Way Station Page 15

  “It’s too much for one man…”

  “Something hopeful,” Ulysses said, “that you might consider. The method is offered only to those races which seem to us to be worth the saving.”

  “You have to give me time,” said Enoch.

  But he knew there was no time.

  23

  A man would have a job and suddenly be unable to perform it. Nor could the men around him carry on their jobs. For they would not have the knowledge or the backgrounds to do the tasks that they had been doing. They might try, of course—they might keep on trying for a time, but perhaps for not too long. And because the jobs could not be done, the business or the corporation or factory or whatever it might be, would cease its operation. Although the going out of business would not be a formal nor a legal thing. It would simply stop. And not entirely because the jobs could not be done, because no one could muster the business sense to keep it operating, but also because the transportation and communications which made the business possible also would have stopped.

  Locomotives could not be operated, nor could planes and ships, for there would be no one who would remember how to operate them. There would be men who at one time had possessed all the skills that had been necessary for their operation, but now the skills would have disappeared. There might be some who still would try, with tragic consequences. And there still might be a few who could vaguely remember how to operate the car or truck or bus, for they were simple things to run and it would be almost second nature for a man to drive them. But once they had broken down, there would be no one with the knowledge of mechanics to repair them and they’d not run again.

  In the space of a few hours’ time the human race would be stranded in a world where distance once again had come to be a factor. The world would grow the larger and the oceans would be barriers and a mile would be long once more. And in a few days’ time there would be a panic and a huddling and a fleeing and a desperation in the face of a situation that no one could comprehend.

  How long, Enoch wondered, would it take a city to use the last of the food stacked in its warehouses and then begin to starve? What would happen when electricity stopped flowing through the wires? How long, under a situation such as this, would a silly symbolic piece of paper or a minted coin still retain its value?

  Distribution would break down; commerce and industry would die; government would become a shadow, with neither the means nor the intelligence to keep it functioning; communications would cease; law and order would disintegrate; the world would sink into a new barbaric framework and would begin to slowly readjust. That readjustment would go on for years and in the process of it there would be death and pestilence and untold misery and despair. In time it would work out and the world would settle down to its new way of life, but in the process of shaking down there’d be many who would die and many others who would lose everything that had spelled out life for them and the purpose of that life.

  But would it, bad as it might be, be as bad as war?

  Many would die of cold and hunger and disease (for medicine would go the way of all the rest), but millions would not be annihilated in the fiery breath of nuclear reaction. There would be no poison dust raining from the skies and the waters still would be as pure and fresh as ever and the soil remain as fertile. There still would be a chance, once the initial phases of the change had passed, for the human race to go on living and rebuild society.

  If one were certain, Enoch told himself, that there would be a war, that war was inescapable, then the choice might not be hard to make. But there was always the possibility that the world could avoid war, that somehow a frail, thin peace could be preserved, and in such a case the desperate need of the galactic cure for war would be unnecessary. Before one could decide, he told himself, one must be sure; and how could one be sure? The chart lying in the desk drawer said there would be a war; many of the diplomats and observers felt that the upcoming peace conference might serve no other purpose than to trigger war. Yet there was no surety.

  And even if there were, Enoch asked himself, how could one man—one man, alone—take it upon himself to play the role of God for the entire race? By what right did one man make a decision that affected all the rest, all the billions of others? Could he, if he did, ever be able, in the years to come, to justify his choice?

  How could a man decide how bad war might be and, in comparison, how bad stupidity? The answer seemed to be he couldn’t. There was no way to measure possible disaster in either circumstance.

  After a time, perhaps, a choice either way could be rationalized. Given time, a conviction might develop that would enable a man to arrive at some sort of decision which, while it might not be entirely right, he nevertheless could square with his conscience.

  Enoch got to his feet and walked to the window. The sound of his footsteps echoed hollowly in the station. He looked at his watch and it was after midnight.

  There were races in the galaxy, he thought, who could reach a quick and right decision on almost any question, cutting straight across all the tangled lines of thought, guided by rules of logic that were more specific than anything the human race might have. That would be good, of course, in the sense that it made decision possible, but in arriving at decision would it not tend to minimize, perhaps ignore entirely, some of those very facets of the situation that might mean more to the human race than the decision would itself?

  Enoch stood at the window and stared out across the moonlit fields that ran down to the dark line of the woods. The clouds had blown away and the night was peaceful. This particular spot, he thought, always would be peaceful, for it was off the beaten track, distant from any possible target in atomic war. Except for the remote possibility of some ancient and non-recorded, long forgotten minor conflict in prehistoric days, no battle ever had been fought here or ever would be fought. And yet it would not escape the common fate of poisoned soil and water if the world should suddenly, in a fateful hour of fury, unleash the might of its awesome weapons. Then the skies would be filled with atomic ash, which would come sifting down, and it would make little difference where a man might be. Soon or late, the war would come to him, if not in a flash of monstrous energy, then in the snow of death falling from the skies.

  He walked from the window to the desk and gathered up the newspapers that had come in the morning mail and put them in a pile, noticing as he did so that Ulysses had forgotten to take with him the stack of papers which had been saved for him. Ulysses was upset, he told himself, or he’d not have forgotten the papers. God save us both, he thought; for we have our troubles.

  It had been a busy day. He had done no more, he realized, than read two or three of the stories in the Times, all touching on the calling of the conference. The day had been too full, too full of direful things.

  For a hundred years, he thought, things had gone all right. There had been the good moments and the bad, but by and large his life had gone on serenely and without alarming incident. Then today had dawned and all the serene years had come tumbling down all about his ears.

  There once had been a hope that Earth could be accepted as a member of the galactic family, that he might serve as the emissary to gain that recognition. But now that hope was shattered, not only by the fact that the station might be closed, but that its very closing would be based upon the barbarism of the human race. Earth was being used as a whipping boy, of course, in galactic politics, but the brand, once placed, could not soon be lifted. And in any event, even if it could be lifted, now the planet stood revealed as one against which Galactic Central, in the hope of saving it, might be willing to apply a drastic and degrading action.

  There was something he could salvage out of all of it, he knew. He could remain an Earthman and turn over to the people of the Earth the information that he had gathered through the years and written down, in meticulous detail, along with personal happenings and impressions and much other trivia, in the long rows of record books which stood on the shelves against the wal
l. That and the alien literature he had obtained and read and hoarded. And the gadgets and the artifacts which came from other worlds. From all of this the people of the Earth might gain something which could help them along the road that eventually would take them to the stars and to that further knowledge and that greater understanding which would be their heritage—perhaps the heritage and right of all intelligence. But the wait for that day would be long—longer now, because of what had happened on this day, than it had ever been before. And the information that he held, gathered painfully over the course of almost a century, was so inadequate compared with that more complete knowledge which he could have gathered in another century (or a thousand years) that it seemed a pitiful thing to offer to his people.

  If there could only be more time, he thought. But, of course, there never was. There was not the tune right now and there would never be. No matter how many centuries he might be able to devote, there’d always be so much more knowledge than he’d gathered at the moment that the little he had gathered would always seem a pittance.

  He sat down heavily in the chair before the desk and now, for the first time, he wondered how he’d do it—how he could leave Galactic Central, how he could trade the galaxy for a single planet, even if that planet still remained his own.

  He drove his haggard mind to find the answer and the mind could find no answer.

  One man alone, he thought.

  One man alone could not stand against both Earth and galaxy.

  24

  The sun streaming through the window woke him and he stayed where he was, not stirring for a moment, soaking in its warmth. There was a good, hard feeling to the sunlight, a reassuring touch, and for a moment he held off the worry and the questioning. But he sensed its nearness and he closed his eyes again. Perhaps if he could sleep some more it might go away and lose itself somewhere and not be there when he awakened later.

  But there was something wrong, something besides the worry and the questioning.

  His neck and shoulders ached and there was a strange stiffness in his body and the pillow was too hard.

  He opened his eyes again and pushed with his hands to sit erect and he was not in bed. He was sitting in a chair and his head, instead of resting on a pillow, had been laid upon the desk. He opened and shut his mouth to taste it, and it tasted just as bad as he knew it would.

  He got slowly to his feet, straightening and stretching, trying to work out the kinks that had tied themselves into joints and muscles. As he stood there, the worry and the trouble and the dreadful need of answers seeped back into him, from wherever they’d been hiding. But he brushed them to one side, not an entirely successful brush, but enough to make them retreat a little and crouch there, waiting to close in again.

  He went to the stove and looked for the coffeepot, then remembered that last night he’d set it on the floor beside the coffee table. He went to get it. The two cups still stood on the table, the dark brown dregs of coffee covering the bottoms of them. And in the mass of gadgets that Ulysses had pushed to one side to make room for the cups, the pyramid of spheres lay tilted on its side, but it still was sparkling and glinting, each successive sphere revolving in an opposite direction to its fellow spheres.

  Enoch reached out and picked it up. His fingers carefully explored the base upon which the spheres were set, seeking something—some lever, some indentation, some trip, some button—by which it might be turned either on or off. But there was nothing he could find. He should have known, he told himself, that there would be nothing. For he had looked before. And yet yesterday Lucy had done something that had set it operating and it still was operating. It had operated for more than twelve hours now and no results had been obtained. Check that, he thought—no results that could be recognized.

  He set it back on the table on its base and stacked the cups, one inside the other, and picked them up. He stooped to lift the coffeepot off the floor. But his eyes never left the pyramid of spheres.

  It was maddening, he told himself. There was no way to turn it on and yet, somehow, Lucy had turned it on. And now there was no way to turn it off—although it probably did not matter if it were off or on.

  He went back to the sink with the cups and coffeepot.

  The station was quiet—a heavy, oppressive quietness; although, he told himself, the impression of oppressiveness probably was no more than his imagination.

  He crossed the room to the message machine and the plate was blank. There had been no messages during the night. It was silly of him, he thought, to expect there would be, for if there were, the auditory signal would be functioning, would continue to sound off until he pushed the lever.

  Was it possible, he wondered, that the station might already have been abandoned, that whatever traffic that happened to be moving was being detoured around it? That, however, was hardly possible, for the abandonment of Earth station would mean as well that those beyond it must also be abandoned. There were no shortcuts in the network extending out into the spiral arm to make rerouting possible. It was not unusual for many hours, even for a day, to pass without any traffic. The traffic was irregular and had no pattern to it. There were times when scheduled arrivals had to be held up until there were facilities to take care of them, and there were other times when there would be none at all, when the equipment would sit idle, as it was sitting now.

  Jumpy, he thought. I am getting jumpy.

  Before they closed the station, they would let him know. Courtesy, if nothing else, would demand that they do that.

  He went back to the stove and started the coffeepot. In the refrigerator he found a package of mush made from a cereal grown on one of the Draconian jungle worlds. He took it out, then put it back again and took out the last two eggs of the dozen that Wins, the mailman, had brought out from town a week or so ago.

  He glanced at his watch and saw that he had slept later than he thought. It was almost time for his daily walk.

  He put the skillet on the stove and spooned in a chunk of butter. He waited for the butter to melt, then broke in the eggs.

  Maybe, he thought, he’d not go on the walk today. Except for a time or two when a blizzard had been raging, it would be the first time he had ever missed his walk. But because he always did it, he told himself, contentiously, was no sufficient reason that he should always take it. He’d just skip the walk and later on go down and get the mail. He could use the time to catch up on all the things he’d failed to do yesterday. The papers still were piled upon his desk, waiting for his reading. He’d not written in his journal, and there was a lot to write, for he must record in detail exactly what had happened and there had been a good deal happening.

  It had been a rule he’d set himself from the first day that the station had begun its operation—that he never skimped the journal. He might be a little late at times in getting it all down, but the fact that he was late or that he was pressed for time had never made him put down one word less than he had felt might be required to tell all there was to tell.

  He looked across the room at the long rows of record books that were crowded on the shelves and thought, with pride and satisfaction, of the completeness of that record. Almost a century of writing lay between the covers of those books and there was not a single day that he had ever skipped.

  Here was his legacy, he thought; here was his bequest to the world; here would be his entrance fee back into the human race; here was all he’d seen and heard and thought for almost a hundred years of association with those alien peoples of the galaxy.

  Looking at the rows of books, the questions that he had shoved aside came rushing in on him and this time there was no denying them. For a short space of time he had held them off, the little time he’d needed for his brain to clear, for his body to become alive again. He did not fight them now. He accepted them, for there was no dodging them.

  He slid the eggs out of the skillet onto the waiting plate. He got the coffeepot and sat down to his breakfast.

  He glan
ced at his watch again.

  There still was time to go on his daily walk.

  25

  The ginseng man was waiting at the spring.

  Enoch saw him while still some distance down the trail and wondered, with a quick flash of anger, if he might be waiting there to tell him that he could not return the body of the Hazer, that something had come up, that he had run into unexpected difficulties.

  And thinking that, Enoch remembered how he’d threatened the night before to kill anyone who held up the return of the body. Perhaps, he told himself, it had not been smart to say that. Wondering whether he could bring himself to kill a man—not that it would be the first man he had ever killed. But that had been long ago and it had been a matter then of kill or being killed.

  He shut his eyes for a second and once again could see that slope below him, with the long lines of men advancing through the drifting smoke, knowing that those men were climbing up the ridge for one purpose only, to kill himself and those others who were atop the ridge.

  And that had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment—not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.

  It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death of misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.

  Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many hard-won centuries.