helping out. But I couldn’t stay. It’s awful.’
‘What’s so bad about it? That thing – whatever you may call it fixed up
Doc. He’s up and walking around and he looks as good as new. And Floyd
Caldwell’s heart and…’
She shuddered. ‘That’s the terrible thing about it. They are as good as
new. They’re better than new. They aren’t cured, Brad; they are repaired,
like a machine. It’s like witchcraft. It’s indecent. This wizened thing
looks them over and he never makes a sound, but just glides around and looks
them over and you can see that he’s not looking at the outside of them but
at their very insides. I don’t know how you know this, but you do. As if he
were reaching deep inside of them and…’
She stopped. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t talk this way.’ It’s
not very decent talk.’
‘It’s not a very decent situation,’ I said. ‘We may have to change our
minds a great deal about what is decent and indecent. There are a lot of
ways we may have to change. I don’t suppose that we will like it…’
‘You talk as if it’s settled.’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ I said, and I told her what Smith had told the
newsmen. It felt good to tell her. There was no one else I could have told
right then. It was a piece of news so weighted with guilt I would have been
ashamed to tell it to anyone but Nancy.
‘But now,’ said Nancy, ‘there can’t be war – not the kind of war the
whole world feared.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘there can’t be any war.’ But I couldn’t seem to feel too
good about it. ‘We may have something now that’s worse than war.’
‘There is nothing worse than war,’ she said.
And that, of course, would be what everyone would say. Maybe they’d be
right. But now the aliens would come into this world of ours and once we’d
let them in we’d be entirely at their mercy. They had tricked us and we had
nothing with which we could defend ourselves. Once here they could take over
and supersede all plant life upon the Earth, without our knowing it, without
our ever being able to find out. Once we let them in we never could be sure.
And once they’d done that, then they’d own us. For all the animal life on
Earth, including man, depended on the plants of Earth for their energy.
‘What puzzles me,’ I said, ‘is that they could have taken over, anyhow.
If they’d had a little patience, if they had taken a little time, they could
have taken over and we never would have known. For there are some of them
right here, their roots in Millville ground. They needn’t have stayed as
flowers. They could have been anything. In a hundred years they could have
been every branch and leaf, every blade of grass…’
‘Maybe there was a time factor of some sort,’ said Nancy. ‘Maybe they
couldn’t afford to wait.’
I shook my head. ‘They had lots of time. If they needed more, they
could have made it.’
‘Maybe they need the human race,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we have something
they want. A plant society couldn’t do a thing itself. They can’t move about
and they haven’t any hands. They can store a lot of knowledge and they can
think long thoughts – they can scheme and plan. But they can’t put any of
that planning into execution. They would need a partner to carry out their
plans.’
‘They’ve had partners,’ I reminded her. ‘They have a lot of partners
even now. There are the people who made the time machine. There’s this funny
little doctor and that big windbag of a Smith. The Flowers have all the
partners they need. It must be something else.’
‘These people that you mention,’ she said, ‘may not be the right kind
of people. Perhaps they searched world after world for the right kind of
human beings. For the right kind of partner. Maybe that’s us.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘the others weren’t mean enough. They may be looking
for a deadly race. And a deadly race, that’s us. Maybe they want someone
who’ll go slashing into parallel world after parallel world, in a sort of
frenzy; brutal, ruthless, terrible. For when you come right down to it, we
are pretty terrible. They may figure that, working with us, there’s nothing
that can stop them. Probably they are right. With all their accumulated
knowledge and their mental powers, plus our understanding of physical
concepts and our flair for technology, there probably is no limit to what
the two of us could do.’
‘I don’t think that’s it,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter with you? I
gained the impression to start with that you thought the Flowers might be
all right.’
‘They still may be,’ I told her, ‘but they used so many tricks and I
fell for all the tricks. They used me for a fall guy.’
‘So that’s what bothers you.’
‘I feel like a heel,’ I said.
We sat quietly side by side upon the step. The Street was silent and
empty. During all the time we had sat there, no one had passed.
Nancy said, ‘It’s strange that anyone could submit himself to that
alien doctor. He’s a creepy sort of being, and you can’t be sure…’
‘There are a lot of people,’ I told her, ‘who run most willingly to
quackery.’
‘But this isn’t quackery,’ she said. ‘He did cure Doc and the rest of
them. I didn’t mean he was a faker, but only that he’s horrid and
repulsive.’
‘Perhaps we appear the same to him.’
‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘His technique is so different. No
drugs, no instruments, no therapy. He just looks you over and probes into
you with nothing, but you can see him probing, and then you’re whole again –
not only well, but whole. And if he can do that to our bodies, what about
our minds? Can he change our minds, can he re-orient our thoughts?’
‘For some people in this village,’ I told her, ‘that might be a good
idea. Higgy, for example.’
She said, sharply, ‘Don’t joke about it, Brad.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I won’t.’
‘You’re just talking that way to keep from being scared.’
‘And you,’ I said, ‘are talking seriously about it in an effort to
reduce it to a commonplace.’
She nodded. ‘But it doesn’t help,’ she said. ‘It isn’t commonplace.’
She stood up. ‘Take me home,’ she said.
So I walked her home.
24
Twilight was falling when I walked downtown. I don’t know why I went
there. Restlessness, I guess. The house was too big and empty (emptier than
it had ever been before) and the neighbourhood too quiet. There was no noise
at all except for the occasional snatch of voices either excited or
pontifical, strained through the electronic media. There was not a house in
the entire village, I was certain, that did not have a television set or
radio turned on.
But when I turned on the TV in the living-room and settled back to
watch, it did no more than make me nervous and uneasy.
A commentator, one of the better known ones, was holding forth with a
calm and deep assurance.
‘…no way of knowing whether this contraption which is circling the
skies can really do the job which our Mr Smith from the other world has
announced to be its purpose. It has been picked up on a number of occasions
by tracking stations which do not seem to be able, for one reason or
another, to keep it in their range, and there have been instances,
apparently verified, of visual sightings of it. But it is something about
which it is difficult to get any solid news.’
‘Washington, it is understood, is taking the position that the word of
an unknown being – unknown by either race or reputation – scarcely can be
taken as undisputed fact. The capital tonight seems to be waiting for more
word and until something of a solid nature can be deduced, it is unlikely
there will be any sort of statement. That is the public position, of course;
what is going on behind the scenes may be anybody’s guess. And the same
situation applies fairly well to all other capitals throughout the entire
world.
‘But this is not the situation outside the governmental circles.
Everywhere the news has touched off wild celebration.
There are joyous, spontaneous marches breaking out in London, and in
Moscow a shouting, happy mob has packed Red Square. The churches everywhere
have been filled since the first news broke, people thronging there to utter
prayers of thankfulness.
‘In the people there is no doubt and not the slightest hesitation. The
man in the street, here in the United States and in Britain and in France –