11

I had taken that one step and everything had happened. So now I took another one to bring my feet together and I stood there, stiff and scared, afraid to turn around afraid, perhaps, of what I’d see behind me. Although I think I knew what I would see behind me. Just more purple flowers.

For this, I knew, in one dim corner of my curdled mind, was the place that Tupper had been telling me about.

Tupper had come out of this place and he’d gone back to this place and now I’d followed him.

Nothing happened.

And that was right, of course. For it seemed to me, somehow, that this would be the sort of place where nothing ever happened.

There were just the flowers and the sun blazing in the sky and there was nothing else. There wasn’t a breath of wind and there was no sound. But there was a fragrance, the almost overpowering, cloying fragrance of all those little blossoms with their monkey faces.

At last I dared to move and I slowly turned around. And there was nothing but the flowers.

Millville had gone away somewhere, into some other world.

Although that was wrong, I told myself. For somewhere, in its same old world, there yet must be a Millville. It had not been Millville, but myself, that had gone away. I had taken just one step and had walked clear out of Millville into another place.

Yet, while it was a different place, the terrain seemed to be identical with the old terrain. I still was standing in the dip of ground that lay behind my house and back of me the hill rose steeply to the now non-existent street where Doc’s house had stood and a half a mile away loomed the hill where the Sherwood house should be.

This, then, was Tupper’s world. It was the world into which he had gone ten years ago and again this morning. Which meant that, at this very moment, he must still be here.

And that meant, I told myself with a sudden rush of hope, that there was a chance of getting out, of getting back to Millvile. For Tupper had gotten back again and thus must know the way. Although, I realized, one never could be sure. You never could be sure of anything with a dope like Tupper Tyler.

The first thing to do, of course, was find him. He could not be far off. It might take a while, but I was fairly confident that I could track him down.

I walked slowly up the hill that, back in my home village, would have taken me to Doc Fabian’s place.

I reached the top of the hill and stopped and there, below me, lay the far sweep of land clothed by the purple flowers.

The land looked strange, robbed of all its landmarks, naked of its trees and roads and houses. But it lay, I saw, as it had lain. If there were any differences, they were minor ones.

There, to the east, was the wet and swampy land below the little knoll where Stiffy’s shack had stood - where Stiffy’s shack still stood in another time or place.

What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step from one world to another.

I stood, a stranger in an unknown land, with the perfume of the flowers dogging not my nostrils only, but every pore of me, pressing in upon me, as if the flowers themselves were rolling in great purple waves to bear me down and bury me for all eternity. The world was quiet; it was the quietest place I had ever been. There was no sound at all. And I realized that perhaps at no time in my life had I ever known silence. Always there had been something that had made some sort of noise - the chirring of a lone insect in the quiet of a summer noon, or the rustle of a leaf. Even in the dead of night there would have been the creaking of the timbers in the house, the murmur of the furnace, the slight keening of a wind that ran along the eaves.

But there was silence here. There was no sound at all. There was no sound, I knew, because there was nothing that could make a sound. There were no trees or bushes; there were no birds or insects. There was nothing here but the flowers and the soil in which they grew.

A silence and the emptiness that held the silence in its hand, and the purpleness that ran to the far horizon to meet the burnished, pale-blue brightness of a summer sky.

Now, for the first time, I felt panic stalking me - not a big and burly panic that would send one fleeing, howling as he fled, but a little, sneaky panic that circled all about me, like a pesky, yapping dog, bouncing on its pipestem legs, waiting for a chance to sink its needle teeth in me. Nothing one could fight, nothing one could stand against - a little yapping panic that set the nerves on edge.

There was no fear of danger, for there was no danger. One could see with half an eye that there was no danger. But there was, perhaps worse than any danger, the silence and the loneliness and the sameness and the not knowing where you were.

Down the slope was the wet and swampy area where Stiffy’s shack should be, and there, a little farther off, the silver track of river that ran at the edge of town. And at the place where the river bent toward the south, a plume of smoke rose daintily against the blue wash of the sky - so faint and far a trickle that one could barely make it out.

‘Tupper!’ I shouted, running down the slope, glad of a chance to run, of some reason I should run, for I had been standing, determined not to run, determined not to allow the little yapping panic to force me into running, and all the time I’d stood there I had ached to run.

I crossed the little ridge that hid the river and the camp lay there before me - a tiny hut of crudely woven branches, a garden full of growing things, and all along the river bank little straggling, dying trees, with most of their branches dead and bearing only a few tassels of green leaves at their very tops.

A small campfire burned in front of the hut and squatting by the fire was Tupper. He wore the shirt and trousers I had given him and he still had the outrageous hat perched on his head.

‘Tupper!’ I shouted and he rose and came gravely up the slope to meet me. He wiped off his chin and held out his hand in greeting. It still was wet with slobber, but I didn’t mind.

Tupper wasn’t much, but he was another human.

‘Glad you could make it, Brad,’ he said. ‘Glad you could drop over.’

As if I’d been dropping over every day, for years.

‘Nice place you have,’ I said.

‘They did it all for me,’ he said, with a show of pride. ‘The Flowers fixed it up for me. It wasn’t like this to start with, but they fixed it up for me. They have been good to me.’

‘Yes, they have,’ I said.

I didn’t know what it was all about, but I went along. I had to go along. There was just a chance that Tupper could get me back to Millville.

‘They’re the best friends I have,’ said Tupper, slobbering in his happiness. ‘That is, except for you and your papa. Until I found the Flowers, you and your papa were the only friends I had. All the rest of them just made fun of me. I let on I didn’t know that they were making fun, but I knew they were and I didn’t like it.’

‘They weren’t really unkind,’ I assured him. ‘They really didn’t mean what they said or did. They were only being thoughtless.’

‘They shouldn’t have done it,’ Tupper insisted. ‘You never made any fun of me. I like you because you never made any fun of me.’

And he was right, of course. I’d not made fun of him. But not because I hadn’t wanted to at times; there were times when I could have killed him. But my father had taken me off to the side one day and warned me that if he ever caught me making fun of Tupper, like the other kids, he would warm my bottom.’

‘This is the place you were telling me about,’ I said. ‘The place with all the flowers.’

He grinned delightedly, drooling from both corners of his mouth ‘Ain’t it nice?’ he said.

We had been walking down the slope together and now we reached the fire. A crude clay pot was standing in the ashes and there was something bubbling in it.

‘You’ll stay and eat with me,’ invited Tupper. ‘Please, Brad, say you’ll stay and eat with me. It’s been so long since I’ve had anyone who would eat with me.’

Weak tears were running down his cheeks at the thought of how long it had been since he’d had someone who would stay and eat with him.

‘I got corn and potatoes roasting in the coals,’ he said, ‘and I got peas and beans and carrots all cooked up together. That’s them in the pot. There isn’t any meat. You don’t mind, do you, if there isn’t any meat?’

‘Not at all,’ I told him.

‘I miss meat something dreadful,’ he confided. ‘But they can’t do anything about it. They can’t turn themselves into animals.’

‘They?’ I asked.

‘The Flowers,’ he said, and the way he said it, he made them a proper noun. ‘They can turn themselves into anything at all - plant things, that is. But they can’t make themselves into things like pigs or rabbits. I never asked them to. That is, I mean I never asked them twice. I asked them once and they explained to me. I never asked again, for they’ve done a lot of things for me and I am grateful to them.’

‘They explained to you? You mean you talk with them.’

‘All the time,’ said Tupper.

He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hut, scrabbling around for something, with his back end sticking out, like a busy dog digging out a woodchuck.

He backed out and he brought with him a couple of crude pottery plates, lopsided and uneven. He put them down upon the ground and laid on each of them a spoon carved out of wood.

‘Made them myself,’ he told me. ‘Found some clay down in the river bank and at first I couldn’t seem to do it, but then they found out for me and…’

‘The Flowers found out for you?’

‘Sure, the Flowers. They do everything for me.’

‘And the spoons?’

‘Used a piece of stone. Flint, I guess. Had a sharp edge on it. Nothing like a knife, but it did the job. Took a long time, though.’

I nodded.

‘But that’s all right,’ he said. ‘I had a lot of time.’

He did a mopping job and wiped his hands meticulously on his trouser seat.

‘They grew flax for me,’ he said, ‘so I could make some clothes. But I couldn’t get the hang of it. They told me and they told me, but I couldn’t do it. So they finally quit. I went around without no clothes for quite a spell. Except for this hat,’ he said. ‘I did that myself, without no help at all. They didn’t even tell me, I figured it all out and did it by myself. Afterwards they told me that I’d done real good.’

‘They were right,’ I said. ‘It’s magnificent.’ ‘You really think so, Brad?’

‘Of course I do,’ I said.

‘I’m glad to hear you say so, Brad. I’m kind of proud of it. It’s the first thing in my life I ever did alone, without no one telling me.’

‘These flowers of yours…’

‘They ain’t my flowers,’ said Tupper, sharply.

‘You say these flowers can turn themselves into anything they want to. You mean they turned themselves into garden stuff for you.’

‘They can turn themselves into any kind of plants. All I do is ask them.’

‘Then, if they can be anything they want to be, why are they all flowers?’

‘They have to be something, don’t they?’ Tupper demanded, rather heatedly. ‘They might as well be flowers.’

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose they might.’

He raked two ears of corn out of the coals and a couple of potatoes. He used a pot-lifter that looked as if it were fashioned out of bark to get the pot off the fire. He dumped the cooked vegetables that were in it out onto the plates.

‘And the trees?’ I asked.

‘Oh, them are things they changed themselves into. I needed them for wood. There wasn’t any wood to start with and I couldn’t do no cooking and I told them how it was. So they made the trees and they made them special for me. They grow fast and die so that I can break branches off and have dry wood for fire. Slow burning, though, not like ordinary dry wood. And that’s good, for I have to keep a fire burning all the time. I had a pocket full of matches when I came here, but I haven’t had any for a long, long time.’

I remembered when he spoke about the pocket full of matches how entranced he had always been with fire. He always carried matches with him and he’d sit quietly by himself and light match after match, letting each burn down until it scorched his fingers, happy with the sight of flame. A lot of people had been afraid that he might bunt some building down, but he never did. He was just a little jerk who liked the sight of fire.

‘I haven’t any salt; said Tupper. ‘The stuff may taste funny to you. I’ve got used to it.’

‘But you eat vegetables all the time. You need salt for that kind of stuff’

‘The Flowers say I don’t. They say they put things into the vegetables that takes the place of salt. Not that you can taste it, but it gives you the things you need just the same as salt. They studied me to find out what my body needed and they put in a lot of stuff they said I needed. And just down the river I have an orchard full of fruit. And I have raspberries and strawberries that bear almost all the time.’

I couldn’t rightly understand what fruit had to do with the problem of nutrition if the Flowers could do all he said they could, but I let the matter stand. One never got anywhere trying to get Tupper straightened out. If you tried to reason with him, you just made matters worse.

‘We might as well sit down,’ said Tupper, ‘and get started on this.’

I sat down on the ground and he handed me a plate, then sat down opposite me and took the other plate.

I was hungry and the saltless food didn’t go so badly. Flat, of course, and tasting just a little strange, but it was all right. It took away the hunger.

‘You like it here? I asked.

‘It is home to me,’ said Tupper, solemnly. ‘It is where my friends are.’

‘You don’t have anything,’ I said. ‘You don’t have an axe or knife. You don’t have a pot or pan. And there is no one you can turn to. What if you got sick?’

Tupper quit wolfing down his food and stared at me, as if I were the crazy one.

‘I don’t need any of those things,’ he said. ‘I make my dishes out of clay. I can break off the branches with my hands and I don’t need an axe. I don’t need to hoe the garden. There aren’t ever any weeds. I don’t even need to plant it. It’s always there. While I use up one row of stuff, another row is growing. And if I got sick, the Flowers would take care of me. They told me they would.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK.’

He went back to his eating. It was a terrible sight to watch. But he was right about the garden. Now that he had mentioned it, I could see that it wasn’t cultivated. There were rows of growing vegetables - long, neat rows without the sign of ever being hoed and without a single weed. And that, of course, was the way it would be, for no weed would dare to grow here. There was nothing that could grow here except the Flowers themselves, or the things into which the Flowers had turned themselves, like the vegetables and trees.

The garden was a perfect garden. There were no stunted plants and no disease or blight. The tomatoes, hanging on the vines, were an even red and all were perfect globes. The corn stood straight and tall.

‘You cooked enough for two,’ I said. ‘Did you know that I was coming?’

For I was fast reaching the point where I’d have believed almost anything. It was just possible, I told myself that he (or the Flowers) had known that I was coming.

‘I always cook enough for two,’ he told me. ‘There never is no telling when someone might drop in.’

‘But no one ever has?’

‘You’re the first,’ he said. ‘I’m glad that you could come.’

I wondered if time had any meaning for him. Sometimes it seemed it didn’t. And yet he had wept weak tears because it had been so long since anyone had broken bread with him.

We ate in silence for a while and then I took a chance. I’d humoured him long enough and it was time to ask some questions.

‘Where is this place?’ I asked. ‘What kind of place is it? And if you want to get out of it, to get back home, how do you go about it?

I didn’t mention the fact that he had gotten out of it and returned to Millville. I sensed it might be something he would resent, for he’d been in a hurry to get back again - as if he’d broken some sort of rule or regulation and was anxious to return before anyone found out.

Carefully Tupper laid his plate on the ground and 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.’