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