They had told me, I remembered, that I'd get my money back — they had guaranteed it. And here I was, back home again, without my fifteen hundred.
I got to my feet and started for the house, then changed my mind. I turned around and went up the slope toward Doc Fabian's house. It might be a good idea, I told myself, to see what was going on outside the barrier. The people who were waiting at the house could wait a little longer.
I reached the top of the slope and turned around, looking toward the east. There, beyond the village, blazed a line of campfires and the lights of many cars running back and forth.
A searchlight swung a thin blue finger of light up into the sky, slowly sweeping back and forth. And at one spot that seemed a little closer was a greater blob of light. A great deal of activity seemed to be going on around it.
Watching it, I made out a steam shovel and great black mounds of earth piled up on either side of it. I could hear, faintly, the metallic clanging of the mighty scoop as it dumped a load and then reached down into the hole to take another bite. Trying, I told myself, to dig beneath the barrier.
A car came rattling down the street and turned into the driveway of the house behind me. Doc, I thought — Doc coming home after being routed out of bed on an early morning call. I walked across the lawn and around the house.
The car was parked on the concrete strip of driveway and Doc was getting out.
"Doc," I said, "it's Brad." He turned and peered at me.
"Oh," he said, and his voice sounded tired, "so you are back again. There are people waiting at the house, you know." Too tired to be surprised that I was back again; too all beat out to care.
He shuffled forward and I saw, quite suddenly, that Doc was old. Of course I had thought of him as old, but never before had he actually seemed old. Now I could see that he was — the slightly stooped shoulders, his feet barely lifting off the ground as he walked toward me, the loose, old-man hang of his trousers, the deep lines in his face.
"Floyd Caidwell," he said. "I was out to Floyd" s. He had a heart attack — a strong, tough man like him and he has a heart attack."
"How is he?"
"As well as I can manage. He should be in a hospital, getting complete rest. But I can't get him there. With that thing out there, I can't get him where he should be.
"I don't know, Brad. I just don't know what will happen to us. Mrs Jensen was supposed to go in this morning for surgery. Cancer. She'll die, anyhow, but surgery would give her months, maybe a year or two, of life. And there's no way to get her there. The little Hopkins girl has been going regularly to a specialist and he's been helping her a lot. Decker — perhaps you've heard of him. He's a top-notch man. We interned together." He stopped in front of me. "Can't you see," he said. "I can't help these people. I can do a little, but I can't do enough. I can't handle things like this — I can't do it all alone. Other times I could send them somewhere else, to someone who could help them. And now I can't do that. For the first time in my life, I can't help my people."
"You're taking it too hard," I said.
He looked at me with a beaten look, a tired and beaten look.
"I can't take it any other way," he said. "All these years, they've depended on me."
"How's Stuffy?" I asked.
"You have heard, of course." Doc snorted angrily. "The damn fool ran away."
"From the hospital?"
"Where else would he run from? Got dressed when their backs were turned and snuck away. He always was a sneaky old goat and he never had good sense. They're looking for him, but no one's found him yet."
"He'd head back here," I said.
"I suppose he would," said Doc. "What about this story I heard about; some telephone he had?"
I shook my head. "Hiram said he found one."
Doc peered sharply at me. "You don't know anything about it?"
"Not very much," I said.
"Nancy said you were in some other world or something. What kind of talk is that?"
"Did Nancy tell you that?"
He shook his head. "No, Gerald told me. He asked me what to do. He was afraid that if he mentioned it, he would stir up the village."
"And?"
"I told him not to. The folks are stirred up enough. He told them what you said about the flowers. He had to tell them something."
"Doc," I said, "it's a funny business. I don't rightly know myself. Let's not talk about it. Tell me what's going on. What are those fires out there?"
"Those are soldier fires," he told me. "There are state troops out there. They've got the town ringed in. Brad, it's crazier than hell. We can't get out and no one can get in, but they got troops out there. I don't know what they think they're doing. They evacuated everybody for ten miles outside the barrier and there are planes patrolling and they have some tanks. They tried to dynamite the barrier this morning and they didn't do a thing except blow a hole in Jake Fisher's pasture. They could have saved that dynamite."
"They're trying to dig under the barrier," I said.
"They've done a lot of things," said Doe. "They had some helicopters that flew above the town, then tried to come straight down. Figuring, I guess, that there are only walls out there, without any top to them. But they found there was a top. They fooled around all afternoon and they wrecked two ‘copters, but they found out, I guess, that it's a sort of dome. It curves all the way above us. A kind of bubble, you might say."
"And there are all those fool newspapermen out there. I tell you, Brad, there's an army of them. There isn't anything but Millville on the TV and radio, or in the papers either."
"It's big news," I said.
"Yes, I suppose so. But I'm worried, Brad. This village is getting ready to blow up. The people are on edge. They're scared and touchy. The whole damn place could go hysterical if you snapped your fingers." He came a little closer. "What are you planning, Brad?"
"I'm going down to my place. There are people down there. You want to come along?"
He shook his head. "No, I was down there for a while and then I got this call from Floyd. I'm all beat out. I'm going in to bed." He turned, and started to shuffle away and then he turned back.
"You be careful, boy," he warned. "There's a lot of talk about the flowers. They say if your father hadn't raised those flowers it never would have happened. They think it was a plot your father started and you are in on it."
"I'll watch my step," I said.
16
They were in the living-room. As soon as I came in the kitchen door, Hiram Martin saw me.
"There he is!" he bellowed, leaping up and charging out into the kitchen.
He stopped his rush and looked accusingly at me. "It took you long enough," he said.
I didn't answer him.
I put the time contraption, still wrapped in my jacket, on the kitchen table. A fold of cloth fell away from it and the many-angled lenses winked in the light from the ceiling fixture.
Hiram backed away a step. "What's that?" he asked.
"Something I brought back," I said. "A time machine, I guess." The coffee pot was on the stove and the burner was turned low. Used coffee cups covered the top of the kitchen sink. The sugar canister had its lid off and there was spilled sugar on the counter top.
The others in the living-room were crowding through the door and there were a lot of them, more than I'd expected.
Nancy came past Hiram and walked up to me. She put out a hand and laid it on my arm.
"You're all right," she said.
"It was a breeze," I told her.
She was beautiful, I thought — more beautiful than I'd remembered her, more beautiful than back in the high school days when I'd looked at her through a haze of stars. More beautiful, here close to me, than my memory had made her.
I moved closer to her and put an arm around her. For an instant she leaned her head against my shoulder, then straightened it again. She was warm and soft against me and I was sorry that it couldn't last, but all the rest of them were w
atching us and waiting.
"I made some phone calls," Gerald Sherwood said. "Senator Gibbs is coming out to see you. He'll have someone from the State Department. On short notice, Brad, that was the best I could do."
"It'll do," I said.
For, standing in my kitchen once again, with Nancy close beside me, with the lamplight soft in the coming dawn, with the old familiar things all around, that other world had retreated into the background and had taken on a softness that half obscured its threat — if it were a threat.
"What I want to know," Tom Preston blurted, "is what about this stuff that Gerald tells us about your father's flowers."
"Yes," said Mayor Higgy Morris, "what have they to do with it?" Hiram didn't say anything, but he sneered at me.
"Gentlemen," said lawyer Nichols, "this is not the way to go about it. You must be fair about it. Keep the questions until later. Let Brad tell us what he knows."
Joe Evans said, "Anything he has to say will be more than we know now."
"OK," said Higgy, "we'll be glad to listen."
"But first," said Hiram, "I want to know about that thing on the table. It might be dangerous. It might be a bomb."
"I don't know what it is," I said. "It has to do with time. It can handle time. Maybe you would call it a time camera, some sort of time machine." Tom Preston snorted and Hiram sneered again.
Father Flanagan, the town's one Catholic priest, had been standing quietly in the doorway, side by side with Pastor Silas Middleton, from the church across the street. Now the old priest spoke quietly, so quietly that one could barely hear him, his voice one with the lamplight and the dawn. "I would be the last," he said, "to hold that time might be manipulated or that flowers would have anything to do with what has happened here. These are propositions that go against the grain of my every understanding. But unlike some of the rest of you, I'm willing to listen before I reach a judgement."
"I'll try to tell you," I said. "I'll try to tell you just the way it happened."
"Alf Peterson has been trying to call you," Nancy said. "He's phoned a dozen times."
"Did he leave a number?"
"Yes, I have it here."
"That can wait," said Higgy. "We want to hear this story."
"Perhaps," suggested Nancy's father, "you'd better tell us right away. Let's all go in the living-room where we'll be comfortable." We all went into the living-room and sat down.
"Now, my boy," said Higgy, companionably, "go ahead and spill it." I could have strangled him. When I looked at him, I imagine that he knew exactly how I felt.
"We'll keep quiet," he said. "We'll hear you out." I waited until they all were quiet and then I said, "I'll have to start with yesterday morning when I came home, after my car had been wrecked, and found Tupper Tyler sitting in the swing."
Higgy leaped to his feet. "But that's crazy?" he shouted. "Tupper has been lost for years."
Hiram jumped up, too. "You made fun of me," he bellowed, "when I told you Tom had talked to Tupper."
"I lied to you," I said. "I had to lie to you. I didn't know what was going on and you were on the prod."
The Reverend Silas Middleton asked, "Brad, you admit you lied?"
"Yes, of course I do. That big ape had me pinned against the wall…"
"If you lied once, you'll lie again," Tom Preston shrilled. "How can we believe anything you tell us?"
"Tom," I said, "I don't give a damn if you believe me or not." They all sat down and sat there looking at me and I knew that I had been childish, but they burned me up.
"I would suggest," said Father Flanagan, "that we should start over and all of us make a heroic effort to behave ourselves."
"Yes, please," said Higgy, heavily, "and everyone shut up." I looked around and no one said a word. Gerald Sherwood nodded gravely at me.
I took a deep breath and began.
"Maybe," I said, "I should go even farther back than that — to the time Tom Preston sent Ed Adler around to take out my telephone."
"You were three months in arrears," yelped Preston. "You hadn't even…"
"Tom," said lawyer Nichols, sharply.
Tom settled back into his chair and began to sulk.
I went ahead and told everything — about Stiffy Grant and the telephone I'd found in my office and about the story Alf Peterson had told me and then how I'd gone out to Stiffy's shack. I told them everything except about Gerald Sherwood and how he had made the phones. I somehow had the feeling that I had no right to tell that part of it.
I asked them, "Are there any questions?"
"There are a lot of them," said lawyer Nichols, "but go ahead and finish. Is that all right with the rest of you?"
Higgy Morris grunted. "It's all right with me," he said.
"It's not all right with me," said Preston, nastily. "Gerald told us that Nancy talked with Brad. He never told us how. She used one of them phones, of course."
"My phone," said Sherwood. "I've had one of them for years."
Higgy said, "You never told me, Gerald."
"It didn't occur to me," said Sherwood, curtly.
"It seems to me," said Preston, "there has been a hell of a lot going on that we never knew about."
"That," said Father Flanagan, "is true beyond all question. But I have the impression that this young man has no more than started on his story." So I went ahead. I told it as truthfully as I could and in all the detail I could recall.
Finally I was finished and they sat not moving, stunned perhaps, and shocked, and maybe not believing it entirely, but believing some of it.
Father Flanagan stirred uneasily. "Young man," he asked, "you are absolutely sure this is not hallucination?"
"I brought back the time contraption. That's not hallucination."
"We must agree, I think," said Nichols, "that there are strange things going on. The story Brad has told us is no stranger than the barrier."
"There isn't anyone," yelled Preston, "who can work with time. Why time is — well, it" s…"
"That's exactly it," said Sherwood. "No one knows anything of time. And it's not the only thing of which we're wholly ignorant. There is gravitation. There is no one, absolutely no one, who can tell you what gravitation is."
"I don't believe a word of it," said Hiram, flatly. "He's been hiding out somewhere…"
Joe Evans said, "We combed the town. There was no place be could hide."
"Actually," said Father Flanagan, "it doesn't matter if we believe all this or not. The important thing is whether the people who are coming out from Washington believe it." Higgy pulled himself straighter in his chair. He turned to Sherwood.
"You said Gibbs was coming out. Bringing others with him."
Sherwood nodded. "A man from the State Department."
"What exactly did Gibbs say?"
"He said he'd be right out. He said the talk with Brad could only be preliminary. Then he'd go back and report. He said it might not be simply a national problem. It might be international. Our government might have to confer with other governments. He wanted to know more about it. All I could tell him was that a man here in the village had some vital information."
"They'll be out at the edge of the barrier, waiting for us. The east road, I presume."
"I suppose so," Sherwood said. "We didn't go into it. He'll phone me from some place outside the barrier when he arrives."
"As a matter of fact," said Higgy, lowering his voice as if he were speaking confidentially, "if we can get out of this without being hurt, it'll be the best thing that ever happened to us. No other town in all of history has gotten the kind of publicity we're getting now. Why, for years there'll be tourists coming just to look at us, just to say they've been here."
"It seems to me," said Father Flanagan, "that if this should all be true, there are far greater things involved than whether or not our town can attract some tourists."
"Yes," said Silas Middleton. "It means we are facing an alien form of life. How we handle it may mean the differ
ence between life and death. Not for us alone, I mean, the people in this village. But the life or death of the human race."
"Now, see here," piped Preston, "you can't mean that a bunch of flowers…"
"You damn fool," said Sherwood, "it's not just a bunch of flowers."
Joe Evans said, "That's right. Not just a bunch of flowers. But an entirely different form of life. Not an animal life, but a plant life — a plant life that is intelligent."
"And a life," I said, "that has stored away the knowledge of God knows how many other races. They'll know things we've never even thought about."
"I don't see," said Higgy, doggedly, "what we've got to be afraid of. There never was a time that we couldn't beat a bunch of weeds. We can use sprays and…"
"If we want to kill them off," I said, "I don't think it's quite as easy as you try to make it. But putting that aside for the moment, do we want to kill them off?"
"You mean," yelled Higgy, "let them come in and take over?"
"Not take over. Come in and co-operate with us."
"But the barrier!" yelled Hiram. "Everyone forgets about the barrier!"
"No one has forgotten about it," said Nichols. "The barrier is no more than a part of the entire problem. Let's solve the problem and we can take care of the barrier as well."
"My God," groaned Preston, "you all are talking as if you believe every word of it."
"That isn't it," said Silas Middleton. "But we have to use what Brad has told us as a working hypothesis. I don't say that what he has told us is absolutely right. He may have misinterpreted, he may simply be mistaken in certain areas. But at the moment it's the only solid information we have to work with."
"I don't believe a word of it," said Hiram, flatly. "There's a dirty plot afoot and I…" The telephone rang, its signal blasting through the room.
Sherwood answered it.
"It's for you," he told me. "It's Alf again." I went across the room and took the receiver Sherwood held out to me.
"Hello, Alf," I said.
"I thought," said Alf, "you were going to call me back. In an hour, you said."
All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 17