"You have a lot of knowledge?"
"Very much," they said. "It is a thing we pay much attention to — the absorption of all knowledge."
"And you're very busy collecting it from us. You are the people who are hiring all the readers?"
"It is so much more efficient," they explained, "than the way we used to do it, with results indifferent at best. This way is more certain and a great deal more selective."
"Ever since the time," I said, "that you got Gerald Sherwood to make the telephones."
"The telephones," they told me, "provide direct communication. All we had before was the tapping of the mind."
"You mean you had mental contact with people of our Earth? Perhaps for a good long time?"
"Oh, yes," they said, most cheerfully. "With very many people, for many, many years. But the sad part of it was that it was a one-way business. We had contact with them, but by and large, they had none with us. Most of them were not aware of us at all and others, who were more sensitive, were aware of us only in a vague and fumbling way."
"But you picked those minds."
"Of course we did," they said. "But we had to content ourselves with what was in the minds. We could not manage to direct them to specific areas of interest."
"You tried nudging them, of course."
"There were some we nudged with fair success. There were others we could nudge, but they moved in wrong directions. And there were many, most of them perhaps, who stubbornly remained unaware of us, no matter what we did. It was discouraging."
"You contact these minds through certain thin spots, I suppose. You could not have done it through the normal boundaries."
"No, we had to make maximum usage of the thin spots that we found."
"It was, I gather, somewhat unsatisfactory."
"You are perceptive, sir. We were getting nowhere."
"Then you made a breakthrough."
"We are not quite sure we understand."
"You tried a new approach. You concentrated on actually sending something physical through the boundary. A handful of seeds, perhaps."
"You are right, of course. You follow us so closely and you understand so well. But even that would have failed if it had not been for your father. Only a very few of the seeds germinated and the resultant plants would have died out eventually if he'd not found them and taken care of them. You must understand that is why we want you to act as our emissary…"
"Now, just a minute there," I told them. "Before we get into that, there are a few more points I want cleared up. The barrier, for instance, that you've thrown around Millville."
"The barrier," said the Flowers, "is a rather simple thing. It is a time bubble we managed to project outward from the thin spot in the boundary that separates our worlds. That one slight area of space it occupies is out of phase both with Millville and with the rest of your Earth. The smallest imaginable fraction of a second in the past, running that fraction of a second of time behind the time of Earth. So slight a fraction of a second, perhaps, that it would be difficult, we should imagine, for the most sophisticated of your instruments to take a measurement. A very little thing and yet, we imagine you'll agree, it is quite effective."
"Yes," I said, "effective." And, of course, it would be — by the very nature of it, it would be strong beyond imagination. For it would represent the past, a filmy soap bubble of the past encapsulating Millville, so slight a thing that it did not interfere with either sight or sound, and yet was something no human could hope to penetrate.
"But sticks and stones," I said. "And raindrops…"
"Only life," they said. "Life at a certain level of sentience, of awareness of its surroundings, of feeling — how do you say it?"
"You've said it well enough," I told them. "And the inanimate…"
"There are many rules of time," they told me, "of the natural phenomenon which you call time. That is a part, a small part, of the knowledge we would share with you."
"Anything at all," I said, "in that direction would be new knowledge for us. We have not studied time. We haven't even thought of it as a force that we could study. We haven't made a start. A lot of metaphysical mutterings, of course, but no real study of it. We have never found a place where we could start a study of it."
"We know all that," they said.
And was there a note of triumph in the way they said it? I could not be entirely sure.
A new sort of weapon, I thought. A devilish sort of weapon. It wouldn't kill you and it wouldn't hurt you! It would shove you along, herding you along, out of the way, crowding you together, and there wouldn't be a thing you could do about it.
What, Nancy had asked, if it swept all life from Earth, leaving only Millville? And that, perhaps, was possible, although it need not go that far. If it was living space alone that the Flowers were looking for, then they already had the instrument to get that living space. They could expand the bubble, gaining all the space they needed, holding the human race at bay while they settled down in that living space. The weapon was at once a weapon to be used against the people of the Earth and a protection for the Flowers against such reprisals as mankind might attempt.
The way was open to them if they wanted Earth. For Tupper had travelled the way that they must go and so had I and there was nothing now to stop them. They could simply move into the Earth, shielded by that wall of time.
"So," I asked, "what are you waiting for?"
"You are, on certain points, so slow to reach an understanding of what we intend," they said. "We do not plan invasion. We want co-operation. We want to come as friends in perfect understanding."
"Well, that's fine," I said. "You are asking to be friends. First we must know our friends. What sort of things are you?"
"You are being rude," they said.
"I am not being rude. I want to know about you. You speak of yourselves as plural, or perhaps collective."
"Collective," they said. "You probably would describe us as an organism. Our root system is planet-wide and interconnected and you might want to think of it as our nervous system. At regular intervals there are great masses of our root material and these masses serve — we suppose you'd call them brains. Many, many brains and all of them connected by a common nervous system."
"But it's all wrong," I protested. "It goes against all reason. Plants can't be intelligent. No plant could experience the survival pressure or the motivation to achieve intelligence."
"Your reasoning," they told me calmly, "is beyond reproach."
"So it is beyond reproach," I said. "Yet I am talking with you."
"You have an animal on your Earth that you call a dog."
"That is right. An animal of great intelligence."
"Adopted by you humans as a pet and a companion. An animal that has associated with you people since before the dawning of your history. And, perhaps, the more intelligent because of that association. An animal that is capable of a great degree of training."
"What has the dog to do with it?" I asked.
"Consider," they said. "If the humans of your Earth had devoted all their energies, through all their history, to the training of the dog, what might have been achieved?"
"Why, I don't know," I said. "Perhaps, by now, we'd have a dog that might be our equal in intelligence. Perhaps not intelligent in the same manner that we're intelligent, but…"
"There once was another race," the Flowers told me, "that did that very thing with us. It all began more than a billion years ago."
"This other race deliberately made a plant intelligent?"
"There was a reason for it. They were a different kind of life than you. They developed us for one specific purpose. They needed a system of some sort that would keep the data they had collected continually correlated and classified and ready for their use."