For even if the life of my own Earth and this other Earth on which I stood had started out identically (and they might well have started out identically) there still would be, along the way, millions of little deviations, no one of which perhaps, by itself, would be significant, but the cumulative effects of all these deviations eventually would result in a life and culture that would bear no resemblance to any other Earth.

Tupper had begun to snore — great wet, slobbering snores, the very kind of snores that one might guess he'd make. He was lying on his back inside the hut, on a bed of leaves, but the hut was so small that his feet stuck out the doorway. They rested on his calloused heels and his spraddled toes pointed at the sky and they had a raw and vulgar look about them.

I picked up the plates and spoons from where they rested on the ground and tucked the bowl in which Tupper had cooked our meal underneath my arm. I found the trail that led down to the water's edge and followed it. Tupper had cooked the food; the least I could do, I told myself; was to wash the dishes.

I squatted by the river's edge and washed the awkward plates and pot, sluiced off the spoons and rubbed them clean between my fingers. I was careful with the plates, for I had the feeling they'd not survive much wetting. On both of them and on the pot there still were the marks of Tupper's great splayed fingers, where he had pressed them into shape.

For ten years he had lived and been happy here, happy with the purple flowers that had become his friends, secure at last from the unkindness and the cruelty of the world into which he was born. The world that had been unkind and cruel because he had been different, but which was capable of unkindness and of cruelty even when there was no difference.

To Tupper, I knew, this must seem a fairyland, for real. Here was the beauty and the simplicity to which his simple soul responded. Here he could live the uncomplicated and undisturbed sort of life for which he'd always yearned, perhaps not knowing that he yearned for it.

I set the plates and pot on the river bank and stooped above the water, scooping it up in my two hands, clasped together, drinking it. It had a smooth, clean taste and despite the heat of the summer sun, it had a touch of coldness.

As I straightened up, I heard the faint sound of crinkling paper and, with a sinking heart, suddenly remembered. I put my hand into my inside jacket pocket and pulled out the long, white envelope. I flipped back the flap and there was the sheaf of money, the fifteen hundred dollars that Sherwood had put on the desk for me.

I squatted there, with the envelope in my hand and I thought what a damn fool thing to do. I had meant to hide it somewhere in the house, since I intended leaving on the fishing trip with Alf before the bank had opened, and then, in the rush of events, had forgotten it. How in the world, I wondered, could one forget fifteen hundred dollars!

With a cold sweat breaking out on me, I ran through my mind all the things that could have happened to that envelope. Except for plain fool luck, I'd have lost it a dozen times or more. And yet, aghast as I might be that I should so utterly forget such a handsome sum of cash, as I sat there and looked at it, it seemed to have lost some of its significance.

Perhaps it was, I thought, a condition of Tupper's fairyland that I should not think so highly of it as I had at one time. Although I knew that if it were possible to get back into my world again it would assume its old importance. But here, for this little moment, a crude piece of pottery made out of river day was an important thing, a hut made out of sticks and a bed made out of leaves. And more important than all the money in the world, the necessity to keep a little campfire burning once the matches were gone.

Although, I told myself, this was not my world. This was Tupper's world, his soft, short-sighted world — and tied in with it was his utter failure to grasp the overwhelming implications of this world of his.

For this was the day about which there had been speculation — although far too little speculation and too little done about it because it seemed so distant and so improbable. This was the day that the human race had come into contact (or perhaps, collision) with an alien race.

All the speculation, of course, had concerned an alien out of space, an alien on, or from, some other world in space. But here was the alien, not out of space, but time or at least from behind a barrier in time.

It made no difference, I told myseIf. Out of either space or time, the involvement was the same. Man at this moment finally faced his greatest test, and one he could not fail.

I gathered up the pottery and went back up the trail again.

Tupper was still sleeping, but no longer snoring. He had not changed position and his toes still pointed at the sky.

The sun had moved far down the west, but the heat still held and there was no hint of breeze. The purple of the flowers lay unstirring on the hillsides.

I stood and looked at them and they were innocent and pretty and they held no promise and no threat. They were just a field of flowers, like a field of daisies or of daffodils. They were the sort of thing that we had taken for granted all our years on earth. They had no personality and they stood for nothing except a splotch of colour that was pleasing to the eye.

That was the hard thing about all this, I thought — the utter impossibility of thinking of the Flowers as anything but flowers. It was impossible to think of them as beings, as anything that had even a symbol of importance. One could not take them seriously and yet they must be taken seriously, for in their right they were as intelligent, perhaps more intelligent than the human race.

I put the dishes down beside the fire and slowly climbed the hill. My moving feet brushed the flowers aside and I crushed some of them, but there was no chance of walking without crushing some of them.

I'd have to talk to them again, I told myself. As soon as Tupper could get rested, I'd talk to them again. There were a lot of things that must be clarified, much to be explained. If the Flowers and the human race were to live together, there must be understanding. I ran through the conversation I'd had with them, trying to find the gentle threat that I knew was there.

But from what I could remember, there had been no threat.

I reached the top of the hill and stopped there, gazing out across the undulating purple swales. At the bottom of the slope, a small creek ran between the hills to reach the river. From where I was I could hear the silver babble of it as it ran across the stones.

Slowly I made my way down the hill toward it and as I moved down the slope I saw the mound that lay across the creek, at the foot of the opposite slope. I had not seen it before and I supposed that my failure to see it was because it had been masked by the slant of light across the land.

There was nothing special about it except that it appeared slightly out of character. Here, in this place of flowing swales, it stood by itself, like a hump-backed monstrosity left over from another time.

I came down to the creek and waded across a shallow place where the water ran no deeper than three inches over a shining gravel bar.

At the water's edge a large block of stone lay half-buried in the sharp rise of the bank. It offered a ready seat and I sat down upon it, looking down the stream. The sun glanced off the water, making diamonds out of every ripple, and the air was sprayed with the silver tinkle of the singing brook.

There was no creek here in the world where Millville lay, although there was a dry run in Jack Dickson's pasture, through which the swamp that lay back of Stiffy's shack sometimes drained. Perhaps there had been such a creek as this, I thought, in Millville's world before the farmer's plough and resultant erosion had reshaped the terrain.