If you tried to reason with him, you just made matters worse.

"We might as well sit down," said Tupper, "and get started on this." I sat down on the ground and he handed me a plate, then sat down opposite me and took the other plate.

I was hungry and the saltless food didn't go so badly. Flat, of course, and tasting just a little strange, but it was all right. It took away the hunger.

"You like it here? I asked.

"It is home to me," said Tupper, solemnly. "It is where my friends are."

"You don't have anything," I said. "You don't have an axe or knife. You don't have a pot or pan. And there is no one you can turn to. What if you got sick?" Tupper quit wolfing down his food and stared at me, as if I were the crazy one.

"I don't need any of those things," he said. "I make my dishes out of clay. I can break off the branches with my hands and I don't need an axe. I don't need to hoe the garden. There aren't ever any weeds. I don't even need to plant it. It's always there. While I use up one row of stuff, another row is growing. And if I got sick, the Flowers would take care of me. They told me they would."

"OK," I said. "OK." He went back to his eating. It was a terrible sight to watch. But he was right about the garden. Now that he had mentioned it, I could see that it wasn't cultivated. There were rows of growing vegetables — long, neat rows without the sign of ever being hoed and without a single weed. And that, of course, was the way it would be, for no weed would dare to grow here. There was nothing that could grow here except the Flowers themselves, or the things into which the Flowers had turned themselves, like the vegetables and trees.

The garden was a perfect garden. There were no stunted plants and no disease or blight. The tomatoes, hanging on the vines, were an even red and all were perfect globes. The corn stood straight and tall.

"You cooked enough for two," I said. "Did you know that I was coming?" For I was fast reaching the point where I'd have believed almost anything. It was just possible, I told myself that he (or the Flowers) had known that I was coming.

"I always cook enough for two," he told me. "There never is no telling when someone might drop in."

"But no one ever has?"

"You're the first," he said. "I'm glad that you could come." I wondered if time had any meaning for him. Sometimes it seemed it didn't. And yet he had wept weak tears because it had been so long since anyone had broken bread with him.

We ate in silence for a while and then I took a chance. I'd humoured him long enough and it was time to ask some questions.

"Where is this place?" I asked. "What kind of place is it? And if you want to get out of it, to get back home, how do you go about it?

I didn't mention the fact that he had gotten out of it and returned to Millville. I sensed it might be something he would resent, for he'd been in a hurry to get back again — as if he'd broken some sort of rule or regulation and was anxious to return before anyone found out.

Carefully Tupper laid his plate on the ground and placed his spoon upon it, then he answered me. But he answered me in a different voice, in the measured voice of the businessman who had talked to me on the mystery phone.

"This," said Tupper, in the voice of the businessman, "is not Tupper Tyler speaking. This is Tupper speaking for the Flowers. What shall we talk about?"

"You're kidding me," I said, but it wasn't that I really thought I was being kidded. What I said I said almost instinctively, to gain a little time.

"I can assure you," said the voice, "that we are very much in earnest. We are the Flowers and you want to talk with us and we want to talk with you. This is the only way to do it." Tupper wasn't looking at me; he didn't seem to be looking at anything at all. His eyes had gone all bleak and vacant and he had an indrawn look.

He sat stiff and straight, with his hands dangling in his lap. He didn't look human, any more; he looked like a telephone.

"I've talked to you before," I said.

"Oh, yes," said the Flowers, "but only very briefly. You did not believe in us."

"I have some questions that I want to ask."

"And we shall answer you. We'll do the best we can. We'll reply to you as concisely as we know."

"What is this place?" I asked.

"This is an alternate Earth," said the Flowers. "It's no more than a clock-tick away from yours."

"An alternate Earth?"

"Yes, there are many Earths. You did not know that, did you?"

"No," I said, "I didn't."

"But you can believe it?"

"With a little practice, maybe."

"There are billions of Earths," the Flowers told me. "We don't know how many, but there are many billions of them. There may be no end to them. There are some who think so."

"One behind the other?"

"No. That's not the way to think of it. We don't know how to tell it. It becomes confused in telling."

"So let's say there are a lot of Earths. It's a little hard to understand. If there were a lot of Earths, we'd see them."

"You could not see them," said the Flowers, "unless you could see in time. The alternate Earths exist in a time matrix…"

"A time matrix? You mean…"

"The simplest way to say it is that time divides the many Earths. Each one is distinguished by its time-location. All that exists for you is the present moment. You cannot see into the past or future…"

"Then to get here I travelled into time."

"Yes," said the Flowers. "That is exactly what you did." Tupper still was sitting there with the blank look on his face, but I'd forgotten him. It was his lips and tongue and larynx that formed the words I heard, but it was not Tupper speaking. I knew that I was talking with the Flowers; that, insane as it might seem, I was talking with the purpleness that flowed all around the camp.

"Your silence tells us," said the Flowers, "that you find it hard to digest what we are telling you."

"I choke on it," I told them.

"Let's try to say it another way. Earth is a basic structure but it progresses along the time path by a process of discontinuity."

"Thanks," I said, "for trying, but it doesn't help too much."

"We have known it for a long time," said the Flowers. "We discovered it many years ago. To us it is a natural law, but to you it's not. It'll take you a little time. You cannot swallow at a single gulp what it took us centuries to know."

"But I walked through time," I said. "That's what's hard to take. How could I walk through time?"

"You walked through a very thin spot."

"Thin spot?"

"A place where time was not so thick."

"And you made this thin spot?"

"Let's say that we exploited it."

"To try to reach our Earth?"

"Please, sir," said the Flowers, "not that tone of horror. For some years now, you people have been going into space."

"We've been trying to," I said.

"You're thinking of invasion. In that we are alike. You are trying to invade space; we're trying to invade time."

"Let's just go back a ways," I pleaded. "There are boundaries between these many Earths?"

"That is right."

"Boundaries in time? The worlds are separated by time phases?"

"That is indeed correct. You catch on very neatly."

"And you are trying to break through this time barrier so you can reach my Earth?"

"To reach your Earth," they told me.

"But why?"

"To co-operate with you. To form a partnership. We need living space and if you give us living space, we'll give our knowledge; we need technology, for we have no hands, and with our knowledge you can shape new technologies and those technologies can be used for the benefit of each of us. We can go together into other worlds. Eventually a long chain of many Earths will be linked together and the races in them linked, as well, in a common aim and purpose." A cold lump of lead blossomed in my guts, and despite the lump of lead I felt that I was empty and there was a vile metallic taste that coated tongue and mouth. A partnership, and who would be in charge? Living space, and how much would they leave for us? Other worlds, and what would happen in those other worlds?