All Flesh Is Grass Part 31

They had reached the bottom of the slope and were charging across the flat ground of the garden, with Hiram in the lead. I stood and waited for them, with the club half raised, watching Hiram run toward me, with the white gash of his teeth s.h.i.+ning in the darkness of his face.

Right between the eyes, I told myself, and split his skull wide open. And after that get another of them if there were time to do it.

The fire was roaring now, racing through the dryness of the house, and even where I stood the heat reached out to touch me.

The men were closing in and I raised the club a little higher, working my fingers to get a better grip upon it.

But in that last instant before they came within my reach, they skidded to a milling halt, some of them half turning to run back up the slope, the others simply staring, with their mouths wide open in astonishment and horror. Staring, not at me, but at something that was beyond me.

Then they broke and ran, back toward the slope, and above the roaring of the burning house, I could hear their bellowing-like stampeded cattle racing before a prairie fire, bawling out their terror as they ran.

I swung around to look behind me and there stood those other things from that other world, their ebon hides gleaming in the flicker of the firelight, their silver plumes stirring gently in the breeze. And as they moved toward me, they twittered in their weird bird-song.

My G.o.d, I thought, they couldn't wait! They came a little early so they wouldn't miss a single tremor of this terror-stricken place.

And not only on this night, but on other nights to come, rolling back

the time to this present instant. A new place for them to stand and wait for it to commence, a new ghost house with gaping windows through which they'd glimpse the awfulness of another earth.

They were moving toward me and I was standing there with the club gripped in my hands and there was the smell of purpleness again and a soundless voice I recognized.

Go back, the voice said. Go back. You've come too soon. This world isn't open.

Someone was calling from far away, the call lest in the thundering and the crackling of the fire and the high, excited, liquid trilling of these ghouls from the purple world of Tupper Tyler.

Go back, said the elm tree, and its voiceless words cracked like a snapped whiplash.

And they were going back-or, at least, they were disappearing, melting into some strange darkness that was blacker than the night.

One elm tree that talked, I thought, and how many other trees? How much of this place still was Millville and how much purple world? I lifted my head so that I could see the treetops that rimmed the garden and they were there, ghosts against the sky, fluttering in some strange wind that blew from an unknown quarter. Fluttering-or were they talking, too? The old, dumb, stupid trees of earth, or a different kind of tree from a different earth?

We'd never know, I told myself, and perhaps it did not matter, for from the very start we'd never had a chance. We were licked before we started. We had been lost on that long-gone day when my father brought home the purple flowers.

From far off someone was calling and the name was mine.

I dropped the two-by-four and started across the garden, wondering who it was. Not Nancy, but someone that I knew.

Nancy came running down the hill. "Hurry, Brad," she called.

"Where were you?" I asked. "What's going on?"

"It's Stuffy. I told you it was Stuffy. He's waiting at the barrier. He sneaked through the guards. He says he has to see you."

"But Stiffy..."

"He's here, I tell you. And he wants to talk with you. No one else will do."

She turned and trotted up the hill and I lumbered after her. We went through Doc's yard and across the street and through another yard and there, just ahead of us, I knew, was the barrier.

A gnome-like figure rose from the ground.

"That you, lad?" he asked.

I hunkered down at the edge of the barrier and stared across at him.

"Yes, it's me," I said, "but you..."

"Later. We haven't got much time. The guards know I got through the lines. They're hunting for me."

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Not what I want," he said. What everybody wants. Something that you need. You're in a jam."

"Everyone's in a jam," I said.

"That's what I mean," said Stuffy. "Some d.a.m.n fool in the Pentagon is set to drop a bomb. I heard some of the ruckus on a car radio when I was sneaking through. Just a s.n.a.t.c.h of it, "So, all right," I said. "The human race is sunk."

"Not sunk," insisted Stuffy. "I tell you there's a way. If Was.h.i.+ngton just understood, if..."

"If you know a way," I asked, "why waste time in reaching me? You could have told..."

"Who would I tell?" asked Stuffy. "Who would believe me, even if I told? I'm just a lousy b.u.m and I ran off from that hospital and..."

"All right," I said. "All right."

"You were the man to tell," said Stiffy. "You're accredited, it seems like. Someone will listen to you. You can get in touch with someone and they'll listen to you."

"If it was good enough," I said.

"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 d.a.m.ned 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 b.u.m, 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.

end.