It was, I gathered, some sort of holiday, although there was something
in that circle which made it more than a holiday.
There was a sense of anticipation in the faces and the bodies of these
people sitting in the circle, as if they might be waiting for an event of
great importance. They were happy and excited and vibrant with the sense of
life to their fingertips.
Except for their crests, they were humanoid, and I could see now that
they wore no clothing. I found time to wonder where they might have come
from, for Tupper would have told me if there were people such as they. But
he had told me that the Flowers were the only things which existed on this
planet, although he had said sometimes there were others who came visiting.
Were these people, then, the ones who came visiting, or was it possible
that they were the descendants of those people whose bones I had found down
on the mound, now finally emerged from some secret hiding place? Although
there was no sign in them of ever having hidden, of ever having skulked.
The strange contraption lay in the centre of the circle. At a picnic
back in Millville it would have been a record player or a radio that someone
had brought along. But these people had no need of music, for they talked in
music, and the thing looked like nothing I had ever seen. It was round and
seemed to be fashioned of many lenses, all tilted at different angles so
that the surfaces caught the moonlight, reflecting it to make the ball
itself a sphere of shining glory.
Some of the people sitting in the circle began an unpacking of the
hampers and an uncorking of the bottles and I knew that more than likely
they’d ask me to eat with them. It worried me to think of it, for since
they’d been so kind I could not very well refuse, and yet it might be
dangerous to eat the food they had. For although they were humanoid, there
easily could be differences in their metabolism and what might be food for
them could be poisonous for me.
It was a little thing, of course, but it seemed a big decision, and I
sat there in mental agony, trying to make up my mind.
The food might be a loathsome and nauseating mess, but that I could
have managed; for the friendship of these people I would have choked it
down. It was the thought that it might be deadly that made me hesitate.
A while ago, I remembered, I had convinced myself that no matter how
great a threat the Flowers might be, we still must let them in, must strive
to find a common ground upon which any differences that might exist between
us could somehow be adjusted. I had told myself that the future of the human
race might easily hang upon our ability to meet and to get along with an
alien race, for the time was coming, in a hundred years from now, or a
thousand years from now, when we’d be encountering other alien races, and we
could not fail this first time.
And here, I realized, was another alien race, sitting in this circle,
and there could be no double standard as between myself and the world at
large. I, in my own right, must act as I’d decided the human race must act –
I must eat the food when it was offered me.
Perhaps I was not thinking very clearly. Events were happening much too
fast and I had too little time. It was a snap decision at best and I hoped I
was not wrong.
I never had a chance to know, for before the food could be passed
around, the contraption in the centre of the circle began a little ticking –
no more than the ticking of a clock in an empty room, but at the first tick
it gave they all jumped to their feet and stood watching it.
I jumped up, too, and stood watching with them, and I could sense that
they’d forgotten I was with them. All of their attentions were fastened on
that shining basketball.
As it ticked, the glow of it became a shining mistiness and the
mistiness spread out, like a fog creeping up the land from a river bottom.
The mistiness enveloped us and out of that mistiness strange shapes
began to form. At first they were wavering and unstable forms, but in a
while they steadied and became more substantial, although never quite
substantial; there was about them a touch of fairyland, of a shape and time
that one might see, but that was forever out of reach.
And now the mistiness went away – or perhaps it still remained and we
did not notice it, for with the creation of the forms it had supplied
another world, of which we were observers, if not an actual part.
It appeared that we were standing on the terrace of what on Earth might
have been called a villa. Beneath our feet were rough-hewn flagstones, with
thin lines of grass growing in the cracks between the stones, and back of us
rose rough walls of masonry. But the walls had a misty texture, as if they
were some sort of simulated backdrop that one was not supposed to inspect
too closely.
In front of us spread a city, an ugly city with no beauty in it. It was
utilitarian in its every aspect, a geometric mass of stone, reared without
imagination, with no architectural concept beyond the principle that one
stone piled atop another would achieve a place of shelter. The city was the
drab colour of dried mud and it spread as far as the eye could see, a
disorderly mass of rectilinear structures thrust together, cheek by jowl,
with no breathing space provided.
And yet there was an insubstantiality about it; never for an instant
did that massive city become solid masonry. Nor were the flagstones
underneath our feet an actual flagstone terrace.
Rather it was as though we floated, a fraction of an inch above the
flagstones, never touching them.
We stood, it seemed, in the middle of a three-dimensional movie. And
all around us the movie moved and went about its business and we knew that
we were there, for we could see it on every side of us, but the actors in
the movie were unaware of us and while we knew that we were there, there
also was the knowledge that we were not a part of it, that we somehow stood
aside from this magic world in which we were engulfed.
At first I’d seen only the city, but now I saw there was terror in the
city. People were running madly in the streets, and from far off I could
hear the screaming, the thin and frantic wailing of a lost and hopeless
people.
Then the city and the screaming were blotted out in a searing flash of
light, a blossoming whiteness that became so intense it suddenly went black.
The blackness covered us and we stood in a world that had nothing in it
except the darkness and the cataract of thunder that poured out of that
place where the flash of light had blossomed.
I took a short step forward, groping as I went. My hands met emptiness
and the feeling flooded over me that I stood in an emptiness that stretched
on forever, that what I’d known before had been nothing but illusion and the
illusion now was gone, leaving me to grope eternally through black
nothingness.
I took no other step, but stood stiff and straight, afraid to move a
muscle, sensing in all irrationality that I stood upon a platform and might
fall from it into a great emptiness which would have no bottom.
As I stood there the blackness turned to grey and through the greyness
I could see the city, flattened and sharded, swept by tornadic winds, with
gouts of flame and ash twisting in the monstrous whirlwind of destruction.
Above the city was a rolling cloud, as if a million thunderstorms had been
rolled all into one. And from this maelstrom of fury came a deepthroated
growling of death and fear and fate, a savage terrible sound that made one
think of evil.
Around me I saw the others – the black-skinned people with the silver
crests – standing transfixed and frozen, fascinated by the sight that lay
before them, rigid as if with fear, but something more than just plain fear
– superstitious fear, perhaps.
I stood there, rooted with them, and the growling died away. Thin wisps
of smoke curled up above the rubble, and in the silence that came as the
growling ceased I could hear the little cracklings and groanings and the
tiny crashes as the splintered stone that still remained settled more firmly