Clifford Simak - All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

"Brad," said Nancy, "I think I'm beginning to get scared." She reached out a hand and put it on my arm. Her fingers tightened, hanging onto me.

"It makes me mad," she said, "I've never been scared, never my life. Never scared like this."

"It's all over now," I said. "The storm is ended and the barrier has stopped moving. Everything's all right."

"It's not like that at all," she told me. "It's only just beginning." A man was running up the road toward us, but he was the only one in sight. All the other people who had been around the parked cars were no longer there. They had run for cover, back to the village, probably, when the blast of wind had come and the seeds had fallen.

The running man, I saw, was Ed Adler, and he was shouting something at us as he run.

We got out of the car and walked around in front of it and stood there, waiting for him.

He came up to us, panting with his running.

"Brad," he gasped, "maybe you don't know this, but Hiram and Tom Preston are stirring up the people. They think you have something to do with what's happening. Some talk about a phone or something."

"Why, that's crazy!" Nancy cried.

"Sure it is," said Ed, "but the village is on edge. It wouldn't take too much to get them thinking it. They're ready to think almost anything. They need an explanation; they'll grab at anything. They won't stop to think if it's right or wrong."

I asked him: "What do you have in mind?"

"You better hide out, Brad, until it all blows over. In another day or two…"

I shook my head. "I have too many things to do."

"But, Brad…"

"I didn't do it, Ed. I don't know what happened, but I didn't have a thing to do with it."

"That don't make no difference."

"Yes, it does," I said.

"Hiram and Tom are saying they found these funny phones…" Nancy started to say something, but I jumped in ahead of her and cut her off, so she didn't have a chance to say it.»

"I know about those phones," I said. "Hiram told me all about them. Ed, take my word for it. The phones are out of it. They are something else entirely." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy staring at me.

"Forget about the phones," I said.

I hoped she'd understand and apparently she did, for she didn't say a thing about the phones. I wasn't actually sure that she'd intended to, for I had no idea if she knew about the phone in her father's study. But I couldn't take a chance.

"Brad," warned Ed, "you're walking into it."

"I can't run away," I told him. "I can't run somewhere and hide. Not from anyone, especially not from a pair like Tom and Hiram." He looked me up and down.

"No, I guess you can't," he said. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Maybe," I said. "You can see that Nancy gets home safely. I've got a thing or two to do." I looked at Nancy. She nodded at me.

"It's all right, Brad, but the car's just down the road. I could drive you home."

"I'd better take a short cut. If Ed is right, there's less chance of being seen."

"I'll stay with her," said Ed, "until she's inside the house." Already, in two hour's time, I thought, it had come to this — to a state of mind where one questioned the safety of a girl alone upon the street.

Now, finally, I had to do a thing I had intended to do ever since this morning — a thing I probably should have done last night — get in touch with Alf. It was more important now than ever that I get in touch with him, for in the back of my mind was a growing conviction that there must be some connection between what was happening here in Millville and that strange research project down in Mississippi.

I reached a dead-end street and started walking down it. There was not a soul in sight. Everyone who could either walk or ride would be down in the business section.

I got to worrying that maybe I'd not be able to locate Alf, that he might have checked out of the motel when I failed to get there, or that he might be out gawping at the barrier with a lot of other people.

But there was no need to worry, for when I reached my house the phone was ringing and Alf was on the line.

"I've been trying for an hour to get you," he said. "I wondered how you were."

"You know what happened, Alf?"

He told me that he did. "Some of it," he said.

"Minutes earlier," I said, "and I would have been with you instead of penned up in the village. I must have hit the barrier when it first appeared." I went ahead and told him what had happened after I had hit the barrier. Then I told him about the phones.

"They told me they had a lot of readers. People who read books to them…"

"A way of getting information."

"I gathered that was it."

"Brad," he said, "I've got a terrible hunch."

"So have I," I said.

"Do you think this Greenbriar project…?"

"That's what I was thinking, too." I heard him drawing a deep breath, the air whistling in his teeth."

"It's not just Millville, then."

"Maybe a whole lot more than Millville."

"What are you going to do now, Brad?"

"Go down into my garden and have a hard look at some flowers."

"Flowers?"

"Alf," I told him, "it's a long, long story. I'll tell you later. Are you staying on?"

"Of course I am," said Alf "The greatest show on earth and me with a ringside seat."

"I'll call you back in an hour or so."

"I'll stay close," he promised. "I'll be waiting for your call." I put down the phone and stood there, trying to make some head or tail of it. The flowers, somehow, were important, and so was Tupper Tyler, but they were all mixed up together and there was no place one could start.

I went out of the house and down into the garden by the greenhouse. The trail that Tupper had left was still plain and I was considerably relieved, for I had been afraid that the wind that brought the seeds might have blown it away, that the flowers might have been so beaten and so twisted that the trail could well be lost.

I stood at the edge of the garden and looked around, as if I were seeing the place for the first time in my life. It wasn't really a garden.

At one time it had been land on which we'd grown the stuff we sold, but when I quit the greenhouse business I'd simply let it go wild and the flowers had taken over. To one side stood the greenhouse, with its door hanging on the broken hinges and most of the panes gone from the windows. And at one corner of it stood the elm tree that had grown from seed — the one I'd been about to pull up when my father stopped me.

Tupper had talked wildly about flowers growing by the acre. All of them, he said, had been purple flowers and he had been most emphatic that my father should be told of them. The mystery voice, or one of the mystery voices on the phone had been well informed about my father's greenhouse and had asked if I still ran it. And there had been, less than an hour ago, a perfect storm of seeds.

All the little purple flower-heads with their monkey faces seemed to be nodding at me as if at a secret joke and I jerked my gaze away from them to stare up at the sky. Broken clouds still streamed across it, shutting out the sun. Although, once the clouds were gone, the day would be a scorcher.

One could smell the heat in the very air.

I moved out into the garden, following Tupper's trail. At the end of the trail I stopped and told myself that it had been a witless thing — this belief of mine that I would find something in this flower patch that would make some sense.

Tupper Tyler had disappeared ten years ago and he'd disappeared today and how he'd managed it no man might ever know.

And yet the idea still went on banging in my skull that Tupper was the key to all this screwy business.

Yet I couldn't, for the life of me, explain the logic of my thinking.