The grayness faded and the city began to dim. Out in the center of the picnic circle I could make out the glimmer of the lens-covered basketball. There were no signs of my fellow picnickers; they had disappeared. And from the thinning grayness came another screaming—but a different kind of screaming, not the kind I’d heard from the city before the bomb had struck.
For now I knew that I had seen a city destroyed by a nuclear explosion—as one might have watched it on a TV set. And the TV set, if one could call it that, could have been nothing other than the basketball. By some strange magic mechanism it had invaded time and brought back from the past a moment of high crisis.
The grayness faded out and the night came back again, with the golden moon and the dust of stars and the silver slopes that curved to meet the quicksilver of the creek.
Down the farther slope I could see the scurrying figures, with their silver topknots gleaming in the moonlight, running wildly through the night and screaming in simulated terror.
I stood looking after them and shivered, for there was something here, I knew, that had a sickness in it, a sickness of the mind, an illness of the soul.
Slowly I turned back to the basketball. It was, once again, just a thing of lenses. I walked over to it and knelt beside it and had a look at it. It was made of many lenses and in the interstices between the tilted lenses, I could catch glimpses of some sort of mechanism, although all the details of it were lost in the weakness of the moonlight.
I reached out a hand and touched it gingerly. It seemed fragile and I feared that I might break it, but I couldn’t leave it here. It was something that I wanted and I told myself that if I could get it back to Earth, it would help to back up the story I had to tell.
I took off my jacket and spread it on the ground, and then carefully picked up the basketball, using both my hands to cradle it, and put it on the jacket. I gathered up the ends of the cloth and wrapped them all around the ball, then tied the sleeves together to help hold the folds in place.
I picked it up and tucked it securely underneath an arm, then got to my feet.
The hampers and the bottles lay scattered all about and it occurred to me that I should get away as quickly as I could, for these other people would be coming back to get the basketball and to gather up their picnic. But there was as yet no sign of them. Listening intently, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint sounds of their screaming receding in the distance.
I turned and went down the hill and crossed the creek. Halfway up the other slope I met Tupper coming out to hunt me.
“Thought you had got lost,” he said.
“I met a group of people. I had a picnic with them.”
“They have funny topknots?”
“They had that,” I said.
“Friends of mine,” said Tupper. “They come here many times. They come here to be scared.”
“Scared?”
“Sure. It’s fun for them. They like being scared.”
I nodded to myself. So that was it, I thought. Like a bunch of kids creeping on a haunted house and peeking through the windows so that they might run, shrieking from imagined horror at imagined stirrings they’d seen inside the house. And doing it time after time, never getting tired of the good time that they had, gaining some strange pleasure from their very fright.
“They have more fun,” said Tupper, “than anyone I know.”
“You’ve seen them often?”
“Lots of times,” said Tupper.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I never had the time,” said Tupper. “I never got around to it.”
“And they live close by?”
“No,” said Tupper. “Very far away.”
“But on this planet.”
“Planet?” Tupper asked.
“On this world,” I said.
“No. On another world. In another place. But that don’t make no difference. They go everywhere for fun.”
So they went everywhere for fun, I thought. And everywhen, perhaps. They were temporal ghouls, feeding on the past, getting their vicarious kicks out of catastrophe and disaster of an ancient age, seeking out those historic moments that were horrible and foul. Coming back again and yet again to one such scene that had a high appeal to their perverted minds.
A decadent race, I wondered, from some world conquered by the Flowers, free now to use the many gateways that led from world to world?
Conquered, in the light of what I knew, might not be the proper word. For I had seen this night what had happened to this world. Not depopulated by the Flowers, but by the mad suicide of the humans who had been native to it. More than likely it had been an empty and a dead world for years before the Flowers had battered down the time-phase boundary that let them into it. The skulls I had found had been those of the survivors—perhaps a relatively few survivors—who had managed to live on for a little time, but who had been foredoomed by the poisoned soil and air and water.
So the Flowers had not really conquered; they had merely taken over a world that had gone forfeit by the madness of its owners.
“How long ago,” I asked, “did the Flowers come here?”
“What makes you think,” asked Tupper, “that they weren’t always here?”
“Nothing. Just a thought. They never talked to you about it?”
“I never asked,” said Tupper.
Of course he wouldn’t ask; he’d have no curiosity. He would be simply glad that he had found this place, where he had friends who talked with him and provided for his simple needs, where there were no humans to mock or pester him.
We came down to the camping place and I saw that the moon had moved far into the west. The fire was burning low and Tupper fed it with some sticks, then sat down beside it. I sat down across from him and placed the wrapped basketball beside me.
“What you got there?” asked Tupper.
I unwrapped it for him.
He said, “It’s the thing my friends had. You stole it from my friends.”
“They ran away and left it. I want a look at it.”
“You see other times with it,” said Tupper.
“You know about this, Tupper?”
He nodded. “They show me many times—not often, I don’t mean that, but many other times. Time not like we’re in.”
“You don’t know how it works?”
“They told me,” Tupper said, “but I didn’t understand.”
He wiped his chin, but failed to do the job, so wiped it a second time.
They told me, he had said. So he could talk with them. He could talk with Flowers and with a race that conversed by music. There was no use, I knew, in asking him about it, because he couldn’t tell me. Perhaps there was no one who could explain an ability of that sort—not to a human being. For more than likely there’d be no common terms in which an explanation could be made.
The basketball glowed softly, lying on the jacket.
“Maybe,” Tupper said, “we should go back to bed.”
“In a little while,” I said. Anytime I wanted, it would be no trouble going back to bed, for the ground was bed.
I put out a hand and touched the basketball.
A mechanism that extended back in time and recorded for the viewer the sight and sound of happenings that lay deep in the memory of the space-time continuum. It would have, I thought, very many uses. It would be an invaluable tool in historical research. It would make crime impossible, for it could dig out of the past the details of any crime. And it would be a terrible device if it fell into unscrupulous hands or became the property of a government.
I’d take it back to Millville, if I could take it back, if I could get back myself. It would help to support the story I had to tell, but after I had told the story and had offered it as proof, what would I do with it? Lock it in a vault and destroy the combination? Take a sledge and smash it into smithereens? Turn it over to the scientists? What could one do with it?
“You messed up your coat,” said Tupp
er, “carrying that thing.”
I said, “It wasn’t much to start with.”
And then I remembered that envelope with the fifteen hundred dollars in it. It had been in the breast pocket of the jacket and I could have lost it in the wild running I had done or when I used the jacket to wrap up the time contraption.
What a damn fool thing to do, I thought. What a chance to take. I should have pinned it in my pocket or put it in my shoe or something of the sort. It wasn’t every day a man got fifteen hundred dollars.
I bent over and put my hand into the pocket and the envelope was there and I felt a great relief as my fingers touched it. But almost immediately I knew there was something wrong. My groping fingers told me the envelope was thin and it should have been bulging with thirty fifty-dollar bills.
I jerked it from my pocket and flipped up the flap. The envelope was empty.
I didn’t have to ask. I didn’t have to wonder. I knew just what had happened. That dirty, slobbering, finger-counting bum—I’d choke it out of him, I’d beat him to a pulp, I’d make him cough it up!
I was halfway up to nail him when he spoke to me and the voice that he spoke with was that of the TV glamor gal.
“This is Tupper speaking for the Flowers,” the voice said. “And you sit back down and behave yourself.”
“Don’t give me that,” I snarled. “You can’t sneak out of this by pretending…”
“But this is the Flowers,” the voice insisted sharply and even as it said the words, I saw that Tupper’s face had taken on that wall-eyed, vacant look.
“But he took my roll,” I said. “He sneaked it out of the envelope when I was asleep.”
“Keep quiet,” said the honeyed voice. “Just keep quiet and listen.”
“Not until I get my fifteen hundred back.”
“You’ll get it back. You’ll get much more than your fifteen hundred back.”
“You can guarantee that?”
“We’ll guarantee it.”
I sat down again.
“Look,” I said, “you don’t know what that money meant to me. It’s part my fault, of course. I should have waited until the bank was open or I should have found a good safe place to hide it. But there was so much going on…”
“Don’t worry for a moment,” said the Flowers. “We’ll get it back to you.”
“O.K.,” I said, “and does he have to use that voice?”
“What’s the matter with the voice?”
“Oh, hell,” I said, “go ahead and use it. I want to talk to you, maybe even argue with you, and it’s unfair, but I’ll remember who is speaking.”
“We’ll use another voice, then,” said the Flowers, changing in the middle of the sentence to the voice of the businessman.
“Thanks very much,” I said.
“You remember,” said the Flowers, “the time we spoke to you on the phone and suggested that you might represent us?”
“Certainly I remember. But as for representing you…”
“We need someone very badly. Someone we can trust.”
“But you can’t be certain I’m the man to trust.”
“Yes, we can,” they said. “Because we know you love us.”
“Now, look here,” I said. “I don’t know what gives you that idea. I don’t know if…”
“Your father found those of us who languished in your world. He took us home and cared for us. He protected us and tended us and he loved us and we flourished.”
“Yes, I know all that.”
“You’re an extension of your father.”
“Well, not necessarily. Not the way you mean.”
“Yes,” they insisted. “We have knowledge of your biology. We know about inherited characteristics. Like father, like son is a saying that you have.”
It was no use, I saw. You couldn’t argue with them. From the logic of their race, from the half-assimilated, half-digested facts they had obtained in some manner in their contact with our Earth, they had it figured out. And it probably made good sense in their plant world, for an offspring plant would differ very little from the parents. It would be, I suspected, a fruitless battle to try to make them see that an assumption that was valid in their case need not extend its validity into the human race.
“All right,” I said, “we’ll let you have it your way. You’re sure that you can trust me and probably you can. But in all fairness I must tell you I can’t do the job.”
“Can’t?” they asked.
“You want me to represent you back on Earth. To be your ambassador. Your negotiator.”
“That was the thought we had in mind.”
“I have no training for a job of that sort. I’m not qualified. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I wouldn’t even know how to make a start.”
“You have started,” said the Flowers. “We are very pleased with the start you’ve made.”
I stiffened and jerked upright. “The start I’ve made?” I asked.
“Why, yes, of course,” they told me. “Surely you remember. You asked that Gerald Sherwood get in touch with someone. Someone, you stressed, in high authority.”
“I wasn’t representing you.”
“But you could,” they said. “We want someone to explain us.”
“Let’s be honest,” I told them. “How can I explain you? I know scarcely anything about you.”
“We would tell you anything you want to know.”
“For openers,” I said, “this is not your native world.”
“No, it’s not. We’ve advanced through many worlds.”
“And the people—no, not the people, the intelligences—what happened to the intelligences of those other worlds?”
“We do not understand.”
“When you get into a world, what do you do with the intelligence you find there?”
“It is not often we find intelligence—not meaningful intelligence, not cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence does not develop on all worlds. When it does, we co-operate. We work with it. That is, when we can.”
“There are times when you can’t?”
“Please do not misunderstand,” they pleaded. “There has been a case or two where we could not contact a world’s intelligence. It would not become aware of us. We were just another life form, another—what do you call it?—another weed, perhaps.”
“What do you do, then?”
“What can we do?” they asked.
It was not, it seemed to me, an entirely honest answer. There were a lot of things that they could do.
“And you keep on going.”
“Keep on going?”
“From world to world,” I said. “From one world to another. When do you intend to stop?”
“We do not know,” they said.
“What is your goal? What are you aiming at?”
“We do not know,” they said.
“Now, just wait a minute. That’s the second time you’ve said that. You must know…”
“Sir,” they asked, “does your race have a goal—a conscious goal?”
“I guess we don’t,” I said.
“So that would make us even.”
“I suppose it would.”
“You have on your world things you call computers.”
“Yes,” I said, “but very recently.”
“And the function of computers is the storage of data and the correlation of that data and making it available whenever it is needed.”
“There still are a lot of problems. The retrieval of the data…”
“That is beside the point. What would you say is the goal of your computers?”
“Our computers have no purpose. They are not alive.”
“But if they were alive?”
“Well, in that case, I suppose the ultimate purpose would be the storage of a universal data and its correlation.”
“That perhaps is right,” they said. “We are living computers.”
“Then there is no end for you. You’ll keep on fore
ver.”
“We are not sure,” they said.
“But…”
“Data,” they told me, pontifically, “is the means to one end only—arrival at the truth. Perhaps we do not need a universal data to arrive at truth.”
“How do you know when you have arrived?”
“We will know,” they said.
I gave up. We were getting nowhere.
“So you want our Earth,” I said.
“You state it awkwardly and unfairly. We do not want your Earth. We want to be let in, we want some living space, we want to work with you. You give us your knowledge and we will give you ours.”
“We’d make quite a team,” I said.
“We would, indeed,” they said.
“And then?”
“What do you mean?” they asked.
“After we’ve swapped knowledge, what do we do then?”
“Why, we go on,” they said. “Into other worlds. The two of us together.”
“Seeking other cultures? After other knowledge?”
“That is right,” they said.
They made it sound so simple. And it wasn’t simple; it couldn’t be that simple. There was nothing ever simple.
A man could talk with them for days and still be asking questions, getting no more than a bare outline of the situation.
“There is one thing you must realize,” I said. “The people of my Earth will not accept you on blind faith alone. They must know what you expect of us and what we can expect of you. They must have some assurance that we can work together.”
“We can help,” they said, “in many different ways. We need not be as you see us now. We can turn ourselves into any kind of plant you need. We can provide a great reservoir of economic resources. We can be the old things that you have relied upon for years, but better than the old things ever were. We can be better foodstuff and better building material, better fiber. Name anything you need from plants and we can be that thing.”