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.’