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 God, 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 damn 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 snatch of it."
"So, all right," I said. "The human race is sunk."
"Not sunk," insisted Stuffy. "I tell you there's a way. If Washington 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 bum 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 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 ne
gotiation.
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.
All the Traps of Earth
THE INVENTORY list was long. On its many pages, in his small and precise script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and all the rest of it — all the personal belongings that had been accumulated by the Barringtons through a long family history.
And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the last item of them all: One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.
He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them — the little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that aunt Hortense had picked up that last visit she had made to Peking.
And having done that, his job came to an end.
He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked across the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the family's past. There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon had worn in the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece itself, the cup the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of moon-dust that Tony had brought back from Man's fifth landing on the Moon, and the old chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family spacecraft that had plied the asteroids.
And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had helped to fashion.
And not a one of them from the last six hundred years, thought Richard Daniel, staring at them one by one, that he had not known.
There, to the right of the fireplace, old Rufus Andrew Barrington, who had been a judge some two hundred years ago. And to the right of Rufus, Johnson Joseph Barrington, who had headed up that old lost dream of mankind, the Bureau of Paranormal Research. There, beyond the door that led out to the porch, was the scowling pirate face of Danley Barrington, who had first built the family fortune.
And many others — administrator, adventurer, corporation chief. All good men and true.
But this was at an end. The family had run out.
Slowly Richard Daniel began his last tour of the house — the family room with its cluttered living space, the den with its old mementos, the library and its rows of ancient books, the dining hall in which the crystal and the china shone and sparkled, the kitchen gleaming with the copper and aluminum and the stainless steel, and the bedrooms on the second floor, each of them with its landmarks of former occupants. And finally, the bedroom where old Aunt Hortense had finally died, at long last closing out the line of Barringtons.
The empty dwelling held a not-quite-haunted quality, the aura of a house that waited for the old gay life to take up once again. But it was a false aura. All the portraits, all the china and the silverware, everything within the house would be sold at public auction to satisfy the debts. The rooms would be stripped and the possessions would be scattered and, as a last indignity, the house itself be sold.
Even he, himself, Richard Daniel thought, for he was chattel, too. He was there with all the rest of it, the final item on the inventory.
Except that what they planned to do with him was worse than simple sale. For he would be changed before he was offered up for sale. No one would be interested in putting up good money for him as he stood. And, besides, there was the law — the law that said no robot could legally have continuation of a single life greater than a hundred years.
And he had lived in a single life six times a hundred years. He had gone to see a lawyer and the lawyer had been sympathetic, but had held forth no hope.
"Technically," he had told Richard Daniel in his short, clipped lawyer voice, "you are at this moment much in violation of the statute. I completely fail to see how your family got away with it."
"They liked old things," said Richard Daniel. "And, besides, I was very seldom seen. I stayed mostly in the house. I seldom ventured out."
"Even so," the lawyer said, "there are such things as records. There must be a file on you…"
"The family," explained Richard Daniel, "in the past had many influential friends. You must understand, sir, that the Barringtons, before they fell upon hard times, were quite prominent in politics and in many other matters." The lawyer grunted knowingly.
"What I can't quite understand," he said, "is why you should object so bitterly. You'll not be changed entirely. You'll still be Richard Daniel."
"I would lose my memories, would I not?"
"Yes, of course you would. But memories are not too important. And you'd collect another set."
"My memories are dear to me," Richard Daniel told him.
"They are all I have. After some six hundred years, they are my sole worthwhile possession. Can you imagine, counselor, what it means to spend six centuries with one family?"
"Yes, I think I can," agreed the lawyer. "But now, with the family gone, isn't it just possible the memories may prove painful?"
"They're a comfort. A sustaining comfort. They make me feel important.
They give me perspective and a niche."
"But don't you understand? You'll need no comfort, no importance once you're reoriented. You'll be brand new. All that you'll retain is a certain sense of basic identity — that they cannot take away from you even if they wished. There'll be nothing to regret. There'll be no leftover guilts, no frustrated aspirations, no old loyalties to hound you."
"I must be myself," Richard Daniel insisted stubbornly. "I've found a depth of living, a background against which my living has some meaning. I could not face being anybody else."
"You'd be far better off," the lawyer said wearily. "You'd have a better body. You'd have better mental tools. You'd be more intelligent." Richard Daniel got up from the chair. He saw it was no use.
"You'll not inform on me?" he asked.
"Certainly not," the lawyer said. "So far as I'm concerned, you aren't even here."
"Thank you," said Richard Daniel. "How much do I owe you?"
"Not a thing," the lawyer told him. "I never make a charge to anyone who is older than five hundred." He had meant it as a joke, but Richard Daniel did not smile. He had not felt like smiling.
At the door he turned around.
"Why?" he was going to ask. "Why this silly law." But he did not have to ask — it was not hard to see.
Human vanity, he knew. No human being lived much longer than a hundred years, so neither could a robot. But a robot, on the other hand, was too valuable simply to be junked at the end of a hundred years of service, so there was this law providing for the periodic breakup of the continuity of each robot's life. And thus no human need undergo the psychological indignity of knowing that his faithful serving man might manage to outlive him by several thousand years.
It was illogical, but humans were illogical.
Illogical, but kind. Kind in many different ways.
Kind, sometimes, as the Barringtons had been kind, thought Richard Daniel. Six hundred years of kindness. It was a prideful thing to think about. They had even given him a double name. There weren't many robots nowadays who had double names. It was a special mark of affection a
nd respect.
The lawyer having failed him, Richard Daniel had sought another source of help. Now, thinking back on it, standing in the room where Hortense Barrington had died, he was sorry that he'd done it. For he had embarrassed the religico almost unendurably. It had been easy for the lawyer to tell him what he had. Lawyers had the statutes to determine their behavior, and thus suffered little from agonies of personal decision.
But a man of the cloth is kind if he is worth his salt. And this one had been kind instinctively as well as professionally, and that had made it worse.
"Under certain circumstances," he had said somewhat awkwardly, "I could counsel patience and humility and prayer. Those are three great aids to anyone who is willing to put them to his use. But with you I am not certain."
"You mean," said Richard Daniel, "because I am a robot."
"Well, now…" said the minister, considerably befuddled at this direct approach.
"Because I have no soul?"
"Really," said the minister miserably, "you place me at a disadvantage.
You are asking me a question that for centuries has puzzled and bedeviled the best minds in the church."
"But one," said Richard Daniel, "that each man in his secret heart must answer for himself."
"I wish I could," cried the distraught minister. "I truly wish I could."
"If it is any help," said Richard Daniel, "I can tell you that sometimes I suspect I have a soul." And that, he could see, had been most upsetting for this kindly human.
It had been, Richard Daniel told himself, unkind of him to say it. For it must have been confusing, since coming from himself it was not opinion only, but expert evidence.
So he had gone away from the minister's study and come back to the empty house to get on with his inventory work.
Now that the inventory was all finished and the papers stacked where Dancourt, the estate administrator, could find them when be showed up in the morning, Richard Daniel had done his final service for the Barringtons and now must begin doing for himself.
He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him and went quietly down the stairs and along the hallway to the little cubby, back of the kitchen, that was his very own.
All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Page 26