23

When I got back home, Nancy was waiting for me. She was sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, huddled there, crouched against the world. I saw her from a block away and hurried, gladder at the sight of her than I had ever been before. Glad and humble, and with a tenderness I never knew I had welling up so hard inside of me that I nearly choked.

Poor kid, I thought. It had been rough on her. Just one day home and the world of Millville, the world that she remembered and thought of as her home, had suddenly come unstuck.

Someone was shouting in the garden where tiny fifty-dollar bills presumably were still growing on the little bushes.

Coming in the gate, I stopped short at the sound of bellowing.

Nancy looked up and saw me.

‘It’s nothing, Brad,’ she said. ‘It’s just Hiram down there.

Higgy has him guarding all that money. The kids keep sneaking in, the little eight and ten-year-olds. They only want to count the money on each bush. They aren’t doing any harm.

But Hiram chases them. There are times,’ she said, ‘when I feel sorry for Hiram.’

‘Sorry for him?’ I asked, astonished. He was the last person in the world I’d suspected anyone might feel sorry for. ‘He’s just a stupid slob.’

‘A stupid slob,’ she said, ‘who’s trying to prove something and is not entirely sure what he wants to prove.’

‘That he has more muscle…’

‘No,’ she told me, ‘that’s not it at all.’

Two kids came tearing out of the garden and vanished down the street. There was no sign of Hiram. And no more hollering. He had done his job; he had chased them off.

I sat down on the step beside her.

‘Brad,’ she said, ‘it’s not going well. I can feel it isn’t going well.’

I shook my head, agreeing with her.

‘I was down at the village hall,’ she said. ‘Where that terrible, shrivelled creature is conducting a clinic. Daddy’s down there, too. He’s helping out. But I couldn’t stay. It’s awful.’

‘What’s so bad about it? That thing - whatever you may call it fixed up Doc. He’s up and walking around and he looks as good as new. And Floyd Caldwell’s heart and…’

She shuddered. ‘That’s the terrible thing about it. They are as good as new. They’re better than new. They aren’t cured, Brad; they are repaired, like a machine. It’s like witchcraft. It’s indecent. This wizened thing looks them over and he never makes a sound, but just glides around and looks them over and you can see that he’s not looking at the outside of them but at their very insides. I don’t know how you know this, but you do. As if he were reaching deep inside of them and…’

She stopped. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t talk this way.’ It’s not very decent talk.’

‘It’s not a very decent situation,’ I said. ‘We may have to change our minds a great deal about what is decent and indecent. There are a lot of ways we may have to change. I don’t suppose that we will like it…’

‘You talk as if it’s settled.’

‘I’m afraid it is,’ I said, and I told her what Smith had told the newsmen. It felt good to tell her. There was no one else I could have told right then. It was a piece of news so weighted with guilt I would have been ashamed to tell it to anyone but Nancy.

‘But now,’ said Nancy, ‘there can’t be war - not the kind of war the whole world feared.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘there can’t be any war.’ But I couldn’t seem to feel too good about it. ‘We may have something now that’s worse than war.’

‘There is nothing worse than war,’ she said.

And that, of course, would be what everyone would say. Maybe they’d be right. But now the aliens would come into this world of ours and once we’d let them in we’d be entirely at their mercy. They had tricked us and we had nothing with which we could defend ourselves. Once here they could take over and supersede all plant life upon the Earth, without our knowing it, without our ever being able to find out. Once we let them in we never could be sure. And once they’d done that, then they’d own us. For all the animal life on Earth, including man, depended on the plants of Earth for their energy.

‘What puzzles me,’ I said, ‘is that they could have taken over, anyhow. If they’d had a little patience, if they had taken a little time, they could have taken over and we never would have known. For there are some of them right here, their roots in Millville ground. They needn’t have stayed as flowers. They could have been anything. In a hundred years they could have been every branch and leaf, every blade of grass…’

‘Maybe there was a time factor of some sort,’ said Nancy. ‘Maybe they couldn’t afford to wait.’

I shook my head. ‘They had lots of time. If they needed more, they could have made it.’

‘Maybe they need the human race,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we have something they want. A plant society couldn’t do a thing itself. They can’t move about and they haven’t any hands. They can store a lot of knowledge and they can think long thoughts - they can scheme and plan. But they can’t put any of that planning into execution. They would need a partner to carry out their plans.’

‘They’ve had partners,’ I reminded her. ‘They have a lot of partners even now. There are the people who made the time machine. There’s this funny little doctor and that big windbag of a Smith. The Flowers have all the partners they need. It must be something else.’

‘These people that you mention,’ she said, ‘may not be the right kind of people. Perhaps they searched world after world for the right kind of human beings. For the right kind of partner. Maybe that’s us.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the others weren’t mean enough. They may be looking for a deadly race. And a deadly race, that’s us. Maybe they want someone who’ll go slashing into parallel world after parallel world, in a sort of frenzy; brutal, ruthless, terrible. For when you come right down to it, we are pretty terrible. They may figure that, working with us, there’s nothing that can stop them. Probably they are right. With all their accumulated knowledge and their mental powers, plus our understanding of physical concepts and our flair for technology, there probably is no limit to what the two of us could do.’

‘I don’t think that’s it,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with you? I gained the impression to start with that you thought the Flowers might be all right.’

‘They still may be,’ I told her, ‘but they used so many tricks and I fell for all the tricks. They used me for a fall guy.’

‘So that’s what bothers you.’

‘I feel like a heel,’ I said.

We sat quietly side by side upon the step. The Street was silent and empty. During all the time we had sat there, no one had passed.

Nancy said, ‘It’s strange that anyone could submit himself to that alien doctor. He’s a creepy sort of being, and you can’t be sure…’

‘There are a lot of people,’ I told her, ‘who run most willingly to quackery.’

‘But this isn’t quackery,’ she said. ‘He did cure Doc and the rest of them. I didn’t mean he was a faker, but only that he’s horrid and repulsive.’

‘Perhaps we appear the same to him.’

‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘His technique is so different. No drugs, no instruments, no therapy. He just looks you over and probes into you with nothing, but you can see him probing, and then you’re whole again - not only well, but whole. And if he can do that to our bodies, what about our minds? Can he change our minds, can he re-orient our thoughts?’

‘For some people in this village,’ I told her, ‘that might be a good idea. Higgy, for example.’

She said, sharply, ‘Don’t joke about it, Brad.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’

‘You’re just talking that way to keep from being scared.’

‘And you,’ I said, ‘are talking seriously about it in an effort to reduce it to a commonplace.’

She nodded. ‘But it doesn’t help,’ she said. ‘It isn’t commonplace.’

She stood up. ‘Take me home,’ she said.

So I walked her home.