Slowly I twisted my head a bit and when I did I could see the moon, bright and seeming very near, swimming just above the line of scrubby trees that grew on the river bank.

1 was lying flat upon the ground, with nothing under me but the hard-packed earth. Tupper had crawled into his hut to sleep, curling up so his feet did not stick out. And if he were still there and sleeping, he was very quiet about it, for I heard no sound from him.

Having turned my head, I lay quietly for a time, listening for a sound to tell me that something prowled the camp. But there was no sound and finally I sat up.

The slope of ground above the camp, silvered by the floodlight of the moon, ran up to touch the night-blue sky-a balanced piece of beauty hanging in the silence, so fragile that one was careful not to speak nor to make any sudden motion, for fear that one might break that beauty and that silence and bring it down, sky and slope together, in a shower of shards.

Carefully I got to my feet, standing in the midst of that fragile world, still wondering what had wakened me.

But there was nothing. The land and sky were poised, as if they stood on tiptoe in a single instant of r.e.t.a.r.ded time. Here, it seemed, was the present frozen, with no past or future, a place where no clock would ever tick nor any word be spoken.

Then something moved upon the hilltop, a man or a manlike thing, running on the ridge crest, black against the sky, lithe and tall and graceful, running with abandon.

I was running, too. Without reason, without purpose, simply running up the slope. Simply knowing there was a man or a man1ike thing up there and that I must stand face to face with it, hoping, perhaps, that in this land of emptiness and flowers, in this land of silence and of fragile beauty, it might make some sense, might lend to this strange dimension of s.p.a.ce and time some sort of perspective that I could understand.

The manlike thing was still running on the hilltop and I tried to shout to it, but my throat would make no sound and so I kept on running.

The figure must have seen me, for suddenly it stopped and swung around to face me and stood there on the hilltop, looking down at me. And now I saw that while it undoubtedly was of human form, it had a crest of some sort above its head, giving it a birdlike look as if the head of a c.o.c.katoo had been grafted on a human body.

I ran, panting, toward it, and now it moved down the hill to meet me, walking slowly and deliberately and with unconscious grace.

I stopped running and stood still, fighting to regain my breath. There was no need of running any more. I need not run to catch it.

It continued walking down the hill toward me and while its body still stayed black and featureless, I could see that the crest was white, or silver. In the moonlight it was hard to tell if it were white or silver.

My breath came more easily now and I climbed up the hill to meet it. We approached one another slowly, each of us, I suppose, afraid that any other manner of approach might give the other fright.

The manlike thing stopped ten feet or so away and I stopped as well, and now I saw that indeed it was humanoid and that it was a woman, either a naked or an almost naked woman. In the moonlight, the crest upon her head was a thing of shining wonder, but I could not make out if it were a natural appendage or some sort of eccentric hairdo, or perhaps a hat.

The crest was white, but the rest of her was black, a jet black with blue highlights that glinted in the moonlight. And there was about her body an alertness and an awareness and a sense of bubbling life that took my breath away.

She spoke to me in music. It must have been a music, for there seemed to be no words.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I do not understand."

She spoke again and the trilling of the voice ran across the blue and silver world like a spray of crystal thought, but there was no understanding. I wondered, in despair, if any man of my race could ever understand a language that expressed itself in music, or if, in fact, it was meant to be understood as were the words we used.

I shook my head and she laughed, the laughter making her without any doubt a human-a low and tinkling laugh that was happy and excited.

She held out her hand and took a few quick steps toward me and I took the outstretched hand. And as I took her hand, she turned and ran lightly up the hill and I went running with her. We reached the top of the ridge and continued running, hand in hand, down the other slope, a wild, ecstatic running that was sheer youth and craziness-a running into nothing, for the utter joy of being alive in that heady moonlight.

We were young and drunk with a strange happiness for which there seemed no reason or accounting-drunk with, at least for me, a wild exuberance.

Her grip upon my hand was hard, with a lithe, young strength, and we ran together as if we were one person running-and it seemed to me, indeed, that in some awesome manner I had become a part of her, and that somehow I knew where we were going and why we were going there, but my brain was so seething with this strange happiness that it could not translate the knowledge into terms I understood.

We came down to the creek and splashed across, then ran around the mound where I had found the skulls and on up the second ridge and there, at

the top of it, we came upon the picnic.

There were other people there, at this midnight picnic, a half a dozen of them, all like this alien girl who had run with me. Scattered on the ground were hampers, or things that looked like hampers, and bottles, and these bottles and the hampers were arranged in a sort of circle. In the centre of the circle was a small, silvery contraption that was just slightly larger than a basketball.

We stopped at the edge of the circle and all the rest of them turned to look at us-but to look without surprise, as if it were not unusual at all for one of them to lead in an alien creature such as I.

The woman who was with me spoke in her singing voice and they answered back with music. All of them were watching me, but it was friendly watching.

Then all of them except one sat down in the circle and the one who remained standing stepped toward me, making a motion inviting me to join the circle with them.

I sat down, with the running woman on one side of me and the one who made the invitation sitting on the other.

It was, I gathered, some sort of holiday, although there was something in that circle which made it more than a holiday.

There was a sense of antic.i.p.ation in the faces and the bodies of these people sitting in the circle, as if they might be waiting for an event of great importance. They were happy and excited and vibrant with the sense of life to their fingertips.

Except for their crests, they were humanoid, and I could see now that they wore no clothing. I found time to wonder where they might have come from, for Tupper would have told me if there were people such as they. But he had told me that the Flowers were the only things which existed on this planet, although he had said sometimes there were others who came visiting.

Were these people, then, the ones who came visiting, or was it possible that they were the descendants of those people whose bones I had found down on the mound, now finally emerged from some secret hiding place? Although there was no sign in them of ever having hidden, of ever having skulked.

The strange contraption lay in the centre of the circle. At a picnic back in Millville it would have been a record player or a radio that someone had brought along. But these people had no need of music, for they talked in music, and the thing looked like nothing I had ever seen. It was round and seemed to be fashioned of many lenses, all tilted at different angles so that the surfaces caught the moonlight, reflecting it to make the ball itself a sphere of shining glory.

Some of the people sitting in the circle began an unpacking of the hampers and an uncorking of the bottles and I knew that more than likely they'd ask me to eat with them. It worried me to think of it, for since they'd been so kind I could not very well refuse, and yet it might be dangerous to eat the food they had. For although they were humanoid, there easily could be differences in their metabolism and what might be food for them could be poisonous for me.

It was a little thing, of course, but it seemed a big decision, and I sat there in mental agony, trying to make up my mind.

The food might be a loathsome and nauseating mess, but that I could have managed; for the friendship of these people I would have choked it down. It was the thought that it might be deadly that made me hesitate.

A while ago, I remembered, I had convinced myself that no matter how great a threat the Flowers might be, we still must let them in, must strive to find a common ground upon which any differences that might exist between us could somehow be adjusted. I had told myself that the future of the human race might easily hang upon our ability to meet and to get along with an alien race, for the time was coming, in a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, when we'd be encountering other alien races, and we could not fail this first time.

And here, I realized, was another alien race, sitting in this circle, and there could be no double standard as between myself and the world at large. I, in my own right, must act as I'd decided the human race must act-I must eat the food when it was offered me.

Perhaps I was not thinking very clearly. Events were happening much too fast and I had too little time. It was a snap decision at best and I hoped I was not wrong.

I never had a chance to know, for before the food could be pa.s.sed around, the contraption in the centre of the circle began a little ticking-no more than the ticking of a clock in an empty room, but at the first tick it gave they all jumped to their feet and stood watching it.

I jumped up, too, and stood watching with them, and I could sense that they'd forgotten I was with them. All of their attentions were fastened on that shining basketball.

As it ticked, the glow of it became a shining mistiness and the mistiness spread out, like a fog creeping up the land from a river bottom.

The mistiness enveloped us and out of that mistiness strange shapes began to form. At first they were wavering and unstable forms, but in a while they steadied and became more substantial, although never quite substantial; there was about them a touch of fairyland, of a shape and time that one might see, but that was forever out of reach.

And now the mistiness went away-or perhaps it still remained and we did not notice it, for with the creation of the forms it had supplied another world, of which we were observers, if not an actual part.

It appeared that we were standing on the terrace of what on Earth might have been called a villa. Beneath our feet were rough-hewn flagstones, with thin lines of gra.s.s growing in the cracks between the stones, and back of us rose rough walls of masonry. But the walls had a misty texture, as if they were some sort of simulated backdrop that one was not supposed to inspect too closely.

In front of us spread a city, an ugly city with no beauty in it. It was utilitarian in its every aspect, a geometric ma.s.s of stone, reared without imagination, with no architectural concept beyond the principle that one stone piled atop another would achieve a place of shelter. The city was the drab colour of dried mud and it spread as far as the eye could see, a disorderly ma.s.s of rectilinear structures thrust together, cheek by jowl, with no breathing s.p.a.ce provided.

And yet there was an insubstantiality about it; never for an instant did that ma.s.sive city become solid masonry. Nor were the flagstones underneath our feet an actual flagstone terrace.

Rather it was as though we floated, a fraction of an inch above the flagstones, never touching them.

We stood, it seemed, in the middle of a three-dimensional movie. And all around us the movie moved and went about its business and we knew that we were there, for we could see it on every side of us, but the actors in the movie were unaware of us and while we knew that we were there, there also was the knowledge that we were not a part of it, that we somehow stood aside from this magic world in which we were engulfed.

At first I'd seen only the city, but now I saw there was terror in the city. People were running madly in the streets, and from far off I could hear the screaming, the thin and frantic wailing of a lost and hopeless people.

Then the city and the screaming were blotted out in a searing flash of light, a blossoming whiteness that became so intense it suddenly went black. The blackness covered us and we stood in a world that had nothing in it except the darkness and the cataract of thunder that poured out of that place where the flash of light had blossomed.

I took a short step forward, groping as I went. My hands met emptiness and the feeling flooded over me that I stood in an emptiness that stretched on forever, that what I'd known before had been nothing but illusion and the illusion now was gone, leaving me to grope eternally through black nothingness.

I took no other step, but stood stiff and straight, afraid to move a muscle, sensing in all irrationality that I stood upon a platform and might fall from it into a great emptiness which would have no bottom.

As I stood there the blackness turned to grey and through the greyness I could see the city, flattened and sharded, swept by tornadic winds, with gouts of flame and ash twisting in the monstrous whirlwind of destruction. Above the city was a rolling cloud, as if a million thunderstorms had been rolled all into one. And from this maelstrom of fury came a deepthroated growling of death and fear and fate, a savage terrible sound that made one think of evil.

Around me I saw the others-the black-skinned people with the silver crests-standing transfixed and frozen, fascinated by the sight that lay before them, rigid as if with fear, but something more than just plain fear-superst.i.tious fear, perhaps.

I stood there, rooted with them, and the growling died away. Thin wisps of smoke curled up above the rubble, and in the silence that came as the growling ceased I could hear the little cracklings and groanings and the tiny crashes as the splintered stone that still remained settled more firmly into place. But there was no sound of crying now, none of the thin, high screaming. There were no people and the only movements were the little ripples of settling rubble that lay beyond the bare and blackened and entirely featureless area where the light had blossomed.

The greyness faded and the city began to dim. Out in the centre of the picnic circle I could make out the glimmer of the lens-covered basketball. There were no signs of my fellow picnickers; they had disappeared. And from the thinning greyness came another screaming-but a different kind of screaming, not the kind I'd heard from the city before the bomb had struck.

For now I knew that I had seen a city destroyed by a nuclear explosion-as one might have watched it on a TV set. And the TV set, if one could call it that, could have been nothing other than the basketball. By some strange magic mechanism it had invaded time and brought back from the past a moment of high crisis.

The greyness faded out and the night came back again, with the golden moon and the dust of stars and the silver slopes that curved to meet the quicksilver of the creek.

Down the farther slope I could see the scurrying figures, with their silver topknots gleaming in the moonlight, running wildly through the night and screaming in simulated terror. I stood looking after them and shivered, for there was something here, I knew, that had a sickness in it, a sickness of the mind, an illness of the soul.

Slowly I turned back to the basketball. It was, once again, just a thing of lenses. I walked over to it and knelt beside it and had a look at it. It was made of many lenses and in the interstices between the tilted lenses, I could catch glimpses of some sort of mechanism, although all the details of it were lost in the weakness of the moonlight.

I reached out a hand and touched it gingerly. It seemed fragile and I feared that I might break it, but I couldn't leave it here. It was something that I wanted and I told myself that if I could get it back to Earth, it would help to back up the story I had to tell.

I took off my jacket and spread it on the ground, and then carefully picked up the basketball, using both my hands to cradle it, and put it on the jacket. I gathered up the ends of the cloth and wrapped them all around the ball, then tied the sleeves together to help hold the folds in place.

I picked it up and tucked it securely underneath an arm, then got to my feet.

The hampers and the bottles lay scattered all about and it occurred to me that I should get away as quickly as I could, for these other people would be coming back to get the basketball and to gather up their picnic. But there was as yet no sign of them. Listening intently, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint sounds of their screaming receding in the distance.

I turned and went down the hill and crossed the creek. Halfway up the other slope I met Tupper coming out to hunt me.

"Thought you had got lost," he said.

"I met a group of people. I had a picnic with them."

"They have funny topknots?"

"They had that," I said.

"Friends of mine," said Tupper. "They come here many times. They come here to be scared."

"Scared?"

"Sure. It's fun for them. They like being scared."

I nodded to myself. So that was it, I thought. Like a bunch of kids creeping on a haunted house and peeking through the windows so that they might run, shrieking from imagined horror at imagined stirrings they'd seen inside the house. And doing it time after time, never getting tired of the good time that they had, gaining some strange pleasure from their very fright.

"They have more fun," said Tupper, "than anyone I know."

"You've seen them often?"

"Lots of times," said Tupper.

"You didn't tell me."

"I never had the time," said Tupper. "I never got around to."

"And they live close by?"

"No," said Tupper. "Very far away."

"But on this planet."

"Planet?" Tupper asked.

"On this world," I said.

"No. On another world. In another place. But that don't make no difference. They go everywhere for fun."

So they went everywhere for fun, I thought. And everywhen, perhaps. They were temporal ghouls, feeding on the past, getting their vicarious kicks out of catastrophe and disaster of an ancient age, seeking out those historic moments that were horrible and foul. Coming back again and yet again to one such scene that had a high appeal to their perverted minds.

A decadent race, I wondered, from some world conquered by the Flowers, free now to use the many gateways that led from world to world?

Conquered, in the light of what I knew, might not be the proper word. For I had seen this night what had happened to this world. Not depopulated by the Flowers, but by the mad suicide of the humans who had been native to it. More than likely it had been an empty and a dead world for years before the Flowers had battered down the time-phase boundary that let them into it. The skulls I had found had been those of the survivors-perhaps a relatively few survivors-who had managed to live on for a little time, but who had been foredoomed by the poisoned soil and air and water.

So the Flowers had not really conquered; they had merely taken over a world that had gone forfeit by the madness of its owners.

"How long ago," I asked, "did the Flowers come here?"

"What makes you think," asked Tupper, "that they weren't always here?"

"Nothing. Just a thought. They never talked to you about it?"

"I never asked," said Tupper.

Of course he wouldn't ask; he'd have no curiosity. He would be simply glad that he had found this place, where he had friends who talked with him and provided for his simple needs, where there were no humans to mock or pester him.

We came down to the camping place and I saw that the moon had moved far into the west. The fire was burning low and Tupper fed it with some sticks, then sat down beside it.

I sat down across from him and placed the wrapped basketball beside me.

"What you got there?" asked Tupper.