nd 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 travelled 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, sir,' 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 travelled
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?'
     '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 Tupper. '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. 'I hat'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 endeavours 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 squirrelled 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 day 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 myseIf. 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 colour 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 plough
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 travelled 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 fal1ing.
     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. If it were really humanoid, I told myself,
then it meant that at one time a thing like man had lived here. And could it
mean that something very similar to the human race still resided here?
     A planet full of flowers with nothing living on it except the purple
flowers, and more lately Tupper Tyler. That was what I'd thought when I had
seen the flowers spreading to the far horizons, but it had been supposition
only. It was a conclusion I had jumped to without too much evidence.
Although it was in part supported by the seeming fact that nothing else
existed in this particular place - no birds, no insects or animals, not a
thing at all, except perhaps some bacteria and viruses and even these, I
thought, might be essential to the well-being of the Flowers.
     Although the outer surface of the bone had chalked off when I picked it
up, it seemed sound in structure. Not too long ago, I knew, it had been a
part of a living thing. Its age probably would depend to a large extent upon
the composition and the moistness of the soil and probably many other
factors. It was a problem for an expert and I was no expert.
     Now I saw something else, a little spot of whiteness just to the right
of me. It could have been a white stone lying on the ground, but even as I
looked at it I didn't think it was. It had that same chalky whiteness of the
rib I had picked up.
     I moved over to it and as I bent above it I could see it was no stone.
I let the rib drop from my fingers and began to dig.
     The soil was loose and sandy and although I had no tools, my fingers
served the purpose.
     As I dug, the bone began to reveal its shape and in a moment I knew it
was a skull - and only a little later that it was a human skull.
     I dug it loose and lifted it and while I might have failed to identify
the rib, there was no mistaking this.
     I hunkered on the slope and felt pity well inside of me, pity for this
creature that once had lived and died - and a growing fear, as well.
     For by the evidence of the skull I held within my hands, I knew for a
certainty that this was not the home world of the Flowers. This was - this
must be a world that they had conquered, or at least had taken over. They
might, indeed, I thought, be very far in time from that old home where
another race (by their description of it, a non-human race) had trained them
to intelligence.
     How far back, I wondered, lay the homeland of the Flowers? How many
conquered earths lay between this world and the one where they had risen?
How many other earths lay empty, swept clean of any life that might compete
with the Flowers?
     And that other race, the race that had raised and elevated them above
their vegetable existence where was that old race today?
     I put the skull back into the hole from which I'd taken it. Carefully,
I brushed back the sand and dirt until it was covered once again, this time
entirely covered, with no part of it showing. I would have liked to take it
back to camp with me so I could have a better look at it. But I knew I
couldn't, for Tupper must not know what I had found. His mind was an open
book to his friends the Flowers, and I was sure mine wasn't, for they had
had to use the telephone to get in touch with me. So long as I told Tupper
nothing, the Flowers would never know that I had found the skull. There was
the possibility, of course, that they already knew, that they had the sense
of sight, or perhaps some other sense that was as good as sight. But I
doubted that they had; there was so far no evidence they had. The best bet
was that they were mental symbionts, that they had no awareness beyond the
awareness they shared with minds in other kinds of life.
     I worked my way around and down the mound and along the way I found
other blocks of stone. It was becoming evident to me that at some other time
a building had stood upon this site. A city, I wondered, or a town? Although
whatever form it might have taken, it had been a dwelling place.
     I reached the creek at the far end of the mound, where it ran close
against the cutbank it had chewed out of the mound, and started wading back
to the place where I had crossed.
     The sun had set and with it had gone the diamond sparkle of the water.
The creek ran dark and tawny in the shadow of the first twilight.
     Teeth grinned at me out of the blackness of the bank that rose above
the stream, and I stopped dead, staring at that row of snaggled teeth and
the whiteness of the bone that arched above them. The water, tugging at my
ankles, growled a little at me and I shivered in the chill that swept down
from the darkening hills.
     For, staring at that second skull, grinning at me out of the darkness
of the soil that stood poised above the water, I knew that the human race
faced the greatest danger it had ever known. Except for man himself, there
had been, up to this moment, no threat against the continuity of humanity.
But here, finally, that threat lay before my eyes.

        13

     I sighted the small glowing of the fire before I reached the camp. When
I stumbled down the hillside, I could see that Tupper had finished with his
nap and was cooking supper.
     'Out for a walk?' he asked.
     'Just a look around,' I said. 'There isn't much to see.'
     'The Flowers is all,' said Tupper.
     He wiped his chin and counted the fingers on one hand, then counted
them again to be sure he'd made no mistake.
     'Tupper?'
     'What is it, Brad?'
     'Is it all like this? All over this Earth, I mean? Nothing but the
Flowers?'
     'There are others come sometimes.'
     'Others?'
     'From other worlds,' he said. 'But they go away.'
     'What kind of others?'
     'Fun people. Looking for some fun.' 'What kind of fun?'
     'I don't know,' he said. 'Just fun, is all.'
     He was surly and evasive.
     'But other than that,' I said, 'there's nothing but the Flowers?'
     'That's all,' he said.
     'But you haven't seen it all.'
     'They tell me,' Tupper said. 'And they wouldn't lie. They aren't like
people back in Millville. They don't need to lie.'
     He used two sticks to move the earthen pot off the hot part of the
fire.
     'Tomatoes,' he said. 'I hope you like tomatoes.'
     I nodded that I did and he squatted down beside the fire to watch the
supper better.
     'They don't tell nothing but the truth,' be said, going back to the
question I had asked. 'They couldn't tell nothing but the truth. That's the
way they're made. They got all this truth wrapped up in them and that's what
they live by. And they don't need to tell nothing but the truth. It's afraid
of being hurt that makes people lie and there is nothing that can hurt
them.'
     He lifted his face to stare at me, daring me to disagree with him.
     'I didn't say they lied,' I told him. 'I never for a moment questioned
anything they said. By this truth they're wrapped up in, you mean their
knowledge, don't you?'
     'I guess that's what I mean. They know a lot of things no one back in
Millville knows.'
     I let it go at that. Millville was Tupper's former world. By saying
Millville, he meant the human world.
     Tupper was off on his finger-counting routine once again. I watched him
as he squatted there, so happy and content, in a world where he had nothing,
but was happy and content.
     I wondered once again at his strange ability to communicate with the
Flowers, to know them so well and so intimately that he could speak for
them. Was it possible, I asked myself, that this slobbering, finger-counting
village idiot possessed some sensory perception that the common run of
mankind did not have? That this extra ability of his might be a form of
compensation, to make up in some measure for what he did not have?
     After all, I reminded myself, man was singularly limited in his
perception, not knowing what he lacked, not missing what he lacked by the
very virtue of not being able to imagine himself as anything other than he
was. It was entirely possible that Tupper, by some strange quirk of genetic
combination, might have abilities that no other human had, all unaware that
he was gifted in any special way, never guessing that other men might lack
what seemed entirely normal to himself. And could these extra-human
abilities match c