it work, I wondered. Would it really work?
And, of course, it would.
The business of being flowers loved by another race, cared for by
another race, would bind these aliens to us as closely as we would be bound
to them by the banishment of war.
A different kind of bond, but as strong a bond as that which bound man
and dog together. And that bond was all we needed; one that would give us
time to learn to work together.
We would never need to fear the Flowers, for we were someone they had
been looking for, not knowing they were looking for us, not once suspecting
that the sort of thing existed that we could offer them.
'Something new,' I said.
'Yeah, something new,' said Stuffy.
Something new and strange, I told myself. As new and strange to the
Flowers as their time manipulation was new and strange to us.
'Well,' asked Stuffy, 'do you buy it? There's a bunch of soldier boys
out here looking for me. They know I slipped through the lines and in a
little while they'll nose me out.'
The State Department man and the senator, I recalled, had talked this
very morning of long negotiation if, in fact, there could be negotiation.
And the general had talked in terms of force. But all the time the answer
had lain in a soft and very human trait, mankind's love of beauty. It had
remained for an undistinguished man, no senator or no general, but a crummy
bum, to come up with the answer.
'Call in your soldier boys,' I said, 'and ask them for a phone. I'd
just as soon not go hunting one.'
First I'd have to reach the senator and he'd talk to the President.
Then I'd get hold of Higgy and tell him what had happened so he could tame
down the village.
But for a little moment I'd have it as I wanted to remember it, here
with Nancy at my side and that old reprobate friend of mine across the
barrier, savouring the greatness of this tiny slice of time in which the
strength of true humanity (not of position or of power) rose to the vision
of a future in which many different races marched side by side toward a
glory we could not guess as yet.
too, if he were here.
I ran off the street and plunged down the slope back of the Fabian
house, heading for the little swale where the money crop was growing. It was
not until I was halfway down the slope that I thought of Hiram. Earlier in
the day he had been guarding the money bushes and he might still be there. I
skidded to a halt and crouched against the ground. Quickly I surveyed the
area below me, then went slowly over it, looking for any hunch of darkness,
any movement that might betray a watcher.
From far away I heard a shout and on the Street above someone ran, feet
pounding on the pavement. A door banged and somewhere, several blocks away,
a car was started and the driver gunned the engine. The excited voice of a
news commentator floated thinly through an open window, but I could not make
out the words.
There was no sign of Hiram.
I rose from my crouch and went slowly down the slope. I reached the
garden and made my way across it. Ahead of me loomed the shattered
greenhouse, and growing at its corner the seedling elm tree.
I came up to the greenhouse and stood beside it for a moment, taking
one last look for Hiram, to make sure he wasn't sneaking up on me. Then I
started to move on, but a voice spoke to me and the sound of the voice froze
me.
Although, even as I stood frozen, I realized there'd been no sound.
Bradshaw Carter, said the voice once again, speaking with no sound.
And there was a smell of purpleness - perhaps not a smell, exactly, but
a sense of purpleness. It lay heavy in the air and it took me back in sharp
and crystal memory to Tupper Tyler's camp where the Presence had waited on
the hillside to walk me back to Earth.
'Yes,' I said. 'Where are you?'
The seedling elm at the corner of the greenhouse seemed to sway,
although there was not breeze enough to sway it.
I am here, it said. I have been here all the years. I have been looking
forward to this time when I could talk with you.
'You know?' I asked, and it was a foolish question, for somehow I was
sure it knew about the bomb and all the rest of it.
We know, said the elm tree, but there can be no despair.
'No despair?' I asked, aghast.
If we fail this time, it said, we will try again. Another place,
perhaps. Or we may have to wait the - what do you call it?
'The radiation,' I said. 'That is what you call it.'
Until, said the purpleness, the radiations leave.
'That will be years,' I said.
We have the years, it said. We have all the time there is. There is no
end of us. There is no end of time.
'But there is an end of time for us,' I said, with a gush of pity for
all humanity, but mostly for myself. 'There is an end for me.'
Yes, we know, said the purpleness. We feel much sorrow for you.
And now, I knew, was the time to ask for help, to point out that we
were in this situation through no choice and no action of our own, and that
those who had placed us in it should help to get us out.
But when I tried to say the words, I couldn't make them come. I
couldn't admit to this alien thing our complete helplessness.
It was, I suppose, stubbornness and pride. But I had not known until I
tried to speak the words that I had the stubborness and pride.
We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of
sorrow - a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow
of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?
I would be bone and dust and eventually neither bone nor dust but
forgetfulness and clay, and these things would live on and on, forever.
And it would be more important, I knew, for us who would be bone and
dust to have a stubborn pride than it would be for a thing of strength and
surety. It was the one thing we had, the one thing we could cling to.
A purpleness, I thought, and what was the purpleness? It was not a
colour; it was something more than that. It was, perhaps, the odour of
immortality, the effluvium of that great uncaring which could not afford to
care since anything it cared for could only last a day, while it went on
into an eternal future toward other things and other lives for which it
could not allow itself to care.
And this was loneliness, I thought, a never-ending and hopeless
loneliness such as the human race would never be called upon to face.
Standing there, touching the hard, cold edge of that loneliness, I felt
pity stir in me and it seemed strange that one should feel pity for a tree.
Although, I knew, it was not the tree nor the purple flowers but the
Presence that had walked me home and that was here as well - the same life
stuff of which I myself was made - that I felt pity for.
'I am sorry for you, too,' I said, but even as I spoke I knew it would
not understand the pity any more than it would have understood the pride if
it had known about the pride.
A car came screeching around the curve on the street above the swale
and the illumination of its headlights slashed across the greenhouse. I
flinched away, but the lights were gone before the flinch had finished.
Somewhere out in the darkness someone was calling me, speaking softly,
almost fearfully.
Another car came around the curve, turning fast, its tires howling on
the turn. The first car was stopping at my house, skidding on the pavement
as the brakes spun it to a halt.
'Brad!' said the soft and fearful voice. 'Are you out there, Brad?'
'Nancy,' I said. 'Nancy, over here.'
There was something wrong, I knew, something terribly wrong. There was
a tenseness in her voice, as if she were speaking through a haze of terror.
And there was a wrongness, too, about those speeding cars stopping at the
house.
'I thought I heard you talking,' Nancy said, 'but I couldn't see you.
You weren't in the house and...'
A man was running around the back of the house, a dark shadow outlined
briefly by the street lamp at the corner. Out in front were other men; I
could hear their running and the angry mumble of them.
'Brad,' said Nancy.
'Hold it,' I cautioned. 'There's something wrong.'
I could see her now. She was stumbling toward me through the darkness.
Up by the house a voice yelled: 'We know you're in there, Carter! We're
coming in to get you if you don't come out!'
I turned and ran toward Nancy and caught her in my arms. She was
shivering.
'Those men,' she said.
'Hiram and his pals,' I said.
Glass crashed and a streak of fire went arcing through the night.
'Now, damn it,' someone yelled, triumphantly, 'maybe you'll come out.'
'Run,' I said to Nancy. 'Up the hill. Get in among the trees...'
'It's Stiffy,' she whispered back. 'I saw him and he sent me...'
A sudden glow of fire leaped up inside the house. The windows in the
dining-room flared like gleaming eyes. And in the light cast by the flame I
saw the dark figures gambolling, screaming now in a mindless frenzy.
Nancy turned and ran and I pelted after her, and behind us a voice
boomed above the bawling of the mob.
'There he goes!' the voice shouted. 'Down there in the garden!'
Something caught my foot and tripped me and I fell, sprawling among the
money bushes. The scraggly branches raked across my face and clawed at my
clothes as I struggled to my feet.
A tongue of whipping flame leaped above the house, funnelled through
the hole the time machine had punched in the roof, and the windows all were
glowing now. In the sudden silence I could hear the sucking roar of fire
eating through the structure.
They were running down the slope toward the garden a silent group of
men. The pounding of their feet and the ugly gasping of their breath came
across the space between us.
I stooped and ran my hand along the ground and in the darkness found
the thing that tripped me. My fingers closed about it and I brought it up, a
four foot length of two-by-four, old and beginning to rot along its edges,
but still sound in the core.
A club, I thought, and this was the end of it. But one of them would
die perhaps two of them while they were killing me.
'Run!' I screamed at Nancy, knowing she was out there somewhere,
although I could not see her.
There was just one thing left, I told myself one thing more that I must
do. And that was to get Hiram Martin with the club before the mob closed
over me.
They had reached the bottom of the slope and were charging across the
flat ground of the garden, with Hiram in the lead. I stood and waited for
them, with the club half raised, watching Hiram run toward me, with the
white gash of his teeth shining in the darkness of his face.
Right between the eyes, I told myself, and split his skull wide open.
And after that get another of them if there were time to do it.
The fire was roaring now, racing through the dryness of the house, and
even where I stood the heat reached out to touch me.
The men were closing in and I raised the club a little higher, working
my fingers to get a better grip upon it.
But in that last instant before they came within my reach, they skidded
to a milling halt, some of them half turning to run back up the slope, the
others simply staring, with their mouths wide open in astonishment and
horror. Staring, not at me, but at something that was beyond me.
Then they broke and ran, back toward the slope, and above the roaring
of the burning house, I could hear their bellowing - like stampeded cattle
racing before a prairie fire, bawling out their terror as they ran.
I swung around to look behind me and there stood those other things
from that other world, their ebon hides gleaming in the flicker of the
firelight, their silver plumes stirring gently in the breeze. And as they
moved toward me, they twittered in their weird bird-song.
My God, I thought, they couldn't wait! They came a little early so they
wouldn't miss a single tremor of this terror-stricken place.
And not only on this night, but on other nights to come, rolling back
the time to this present instant. A new place for them to stand and wait for
it to commence, a new ghost house with gaping windows through which they'd
glimpse the awfulness of another earth.
They were moving toward me and I was standing there with the club
gripped in my hands and there was the smell of purpleness again and a
soundless voice I recognized.
Go back, the voice said. Go back. You've come too soon. This world
isn't open.
Someone was calling from far away, the call lest in the thundering and
the crackling of the fire and the high, excited, liquid trilling of these
ghouls from the purple world of Tupper Tyler.
Go back, said the elm tree, and its voiceless words cracked like a
snapped whiplash.
And they were going back - or, at least, they were disappearing,
melting into some strange darkness that was blacker than the night.
One elm tree that talked, I thought, and how many other trees? How much
of this place still was Millville and how much purple world? I lifted my
head so that I could see the treetops that rimmed the garden and they were
there, ghosts against the sky, fluttering in some strange wind that blew
from an unknown quarter. Fluttering - or were they talking, too? The old,
dumb, stupid trees of earth, or a different kind of tree from a different
earth?
We'd never know, I told myself, and perhaps it did not matter, for from
the very start we'd never had a chance. We were licked before we started. We
had been lost on that long-gone day when my father brought home the purple
flowers.
From far off someone was calling and the name was mine.
I dropped the two-by-four and started across the garden, wondering who
it was. Not Nancy, but someone that I knew.
Nancy came running down the hill. 'Hurry, Brad,' she called.
'Where were you?' I asked. 'What's going on?'
'It's Stuffy. I told you it was Stuffy. He's waiting at the barrier. He
sneaked through the guards. He says he has to see you.'
'But Stiffy...'
'He's here, I tell you. And he wants to talk with you. No one else will
do.'
She turned and trotted up the hill and I lumbered after her. We went
through Doc's yard and across the street and through another yard and there,
just ahead of us, I knew, was the barrier.
A gnome-like figure rose from the ground.
'That you, lad?' he asked.
I hunkered down at the edge of the barrier and stared across at him.
'Yes, it's me,' I said, 'but you...'
'Later. We haven't got much time. The guards know I got through the
lines. They're hunting for me.'
'What do you want?' I asked.
'Not what I want,' he said. What everybody wants. Something that you
need. You're in a jam.'
'Everyone's in a jam,' I said.
'That's what I mean,' said Stuffy. 'Some damn fool in the Pentagon is
set to drop a bomb. I heard some of the ruckus on a car radio when I was
sneaking through. Just a snatch of it,
'So, all right,' I said. 'The human race is sunk.'
'Not sunk,' insisted Stuffy. 'I tell you there's a way. If Washington
just understood, if...'
'If you know a way,' I asked, 'why waste time in reaching me? You could
have told...'
'Who would I tell?' asked Stuffy. 'Who would believe me, even if I
told? I'm just a lousy bum and I ran off from that hospital and...'
'All right,' I said. 'All right.'
'You were the man to tell,' said Stiffy. 'You're accredited, it seems
like. Someone will listen to you. You can get in touch with someone and
they'll listen to you.'
'If it was good enough,' I said.
'This is good enough,' said Stuffy. We have something that the aliens
want. We're the only people who can give it to them.'
'Give to them!' I shouted. 'Anything they want, they can take away from
us.'
'Not this, they can't,' said Stuffy.
I shook my head. 'You make it sound too easy. They already have us
hooked. The people want them in, although they'd come in anyhow, even if the
people didn't. They hit us in our weak spot . . .'
'The Flowers have a weak spot, too,' said Stuffy.
'Don't make me laugh,' I said.
'You're just upset,' said Stiffy.
'You're damned right I am.'
And I had a right to be. The world had gone to pot. Nuclear
annihilation was poised above our heads and the village, wild before, would
be running frantic when Hiram told what he'd seen down in the garden. Hiram
and his hoodlum pals had burned down my house and I didn't have a home - no
one had a home, for the earth was home no longer. It was just another in a
long, long chain of worlds that was being taken over by another kind of life
that mankind had no chance of fighting.
'The Flowers are an ancient race,' said Stuffy. 'How ancient, I don't
know. A billion years, two billion, it's anybody's guess. They've gone into
a lot of worlds and they've known a lot of races - intelligent races, that
is. And they've worked with these races and gone hand in hand with them. But
no other race has ever loved them. No other race has ever grown them in
their gardens and tended them for the beauty that they gave and no . . .'
'You're crazy!' I yelled. 'You're stark, raving mad.'
'Brad,' said Nancy, breathlessly, 'he could be right, you know.
Realization of natural beauty is something the human race developed in the
last two thousand years or so. No caveman ever thought a flower was
beautiful or...'
'You're right,' said Stuffy. 'No other race, none of the other races,
ever developed the concept of beauty. Only a man of Earth would have dug up
a clump of flowers growing in the woods and brought them home and tended
them for the beauty that the Flowers had never known they had until that
very moment. No one had ever loved them before, for any reason, or cared for
them before. Like a lovely woman who had never known she was beautiful until
someone told her that she was. Like an orphan that never had a home and
finally found a home.'
It was simple, I told myself. It couldn't be that simple. There was
nothing ever simple. Yet, when one thought of it, it seemed to make some
sense. And it was the only thing that made any sense.
'The Flowers made one condition,' Stuffy said. 'Let us make another.
Let us insist that a certain percentage of them, when we invite them, must
remain as flowers.'
'So that the people of the earth,' said Nancy, 'can cultivate them and
lavish care on them and admire them for themselves.'
Stuffy chuckled softly. 'I've thought on it a lot,' he said. 'I could
write that clause myself...'
Would it work, I wondered. Would it really work?
And, of course, it would.
The business of being flowers loved by another race, cared for by
another race, would bind these aliens to us as closely as we would be bound
to them by the banishment of war.
A different kind of bond, but as strong a bond as that which bound man
and dog together. And that bond was all we needed; one that would give us
time to learn to work together.
We would never need to fear the Flowers, for we were someone they had
been looking for, not knowing they were looking for us, not once suspecting
that the sort of thing existed that we could offer them.
'Something new,' I said.
'Yeah, something new,' said Stuffy.
Something new and strange, I told myself. As new and strange to the
Flowers as their time manipulation was new and strange to us.
'Well,' asked Stuffy, 'do you buy it? There's a bunch of soldier boys
out here looking for me. They know I slipped through the lines and in a
little while they'll nose me out.'
The State Department man and the senator, I recalled, had talked this
very morning of long negotiation if, in fact, there could be negotiation.
And the general had talked in terms of force. But all the time the answer
had lain in a soft and very human trait, mankind's love of beauty. It had
remained for an undistinguished man, no senator or no general, but a crummy
bum, to come up with the answer.
'Call in your soldier boys,' I said, 'and ask them for a phone. I'd
just as soon not go hunting one.'
First I'd have to reach the senator and he'd talk to the President.
Then I'd get hold of Higgy and tell him what had happened so he could tame
down the village.
But for a little moment I'd have it as I wanted to remember it, here
with Nancy at my side and that old reprobate friend of mine across the
barrier, savouring the greatness of this tiny slice of time in which the
strength of true humanity (not of position or of power) rose to the vision
of a future in which many different races marched side by side toward a
glory we could not guess as yet.