into place. But there was no sound of crying now, none of the thin, high
screaming. There were no people and the only movements were the little
ripples of settling rubble that lay beyond the bare and blackened and
entirely featureless area where the light had blossomed.
The greyness faded and the city began to dim. Out in the centre of the
picnic circle I could make out the glimmer of the lens-covered basketball.
There were no signs of my fellow picnickers; they had disappeared. And from
the thinning greyness came another screaming – but a different kind of
screaming, not the kind I’d heard from the city before the bomb had struck.
For now I knew that I had seen a city destroyed by a nuclear explosion
– as one might have watched it on a TV set. And the TV set, if one could
call it that, could have been nothing other than the basketball. By some
strange magic mechanism it had invaded time and brought back from the past a
moment of high crisis.
The greyness faded out and the night came back again, with the golden
moon and the dust of stars and the silver slopes that curved to meet the
quicksilver of the creek.
Down the farther slope I could see the scurrying figures, with their
silver topknots gleaming in the moonlight, running wildly through the night
and screaming in simulated terror. I stood looking after them and shivered,
for there was something here, I knew, that had a sickness in it, a sickness
of the mind, an illness of the soul.
Slowly I turned back to the basketball. It was, once again, just a
thing of lenses. I walked over to it and knelt beside it and had a look at
it. It was made of many lenses and in the interstices between the tilted
lenses, I could catch glimpses of some sort of mechanism, although all the
details of it were lost in the weakness of the moonlight.
I reached out a hand and touched it gingerly. It seemed fragile and I
feared that I might break it, but I couldn’t leave it here. It was something
that I wanted and I told myself that if I could get it back to Earth, it
would help to back up the story I had to tell.
I took off my jacket and spread it on the ground, and then carefully
picked up the basketball, using both my hands to cradle it, and put it on
the jacket. I gathered up the ends of the cloth and wrapped them all around
the ball, then tied the sleeves together to help hold the folds in place.
I picked it up and tucked it securely underneath an arm, then got to my
feet.
The hampers and the bottles lay scattered all about and it occurred to
me that I should get away as quickly as I could, for these other people
would be coming back to get the basketball and to gather up their picnic.
But there was as yet no sign of them. Listening intently, it seemed to me
that I could hear the faint sounds of their screaming receding in the
distance.
I turned and went down the hill and crossed the creek. Halfway up the
other slope I met Tupper coming out to hunt me.
‘Thought you had got lost,’ he said.
‘I met a group of people. I had a picnic with them.’
‘They have funny topknots?’
‘They had that,’ I said.
‘Friends of mine,’ said Tupper. ‘They come here many times. They come
here to be scared.’
‘Scared?’
‘Sure. It’s fun for them. They like being scared.’
I nodded to myself. So that was it, I thought. Like a bunch of kids
creeping on a haunted house and peeking through the windows so that they
might run, shrieking from imagined horror at imagined stirrings they’d seen
inside the house. And doing it time after time, never getting tired of the
good time that they had, gaining some strange pleasure from their very
fright.
‘They have more fun,’ said Tupper, ‘than anyone I know.’
‘You’ve seen them often?’
‘Lots of times,’ said Tupper.
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I never had the time,’ said Tupper. ‘I never got around to.’
‘And they live close by?’
‘No,’ said Tupper. ‘Very far away.’
‘But on this planet.’
‘Planet?’ Tupper asked.
‘On this world,’ I said.
‘No. On another world. In another place. But that don’t make no
difference. They go everywhere for fun.’
So they went everywhere for fun, I thought. And everywhen, perhaps.
They were temporal ghouls, feeding on the past, getting their vicarious
kicks out of catastrophe and disaster of an ancient age, seeking out those
historic moments that were horrible and foul. Coming back again and yet
again to one such scene that had a high appeal to their perverted minds.
A decadent race, I wondered, from some world conquered by the Flowers,
free now to use the many gateways that led from world to world?
Conquered, in the light of what I knew, might not be the proper word.
For I had seen this night what had happened to this world. Not depopulated
by the Flowers, but by the mad suicide of the humans who had been native to
it. More than likely it had been an empty and a dead world for years before
the Flowers had battered down the time-phase boundary that let them into it.
The skulls I had found had been those of the survivors – perhaps a
relatively few survivors – who had managed to live on for a little time, but
who had been foredoomed by the poisoned soil and air and water.
So the Flowers had not really conquered; they had merely taken over a
world that had gone forfeit by the madness of its owners.
‘How long ago,’ I asked, ‘did the Flowers come here?’
‘What makes you think,’ asked Tupper, ‘that they weren’t always here?’
‘Nothing. Just a thought. They never talked to you about it?’
‘I never asked,’ said Tupper.
Of course he wouldn’t ask; he’d have no curiosity. He would be simply
glad that he had found this place, where he had friends who talked with him
and provided for his simple needs, where there were no humans to mock or
pester him.
We came down to the camping place and I saw that the moon had moved far
into the west. The fire was burning low and Tupper fed it with some sticks,
then sat down beside it.
I sat down across from him and placed the wrapped basketball beside me.
‘What you got there?’ asked Tupper.
I unwrapped it for him.
He said, ‘It’s the thing my friends had. You stole it from my friends.’
‘They ran away’ and left it. I want a look at it.’
‘You see other times with it,’ said Tupper.
‘You know about this, Tupper?’
He nodded. ‘They show me many times – not often, I don’t mean that, but
many other times. Time not like we’re in.’
‘You don’t know how it works?’
‘They told me,’ Tupper said, ‘but I didn’t understand.’
He wiped his chin, but failed to do the job, so wiped it a second time.
They told me, he had said. So he could talk with them. He could talk
with Flowers and with a race that conversed by music. There was no use, I
knew, in asking him about it, because he couldn’t tell me. Perhaps there was
no one who could explain an ability of that sort – not to a human being.
For more than likely there’d be no common terms in which an explanation
could be made.
The basketball glowed softly, lying on the jacket.
‘Maybe,’ Tupper said, ‘we should go back to bed.’
‘In a little while,’ I said. Anytime I wanted, it would be no trouble
going back to bed, for the ground was bed.
I put out a hand and touched the basketball.
A mechanism that extended back in time and recorded for the viewer the
sight and sound of happenings that lay deep in the memory of the space-time
continuum. It would have, I thought, very many uses. It would be an
invaluable tool in historical research. It would make crime impossible, for
it could dig out of the past the details of any crime. And it would be a
terrible device if it fell into unscrupulous hands or became the property of
a government.
I’d take it back to Millville, if I could take it back, if I could get
back myself. It would help to support the story I had to tell, but after I
had told the story and had offered it as proof; what would I do with it?
Lock it in a vault and destroy the combination? Take a sledge and smash it
into smithereens? Turn it over to the scientists? What could one do with
it’?
‘You messed up your coat,’ said Tupper, ‘carrying that thing.’