All Flesh Is Grass Read online

  From far off someone was calling and the name was mine.

  I dropped the two-by-four and started across the garden, wondering who it was. Not Nancy, but someone that I knew.

  Nancy came running down the hill. “Hurry, Brad,” she called.

  “Where were you?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Stiffy. I told you it was Stiffy. He’s waiting at the barrier. He sneaked through the guards. He says he has to see you.”

  “But Stiffy…”

  “He’s here, I tell you. And he wants to talk with you. No one else will do.”

  She turned and trotted up the hill and I lumbered after her. We went through Doc’s yard and across the street and through another yard and there, just ahead of us, I knew, was the barrier.

  A gnome-like figure rose from the ground.

  “That you, lad?” he asked.

  I hunkered down at the edge of the barrier and stared across at him.

  “Yes, it’s me,” I said, “but you…”

  “Later. We haven’t got much time. The guards know I got through the lines. They’re hunting for me.”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Not what I want,” he said. “What everybody wants. Something that you need. You’re in a jam.”

  “Everyone’s in a jam,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Stiffy. “Some damn fool in the Pentagon is set to drop a bomb. I heard some of the ruckus on a car radio when I was sneaking through. Just a snatch of it.”

  “So, all right,” I said. “The human race is sunk.”

  “Not sunk,” insisted Stiffy. “I tell you there’s a way. If Washington just understood, if…”

  “If you know a way,” I asked, “why waste time in reaching me? You could have told…”

  “Who would I tell?” asked Stiffy. “Who would believe me, even if I told? I’m just a lousy bum and I ran off from that hospital and…”

  “All right,” I said. “All right.”

  “You were the man to tell,” said Stiffy. “You’re accredited, it seems like. Someone will listen to you. You can get in touch with someone and they’ll listen to you.”

  “If it was good enough,” I said.

  “This is good enough,” said Stiffy. “We have something that the aliens want. We’re the only people who can give it to them.”

  “Give to them!” I shouted. “Anything they want, they can take away from us.”

  “Not this, they can’t,” said Stiffy.

  I shook my head. “You make it sound too easy. They already have us hooked. The people want them in, although they’d come in anyhow, even if the people didn’t. They hit us in our weak spot…”

  “The Flowers have a weak spot, too,” said Stiffy.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” I said.

  “You’re just upset,” said Stiffy.

  “You’re damned right I am.”

  And I had a right to be. The world had gone to pot. Nuclear annihilation was poised above our heads and the village, wild before, would be running frantic when Hiram told what he’d seen down in the garden. Hiram and his hoodlum pals had burned down my house and I didn’t have a home—no one had a home, for the earth was home no longer. It was just another in a long, long chain of worlds that was being taken over by another kind of life that mankind had no chance of fighting.

  “The Flowers are an ancient race,” said Stiffy. “How ancient, I don’t know. A billion years, two billion—it’s anybody’s guess. They’ve gone into a lot of worlds and they’ve known a lot of races—intelligent races, that is. And they’ve worked with these races and gone hand in hand with them. But no other race has ever loved them. No other race has ever grown them in their gardens and tended them for the beauty that they gave and no…”

  “You’re crazy!” I yelled. “You’re stark, raving mad.”

  “Brad,” said Nancy, breathlessly, “he could be right, you know. Realization of natural beauty is something the human race developed in the last two thousand years or so. No caveman ever thought a flower was beautiful or…”

  “You’re right,” said Stiffy. “No other race, none of the other races, ever developed the concept of beauty. Only a man of Earth would have dug up a clump of flowers growing in the woods and brought them home and tended them for the beauty that the Flowers had never known they had until that very moment. No one had ever loved them before, for any reason, or cared for them before. Like a lovely woman who had never known she was beautiful until someone told her that she was. Like an orphan that never had a home and finally found a home.”

  It was simple, I told myself. It couldn’t be that simple. There was nothing ever simple. Yet, when one thought of it, it seemed to make some sense. And it was the only thing that made any sense.

  “The Flowers made one condition,” Stiffy said. “Let us make another. Let us insist that a certain percentage of them, when we invite them, must remain as flowers.”

  “So that the people of the earth,” said Nancy, “can cultivate them and lavish care on them and admire them for themselves.”

  Stiffy chuckled softly. “I’ve thought on it a lot,” he said. “I could write that clause myself.”

  Would it work, I wondered. Would it really work?

  And, of course, it would.

  The business of being flowers loved by another race, cared for by another race, would bind these aliens to us as closely as we would be bound to them by the banishment of war.

  A different kind of bond, but as strong a bond as that which bound man and dog together. And that bond was all we needed; one that would give us time to learn to work together.

  We would never need to fear the Flowers, for we were someone they had been looking for, not knowing they were looking for us, not once suspecting that the sort of thing existed that we could offer them.

  “Something new,” I said.

  “Yeah, something new,” said Stiffy.

  Something new and strange, I told myself. As new and strange to the Flowers as their time manipulation was new and strange to us.

  “Well,” asked Stiffy, “do you buy it? There’s a bunch of soldier boys out here looking for me. They know I slipped through the lines and in a little while they’ll nose me out.”

  The State Department man and the senator, I recalled, had talked this very morning of long negotiation if, in fact, there could be negotiation. And the general had talked in terms of force. But all the time the answer had lain in a soft and very human trait, mankind’s love of beauty. It had remained for an undistinguished man, no senator or no general, but a crummy bum, to come up with the answer.

  “Call in your soldier boys,” I said, “and ask them for a phone. I’d just as soon not go hunting one.”

  First I’d have to reach the senator and he’d talk to the President. Then I’d get hold of Higgy and tell him what had happened so he could tame down the village.

  But for a little moment I’d have it as I wanted to remember it, here with Nancy at my side and that old reprobate friend of mine across the barrier, savoring the greatness of this tiny slice of time in which the strength of true humanity (not of position or of power) rose to the vision of a future in which many different races marched side by side toward a glory we could not guess as yet.