All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Davenport nodded. "You may have something there, Mr Carter. You say these plants pretend to have stored knowledge, the knowledge, you suspect, of many different races."

  "That's the impression I was given."

  "Stored and correlated. Not just a jumble of data."

  "Correlated, too," I said. "You must bear in mind that I cannot swear to this. I have no way of knowing it is true. But their spokesman, Tupper, assured me that they didn't lie…"

  "I know," said Davenport. "There is some logic in that. They wouldn't need to lie."

  "Except," said the general, "that they never did give back your fifteen hundred dollars."

  "No, they didn't," I said.

  "After they said they would."

  "Yes. They were emphatic on that point."

  "Which means they lied. And they tricked you into bringing back what you thought was a time machine."

  "And," Newcombe pointed out, "they were very smooth about it."

  "I don't think," said the general, "we can place a great deal of trust in them."

  "But look here," protested Newcombe, "we've gotten around to talking as if we believed every word of it."

  "Well," said the senator, "that was the idea, wasn't it? That we'd use the information as a basis for discussion."

  "For the moment," said the general, "we must presume the worst."

  Davenport chuckled. "What's so bad about it? For the first time in its history, humanity may be about to meet another intelligence. If we go about it right, we may find it to our benefit."

  "But you can't know that," said the general.

  "No, of course we can't. We haven't sufficient data. We must make further contact."

  "If they exist," said Newcombe.

  "If they exist," Davenport agreed.

  "Gentlemen," said the senator, "we are losing sight of something. A barrier does exist. It will let nothing living through it…"

  "We don't know that," said Davenport. "There was the instance of the car. There would have been some micro-organisms in it. There would have had to be. My guess is that the barrier is not against life as such, but against sentience, against awareness. A thing that has awareness of itself…"

  "Well, anyhow," said the senator, "we have evidence that something very strange has happened. We can't just shut our eyes. We must work with what we have."

  "All right, then," said the general, "let's get down to business. Is it safe to assume that these things pose a threat?"

  I nodded. "Perhaps. Under certain circumstances."

  "And those circumstances?"

  "I don't know. There is no way of knowing how they think."

  "But there's the potentiality of a threat?"

  "I think," said Davenport, "that we are placing too much stress upon the matter of a threat. We should first…"

  "My first responsibility," said the general, "is consideration of a potential danger…"

  "And if there were a danger?"

  "We could stop them," said the general, "if we moved fast enough. If we moved before they'd taken in too much territory. We have a way to stop them."

  "All you military minds can think of," Davenport said angrily, "is the employment of force. I'll agree with you that a thermonuclear explosion could kill all the alien life that has gained access to the Earth, possibly might even disrupt the time-phase barrier and close the Earth to our alien friends…"

  "Friends!" the general wailed. "You can't know…"

  "Of course I can't," said Davenport. "And you can't know that they are enemies. We need more data; we need to make a further contact…"

  "And while you're getting your additional data, they'll have the time to strengthen the barrier and move it…"

  "Some day," said Davenport, angrier than ever, "the human race will have to find a solution to its problems that does not involve the use of force. Now might be the time to start. You propose to bomb this village. Aside from the moral issue of destroying several hundred innocent people…"

  "You forget," "said the general, speaking gruffly, "that we'd be balancing those several hundred lives against the safety of all the people of the Earth. It would be no hasty action. It would be done only after some deliberation. It would have to be a considered decision."

  "The very fact that you can consider it," said the biologist, "is enough to send a cold shiver down the spine of all humanity."

  The general shook his head. "It's my duty to consider distasteful things like this. Even considering the moral issue involved, in the case of necessity I would…"

  "Gentlemen," the senator protested weakly.

  The general looked at me. I am afraid they had forgotten I was there.

  "I'm sorry, sir," the general said to me. "I should not have spoken in this manner."

  I nodded dumbly. I couldn't have said a word if I'd been paid a million dollars for it. I was all knotted up inside and I was afraid to move.

  I had not been expecting anything like this, although now that it had come, I knew I should have been. I should have known what the world reaction would be and if I had failed to know, all I had to do would have been to remember what Stiffy Grant had told me as he lay on the kitchen floor.

  They'll want to use the bomb, he'd said. Don't let them use the bomb.

  Newcombe stared at me coldly. His eyes stabbed out at me.

  "I trust," he said, "that you'll not repeat what you have heard."

  "We have to trust you, boy," said the senator."You hold us in your hands."

  I managed to laugh. I suppose that it came out as an ugly laugh. "Why should I say anything?" I asked. "We're sitting ducks. There would be no point in saying anything. We couldn't get away." For a moment I thought wryly that perhaps the barrier would protect us even from a bomb. Then I saw how wrong I was. The barrier concerned itself with nothing except life — or, if Davenport were right (and he probably was) only with a life that was aware of its own existence. They had tried to dynamite the barrier and it had been as if there had been no barrier. The barrier had offered no resistance to the explosion and therefore had not been affected by it.

  From the general's viewpoint, the bomb might be the answer. It would kill all life; it was an application of the conclusion Alf Peterson had arrived at on the question of how one killed a noxious plant that had great adaptability. A nuclear explosion might have no effect upon the time-phase mechanism, but it would kill all life and would so irradiate and poison the area that for a long, long time the aliens would be unable to re-occupy it.

  "I hope," I said to the general, "you'll be as considerate as you're asking me to be. If you find you have to do it, you'll make no prior announcement." The general nodded, thin-lipped.

  "I'd hate to think," I said, "what would happen in this village…"

  The senator broke in. "Don't worry about it now. It's just one of many alternatives. For the time we'll not even consider it. Our friend, the general, spoke a little out of turn."

  "At least," the general said, "I am being honest. I wasn't pussy-footing. I wasn't playing games." He seemed to be saying that the others were.

  "There is one thing you must realize," I told them. "This can't be any cloak-and-dagger operation. You have to do it honestly — whatever you may do. There are certain minds the Flowers can read. There are minds, perhaps many minds; they are in contact with at this very moment. The owners of those minds don't know it and there is no way we can know to whom those minds belong. Perhaps to one of you. There is an excellent chance the Flowers will know, at all times, exactly what is being planned." I could see that they had not thought of that. I had told them, of course, in the telling of my story, but it hadn't registered. There was so much that it took a man a long time to get it straightened out.

  "Who are those people down there by the cars?" asked Newcombe.

  I turned and looked.

  Half the village probably was there. They had come out to watch. And one couldn't blame them, I told myself. They had a right to be concerned; they had the
right to watch. This was their life. Perhaps a lot of them didn't trust me, not after what Hiram and Tom had been saying about me, and here I was, out here, sitting on a chair in the middle of the road, talking with the men from Washington. Perhaps they felt shut out. Perhaps they felt they should be sitting in a meeting such as this.

  I turned back to the four across the bather.

  "Here's a thing," I told them, urgently, "that you can't afford to mull. If we do, we'll fail all the other chances as they come along…"

  "Chances?" asked the senator.

  "This is our first chance to make contact with another race. It won't be the last. When man goes into space…"

  "But we aren't out in space," said Newcombe.

  I knew then that there was no use. I'd expected too much of the men in my living-room and I'd expected too much of these men out here on the road.

  They would fail. We would always fail. We weren't built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn't change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we travelled.

  Although, I thought, perhaps the human race was not alone in this.

  Perhaps this alien race we faced, perhaps any alien race, travelled a rut that was as deep and narrow as the human rut. Perhaps the aliens would be as arbitrary and as unbending and as blind as was the human race.

  I made a gesture of resignation, but I doubt that they ever saw it. All of them were looking beyond me, staring down the road.

  I twisted around and there, halfway up the road, halfway between the barrier and the traffic snarl, marched all those people who had been out there waiting. They came on silently and with great deliberation and determination. They looked like the march of doom, bearing down upon us.

  "What do they want, do you suppose?" the senator asked, rather nervously.

  George Walker, who ran the Red Owl butcher department, was in the forefront of the crowd, and walking just behind him was Butch Ormsby, the service station operator, and Charley Hutton of the Happy Hollow. Daniel Willoughby was there, too, looking somewhat uncomfortable, for Daniel wasn't the kind of man who enjoyed being with a mob. Higgy wasn't there and neither was Hiram, but Tom Preston was. I looked for Sherwood, thinking it unlikely that he would be there.

  And I was right; he wasn't. But there were a lot of others, people I knew. Their faces all wore a hard and determined look.

  I stepped off to one side, clear of the road, and the crowd tramped past me, paying no attention.

  "Senator," said George Walker in a voice that was louder than seemed necessary. "You are the senator, ain't you?"

  "Yes," said the senator. "What can I do for you?"

  "That," said Walker, "is what we're here to find out. We are a delegation, sort of."

  "I see," said the senator.

  "We got trouble," said George Walker, "and all of us are taxpayers and we got a right to get some help. I run the meat department at the Red Owl store and without no customers coming into town, I don't know what will happen. If we can't get any out-of-town trade, we'll have to close our doors. We can sell to the people here in town, of course, but there ain't enough trade in town to make it worth our while and in a little while the people here in town won't have any money to pay for the things they buy, and our business isn't set up so we can operate on credit. We can get meat, of course. We've got that all worked out, but we can't go on selling it and…"

  "Now, just a minute," said the senator. "Let's take this a little slow. Let's not go so fast. You have problems and I know you have them and I aim to do all I can…"

  "Senator," interrupted a man with a big, bull voice, "there are others of us have problems that are worse than George" s. Take myself, for example. I work out of town and I depend on my pay cheque, every week, to buy food for the kids, to keep them in shoes and to pay the other bills. And now I can't get to work and there won't be any cheque. I'm not the only one. There are a lot of others like me. It isn't like we had some money laid by to take care of emergencies. I tell you, Senator, there isn't hardly anyone in town got anything laid by. We all are…"

  "Hold on," pleaded the senator. "Let me get a word in edgewise. Give me a little time. The people in Washington know what is going on. They know what you folks are facing out here. They'll do what they can to help. There'll be a relief bill in the Congress to help out you folks and I, for one, will work unceasingly to see that it is passed without undue delay. And that isn't all. There are two or three papers in the east and some television stations that have started a drive for funds to be turned over to this village. And that's just a start. There will be a lot of…"

  "Hell, Senator," yelled a man with a scratchy voice, "that isn't what we want. We don't want relief. We don't ask for charity. We just want to be able to get back to our jobs."

  The senator was flabbergasted, "You mean you want us to get rid of the barrier?"

  "Look, Senator," said the man with the bull-like voice, "for years the government has been spending billions to send a man up to the moon. With all them scientists you got, you can spend some time and money to get us out of here. We been paying taxes for a long time now, without getting anything…"

  "But that," said the senator, "will take a little time. We'll have to find out what this barrier is and then we'll have to figure out what can be done with it. And I tell you, frankly, we aren't going to be able to do that overnight."

  Norma Shepard, who worked as receptionist for Doc Fabian, wriggled through the press of people until she faced the Senator.

  "But something has to be done," she said. "Has to be done, do you understand? Someone has to find a way. There are people in this town who should be in a hospital and we can't get them there. Some of them will die if we can't get them there. We have one doctor in this town and he's no longer young. He's been a good doctor for a long, long time, but he hasn't got the skill or the equipment to take care of the people who are terribly sick. He never has had, he never pretended that he had…"

  "My dear," said the senator, consolingly. "I recognize your concern and I sympathize with it, and you may rest assured…" It was apparent that my interview with the men from Washington had come to an end. I walked slowly down the road, not actually down the road, but along the edge of it, walking in the harrowed ground out of which, already, thin points of green were beginning to protrude. The seeds which had been sown in that alien whirlwind had in that short time germinated and were pushing toward the light.

  I wondered bitterly, as I walked along, what kind of crops they'd bear.

  And I wondered, too, how angry Nancy might be at me for my fight with Hiram Martin. I had caught that one look on her face and then she'd turned her back and gone up the walk.

  And she had not been with Sherwood when he had come charging down the walk to announce that Gibbs had phoned.

  For that short moment in the kitchen, when I had felt her body pressing close to mine, she had been once again the sweetheart out of time — the girl who had walked hand in hand with me, who had laughed her throaty laugh and been an unquestioned part of me, as I had been of her.

  Nancy, I almost cried aloud, Nancy, please let it be the same. But maybe it could never be the same, I told myself. Maybe it was Millville — a village that had come between us for she had grown away from Millville in the years she'd been away, and I, remaining here, had grown more deeply into it.

  You could not dig back, I thought, through the dust of years, through the memories and the happenings and the changes in yourself- in both yourselves — to rescue out of time another day and hour. And even if you found it, you could not dust it clean, you could never make it shine as you remembered it. For perhaps it never had been quite the shining thing that you remembered, perhaps you had burnished it in your longing and your loneliness.

  And perhaps it was only once in every lifetime (and perhaps not in every lifetime) that a shining moment came. Perhaps ther
e was a rule that it could never come again.

  "Brad," a voice said.

  I had been walking, not looking where I went, staring at the ground.

  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 time 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.