"They could have kept their records. They could have written it all down."

"There were certain physical restrictions and, perhaps more important, certain mental blocks."

"You mean they couldn't write."

"They never thought of writing. It was an idea that did not occur to them. Not even speech, the way you speak. And even if they had had speech or writing, it would not have done the job they wanted."

"The classification and the correlation?"

"That is part of it, of course. But how much ancient human knowledge, written down and committed to what seemed at that time to be safe keeping, is still alive today?"

"Not much of it. It has been lost or destroyed. Time has washed it out."

"We still hold the knowledge of that other race," they said. "We proved better than the written record — although this other race, of course, did not consider written records."

"This other race," I said. "The knowledge of this other race and how many other races?"

They did not answer me. "If we had the time," they said, "we'd explain it all to you. There are many factors and considerations you'd find incomprehensible. Believe us when we say that the decision of this other race, to develop us into a data storage system, was the most reasonable and workable of the many alternatives they had under study."

"But the time it took," I said, dismayed "My God, how much time would it take to make a plant intelligent! And how could they even start? What do you do to make a plant intelligent?"

"Time," they said, "was no great consideration. It wasn't any problem. They knew how to deal with time. They could handle time as you can handle matter. And that was a part of it. They compressed many centuries of our lives into seconds of their own. They had all the time they needed. They made the time they needed."

"They made time?"

"Certainly. Is that so hard to understand?"

"For me, it is," I told them. "Time is a river. It flows on and on. There is nothing you can do about it."

"It is nothing like a river," said the Flowers, "and it doesn't flow, and there's much that can be done with it. And, furthermore, we ignore the insult that you offer us."

"The insult?"

"Your feeling that it would be so difficult for a plant to acquire intelligence."

"No insult was intended. I was thinking of the plants of Earth. I can't imagine a dandelion…"

"A dandelion?"

"A very common plant."

"You may be right," they said. "We may have been different, originally, than the plants of Earth."

"You remember nothing of it all, of course."

"You mean ancestral memory?"

"I suppose that's what I mean."

"It was so long ago," they said. "We have the record of it. Not a myth, you understand, not a legend. But the actual record of how we became intelligent."

"Which," I said, "is far more than the human race has got."

"And now," said the Flowers, "we must say goodbye. Our enunciator is becoming quite fatigued and we must not abuse his strength, for he has served us long and faithfully and we have affection for him. We will talk with you again."

"Whew!" said Tupper.

He wiped the slobber off his chin.

"That's the longest," he said, "I have ever talked for them. What did you talk about?"

"You mean you don't know?"

"Of course I don't," snapped Tupper. "I never listen in." He was human once again. His eyes had returned to normal and his face had become unstuck.

"But the readers," I said. "They read longer than we talked."

"I don't have nothing to do with the reading that is done," said Tupper. "That ain't two-way talk. That's all mental contact stuff."

"But the phones," I said.

"The phones are just to tell them the things they should read."

"Don't they read into the phones?"

"Sure they do," said Tupper. "That's so they'll read aloud. It's easier for the Flowers to pick it up if they read aloud. It's sharper in the reader's brain or something." He got up slowly.

"Going to take a nap," he said.

He headed for the hut.

Halfway there, he stopped and turned back to face me. "I forgot," he said. "Thanks for the pants and shirt."

12

My hunch had been correct. Tupper was a key, or at least one of the keys, to what was happening. And the place to look for clues, crazy as it had sounded, had been the patch of flowers in the garden down below the greenhouse.

For the flower patch had led, not alone to Tupper, but to all the rest of it — to that second self that had helped out Gerald Sherwood, to the phone set-up and the reader service, to the ones who employed Stiffy Grant and probably to the backers of that weird project down in Mississippi. And to how many other projects and endeavours I had no idea.

It was not only now, I knew, that this was happening, but it had been happening for years. For many years, they'd told me, the Flowers had been in contact with many minds of Earth, had been stealing the ideas and the attitudes and knowledge which had existed in those minds, and even in those instances in which the minds were unaware of the prowlers in them, had persisted in the nudging of those minds, as they had nudged the mind of Sherwood.

For many years, they'd said, and I had not thought to ask them for a better estimate. For several centuries, perhaps, and that seemed entirely likely, for when they spoke of the lifetime of their intelligence they spoke of a billion years.

For several hundred years, perhaps, and could those centuries, I wondered, have dated from the Renaissance? Was it possible, I asked myself, that the credit for the flowering of man's culture, that the reason for his advancement might be due, at least in part, to the nudging of the Flowers?

Not, of course, that they themselves would have placed their imprint upon the ways of man, but theirs could have been the nagging force which had driven man to much of his achievement.

In the case of Gerald Sherwood, the busybody nudging had resulted in constructive action. Was it too much to think, I wondered, that in many other instances the result had been the same — although perhaps not as pronounced as it had been in Sherwood's case? For Sherwood had recognized the otherness that had come to live with him and had learned that it was to his benefit to co-operate. In many other cases there would not have been awareness, but even with no awareness, the drive and urge were there and, in part, there would have been response.

In those hundreds of years, the Flowers must have learned a great deal of humanity and have squirrelled away much human knowledge. For that had been their original purpose, to serve as knowledge storage units. During the last several years man's knowledge had flowed to them in a steady stream, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of readers busily engaged in pouring down their mental gullets the accumulated literary efforts of all of humankind.

I got off the ground where I was sitting and found that I was stiff and cramped. I stretched and slowly turned and there, on every side, reaching to the near horizons of the ridges that paralleled the river, swept the purple tide.

It could not be right, I told myself. I could not have talked with flowers. For of all the things on Earth, plants were the one thing that could never talk.

And yet this was not the Earth. This was another Earth — only one, they'd said, of many billion earths.

Could one measure, I asked myself, one earth by another? And the answer seemed to be one couldn't. The terrain appeared to be almost identical with the terrain I had known back on my own Earth, and the terrain itself might remain the same for all those multi-billion earths. For what was it they had said — that earth was a basic structure?

But when one considered life and evolution, then all the bets were off.