“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 barrier.
“Here’s a thing,” I told them, urgently, “that you can’t afford to muff. 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 traveled.
Although, I thought, perhaps the human race was not alone in this. Perhaps this alien race we faced, perhaps any alien race, traveled 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 check, 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 check. 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 t
he 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 your selves—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 there 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 to 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.
“Kids are having a great time,” said Donovan. “Most excitement they’ve ever had. Better than a circus.”
Some more kids went past, whooping as they ran.
“Say,” asked Donovan, “do you think something might have happened?”
The first two kids had reached the crowd and were tugging at people’s arms and shouting something at them.
“Looks like it,” I said.
A few of the crowd started back down the road, walking to start with, then breaking into a trot, heading back for town.
As they came close, Donovan darted out to intercept them.
“What’s the matter?” he yelled. “What’s going on?”
“Money,” one of them shouted back at him. “Someone’s found some money.”
By now the whole crowd had left the barrier and was running down the road.
As they swept past, Mae Hutton shouted at me, “Come on, Brad! Money in your garden!”
Money in my garden! For the love of God, what next?
I took one look at the four men from Washington, standing beyond the barrier. Perhaps they were thinking that the town was crazy. They had every right to think so.
I stepped out into the road and jogged along behind the crowd, heading back for town.
19
When I came back that morning I had found that the purple flowers growing in the swale behind my house, through the wizardy of that other world, had been metamorphosed into tiny bushes. In the dark I had run my fingers along the bristling branches and felt the many swelling buds. And now the buds had broken and where each bud had been was, not a leaf, but a miniature fifty-dollar bill!
Len Streeter, the high school science teacher, handed one of the tiny bills to me.
“It’s impossible,” he said.
And he was right. It was impossible. No bush in its right mind would grow fifty-dollar bills—or any kind of bills.
There were a lot of people there—all the crowd that had been out in the road shouting at the senator, and as many more. It looked to me as if the entire village might be there. They were tramping around among the bushes and yelling at one another, all happy and excited. They had a right to be. There probably weren’t many of them who had ever seen a fifty-dollar bill, and here were thousands of them.
“You’ve looked close at it,” I asked the teacher. “You’re sure it actually is a bill?”
He pulled a small magnifying glass out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.
“Have a look,” he said.
I had a look and there was no question that it looked like a fifty-dollar bill—although the only fifty-dollar bills I had ever seen were the thirty of them in the envelope Sherwood had given me. And I hadn’t had a chance to more than glance at those. But through the glass I could see that the little bills had the fabric-like texture one finds in folding money and everything else, including the serial number, looked authentic.
And I knew, even as I squinted through the lens, that it was authentic. For these were (how would one say it—the descendants?) of the money Tupper Tyler had stolen from me.
I knew exactly what had happened and the knowledge was a chill that bit deep into my mind.
“It’s possible,” I told Streeter. “With that gang back there, it’s entirely possible.”
“You mean the gang from your other world?”
“Not my other world,” I shouted. “Your other world. This world’s other world. When you get it through your damn thick skulls…”
I didn’t say the rest of it. I was glad I didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” Streeter said. “I didn’t mean it quite the way it sounded.”
Higgy, I saw, was standing halfway up the s
lope that led to the house and he was yelling for attention.
“Listen to me!” he was shouting. “Fellow citizens, won’t you listen to me.”
The crowd was beginning to quiet down and Higgy went on yelling until everyone was quiet.
“Stop pulling off them leaves,” he told them. “Just leave them where they are.”
Charley Hutton said, “Hell, Higgy, all that we was doing was picking a few of them to have a better look.”
“Well, quit it,” said the mayor, sternly. “Every one that you pull off is fifty dollars less. Give them leaves a little time and they’ll grow to proper size and then they’ll drop off and all we need to do is to pick them up and every one of them will be money in our pocket.”
“How do you know that?” Grandma Jones shrilled at him.
“Well,” the mayor said, “it stands to reason, don’t it? Here we have these marvelous plants growing money for us. The least we can do is let them be, so they can grow it for us.”
He looked around the crowd and suddenly saw me.
“Brad,” he asked me, “isn’t that correct?”
“I’m afraid it is,” I said.
For Tupper had stolen the money and the Flowers had used the bills as patterns on which to base the leaves. I would have bet, without looking further, that there were no more than thirty different serial numbers in the entire crop of money.
“What I want to know,” said Charley Hutton, “is how you figure we should divide it up—once it’s ripe, that is.”
“Why,” said the mayor, “that’s something I hadn’t even thought of. Maybe we could put it in a common fund that could be handed out to people as they have the need of it.”
“That don’t seem fair to me,” said Charley. “That way some people would get more of it than others. Seems to me the only way is to divide it evenly. Everyone should get his fair share of it, to do with as he wants.”
“There’s some merit,” said the mayor, “in your point of view. But it isn’t something on which we should make a snap decision. This afternoon I’ll appoint a committee to look into it. Anyone who has any ideas can present them and they’ll get full consideration.”
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