Clifford D.Simak. Way Station
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Original copyright year: 1963
Date of e-text: June 26, 1999
Prepared by: Anada Sucka
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1
The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog
above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that
had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence,
if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while
before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate
and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart,
exhausted.
For endless time, it seemed, there had been belching thunder rolling
from horizon to horizon and the gouted earth that had spouted in the sky and
the screams of horses and the hoarse bellowing of men; the whistling of
metal and the thud when the whistle ended; the flash of searing fire and the
brightness of the steel; the bravery of the colors snapping in the battle
wind.
Then it all had ended and there was a silence.
But silence was an alien note that held no right upon this field or
day, and it was broken by the whimper and the pain, the cry for water, and
the prayer for death- the crying and the calling and the whimpering that
would go on for hours beneath the summer sun. Later the hupled shapes would
grow quiet and still and there would be an odor that would sicken all who
passed, and the graves would be shallow graves.
There was wheat that never would be harvested, trees that would not
bloom when spring came round again, and on the slope of land that ran up to
the ridge the words unspoken and the deeds undone and the sopen bundles that
cried aloud the emptiness and the waste of death.
There were proud names that were the prouder now, but now no more than
names to echo down the ages - the Iron Brigade, the 5th New Hampshire, the
1st Minnesota, the 2nd Massachusetts, the 16th Maine.
And there was Enoch Wallace.
He still held the shattered musket and there were blisters on his
hands. His face was smudged with powder. His shoes were caked with dust and
blood.
He was still alive.
2
Dr. Erwin Hardwicke rolled the pencil back and forth between his palms,
an irritating business. He eyed the man across the desk from him with some
calculation.
"What I can't figure out," said Hardwicke, "is why you should come to
us."
"Well, you're the National Academy and I thought ..."
"And you're Intelligence."
"Look, Doctor, if it suits you better, let's call this visit
unofficial. Pretend I'm a puzzled citizen who dropped in to see if you could
help."
"It's not that I wouldn't like to help, but I don't see how I can. The
whole thing is so hazy and so hypothetical."
"Damn it, man," Claude Lewis said, "you can't deny the proof-the little
that I have."
"All right, then," said Hardwicke, "let's start over once again and
take it piece by piece. You say you have this man ..."
"His name," said Lewis, "is Enoch Wallace. Chronologically, he is one
hundred and twenty-four years old. He was born on a farm a few miles from
the town of Millville in Wisconsin, April 22, 1840, and he is the only child
of Jedediah and Amanda Wallace. He enlisted among the first of them when Abe
Lincoln called for volunteers. He was with the Iron Brigade, which was
virtually wiped out at Gettysburg in 1863. But Wallace somehow managed to
get transferred to another fighting outfit and fought down across Virginia
under Grant. He was in on the end of it at Appomattox ...
"You've run a check on him."
"I've looked up his records. The record of enlistment at the State
Capitol in Madison. The rest of it, including discharge here in Washington."
"You say he looks like thirty."
"Not a day beyond it. Maybe even less than that."
"But you haven't talked with him."
Lewis shook his head.
"He may not be the man. If you had fingerprints ...
"At the time of the Civil War," said Lewis, "they'd not thought of
fingerprints."
"The last of the veterans of the Civil War," said Hardwicke, "died
several years ago. A Confederate drummer boy, I think. There must be some
mistake."
Lewis shook his head. "I thought so myself, when I was assigned to it."
"How come you were assigned? How does Intelligence get involved in a
deal like this?"
"I'll admit," said Lewis, "that it's a bit unusual. But there were so
many implications ..."
"Immortality, you mean."
"It crossed our mind, perhaps. The chance of it. But only incidentally.
There were other considerations. It was a strange setup that bore some
looking into."
"But Intelligence ..."
Lewis grinned. "You are thinking, why not a scientific outfit?
Logically, I suppose it should have been. But one of our men ran afoul of
it. He was on vacation. Had relatives back in Wisconsin. Not in that
particular area, but some thirty miles away. He heard a rumor-just the
vaguest rumor, almost a casual mention. So he nosed around a bit. He didn't
find out too much but enough to make him think there might be something to
it."
"That's the thing that puzzles me," said Hardwicke. "How could a man
live for one hundred and twenty-four years in one locality without becoming
a celebrity that the world would hear about? Can you imagine what the
newspapers could do with a thing like this?"
"I shuper," Lewis said, "when I think about it."
"You haven't told me how."
"This," said Lewis, "is a bit hard to explain. You'd have to know the
country and the people in it. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is
bounded by two rivers, the Mississippi on the west, the Wisconsin on the
north. Away from the rivers there is flat, broad prairie land, rich land,
with prosperous farms and towns. But the land that runs down to the river is
rough and rugged; high hills and bluffs and deep ravines and cliffs, and
there are certain areas forming bays or pockets that are isolated. They are
served by inadequate roads and the small, rough farms are inhabited by a
people who are closer, perhaps, to the pioneer days of a hundred years ago
than they are to the twentieth century. They have cars, of course, and
radios, and someday soon, perhaps, even television. But in spirit they are
conservative and clannish-not all the people, of course, not even many of
them, but these little isolated neighborhoods.
"At one time there were a lot of farms in these isolated pockets, but
today a man can hardly make a living on a farm of that sort. Slowly the
people are being squeezed out of the areas by economic circumstances. They
sell their farms for whatever they can get for them and move somewhere else,
to the cities mostly, where they can make a living."
Hardwicke noped. "And the ones that are left, of course, are the most
conservative and clannish."
"Right. Most of the land now is held by absentee owners who make no
pretense of farming it. They may run a few head of cattle on it, but that is
all. It's not too bad as a tax write-off for someone who needs that sort of
thing. And in the land-bank days a lot of the land was put into the bank."
"You're trying to tell me these backwoods people-is that what you'd
call them?-engaged in a conspiracy of silence."
"Perhaps not anything," said Lewis, "as formal or elaborate as that. It
is just their way of doing things, a holdover from the old, stout pioneer
philosophy. They minded their own business. They didn't want folks
interfering with them and they interfered with no one else. If a man wanted
to live to be a thousand, it might be a thing of wonder, but it was his own
damned business. And if he wanted to live alone and be let alone while he
was doing it, that was his business, too. They might talk about it among
themselves, but to no one else. They'd resent it if some outsider tried to
talk about it.
"After a time, I suppose, they came to accept the fact that Wallace
kept on being young while they were growing old. The wonder wore off it and
they probably didn't talk about it a great deal, even among themselves. New
generations accepted it because their elders saw in it nothing too
unusual-and anyhow no one saw much of Wallace because he kept strictly to
himself.
"And in the nearby areas the thing, when it was thought of at all, grew
to be just a sort of legend- another crazy tale that wasn't worth looking
into. Maybe just a joke among those folks down Dark Hollow way. A Rip Van
Winkle sort of business that probably didn't have a word of truth in it. A
man might look ridiculous if he went prying into it."
"But your man looked into it."
"Yes. Don't ask me why."
"Yet he wasn't assigned to follow up the job."
"He was needed somewhere else. And besides he was known back there."
"And you?"
"It took two years of work."
"But now you know the story."
"Not all of it. There are more questions now than there were to start
with."
"You've seen this man."
"Many times," said Lewis. "But I've never talked with him. I don't
think he's ever seen me. He takes a walk each day before he goes to get the
mail. He never moves off the place, you see. The mailman brings out the
little stuff he needs. A bag of flour, a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs,
cigars, and sometimes liquor."
"But that must be against the postal regulations."
"Of course it is. But mailmen have been doing it for years. It doesn't
hurt a thing until someone screams about it. And no one's going to. The
mailmen probably are the only friends he has ever had."
"I take it this Wallace doesn't do much farming."
"None at all. He has a little vegetable garden, but that is all he
does. The place has gone back pretty much to wilderness."
"But he has to live. He must get money somewhere."
"He does," said Lewis. "Every five or ten years or so he ships off a
fistful of gems to an outfit in New York."
"Legal?"
"If you mean, is it hot, I don't think so. If someone wanted to make a
case of it, I suppose there are illegalities. Not to start with, when he
first started sending them, back in the old days. But laws change and I
suspect both he and the buyer are in defiance of any number of them."
"And you don't mind?"
"I checked on this firm," said Lewis, "and they were rather nervous.
For one thing, they'd been stealing Wallace blind. I told them to keep on
buying. I told them that if anyone came around to check, to refer them
straight to me. I told them to keep their mouths shut and not change
anything."
"You don't want anyone to scare him off," said Hardwicke.
"You're damned right, I don't. I want the mailman to keep on acting as
a delivery boy and the New York firm to keep on buying gems. I want
everything to stay just the way it is. And before you ask me where the
stones come from, I'll tell you I don't know."
"He maybe has a mine."
"That would be quite a mine. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds, all out
of the same mine."
"I would suspect, even at the prices that he gets from them, he picks
up a fair income."
Lewis noped. "Apparently he only sends a shipment in when he runs out
of cash. He wouldn't need too much. He lives rather simply, to judge from
the grub he buys. But he subscribes to a lot of daily papers and news
magazines and to dozens of scientific journals. He buys a lot of books."
"Technical books?"
"Some of them, of course, but mostly keeping up with new developments.
Physics and chemistry and biology-all that sort of stuff."
"But I don't ..."
"Of course you don't. Neither do I. He's no scientist. Or at least he
has no formal education in the sciences. Back in the days when he went to
school there wasn't much of it-not in the sense of today's scientific
education. And whatever he learned then would be fairly worthless now in any
event. He went through grade school-one of those one-room country
schools-and spent one winter at what was called an academy that operated for
a year or two down in Millville village. In case you don't know, that was
considerably better than par back in the 1850s. He was, apparently, a fairly
bright young man."
Hardwicke shook his head. "It sounds incredible. You've checked on all
of this?"
"As well as I could. I had to go at it gingerly. I wanted no one to
catch on. And one thing I forgot-he does a lot of writing. He buys these
big, bound record books, in lots of a dozen at the time. He buys ink by the
pint."
Hardwicke got up from his desk and paced up and down the room.
"Lewis," he said, "if you hadn't shown me your credentials and if I
hadn't checked on them, I'd figure all of this to be a very tasteless joke."
He went back and sat down again. He picked up the pencil and started
rolling it between his palms once more.
"You've been on the case two years," he said. "You have no ideas?"
"Not a one," said Lewis. "I'm entirely baffled. That is why I'm here."
"Tell me more of his history. After the war, that is."
"His mother died," said Lewis, "while he was away. His father and the
neighbors buried her right there on the farm. That was the way a lot of
people did it then. Young Wallace got a furlough, but not in time to get
home for the funeral. There wasn't much embalming done in those days and the
traveling was slow. Then he went back to the war. So far as I can find, it
was his only furlough. The old man lived alone and worked the farm, batching
it and getting along all right. From what I can pick up, he was a good
farmer, an exceptionally good farmer for his day. He subscribed to some farm
journals and was progressive in his ideas. He paid attention to such things
as crop rotation and the prevention of erosion. The farm wasn't much of a
farm by modern standards, but it made him a living and a little extra he
managed to lay by.
"Then Enoch came home from the war and they farmed the place together
for a year or so. The old man bought a mower-one of those horse-drawn
contraptions with a sickle bar to cut hay or grain. It was the progressive
thing to do. It beat a scythe all hollow.
"Then one afternoon the old man went out to mow a hayfield. The horses
ran away. Something must have scared them. Enoch's father was thrown off the
seat and forward, in front of the sickle bar. It was not a pretty way to
die."
Hardwicke made a grimace of distaste. "Horrible," he said.
"Enoch went out and gathered up his father and got the body to the
house. Then he took a gun and went hunting for the horses. He found them
down in the corner of the pasture and he shot the two of them and he left
them. I mean exactly that. For years their skeletons lay there in the
pasture, where he'd killed them, still hitched to the mower until the
harness rotted.
"Then he went back to the house and laid his father out. He washed him
and he dressed him in the good black suit and laid him on a board, then went
out to the barn and carpentered a coffin. And after that, he dug a grave
beside his mother's grave. He finished it by lantern light, then went back
to the house and sat up with his father. When morning came, he went to tell
the nearest neighbor and that neighbor notified the others and someone went
to get a preacher. Late in the afternoon they had the funeral, and Enoch
went back to the house. He has lived there ever since, but he never farmed
the land. Except the garden, that is."
"You told me these people wouldn't talk to strangers. You seem to have
learned a lot."
"It took two years to do it. I infiltrated them. I bought a beat-up car
and drifted into Millville and I let it out that I was a ginseng hunter."
"A what?"
"A ginseng hunter. Ginseng is a plant."
"Yes, I know. But there's been no market for it for years."
"A small market and an occasional one. Exporters will take on some of
it. But I hunted other medicinal plants as well and pretended an extensive
knowledge of them and their use. 'Pretended' isn't actually the word; I
boned up plenty on them."
"The kind of simple soul," said Hardwicke, "those folks could
understand. A sort of cultural throwback. And inoffensive, too. Perhaps not
quite right in the head."
Lewis noped. "It worked even better than I thought. I just wandered
around and people talked to me. I even found some ginseng. There was one
family in particular-the Fisher family. They live down in the river bottoms
below the Wallace farm, which sits on the ridge above the bluffs. They've
lived there almost as long as the Wallace family, but a different stripe
entirely. The Fishers are a coon-hunting, catfishing, moonshine-cooking
tribe. They found a kindred spirit in me. I was just as shiftless and
no-account as they were. I helped them with their moonshine, both in the
making and the drinking and once in a while the pepling. I went fishing with
them and hunting with them and I sat around and talked and they showed me a
place or two where I might find some ginseng-'sang' is what they call it. I
imagine a social scientist might find a gold mine in the Fishers. There is
one girl-a deaf-mute, but a pretty thing, and she can charm off warts ..."
"I recognize the type," said Hardwicke. "I was born and raised in the
southern mountains."
"They were the ones who told me about the team and mower. So one day I
went up in that corner of the Wallace pasture and did some digging. I found
a horse's skull and some other bones."
"But no way of knowing if it was one of the Wallace horses."
"Perhaps not," said Lewis. "But I found part of the mower as well. Not
much left of it, but enough to identify."
"Let's get back to the history," suggested Hardwicke. "After the
father's death, Enoch stayed on at the farm. He never left it?"
Lewis shook his head. "He lives in the same house. Not a thing's been
changed. And the house apparently has aged no more than the man."
"You've been in the house?"
"Not in it. At it. I will tell you how it was."
3
He had an hour. He knew he had an hour, for he had timed Enoch Wallace
during the last ten days. And from the time he left the house until he got
back with his mail, it had never been less than an hour. Sometimes a little
longer, when the mailman might be late, or they got to talking. But an hour,
Lewis told himself, was all that he could count on.
Wallace had disappeared down the slope of ridge, heading for the point
of rocks that towered above the bluff face, with the Wisconsin River running
there below. He would climb the rocks and stand there, with the rifle tucked
beneath his arm, to gaze across the wilderness of the river valley. Then he
would go back down the rocks again and trudge along the wooded path to
where, in proper season, the pink lady's-slippers grew, and from there up
the hill again to the spring that gushed out of the hillside just below the
ancient field that had lain fallow for a century or more, and then along the
slope until he hit the almost overgrown road and so down to the mailbox.
In the ten days that Lewis had watched him, his route had never varied.
It was likely, Lewis told himself, that it had not varied through the years.
Wallace did not hurry. He walked as if he had all the time there was. And he
stopped along the way to renew acquaintances with old friends of his-a tree,
a squirrel, a flower. He was a rugged man and there still was much of the
soldier in him-old tricks and habits left from the bitter years of
campaigning under many leaders. He walked with his head held high and his
shoulders back and he moved with the easy stride of one who had known hard
marches.
Lewis came out of the tangled mass of trees that once had been an
orchard and in which a few trees, twisted and gnarled and gray with age,
still bore their pitiful and bitter crop of apples.
He stopped at the edge of the copse and stood for a moment to stare up
at the house on the ridge above, and for a single instant it seemed to him
the house stood in a special light, as if a rare and more distilled essence
of the sun had crossed the gulf of space to shine upon this house and to set
it apart from all other houses in the world. Bathed in that light, the house
was somehow unearthly, as if, indeed, it might be set apart as a very
special thing. And then the light, if it ever had been there, was gone and
the house shared the common sunlight of the fields and woods.
Lewis shook his head and told himself that it had been foolishness, or
perhaps a trick of seeing. For there was no such thing as special sunlight
and the house was no more than a house, although wondrously preserved.
It was the kind of house one did not see too often in these days. It
was rectangular, long and narrow and high, with old-fashioned gingerbread
along the eaves and gables. It had a certain gauntness that had nothing to
do with age; it had been gaunt the day it had been built-gaunt and plain and
strong, like the people that it sheltered. But gaunt as it might be, it
stood prim and neat, with no peeling paint, with no sign of weathering, and
no hint of decay.
Against one end of it was a smaller building, no more than a shed, as
if it were an alien structure that had been carted in from some other place
and shoved against its end, covering the side door of the house. Perhaps the
door, thought Lewis, that led into the kitchen. The shed undoubtedly had
been used as a place to hang outdoor clothing and to leave overshoes and
boots, with a bench for milk cans and buckets, and perhaps a basket in which
to gather eggs. From the top of it extended some three feet of stovepipe.
Lewis went up to the house and around the shed and there, in the side
of it, was a door ajar. He stepped up on the stoop and pushed the door wide
open and stared in amazement at the room.
For it was not a simple shed. It apparently was the place where Wallace
lived.
The stove from which the stovepipe projected stood in one corner, an
ancient cookstove, smaller than the old-fashioned kitchen range. Sitting on
its top was a coffeepot, a frying pan, and a griple. Hung from hooks on a
board behind it were other cooking implements. Opposite the stove, shoved
against the wall, was a three-quarter-size four-poster bed, covered with a
lumpy quilt, quilted in one of the ornate patterns of many pieces of
many-colored cloth, such as had been the delight of ladies of a century
before. In another corner was a table and a chair, and above the table, hung
against the wall, a small open cupboard in which were stacked some dishes.
On the table stood a kerosene lantern, battered from much usage, but with
its chimney clean, as if it had been washed and polished as recently as this
morning.
There was no door into the house, no sign there had ever been a door.
The clapboard of the house's outer wall ran unbroken to form the fourth wall
of the shed.
This was incredible, Lewis told himself-that there should be no door,
that Wallace should live here, in this shed, when there was a house to live
in. As if there were some reason he should not occupy the house, and yet
must stay close by it. Or perhaps that he might be living out a penance of
some sort, living here in this shed as a medieval hermit might have lived in
a woodland hut or in a desert cave.
He stood in the center of the shed and looked around him, hoping that
he might find some clue to this unusual circumstance. But there was nothing,
beyond the bare, hard fact of living, the very basic necessities of
living-the stove to cook his food and heat the place, the bed to sleep on,
the table to eat on, and the lantern for its light. Not even so much as an
extra hat (although, come to think of it, Wallace never wore a hat) or an
extra coat.
No sign of magazines or papers, and Wallace never came home from the
mailbox empty-handed. He subscribed to the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Star, as well as
many scientific and technical journals. But there was no sign of them here,
nor of the many books he bought. No sign, either, of the bound record books.
Nothing at all on which a man could write.
Perhaps, Lewis told himself, this shed, for some baffling reason, was
no more than a show place, a place staged most carefully to make one think
that this was where Wallace lived. Perhaps, after all, he lived in the
house. Although, if that were the case, why all this effort, not too
successful, to make one think he didn't?
Lewis turned to the door and walked out of the shed. He went around the
house until he reached the porch that led up to the front door. At the foot
of the steps, he stopped and looked around. The place was quiet. The sun was
midmorning-high and the day was warming up and this sheltered corner of the
earth stood relaxed and hushed, waiting for the heat.
He looked at his watch and he had forty minutes left, so he went up the
steps and across the porch until he came to the door. Reaching out his hand,
he grasped the knob and turned-except he didn't turn it; the knob stayed
exactly where it was and his clenched fingers went half around it in the
motion of a turn.
Puzzled, he tried again and still he didn't turn the knob. It was as if
the knob was covered with some hard, slick coating, like a coat of brittle
ice, on which the fingers slipped without exerting any pressure on the knob.
He bent his head close to the knob and tried to see if there were any
evidence of coating, and there was no evidence. The knob looked perfectly
all right-too all right, perhaps. For it was clean, as if someone had wiped
and polished it. There was no dust upon it, and no weather specks.
He tried a thumbnail on it, and the thumbnail slipped but left no mark
behind it. He ran his palm over the outer surface of the door and the wood
was slick. The rubbing of the palm set up no friction. The palm slid along
the wood as if the palm were greased, but there was no sign of grease. There
was no indication of anything to account for the slickness of the door.
Lewis moved from the door to the clapboard and the clapboard also was
slick. He tried palm and thumbnail on it and the answer was the same. There
was something covering this house which made it slick and smooth-so smooth
that dust could not cling upon its surface nor could weather stain it.
He moved along the porch until he came to a window, and now, as he
stood facing the window, he realized something he had not noticed before,
something that helped make the house seem gaunter than it really was. The
windows were black. There were no curtains, no drapes, no shades; they were
simply black rectangles, like empty eyes staring out of the bare skull of
the house.
He moved closer to the window and put his face up to it, shading the
sides of his face, next to the eyes, with his upheld hands to shield out the
sunlight. But even so, he could not see into the room beyond. He stared,
instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had
no reflective qualities. He could not see himself reflected in the glass. He
could see nothing but the blackness, as if the light hit the window and was
absorbed by it, sucked in and held by it. There was no bouncing back of
light once it had hit that window.
He left the porch and went slowly around the house, examining it as he
went. The windows were all blank, black pools that sucked in the captured
light, and all the exterior was slick and hard.
He pounded the clapboard with his fist, and it was like the pounding of
a rock. He examined the stone walls of the basement where they were exposed,
and the walls were smooth and slick. There were mortar gaps between the
stones and in the stones themselves one could see uneven surfaces, but the
hand rubbed across the wall could detect no roughness.
An invisible something had been laid over the roughness of the stone,
just enough of it to fill in the pits and uneven surfaces. But one could not
detect it. It was almost as if it had no substance.
Straightening up from his examination of the wall, Lewis looked at his
watch. There were only ten minutes left. He must be getting on.
He walked down the hill toward the tangle of old orchard. At its edge
he stopped and looked back, and now the house was different. It was no
longer just a structure. It wore a personality, a mocking, leering look, and
there was a malevolent chuckle bubbling inside of it, ready to break out.
Lewis ducked into the orchard and worked his way in among the trees.
There was no path and beneath the trees the grass and weeds grew tall. He
ducked the drooping branches and walked around a tree that had been uprooted
in some windstorm of many years before.
He reached up as he went along, picking an apple here and there,
scrubby things and sour, taking a single bite out of each one of them, then
throwing it away, for there was none of them that was fit to eat, as if they
might have taken from the neglected soil a certain basic bitterness.
At the far side of the orchard he found the fence and the graves that
it enclosed. Here the weeds and grass were not so high and the fence showed
signs of repair made rather recently, and at the foot of each grave,
opposite the three crude native limestone headstones, was a peony bush, each
a great straggling mass of plants that had grown, undisciplined, for years.
Standing before the weathered picketing, he knew that he had stumbled
on the Wallace family burial plot.
But there should have been only the two stones. What about the third?
He moved around the fence to the sagging gate and went into the plot.
Standing at the foot of the graves, he read the legends on the stones. The
carving was angular and rough, giving evidence of having been executed by
unaccustomed hands. There were no pious phrases, no lines of verse, no
carvings of angels or of lambs or of other symbolic figures such as had been
customary in the 1 860s. There were just the names and dates.
On the first stone: Amanda Wallace 1821-1863
And on the second stone: Jedediah Wallace 1816-1866
And on the third stone-
4
"Give me that pencil, please," said Lewis.
Hardwicke quit rolling it between his palms and banded it across.
"Paper, too?" he asked.
"If you please," said Lewis.
He bent above the desk and drew rapidly.
"Here," he said, handing back the paper.
Hardwicke wrinkled his brow.
"But it makes no sense," he said. "Except for that figure underneath."
"The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for
infinity."
"But the rest of it?"
"I don't know," said Lewis. "it is the inscription on the tombstone. I
copied it ..."
"And you know it now by heart."
"I should. I've studied it enough."
"I've never seen anything like it in my life," said Hardwicke. "Not
that I'm an authority. I really know little at all in this field."
"You can put your mind at rest. It's nothing that anyone knows anything
about. It bears no resemblance, not even the remotest, to any language or
any known inscription. I checked with men who know. Not one, but a dozen of
them. I told them I'd found it on a rocky cliff. I am sure that most of them
think I am a crackpot. One of those people who are trying to prove that the
Romans or the Phoenicians or the Irish or whatnot had pre-Colombian
settlements in America."
Hardwicke put down the sheet of paper.
"I can see what you mean," he said, "when you say you have more
questions now than when you started. Not only the question of a young man
more than a century old, but likewise the matter of the slickness of the
house and the third gravestone with the undecipherable inscription. You say
you've never talked with Wallace?"
"No one talks to him. Except the mailman. He goes out on his daily
walks and he packs this gun."
"People are afraid to talk with him?"
"Because of the gun, you mean."
"Well, yes, I suppose that was in the back of my mind. I wondered why
he carried it."
Lewis shook his head. "I don't know. I've tried to tie it in, to find
some reason he always has it with him. He has never fired the rifle so far
as I can find. But I don't think the rifle is the reason no one talks with
him. He's an anachronism, something living from another age. No one fears
him, I am sure of that. He's been around too long for anyone to fear him.
Too familiar. He's a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no
one feels quite comfortable with him, either. I would imagine that most of
them, if they should come face to face with him, would feel uncomfortable.
For he's something they are not-something greater than they are and at the
same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his
own humanity. I think that, secretly, many of his neighbors may be a bit
ashamed of him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly,
side-stepped growing old, one of the penalties, but perhaps, as well, one of
the rights of all humankind. And perhaps this secret shame may contribute in
some part to their unwillingness to talk about him."
"You spent a good deal of time watching him?"
"There was a time I did. But now I have a crew. They watch on regular
shifts. We have a dozen spots we watch from, and we keep shifting them
around. There isn't an hour, day in, day out, that the Wallace house isn't
under observation."
"This business really has you people bugged."
"I think with reason," Lewis said. "There is still one other thing."
He bent over and picked up the brief case he had placed beside his
chair. Unsnapping it, he took out a sheaf of photographs and handed them to
Hardwicke.
"What do you make of these?" he asked. Hardwicke picked them up.
Supenly he froze. The color drained out of his face. His hands began to
tremble and he laid the pictures carefully on the desk. He had looked at
only the top one; not any of the others.
Lewis saw the question in his face.
"In the grave," he said. "The one beneath the headstone with the funny
writing."
5
The message machine whistled shrilly, and Enoch Wallace put away the
book in which he had been writing and got up from his desk. He walked across
the room to the whistling machine. He punched a button and shoved a key and
the whistling stopped.
The machine built up its hum and the message began to form on the
plate, faint at first and then becoming darker until it stood out clearly.
It read:
NO. 406301 TO STATION 18327. TRAVELER AT 16097.38. NATIVE THUBAN VI. NO
BAGGAGE. NO. 3 LIQUID TANK. SOLUTION 27. DEPART FOR STATION 12892 AT
16439.16.
CONFIRM.
Enoch glanced up at the great galactic chronometer hanging on the wall.
There was almost three hours to go.
He touched a button, and a thin sheet of metal bearing the message
protruded from the side of the machine. Beneath it the duplicate fed itself
into the record file. The machine chuckled and the message plate was clear
once more and waiting.
Enoch pulled out the metal plate, threaded the holes in it through the
double filing spindle and then dropped his fingers to the keyboard and
typed: NO. 406301 RECEIVED. CONFIRM MOMENTARILY. The message came into being
on the plate and he left it there.
Thuban VI? Had there been, he wondered, one of them before? As soon as
he got the chores done, he would go to the filing cabinet and check.
It was a liquid tank case and those, as a rule, were the most
uninteresting of all. They usually were hard ones to strike up a
conversation with, because too often their concept of language was too
difficult to handle. And as often, too, their very thinking processes proved
too divergent to provide much common ground for communication.
Although, he recalled, that was not always true. There had been that
tank traveler several years ago, from somewhere in Hydra (or had it been the
Hyades?), he'd sat up the whole night with and almost failed of sending off
on time, yarning through the hours, their communication (you couldn't call
it words) tumbling over one another as they packed into the little time they
had a lot of fellowship and, perhaps, some brotherhood.
He, or she, or it-they'd never got around to that- had not come back
again. And that was the way it was, thought Enoch; very few came back. By
far the greater part of them were just passing through.
But he had he, or she, or it (whichever it might be) down in black and
white, as he had all of them, every single blessed one of them, down in
black and white. It had taken him, he remembered, almost the entire
following day, crouched above his desk, to get it written down; all the
stories he'd been told, all the glimpses he had caught of a far and
beautiful and tantalizing land (tantalizing because there was so much of it
he could not understand), all the warmth and comradeship that had flowed
between himself and this misshapen, twisted, ugly living being from another
world. And any time he wished, any day he wished, he could take down the
journal from the row of journals and relive that night again. Although he
never had. It was strange, he thought, how there was never time, or never
seemed to be the time, to thumb through and reread in part what he'd
recorded through the years.
He turned from the message machine and rolled a No. 3 liquid tank into
place beneath the materializer, positioning it exactly and locking it in
place. Then he pulled out the retracting hose and thumbed the selector over
to No. 27. He filled the tank and let the hose slide back into the wall.
Back at the machine, he cleared the plate and sent off his confirmation
that all was ready for the traveler from Thuban, got back double
confirmation from the other end, then threw the machine to neutral, ready to
receive again.
He went from the machine to the filing cabinet that stood next to his
desk and pulled out a drawer jammed with filing cards. He looked and Thuban
VI was there, keyed to August 22, 1931. He walked across the room to the
wall filled with books and rows of magazines and journals, filled from floor
to ceiling, and found the record book he wanted. Carrying it, he walked back
to his desk.
August 22, 1931, he found, when he located the entry, had been one of
his lighter days. There had been one traveler only, the one from Thuban VI.
And although the entry for the day filled almost a page in his small,
crabbed writing, he had devoted no more than one paragraph to the visitor.
Came today [it read] a blob from Thuban VI. There is no other way in
which one might describe it. It is simply a mass of matter, presumably of
flesh, and this mass seems to go through some sort of rhythmic change in
shape, for periodically it is globular, then begins to flatten out until it
lies in the bottom of the tank, somewhat like a pancake. Then it begins to
contract and to pull in upon itself, until finally it is a ball again. This
change is rather slow and definitely rhythmic, but only in the sense that it
follows the same pattern. It seems to have no relation to time. I tried
timing it and could detect no time pattern. The shortest period needed to
complete the cycle was seven minutes and the longest was eighteen. Perhaps
over a longer period one might be able to detect a time rhythm, but I didn't
have the time. The semantic translator did not work with it, but it did emit
for me a series of sharp clicks, as if it might be clicking claws together,
although it had no claws that I could see. When I looked this up in the
pasimology manual I learned that what it was trying to say was that it was
all right, that it needed no attention, and please leave it alone. Which I
did thereafter.
And at the end of the paragraph, jammed into the little space that had
been left, was the notation: See Oct. 16, 1931.
He turned the pages until he came to October 16 and that had been one
of the days, he saw, that Ulysses had arrived to inspect the station.
His name, of course, was not Ulysses. As a matter of fact, he had no
name at all. Among his people there was no need of names; there was other
identifying terminology which was far more expressive than mere names. But
this terminology, even the very concept of it, was such that it could not be
grasped, much less put to use, by human beings.
"I shall call you Ulysses," Enoch recalled telling him, the first time
they had met. "I need to call you something."
"It is agreeable," said the then strange being (but no longer strange).
"Might one ask why the name Ulysses?"
"Because it is the name of a great man of my race."
"I am glad you chose it," said the newly christened being. "To my
hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I
shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us
shall work together for many of your years."
And it had been many years, thought Enoch, with the record book open to
that October entry of more than thirty years ago. Years that had been
satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it
had all been laid out before him.
And it would go on, he thought, much longer than it already had gone
on-for many centuries more, for a thousand years, perhaps. And at the end of
that thousand years, what would he know then?
Although, perhaps, he thought, the knowing was not the most important
part of it.
And none of it, he knew, might come to pass, for there was interference
now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher, and before too long whoever
it might be might start closing in. What he'd do or how he'd meet the
threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had
been almost bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have
happen all these years. There was some reason to wonder, he knew, that it
had not happened sooner.
He had told Ulysses of the danger of it that first day they'd met. He'd
been sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, and thinking of it now,
he could remember it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday.
6
He was sitting on the steps and it was late afternoon. He was watching
the great white thunderheads that were piling up across the river beyond the
Iowa hills. The day was hot and sultry and there was not a breath of moving
air. Out in the barnyard a half a dozen bedraggled chickens scratched
listlessly, for the sake, it seemed, of going through the motions rather
than from any hope of finding food. The sound of the sparrows' wings, as
they flew between the gable of the barn and the hedge of honeysuckle that
bordered the field beyond the road, was a harsh, dry sound, as if the
feathers of their wings had grown stiff with heat.
And here he sat, he thought, staring at the thunderheads when there was
work to do-corn to be plowed and hay to be gotten in and wheat to reap and
shock.
For despite whatever might have happened, a man still had a life to
live, days to be gotten through the best that one could manage. It was a
lesson, he reminded himself, that he should have learned in all its fullness
in the last few years. But war, somehow, was different from what had
happened here. In war you knew it and expected it and were ready when it
happened, but this was not the war. This was the peace to which he had
returned. A man had a right to expect that in the world of peace there
really would be peace fencing out the violence and the horror.
Now he was alone, as he'd never been alone before. Now, if ever, could
be a new beginning; now, perhaps, there had to be a new beginning. But
whether it was here, on the homestead acres, or in some other place, it
still would be a beginning of bitterness and anguish.
He sat on the steps, with his wrists resting on his knees, and watched
the thunderheads piling in the west. It might mean rain and the land could
use the rain-or it might be nothing, for above the merging river valleys the
air currents were erratic and there was no way a man could tell where those
clouds might flow.
He did not see the traveler until he turned in at the gate. He was a
tall and gangling one and his clothes were dusty and from the appearance of
him he had walked a far way. He came up the path and Enoch sat waiting for
him, watching him, but not stirring from the steps.
"Good day, sir," Enoch finally said. "It's a hot day to be walking. Why
don't you sit a while."
"Quite willingly," said the stranger. "But first, I wonder, could I
have a drink of water?"
Enoch got up to his feet. "Come along," he said. "I'll pump a fresh one
for you."
He went down across the barnyard until he reached the pump. He unhooked
the dipper from where it hung upon a bolt and handed it to the man. He
grasped the handle of the pump and worked it up and down.
"Let it run a while," he said. "It takes a time for it to get real
cool."
The water splashed out of the spout, running on the boards that formed
the cover of the well. It came in spurts as Enoch worked the handle.
"Do you think," the stranger asked, "that it is about to rain?"
"A man can't tell," said Enoch. "We have to wait and see."
There was something about this traveler that disturbed him. Nothing,
actually, that one could put a finger on, but a certain strangeness that was
vaguely disquieting. He watched him narrowly as he pumped and decided that
probably this stranger's ears were just a bit too pointed at the top, but
put it down to his imagination, for when he looked again they seemed to be
all right.
"I think," said Enoch, "that the water should be cold by now."
The traveler put down the dipper and waited for it to fill. He offered
it to Enoch. Enoch shook his head.
"You first. You need it worse than I do."
The stranger drank greedily and with much slobbering.
"Another one?" asked Enoch.
"No, thank you," said the stranger. "But I'll catch another dipperful
for you if you wish me to."
Enoch pumped, and when the dipper was full the stranger handed it to
him. The water was cold and Enoch, realizing for the first time that he had
been thirsty, drank it almost to the bottom.
He hung the dipper back on its bolt and said to the man, "Now, let's
get in that sitting."
The stranger grinned. "I could do with some of it," he said. Enoch
pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. "The air gets
close," he said, "just before a rain."
And as he mopped his face, quite supenly he knew what it was that had
disturbed him about the traveler. Despite his bedraggled clothes and his
dusty shoes, which attested to long walking, despite the heat of this
time-before-a-rain, the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and
cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime.
Enoch put the bandanna back into his pocket and they walked back to the
steps and sat there, side by side.
"You've traveled a far way," said Enoch, gently prying.
"Very far, indeed," the stranger told him. "I'm a right smart piece
from home."
"And you have a far way yet to go?"
"No," the stranger said, "I believe that I have gotten to the place
where I am going."
"You mean ..." asked Enoch, and left the question hanging. "I mean
right here," said the stranger, "sitting on these steps. I have been looking
for a man and I think that man is you. I did not know his name nor where to
look for him, but yet I knew that one day I would find him."
"But me," Enoch said, astonished. "Why should you look for me?"
"I was looking for a man of many different parts. One of the things
about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what
they were."
"Yes," said Enoch, "that is something I have done. On many nights,
camping in the field, I have lain in my blankets and looked up at the sky,
looking at the stars and wondering what they were and how they'd been put up
there and, most important of all, why they had been put up there. I have
heard some say that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on
Earth, but I don't know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too
much about them."
"There are some," the stranger said, "who know a deal about them."
"You, perhaps," said Enoch, mocking just a little, for the stranger did
not look like a man who'd know much of anything.
"Yes, I," the stranger said. "Although I do not know as much as many
others do."
"I've sometimes wondered," Enoch said, "if the stars are other suns,
might there not be other planets and other people, too."
He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the
other fellows to pass away the time. And once he'd mentioned this idea of
maybe other people on other planets circling other suns and the fellows all
had jeered him and for days afterward had made fun of him, so he had never
mentioned it again. Not that it mattered much, for he had no real belief in
it himself; it had never been more than campfire speculation.
And now he'd mentioned it again and to an utter stranger. He wondered
why he had.
"You believe that?" asked the stranger.
Enoch said, "It was just an idle notion."
"Not so idle," said the stranger. "There are other planets and there
are other people. I am one of them."
"But you ..." cried Enoch, then was stricken into silence.
For the stranger's face had split and began to fall away and beneath it
he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face.
And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great
sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of
thunder seemed to shake the land and from far off he heard the rushing rain
as it charged across the hills.
7
That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The
campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic
charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star.
Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things
as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were
people.
He looked back at the entry for October 16, 1931, and ran through it
swiftly. There, near the end of it was the sentence:
Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest
mathematicians in the galaxy. They have developed, it seems, a numeration
system superior to any in existence, especially valuable in the handling of
statistics.
He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the
statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans' work. Perhaps they did, he
thought, for certainly some of the math they used was unconventional.
He pushed the record book to one side and dug into a desk drawer,
bringing out his chart. He spread it flat on the desk before him and puzzled
over it. If he could be sure, he thought. If he only knew the Mizar
statistics better. For the last ten years or more he had labored at the
chart, checking and rechecking all the factors against the Mizar system,
testing again and again to determine whether the factors he was using were
the ones he should be using.
He raised a clenched fist and hammered at the desk. If he only could be
certain. If he could only talk with someone. But that had been something
that he had shrank from doing, for it would be equivalent to showing the
very nakedness of the human race.
He still was human. Funny, he thought, that he should stay human, that
in a century of association with these beings from the many stars he should
have, through it all, remained a man of Earth.
For in many ways, his ties with Earth were cut. Old Winslowe Grant was
the only human he ever talked with now. His neighbors shunned him, and there
were no others, unless one could count watchers, and those he seldom
saw-only glimpses of them, only the places they had been.
Only old Winslowe Grant and Mary and the other people from the shadow
who came occasionally to spend lonely hours with him.
That was all of Earth he had, old Winslowe and the shadow people and
the homestead acres that lay outside the house-but not the house itself, for
the house was alien now.
He shut his eyes and remembered how the house had been in the olden
days. There had been a kitchen, in this same area where he was sitting, with
the iron cook-stove, black and monstrous, in its corner, showing its row of
fiery teeth along the slit made by the grate. Pushed against the wall had
been the table where the three of them had eaten, and he could remember how
the table looked, with the vinegar cruet and the glass that held the spoons
and the Lazy Susan with the mustard, horseradish, and chili sauce sitting in
a group, a sort of centerpiece in the miple of the red checkered cloth that
the table wore.
There had been a winter night and he had been, it seemed, no more than
three or four. His mother was busy at the stove with supper. He was sitting
on the floor in the center of the kitchen, playing with some blocks, and
outside he could hear the muffled howling of the wind as it prowled along
the eaves. His father had come in from milking at the barn, and a gust of
wind and a swirl of snow had come into the room with him. Then he'd shut the
door and the wind and snow were gone, shut outside this house, condemned to
the outer darkness and the wilderness of night. His father had set the pail
of milk that he had been carrying on the kitchen sink and Enoch saw that his
beard and eyebrows were coated with snow and there was frost on the whiskers
all around his mouth.
He held that picture still, the three of them like historic manikins
posed in a cabinet in a museum-his father with the frost upon his whiskers
and the great felt boots that came up to his knees; his mother with her face
flushed from working at the stove and with the lace cap upon her head, and
himself upon the floor, playing with the blocks.
There was one other thing that he remembered, perhaps more clearly than
all the rest of it. There was a great lamp sitting on the table, and on the
wall behind it hung a calendar, and the glow of the lamp fell like a
spotlight upon the picture on the calendar. There was old Santa Claus,
riding in his sleigh along a woodland track and all the little woodland
people had turned out to watch him pass. A great moon hung above the trees
and there was thick snow on the ground. A pair of rabbits sat there, gazing
soulfully at Santa, and a deer beside the rabbits, with a raccoon just a
little distance off, ringed tail wrapped about his feet, and a squirrel and
chickadee side by side upon an overhanging branch. Old Santa had his whip
raised high in greeting and his cheeks were red and his smile was merry and
the reindeer hitched to his sled were fresh and spirited and proud.
Through all the years this mid-nineteenth-century Santa had ripen down
the snowy aisles of time, with his whip uplifted in happy greeting to the
woodland creatures. And the golden lamplight had ripen with him, still
bright upon the wall and the checkered tablecloth.
So, thought Enoch, some things do endure-the memory and the thought and
the snug warmness of a childhood kitchen on a stormy winter night.
But the endurance was of the spirit and the mind, for nothing else
endured. There was no kitchen now, nor any sitting room with its
old-fashioned sofa and the rocking chair; no back parlor with its stuffy
elegance of brocade and silk, no guest bedroom on the first and no family
bedrooms on the second floor.
It all was gone and now one room remained. The second-story floor and
all partitions had been stripped away. Now the house was one great room. One
side of it was the galactic station and the other side the living space for
the keeper of the station. There was a bed over in one corner and a stove
that worked on no principle known on Earth and a refrigerator that was of
alien make. The walls were lined with cabinets and shelves, stacked with
magazines and books and journals.
There was just one thing left from the early days, the one thing Enoch
had not allowed the alien crew that had set up the station to strip away-the
massive old fireplace of brick and native stone that had stood against one
wall of the sitting room. It still stood there, the one reminder of the days
of old, the one thing left of Earth, with its great, scarred oak mantel that
his father had carved out with a broadax from a massive log and had smoothed
by hand with plane and draw-shave.
On the fireplace mantel and strewn on shelf and table were articles and
artifacts that had no earthly origin and some no earthly names-the steady
accumulation through the years of the gifts from friendly travelers.
Some of them were functional and others were to look at only, and there
were other things that were entirely useless because they had little
application to a member of the human race or were inoperable on Earth, and
many others of the purpose of which he had no idea, accepting them,
embarrassed, with many stumbling thanks, from the well-meaning folks who had
brought them to him.
And on the other side of the room stood the intricate mass of
machinery, reaching well up into the open second story, that wafted
passengers through the space that stretched from star to star.
An inn, he thought, a stopping place, a galactic crossroads.
He rolled up the chart and put it back into the desk. The record book
he put away in its proper place among all the other record books upon the
shelf.
He glanced at the galactic clock upon the wall and it was time to go.
He pushed the chair tight against the desk and shrugged into the jacket
that hung upon the chair back. He picked the rifle off the supports that
held it on the wall and then he faced the wall itself and said the single
word that he had to say. The wall slid back silently and he stepped through
it into the little shed with its sparse furnishings. Behind him the section
of the wall slid back and there was nothing there to indicate it was
anything but a solid wall.
Enoch stepped out of the shed and it was a beautiful late summer day.
In a few weeks now, he thought, there'd be the signs of autumn and a strange
chill in the air. The first goldenrods were blooming now and he'd noticed,
just the day before, that some of the early asters down in the ancient fence
row had started to show color.
He went around the corner of the house and headed toward the river,
striding down the long deserted field that was overrun with hazel brush and
occasional clumps of trees.
This was the Earth, he thought-a planet made for Man. But not for Man
alone, for it was as well a planet for the fox and owl and weasel, for the
snake, the katydid, the fish, for all the other teeming life that filled the
air and earth and water. And not these natives alone, but for other beings
that called other earths their home, other planets that far light-years
distant were basically the same as Earth. For Ulysses and the Hazers and all
the rest of them who could live upon this planet, if need be, if they
wished, with no discomfort and no artificial aids.
Our horizons are so far, he thought, and we see so little of them. Even
now, with flaming rockets striving from Canaveral to break the ancient
bonds, we dream so little of them.
The ache was there, the ache that had been growing, the ache to tell
all mankind those things that he had learned. Not so much the specific
things, although there were some of them that mankind well could use, but
the general things, the unspecific central fact that there was intelligence
throughout the universe, that Man was not alone, that if he only found the
way he need never be alone again.
He went down across the field and through the strip of woods and came
out on the great outthrust of rock that stood atop the cliff that faced the
river. He stood there, as he had stood on thousands of other mornings, and
stared out at the river, sweeping in majestic blue-and-silverness through
the wooded bottom land.
Old, ancient water, he said, talking silently to the river, you have
seen it happen-the mile-high faces of the glaciers that came and stayed and
left, creeping back toward the pole inch by stubborn inch, carrying the
melting water from those very glaciers in a flood that filled this valley
with a tide such as now is never known; the mastodon and the sabertooth and
the bear-sized beaver that ranged these olden hills and made the night
clamorous with trumpeting and screaming; the silent little bands of men who
trotted in the woods or clambered up the cliffs or papled on your surface,
woods-wise and water-wise, weak in body, strong in purpose, and persistent
in a way no other thing ever was persistent, and just a little time ago that
other breed of men who carried dreams within their skulls and cruelty in
their hands and the awful sureness of an even greater purpose in their
hearts. And before that, for this is ancient country beyond what is often
found, the other kinds of life and the many turns of climate and the changes
that came upon the Earth itself. And what think you of it? he asked the
river. For yours is the memory and the perspective and the time and by now
you should have the answers, or at least some of the answers.
As Man might have some of the answers had he lived for several million
years-as he might have the answers several million years from this very
summer morning if be still should be around.
I could help, thought Enoch. I could not give the answers but I could
help Man in his scramble after them. I could give him faith and hope and I
could give purpose such as he has not had before.
But he knew he dare not do it.
Far below a hawk swung in lazy circles above the highway of the river.
The air was so clear that Enoch imagined, if he strained his eyes a little,
he could see every feather in those outspread wings.
There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far
look and the clear air and the feeling of detachment that touched almost on
greatness of the spirit. As if this were a special place, one of those
special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as
lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found
it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it.
He stood upon the rock and stared out across the river, watching the
lazy hawk and the sweep of water and the green carpeting of trees, and his
mind went up and out to those other places until his mind was dizzy with the
thought of it. And then he called it home.
He turned slowly and went back down the rock and moved off among the
trees, following the path he'd beaten through the years.
He considered going down the hill a way to look in on the patch of pink
lady's-slippers, to see how they might be coming, to try to conjure up the
beauty that would be his again in June, but decided that there'd be little
point to it, for they were well hipen in an isolated place, and nothing
could have harmed them. There had been a time, a hundred years ago, when
they had bloomed on every hill and he had come trailing home with great
armloads of them, which his mother had put in the great brown jug she had,
and for a day or two the house had been filled with the heaviness of their
rich perfume. But they were hard to come by now. The trampling of the
pastured cattle and flower-hunting humans had swept them from the hills.
Some other day, he told himself, some day before first frost, he would
visit them again and satisfy himself that they'd be there in the spring.
He stopped a while to watch a squirrel as it frolicked in an oak. He
squatted down to follow a snail which had crossed his path. He stopped
beside a massive tree and examined that pattern of the moss that grew upon
the trunk. And he traced the wanderings of a silent, flitting songbird as it
fluttered tree to tree.
He followed the path out of the woods and along the edge of field until
he came to the spring that bubbled from the hillside.
Sitting beside the spring was a woman and he recognized her as Lucy
Fisher, the deaf-mute daughter of Hank Fisher, who lived down in the river
bottoms.
He stopped and watched her and thought how full she was of grace and
beauty, the natural grace and beauty of a primitive and lonely creature.
She was sitting by the spring and one hand was uplifted and she held in
it, at the tips of long and sensitive fingers, something that glowed with
color. Her head was held high, with a sharp look of alertness, and her body
was straight and slender, and it also had that almost startled look of quiet
alertness.
Enoch moved slowly forward and stopped not more than three feet behind
her, and now he saw that the thing of color on her fingertips was a
butterfly, one of those large gold and red butterflies that come with the
end of summer. One wing of the insect stood erect and straight, but the
other was bent and crumpled and had lost some of the dust that lent sparkle
to the color.
She was, he saw, not actually holding the butterfly. It was standing on
one fingertip, the one good wing fluttering very slightly every now and then
to maintain its balance.
But he had been mistaken, he saw, in thinking that the second wing was
injured, for now he could see that somehow it had been simply bent and
distorted in some way. For now it was straightening slowly and the dust (if
it ever had been gone) was back on it again, and it was standing up with the
other wing.
He stepped around the girl so that she could see him and when she saw
him there was no start of surprise. And that, he knew would be quite
natural, for she must be accustomed to it-someone coming up behind her and
supenly being there.
Her eyes were radiant and there was, he thought, a holy look upon her
face, as if she had experienced some ecstasy of the soul. And he found
himself wondering again, as he did each time he saw her, what it must be
like for her, living in a world of two-way silence, unable to communicate.
Perhaps not entirely unable to communicate, but at least barred from that
free flow of communication which was the birthright of the human animal.
There had been, he knew, several attempts to establish her in a state
school for the deaf, but each had been a failure. Once she'd run away and
wandered days before being finally found and returned to her home. And on
other occasions she had gone on disobedience strikes, refusing to co-operate
in any of the teaching.
Watching her as she sat there with the butterfly, Enoch thought he knew
the reason. She had a world, he thought, a world of her very own, one to
which she was accustomed and knew how to get along in. In that world she was
no cripple, as she most surely would have been a cripple if she had been
pushed, part way, into the normal human world.
What good to her the hand alphabet or the reading of the lips if they
should take from her some strange inner serenity of spirit?
She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and
autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was,
in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in
an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that
Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he'd ever held it.
And there she sat, with the wild red and gold of the butterfly poised
upon her finger, with the sense of alertness and expectancy and, perhaps,
accomplishment shining on her face. She was alive, thought Enoch, as no
other thing he knew had ever been alive.
The butterfly spread its wings and floated off her finger and went
fluttering, unconcerned, unfrightened, up across the wild grass and the
goldenrod of the field.
She pivoted to watch it until it disappeared near the top of the hill
up which the old field climbed, then she turned to Enoch. She smiled and
made a fluttery motion with her hands, like the fluttering of the red and
golden wings, but there was something else in it, as well-a sense of
happiness and an expression of well-being, as if she might be saying that
the world was going fine.
If, Enoch thought, I could only teach her the pasimology of my galactic
people-then we could talk, the two of us, almost as well as with the flow of
words on the human tongue. Given the time, he thought, it might not be too
hard, for there was a natural and a logical process to the galactic sign
language that made it almost instinctive once one had caught the underlying
principle.
Throughout the Earth as well, in the early days; there had been sign
languages, and none so well developed as that one which obtained among the
aborigines of North America, so that an Amerindian, no matter what his
tongue, could express himself among many other tribes.
But even so the sign language of the Indian was, at best, a crutch that
allowed a man to hobble when he couldn't run. Whereas that of the galaxy was
in itself a language, adaptable to many different means and methods of
expression. It had been developed through millennia, with many different
peoples making contributions, and through the centuries it had been refined
and shaken down and polished until today it was a communications tool that
stood on its own merits.
There was need for such a tool, for the galaxy was Babel. Even the
galactic science of pasimology, polished as it might be, could not surmount
all the obstacles, could not guarantee, in certain cases, the basic minimum
of communication. For not only were there millions of tongues, but those
other languages as well which could not operate on the principle of sound
because the races were incapable of sound. And even sound itself failed of
efficiency when the race talked in ultrasonics others could not hear. There
was telepathy, of course, but for every telepath there were a thousand races
that had telepathic blocks. There were many who got along on sign languages
alone and others who could communicate only by a written or pictographic
system, including some who carried chemical blackboards built into their
bodies. And there was that sightless, deaf, and speechless race from the
mystery stars of the far side of the galaxy who used what was perhaps the
most complicated of all the galactic languages-a code of signals routed
along their nervous systems.
Enoch had been at the job almost a century, and even so, he thought,
with the aid of the universal sign language and the semantic translator,
which was little more than a pitiful (although complicated) mechanical
contrivance, he still was hard put at times to know what many of them said.
Lucy Fisher picked up a cup that was standing by her side-a cup
fashioned of a strip of folded birch bark-and dipped it in the spring. She
held it out to Enoch and he stepped close to take it, kneeling down to drink
from it. It was not entirely water-tight, and water ran from it down across
his arm, wetting the cuff of shirt and jacket.
He finished drinking and handed back the cup. She took it in one hand
and reached out the other, to brush across his forehead with the tip of
gentle fingers in what she might have thought of as a benediction.
He did not speak to her. Long ago he had ceased talking to her, sensing
that the movement of his mouth, making sounds she could not hear, might be
embarrassing.
Instead he put out a hand and laid his broad palm against her cheek,
holding it there for a reassuring moment as a gesture of affection. Then he
got to his feet and stood staring down at her and for a moment their eyes
looked into the other's eyes and then turned away.
He crossed the little stream that ran down from the spring and took the
trail that led from the forest's edge across the field, heading for the
ridge. Halfway up the slope, he turned around and saw that she was watching
him. He held up his hand in a gesture of farewell and her hand gestured in
reply.
It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had
seen her, a little fairy person of ten years or so, a wild thing running in
the woods. They had become friends, he recalled, only after a long time,
although he saw her often, for she roamed the hills and valley as if they
were a playground for her-which, of course, they were.
Through the years he had watched her grow and had often met her on his
daily walks, and between the two of them had grown up an understanding of
the lonely and the outcast, but understanding based on something more than
that-on the fact that each had a world that was their own and worlds that
had given them an insight into something that others seldom saw. Not that
either, Enoch thought, ever told the other, or tried to tell the other, of
these private worlds, but the fact of these private worlds was there, in the
consciousness of each, providing a firm foundation for the building of a
friendship.
He recalled the day he'd found her at the place where the pink
lady's-slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking
any of them, and how he'd stopped beside her and been pleased she had not
moved to pick them, knowing that in the sight of them, the two, he and she,
had found a joy and a beauty that was beyond possession.
He reached the ridgetop and turned down the grass-grown road that led
down to the mailbox.
And he'd not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how
it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly's wing had been torn and
crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing and
then it had been whole again and had flown away.
8
Winslowe Grant was on time.
Enoch, as he reached the mailbox, sighted the dust raised by his old
jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought,
as he stood beside the box. There had been little rain and the crops had
suffered. Although, to tell the truth, there were few crops on the ridge
these days. There had been a time when comfortable small farms had existed,
almost cheek by jowl, all along the road, with the barns all red and the
houses white. But now most of the farms had been abandoned and the houses
and the barns were no longer red or white, but gray and weathered wood, with
all the paint peeled off and the ridgepoles sagging and the people gone.
It would not be long before Winslowe would arrive and Enoch settled
down to wait. The mailman might be stopping at the Fisher box, just around
the bend, although the Fishers, as a rule, got but little mail, mostly just
the advertising sheets and other junk that was mailed out indiscriminately
to the rural boxholders. Not that it mattered to the Fishers, for sometimes
days went by in which they did not pick up their mail. If it were not for
Lucy, they perhaps would never get it, for it was mostly Lucy who thought to
pick it up.
The Fishers were, for a fact, Enoch told himself, a truly shiftless
outfit. Their house and all the buildings were ready to fall in upon
themselves and they raised a grubby patch of corn that was drowned out, more
often than not, by a flood rise of the river. They mowed some hay off a
bottom meadow and they had a couple of raw-boned horses and a half-dozen
scrawny cows and a flock of chickens. They had an old clunk of a car and a
still hipen out somewhere in the river bottoms and they hunted and fished
and trapped and were generally no-account. Although, when one considered it,
they were not bad neighbors. They tended to their business and never
bothered anyone except that periodically they went around, the whole tribe
of them, distributing pamphlets and tracts through the neighborhood for some
obscure fundamentalist sect that Ma Fisher had become a member of at a tent
revival meeting down in Millville several years before.
Winslowe didn't stop at the Fisher box, but came boiling around the
bend in a cloud of dust. He braked the panting machine to a halt and turned
off the engine.
"Let her cool a while," he said.
The block crackled as it started giving up its heat.
"You made good time today," said Enoch.
"Lots of people didn't have any mail today," said Winslowe. "Just went
sailing past their boxes."
He dipped into the pouch on the seat beside him and brought out a
bundle tied together with a bit of string for Enoch-several daily papers and
two journals.
"You get a lot of stuff," said Winslowe, "but hardly ever letters."
"There is no one left," said Enoch, "who would want to write to me."
"But," said Winslowe, "you got a letter this time."
Enoch looked, unable to conceal surprise, and could see the end of an
envelope peeping from between the journals.
"A personal letter," said Winslowe, almost smacking his lips. "Not one
of them advertising ones. Nor a business one."
Enoch tucked the bundle underneath his arm, beside the rifle stock.
"Probably won't amount to much," he said.
"Maybe not," said Winsl!we, a sly
glitter in his eyes. He pulled a pipe and pouch from his pocket and slowly
filled the pipe. The engine block continued its crackling and popping. The
sun beat down out of a cloudless sky. The vegetation alongside the road was
coated with dust and an acrid smell rose from it.
"Hear that ginseng fellow is back again," said Winslowe,
conversationally, but unable to keep out a conspiratorial tone. "Been gone
for three, four days."
"Maybe off to sell his sang."
"You ask me," the mailman said, "he ain't hunting sang. He's hunting
something else."
"Been at it," Enoch said, "for a right smart time."
"First of all," said Winslowe, "there's barely any market for the stuff
and even if there was, there isn't any sang. Used to be a good market years
ago. Chinese used it for medicine, I guess. But now there ain't no trade
with China. I remember when I was a boy we used to go hunting it. Not easy
to find, even then. But most days a man could locate a little of it."
He leaned back in the seat, puffing serenely at his pipe.
"Funny goings on," he said.
"I never saw the man," said Enoch.
"Sneaking through the woods," said Winslowe. "Digging up different
kinds of plants. Got the idea myself he maybe is a sort of magic-man.
Getting stuff to make up charms and such. Spends a lot of his time yarning
with the Fisher tribe and drinking up their likker. You don't hear much of
it these days, but I still hold with magic. Lots of things science can't
explain. You take that Fisher girl, the dummy, she can charm off warts."
"So I've heard," said Enoch.
And more than that, he thought. She can fix a butterfly.
Winslowe hunched forward in his seat.
"Almost forgot," he said. "I have something else for you."
He lifted a brown paper parcel from the floor and handed it to Enoch.
"This ain't mail," he said. "It's something that I made for you."
"Why, thank you," Enoch said, taking it from him.
"Go ahead," Winslowe said, "and open it up." Enoch hesitated.
"Ah, hell," said Winslowe, "don't be bashful."
Enoch tore off the paper and there it was, a full-figure wood carving
of himself. It was in a blond, honey-colored wood and some twelve inches
tall. It shone like golden crystal in the sun. He was walking, with his
rifle tucked beneath his arm and a wind was blowing, for he was leaning
slightly into it and there were wind-flutter ripples on his jacket and his
trousers.
Enoch gasped, then stood staring at it.
"Wins," he said, "that's the most beautiful piece of work I have ever
seen."
"Did it," said the mailman, "out of that piece of wood you gave me last
winter. Best piece of whittling stuff I ever ran across. Hard and without
hardly any grain. No danger of splitting or of nicking or of shreping. When
you make a cut, you make it where you want to and it stays the way you cut
it. And it takes polish as you cut. Just rub it up a little is all you need
to do."
"You don't know," said Enoch, "how much this means to me."
"Over the years," the mailman told him, "you've given me an awful lot
of wood. Different kinds of wood no one's ever seen before. All of it
top-grade stuff and beautiful. It was time I was carving something for you."
"And you," said Enoch, "have done a lot for me. Lugging things from
town."
"Enoch," Winslowe said, "I like you. I don't know what you are and I
ain't about to ask, but anyhow I like you."
"I wish that I could tell you what I am," said Enoch. "Well," said
Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, "it don't matter
much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of
the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like
ours-a lesson in how to get along-the world would be a whole lot better."
Enoch noped gravely. "It doesn't look too good, does it?"
"It sure don't," said the mailman, starting up the car.
Enoch stood and watched the car move off, down the bill, building up
its cloud of dust as it moved along.
Then he looked again at the wooden statuette of himself.
It was as if the wooden figure were walking on a hilltop, naked to the
full force of the wind and bent against the gale.
Why? He wondered. What was it the mailman had seen in him to portray
him as walking in the wind?
9
He laid the rifle and the mail upon a patch of dusty grass and
carefully rewrapped the statuette in the piece of paper. He'd put it, he
decided, either on the mantelpiece or, perhaps better yet, on the coffee
table that stood beside his favorite chair in the corner by the desk. He
wanted it, he admitted to himself, with some quiet embarrassment, where it
was close at hand, where he could look at it or pick it up any time he
wished. And he wondered at the deep, heart-warming, soul-satisfying pleasure
that he got from the mailman's gift.
It was not, he knew, because he was seldom given gifts. Scarcely a week
went past that the alien travelers did not leave several with him. The house
was cluttered and there was a wall of shelves down in the cavernous basement
that were crammed with the stuff that had been given him. Perhaps it was, he
told himself, because this was a gift from Earth, from one of his own kind.
He tucked the wrapped statuette beneath his arm and, picking up the
rifle and the mail, headed back for home, following the brush-grown trail
that once had been the wagon road leading to the farm.
Grass had grown into thick turf between the ancient ruts, which had
been cut so deep into the clay by the iron tires of the old-time wagons that
they still were no more than bare, impacted earth in which no plant as yet
had gained a root-hold. But on each side the clumps of brush, creeping up
the field from the forest's edge, grew man-high or better, so that now one
moved down an aisle of green.
But at certain points, quite unexplainably-perhaps due to the character
of the soil or to the mere vagaries of nature-the growth of brush had
faltered, and here were vistas where one might look out from the ridgetop
across the river valley.
It was from one of these vantage points that Enoch caught the flash
from a clump of trees at the edge of the old field, not too far from the
spring where he had found Lucy.
He frowned as he saw the flash and stood quietly on the path, waiting
for its repetition But it did not come again.
It was one of the watchers, he knew, using a pair of binoculars to keep
watch upon the station. The flash he had seen had been the reflection of the
sun upon the glasses.
Who were they? he wondered. And why should they be watching? It had
been going on for some time now but, strangely, there had been nothing but
the watching. There had been no interference. No one had attempted to
approach him, and such approach, he realized, could have been quite simple
and quite natural. If they-whoever they might be-had wished to talk with
him, a very casual meeting could have been arranged during any one of his
morning walks.
But apparently as yet they did not wish to talk.
What, then, he wondered, did they wish to do? Keep track of him,
perhaps. And in that regard, he thought, with a wry inner twinge of humor,
they could have become acquainted with the pattern of his living in their
first ten days of watching.
Or perhaps they might be waiting for some happening that would provide
them with a clue to what he might be doing. And in that direction there lay
nothing but certain disappointment. They could watch for a thousand years
and gain no hint of it.
He turned from the vista and went ploping up the road, worried and
puzzled by his knowledge of the watchers.
Perhaps, he thought, they had not attempted to contact him because of
certain stories that might be told about him. Stories that no one, not even
Winslowe, would pass on to him. What kind of stories, he wondered, might the
neighborhood by now have been able to fabricate about him-fabulous folk
tales to be told in bated breath about the chimney corner?
It might be well, he thought, that he did not know the stories,
although it would seem almost a certainty that they would exist. And it also
might be as well that the watchers had not attempted contact with him. For
so long as there was no contact, he still was fairly safe. So long as there
were no questions, there need not be any answers.
Are you really, they would ask, that same Enoch Wallace who marched off
in 1861 to fight for old Abe Lincoln? And there was one answer to that,
there could only be one answer. Yes, he'd have to say, I am that same man.
And of all the questions they might ask him that would be the only one
of all he could answer truthfully. For all the others there would
necessarily be silence or evasion.
They would ask how come that he had not aged-how he could stay young
when all mankind grew old.
And he could not tell them that he did not age inside the station, that
he only aged when he stepped out of it, that he aged an hour each day on his
daily walks, that he might age an hour or so working in his garden, that he
could age for fifteen minutes sitting on the steps to watch a lovely sunset.
But that when he went back indoors again the aging process was completely
canceled out.
He could not tell them that. And there was much else that he could not
tell them. There might come a time, he knew, if they once contacted him,
that he'd have to flee the questions and cut himself entirely from the
world, remaining isolated within the station's walls.
Such a course would constitute no hardship physically, for he could
live within the station without any inconvenience. He would want for
nothing, for the aliens would supply everything he needed to remain alive
and well. He had bought human food at times, having Winslowe purchase it and
haul it out from town, but only because he felt a craving for the food of
his own planet, in particular those simple foods of his childhood and his
campaigning days.
And, he told himself, even those foods might well be supplied by the
process of duplication. A slab of bacon or a dozen eggs could be sent to
another station and remain there as a master pattern for the pattern
impulses, being sent to him on order as he needed them.
But there was one thing the aliens could not provide-the human contacts
he'd maintained through Winslowe and the mail. Once shut inside the station,
he'd be cut off completely from the world he knew, for the newspapers and
the magazines were his only contact. The operation of a radio in the station
was made impossible by the interference set up by the installations.
He would not know what was happening in the world, would know no longer
how the outside might be going. His chart would suffer from this and would
become largely useless; although, he told himself, it was nearly useless
now, since he could not be certain of the correct usage of the factors.
But aside from all of this, he would miss this little outside world
that he had grown to know so well, this little corner of the world
encompassed by his walks. It was the walks, he thought, more than anything,
perhaps, that had kept him human and a citizen of Earth.
He wondered how important it might be that he remain, intellectually
and emotionally, a citizen of Earth and a member of the human race. There
was, he thought, perhaps no reason that he should. With the cosmopolitanism
of the galaxy at his fingertips, it might even be provincial of him to be so
intent upon his continuing identification with the old home planet. He might
be losing something by this provincialism.
But it was not in himself, he knew, to turn his back on Earth. It was a
place he loved too well-loving it more, most likely, than those other humans
who had not caught his glimpse of far and unguessed worlds. A man, he told
himself, must belong to something, must have some loyalty and some identity.
The galaxy was too big a place for any being to stand naked and alone.
A lark sailed out of a grassy plot and soared high into the sky, and
seeing it, he waited for the trill of liquid song to spray out of its throat
and drip out of the blue. But there was no song, as there would have been in
spring.
He ploped down the road and now, ahead of him, he saw the starkness of
the station, reared upon its ridge.
Funny, he thought, that he should think of it as station rather than as
home, but it had been a station longer than it had been a home.
There was about it, he saw, a sort of ugly solidness, as if it might
have planted itself upon that ridgetop and meant to stay forever.
It would stay, of course, if one wanted it, as long as one wanted it.
For there was nothing that could touch it.
Even should he be forced some day to remain within its walls, the
station still would stand against all of mankind's watching, all of
mankind's prying. They could not chip it and they could not gouge it and
they could not break it down. There was nothing they could do. All his
watching, all his speculating, all his analyzing, would gain Man nothing
beyond the knowledge that a highly unusual building existed on that
ridgetop. For it could survive anything except a thermonuclear explosion-
and maybe even that.
He walked into the yard and turned around to look back toward the clump
of trees from which the flash had come, but there was nothing now to
indicate that anyone was there.
10
Inside the station, the message machine was whistling plaintively.
Enoch hung up his gun, dropped the mail and statuette upon his desk and
strode across the room to the whistling machine. He pushed the button and
punched the lever and the whistling stopped.
Upon the message plate he read:
NO. 406,302 TO STATION 18327. WILL ARRiVE EARLY EVENING YOUR TIME. HAVE
THE COFFEE HOT. ULYSSES.
Enoch grinned. Ulysses and his coffee! He was the only one of the
aliens who had ever liked any of Earth's foods or drinks. There had been
others who had tried them, but not more than once or twice.
Funny about Ulysses, he thought. They had liked each other from the
very first, from that afternoon of the thunderstorm when they had been
sitting on the steps and the mask of human form had peeled off the alien's
face.
It had been a grisly face, graceless and repulsive. The face, Enoch had
thought, of a cruel clown. Wondering, even as he thought it, what had put
that particular phrase into his head, for clowns were never cruel. But here
was one that could be-the colored patchwork of the face, the hard, tight set
of jaw, the thin slash of the mouth.
Then he saw the eyes and they canceled all the rest. They were large
and had a softness and the light of understanding in them, and they reached
out to him, as another being might hold out its hands in friendship.
The rain had come hissing up the land to thrum across the machine-shed
roof, and then it was upon them, slanting sheets of rain that hammered
angrily at the dust which lay across the yard, while surprised, bedraggled
chickens ran frantically for cover.
Enoch sprang to his feet and grasped the other's arm, pulling him to
the shelter of the porch.
They stood facing one another, and Ulysses had reached up and pulled
the split and loosened mask away, revealing a bullet head without a hair
upon it- and the painted face. A face like a wild and rampaging Indian,
painted for the warpath, except that here and there were touches of the
clown, as if the entire painting job had been meant to point up the
inconsistent grotesqueries of war. But even as he stared, Enoch knew it was
not paint, but the natural coloration of this thing which had come from
somewhere among the stars.
Whatever other doubt there was, or whatever wonder, Enoch had no doubt
at all that this strange being was not of the Earth. For it was not human.
It might be in human form, with a pair of arms and legs, with a head and
face. But there was about it an essence of inhumanity, almost a negation of
humanity.
In olden days, perhaps, he thought, it might have been a demon, but the
days were past (although, in some areas of the country, not entirely past)
when one believed in demons or in ghosts or in any of the others of that
ghastly tribe which, in man's imagination, once had walked the Earth.
From the stars, he'd said. And perhaps he was. Although it made no
sense. It was nothing one ever had imagined even in the purest fantasy.
There was nothing to grab hold of, nothing to hang on to. There was no
yardstick for it and there were no rules. And it left a sort of blank spot
in one's thinking that might fill in, come time, but now was no more than a
tunnel of great wonder that went on and on forever.
"Take your time," the alien said. "I know it is not easy. And I do not
know of a thing that I can do to make it easier. There is, after all, no way
for me to prove I am from the stars."
"But you talk so well."
"In your tongue, you mean. It was not too difficult. If you only knew
of all the languages in the galaxy, you would realize how little difficult.
Your language is not hard. It is a basic one and there are many concepts
with which it need not deal."
And, Enoch conceded, that could be true enough. "If you wish," the
alien said, "I can walk off somewhere for a day or two. Give you time to
think. Then I could come back. You'd have thought it out by then."
Enoch smiled, woodenly, and the smile had an unnatural feel upon his
face.
"That would give me time," he said, "to spread alarm throughout the
countryside. There might be an ambush waiting for you."
The alien shook its head. "I am sure you wouldn't do it. I would take
the chance. If you want me to ..."
"No," said Enoch, so calmly he surprised himself. "No, when you have a
thing to face, you face it. I learned that in the war."
"You'll do," the alien said. "You will do all right. I did not misjudge
you and it makes me proud."
"Misjudge me?"
"You do not think I just came walking in here cold? I know about you,
Enoch. Almost as much, perhaps, as you know about yourself. Probably even
more."
"You know my name?"
"Of course I do."
"Well, that is fine," said Enoch. "And what about your own?"
"I am seized with great embarrassment," the alien told him. "For I have
no name as such. Identification, surely, that fits the purpose of my race,
but nothing that the tongue can form."
Supenly, for no reason, Enoch remembered that slouchy figure perching
on the top rail of a fence, with a stick in one hand and a jackknife in the
other, whittling placidly while the cannon balls whistled overhead and less
than half a mile away the muskets snarled and crackled in the billowing
powder smoke that rose above the line.
"Then you need a name to call you by," he said, "and it shall be
Ulysses. I need to call you something,"
"It is agreeable," said that strange one. "But might one ask why the
name Ulysses?"
"Because it is the name," said Enoch, "of a great man of my race."
It was a crazy thing, of course. For there was no resemblance between
the two of them-that slouchy Union general whittling as he perched upon the
fence and this other who stood upon the porch.
"I am glad you chose it," said this Ulysses, standing on the porch. "To
my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I
shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, as friends of the
first names, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years."
It was beginning to come straight now and the thought was staggering.
Perhaps it was as well, Enoch told himself, that it had waited for a while,
that he had been so dazed it had not come on him all at once.
"Perhaps," said Enoch, fighting back the realization that was crowding
in on him, crowding in too fast, "I could offer you some victuals. I could
cook up some coffee..."
"Coffee," said Ulysses, smacking his thin lips. "Do you have the
coffee?"
"I'll make a big pot of it. I'll break in an egg so it will settle
clear ..."
"Delectable," Ulysses said. "Of all the drinks that I have drank on all
the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best."
They went into-the kitchen and Enoch stirred up the coals in the
kitchen range and then put in new wood. He took the coffeepot over to the
sink and ladled in some water from the water pail and put it on to boil. He
went into the pantry to get some eggs and down into the cellar to bring up
the ham.
Ulysses sat stiffly in a kitchen chair and watched him as he worked.
"You eat ham and eggs?" asked Enoch.
"I eat anything," Ulysses said. "My race is most adaptable. That is the
reason I was sent to this planet as a-what do you call it?-a looker-out,
perhaps."
"A scout," suggested Enoch.
"That is it, a scout."
He was an easy thing to talk with, Enoch told himself-almost like
another person, although, God knows, he looked little like a person. He
looked, instead, like some outrageous caricature of a human being.
"You have lived here, in this house," Ulysses said, "for a long, long
time. You feel affection for it."
"It has been my home," said Enoch, "since the day that I was born. I
was gone from it for almost four years, but it was always home."
"I'll be glad," Ulysses told him, "to be getting home again myself.
I've been away too long. On a mission such as this one, it always is too
long."
Enoch put down the knife he had been using to cut a slice of ham and
sat down heavily in a chair. He stared at Ulysse