Way Station Page 3

  “In the grave,” he said. “The one beneath the headstone with the funny writing.”

  5

  The message machine whistled shrilly, and Enoch Wallace put away the book in which he had been writing and got up from his desk. He walked across the room to the whistling machine. He punched a button and shoved a key and the whistling stopped.

  The machine built up its hum and the message began to form on the plate, faint at first and then becoming darker until it stood out clearly. It read:

  NO. 406301 TO STATION 18327. TRAVELER AT 16097.38. NATIVE THUBAN VI. NO BAGGAGE. NO. 3 LIQUID TANK. SOLUTION 27. DEPART FOR STATION 12892 AT 16439.16. CONFIRM.

  Enoch glanced up at the great galactic chronometer hanging on the wall. There was almost three hours to go.

  He touched a button, and a thin sheet of metal bearing the message protruded from the side of the machine. Beneath it the duplicate fed itself into the record file. The machine chuckled and the message plate was clear once more and waiting.

  Enoch pulled out the metal plate, threaded the holes in it through the double filing spindle and then dropped his fingers to the keyboard and typed: NO. 406301 RECEIVED. CONFIRM MOMENTARILY. The message came into being on the plate and he left it there.

  Thuban VI? Had there been, he wondered, one of them before? As soon as he got the chores done, he would go to the filing cabinet and check.

  It was a liquid tank case and those, as a rule, were the most uninteresting of all. They usually were hard ones to strike up a conversation with, because too often their concept of language was too difficult to handle. And as often, too, their very thinking processes proved too divergent to provide much common ground for communication.

  Although, he recalled, that was not always true. There had been that tank traveler several years ago, from somewhere in Hydra (or had it been the Hyades?), he’d sat up the whole night with and almost failed of sending off on time, yarning through the hours, their communication (you couldn’t call it words) tumbling over one another as they packed into the little time they had a lot of fellowship and, perhaps, some brotherhood.

  He, or she, or it—they’d never got around to that—had not come back again. And that was the way it was, thought Enoch; very few came back. By far the greater part of them were just passing through.

  But he had he, or she, or it (whichever it might be) down in black and white, as he had all of them, every single blessed one of them, down in black and white. It had taken him, he remembered, almost the entire following day, crouched above his desk, to get it written down; all the stories he’d been told, all the glimpses he had caught of a far and beautiful and tantalizing land (tantalizing because there was so much of it he could not understand), all the warmth and comradeship that had flowed between himself and this misshapen, twisted, ugly living being from another world. And any time he wished, any day he wished, he could take down the journal from the row of journals and relive that night again. Although he never had. It was strange, he thought, how there was never time, or never seemed to be the time, to thumb through and reread in part what he’d recorded through the years.

  He turned from the message machine and rolled a No. 3 liquid tank into place beneath the materializer, positioning it exactly and locking it in place. Then he pulled out the retracting hose and thumbed the selector over to No. 27. He filled the tank and let the hose slide back into the wall.

  Back at the machine, he cleared the plate and sent off his confirmation that all was ready for the traveler from Thuban, got back double confirmation from the other end, then threw the machine to neutral, ready to receive again.

  He went from the machine to the filing cabinet that stood next to his desk and pulled out a drawer jammed with filing cards. He looked and Thuban VI was there, keyed to August 22, 1931. He walked across the room to the wall filled with books and rows of magazines and journals, filled from floor to ceiling, and found the record book he wanted. Carrying it, he walked back to his desk.

  August 22, 1931, he found, when he located the entry, had been one of his lighter days. There had been one traveler only, the one from Thuban VI. And although the entry for the day filled almost a page in his small, crabbed writing, he had devoted no more than one paragraph to the visitor.

  Came today [it read] a blob from Thuban VI. There is no other way in which one might describe it. It is simply a mass of matter, presumably of flesh, and this mass seems to go through some sort of rhythmic change in shape, for periodically it is globular, then begins to flatten out until it lies in the bottom of the tank, somewhat like a pancake. Then it begins to contract and to pull in upon itself, until finally it is a ball again. This change is rather slow and definitely rhythmic, but only in the sense that it follows the same pattern. It seems to have no relation to time. I tried timing it and could detect no time pattern. The shortest period needed to complete the cycle was seven minutes and the longest was eighteen. Perhaps over a longer period one might be able to detect a time rhythm, but I didn’t have the time. The semantic translator did not work with it, but it did emit for me a series of sharp clicks, as if it might be clicking claws together, although it had no claws that I could see. When I looked this up in the pasimology manual I learned that what it was trying to say was that it was all right, that it needed no attention, and please leave it alone. Which I did thereafter.

  And at the end of the paragraph, jammed into the little space that had been left, was the notation: See Oct. 16, 1931.

  He turned the pages until he came to October 16 and that had been one of the days, he saw, that Ulysses had arrived to inspect the station.

  His name, of course, was not Ulysses. As a matter of fact, he had no name at all. Among his people there was no need of names; there was other identifying terminology which was far more expressive than mere names. But this terminology, even the very concept of it, was such that it could not be grasped, much less put to use, by human beings.

  “I shall call you Ulysses,” Enoch recalled telling him, the first time they had met. “I need to call you something.”

  “It is agreeable,” said the then strange being (but no longer strange). “Might one ask why the name Ulysses?”

  “Because it is the name of a great man of my race.”

  “I am glad you chose it,” said the newly christened being. “To my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years.”

  And it had been many years, thought Enoch, with the record book open to that October entry of more than thirty years ago. Years that had been satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it had all been laid out before him.

  And it would go on, he thought, much longer than it already had gone on—for many centuries more, for a thousand years, perhaps. And at the end of that thousand years, what would he know then?

  Although, perhaps, he thought, the knowing was not the most important part of it.

  And none of it, he knew, might come to pass, for there was interference now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher, and before too long whoever it might be might start closing in. What he’d do or how he’d meet the threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had been almost bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have happen all these years. There was some reason to wonder, he knew, that it had not happened sooner.

  He had told Ulysses of the danger of it that first day they’d met. He’d been sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, and thinking of it now, he could remember it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday.

  6

  He was sitting on the steps and it was late afternoon. He was watching the great white thunderheads that were piling up across the river beyond the Iowa hills. The day was hot and sultry and there was not a breath of moving air. Out in the barnyard a half a dozen bedraggled chickens scratched listlessly, for the sake, it seemed, of g
oing through the motions rather than from any hope of finding food. The sound of the sparrows’ wings, as they flew between the gable of the barn and the hedge of honeysuckle that bordered the field beyond the road, was a harsh, dry sound, as if the feathers of their wings had grown stiff with heat.

  And here he sat, he thought, staring at the thunderheads when there was work to do—corn to be plowed and hay to be gotten in and wheat to reap and shock.

  For despite whatever might have happened, a man still had a life to live, days to be gotten through the best that one could manage. It was a lesson, he reminded himself, that he should have learned in all its fullness in the last few years. But war, somehow, was different from what had happened here. In war you knew it and expected it and were ready when it happened, but this was not the war. This was the peace to which he had returned. A man had a right to expect that in the world of peace there really would be peace fencing out the violence and the horror.

  Now he was alone, as he’d never been alone before. Now, if ever, could be a new beginning; now, perhaps, there had to be a new beginning. But whether it was here, on the homestead acres, or in some other place, it still would be a beginning of bitterness and anguish.

  He sat on the steps, with his wrists resting on his knees, and watched the thunderheads piling in the west. It might mean rain and the land could use the rain—or it might be nothing, for above the merging river valleys the air currents were erratic and there was no way a man could tell where those clouds might flow.

  He did not see the traveler until he turned in at the gate. He was a tall and gangling one and his clothes were dusty and from the appearance of him he had walked a far way. He came up the path and Enoch sat waiting for him, watching him, but not stirring from the steps.

  “Good day, sir,” Enoch finally said. “It’s a hot day to be walking. Why don’t you sit a while.”

  “Quite willingly,” said the stranger. “But first, I wonder, could I have a drink of water?”

  Enoch got up to his feet. “Come along,” he said. “I’ll pump a fresh one for you.”

  He went down across the barnyard until he reached the pump. He unhooked the dipper from where it hung upon a bolt and handed it to the man. He grasped the handle of the pump and worked it up and down.

  “Let it run a while,” he said. “It takes a time for it to get real cool.”

  The water splashed out of the spout, running on the boards that formed the cover of the well. It came in spurts as Enoch worked the handle.

  “Do you think,” the stranger asked, “that it is about to rain?”

  “A man can’t tell,” said Enoch. “We have to wait and see.”

  There was something about this traveler that disturbed him. Nothing, actually, that one could put a finger on, but a certain strangeness that was vaguely disquieting. He watched him narrowly as he pumped and decided that probably this stranger’s ears were just a bit too pointed at the top, but put it down to his imagination, for when he looked again they seemed to be all right.

  “I think,” said Enoch, “that the water should be cold by now.”

  The traveler put down the dipper and waited for it to fill. He offered it to Enoch. Enoch shook his head.

  “You first. You need it worse than I do.”

  The stranger drank greedily and with much slobbering.

  “Another one?” asked Enoch.

  “No, thank you,” said the stranger. “But I’ll catch another dipperful for you if you wish me to.”

  Enoch pumped, and when the dipper was full the stranger handed it to him. The water was cold and Enoch, realizing for the first time that he had been thirsty, drank it almost to the bottom.

  He hung the dipper back on its bolt and said to the man, “Now, let’s get in that sitting.”

  The stranger grinned. “I could do with some of it,” he said. Enoch pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and mopped his face. “The air gets close,” he said, “just before a rain.”

  And as he mopped his face, quite suddenly he knew what it was that had disturbed him about the traveler. Despite his bedraggled clothes and his dusty shoes, which attested to long walking, despite the heat of this time-before-a-rain, the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime.

  Enoch put the bandanna back into his pocket and they walked back to the steps and sat there, side by side.

  “You’ve traveled a far way,” said Enoch, gently prying.

  “Very far, indeed,” the stranger told him. “I’m a right smart piece from home.”

  “And you have a far way yet to go?”

  “No,” the stranger said, “I believe that I have gotten to the place where I am going.”

  “You mean…” asked Enoch, and left the question hanging.

  “I mean right here,” said the stranger, “sitting on these steps. I have been looking for a man and I think that man is you. I did not know his name nor where to look for him, but yet I knew that one day I would find him.”

  “But me,” Enoch said, astonished. “Why should you look for me?”

  “I was looking for a man of many different parts. One of the things about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what they were.”

  “Yes,” said Enoch, “that is something I have done. On many nights, camping in the field, I have lain in my blankets and looked up at the sky, looking at the stars and wondering what they were and how they’d been put up there and, most important of all, why they had been put up there. I have heard some say that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on Earth, but I don’t know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too much about them.”

  “There are some,” the stranger said, “who know a deal about them?”

  “You, perhaps,” said Enoch, mocking just a little, for the stranger did not look like a man who’d know much of anything.

  “Yes, I,” the stranger said. “Although I do not know as much as many others do.”

  “I’ve sometimes wondered,” Enoch said, “if the stars are other suns, might there not be other planets and other people, too.”

  He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the other fellows to pass away the time. And once he’d mentioned this idea of maybe other people on other planets circling other suns and the fellows all had jeered him and for days afterward had made fun of him, so he had never mentioned it again. Not that it mattered much, for he had no real belief in it himself; it had never been more than campfire speculation.

  And now he’d mentioned it again and to an utter stranger. He wondered why he had.

  “You believe that?” asked the stranger.

  Enoch said, “It was just an idle notion.”

  “Not so idle,” said the stranger. “There are other planets and there are other people. I am one of them.”

  “But you…” cried Enoch, then was stricken into silence.

  For the stranger’s face had split and began to fall away and beneath it he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face.

  And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of thunder seemed to shake the land and from far off he heard the rushing rain as it charged across the hills.

  7

  That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star. Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were people.

  He looked back at the entry for October 16, 1931, and ran through it swiftly. There, near the end of it was the sentence:

  Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy. They have developed, it seems, a numeration system superior to any in existence, e
specially valuable in the handling of statistics.

  He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans’ work. Perhaps they did, he thought, for certainly some of the math they used was unconventional.

  He pushed the record book to one side and dug into a desk drawer, bringing out his chart. He spread it flat on the desk before him and puzzled over it. If he could be sure, he thought. If he only knew the Mizar statistics better. For the last ten years or more he had labored at the chart, checking and rechecking all the factors against the Mizar system, testing again and again to determine whether the factors he was using were the ones he should be using.

  He raised a clenched fist and hammered at the desk. If he only could be certain. If he could only talk with someone. But that had been something that he had shrank from doing, for it would be equivalent to showing the very nakedness of the human race.

  He still was human. Funny, he thought, that he should stay human, that in a century of association with these beings from the many stars he should have, through it all, remained a man of Earth.

  For in many ways, his ties with Earth were cut. Old Winslowe Grant was the only human he ever talked with now. His neighbors shunned him, and there were no others, unless one could count watchers, and those he seldom saw—only glimpses of them, only the places they had been.

  Only old Winslowe Grant and Mary and the other people from the shadow who came occasionally to spend lonely hours with him.

  That was all of Earth he had, old Winslowe and the shadow people and the homestead acres that lay outside the house—but not the house itself, for the house was alien now.

  He shut his eyes and remembered how the house had been in the olden days. There had been a kitchen, in this same area where he was sitting, with the iron cook-stove, black and monstrous, in its corner, showing its row of fiery teeth along the slit made by the grate. Pushed against the wall had been the table where the three of them had eaten, and he could remember how the table looked, with the vinegar cruet and the glass that held the spoons and the Lazy Susan with the mustard, horseradish, and chili sauce sitting in a group, a sort of centerpiece in the middle of the red checkered cloth that the table wore.