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