g the shelves were jammed
with a junkyard  accumulation  from all the corners of the  galaxy. And yet,
thought  Enoch,  perhaps not  actually a junkyard, for there  would be  very
little of this  stuff that would be actual  junk. All of it  was serviceable
and had some purpose,  either  practical or aesthetic, if only that  purpose
could  be  learned. Although perhaps  not  in every instance a  purpose that
would be applicable to humans.
     Down at the end of  the shelves was one section of shelving  into which
the articles were packed more systematically and with greater care, each one
tagged  and  numbered,  with  cross-filing  to a card catalogue  and certain
journal dates. These were the articles of  which he knew the purpose and, in
certain  instances, something of  the  principles involved.  There were some
that were  innocent  enough and  others that held great potential value  and
still  others  that  had,  at the moment, no connection whatsoever with  the
human way of life-and there were, as  well,  those few, tagged in  red, that
made one shuper to even think upon.
     He  went  down the  gallery,  his footsteps echoing loudly  as  he trod
through this place of alien ghosts.
     Finally the gallery widened into an oval room  and the walls here  were
paped  with  a thick gray substance that would entrap a bullet and prevent a
ricochet.
     Enoch  walked over  to a panel set inside  a  deep recess sunk into the
wall.  He reached in and thumbed up a tumbler, then stepped quickly out into
the center of the room.
     Slowly the room began to darken, then supenly it seemed to flare and he
was in the room no  longer, but in another place, a place he had never  seen
before.
     He stood  on  a little hillock and in front of him the land sloped down
to a sluggish river bordered by a width of  marsh.  Between the beginning of
the marsh and the  foot of the hillock stretched a sea of rough, tall grass.
There was  no wind, but the grass was rippling and he knew that the rippling
motion of the grass was caused by many moving bodies, foraging in the grass.
Out of it came a savage grunting, as if a thousand angry hogs  were fighting
for  choice morsels in a hundred swill  troughs. And from somewhere  farther
off, perhaps from the river,  came a deep, monotonous bellowing that sounded
hoarse and tired.
     Enoch felt the  hair  crawling on his scalp and he thrust the rifle out
and ready. It was puzzling. He felt and knew the danger and as yet there was
no danger. Still, the very air of  this place-wherever it might be-seemed to
crawl with danger.
     He spun  around and saw that  close  behind  him the thick,  dark woods
climbed down the range of river hills,  stopping at the  sea of  grass which
flowed around, the hillock on which he found himself. Off beyond  the hills,
dark purple in the  air,  loomed a range of mighty mountains that  seemed to
fade into  the sky,  but purple to their peaks, with  no  sign  of snow upon
them.
     Two things came trotting from the woods and stopped at the edge of  it.
They  sat down and grinned  at  him,  with their  tails wrapped neatly round
their feet. They might have been wolves or dogs, but they were neither  one.
They were nothing he had ever seen or heard of. Their pelts glistened in the
weak sunshine, as if  they had been greased, but the pelts  stopped at their
necks,  with  their skulls  and faces  bare. Like  evil old men,  off  on  a
masquerade,  with  their  bodies  draped  in  the hides  of wolves. But  the
disguise was  spoiled by  the  lolling  tongues which spilled  out of  their
mouths, glistening scarlet against the bone-white of their faces.
     The woods was still.  There were only  the two gaunt  beasts sitting on
their haunches. They sat and grinned at him, a strangely toothless grin.
     The  woods was dark and tangled, the foliage so dark green  that it was
almost black.  All the  leaves had a shine to  them, as  if  they  had  been
polished to a special sheen.
     Enoch spun around again,  to look back  towards the river, and crouched
at the edge of the grass was a line of toadlike monstrosities, six feet long
and standing three feet  high,  their bodies the color of a dead fish belly,
and each  with a single eye, or what seemed  to be an  eye, which  covered a
great part  of  the area  just  above the  snout.  The eyes were faceted and
glowed in the dim sunlight, as  the eyes  of a hunting  cat will  glow  when
caught in a beam of light.
     The hoarse  bellowing  still  came from  the  river and in  between the
bellowing there was a  faint, thin buzzing, an angry  and malicious buzzing,
as if  a mosquito might be hovering for attack, although there was a sharper
tone in it than in the noise of a mosquito.
     Enoch jerked up his  head to look into the sky and far in the depths of
it he  saw a string  of  dots, so high that there was no way of knowing what
kind of things they were.
     He  lowered  his head  to look back  at the line of squatting, toadlike
things, but from the corner of his eye he caught the sense of flowing motion
and swung back toward the woods.
     The wolf-like bodies with the skull-like heads were coming up  the hill
in a silent rush. They  did not seem to run. There  was  no  motion of their
running. Rather they were moving as if they had been squirted from a tube.
     Enoch jerked up his rifle and it came into his shoulder, fitting there,
as if it were a part  of  him. The bead settled in  the rear-sight notch and
blotted  out the skull-like face of the  leading beast. The gun bucked as he
squeezed the trigger and, without waiting to see if the  shot had downed the
beast,  the rifle  barrel was  swinging  toward the second as his right fist
worked  the  bolt.  The rifle bucked again  and the second  wolf-like  being
somersaulted  and  slid forward for an instant, then began  rolling down the
hill, flopping as it rolled.
     Enoch  worked the bolt again and the spent brass case glittered in  the
sun as he turned swiftly to face the other slope.
     The  toadlike things were closer now. They had been creeping in, but as
he turned they stopped and squatted, staring at him.
     He reached a hand into his pocket and took out two cartridges, cramming
them into the magazine to replace the shells he'd fired.
     The bellowing  down by  the  river had  stopped,  but now  there  was a
honking sound that he could not  place.  Turning  cautiously,  he  tried  to
locate  what might  be making  it,  but  there was nothing  to be seen.  The
honking sound seemed to  be coming  from  the forest,  but there was nothing
moving.
     In between the honking, he still  could hear the  buzzing and it seemed
louder now. He glanced into the sky and the  dots were larger and no  longer
in  a  line.  They  had formed  into  a  circle  and  seemed to be spiraling
downward, but they were still so high that he  could not make out what kinds
of things they were.
     He glanced back toward the toadlike  monsters and they were closer than
they had been before. They had crept up again.
     Enoch lifted the rifle and, before it reached his shoulder, pressed the
trigger,  shooting from  the hip. The  eye  of one of  the foremost  of them
exploded, like  the splash a stone  would  make  if  thrown  into water. The
creature did not jump or flop. It simply settled down, flat upon the ground,
as if someone had put his foot upon it and had exerted exactly  force enough
to squash it flat. It lay there, flat,  and there was a big round hole where
the eye had been and the hole was filling with a thick and ropy yellow fluid
that may have been the creature's blood.
     The others backed away, slowly, watchfully. They backed all the way off
the hillock and only stopped when they reached the grass edge.
     The honking was  closer and the buzzing  louder and there  could be  no
doubt that the honking was coming from the hills.
     Enoch swung about and saw it, striding through the sky, coming down the
ridge, stepping through the trees and honking dolefully. It  was a round and
black balloon  that swelled and  deflated with  its  honking, and jerked and
swayed as it  walked along, hung  from the center of four stiff and  spindly
legs that arched above it to the joint that  connected this upper portion of
the  leg  arrangement  with the downward-sprapling legs that raised  it high
above the forest. It was walking jerkily, lifting its legs high to clear the
massive treetops  before putting them down again.  Each time  it put down  a
foot, Enoch could hear the crunching of the branches and the crashing of the
trees that it broke or brushed aside.
     Enoch felt  the skin along his spine  trying to roll up his back like a
window  shade, and the  bristling of  the  hair along the base of his skull,
obeying some primordial instinct  in its striving to raise itself erect into
a fighting ruff.
     But even  as he stood there, almost stiff with fright, some part of his
brain  remembered that one  shot he had fired and  his  fingers dug into his
pocket for another cartridge to fill the magazine.
     The buzzing was much  louder and the pitch had changed. The buzzing was
now approaching at tremendous speed.
     Enoch jerked up his head  and the dots no  longer were circling in  the
sky, but were plunging down toward him, one behind the other.
     He flicked a  glance  toward the  balloon, honking  and  jerking on its
stilt-like legs. It  still was  coming on, but the plunging dots were faster
and would reach the hillock first.
     He shifted the rifle  forward, outstretched and  ready  to slap against
his shoulder, and watched the  falling dots,  which were dots no longer, but
hideous streamlined bodies, each  carrying a  rapier that projected from its
head. A bill of sorts, thought Enoch, for these things might be birds, but a
longer, thinner, larger, more deadly bird than any earthly bird.
     The buzzing changed into a scream  and the scream kept  mounting up the
scale  until it  set the  teeth on edge  and  through  it,  like a metronome
measuring off  a  beat, came the hooting  of the black  balloon  that strode
across the hills.
     Without knowing that he had moved  his arms, Enoch had the rifle at his
shoulder, waiting for that instant when the first  of the plunging  monsters
was close enough to fire.
     They dropped like stones  out of  the sky and  they were bigger than he
had  thought they were-big and coming like so  many arrows aimed directly at
him.
     The rifle thuped against his shoulder and the  first one crumpled, lost
its arrow shape, folding up and falling, no longer on its course.  He worked
the bolt and fired again  and  the second one in  line lost its balance  and
began  to  tumble-and the bolt was worked once more and the trigger pressed.
The third  skiped  in the air  and went off at  a  slant, limp  and  ragged,
fluttering in the wind, falling toward the river.
     The rest broke off their  dive. They made a shallow turn and beat their
way up into the sky, great  wings that  were more like  windmill  vanes than
wings thrashing desperately.
     A shadow  fell across the  hillock and a mighty  pillar came down  from
somewhere overhead, driving  down to strike to one  side of the hillock. The
ground  trembled  at the  tread  and the water that lay  hipen  by the grass
squirted high into the air.
     The  honking was  an engulfing sound that blotted out all else  and the
great balloon was zooming down, cradled on its legs.
     Enoch saw the  face,  if anything so grotesque and so  obscene could be
called a face. There was  a beak and beneath it a sucking mouth and a  dozen
or so other organs that might have been the eyes.
     The legs were like inverted V's, with the inner stroke somewhat shorter
than the outer and  in  the center  of these  inner  joints  hung the  great
balloon that was the body of the creature, with its face on the underside so
that it could see all the hunting territory that might lie beneath it.
     But now auxiliary joints in the outer span of  legs were bending to let
the body of the creature down so it could seize its prey.
     Enoch was not conscious of putting up the rifle or of operating it, but
it was hammering at his shoulder and it seemed to  him that a second part of
him stood off, apart, and watched the  firing of the rifle-as if the  figure
that held and fired the weapon might be a second man.
     Great gouts of  flesh flew out of the black  balloon  and  jagged rents
supenly tore  across it and  from these  rents  poured out a cloud of liquid
that turned into a mist, with black droplets raining from it.
     The  firing pin clicked on an empty breech and  the gun was  empty, but
there  was  no  need  of  another  shot.  The  great  legs were folding, and
trembling as they folded, and the shrunken body shivered convulsively in the
heavy mist that was pouring out of it.  There was no hooting now, and  Enoch
could hear the  patter  of the black drops falling  from that cloud  as they
struck the short grass on the bill.
     There was a sickening odor  and the drops, where they fell on him, were
sticky, running  like cold oil, and above him the  great structure that  had
been the stilt-like creature was toppling to the ground.
     Then the world faded swiftly and was no longer there.
     Enoch stood in the oval room in the faint  glow of the bulbs. There was
the heavy smell of powder and all about his feet, glinting in the light, lay
the spent and shining cases that had been kicked out of the gun.
     He was back in the basement once again. The target shoot was over.

        29
     Enoch lowered  the  rifle  and  drew in a slow  and careful breath.  It
always  was like this,  he  thought. As if it were necessary for him to ease
himself,  by slow degrees, back to  this world  of  his  after the season of
unreality.
     One knew that it would be  illusion  when he kicked on the  switch that
set into  motion whatever was to happen  and  one knew it had been  illusion
when it all had ended, but during the time  that it was happening it was not
illusion. It was as real and substantial as if it all were true.
     They had asked  him, he remembered, when the station had been built, if
he had a hobby-if  there was  any sort  of  recreational facility they could
build into  the station for him. And he had said  that he would like a rifle
range, expecting  no  more  than a shooting  gallery with ducks  moving on a
chain or  clay pipes rotating  on a wheel. But that,  of course, would  have
been too  simple for  the  screwball architects, who had  designed, and  the
slap-happy crew of workmen who had built the station.
     At first they had not been certain  what he meant  by a rifle range and
he'd had to tell them what a rifle was  and how  it operated and for what it
might be  used. He  had told  them about hunting  squirrels on sunny  autumn
mornings and shaking rabbits out of brush piles with the first coming of the
snow (although one did not use a rifle,  but  a  shotgun, on  the  rabbits),
about hunting coons of  an autumn night, and waiting for the  deer along the
run that went  down to the river. But he was dishonest  and he did  not tell
them about that other use to which he'd put a rifle during four long years.
     He'd told  them (since  they were easy  folks  to talk with) about  his
youthful dream  of some  day going on a hunt in Africa, although  even as he
told them he was well aware of how unattainable it  was. But  since that day
he'd hunted (and  been hunted  by) beasts  far stranger  than  anything that
Africa could boast.
     From what  these beasts might have been patterned, if indeed  they came
from anywhere other than the  imagination of those aliens who had set up the
tapes which produced the target scene, he had no idea. There had not, so far
in  the thousands  of  times that he had used the range, been a  duplication
either in the scene nor  in the  beasts  which  rampaged  about  the  scene.
Although, perhaps, he thought, there might be  somewhere an end of them, and
then  the whole sequence might start over and run its  course once more. But
it would make little difference now, for if the tapes should start rerunning
there'd be but  little  chance  of his recalling in any considerable  detail
those adventures he had lived so many years ago.
     He  did not understand the  techniques  nor the  principle  which  made
possible this fantastic rifle range. Like many other  things, he accepted it
without the need  of understanding. Although, some day, he thought, he might
find  the   clue   which   in  time  would  turn   blind   acceptance   into
understanding-not only of the range, but of many other things.
     He had often wondered what the aliens might think about his fascination
with the rifle  range, with that primal force that drove  a man to kill, not
for the joy of killing  so much  as to negate a danger, to meet force with a
greater and more skillful force,  cunning  with  more  cunning. Had  he,  he
wondered, given his alien friends concern in their assessment  of  the human
character  by his preoccupation with the rifle?  For the understanding of an
alien, how could one draw a line between the killing of other  forms of life
and the killing of one's  own? Was there actually a differential  that would
stand up  under logical examination  between  the sport  of hunting and  the
sport of war? To an alien,  perhaps, such a  differentiation would be rather
difficult, for in many cases the  hunted animal would be more closely allied
to the human  hunter in its form and characteristics than would  many of the
aliens.
     Was  war an instinctive thing, for which each ordinary man was  as much
responsible  as the  policy makers and the  so-called statesmen?  It  seemed
impossible,  and  yet, deep in every  man  was  the combative  instinct, the
aggressive  urge, the  strange  sense of  competition-all of  which  spelled
conflict of one kind or another if carried to conclusion.
     He  put  the  rifle underneath his  arm and walked over to  the  panel.
Sticking from a slot in the bottom of it was a piece of tape.
     He pulled it out and puzzled out the symbols. They were not reassuring.
He had not done so well.
     He  had  missed that first shot he had fired at the charging wolf-thing
with the  old man's face, and  back there  somewhere,  in that  dimension of
unreality, it and its companion were snarling over the tangled, torn mass of
ribboned flesh and broken bone that had been Enoch Wallace.

        30
     He went back through the gallery, with its gifts stacked there as other
gifts,  in regular human establishments, might be  stacked away  in  dry and
dusty attics.
     The tape nagged at him, the  little piece of tape which said that while
he had made all  his other shots, he had missed that first one back there on
the hillock. It  was not often that he missed. And his training had been for
that  very  type of  shooting-the you-never-know-what-will-happen-next,  the
totally unexpected, the kill-or-be-killed kind of shooting that thousands of
expeditions  into the  target  area had  taught  him.  Perhaps, he  consoled
himself, he  had not been  as faithful  in his practice lately as  he should
have been. Although there actually was no reason that he should be faithful,
for  the shooting was  for recreation only and his carrying of the  rifle on
his daily walks  was  from force of habit only  and for no other  reason. He
carried the rifle as another man might  take along a cane or walking  stick.
At the time he had first done it, of course, it had been a different kind of
rifle and a different day. It then was no unusual thing for a man to carry a
gun while out on a  walk. But today  was different  and he wondered, with an
inner grin, how much talk his carrying a gun might have furnished the people
who had seen him with it.
     Near the end of the gallery he saw the black bulk of a trunk projecting
from beneath the  lower shelf, too big to fit comfortably beneath it, jammed
against the wall, but with a foot  or two  of it still projecting out beyond
the shelf.
     He went on  walking past it, then supenly turned around. That trunk, he
thought-that  was the trunk which  had  belonged to the Hazer  who had  died
upstairs. It  was  his legacy from that being whose  stolen  body  would  be
brought back to its grave this evening.
     He walked over to the  shelving and leaned his rifle against the  wall.
Stooping he pulled the trunk clear of its resting place.
     Once before,  prior to carrying it down the  stairs and storing it here
beneath the shelves, he had gone through  its contents, but  at the time, he
recalled, he'd not been too interested. Now,  supenly, he felt an  absorbing
interest in it.
     He lifted the lid carefully and tilted it back against the shelves.
     Crouching above the open  trunk, and without touching anything to start
with, he tried to catalogue the upper layer of its contents.
     There  was a  shimmering cloak,  neatly  folded,  perhaps some  sort of
ceremonial cloak, although he could not know. And atop  the cloak lay a tiny
bottle  that was a blaze  of  reflected light, as if  someone  had  taken  a
large-sized diamond and hollowed it out to  make a bottle  of it. Beside the
cloak lay  a nest of  balls,  deep  violet and dull,  with  no shine at all,
looking  for all the world like a bunch  of  table-tennis balls that someone
had  cemented  together to make  a globe. But that  was not the  way it was,
Enoch remembered, for that other time he had been entranced by them  and had
picked them up, to  find  that they were  not cemented, but  could be freely
moved  about, although never outside the context  of  their  shape. One ball
could not be  broken from  the mass, no matter how  hard  one might try, but
would move about, as  if buoyed in a fluid, among all  the  other balls. One
could move  any,  or all, of the balls,  but the mass  remained  the same. A
calculator  of some  sort,  Enoch  wondered,  but  that seemed  only  barely
possible, for one ball was entirely like another, there was no  way in which
they could be identified. Or at least, no way to identify them by  the human
eye. Was it  possible, he wondered, that identification might be possible to
a Hazer's eye? And if a calculator, what kind of a calculator? Mathematical?
Or ethical?  Or philosophical? Although  that was slightly foolish, for  who
had  ever heard of a  calculator for ethics or  philosophy? Or, rather, what
human  had  ever heard?  More  than likely  it  was  not a  calculator,  but
something else entirely. Perhaps a sort of game-a game of solitaire?
     Given  time, a man might  finally get it  figured out. But there was no
time and no incentive at  the moment to spend  upon  one particular item any
great  amount  of  time  when  there  were hundreds  of  other items equally
fantastic and  incomprehensible. For while  one puzzled over a  single item,
the  edges of  his mind would always wonder if he might not be spending time
on the most insignificant of the entire lot.
     He was a victim of museum fatigue, Enoch  told himself, overwhelmed  by
the many pieces of the unknown scattered all about him.
     He reached  out a hand, not for the globe of balls, but for the shining
bottle that lay atop the cloak. As he picked it up and brought it closer, he
saw that  there was a line of writing engraved upon the glass (or  diamond?)
of  the bottle. Slowly he studied out the  writing.  There had  been a time,
long ago, when he had been able to read the Hazer language, if not fluently,
at least well enough to get along. But he had not read it for some years now
and  he had lost a good deal of it and he stumbled haltingly from one symbol
to another. Translated very freely,  the inscription on  the bottle read: <I>To
be taken when the first symptoms occur.</I>
     A bottle of  medicine! To be taken when  the first  symptoms occur. The
symptoms, perhaps, that had come so quickly and built up so rapidly that the
owner of this bottle could make no move to reach it and so had died, falling
from the sofa.
     Almost reverently, he put the bottle back in its place  atop the cloak,
fitting it back into the faint impression it had made from lying there.
     So different from us in so many  ways, thought Enoch, and then in other
little  ways so like  us  that it is frightening.  For  that bottle  and the
inscription  on its  face  was  an exact parallel of the prescription bottle
that could be compounded by any corner drugstore.
     Beside the globe of balls was a box, and  he reached out and lifted it.
It  was  made of wood  and had a rather simple clasp to  hold  it  shut.  He
flipped back  the lid and inside he saw the metallic sheen  of  the material
the Hazers used as paper.
     Carefully  he lifted out  the first  sheet and  saw that it  was not  a
sheet,  but a  long  strip  of  the  material folded in  accordion  fashion.
Underneath it were more strips, apparently of the same material.
     There was writing on it, faint  and faded,  and Enoch held it close  to
read it.
     <I>To my  -,--  friend:</I>  (although  it was not  "friend." "Blood brother,"
perhaps, or "colleague." And the adjectives which preceded  it were  such as
to escape his sense entirely.)
     The  writing  was  hard  to  read. It  bore  some  resemblance  to  the
formalized version of the  language, but  apparently bore the imprint of the
writer's personality, expressed in curlicues and flourishes  which  obscured
the  form. Enoch worked his way slowly down  the paper, missing much of what
was there, but picking up the sense of much that had been written.
     The writer had  been on a visit to some other  planet, or possibly just
some other place. The name of the place or planet was one that Enoch did not
recognize.  While  he had been there he had performed some  sort of function
(although exactly what it was was not entirely  clear) which had to  do with
his approaching death.
     Enoch, startled, went back over the phrase again. And while much of the
rest of what was written was not  clear, that part of it was. <I>My approaching
death</I>, he  had written, and there was no room for  mistranslation. All three
of the words were clear.
     He urged that his good  (friend?) do likewise. He said it was a comfort
and made clear the road.
     There was  no further explanation, no further reference.  Just the calm
declaration that he had  done something which he felt must be arranged about
his  death.  As if  he knew death was near  and was not only  unafraid,  but
almost unconcerned.
     The next passage (for there were  no paragraphs) told  about someone he
had met and  how they'd talked about a certain matter which made no sense at
all to Enoch, who found himself lost in a terminology he did not recognize.
     And  then: <I>I  am  most  concerned  about  the mediocrity</I> (incompetence?
inability? weakness?) <I>of  the  recent  custodian of</I>  (and then that  cryptic
symbol  which could  be  translated, roughly, as the Talisman.) <I>For</I> (a word,
which  from the context, seemed to mean a great length of time),  <I>ever since
the death of the last custodian, the Talisman has been but poorly served. It
has  been,  in  all  reality</I>,  (another  long  time  term),<I>  since  a   true</I>
(sensitive?) <I>has been found to  carry out its purpose. Many have been tested
and  none has qualified, and for  the lack of such a one the galaxy has lost
its close identification with  the ruling principle  of life. We here at the</I>
(temple? sanctuary?) <I>all are greatly concerned that without a proper linkage
between the people and</I> (several words that were not decipherable) <I>the galaxy
will go down in chaos</I> (and another line that he could not puzzle out).
     The  next  sentence introduced a new subject-the plans that  were going
forward for some cultural festival which concerned a concept that, to Enoch,
was hazy at the best.
     Enoch slowly folded up the letter and put it back into the box. He felt
a  faint uneasiness in  reading  what  he  had,  as if  he'd  pried  into  a
friendship that he had no right to know.  We here  at the temple, the letter
had  said. Perhaps the  writer had been one of the Hazer mystics, writing to
his old friend, the philosopher. And the other letters, quite possibly, were
from  that same mystic-letters  that the dead old Hazer had valued so highly
that he took them along with him when he went traveling.
     A  slight  breeze  seemed to be blowing across  Enoch's  shoulders; not
actually a breeze, but a strange motion and a coldness to the air.
     He  glanced  back  into  the  gallery  and there was nothing  stirring,
nothing to be seen.
     The wind had quit its blowing,  if it had ever  blown. Here one moment,
gone the next. Like a passing ghost, thought Enoch.
     Did the Hazer have a ghost?
     The people back  on Vega XXI had  known  the moment he had died and all
the  circumstances  of  his  death. They had  known  again  about  the  body
disappearing. And the letter had spoken  calmly, much more calmly than would
have  been in the capacity  of most humans, about the writer's near approach
to death.
     Was it possible that the  Hazers knew more of life  and  death than had
ever been spelled out?  Or had  it been spelled out, put  down in  black and
white, in some depository or depositories in the galaxy?
     Was the answer there? he wondered.
     Squatting  there,  he thought  that perhaps it  might be,  that someone
already knew what  life was for and what its destiny. There was a comfort in
the thought, a strange sort  of personal comfort  in being  able  to believe
that some  intelligence might  have  solved  the riple  of  that  mysterious
equation  of the universe. And how, perhaps, that mysterious  equation might
tie  in  with the  spiritual force that was idealistic brother  to time  and
space and all those other elemental factors that held the universe together.
     He tried to  imagine what one might feel if he were in contact with the
force,  and  could  not. He wondered if even those who  might have  been  in
contact with  it could  find the  words  to tell. It  might, he thought,  be
impossible. For how could one who had been in intimate contact  all his life
with space and time tell what either of these meant to him or how they felt?
     Ulysses, he thought, had not told him all the truth about the Talisman.
He had  told him that it had disappeared and that the galaxy was without it,
but he  had not told him that for many years its  power and  glory  had been
dimmed by the failure of its custodian to provide linkage between the people
and the  force. And all that time  the  corrosion occasioned by that failure
had  eaten away at the bonds of the galactic cofraternity. Whatever might be
happening now had not happened in  the last few years; it  had been building
up  for a longer time than  most aliens would admit. Although, come to think
of it, most aliens probably did not know.
     Enoch closed the box lid and put it back into  the  trunk. Some day, he
thought,  when  he  was in the proper  frame of mind, when the  pressure  of
events made him less emotional, when  he could dull the guilt of prying,  he
would achieve  a  scholarly and conscientious translation  of those letters.
For in  them, he  felt certain, he  might find further understanding of that
intriguing  race. He might,  he thought, then be better able  to gauge their
humanity-not humanity in the  common and accepted sense of being a member of
the human race of Earth, but in the sense that certain rules of conduct must
underlie all racial concepts even as the thing called humanity in its narrow
sense underlay the human concept.
     He reached up to close the lid of the trunk and then he hesitated.
     Some day, he had said. And there might not  be  a  some  day. It  was a
state of mind to be always thinking some  day, a state of mind made possible
by the  conditions inside this station. For here there were endless days  to
come,  forever and forever there were days to come. A  man's concept of time
was twisted out  of shape and  reason and he could look  ahead  complacently
down a long, almost never ending, avenue of time. But that might be all over
now. Time might supenly snap back  into its rightful focus. Should  he leave
this station, the long procession of days to come would end.
     He  pushed back the  lid again  until  it  rested against  the shelves.
Reaching in, he lifted out the box and set it on the floor beside him.  He'd
take  it upstairs, he told himself, and put it with the other stuff that  he
must be prepared  immediately  to take along with him if he should leave the
station.
     If? he asked himself. Was there a question any longer? Had he, somehow,
made that hard decision? Had it crept  upon him unaware, so that he  now was
committed to it?
     And if  he  had actually arrived at that decision, then  he must, also,
have  arrived at the other  one.  If he  left the station, then he could  no
longer  be  in a  position to  appear before Galactic  Central to plead that
Earth be cured of war.
     You are the representative of the Earth,  Ulysses had told him. You are
the only  one  who  can  represent  the  Earth.  But could  he, in  reality,
represent the Earth? Was he any longer  a  true  representative of the human
race? He  was  a  nineteenth-century  man and  how  could  he,  being  that,
represent  the twentieth? How  much,  he  wondered, does the human character
change with each generation? And not only was he of the  nineteenth century,
but he had, as well, lived for almost a hundred years under a separate and a
special circumstance.
     He  knelt there,  regarding himself with awe,  and a little  pity, too,
wondering what he was, if he were even human, if, unknown to himself, he had
absorbed  so  much  of  the mingled  alien  viewpoint to which  he  had been
subjected that he had become  some strange  sort  of hybrid, a queer kind of
galactic half-breed.
     Slowly he pulled the lid down and pushed it  tight. Then he  shoved the
trunk back underneath the shelves.
     He tucked the box  of letters underneath his arm  and  rose, picking up
his rifle, and headed for the stairs.

        31
     He found some  empty cartons stacked in  the kitchen corner, boxes that
Winslowe  had used to bring out from town the supplies that he had  ordered,
and began to pack.
     The journals, stacked neatly in  order, filled one large box and a part
of  another. He took  a  stack  of old  newspapers and carefully wrapped the
twelve  diamond  bottles off  the mantel  and  packed  them in  another box,
thickly  paped, to guard against their breakage.  Out of the cabinet  he got
the  Vegan music box and  wrapped it  as carefully. He pulled out of another
cabinet the alien literature that he had and piled it  in the fourth box. He
went  through his desk, but there  wasn't too much there, only  ops and ends
tucked here  and  there  throughout  the drawers.  He found  his chart  and,
crumpling it, threw it in the wastebasket that stood beside his desk.
     The already filled boxes he carried across the room and stacked  beside
the door  for easy reaching.  Lewis would have  a truck, but once he let him
know  he needed  it, it still might take a while for it to arrive. But if he
had the  important stuff all  packed, he told himself,  he  could get it out
himself and have it waiting for the truck.
     The  important  stuff,  he  thought. Who  could judge  importance?  The
journals and the alien  literature, those first of all,  of course.  But the
rest of it? Which of the rest of it? It was all important; every item should
be  taken.  And  that  might  be  possible.  Given  time  and with  no extra
complications, it might be  possible to  haul  it all away, all  that was in
this room and stored down in the basement. It all was his and he had a right
to  it, for  it  had been  given him. But that did  not mean, he  knew, that
Galactic Central might not object most strenuously to his taking any of it.
     And if that  should happen, it was vital that he should  be able to get
away with those  most important items.  Perhaps he  should  go down into the
basement and lug up those  tagged articles of  which he knew the purpose. It
probably would be better to take material  about  which  something  might be
known than a lot of stuff about which there was nothing known.
     He stood undecided,  looking  all  about the  room. There  were all the
items  on  the  coffee table and those should  be taken, too,  including the
little flashing pyramid of globes that Lucy had set to working.
     He saw that the Pet once again  had crawled off the table and fallen on
the floor. He  stooped and picked it  up and  held it in  his hands. It  had
grown an extra  knob or two since the last  time he had looked at it  and it
was now a faint and  delicate  pink, whereas the last time he had noticed it
had been a cobalt blue.
     He probably was wrong, he told himself, in calling it the Pet. It might
not be alive. But if it were, it was  a sort of life he could not even guess
at. It was not metallic and it was not stone, but very close to both. A file
made  no  impression  on it and  he'd been tempted a time or two to whack it
with a hammer to see what that might do, although  he was willing to bet  it
would have  no effect at all. It grew slowly, and it moved, but there was no
way  of knowing how  it moved. But leave  it and come back and it would have
moved-a little, not too much. It knew  it was being watched and it would not
move while watched. It did not  eat  so far as he could see and it seemed to
have no wastes. It  changed colors, but entirely without season  and with no
visible reason for the change.
     A being from somewhere in the direction of Sagittarius had given it  to
him  just  a year  or  two ago, and the  creature, Enoch recalled, had  been
something for the books. He probably wasn't actually  a  walking plant,  but
that was what he'd  looked like-a rather spindly plant that had been shorted
on good water and  cheated  on  good soil, but which had sprouted a crop  of
dime-store bangles that rang like a thousand silver  bells when he made  any
sort of motion.
     Enoch remembered that he had tried to ask the being what the gift might
be, but  the  walking plant had simply  clashed  its bangles and filled  the
place with ringing sound and didn't try to answer.
     So he  had put the gift on one  end of the desk and  hours later, after
the being was long gone, he found that it had  moved to the other end of the
desk. But it had seemed  too crazy  to think  that  a thing like that  could
move, so he finally convinced himself that he was mistaken as  to where he'd
put it. It was not until days later that he was able  to convince himself it
moved.
     He'd have  to take it when he left and Lucy's pyramid and the cube that
showed you pictures of other worlds when you looked inside of it and a great
deal of other stuff.
     He stood with the Pet held in his hand  and now, for the first time, he
wondered at why he might be packing.
     He was acting as if he'd decided he would leave the station, as if he'd
chosen Earth as  against the galaxy.  But when  and how, he wondered, had he
decided it? Decision should be based on weighing and on measuring and he had
weighed  and  measured nothing. He had  not posed  the  advantages  and  the
disadvantages and  tried to strike a  balance. He  had  not thought it  out.
Somehow, somewhere, it had  sneaked up on him-this decision which had seemed
impossible, but now had been reached so easily.
     Was it, he wondered, that he  had absorbed, unconsciously,  such an  op
mixture of alien thought and ethics that he had evolved, unknown to himself,
a  new way in which to think, perhaps  some subconscious way of thought that
had lain inoperative until now, when it had been needed.
     There  was  a box or  two out in the shed and he'd go and get them  and
finish up the packing of what he'd pick out here. Then he'd go down into the
basement and start lugging  up  the  stuff that he  had tagged.  He  glanced
toward  the window and realized,  with some surprise, that  he would have to
hurry, for the sun was close to setting. It would be evening soon.
     He  remembered that he'd forgotten lunch, but he had no time to eat. He
could get something later.
     He turned to put the  Pet back on the table and as he did a faint sound
caught his ear and froze him where he stood.
     It was the slight  chuckle of a materializer operating and he could not
mistake it. He had heard the sound too often to be able to mistake it.
     And  it must  be, he knew,  the official materializer, for no one could
have traveled on the other without the sending of a message.
     Ulysses,  he  thought. Ulysses coming back again. Or perhaps some other
member of Galactic Central.  For if Ulysses had been coming,  he would  have
sent a message.
     He  took a quick  step  forward so he could see  the  corner  where the
materializer stood and a  dark and slender figure  was stepping out from the
target circle.
     "Ulysses!"  Enoch cried,  but even as  he  spoke he realized it was not
Ulysses.
     For  an  instant he had the  impression of a top hat, of white  tie and
tails,  of a jauntiness,  and  then he saw that the creature was a  rat that
walked  erect, with  sleek, dark fur covering its body and  a sharp,  axlike
rodent face. For an instant, as it turned its head toward him, he caught the
red glitter  of its eyes. Then it  turned back  toward the corner and he saw
that its hand was lifted and was pulling  out of  a harnessed  holster  hung
about its miple something that  glinted with a metallic shimmer even in  the
shadow.
     There  was  something  very  wrong about it.  The creature  should have
greeted him. It should have said hello and come out to meet him. But instead
it had thrown him  that  one  red-eyed  glance  and  then turned back to the
corner.
     The metallic object came out of the holster and it could only be a gun,
or at least some sort of weapon that one might think of as a gun.
     And was this the way, thought Enoch, that they would close the station?
One quick shot, without a word, and the station keeper  dead upon the floor.
With someone  other than Ulysses, because  Ulysses  could  not be trusted to
kill a long-time friend.
     The rifle was lying across the desk top and there wasn't any time.
     But the ratlike creature was not  turning toward the room. It still was
facing toward  the  corner  and  its  hand was  coming up,  with  the weapon
glinting in it.
     An alarm twanged within Enoch's brain and  he swung his arm and yelled,
hurling the Pet toward the creature  in the corner, the yell jerked  out  of
him involuntarily from the bottom of his lungs.
     For  the creature, he  realized, had not been intent on the killing  of
the keeper, but the disruption of the station.  The only thing there was  to
aim  at  in  the corner  was  the  control complex,  the nerve center of the
station's operation. And if that should be knocked out, the station would be
dead. To set it in operation once again it would be necessary to send a crew
of technicians out in a spaceship from the nearest station-a trip that would
require many years to make.
     At  Enoch's yell, the creature jerked around, dropping toward a crouch,
and the flying Pet,  tumbling end for  end, caught it in the belly and drove
it back against the wall.
     Enoch  charged,  arms outspread to  grapple with the creature. The  gun
flew  from the creature's hand and  pinwheeled across  the floor. Then Enoch
was upon the alien and even as he closed with it, his nostrils were assailed
by its body stench-a sickening wave of nastiness.
     He wrapped  his arms about it and heaved, and it was not as heavy as he
had thought it might be.  His powerful wrench  jerked it from the corner and
swung it around and sent it skiping out across the floor.
     It  crashed against  a chair and  came to a stop and then like a  steel
coil it rose off the floor and pounced for the gun.
     Enoch took two  great strides  and had  it by  the neck, lifting it and
shaking it so  savagely that the recovered gun flew from its hand  again and
the bag it  carried on a thong  across its shoulder pounded like a vibrating
trip hammer against its hairy ribs.
     The stench was thick, so  thick that one could almost see it, and Enoch
gagged on it as he shook the creature. And supenly it was worse, much worse,
like a fire raging in one's throat and a hammer in one's head. It was like a
physical blow that hit one in the belly  and shoved against the chest. Enoch
let  go  his hold  upon  the  creature  and  staggered  back, doubled up and
retching. He lifted his hands to his face and tried to push the stench away,
to clear his nostrils and his mouth, to rub it from his eyes.
     Through a haze he saw the creature rise and, snatching up the gun, rush
toward the door. He did not hear the phrase that the creature spoke, but the
door came  open and the creature spurted forward  and was gone. And the door
slammed shut again.

        32
     Enoch wobbled across the room to the desk and caught at it for support.
The stench was diminishing and his  head was clearing and  he scarcely could
believe  that it  all had happened. For it  was incredible that a thing like
this should happen. The creature had traveled on the  official materializer,
and no one but a member of Galactic Central could travel  by that route. And
no member  of Galactic Central,  he was convinced,  would have  acted as the
ratlike creature had. Likewise, the creature had known the phrase that would
operate  the door. No, one but himself and Galactic Central would have known
that phrase.
     He reached out and picked up his rifle and hefted it in his fist.
     It was  all right, he  thought. There  was  nothing harmed. Except that
there was an  alien loose  upon the Earth and  that was something that could
not be  allowed. The Earth was barred to aliens. As  a planet which had  not
been recognized by the galactic cofraternity, it was off-limit territory.
     He stood with  the rifle in his hand and knew what he  must  do-he must
get that alien back, he must get it off the Earth.
     He spoke the phrase aloud and strode toward the door and out and around
the corner of the house
     The alien was running across the field and had almost reached the  line
of woods.
     Enoch  ran desperately, but before he was  halfway down  the field, the
ratlike quarry had plunged into the woods and disappeared.
     The woods was beginning to darken  .The slanting rays of light from the
setting sun still lighted the upper canopy of the foliage, but on the forest
floor the shadows had begun to gather.
     As he ran into the fringe of the  woods, Enoch caught a  glimpse of the
creature angling down a small ravine and plunging up the other slope, racing
through a heavy cover of ferns that reached almost to its miple.
     If it kept on in that direction, Enoch told himself, it might  work out
all right,  for the  slope beyond the ravine ended in a clump  of rocks that
lay above  an outthrust point that  ended in a cliff, with each side curving
in, so that the point and its mass of  boulders lay isolated,  a  place hung
out in space. It might be a little  rough to dig the alien from the rocks if
it took refuge  there, but at  least it would be  trapped and  could not get
away. Although, Enoch reminded himself, he could  waste no time, for the sun
was setting and it would soon be dark.
     Enoch  angled  slightly  westward to go around  the head  of the  small
ravine, keeping  an eye on the  fleeing alien. The creature kept on  up  the
slope and Enoch, observing this, put on an extra burst of  speed. For now he
had the  alien trapped. In  its fleeing,  it had gone  past the point  of no
return. It could no longer turn around and retreat back from the point. Soon
it  would reach the cliff edge and then  there'd be nothing  it could do but
hole up in the patch of boulders.
     Running hard, Enoch crossed the area covered by the ferns and came  out
on the sharper slope some hundred yards  or so below the boulder clump. Here
the cover was not so dense.  There was a scant covering of spotty underbrush
and a scattering  of trees. The soft loam of the forest  floor gave way to a
footing of shattered rock which  through the years had been  chipped off the
boulders by the winters' frost, rolling down the slope. They lay there  now,
covered with thick moss, a treacherous place to walk.
     As he ran, Enoch swept  the  boulders with a  glance, but there was  no
sign of the alien. Then, out of the corner of his vision, he saw the motion,
and threw himself forward to  the  ground behind a patch of hazel brush, and
through the network of the bushes he saw the alien outlined against the sky,
its head pivoting back  and  forth to sweep the slope below, the weapon half
lifted and set for instant use.
     Enoch lay frozen, with his outstretched hand gripping  the rifle. There
was a  slash  of  pain  across one set of knuckles  and  he knew that he had
skinned them on the rock as he had dived for cover.
     The  alien dropped  from  sight  behind  the  boulders and Enoch slowly
pulled the rifle back to where  he would be able to  handle it should a shot
present itself.
     Although,  he wondered, would he dare to fire? Would he dare to kill an
alien?
     The alien could have killed  him back there at the station, when he had
been knocked silly by the dreadful stench. But it had not killed him; it had
fled instead.  Was  it,  he wondered,  that the  creature had been so  badly
frightened that all that it could think of had been to get away? Or had  it,
perhaps, been as  reluctant  to  kill a  station keeper as he himself was to
kill an alien?
     He searched the rocks above him and there was no motion and not a thing
to see.  He must move up that slope, and  quickly, he told himself, for time
would work against him and to the advantage of the alien. Darkness could not
be more than thirty minutes off  and before dark had fallen  this issue must
be settled. If the alien got away, there'd be little chance to find it.
     And why, asked a second self, standing to one  side, should  you  worry
about alien complications? For are  you yourself not  prepared to inform the
Earth that  there are alien  peoples in  the galaxy and to  hand  to  Earth,
unauthorized,  as much of that alien lore and learning as may be within your
power? Why should  you  have stopped  this  alien from the  wrecking of  the
station, insuring its  isolation for many years-for  if that had  been done,
then you'd have been free  to do  as  you might wish with all that is within
the  station? It would have  worked to your advantage to have allowed events
to run their course.
     <I>But I couldn't</I>, Enoch cried inside  himself. <I>Don't you see  I couldn't?
Don't you understand?</I>
     A rustle in the bushes to his left brought him around with the rifle up
and ready.
     And there was Lucy Fisher, not more than twenty feet away.
     "Get out of here!" he shouted, forgetting that she could not hear him.
     But she did not seem  to notice.  She motioned  to the left and  made a
sweeping motion with her hand and pointed toward the boulders.
     <I>Go away</I>, he said underneath his breath. <I>Go away from here</I>.
     And  made  rejection motions  to indicate that she should go back, that
this was no place for her.
     She shook her head and sprang away, in a running crouch, moving further
to the left and up the slope.
     Enoch scrambled to his feet, lunging after her,  and as he  did the air
behind him made a frying sound and there was the sharp bite of ozone in  the
air.
     He hit the ground, instinctively, and farther  down the slope he  saw a
square yard of ground that boiled  and steamed, with the ground cover  swept
away by a fierce heat and  the  very soil  and rock turned  into a simmering
puping.
     A  laser,  Enoch thought. The alien's weapon  was  a laser,  packing  a
terrific punch in a narrow beam of light.
     He  gathered  himself  together and made a short rush up the  hillside,
throwing himself prone behind a twisted birch clump.
     The air made the frying sound again and there was an instant's blast of
heat  and the ozone once  again. Over on the reverse slope a patch of ground
was  steaming.  Ash floated  down and settled on  Enoch's arms. He flashed a
quick glance upward and saw that the top half of the birch  clump  was gone,
sheared off by the laser and reduced to ash. Tiny coils of smoke rose lazily
from the severed stumps.
     No matter what it may have  done, or  failed to  do, back there  at the
station,  the  alien now meant business. It knew that it was cornered and it
was playing vicious.
     Enoch hupled against the ground  and worried about  Lucy. He hoped that
she was safe. The  little  fool should have stayed  out of it.  This was  no
place for her. She shouldn't even have been out in the woods at this time of
day. She'd have old  Hank  out  looking  for  her  again,  thinking  she was
kidnapped. He wondered what the hell had gotten into her.
     The dusk  was deepening. Only the far peak  of  the treetops caught the
last rays of the sun. A coolness came stealing up the ravine from the valley
far below and there was a damp, lush smell that came out of the ground. From
some hipen hollow a whippoorwill called out mournfully.
     Enoch darted out from behind the birch  clump and rushed up  the slope.
He  reached  the  fallen  log  he'd picked as a barricade and threw  himself
behind  it. There  was no sign of the alien and there was  not  another shot
from the laser gun.
     Enoch studied the ground ahead. Two more rushes, one to that small pile
of rock and the next to the edge of the boulder area itself,  and he'd be on
top of the hiding alien. And once  he got there, he wondered, what was he to
do.
     Go in and rout the alien out, of course.
     There was no plan that could be made, no tactics that could be laid out
in advance. Once he got to the edge  of the boulders, he must play it all by
ear, taking advantage of any  break that might present itself  He  was  at a
disadvantage in that he must not kill the alien, but must capture it instead
and drag it back,  kicking and  screaming, if need be, to  the safety of the
station.
     Perhaps, here  in the open air,  it could not use its stench defense as
effectively as it  had in the confines of the station, and that, he thought,
might make it easier. He examined the clump of boulders from one edge to the
other and there was nothing that might help him to locate the alien.
     Slowly he began to snake around, getting ready for the next rush up the
slope, moving carefully so that no sound would betray him.
     Out  of  the tail  of  his eye he  caught  the moving shadow that  came
flowing up the  slope. Swiftly  he sat up, swinging the rifle. But before he
could  bring the muzzle  round, the  shadow  was upon him, bearing him back,
flat upon the ground,  with one great  splay-fingered hand clamped  upon his
mouth.
     "Ulysses!" Enoch gurgled, but the fearsome shape only, hissed at him in
a warning sound.
     Slowly the weight shifted off him and the hand slid from his mouth.
     Ulysses gestured toward the boulder pile and Enoch noped.
     Ulysses crept closer and lowered his  head toward Enoch's. He whispered
with his  mouth inches from the Earthman's ear: "The  Talisman!  He has  the
Talisman!"
     "The Talisman!" Enoch cried aloud, trying to  strangle off the cry even
as  he made it, remembering that he should make  no sound to let the watcher
up above know where they might be.
     From  the ridge above  a loose stone rattled as it  was  dislodged  and
began to roll, bouncing down the  slope. Enoch hunkered closer to the ground
behind the fallen log.
     "Down!" he 'shouted to Ulysses. "Down! He has a gun."
     But Ulysses' hand gripped him by the shoulder.
     "Enoch!" he cried. "Enoch, look!"
     Enoch jerked himself erect  and atop the pile of rock, dark against the
skyline, were two grappling figures.
     "Lucy!" he shouted.
     For one of them was Lucy and the other was the alien.
     She sneaked up on him, he thought. The damn little fool, she sneaked up
on him! While the alien had been distracted with watching the slope, she had
slipped up close and  then  had tackled him. She had a club of  some sort in
her  hand,  an old dead branch,  perhaps,  and it was raised above her head,
ready for a stroke, but the alien had a  grip upon her arm and she could not
strike.
     "Shoot," said Ulysses, in a flat, dead voice.
     Enoch raised  the rifle and had trouble with the sights because  of the
deepening darkness.  And  they were  so  close together! They were too close
together.
     "Shoot!" yelled Ulysses.
     "I can't," sobbed Enoch. "It's too dark to shoot."
     "You have to shoot,"  Ulysses said, his voice tense and hard. "You have
to take the chance."
     Enoch raised the rifle once again and the sights seemed clearer now and
he knew the trouble was not so much  the darkness as that shot which he  had
missed  back there in the  world of the honking  thing that had  strode  its
world on stilts. If he had missed then, he could as well miss now.
     The bead came to rest upon the  head  of the ratlike creature, and then
the head bobbed away, but was bobbing back again.
     "Shoot!" Ulysses yelled.
     Enoch squeezed the trigger and  the rifle coughed and up atop the rocks
the  creature stood  for  a second  with only half a head  and with tattered
gouts  of  flesh  flying  briefly  like  dark  insects  zooming  against the
half-light of the western sky.
     Enoch dropped the gun and sprawled upon the earth, clawing his  fingers
into the  thin and  mossy soil, sick with the  thought  of  what  could have
happened,  weak  with the thankfulness that it  had not happened,  that  the
years on that fantastic rifle range had at last paid off.
     How strange it is, he thought,  how so many senseless things  shape our
destiny. For the  rifle  range had been a senseless thing, as senseless as a
billiard table or a game of cards-designed for one thing only, to please the
keeper of the station. And yet the hours he'd spent  there had shaped toward
this  hour and  end,  to  this  single instant on this restricted  slope  of
ground.
     The sickness drained away into  the earth beneath  him and a peace came
stealing  in upon  him-the peace of  trees and woodland  soil  and the first
faint hush of nightfall. As if the sky and stars and  very  space itself had
leaned close  above him and was whispering his essential  oneness with them.
And it seemed for a moment that he had grasped the  edge of some great truth
and with this truth  had  come a  comfort and  a  greatness he'd never known
before.
     "Enoch," Ulysses whispered. "Enoch, my brother..."
     There was something  like a hipen  sob in the alien's voice and he  had
never, until this moment, called the Earthman brother.
     Enoch  pulled  himself to  his  knees  and up  on  the pile of  tumbled
boulders was  a soft and  wondrous light,  a soft and gentle light, as if  a
giant firefly had turned on its lamp and had not turned it off, but had left
it burning.
     The light was moving down across the rocks toward them and he could see
Lucy  moving with  the light, as  if  she were  walking  toward  them with a
lantern in her hand.
     Ulysses' hand  reached out of  the darkness and closed hard  on Enoch's
arm.
     "Do you see?" he asked.
     "Yes, I see. What is ..."
     "It is the Talisman," Ulysses said, enraptured, his  breath  rasping in
his throat. "And she is our new  custodian. The one we've hunted through the
years."

        33
     You did not become accustomed to it, Enoch told himself as they tramped
up through the  woods. There was not a moment you were not aware of  it.  It
was something  that you  wanted to  hug close  against yourself  and hold it
there forever, and even when it was gone from you, you'd probably not forget
it, ever.
     It was  something that  was past all  description -  a mother's love, a
father's pride, the adoration of a  sweetheart,  the closeness of a comrade,
it was all of  these and more. It made the farthest distance near and turned
the complex simple and  it swept away  all fear and sorrow, for all of there
being a certain  feeling of deep  sorrow in it, as if  one  might feel  that
never in his  lifetime  would he know  an  instant  like this, and  that  in
another instant he would lose it  and  never  would be able  to hunt it  out
again.  But  that  was not the way it was,  for this ascendant instant  kept
going on and on.
     Lucy walked  between them  and she  held  the  bag that  contained  the
Talisman close against her breast, with her  two arms  clasped about it, and
Enoch,  looking  at her, in the soft glow  of its  light, could not help but
think of a little girl carrying her beloved pussy cat.
     "Never for a  century,"  said  Ulysses,  "perhaps for  many  centuries,
perhaps never, has it glowed so  well. I myself cannot remember  when it was
like this. It is wonderful, is it not?"
     "Yes," said Enoch. "It is wonderful."
     "Now  we shall  be one again," Ulysses said. "Now we  shall feel again.
Now we shall be a people instead of many people..."
     "But the creature that had it ..."
     "A clever one," Ulysses said. "He was holding it for ransom."
     "It had been stolen, then."
     "We do not know all the circumstances," Ulysses told him. "We will find
out, of course."
     They  tramped on in silence  through  the woods and far in the east one
could see, through  the  treetops, the first  flush in the sky that foretold
the rising moon.
     "There is something," Enoch said.
     "Ask me," said Ulysses.
     "How could  that creature back  there carry it and  not feel  - feel no
part of it? For if he could have, he would not have stolen it."
     "There is only one in  many billions," Ulysses said, "who can - how  do
you say it? -  tune in on it, perhaps. To you and I it would be  nothing. It
would not respond  to  us. We could hold it in our  hands forever and  there
would nothing happen. But let that one in many  billions lay a finger on  it
and  it becomes alive. There  is a certain rapport,  a sensitivity - I don't
know  how to  say  it - that forms a bridge between this strange machine and
the  cosmic spiritual  force. It is not the machine, itself, you understand,
that reaches out and taps the spiritual force.  It is the living  creature's
mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us."
     A machine, a mechanism, no more than  a tool - technological brother to
the  hoe, the wrench,  the  hammer - and yet  as far a cry from these as the
human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this
planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say
that this  was as far  as a tool could  go, that it was  the ultimate in the
ingenuity  possessed  by  any brain. But that would be  a dangerous  way  of
thinking,  for  perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no
such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature  or
any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and  say,  this is as
far  as  we  can  go, there is no use of trying  to go farther. For each new
development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so  many
other roads to  travel,  that  with  each step one took down  any given road
there  were more paths  to  follow. There'd never be an end, he thought - no
end to anything.
     They  reached the edge of  the field and headed up across it toward the
station. From its upper edge came the sound of running feet.
     "Enoch!" a voice shouted out of the darkness. "Enoch, is that you?"
     Enoch recognized the voice.
     "Yes, Winslowe. What is wrong?"
     The mailman  burst out of  the  darkness and stopped,  panting with his
running, at the edge of light.
     "Enoch, they are coming!  A  couple  of carloads of  them. But I  put a
crimp in  them. Where the road turns off into your lane - that narrow place,
you know. I dumped  two pounds of roofing nails along the ruts. That'll hold
them for a while."
     "Roofing nails?" Ulysses asked.
     "It's a mob," Enoch told him. "They are after me. The nails ...
     "Oh, I see," Ulysses said "The deflation of the tires."
     Winslowe  took a slow step  closer, his gaze riveted on the glow of the
shielded Talisman.
     "That's Lucy Fisher, ain't it?"
     "Of course it is," said Enoch.
     "Her  old man came roaring into town just  a while ago and said she was
gone again. Up until then everything  had quieted down and it was all right.
But old Hank,  he got them stirred up again. So I went down to  the hardware
store and got them roofing nails and I beat them here."
     "This mob?" Ulysses asked. "I don't ..."
     Winslowe  interrupted him,  gasping in his  eagerness  to tell all  his
information. "That ginseng man is up there, waiting at the house for you. He
has a panel truck."
     "That," said Enoch, "would be Lewis with the Hazer's body."
     "He is some upset," said Winslowe. "He said you were expecting him."
     "Perhaps," suggested  Ulysses,  "we shouldn't just be standing here. It
seems  to my poor intellect  that  many things,  indeed, may be coming to  a
crisis."
     "Say,"  the mailman yelled, "what is going  on here? What is that thing
Lucy has and who's this fellow with you?"
     "Later," Enoch told him.  "I'll tell you later. There's no time to tell
you now."
     "But, Enoch, there's the mob."
     "I'll  deal with them," said Enoch  grimly, "when  I have to deal  with
them. Right now there's something more important."
     They ran  up the slope, the four of them,  dodging  through the waist -
high clumps  of  weeds  Ahead of  them  the station reared dark  and angular
against the evening sky.
     "They're down there at the turnoff," Winslowe gasped, wheezing with his
running.  "That flash of light down the ridge. That was the headlights  of a
car."
     They reached the edge of the yard and ran toward  the house. The  black
bulk of the panel truck glimmered in the glow cast by the Talisman. A figure
detached itself from the shadow of the truck and hurried out toward them.
     "Is that you, Wallace?"
     "Yes," said Enoch. "I'm sorry that I wasn't here."
     "I was a bit upset," said Lewis, "when I didn't find you waiting."
     "Something unforeseen," said Enoch. "Something that must  be taken care
of."
     "The body of the honored one?" Ulysses asked. "It is in the truck?"
     Lewis noped. "I am happy that we can restore it."
     "We'll have to carry him down to  the orchard," Enoch  said. "You can't
get a car in there."
     "The other time," Ulysses said, "you were the one who carried him."
     Enoch noped.
     "My friend," the alien said, "I wonder if  on this occasion  I could be
allowed the honor."
     "Why, yes, of course," said Enoch. "He would like it that way."
     And the words came to his tongue, but he choked them back, for it would
not  have done to say them - the words of thanks for lifting  from  him  the
necessity of complete  recompense, for the  gesture which released  him from
the utter letter of the law.
     At his elbow, Winslowe said: "They are coming. I can hear them down the
road."
     He was right.
     From down the road came the soft sound of footsteps paping in the dust,
not hurrying, with no need to  hurry, the insulting and  deliberate treading
of a monster so certain of its prey that it need not hurry.
     Enoch swung around and  half  lifted his rifle, training it toward  the
paping that came out of the dark.
     Behind him, Ulysses spoke softly:  "Perhaps it would be most  proper to
bear him to the grave in the full glory and unshielded light of our restored
Talisman."
     "She can't hear you," Enoch  said.  "You must remember she is deaf. You
will have to show her."
     But even as he said  it,  a blaze leaped out that was  blinding in  its
brightness.
     With  a strangled cry  Enoch half turned back  to face the little group
that stood  beside the truck, and the bag that had enclosed the Talisman, he
saw, lay at Lucy's feet and she held the glowing brightness high and proudly
so that it spread its light across the yard and  the ancient house, and some
of it as well spilled out into the field.
     There was a quietness. As if the entire world had caught its breath and
stood  attentive and  in awe,  waiting  for a  sound that did not come, that
would never come but would always be expected.
     And with the quietness  came  an abiding  sense of peace that seemed to
seep into the very fiber of  one's being. It was no synthetic thing - not as
if someone  had invoked  a  peace and peace  then  was allowed  to exist  by
suffrance. It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came
with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost
- like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about
you, and there  was the feeling that it was not only here but that the peace
extended on and out in all directions, to the  farthest reaches of infinity,
and that it had a depth which would enable it to endure until the final gasp
of all eternity.
     Slowly, remembering, Enoch  turned back  to face  the field and the men
were there,  at  the edge of the light cast  by the Talisman, a gray, hupled
group,  like a pack of chastened wolves that slunk at the faint periphery of
a campfire's light.
     And as  he  watched,  they melted back - back into the deeper dark from
which they had paped in the dust track of the road.
     Except for one who turned and  bolted, plunging  down the hill  in  the
darkness toward the woods, howling in mapened terror like a frightened dog.
     "There goes Hank," said Winslowe. "That is Hank running down the hill."
     "I am sorry that we frightened him," said Enoch soberly. "No man should
be afraid of this."
     "It  is himself that he  is frightened of," the mailman said. "He lives
with a terror in him."
     And that was true, thought Enoch. That was the  way  with  Man;  it had
always been that way. He had carried terror  with him.  And the thing he was
afraid of had always been himself.

        34
     The grave was filled  and  mounded  and the five of  them  stood for  a
moment  more,  listening  to the  restless wind that stirred in  the  moon -
drenched  apple  orchard, while from far away, down in the hollows above the
river valley, the whippoorwills talked  back  and forth  through the  silver
night.
     In the moonlight  Enoch tried  to read the graven line upon the rough -
hewn  tombstone, but there was not light  enough. Although there was no need
to read it; it was in his mind:
     <I>Here  lies  one from a distant  star, but the soil is not alien to him,
for in death he belongs to the universe.</I>
     When  you wrote that, the Hazer diplomat had told him, just  the  night
before, you wrote  as one  of us. And he had not said so, but  the Vegan had
been wrong. For it was not a Vegan sentiment alone; it was human, too.
     The  words were chiseled awkwardly and there was  a  mistake  or two in
spelling, for the Hazer language  was not  an easy one to master. The  stone
was softer than the marble or the granite most commonly used for gravestones
and the lettering would not last. In a few more years the weathering  of sun
and rain and frost would blur the characters,  and  in some years after that
they would  be entirely gone, with no more than the  roughness  of the stone
remaining to  show that words  had  once been written there. But it  did not
matter, Enoch thought, for the words were graven on more than stone alone.
     He looked across  the grave at Lucy. The Talisman was  in its bag  once
more  and  the glow  was softer.  She  still  held it clasped tight  against
herself and her face was still  exalted and unnoticing - as if she no longer
lived in the  present world,  but had entered into  some  other place,  some
other far dimension where she dwelled alone and was forgetful of all past.
     "Do you think," Ulysses asked, "that she will  go with us? Do you think
that we can have her? Will the Earth..."
     "The Earth,"  said Enoch, "has not  a thing to say. We Earth people are
free agents. It is up to her."
     "You think that she will go?"
     "I  think so," Enoch said. "I think maybe this has been the moment  she
had sought for all her life. I  wonder if she might not have sensed it, even
with no Talisman."
     For she always had been  in touch with something outside  of human ken.
She  had something in her no other  human had. You sensed  it, but you could
not name  it,  for there was no name for  this  thing she had.  And she  had
fumbled with  it, trying to use it, not knowing how to  use it, charming off
the warts  and healing poor  hurt butterflies and only God  knew  what other
acts that she performed unseen.
     "Her parent?" Ulysses asked. "The howling one that ran away from us?"
     "I'll handle him," said Lewis.  "I'll have a talk with him.  I know him
fairly well."
     "You want her to go back with you to Galactic Central?" Enoch asked.
     "If she will," Ulysses said. "Central must be told at once."
     "And from there throughout the galaxy?"
     "Yes," Ulysses said. "We need her very badly."
     "Could we, I wonder, borrow her for a day or two."
     "Borrow her?"
     "Yes," said Enoch. "For we need her, too. We need her worst of all."
     "Of course," Ulysses said.  "But I don't ..." "Lewis," Enoch asked, "do
you think our government -  the  Secretary of  State,  perhaps  -  might  be
persuaded to appoint one  Lucy Fisher  as a member  of  our peace conference
delegation?"
     Lewis  stammered, made a full stop, then began again: "I think it could
possibly be managed."
     "Can  you  imagine," Enoch  asked, "the  impact  of this  girl and  the
Talisman at the conference table?"
     "I think I can," said Lewis. "But the Secretary  undoubtedly would want
to talk with you before he arrived at his decision."
     Enoch half turned toward  Ulysses, but  he did  not need to phrase  his
question.
     "By all means," Ulysses said to Lewis. "Let me know and I'll  sit in on
the  meeting. And you  might tell the good Secretary, too, that it would not
be a bad idea to begin the formation of a world committee."
     "A world committee?"
     "To  arrange,"  Ulysses  said, "for the  Earth becoming  one of us.  We
cannot accept a custodian, can we, from an outside planet?"

        35
     In  the  moonlight the  tumbled boulder pile gleamed whitely, like  the
skeleton of  some  prehistoric  beast. For here,  near the edge of the cliff
that towered above  the  river, the heavy  trees  thinned out and, the rocky
point stood open to the sky.
     Enoch stood  beside one of  the massive boulders and gazed down at  the
hupled figure that lay among the rocks. Poor,  tattered bungler, he thought,
dead so  far from  home and, so far as he, himself, must be concerned, to so
little purpose
     Although  perhaps neither poor  nor  tattered, for in  that  brain, now
broken  and spattered beyond  recovery, must  surely have lain  a  scheme of
greatness - the kind  of scheme that the  brain of an  earthly Alexander  or
Xerxes  or Napoleon may  have  held, a dream of  some great power, cynically
conceived, to be attained and held at whatever cost, the dimensions of it so
grandiose that it shoved aside and canceled out all moral considerations.
     He tried momentarily  to imagine what  the scheme  might  be, but knew,
even as  he  tested  his imagination, how  foolish it was to try,  for there
would  be  factors,  he  was   sure,   that   he  would  not  recognize  and
considerations that might lie beyond his understanding.
     But however that  might be, something had gone wrong,  for in  the plan
itself Earth could  have had no place other than as a hideout which could be
used if  trouble struck.  This  creature's lying here, then,  was a part  of
desperation, a last - ditch gamble that had not worked out.
     And, Enoch thought, it was ironic that the  key  of  failure lay in the
fact that the creature,  in its fleeing, had carried the Talisman  into  the
backyard of  a  sensitive,  and on  a planet, too,  where no  one would have
thought  to look for a  sensitive. For, thinking back on  it, there could be
little doubt that Lucy had sensed the Talisman and  had been drawn to  it as
truly  as  a magnet  would attract  a piece  of steel. She had known nothing
else, perhaps, than  that the Talisman had been there  and was something she
must have, that it was  something she had  waited for in all her loneliness,
without knowing what it was or without hope of finding it. Like  a child who
sees, quite  supenly, a shiny, glorious bauble on a Christmas tree and knows
that it's the grandest thing on Earth and that it must be hers.
     This  creature  lying here,  thought  Enoch,  must  have been able  and
resourceful.  For it would  have taken great  ability and resourcefulness to
have stolen the Talisman to start with, to keep it  hipen for years, to have
penetrated into the secrets and the files of Galactic Central. Would it have
been possible, he wondered, if the Talisman had been in effective operation?
With an energetic Talisman would the moral laxity and the driving greed been
possible to motivate the deed?
     But that  was ended now.  The  Talisman  had been  restored  and a  new
custodian  had  been found - a  deaf -  mute girl of  Earth, the humblest of
humans. And  there would be peace on Earth and in time  the Earth would join
the confraternity of the galaxy.
     There were no problems now, he thought. No  decisions  to be made. Lucy
had taken the decisions from the hands of everyone.
     The station would remain  and he could unpack  the  boxes he had packed
and  put the  journals back on the  shelves again. He could go  back  to the
station once again and settle down and carry on his work.
     <I>I am sorry</I>, he told the  hupled shape that lay among the boulders. <I>I am
sorry that mine was the hand that had to do it to you.</I>
     He turned  away and walked out to where the cliff dropped straight down
to  the river flowing at its  foot. He  raised  the rifle and  held it for a
moment motionless and then he threw it out and watched it fall, spinning end
for end, the moonlight glinting off the  barrel, saw the tiny splash it made
as it struck the water. And far below, he heard the smug, contented gurgling
of the water as it flowed past this cliff and went  on, to the further  ends
of Earth.
     There  would be peace on Earth, he thought; there would be no war. With
Lucy at the conference table, there could be no thought of war. Even if some
ran howling from the fear inside themselves, a fear and guilt so great  that
it overrode the glory and the comfort of the Talisman, there  still could be
no war.
     But it was a long trail yet, a long lonesome way, before the brightness
of real peace would live in the hearts of man.
     Until no man  ran howling, wild  with  fear  (any kind  of fear), would
there be actual peace. Until the last man threw away his weapon (any sort of
weapon), the tribe of  Man could not  be at  peace. And a  rifle, Enoch told
himself, was  the  least of the weapons of the  Earth,  the  least of  man's
inhumanity  to man,  no more than a symbol of all  the other and more deadly
weapons.
     He stood on the rim  of the cliff and  looked out across the river  and
the dark  shadow  of the wooded valley.  His hands felt strangely empty with
the rifle gone, but it seemed that somewhere, back there just a way, he  had
stepped into another field of time, as if an age or day had dropped away and
he had come into a place that was shining and brand new and unsullied by any
past mistakes.
     The river rolled below him and the river did not care. Nothing mattered
to the river. It would take the tusk of mastodon,  the skull of  sabertooth,
the rib cage  of a man,  the dead and sunken  tree, the thrown rock or rifle
and  would  swallow each  of  them and cover them in  mud or  sand  and roll
gurgling over them, hiding them from sight.
     A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years
to come there  might  be  no  river - but in a million years from  now there
would be, if  not Man,  at  least a caring thing. And that was the secret of
the universe, Enoch told himself - a thing that went on caring.
     He  turned  slowly  from  the  cliff  edge  and  clambered through  the
boulders, to go walking up the  hill. He heard the  tiny  scurrying of small
life  rustling  through the fallen  leaves  and  once there  was  the sleepy
peeping  of an awakened  bird and through the entire woods lay the peace and
comfort of that glowing light -  not so intense, not so deep and  bright and
so  wonderful as when  it actually had been there, but a breath of it  still
left.
     He came to the edge of the woods and climbed the field and ahead of him
the station stood foursquare upon its ridgetop. And it seemed that it was no
longer a station only,  but his home as  well. Many years ago  it had been a
home  and nothing more and then  it had become  a way station to the galaxy.
But now, although way station still, it was home again.

        36
     He came into  the station and the place was  quiet  and just  a  little
ghostly in the quietness of it. A lamp  burned on his  desk  and over on the
coffee table the little pyramid of spheres was flashing, throwing its many -
colored lights, like  the crystal balls they'd used  in the Roaring Twenties
to turn a dance hall into a place of magic. The tiny  flickering colors went
flitting all about  the room, like the dance of a  zany band  of Technicolor
fireflies.
     He stood for a  moment, indecisive, not knowing  what  to do. There was
something missing and all at once  he  realized what  it was. During all the
years there'd been a rifle to hang upon its  pegs or to lay across the desk.
And now there was no rifle.
     He'd have to settle down, he told himself,  and get back  to work. He'd
have to unpack and put the stuff away. He'd have to get the journals written
and catch up with his reading. There was a lot to do.
     Ulysses  and Lucy  had left an hour  or two before, bound  for Galactic
Central, but the <I>feeling</I> of the Talisman still seemed to linger in the room.
Although, perhaps, he  thought, not  in the room at all, but inside himself.
Perhaps it was a feeling that he'd carry with him no matter where he went.
     He walked slowly across the room and  sat down on the sofa. In front of
him the pyramid of spheres was  splashing out its crystal shower of  colors.
He  reached out a hand to pick it up, then drew it slowly back. What was the
use, he  asked  himself, of  examining it  again? If  he had not learned its
secret the many times before, why should he expect to now?
     A pretty thing, he thought, but useless.
     He  wondered  how Lucy might be getting on and knew she was all  right.
She'd get along, he told himself anywhere she went.
     Instead of sitting here, he should be getting back to work. There was a
lot of catching up to do. And his time would not be his own from now on, for
the Earth would be  pounding  at the  door. There  would be  conferences and
meetings and a lot  of other things and  in a few  hours more the newspapers
might be here. But  before it happened, Ulysses  would be back  to help him,
and perhaps there would be others, too.
     In just  a little while he'd  rustle up some food and then he'd get  to
work. If he worked far into the night, he could get a good deal done.
     Lonely  nights, he told himself,  were good for work. And it was lonely
now, when it should not be lonely. For  he no  longer  was  alone, as he had
thought he was alone just a few short hours before. Now he had the Earth and
the galaxy, Lucy and Ulysses, Winslowe and Lewis and the old philosopher out
in  the apple  orchard.  He rose and walked to  the desk  and picked up  the
statuette  Winslowe had carved of him. He held it beneath the desk  lamp and
turned it  slowly in his hands. There was, he  saw now, a loneliness in that
figure, too - the essential loneliness of a man who walked alone.
     But  he'd had to walk alone. There'd been no other way.  There had been
no choice. It had  been a one - man job. And now the job was - no, not done,
for there still was much that  must  be done. But  the first phase of it now
was over and the second phase was starting.
     He set  the statuette back on the desk  and  remembered that he had not
given Winslowe  the piece of wood  the Thuban traveler had  brought.  Now he
could tell  Winslowe where all the wood had come from. They could go through
the journals and find the  dates  and the origin of every  stick of it. That
would please old Winslowe.
     He heard the silken rustle and swung swiftly round.
     "Mary!" he cried.
     She stood just at the  edge  of shadow and the flitting colors from the
flashing pyramid made her  seem like someone who had stepped from fairyland.
And that was right, he was thinking wildly, for his lost fairyland was back.
     "I  had to come,"  she  said. "You were lonely, Enoch, and I  could not
stay away."
     She could not  stay away  - and that  might be true,  be  thought.  For
within the conditioning he'd set up  there  might have been  the inescapable
compulsion to come whenever she was needed.
     It was a trap, he thought, from which neither could  escape. There  was
no free will here, but  instead the deadly precision of this blind mechanism
he had shaped himself.
     She should not come to see him and perhaps she knew this as well as he,
but could not help herself. Would this be, he wondered, the way it would be,
forever and forever?
     He stood there, frozen, torn by the need of  her and  the emptiness  of
her unreality, and she was moving toward him.
     She was close to  him and in a moment she would stop, for  she knew the
rules as well as he; she, no more than he, could admit illusion.
     But she did not stop. She came so close that he could smell the apple -
blossom fragrance of her. She put out a hand and laid it on his arm.
     It  was no shadow touch  and  it was no shadow hand.  He could feel the
pressure of her fingers and the coolness of them.
     He stood rigid, with her hand upon his arm.
     The flashing light! he thought. The pyramid of spheres!
     For now he remembered  who had given it  to him - one of those aberrant
races  of the  Alphard system. And it  had been from the  literature of that
system  that he had learned the art of fairyland. They had tried to help him
by giving  him the pyramid  and  he had  not understood.  There  had  been a
failure  of communication  - but that was  an easy  thing to happen.  In the
Babel of the galaxy, it was easy to misunderstand or simply not to know.
     For  the  pyramid  of spheres  was  a  wonderful,  and  yet  a  simple,
mechanism. It was the fixation agent that banished all illusion, that made a
fairyland  for real. You made something  as you wanted it and then turned on
the pyramid and you had what  you had made, as real  as if it had never been
illusion.
     Except, he thought, in some things you couldn't fool yourself. You knew
it was illusion, even if it should turn real.
     He reached out toward her  tentatively, but her  hand  dropped from his
arm and she took a slow step backward.
     In the silence of the  room - the terrible, lonely silence - they stood
facing one another while the  colored lights ran  like  playing mice as  the
pyramid of spheres twirled its everlasting rainbow.
     "I  am sorry,"  Mary  said,  "but  it isn't  any  good.  We can't  fool
ourselves."
     He stood mute and shamed.
     "I waited for it," she said. "I thought and dreamed about it."
     "So did I," said Enoch. "I never thought that it would happen."
     And that was  it, of course. So long as it could  not happen, it  was a
thing to dream about. It was romantic and far  - off and impossible. Perhaps
it  had  been  romantic  only because  it had  been  so far  -  off  and  so
impossible.
     "As if a doll  had come to life," she said, "or a beloved  Tepy bear. I
am sorry, Enoch, but you could not love  a doll or a Tepy bear that had come
to life.  You always would remember them the way they  were before. The doll
with the silly, painted smile; the Tepy bear with the stuffing coming out of
it."
     "No!" cried Enoch. "No!"
     "Poor Enoch," she said. "It will be so bad for you. I wish that I could
help. You'll have so long to live with it."
     "But you!" he cried. "But you? What can you do now?"
     It had been she, he thought, who  had  the courage. The courage that it
took to face things as they were.
     How, he wondered, had she sensed it? How could she have known?
     "I shall go away," she said. "I shall not come back. Even when you need
me, I shall not come back. There is no other way."
     "But you can't go away," he said. "You are trapped the same as I."
     "Isn't it strange,"  she said,  "how  it  happened  to us.  Both of  us
victims of illusion ..."
     "But you," he said. "Not you."
     She noped gravely. "I,  the same as  you. You can't  love  the doll you
made or I  the  toymaker. But each of  us thought  we did; each of us  still
think we should and are guilty and miserable when we find we can't."
     "We could try," said Enoch. "If you would only stay."
     "And end up by hating you? And, worse than that, by your hating me. Let
us keep the guilt and misery. It is better than the hate."
     She  moved  swiftly  and the pyramid  of  spheres was  in her  hand and
lifted.
     "No, not that!" 'he shouted. "No, Mary ..."
     The pyramid  flashed,  spinning  in the  air, and  crashed against  the
fireplace. The  flashing lights went out. Something - glass? metal? stone? -
tinkled on the floor.
     "Mary!" Enoch cried, striding forward in the dark.
     But there was no one there.
     "Mary!" he shouted, and the shouting was a whimper.
     She was gone and she would not be back.
     Even when he needed her, she would not be back.
     He stood quietly in the dark and silence, and the voice of a century of
living seemed to speak to him in a silent language.
     All things are hard, it said. There is nothing easy.
     There had been  the  farm girl  living down the road,  and the southern
beauty  who  had  watched him pass her gate,  and now there was  Mary,  gone
forever from him.
     He turned heavily in the room and moved forward, groping for the table.
He found it and switched on the light.
     He stood beside the  table and looked  about the room. In  this  corner
where he stood there once had been a kitchen, and there, where the fireplace
stood, the living room, and  it all had  changed - it had been changed for a
long time now. But he still could see it as if it were only yesterday.
     All the days were gone and all the people in them.
     Only he was left.
     He had lost his world. He had left his world behind him.
     And, likewise,  on this day, had  all the  others - all the humans that
were alive this moment.
     They might not know it yet, but they, too, had left their  world behind
them. It would never be the same again.
     You said good  bye to so many  things, to  so  many  loves, to  so many
dreams.
     "Good bye, Mary," he said. Forgive me and God keep you."
     He sat down  at  the table and pulled the journal that lay upon its top
in front of him. He flipped it open, searching for the pages he must fill.
     He had work to do.
     Now he was ready for it.
     He had said his last good bye.