Way Station Read online

  It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had seen her, a little fairy person of ten years or so, a wild thing running in the woods. They had become friends, he recalled, only after a long time, although he saw her often, for she roamed the hills and valley as if they were a playground for her—which, of course, they were.

  Through the years he had watched her grow and had often met her on his daily walks, and between the two of them had grown up an understanding of the lonely and the outcast, but understanding based on something more than that—on the fact that each had a world that was their own and worlds that had given them an insight into something that others seldom saw. Not that either, Enoch thought, ever told the other, or tried to tell the other, of these private worlds, but the fact of these private worlds was there, in the consciousness of each, providing a firm foundation for the building of a friendship.

  He recalled the day he’d found her at the place where the pink lady’s-slippers grew, just kneeling there and looking at them, not picking any of them, and how he’d stopped beside her and been pleased she had not moved to pick them, knowing that in the sight of them, the two, he and she, had found a joy and a beauty that was beyond possession.

  He reached the ridgetop and turned down the grass-grown road that led down to the mailbox.

  And he’d not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly’s wing had been torn and crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing and then it had been whole again and had flown away.

  8

  Winslowe Grant was on time.

  Enoch, as he reached the mailbox, sighted the dust raised by his old jalopy as it galloped along the ridge. It had been a dusty year, he thought, as he stood beside the box. There had been little rain and the crops had suffered. Although, to tell the truth, there were few crops on the ridge these days. There had been a time when comfortable small farms had existed, almost cheek by jowl, all along the road, with the barns all red and the houses white. But now most of the farms had been abandoned and the houses and the barns were no longer red or white, but gray and weathered wood, with all the paint peeled off and the ridgepoles sagging and the people gone.

  It would not be long before Winslowe would arrive and Enoch settled down to wait. The mailman might be stopping at the Fisher box, just around the bend, although the Fishers, as a rule, got but little mail, mostly just the advertising sheets and other junk that was mailed out indiscriminately to the rural boxholders. Not that it mattered to the Fishers, for sometimes days went by in which they did not pick up their mail. If it were not for Lucy, they perhaps would never get it, for it was mostly Lucy who thought to pick it up.

  The Fishers were, for a fact, Enoch told himself, a truly shiftless outfit. Their house and all the buildings were ready to fall in upon themselves and they raised a grubby patch of corn that was drowned out, more often than not, by a flood rise of the river. They mowed some hay off a bottom meadow and they had a couple of raw-boned horses and a half-dozen scrawny cows and a flock of chickens. They had an old clunk of a car and a still hidden out somewhere in the river bottoms and they hunted and fished and trapped and were generally no-account. Although, when one considered it, they were not bad neighbors. They tended to their business and never bothered anyone except that periodically they went around, the whole tribe of them, distributing pamphlets and tracts through the neighborhood for some obscure fundamentalist sect that Ma Fisher had become a member of at a tent revival meeting down in Millville several years before.

  Winslowe didn’t stop at the Fisher box, but came boiling around the bend in a cloud of dust. He braked the panting machine to a halt and turned off the engine.

  “Let her cool a while,” he said.

  The block crackled as it started giving up its heat.

  “You made good time today,” said Enoch.

  “Lots of people didn’t have any mail today,” said Winslowe. “Just went sailing past their boxes.”

  He dipped into the pouch on the seat beside him and brought out a bundle tied together with a bit of string for Enoch—several daily papers and two journals.

  “You get a lot of stuff,” said Winslowe, “but hardly ever letters.”

  “There is no one left,” said Enoch, “who would want to write to me.”

  “But,” said Winslowe, “you got a letter this time.”

  Enoch looked, unable to conceal surprise, and could see the end of an envelope peeping from between the journals.

  “A personal letter,” said Winslowe, almost smacking his lips. “Not one of them advertising ones. Nor a business one.”

  Enoch tucked the bundle underneath his arm, beside the rifle stock.

  “Probably won’t amount to much,” he said.

  “Maybe not,” said Winslowe, a sly glitter in his eyes.

  He pulled a pipe and pouch from his pocket and slowly filled the pipe. The engine block continued its crackling and popping. The sun beat down out of a cloudless sky. The vegetation alongside the road was coated with dust and an acrid smell rose from it.

  “Hear that ginseng fellow is back again,” said Winslowe, conversationally, but unable to keep out a conspiratorial tone. “Been gone for three, four days.”

  “Maybe off to sell his sang.”

  “You ask me,” the mailman said, “he ain’t hunting sang. He’s hunting something else.”

  “Been at it,” Enoch said, “for a right smart time.”

  “First of all,” said Winslowe, “there’s barely any market for the stuff and even if there was, there isn’t any sang. Used to be a good market years ago. Chinese used it for medicine, I guess. But now there ain’t no trade with China. I remember when I was a boy we used to go hunting it. Not easy to find, even then. But most days a man could locate a little of it.”

  He leaned back in the seat, puffing serenely at his pipe.

  “Funny goings on,” he said.

  “I never saw the man,” said Enoch.

  “Sneaking through the woods,” said Winslowe. “Digging up different kinds of plants. Got the idea myself he maybe is a sort of magic-man. Getting stuff to make up charms and such. Spends a lot of his time yarning with the Fisher tribe and drinking up their likker. You don’t hear much of it these days, but I still hold with magic. Lots of things science can’t explain. You take that Fisher girl, the dummy, she can charm off warts.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Enoch.

  And more than that, he thought. She can fix a butterfly.

  Winslowe hunched forward in his seat.

  “Almost forgot,” he said. “I have something else for you.”

  He lifted a brown paper parcel from the floor and handed it to Enoch.

  “This ain’t mail,” he said. “It’s something that I made for you.”

  “Why, thank you,” Enoch said, taking it from him.

  “Go ahead,” Winslowe said, “and open it up.”

  Enoch hesitated.

  “Ah, hell,” said Winslowe, “don’t be bashful.”

  Enoch tore off the paper and there it was, a full-figure wood carving of himself. It was in a blond, honey-colored wood and some twelve inches tall. It shone like golden crystal in the sun. He was walking, with his rifle tucked beneath his arm and a wind was blowing, for he was leaning slightly into it and there were wind-flutter ripples on his jacket and his trousers.

  Enoch gasped, then stood staring at it.

  “Wins,” he said, “that’s the most beautiful piece of work I have ever seen.”

  “Did it,” said the mailman, “out of that piece of wood you gave me last winter. Best piece of whittling stuff I ever ran across. Hard and without hardly any grain. No danger of splitting or of nicking or of shredding. When you make a cut, you make it where you want to and it stays the way you cut it. And it takes polish as you cut. Just rub it up a little is all you need to do.”

  “You don’t know,” said Enoch, “how much this means to
me.”

  “Over the years,” the mailman told him, “you’ve given me an awful lot of wood. Different kinds of wood no one’s ever seen before. All of it top-grade stuff and beautiful. It was time I was carving something for you.”

  “And you,” said Enoch, “have done a lot for me. Lugging things from town.”

  “Enoch,” Winslowe said, “I like you. I don’t know what you are and I ain’t about to ask, but anyhow I like you.”

  “I wish that I could tell you what I am,” said Enoch.

  “Well,” said Winslowe, moving over to plant himself behind the wheel, “it don’t matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like ours—a lesson in how to get along—the world would be a whole lot better.”

  Enoch nodded gravely. “It doesn’t look too good, does it?”

  “It sure don’t,” said the mailman, starting up the car.

  Enoch stood and watched the car move off, down the hill, building up its cloud of dust as it moved along.

  Then he looked again at the wooden statuette of himself.

  It was as if the wooden figure were walking on a hilltop, naked to the full force of the wind and bent against the gale.

  Why? He wondered. What was it the mailman had seen in him to portray him as walking in the wind?

  9

  He laid the rifle and the mail upon a patch of dusty grass and carefully rewrapped the statuette in the piece of paper. He’d put it, he decided, either on the mantelpiece or, perhaps better yet, on the coffee table that stood beside his favorite chair in the corner by the desk. He wanted it, he admitted to himself, with some quiet embarrassment, where it was close at hand, where he could look at it or pick it up any time he wished. And he wondered at the deep, heart-warming, soul-satisfying pleasure that he got from the mailman’s gift.

  It was not, he knew, because he was seldom given gifts. Scarcely a week went past that the alien travelers did not leave several with him. The house was cluttered and there was a wall of shelves down in the cavernous basement that were crammed with the stuff that had been given him. Perhaps it was, he told himself, because this was a gift from Earth, from one of his own kind.

  He tucked the wrapped statuette beneath his arm and, picking up the rifle and the mail, headed back for home, following the brush-grown trail that once had been the wagon road leading to the farm.

  Grass had grown into thick turf between the ancient ruts, which had been cut so deep into the clay by the iron tires of the old-time wagons that they still were no more than bare, impacted earth in which no plant as yet had gained a root-hold. But on each side the clumps of brush, creeping up the field from the forest’s edge, grew man-high or better, so that now one moved down an aisle of green.

  But at certain points, quite unexplainably—perhaps due to the character of the soil or to the mere vagaries of nature—the growth of brush had faltered, and here were vistas where one might look out from the ridgetop across the river valley.

  It was from one of these vantage points that Enoch caught the flash from a clump of trees at the edge of the old field, not too far from the spring where he had found Lucy.

  He frowned as he saw the flash and stood quietly on the path, waiting for its repetition. But it did not come again.

  It was one of the watchers, he knew, using a pair of binoculars to keep watch upon the station. The flash he had seen had been the reflection of the sun upon the glasses.

  Who were they? he wondered. And why should they be watching? It had been going on for some time now but, strangely, there had been nothing but the watching. There had been no interference. No one had attempted to approach him, and such approach, he realized, could have been quite simple and quite natural. If they—whoever they might be—had wished to talk with him, a very casual meeting could have been arranged during any one of his morning walks.

  But apparently as yet they did not wish to talk.

  What, then, he wondered, did they wish to do? Keep track of him, perhaps. And in that regard, he thought, with a wry inner twinge of humor, they could have become acquainted with the pattern of his living in their first ten days of watching.

  Or perhaps they might be waiting for some happening that would provide them with a clue to what he might be doing. And in that direction there lay nothing but certain disappointment. They could watch for a thousand years and gain no hint of it.

  He turned from the vista and went plodding up the road, worried and puzzled by his knowledge of the watchers.

  Perhaps, he thought, they had not attempted to contact him because of certain stories that might be told about him. Stories that no one, not even Winslowe, would pass on to him. What kind of stories, he wondered, might the neighborhood by now have been able to fabricate about him—fabulous folk tales to be told in bated breath about the chimney corner?

  It might be well, he thought, that he did not know the stories, although it would seem almost a certainty that they would exist. And it also might be as well that the watchers had not attempted contact with him. For so long as there was no contact, he still was fairly safe. So long as there were no questions, there need not be any answers.

  Are you really, they would ask, that same Enoch Wallace who marched off in 1861 to fight for old Abe Lincoln? And there was one answer to that, there could only be one answer. Yes, he’d have to say, I am that same man.

  And of all the questions they might ask him that would be the only one of all he could answer truthfully. For all the others there would necessarily be silence or evasion.

  They would ask how come that he had not aged—how he could stay young when all mankind grew old. And he could not tell them that he did not age inside the station, that he only aged when he stepped out of it, that he aged an hour each day on his daily walks, that he might age an hour or so working in his garden, that he could age for fifteen minutes sitting on the steps to watch a lovely sunset. But that when he went back indoors again the aging process was completely canceled out.

  He could not tell them that. And there was much else that he could not tell them. There might come a time, he knew, if they once contacted him, that he’d have to flee the questions and cut himself entirely from the world, remaining isolated within the station’s walls.

  Such a course would constitute no hardship physically, for he could live within the station without any inconvenience. He would want for nothing, for the aliens would supply everything he needed to remain alive and well. He had bought human food at times, having Winslowe purchase it and haul it out from town, but only because he felt a craving for the food of his own planet, in particular those simple foods of his childhood and his campaigning days.

  And, he told himself, even those foods might well be supplied by the process of duplication. A slab of bacon or a dozen eggs could be sent to another station and remain there as a master pattern for the pattern impulses, being sent to him on order as he needed them.

  But there was one thing the aliens could not provide—the human contacts he’d maintained through Winslowe and the mail. Once shut inside the station, he’d be cut off completely from the world he knew, for the newspapers and the magazines were his only contact. The operation of a radio in the station was made impossible by the interference set up by the installations.

  He would not know what was happening in the world, would know no longer how the outside might be going. His chart would suffer from this and would become largely useless; although, he told himself, it was nearly useless now, since he could not be certain of the correct usage of the factors.

  But aside from all of this, he would miss this little outside world that he had grown to know so well, this little corner of the world encompassed by his walks. It was the walks, he thought, more than anything, perhaps, that had kept him human and a citizen of Earth.

  He wondered how important it might be that he remain, intellectually and emotionally, a citizen of Earth and a member of the hu
man race. There was, he thought, perhaps no reason that he should. With the cosmopolitanism of the galaxy at his fingertips, it might even be provincial of him to be so intent upon his continuing identification with the old home planet. He might be losing something by this provincialism.

  But it was not in himself, he knew, to turn his back on Earth. It was a place he loved too well—loving it more, most likely, than those other humans who had not caught his glimpse of far and unguessed worlds. A man, he told himself, must belong to something, must have some loyalty and some identity. The galaxy was too big a place for any being to stand naked and alone.

  A lark sailed out of a grassy plot and soared high into the sky, and seeing it, he waited for the trill of liquid song to spray out of its throat and drip out of the blue. But there was no song, as there would have been in spring.

  He plodded down the road and now, ahead of him, he saw the starkness of the station, reared upon its ridge.

  Funny, he thought, that he should think of it as station rather than as home, but it had been a station longer than it had been a home.

  There was about it, he saw, a sort of ugly solidness, as if it might have planted itself upon that ridgetop and meant to stay forever.

  It would stay, of course, if one wanted it, as long as one wanted it. For there was nothing that could touch it.

  Even should he be forced some day to remain within its walls, the station still would stand against all of mankind’s watching, all of mankind’s prying. They could not chip it and they could not gouge it and they could not break it down. There was nothing they could do. All his watching, all his speculating, all his analyzing, would gain Man nothing beyond the knowledge that a highly unusual building existed on that ridgetop. For it could survive anything except a thermonuclear explosion—and maybe even that.