All Flesh Is Grass (35 page)

Authors: Clifford D. Simak

BOOK: All Flesh Is Grass

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“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 â¦”

“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.

About the Author

During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D. Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
, writing fiction in his spare time.

Simak was best known for the book
City
, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel
Way Station
. In 1953
City
was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1324-6

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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