“Gentlemen,” said lawyer Nichols, “this is not the way to go about it. You must be fair about it. Keep the questions until later. Let Brad tell us what he knows.”
Joe Evans said: “Anything he has to say will be more than we know now.”
“O.K.,” said Higgy, “we’ll be glad to listen.”
“But first,” said Hiram, “I want to know about that thing on the table. It might be dangerous. It might be a bomb.”
“I don’t know what it is,” I said. “It has to do with time. It can handle time. Maybe you would call it a time camera, some sort of time machine.”
Tom Preston snorted and Hiram sneered again.
Father Flanagan, the town’s one Catholic priest, had been standing quietly in the doorway, side by side with Pastor Silas Middleton, from the church across the street. Now the old priest spoke quietly, so quietly that one could barely hear him, his voice one with the lamplight and the dawn. “I would be the last,” he said, “to hold that time might be manipulated or that flowers would have anything to do with what has happened here. These are propositions that go against the grain of my every understanding. But unlike some of the rest of you, I’m willing to listen before I reach a judgment.”
“I’ll try to tell you,” I said. “I’ll try to tell you just the way it happened.”
“Alf Peterson has been trying to call you,” Nancy said. “He’s phoned a dozen times.”
“Did he leave a number?”
“Yes, I have it here.”
“That can wait,” said Higgy. “We want to hear this story.”
“Perhaps,” suggested Nancy’s father, “you’d better tell us right away. Let’s all go in the living room where we’ll be comfortable.”
We all went into the living room and sat down.
“Now, my boy,” said Higgy, companionably, “go ahead and spill it.”
I could have strangled him. When I looked at him, I imagine that he knew exactly how I felt.
“We’ll keep quiet,” he said. “We’ll hear you out.”
I waited until they all were quiet and then I said, “I’ll have to start with yesterday morning when I came home, after my car had been wrecked, and found Tupper Tyler sitting in the swing.”
Higgy leaped to his feet. “But that’s crazy!” he shouted. “Tupper has been lost for years.”
Hiram jumped up, too. “You made fun of me,” he bellowed, “when I told you Tom had talked to Tupper.”
“I lied to you,” I said. “I had to lie to you. I didn’t know what was going on and you were on the prod.”
The Reverend Silas Middleton asked, “Brad, you admit you lied?”
“Yes, of course I do. That big ape had me pinned against the wall…”
“If you lied once, you’ll lie again,” Tom Preston shrilled. “How can we believe anything you tell us?”
“Tom,” I said, “I don’t give a damn if you believe me or not.”
They all sat down and sat there looking at me and I knew that I had been childish, but they burned me up.
“I would suggest,” said Father Flanagan, “that we should start over and all of us make a heroic effort to behave ourselves.”
“Yes, please,” said Higgy, heavily, “and everyone shut up.”
I looked around and no one said a word. Gerald Sherwood nodded gravely at me.
I took a deep breath and began.
“Maybe,” I said, “I should go even farther back than that—to the time Tom Preston sent Ed Adler around to take out my telephone.”
“You were three months in arrears,” yelped Preston. “You hadn’t even…”
“Tom,” said lawyer Nichols, sharply.
Tom settled back into his chair and began to sulk.
I went ahead and told everything—about Stiffy Grant and the telephone I’d found in my office and about the story Alf Peterson had told me and then how I’d gone out to Stiffy’s shack. I told them everything except about Gerald Sherwood and how he had made the phones. I somehow had the feeling that I had no right to tell that part of it.
I asked them, “Are there any questions?”
“There are a lot of them,” said lawyer Nichols, “but go ahead and finish. Is that all right with the rest of you?”
Higgy Morris grunted. “It’s all right with me,” he said.
“It’s not all right with me,” said Preston, nastily. “Gerald told us that Nancy talked with Brad. He never told us how. She used one of them phones, of course.”
“My phone,” said Sherwood. “I’ve had one of them for years.”
Higgy said, “You never told me, Gerald.”
“It didn’t occur to me,” said Sherwood, curtly.
“It seems to me,” said Preston, “there has been a hell of a lot going on that we never knew about.”
“That,” said Father Flanagan, “is true beyond all question. But I have the impression that this young man has no more than started on his story.”
So I went ahead. I told it as truthfully as I could and in all the detail I could recall.
Finally I was finished and they sat not moving, stunned perhaps, and shocked, and maybe not believing it entirely, but believing some of it.
Father Flanagan stirred uneasily. “Young man,” he asked, “you are absolutely sure this is not hallucination?”
“I brought back the time contraption. That’s not hallucination.”
“We must agree, I think,” said Nichols, “that there are strange things going on. The story Brad has told us is no stranger than the barrier.”
“There isn’t anyone,” yelled Preston, “who can work with time. Why time is—well, it’s…”
“That’s exactly it,” said Sherwood. “No one knows anything of time. And it’s not the only thing of which we’re wholly ignorant. There is gravitation. There is no one, absolutely no one, who can tell you what gravitation is.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Hiram, flatly. “He’s been hiding out somewhere…”
Joe Evans said, “We combed the town. There was no place he could hide.”
“Actually,” said Father Flanagan, “it doesn’t matter if we believe all this or not. The important thing is whether the people who are coming out from Washington believe it.”
Higgy pulled himself straighter in his chair. He turned to Sherwood. “You said Gibbs was coming out. Bringing others with him.”
Sherwood nodded. “A man from the State Department.”
“What exactly did Gibbs say?”
“He said he’d be right out. He said the talk with Brad could only be preliminary. Then he’d go back and report. He said it might not be simply a national problem. It might be international. Our government might have to confer with other governments. He wanted to know more about it. All I could tell him was that a man here in the village had some vital information.”
“They’ll be out at the edge of the barrier, waiting for us. The east road, I presume.”
“I suppose so,” Sherwood said. “We didn’t go into it. He’ll phone me from some place outside the barrier when he arrives.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Higgy, lowering his voice as if he were speaking confidentially, “if we can get out of this without being hurt, it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to us. No other town in all of history has gotten the kind of publicity we’re getting now. Why, for years there’ll be tourists coming just to look at us, just to say they’ve been here.”
“It seems to me,” said Father Flanagan, “that if this should all be true, there are far greater things involved than whether or not our town can attract some tourists.”
“Yes,” said Silas Middleton. “It means we are facing an alien form of life. How we handle it may mean the difference between life and death. Not for us alone, I mean, the people in this village. But the life or death of the human race.”
“Now, see here,” piped Preston, “you can’t mean that a bunch of flowers…”
“You damn fool,” said Sherwoo
d, “it’s not just a bunch of flowers.”
Joe Evans said, “That’s right. Not just a bunch of flowers. But an entirely different form of life. Not an animal life, but a plant life—a plant life that is intelligent.”
“And a life,” I said, “that has stored away the knowledge of God knows how many other races. They’ll know things we’ve never even thought about.”
“I don’t see,” said Higgy, doggedly, “what we’ve got to be afraid of. There never was a time that we couldn’t beat a bunch of weeds. We can use sprays and…”
“If we want to kill them off,” I said, “I don’t think it’s quite as easy as you try to make it. But putting that aside for the moment, do we want to kill them off?”
“You mean,” yelled Higgy, “let them come in and take over?”
“Not take over. Come in and co-operate with us.”
“But the barrier!” yelled Hiram. “Everyone forgets about the barrier!”
“No one has forgotten about it,” said Nichols. “The barrier is no more than a part of the entire problem. Let’s solve the problem and we can take care of the barrier as well.”
“My God,” groaned Preston, “you all are talking as if you believe every word of it.”
“That isn’t it,” said Silas Middleton. “But we have to use what Brad has told us as a working hypothesis. I don’t say that what he has told us is absolutely right. He may have misinterpreted, he may simply be mistaken in certain areas. But at the moment it’s the only solid information we have to work with.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Hiram, flatly. “There’s a dirty plot afoot and I…”
The telephone rang, its signal blasting through the room.
Sherwood answered it.
“It’s for you,” he told me. “It’s Alf again.”
I went across the room and took the receiver Sherwood held out to me.
“Hello, Alf,” I said.
“I thought,” said Alf, “you were going to call me back. In an hour, you said.”
“I got involved,” I told him.
“They moved me out,” he said. “They evacuated everybody. I’m in a motel just east of Coon Valley. I’m going to move over to Elmore—the motel here is pretty bad—but before I did, I wanted to get in touch with you.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. “There are some things I want to ask you. About that project down in Greenbriar.”
“Sure. What about the project?”
“What kind of problems did you have to solve?”
“Many different kinds.”
“Any of them have to do with plants?”
“Plants?”
“You know. Flowers, weeds, vegetables.”
“I see. Let me think. Yes, I guess there were a few.”
“What kind?”
“Well, there was one: could a plant be intelligent?”
“And your conclusion?”
“Now, look here, Brad!”
“This is important, Alf.”
“Oh, all right. The only conclusion I could reach was that it was impossible. A plant would have no motive. There’s no reason a plant should be intelligent. Even if it could be, there’d be no advantage to it. It couldn’t use intelligence or knowledge. It would have no way in which it could apply them. And its structure is wrong. It would have to develop certain senses it doesn’t have, would have to increase its awareness of its world. It would have to develop a brain for data storage and a thinking mechanism. It was easy, Brad, once you thought about it. A plant wouldn’t even try to be intelligent. It took me a while to get the reasons sorted out, but they made good solid sense.”
“And that was all?”
“No, there was another one. How to develop a foolproof method of eradicating a noxious weed, bearing in mind that the weed has high adaptability and would be able to develop immunity to any sort of threat to its existence in a relatively short length of time.”
“There isn’t any possibility,” I guessed.
“There is,” said Alf, “just a possibility. But not too good a one.”
“And that?”
“Radiation. But you couldn’t count on it as foolproof if the plant really had high adaptability.”
“So there’s no way to eradicate a thoroughly determined plant?”
“I’d say none at all—none in the power of man. What’s this all about, Brad?”
“We may have a situation just like that,” I said. Quickly I told him something of the Flowers.
He whistled. “You think you have this straight?”
“I can’t be certain, Alf. I think so, but I can’t be certain. That is, I know the Flowers are there, but…”
“There was another question. It ties right in with this. It wanted to know how you’d go about contacting and establishing relations with an alien life. You think the project … ?”
“No question,” I said. “It was run by the same people who ran the telephones.”
“We figured that before. When we talked after the barrier went up.”
“Alf, what about that question? About contact with an alien?”
He laughed, a bit uneasily. “There are a million answers. The method would depend upon the kind of alien. And there’d always be some danger.”
“That’s all you can think of? All the questions, I mean?”
“I can’t think of any more. Tell me more of what’s happened there.”
“I’d like to, but I can’t. I have a group of people here. You’re going to Elmore now?”
“Yeah. I’ll call you when I get there. Will you be around?”
“I can’t go anywhere,” I said.
There had been no talk among the others while I’d been on the phone. They were all listening. But as soon as I hung up, Higgy straightened up importantly.
“I figure,” he said, “that maybe we should be getting ready to go out and meet the senator. I think most probably I should appoint a welcoming committee. The people in this room, of course, and maybe half a dozen others. Doc Fabian, and maybe…”
“Mayor,” said Sherwood, interrupting him, “I think someone should point out that this is not a civic affair or a social visit. This is something somewhat more important and entirely unofficial. Brad is the one the senator must see. He is the only one who has pertinent information and…”
“But,” Higgy protested, “all I was doing…”
“We know what you were doing,” Sherwood told him. “What I am pointing out is that if Brad wants a committee to go along with him, he is the one who should get it up.”
“But my official duty,” Higgy bleated.
“In a matter such as this,” said Sherwood, flatly, “you have no official duty.”
“Gerald,” said the mayor, “I’ve tried to think the best of you. I’ve tried to tell myself…”
“Mayor,” said Preston, grimly, “there’s no use of pussyfooting. We might as well say it out. There’s something going on, some sort of plot afoot. Brad is part of it and Stiffy’s part of it and…”
“And,” said Sherwood, “if you insist upon a plot, I’m part of it as well. I made the telephones.”
Higgy gulped. “You did what?” he asked.
“I made the telephones. I manufactured them.”
“So you knew all about it all along.”
Sherwood shook his head. “I didn’t know anything at all. I just made the phones.”
Higgy sat back weakly. He clasped and unclasped his hands, staring down at them.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t understand.”
But I am sure he did. Now he understood, for the first time, that this was no mere unusual natural happening which would, in time, quietly pass away and leave Millville a tourist attraction that each year would bring the curious into town by the thousands. For the first time, I am sure, Mayor Higgy Morris realized that Millville and the entire world was facing a problem that it would take more than good luck and the Chamber of Commerce to resolve. r />
“There is one thing,” I said.
“What’s that?” asked Higgy.
“I want my phone. The one that was in my office. The phone, you remember, that hasn’t any dial.”
The mayor looked at Hiram.
“No, I won’t,” said Hiram. “I won’t give it back to him. He’s done harm enough already.”
“Hiram,” said the mayor.
“Oh, all right,” said Hiram. “I hope he chokes on it.”
“It appears to me,” said Father Flanagan, “that we are all acting quite unreasonably. I would suggest we might take this entire matter up and discuss it point by point, and in that way…”
A ticking interrupted him, a loud and ominous ticking that beat a measure, as of doom, through the entire house. And as I heard it, I knew that the ticking had been going on for quite some time, but very softly, and that I’d been hearing it and vaguely wondering what it was.
But now, from one tick to another, it had grown loud and hard, and even as we listened to it, half hypnotized by the terror of it, the tick became a hum and the hum a roar of power.
We all leaped to our feet, startled now, and I saw that the kitchen walls were flashing, as if someone were turning on and off a light of intensive brilliance, a pulsing glow that filled the room with a flood of light, then shut off, then filled it once again.
“I knew it!” Hiram roared, charging for the kitchen. “I knew it when I saw it. I knew it was dangerous!”
I ran after him.
“Look out!” I yelled. “Keep away from it!”
It was the time contraption. It had floated off the table and was hovering in mid-air, with a pulse of tremendous power running through it in a regular beat, while from it came the roar of cascading energy. Below it, lying on the table, was my crumpled jacket.
I grabbed hold of Hiram’s arm and tried to haul him back, but he jerked away and was hauling his pistol from its holster.
With a flash of light, the time contraption moved, rising swiftly toward the ceiling.
“No!” I cried, for I was afraid that if it ever hit the ceiling, the fragile lenses would be smashed.
Then it hit the ceiling and it did not break. Without slackening its pace, it bored straight through the ceiling. I stood gaping at the neat round hole it made.
I heard the stamp of feet behind me and the banging of a door and when I turned around the room was empty, except for Nancy standing by the fireplace.