“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.”
“O.K.,” I said. “O.K.”
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 humored 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 traveled 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, s
ir,” 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 traveled 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?”