Now, at the sound of the voice, I jerked up my head, and saw that I had
reached the tangle of parked cars. Leaning against one of them was Bill
Donovan.
‘Hi there, Bill,’ I said. ‘You should be up there with the rest of
them.’
He made a gesture of disgust. ‘We need help,’ he said. ‘Sure we do. All
the help we can get. But it wouldn’t hurt to wait a while before you ran
squealing for it. You can’t cave in the first tune you are hit. You have to
hang onto at least a shred or two of your self-respect.’
I nodded, not quite agreeing with him. ‘They’re scared,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but there isn’t any call for them to act like a bunch
of bleating sheep.’
‘How about the kids?’ I asked.
‘Safe and sound,’ he told me. ‘Jake got to them just before the barrier
moved. Took them out of there. Jake had to chop down the door to reach them
and Myrt carried on all the time he was chopping it. You never heard so much
uproar in your life about a God damn door.’
‘And Mrs Donovan?’
‘Oh, Liz – she’s all right. Cries for the kids and wonders what’s so
become of us. But the kids are safe and that’s all that counts.’
He patted the metal of the car with the flat of his hand. ‘We’ll work
it out,’ he said. ‘It may take a little time, but there isn’t anything that
men can’t do if they set their minds to it. Like as not they’ll have a
thousand of them scientists working on this thing and, like I say, it may
take a while, but they’ll get her figured out.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose they will.’
If some muddle-headed general didn’t push the panic button first. If,
instead of trying to solve the problem, we didn’t try to smash it.
‘What’s the matter, Brad?’
‘Not a thing,’ I said.
‘You got your worries, too, I guess,’ he said. ‘What you did to Hiram,
he had it coming to him for a long time now. Was that telephone he
threw…?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was one of the telephones.’
‘Heard you, went to some other world or something. How do you manage to
get into another world? It sounds screwy to me, but that’s what everyone is
saying.’
A couple of yelling kids came running through the cars and went pelting
up the road toward where the crowd was still arguing with the senator.
‘Kids are having a great time,’ said Donovan. ‘Most excitement they’ve
ever had. Better than a circus.’
Some more kids went past, whooping as they ran. ‘Say,’ asked Donovan,
‘do you think something might have happened?’
The first two kids had reached the crowd and were tugging at people’s
arms and shouting something at them.
‘Looks like it,’ I said.
A few of the crowd started back down the road, walking to start with,
then breaking into a trot, heading back for town.
As they came close, Donovan darted out to intercept them. ‘What’s the
matter?’ he yelled. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Money,’ one of them shouted back at
him. ‘Someone’s found some money.’
By now the whole crowd had left the barrier and was running down the
road.
As they swept past, Mae Hutton shouted at me, ‘Come on, Brad! Money in
your garden!’
Money in my garden! For the love of God, what next? I took one look at
the four men from Washington, standing beyond the barrier. Perhaps they were
thinking that the town was crazy. They had every right to think so.
I stepped out into the road and jogged along behind the crowd, heading
back for town.
19
When I came back that morning I had found that the purple flowers
growing in the swale behind my house, through the wizardry of that other
world, had been metamorphosed into tiny bushes. In the dark I had run my
fingers along the bristling branches and felt the many swelling buds. And
now the buds had broken and where each bud had been was, not a leaf, but a
miniature fifty-dollar bill!
Len Streeter, the high school science teacher, handed one of the tiny
bills to me.
‘It’s impossible,’ he said.
And he was right. It was impossible. No bush in its right mind would
grow fifty-dollar bills – or any kind of bills.
There were a lot of people there – all the crowd that had been out in
the road shouting at the senator, and as many more. It looked to me as if
the entire village might be there. They were tramping around among the
bushes and yelling at one another, all happy and excited. They had a right
to be. There probably weren’t many of them who had ever seen a fifty-dollar
bill, and here were thousands of them.
‘You’ve looked close at it,’ I asked the teacher. ‘You’re sure it
actually is a bill?’
He pulled a small magnifying glass out of his shirt pocket and handed
it to me.
‘Have a look,’ he said.
I had a look and there was no question that it looked like a
fifty-dollar bill – although the only fifty-dollar bills I had ever seen
were the thirty of them in the envelope Sherwood had given me. And I hadn’t
had a chance to more than glance at those. But through the glass I could see
that the little bills had the fabric-like texture one finds in folding money
and everything else, including the serial number, looked authentic.
And I knew, even as I squinted through the lens, that it was authentic.
For these were (how would one say it – the descendants?) of the money Tupper
Tyler had stolen from me.
I knew exactly what had happened and the knowledge was a chill that bit
deep into my mind.
‘It’s possible,’ I told Streeter. With that gang back there, it’s
entirely possible.’
‘You mean the gang from your other world?’
‘Not my other world,’ I shouted. ‘Your other world. This world’s other
world. When you get it through your damn thick skulls…’
I didn’t say the rest of it. I was glad I didn’t.
‘I’m sorry,’ Streeter said. ‘I didn’t mean it quite the way it
sounded.’
Higgy, I saw, was standing halfway up the slope that led to the house
and he was yelling for attention.
‘Listen to rue!’ he was shouting. ‘Fellow citizens, Won’t you listen to
me.’
The crowd was beginning to quiet down and Higgy went on yelling until
everyone was quiet.
‘Stop pulling off them leaves,’ he told them. ‘Just leave them where
they are.’
Charley Hutton said, ‘Hell, Higgy, all that we was doing was picking a
few of them to have a better look.’
‘Well, quit it,’ said the mayor sternly. ‘Every one that you pull off
is fifty dollars less. Give them leaves a little time and they’ll grow to
proper size and then they’ll drop off and all we need to do is to pick them
up and every one of them will be money in our pocket.’
‘How do you know that?’ Grandma Jones shrilled at him.
‘Well,’ the mayor said, ‘it stands to reason, don’t it? Here we have
these marvellous plants growing money for us. The least we can do is let
them be, so they can grow it for us.’
He looked around the crowd and suddenly saw me.
‘Brad,’ he asked me, ‘isn’t that correct?’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ I said.
For Tupper had stolen the money and the Flowers had used the bills as
patterns on which to base the leaves. I would have bet, without looking
further, that there were no more than thirty different serial numbers in the
entire crop of money.
‘What I want to know,’ said Charley Hutton, ‘is how you figure we
should divide it up – once it’s ripe, that is.’
‘Why,’ said the mayor, ‘that’s something I hadn’t even thought of.
Maybe we could put it in a common fund that could be handed out to people as
they have the need of it.’
‘That don’t seem fair to me,’ said Charley. ‘That way some people would
get more of it than others. Seems to me the only way is to divide it evenly.
Everyone should get his fair share of it, to do with as he wants.’
‘There’s some merit,’ said the mayor, ‘in your point of view. But it
isn’t something on which we should make a snap decision. This afternoon I’ll
appoint a committee to look into it. Anyone who has any ideas can present
them and they’ll get full consideration.’
‘Mr Mayor,’ piped up Daniel Willoughby, ‘there is one thing I think
we’ve overlooked. No matter what we say, this stuff isn’t money.’
‘But it looks like money. Once it’s grown to proper size, no one could
tell the difference.’
‘I know,’ the banker said, ‘that it looks like money. It probably would