All Flesh Is Grass Part 18

"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 s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.surance 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 fibre. Name anything you need from plants and we can be that thing."

"You mean you'd let us eat you and saw you up for lumber and weave you into cloth? And you would not mind?"

They came very close to sighing. "How can we make you understand? Eat one of us and we still remain. Saw one of us and we still remain. The life of us is one life-you could never kill us all, never eat us all. Our life is in our brains and our nervous systems, in our roots and bulbs and tubers. We would not mind your eating us if we knew that we were helping."

"And we would not only be the old forms of economic plant life to which you are accustomed. We could be different kinds of grain, different kinds of trees-ones you have never heard of. We could adapt ourselves to any soils or climates. We could grow anywhere you wanted. You want medicines or drugs. Let your chemists tell us what you want and we'll be that for you. We'll be made-to-order plants."

"All this," I said, "and your knowledge, too."

"That is right," they said.

"And in return, what do we do?"

"You give your knowledge to us. You work with us to utilize all knowledge, the pooled knowledge that we have. You give us an expression we cannot give ourselves. We have knowledge, but knowledge in itself is worthless unless it can be used. We want it used, we want so badly to work with a race that can use what we have to offer, so that we can feel a sense of accomplishment that is denied us now. And, also, of course, we would hope that together we could develop a better way to open the time-phase boundaries into other worlds."

"And the time dome that you put over Millville-why did you do that?

"To gain your world's attention. To let you know that we were here and waiting."

"But you could have told some of your contacts and your contacts could have told the world. You probably did tell some of them. Stiffy Grant, for instance."

"Yes, Stiffy Grant. And there were others, too."

"They could have told the world."

"Who would have believed them? They would have been thought of as how do you say it-crackpots?"

"Yes, I know," I said. "No one would pay attention to anything Stiffy said. But surely there were others."

"Only certain types of minds," they told me, "can make contact with us. We can reach many minds, but they can't reach back to us. And to believe in us, to know us, you must reach back to us."

"You mean only the screwb.a.l.l.s..."

"We're afraid that's what we mean," they said.

It made sense when you thought about it. The most successful contact they could find had been Tupper Tyler and while there was nothing wrong with Stuffy as a human being, he certainly was not what one would call a solid citizen.

I sat there for a moment, wondering why they'd contacted me and Gerald Sherwood. Although that was a little different. They'd contacted Sherwood because he was valuable to them; he could make the telephones for them and he could set up a system that would give them working capital. And me? Because my father had taken care of them? I hoped to heaven that was all it was.

"So, OK," I said. "I guess I understand. How about the storm of seeds?"

"We planted a demonstration plot," they told me. "So your people could realize, by looking at it, how versatile we are."

You never won, I thought. They had an answer for everything you asked.

I wondered if I ever had expected to get anywhere with them or really wanted to get anywhere with them. Maybe, subconsciously, all I wanted was to get back to Millville.

And maybe it was all Tupper. Maybe there weren't any Flowers. Maybe it was simply a big practical joke that Tupper had dreamed up in his so-called mind, sitting here ten years and dreaming up the joke and getting it rehea.r.s.ed so he could pull it off.

But, I argued with myself it couldn't be just Tupper, for Tupper wasn't bright enough. His mind was not given to a concept of this sort. He couldn't dream it up and he couldn't pull it off. And besides, there was the matter of his being here and of my being here, and that was something a joke would not explain.

I came slowly to my feet and turned so that I faced the slope above the camp and there in the bright moonlight lay the darkness of the purple flowers. Tupper still sat where he had been sitting, but now he was hunched forward, almost doubled up, fallen fast asleep and snoring very softly.

The perfume seemed stronger now and the moonlight had taken on a trembling and there was a Presence out there somewhere on the slope. I strained my eyes to see it, and once I thought I saw it, but it faded out again, although I still knew that it was there.

There was a purpleness in the very night and the feel of an intelligence that waited for a word to come stalking down the hill to talk with me, as two friends might talk, with no need of an interpreter, to squat about the campfire and yarn the night away.

Ready? asked the Presence.

A word, I wondered, or simply something stirring in my brain-something born of the purpleness and moonlight?

"Yes," I said, "I'm ready. I will do the best I can."

I bent and wrapped the time contraption in my jacket and tucked it underneath my arm and then went up the slope. I knew the Presence was up there, waiting for me, and there were quivers running up and down my spine. It was fear, perhaps, but it didn't feel like fear.

I came up to where the Presence waited and I could not see it, but I knew that it had fallen into step with me and was walking there beside me.

"I am not afraid of you," I told it.

It didn't say a word. It just kept walking with me. We went across the ridge and down the slope into the dip where in another world the greenhouse and garden were.

A little to your left, said the thing that walked the night with me, and then go straight ahead.

I turned a little to my left and then went straight ahead.

A few more feet, it said.

I stopped and turned my head to face it and there was nothing there. If there had been anything, it was gone from there.

The moon was a golden gargoyle in the west. The world was lone and empty; the silvered slope had a hungry look. The blue-black sky was filled with many little eyes with a hard sharp glitter to them, a predatory glitter and the remoteness of uncaring.

Beyond the ridge a man of my own race drowsed beside a dying campfire, and it was all right for him, for he had a talent that I did not have, that I knew now I did not have-the talent for reaching out to grasp an alien hand (or paw or claw or pad) and being able in his twisted mind to translate that alien touch into a commonplace.

I shuddered at the gargoyle moon and took two steps forward and walked out of that hungry world straight into my garden.

15.

Ragged clouds still raced across the sky, blotting out the moon. A faint lighting in the east gave notice of the dawn. The windows of my house were filled with lamplight and I knew that Gerald Sherwood and the rest of them were waiting there for me. And just to my left the greenhouse with the tree growing at its corner loomed ghostly against the rise of ground behind it.

I started to walk forward and fingers were scratching at my trouser leg. Startled, I looked down and saw that I had walked into a bush.

There had been no bush in the garden the last time I had seen it; there had been only the purple flowers. But I think I guessed what might have happened even before I stooped to have a look.

Squatting there, I squinted along the ground and in the first grey light of the coming day, I saw there were no flowers. Instead of a patch of flowers there was a patch of little bushes, perhaps a little larger, but not much larger than the flowers.

I hunkered there, with a coldness growing in me-for there was no explanation other than the fact that the bushes were the flowers, that somehow the Flowers had changed the flowers that once had grown there into little bushes. And, I wondered wildly, what could their purpose be?

Even here, I thought-even here they reach out for us. Even here they play their tricks on us and lay their traps for us. And they could do anything they wanted, I supposed, for if they did not own, at least they manipulated this corner of the Earth entrapped beneath the dome.

I put out a hand and felt along a branch and the branch had soft-swelling buds all along its length. Springtime buds, that in a day or so would be breaking into leaf. Springtime buds in the depth of summer!

I had believed in them, I thought. In that little s.p.a.ce of time toward the very end, when Tupper had ceased his talking and had dozed before the fire and there had been something on the hillside that had spoken to me and had walked me home, I had believed in them.

Had there been something on that hillside? Had something walked with me? I sweated, thinking of it.

I felt the bulk of the wrapped time contraption underneath my arm, and that, I realized, was a talisman of the actuality of that other world. With that, I must believe.

They had told me, I remembered, that I'd get my money back-they had guaranteed it. And here I was, back home again, without my fifteen hundred.

I got to my feet and started for the house, then changed my mind. I turned around and went up the slope toward Doc Fabian's house. It might be a good idea, I told myself, to see what was going on outside the barrier. The people who were waiting at the house could wait a little longer.

I reached the top of the slope and turned around, looking toward the east. There, beyond the village, blazed a line of campfires and the lights of many cars running back and forth.

A searchlight swung a thin blue finger of light up into the sky, slowly sweeping back and forth. And at one spot that seemed a little closer was a greater blob of light. A great deal of activity seemed to be going on around it.

Watching it, I made out a steam shovel and great black mounds of earth piled up on either side of it. I could hear, faintly, the metallic clanging of the mighty scoop as it dumped a load and then reached down into the hole to take another bite. Trying, I told myself, to dig beneath the barrier.

A car came rattling down the street and turned into the driveway of the house behind me. Doc, I thought-Doc coming home after being routed out of bed on an early morning call. I walked across the lawn and around the house. The car was parked on the concrete strip of driveway and Doc was getting out.

"Doc," I said, "it's Brad. " He turned and peered at me.

"Oh," he said, and his voice sounded tired, "so you are back again. There are people waiting at the house, you know."

Too tired to be surprised that I was back again; too all beat out to care.

He shuffled forward and I saw, quite suddenly, that Doc was old. Of course I had thought of him as old, but never before had he actually seemed old. Now I could see that he was-the slightly stooped shoulders, his feet barely lifting off the ground as he walked toward me, the loose, old-man hang of his trousers, the deep lines in his face.

"Floyd Caidwell," he said. "I was out to Floyd's. He had a heart attack-a strong, tough man like him and he has a heart attack."

"How is he?"

"As well as I can manage. He should be in a hospital, getting complete rest. But I can't get him there. With that thing out there, I can't get him where he should be.

"I don't know, Brad. I just don't know what will happen to us. Mrs Jensen was supposed to go in this morning for surgery. Cancer. She'll die, anyhow, but surgery would give her months, maybe a year or two, of life. And there's no way to get her there. The little Hopkins girl has been going regularly to a specialist and he's been helping her a lot. Decker-perhaps you've heard of him. He's a top-notch man. We interned together."

He stopped in front of me. "Can't you see," he said. "I can't help these people. I can do a little, but I can't do enough. I can't handle things like this-I can't do it all alone. Other times I could send them somewhere else, to someone who could help them. And now I can't do that. For the first time in my life, I can't help my people."

"You're taking it too hard," I said.

He looked at me with a beaten look, a tired and beaten look.

"I can't take it any other way," he said. "All these years, they've depended on me."

"How's Stuffy?" I asked. "You have heard, of course."

Doc snorted angrily. "The d.a.m.n fool ran away."

"From the hospital?"

"Where else would he run from? Got dressed when their backs were turned and snuck away. He always was a sneaky old goat and he never had good sense. They're looking for him, but no one's found him yet."

"He'd head back here," I said.

"I suppose he would," said Doc. "What about this story I heard about; some telephone he had?"

I shook my head. "Hiram said he found one."

Doc peered sharply at me. "You don't know anything about it?"

"Not very much," I said.

"Nancy said you were in some other world or something. What kind of talk is that?"

"Did Nancy tell you that?"