“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 Tucker. “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. “That’s so they’ll read aloud. It’s easier for the Flowers to pick it up if they read aloud. It’s sharper in the reader’s brain or something.”
He got up slowly.
“Going to take a nap,” he said.
He headed for the hut.
Halfway there, he stopped and turned back to face me.
“I forgot,” he said. “Thanks for the pants and shirt.”
12
My hunch had been correct. Tupper was a key, or at least one of the keys, to what was happening. And the place to look for clues, crazy as it had sounded, had been the patch of flowers in the garden down below the greenhouse.
For the flower patch had led, not alone to Tupper, but to all the rest of it—to that second self that had helped out Gerald Sherwood, to the phone set-up and the reader service, to the ones who employed Stiffy Grant and probably to the backers of that weird project down in Mississippi.
And to how many other projects and endeavors 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 squirreled 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 clay was an important thing, a hut made out of sticks and a bed made out of leaves. And more important than all the money in the world, the necessity to keep a little campfire burning once the matches were gone.
Although, I told myself, this was not my world. This was Tupper’s world, his soft, short-sighted world—and tied in with it was his utter failure to grasp the overwhelming implications of this world of his.
For this was the day about which there had been speculation—although far too little speculation and too little done about it because it seemed so distant and so improbable. This was the day that the human race had come into contact (or perhaps, collision) with an alien race.
All the speculation, of course, had concerned an alien out of space, an alien on, or from, some other world in space. But here was the alien, not out of space, but time, or at least from behind a barrier in time.
It made no difference, I told myself. Out of either space or time, the involvement was the same. Man at this moment finally faced his greatest test, and one he could not fail.
I gathered up the pottery and went back up the trail again.
Tupper was still sleeping, but no longer snoring. He had not changed position and his toes still pointed at the sky.
The sun had moved far down the west, but the heat still held and there was no hint of breeze. The purple of the flowers lay unstirring on the hillsides.
I stood and looked at them and they were innocent and pretty and they held no promise and no threat. They were just a field of flowers, like a field of daisies or of daffodils. They were the sort of thing that we had taken for granted all our years on earth. They had no personality and they stood for nothing except a splotch of color that was pleasing to the eye.
That was the hard thing about all this, I thought—the utter impossibility of thinking of the Flowers as anything but flowers. It was impossible to think of them as beings, as anything that had even a symbol of importance. One could not take them seriously and yet they must be taken seriously, for in their right they were as intelligent, perhaps more intelligent than the human race.
I put the dishes down beside the fire and slowly climbed the hill. My moving feet brushed the flowers aside and I crushed some of them, but there was no chance of walking without crushing some of them.
I’d have to talk to them again, I told myself. As soon as Tupper could get rested, I’d talk to them again. There were a lot of things that must be clarified, much to be explained. If the Flowers and the human race were to live together, there must be understanding. I ran through the conversation I’d had with them, trying to find the gentle threat that I knew was there. But from what I could remember, there had been no threat.
I reached the top of the hill and stopped there, gazing out across the undulating purple swales. At the bottom of the slope, a small creek ran between the hills to reach the river. From where I was I could hear the silver babble of it as it ran across the stones.
Slowly I made my way down the hill toward it and as I moved down the slope I saw the mound that lay across the creek, at the foot of the opposite slope. I had not seen it before and I supposed that my failure to see it was because it had been masked by the slant of light across the land.
There was nothing special about it except that it appeared slightly out of character. Here, in this place of flowing swales, it stood by itself, like a hump-backed monstrosity left over from another time.
I came down to the creek and waded across a shallow place where the water ran no deeper than three inches over a shining gravel bar.
At the water’s edge a large block of stone lay half-buried in the sharp rise of the bank. It offered a ready seat and I sat down upon it, looking down the stream. The sun glanced off the water, making diamonds out of every ripple, and the air was sprayed with the silver tinkle of the singing brook.
There was no creek here in the world where Millville lay, although there was a dry run in Jack Dickson’s pasture, through which the swamp that lay back of Stiffy’s shack sometimes drained. Perhaps there had been such a creek as this, I thought, in Millville’s world before the farmer’s plow and resultant erosion had reshaped the terrain.
I sat entranced by the flashing diamonds of the water and the tinkle of the stream. It seemed that a man could sit there forever, warm in the last rays of the sun and guarded by the hills.
I had put my hands on either side of me and had been idly rubbing them back and forth across the surface of the stone on which I sat. My hands must have told me almost instantly that there was something strange about the surface, but I was so engrossed with the sensations of sun and water that it took some minutes before the strangeness broke its way into my consciousness.
When it did, I still remained sitting there, still rubbing the surface of the stone with the tips of my fingers, but not looking at it, making sure that I had not been wrong, that the stone had the feel of artificial shaping.
When I got up and examined the block, there was no doubt of it. The stone had been squared into a block and there were places where the chisel marks could still be seen upon it. Around one corner of it still clung a brittle substance that could be nothing else than some sort of mortar in which the block had once
been set.
I straightened up from my examination and stepped away, back into the stream, with the water tugging at my ankles.
Not a simple boulder, but a block of stone! A block of stone bearing chisel marks and with a bit of mortar still sticking to one edge.
The Flowers, then, were not the only ones upon this planet. There were others—or there had been others. Creatures that knew the use of stone and had the tools to chip the stone into convenient form and size.
My eyes traveled from the block of stone up the mound that stood at the water’s edge, and there were other blocks of stone protruding from its face. Standing frozen, with the glint of water and the silver song forgotten, I traced out the blocks and could see that once upon a time they had formed a wall.
This mound, then, was no vagary of nature. It was the evidence of a work that at one time had been erected by beings that knew the use of tools.
I left the stream and clambered up the mound. None of the stones was large, none was ornamented; there were just the chisel marks and here and there the bits of mortar that had lain between the blocks. Perhaps, a building had stood here at one time. Or it may have been a wall. Or a monument.
I started down the mound, choosing a path a short way downstream from where I had crossed the creek, working my way along slowly and carefully, for the slope was steep, using my hands as brakes to keep myself from sliding or from falling.
And it was then, hugged close against the slope, that I found the piece of bone. It had weathered out of the ground, perhaps not too long ago, and it lay hidden there among the purple flowers. Under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have missed it. I could not see it well at first, just the dull whiteness of it lying on the ground. I had slid past it before I saw it and crawled back to pick it up.
The surface of it powdered slightly at the pressure of my fingers, but it did not break.
It was slightly curved and white, a ghostly, chalky white.
Turning it over in my hand, I made out that it was a rib bone and the shape and size of it was such that it could be human, although my knowledge was too slight to be absolutely sure.