Other people drifted in and it was late in the afternoon before I could call up the Soils Bureau and tell them I wanted the contents of the two jars analyzed. I told them a little of what had happened, although not all of it for, when you tried to put it into words, it sounded pretty weird.
“Banker Stevens called and asked if you’d drop by his place on your way home,” Millie told me.
“What would Stevens want with me?” I asked. “He isn’t a farmer and I don’t owe him any money.”
“He grows fancy flowers,” said Millie.
“I know that. He lives just up the street from me.”
“From what I gathered, something awful happened to them. He was all broken up.”
So, on the way home, I stopped at the Stevens place. The banker was out in the yard, waiting for me. He looked terrible. He led me around to the big flower garden in the back and never have I seen such utter devastation. In that whole area, there wasn’t a single plant alive. Every one of them had given up the ghost and was lying wilted on the ground.
“What could have done it, Joe?” asked Stevens and, the way he said it, I felt sorry for him.
After all, those flowers were a big thing in his life. He’d raised them from special seed and he’d babied them along, and for anybody who is crazy about flowers, I imagine they were tops.
“Someone might have used some spray on them,” I said. “Almost any kind of spray, if you don’t dilute it enough, would kill them.”
Out in the garden, I took a close look at the dead flowers, but nowhere could I see any sign of the burning from too strong a spray.
Then I saw the holes, at first only two or three of them, then, as I went on looking, dozens of them. They were all over the garden, about an inch in diameter, for all the world as if someone had taken a broomstick and punched holes all over the place. I got down on my knees and could see that they tapered, the way they do when you pull weeds with big taproots out of the ground.
“You been pulling weeds?” I asked.
“Not big ones like that,” said the banker. “I take good care of those flowers, Joe. You know that. Keep them weeded and watered and cultivated and sprayed. Put just the right amount of commercial fertilizer in the soil. Try to keep it at top fertility.”
“You should use manure. It’s better than all the commercial fertilizer you can buy.”
“I don’t agree with you. Tests have proved …”
It was an old argument, one that we fought out each year. I let him run on, only half listening to him, while I picked up some of the soil and crumbled it. it was dead soil. You could feel that it was. It crumbled at the lightest touch and was dry, even when I dug a foot beneath the surface.
“You water this bed recently?” I asked.
“Last evening,” Stevens said.
“When did you find the flowers like this?”
“This morning. They looked fine last night. And now—” he blinked fast.
I asked him for a fruit jar and filled it with a sample of the soil.
“I’ll send this in and see if there’s anything wrong with it,” I said.
A bunch of dogs were barking at something in the hedge in front of my place when I got home. Some of the dogs in the neighborhood are hell on cats. I parked the car and picked up an old hoe handle and went out to rescue the cat they seemed to have cornered.
They scattered when they saw me coming and I started to look in the hedge for the cat. There wasn’t any and that aroused my curiosity and I wondered what the dogs could have been barking at. So I went hunting.
And I found it.
It was lying on the ground, close against the lower growth of the hedge, as if it had crawled there for protection.
I reached in and pulled it out—a weed of some sort, about five feet tall, and with a funny root system. There were eight roots, each about an inch in diameter at the top and tapering to a quarter inch or so. They weren’t all twisted up, but were sort of sprung out, so that there were four to the side, each set of four in line. I looked at their tips and I saw that the roots were not broken off, but ended in blunt, strong points.
The stalk, at the bottom, was about as thick as a man’s fist. There were four main branches covered with thick, substantial, rather meaty leaves; but the last foot of the branches was bare of leaves. At the top were several flower or seed pouches, the biggest of them the size of an old-fashioned coffee mug.
I squatted there looking at it. The more I looked, the more puzzled I became. As a county agent, you have to know quite a bit about botany and this plant was like none I had seen before.
I dragged it across the lawn to the toolshed back of the garage and tossed it in there, figuring that after supper I’d have a closer look at it.
I went in the house to get my evening meal ready and decided to broil a steak and fix up a bowl of salad.
A lot of people in town wonder at my living in the old homestead, but I’m used to the house and there seemed to be no sense in moving somewhere else when all it costs me is taxes and a little upkeep. For several years before Mother died, she had been quite feeble and I did all the cleaning and helped with the cooking, so I’m fairly handy at it.
After I washed the dishes, I read what little there was to read in the evening paper and then looked up an old text on botany, to see if I could find anything that might help identify the plant.
I didn’t find anything and, just before I went to bed, I got a flashlight and went out, imagining, I suppose, that I’d find the weed somehow different than I remembered it.
I opened the door of the shed and flashed the light where I’d tossed the weed on the floor. At first, I couldn’t see it, then I heard a leafy rustling over in one corner and I turned the light in that direction.
The weed had crawled over to one corner and it was trying to get up, its stem bowed out—the way a man would arch his back—pressing against the wall of the shed.
Standing there with my mouth open, watching it try to raise itself erect, I felt horror and fear. I reached out to the corner nearest the door and snatched up an axe.
If the plant has succeeded in getting up, I might have chopped it to bits. But, as I stood there, I saw the thing would never make it. I was not surprised when it slumped back on the floor.
What I did next was just as unreasoning and instinctive as reaching for the axe.
I found an old washtub and half filled it with water. Then I picked up the plant—it had a squirmish feel to it, like a worm—stuck its roots into the water, and pushed the tub back against the wall, so the thing could be braced upright.
I went into the house and ransacked a couple of closets until I found the sunlamp I’d bought a couple of years back, to use when I had a touch of arthritis in my shoulder. I rigged up the lamp and trained it on the plant, not too close. Then I got a big shovelful of dirt and dumped it in the tub.
And that, I figured, was about all I could do. I was giving the plant water, soil-food and simulated sunlight. I was afraid that, if I tried a more fancy treatment, I might kill it, for I hadn’t any notion of what conditions it might be used to.
Apparently I handled it right. It perked up considerably and, as I moved about, the coffee-cup-sized pod on the top kept turning, following every move I made.
I watched it for a while and moved the sunlamp back a little, so there’d be no chance of scorching it, and went back into the house.
It was then that I really began to get bone-scared. I had been frightened out in the shed, of course, but that had been shock. Now, thinking it over, I began to understand more clearly what sort of creature I’d found underneath the hedge. I remember I wasn’t yet ready to say it out loud, but it seemed probable that my guest was an alien intelligence.