"You comprehend it fast," said Smith.

"But how can you tell that it is dispersed? A country might say it complied when it really hadn't. How can you really know? How can you police it?"

"We monitor," said Smith.

"You have a way of detecting fissionable material?"

"Yes, most certainly," said Smith.

"All right, then, even if you knew — well, let's say it this way — you find there are concentrations still remaining; what do you do about them?"

"We blow them up," said Smith. "We detonate them loudly."

"But…"

"We muster up a deadline. We edict all concentrations be gone by such a time. Time come and some still here, they auto… auto…"

"Automatically."

"Thank you, kindly person. That is the word I grope for. They automatically blow up." An uneasy silence fell. The newsmen were wondering, I knew, if they were being taken in; if they were being, somehow, tricked by a phony actor decked out in a funny vest.

"Already," Smith said, rather casually, "we have a mechanism pinpointing all the concentrations."

Someone shouted in a loud, hoarse voice: "I'll be damned! The flying time machine!" Then they were off and running, racing pell-mell for their cars parked along the road. With no further word to us, with no leave-taking whatsoever, they were off to tell the world.

And this was it, I thought, somewhat bitterly and more than a little limp.

Now the aliens could walk in any time they wanted, any way they wanted, with full human blessing. There was nothing else that could have turned the trick no argument, no logic, no inducement short of this inducement. In the face of the worldwide clamour which this announcement would stir up, with the public demand that the world accept this one condition of an alien compact, all sane and sober counsel would have no weight at all.

Any workable agreement between the aliens and ourselves would necessarily have been a realistic one, with checks and balances. Each side would have been pledged to some contribution and each would have had to face some automatic, built-in penalty if the agreement should be broken. But now the checks and balances were gone and the way was open for the aliens to come in. They had offered the one thing that the people — not the governments, but the people — wanted, or that they thought they wanted, above every other thing and there'd be no stopping them in their demand for it.

And it had all been trickery, I thought bitterly. I had been tricked into bringing back the time machine and I had been forced into a situation where I had asked for help and Smith had been the help, or at least a part of it. And his announcement of the one demand had been little short of trickery in itself. It was the same old story. Human or alien, it made no difference. You wanted something bad enough and you went out to get it any way you could.

They'd beat us all the way, I knew. All the time they'd been that one long jump ahead of us and now the situation was entirely out of hand and the Earth was licked.

Smith stared after the running reporters.

"What proceeds?" he asked.

Pretending that he didn't know. I could have broken his neck.

"Come on," I said. "I'll escort you back to the village hall. Your pal is down there, doctoring up the folks."

"But all the galloping," he said, "all the shouting? What occasions it?"

"You should know," I said. "You just hit the jackpot."

23

When I got back home, Nancy was waiting for me. She was sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, huddled there, crouched against the world. I saw her from a block away and hurried, gladder at the sight of her than I had ever been before. Glad and humble, and with a tenderness I never knew I had welling up so hard inside of me that I nearly choked.

Poor kid, I thought. It had been rough on her. Just one day home and the world of Millville, the world that she remembered and thought of as her home, had suddenly come unstuck.

Someone was shouting in the garden where tiny fifty-dollar bills presumably were still growing on the little bushes.

Coming in the gate, I stopped short at the sound of bellowing.

Nancy looked up and saw me.

"It's nothing, Brad," she said. "It's just Hiram down there. Higgy has him guarding all that money. The kids keep sneaking in, the little eight and ten-year-olds. They only want to count the money on each bush. They aren't doing any harm. But Hiram chases them. There are times," she said, "when I feel sorry for Hiram."

"Sorry for him?" I asked, astonished. He was the last person in the world I'd suspected anyone might feel sorry for. "He's just a stupid slob."

"A stupid slob," she said, "who's trying to prove something and is not entirely sure what he wants to prove."

"That he has more muscle…"

"No," she told me, "that's not it at all." Two kids came tearing out of the garden and vanished down the street.

There was no sign of Hiram. And no more hollering. He had done his job; he had chased them off.

I sat down on the step beside her.

"Brad," she said, "it's not going well. I can feel it isn't going well." I shook my head, agreeing with her.

"I was down at the village hall," she said. "Where that terrible, shrivelled creature is conducting a clinic. Daddy's down there, too. He's helping out. But I couldn't stay. It's awful."

"What's so bad about it? That thing — whatever you may call it fixed up Doc. He's up and walking around and he looks as good as new. And Floyd Caldwell's heart and…"

She shuddered. "That's the terrible thing about it. They are as good as new. They're better than new. They aren't cured, Brad; they are repaired, like a machine. It's like witchcraft. It's indecent. This wizened thing looks them over and he never makes a sound, but just glides around and looks them over and you can see that he's not looking at the outside of them but at their very insides. I don't know how you know this, but you do. As if he were reaching deep inside of them and…" She stopped. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't talk this way. It's not very decent talk."

"It's not a very decent situation," I said. "We may have to change our minds a great deal about what is decent and indecent. There are a lot of ways we may have to change. I don't suppose that we will like it…"

"You talk as if it's settled."

"I'm afraid it is," I said, and I told her what Smith had told the newsmen. It felt good to tell her. There was no one else I could have told right then. It was a piece of news so weighted with guilt I would have been ashamed to tell it to anyone but Nancy.

"But now," said Nancy, "there can't be war — not the kind of war the whole world feared."

"No," I said, "there can't be any war." But I couldn't seem to feel too good about it. "We may have something now that's worse than war."

"There is nothing worse than war," she said.

And that, of course, would be what everyone would say. Maybe they'd be right. But now the aliens would come into this world of ours and once we'd let them in we'd be entirely at their mercy. They had tricked us and we had nothing with which we could defend ourselves. Once here they could take over and supersede all plant life upon the Earth, without our knowing it, without our ever being able to find out. Once we let them in we never could be sure.

And once they'd done that, then they'd own us. For all the animal life on Earth, including man, depended on the plants of Earth for their energy.

"What puzzles me," I said, "is that they could have taken over, anyhow. If they'd had a little patience, if they had taken a little time, they could have taken over and we never would have known. For there are some of them right here, their roots in Millville ground. They needn't have stayed as flowers. They could have been anything. In a hundred years they could have been every branch and leaf, every blade of grass…"