I’ve since thought how much like two lost children we must have been, strange kids raised in different countries, who would have liked to play together, except neither knew the rules for the other’s games or spoke the other’s language.
I know … I know. According to common sense, you begin with mathematics. You show the alien that you know two and two are four. Then you draw the Solar System and show him the Sun on the diagram and then point to the Sun overhead and you point to Earth on the diagram, then point to yourself. In this way, you demonstrate to him that you know about the Solar System and about space and the stars and so on.
Then you hand him the paper and the pencil.
But what if he doesn’t know mathematics? What if the two-plus-two-makes-four routine doesn’t mean a thing to him? What if he’s never seen a drawing? What if he can’t draw—or see or hear or feel or think the way you do?
To deal with an alien, you’ve got to get down to basics.
And maybe math isn’t basic.
Maybe diagrams aren’t.
In that case, you have to search for something that is.
Yet there must be certain universal basics.
I think I know what they are.
That, if nothing else, Plant taught me.
Happiness is basic. And sadness is basic. And gratitude, in perhaps a lesser sense. Kindness, too. And perhaps hatred—although Plant and I never dealt in that.
Maybe brotherhood. For the sake of humanity, I hope so.
But kindness and happiness and brotherhood are awkward tools to use in reaching specific understanding, although in Plant’s world they may not be.
It was getting on toward autumn and I was beginning to wonder how I’d take care of Plant during the winter months.
I could have kept him in the house, but he hated it there.
Then, one night, we were sitting on the back steps, listening to the first crickets of the season.
The ship came down without a sound. I didn’t see it until it was about at treetop level. It floated down and landed between the house and toolshed.
I was startled for a moment, but not frightened, and perhaps not too surprised. In the back of my head, I’d wondered all the time, without actually knowing it, whether Plant’s pals might not ultimately find him.
The ship was a shimmery sort of thing, as if it might not have been made of metal and was not really solid. I noticed that it had not really landed, but floated a foot or so above the grass.
Three other Plants stepped out and the oddest part of it was that there wasn’t any door. They just came out of the ship and the ship closed behind them.
Plant took me by the arm and twitched it just a little, to make me understand he wanted me to walk with him to the ship. He made little comforting thoughts to try to calm me down.
And all the time that this was going on, I could sense the talk between Plant and those other three—but just grasping the fringe of the conversation, barely knowing there was talk, not aware of what was being said.
And then, while Plant stood beside me, with his hand still on my arm, those other plants walked up. One by one, each took me by the other arm and stood facing me for a moment and told me thanks and happiness.
Plant told me the same, for the last time, and then the four of them walked toward the ship and disappeared into it. The ship left me standing there, watching it rise into the night, until I couldn’t see it any longer.
I stood there for a long time, staring up into the sky, with the thanks and happiness fading and loneliness beginning to creep in.
I knew that, somewhere up there, was a larger ship, that in it were many other Plants, that one of them had lived with me for almost six months and that others of them had died in the hedges and fence corners of the neighborhood. I knew also that it had been the big ship that had scooped out the load of nutritious soil from Pete Skinner’s field.
Finally, I stopped looking at the sky. Over behind the toolshed I saw the whiteness of the yellow rose in bloom and once again I thought about the basics.
I wondered if happiness and kindness, perhaps even emotions that we humans do not know, might not be used on Plant’s world as we use the sciences.
For the rose bush had bloomed when I thought kindly thoughts of it. And the African violet had found a new life in the kindness of a human.
Startling as it may seem, foolish as it may sound, it is not an unknown phenomenon. There are people who have the knack of getting the most out of a flowerbed or a garden. And it is said of these people that they have green thumbs.
May it not be that green thumbness is not so much concerned with skill or how much care is taken of a plant, as with the kindliness and the interest of the person tending it?
For eons, the plant life of this planet has been taken for granted. It is simply there. By and large, plants are given little affection. They are planted or sown. They grow. In proper season, they are harvested.
I sometimes wonder if, as hunger tightens its grip upon our teeming planet, there may not be a vital need for the secret of green thumbness.
If kindness and sympathy can cause a plant to produce beyond its normal wont, then shouldn’t we consider kindness as a tool to ward off Earth’s hunger? How much more might be produced if the farmer loved his wheat?
It’s silly, of course, a principle that could not gain acceptance.
And undoubtedly it would not work—not in a plant-utilizing culture.
For how could you keep on convincing a plant that you feel kindly toward it when, season after season, you prove that your only interest in it is to eat it or make it into clothing or chop it down for lumber?
I walked out back of the shed and stood beside the yellow rose, trying to find the answer. The yellow rose stirred, like a pretty woman who knows she’s being admired, but no emotion came from it.
The thanks and happiness were gone. There was nothing left but the loneliness.
Damned vegetable aliens—upsetting a man so he couldn’t eat his breakfast cereal in peace!
When It’s Hangnoose Time in Hell
As with most of Clifford D. Simak’s Western stories, the title under which this story was originally published was not the one that was on it when it was submitted to the magazine; but when I say that, I cannot tell you what the author’s title for this story was. The titles of most of his Westerns were changed after they left his hands, and most of them were written within a period of a few years; thus, although I’ve been trying, I haven’t had much luck matching what little I know about those stories’ dates of mailing with the publication dates of many of the stories.
This story first appeared in the April 1946 issue of .44 Western Magazine, but although I can tell you that Cliff was paid sixty dollars in 1943 for a story entitled “Sixgun Gamble,” and was paid one hundred and sixty in 1946 for a story entitled “Walk in the Middle of the Street,” I also have to tell you that he sold at least ten other Westerns during the period between those two stories—and no copy of any of those manuscripts is known to exist.
Nonetheless, I can tell you that, true to his preferences, Cliff made this story rather unconventionaclass="underline" Its protagonist is a riverboat gambler who was far from the Mississippi, and he is honest.