Davenport nodded. ‘You may have something there, Mr Carter. You say
these plants pretend to have stored knowledge, the knowledge, you suspect,
of many different races.’
‘That’s the impression I was given.’
‘Stored and correlated. Not just a jumble of data.’
‘Correlated, too,’ I said. ‘You must bear in mind that I cannot swear
to this. I have no way of knowing it is true. But their spokesman, Tupper,
assured me that they didn’t lie…’
‘I know,’ said Davenport. ‘There is some logic in that. They wouldn’t
need to lie.’
‘Except,’ said the general, ‘that they never did give back your fifteen
hundred dollars.’
‘No, they didn’t,’ I said.
‘After they said they would.’
‘Yes. They were emphatic on that point.’
‘Which means they lied. And they tricked you into bringing back what
you thought was a time machine.’
‘And,’ Newcombe pointed out, ‘they were very smooth about it.’
‘I don’t think,’ said the general, ‘we can place a great deal of trust
in them.’
‘But look here,’ protested Newcombe, ‘we’ve gotten around to talking as
if we believed every word of it.’
‘Well,’ said the senator, ‘that was the idea, wasn’t it? That we’d use
the information as a basis for discussion.’
‘For the moment,’ said the general, ‘we must presume the worst.’
Davenport chuckled. ‘What’s so bad about it? For the first time in its
history, humanity may be about to meet another intelligence. If we go about
it right, we may find it to our benefit.’
‘But you can’t know that,’ said the general.
‘No, of course we can’t. We haven’t sufficient data. We must make
further contact.’
‘If they exist,’ said Newcombe. ‘If they exist,’ Davenport agreed.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the senator, ‘we are losing sight of something. A
barrier does exist. It will let nothing living through it…’
‘We don’t know that,’ said Davenport. ‘There was the instance of the
car. There would have been some micro-organisms in it. There would have had
to be. My guess is that the barrier is not against life as such, but against
sentience, against awareness. A thing that has awareness of itself…’
‘Well, anyhow,’ said the senator, ‘we have evidence that something very
strange has happened. We can’t just shut our eyes. We must work with what we
have.’
‘All right, then,’ said the general, ‘let’s get down to business. Is it
safe to assume that these things pose a threat?’
I nodded. ‘Perhaps. Under certain circumstances.’
‘And those circumstances?’
‘I don’t know. There is no way of knowing how they think.’
‘But there’s the potentiality of a threat?’
‘I think,’ said Davenport, ‘that we are placing too much stress upon
the matter of a threat. We should first…’
‘My first responsibility,’ said the general, ‘is consideration of a
potential danger…’
‘And if there were a danger?’
‘We could stop them,’ said the general, ‘if we moved fast enough. If we
moved before they’d taken in too much territory. We have a way to stop
them.’
‘All you military minds can think of,’ Davenport said angrily, ‘is the
employment of force. I’ll agree with you that a thermonuclear explosion
could kill all the alien life that has gained access to the Earth, possibly
might even disrupt the time-phase barrier and close the Earth to our alien
friends…’
‘Friends!’ the general wailed. ‘You can’t know…’
‘Of course I can’t,’ said Davenport. ‘And you can’t know that they are
enemies. We need more data; we need to make a further contact…’
‘And while you’re getting your additional data, they’ll have the time
to strengthen the barrier and move it…’
‘Some day,’ said Davenport, angrier than ever, ‘the human race will
have to find a solution to its problems that does not involve the use of
force. Now might be the time to start. You propose to bomb this village.
Aside from the moral issue of destroying several hundred innocent people…’
‘You forget,’ ‘said the general, speaking gruffly, ‘that we’d be
balancing those several hundred lives against the safety of all the people
of the Earth. It would be no hasty action. It would be done only after some
deliberation. It would have to be a considered decision.’
‘The very fact that you can consider it,’ said the biologist, ‘is
enough to send a cold shiver down the spine of all humanity.’ The general
shook his head. ‘It’s my duty to consider distasteful things like this. Even
considering the moral issue involved, in the case of necessity I would…’
‘Gentlemen,’ the senator protested weakly.
The general looked at me. I am afraid they had forgotten I was there.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the general said to me. ‘I should not have spoken in
this manner.’
I nodded dumbly. I couldn’t have said a word if I’d been paid a million
dollars for it. I was all knotted up inside and I was afraid to move.
I had not been expecting anything like this, although now that it had
come, I knew I should have been. I should have known what the world reaction
would be and if I had failed to know, all I had to do would have been to
remember what Stiffy Grant had told me as he lay on the kitchen floor.
They’ll want to use the bomb, he’d said. Don’t let them use the bomb…
Newcombe stared at me coldly. His eyes stabbed out at me.
‘I trust,’ he said, ‘that you’ll not repeat what you have heard.’
‘We have to trust you, boy,’ said the senator.’You hold us in your
hands.’
I managed to laugh. I suppose that it came out as an ugly laugh. ‘Why
should I say anything?’ I asked. ‘We’re sitting ducks. There would be no
point in saying anything. We couldn’t get away.’
For a moment I thought wryly that perhaps the barrier would protect us
even from a bomb Then I saw how wrong I was. The barrier concerned itself
with nothing except life – or, if Davenport were right (and he probably was)
only with a life that was aware of its own existence. They had tried to
dynamite the barrier and it had been as if there had been no barrier. The
barrier had offered no resistance to the explosion and therefore had not
been affected by it.
From the general’s viewpoint, the bomb might be the answer. It would
kill all life; it was an application of the conclusion Alf Peterson had
arrived at on the question of how one killed a noxious plant that had great
adaptability. A nuclear explosion might have no effect upon the time-phase
mechanism, but it would kill all life and would so irradiate and poison the
area that for a long, long time the aliens would be unable to re-occupy it.
‘I hope,’ I said to the general, ‘you’ll be as considerate as you’re
asking me to be. If you find you have to do it, you’ll make no prior
announcement.’
The general nodded, thin-lipped.
‘I’d hate to think,’ I said, ‘what would happen in this village…’
The senator broke in. ‘Don’t worry about it now. It’s just one of many
alternatives. For the time we’ll not even consider it. Our friend, the
general, spoke a little out of turn.’
‘At least,’ the general said, ‘I am being honest. I wasn’t
pussy-footing. I wasn’t playing games.’
He seemed to be saying that the others were.
‘There is one thing you must realize,’ I told them. ‘This can’t be any
cloak-and-dagger operation. You have to do it honestly – whatever you may
do. There are certain minds the Flowers can read. There are minds, perhaps
many minds; they are in contact with at this very moment. The owners of
those minds don’t know it and there is no way we can know to whom those
minds belong. Perhaps to one of you. There is an excellent chance the
Flowers will know, at all times, exactly what is being planned.’
I could see that they had not thought of that. I had told them, of
course, in the telling of my story, but it hadn’t registered. There was so
much that it took a man a long time to get it straightened out.
‘Who are those people down there by the cars?’ asked Newcombe.
I turned and looked.
Half the village probably was there. They had come out to watch. And
one couldn’t blame them, I told myself. They had a right to be concerned;
they had the right to watch. This was their life. Perhaps a lot of them
didn’t trust me, not after what Hiram and Tom had been saying about me, and
here I was, out here, sitting on a chair in the middle of the road, talking
with the men from Washington. Perhaps they felt shut out. Perhaps they felt
they should be sitting in a meeting such as this.
I turned back to the four across the bather.
‘Here’s a thing,’ I told them, urgently, ‘that you can’t afford to
mull. If we do, we’ll fail all the other chances as they come along…’