‘This is good enough,’ said Stuffy. We have something that the aliens
want. We’re the only people who can give it to them.’
‘Give to them!’ I shouted. ‘Anything they want, they can take away from
us.’
‘Not this, they can’t,’ said Stuffy.
I shook my head. ‘You make it sound too easy. They already have us
hooked. The people want them in, although they’d come in anyhow, even if the
people didn’t. They hit us in our weak spot . . .’
‘The Flowers have a weak spot, too,’ said Stuffy.
‘Don’t make me laugh,’ I said.
‘You’re just upset,’ said Stiffy.
‘You’re damned right I am.’
And I had a right to be. The world had gone to pot. Nuclear
annihilation was poised above our heads and the village, wild before, would
be running frantic when Hiram told what he’d seen down in the garden. Hiram
and his hoodlum pals had burned down my house and I didn’t have a home – no
one had a home, for the earth was home no longer. It was just another in a
long, long chain of worlds that was being taken over by another kind of life
that mankind had no chance of fighting.
‘The Flowers are an ancient race,’ said Stuffy. ‘How ancient, I don’t
know. A billion years, two billion, it’s anybody’s guess. They’ve gone into
a lot of worlds and they’ve known a lot of races – intelligent races, that
is. And they’ve worked with these races and gone hand in hand with them. But
no other race has ever loved them. No other race has ever grown them in
their gardens and tended them for the beauty that they gave and no . . .’
‘You’re crazy!’ I yelled. ‘You’re stark, raving mad.’
‘Brad,’ said Nancy, breathlessly, ‘he could be right, you know.
Realization of natural beauty is something the human race developed in the
last two thousand years or so. No caveman ever thought a flower was
beautiful or…’
‘You’re right,’ said Stuffy. ‘No other race, none of the other races,
ever developed the concept of beauty. Only a man of Earth would have dug up
a clump of flowers growing in the woods and brought them home and tended
them for the beauty that the Flowers had never known they had until that
very moment. No one had ever loved them before, for any reason, or cared for
them before. Like a lovely woman who had never known she was beautiful until
someone told her that she was. Like an orphan that never had a home and
finally found a home.’
It was simple, I told myself. It couldn’t be that simple. There was
nothing ever simple. Yet, when one thought of it, it seemed to make some
sense. And it was the only thing that made any sense.
‘The Flowers made one condition,’ Stuffy said. ‘Let us make another.
Let us insist that a certain percentage of them, when we invite them, must
remain as flowers.’
‘So that the people of the earth,’ said Nancy, ‘can cultivate them and
lavish care on them and admire them for themselves.’
Stuffy chuckled softly. ‘I’ve thought on it a lot,’ he said. ‘I could
write that clause myself…’
Would it work, I wondered. Would it really work?
And, of course, it would.
The business of being flowers loved by another race, cared for by
another race, would bind these aliens to us as closely as we would be bound
to them by the banishment of war.
A different kind of bond, but as strong a bond as that which bound man
and dog together. And that bond was all we needed; one that would give us
time to learn to work together.
We would never need to fear the Flowers, for we were someone they had
been looking for, not knowing they were looking for us, not once suspecting
that the sort of thing existed that we could offer them.
‘Something new,’ I said.
‘Yeah, something new,’ said Stuffy.
Something new and strange, I told myself. As new and strange to the
Flowers as their time manipulation was new and strange to us.
‘Well,’ asked Stuffy, ‘do you buy it? There’s a bunch of soldier boys
out here looking for me. They know I slipped through the lines and in a
little while they’ll nose me out.’
The State Department man and the senator, I recalled, had talked this
very morning of long negotiation if, in fact, there could be negotiation.
And the general had talked in terms of force. But all the time the answer
had lain in a soft and very human trait, mankind’s love of beauty. It had
remained for an undistinguished man, no senator or no general, but a crummy
bum, to come up with the answer.
‘Call in your soldier boys,’ I said, ‘and ask them for a phone. I’d
just as soon not go hunting one.’
First I’d have to reach the senator and he’d talk to the President.
Then I’d get hold of Higgy and tell him what had happened so he could tame
down the village.
But for a little moment I’d have it as I wanted to remember it, here
with Nancy at my side and that old reprobate friend of mine across the
barrier, savouring the greatness of this tiny slice of time in which the
strength of true humanity (not of position or of power) rose to the vision
of a future in which many different races marched side by side toward a
glory we could not guess as yet.