Clifford Simak - All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories

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 yourselves — 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 so 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.

When I came back that morning I had found that the purple flowers growing in the swale behind my house, through the wizardry 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 slope 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 marvellous 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."