Way Station Page 7

  “Presentation to you,” said the clicking. “Deceased vegetation.”

  Enoch peered at the cube floating in the liquid.

  “Take him,” clicked the Thuban. “Bring him for you.”

  Fumblingly, Enoch clicked out his answer, using tapping fingers against the glass side of the tank: “I thank you, gracious one.” Wondering as he did it, if he were using the proper form of address to this blob of matter. A man, he told himself, could get terribly tangled up on that particular point of etiquette. There were some of these beings that one addressed in flowery language (and even in those cases, the floweriness would vary) and others that one talked with in the simplest, bluntest terms.

  He reached into the tank and lifted out the cube and he saw that it was a block of heavy wood, black as ebony and so close-grained it looked very much like stone. He chuckled inwardly, thinking how, in listening to Winslowe, he had grown to be an expert in the judging of artistic wood.

  He put the wood upon the floor and turned back to the tank.

  “Would you mind,” clicked the Thuban, “revealing what you do with him? To us, very useless stuff.”

  Enoch hesitated, searching desperately through his memory. What, he wondered, was the code for “carve?”

  “Well?” the Thuban asked.

  “You must pardon me, gracious one. I do not use this language often. I am not proficient.”

  “Drop, please, the ‘gracious one.’ I am a common being.”

  “Shape it,” Enoch tapped. “Into another form. Are you a visual being? Then I show you one.”

  “Not visual,” said the Thuban. “Many other things, not visual.”

  It had been a globe when it had arrived and now it was beginning to flatten out.

  “You,” the Thuban clicked, “are a biped being.”

  “That is what I am.”

  “Your planet. It is a solid planet?”

  Solid? Enoch wondered. Oh, yes, solid as opposed to liquid.

  “One-quarter solid,” he tapped. “The rest of it is liquid.”

  “Mine almost all liquid. Only little solid. Very restful world.”

  “One thing I want to ask you,” Enoch tapped.

  “Ask,” the creature said.

  “You are a mathematician. All you folks, I mean.”

  “Yes,” the creature said. “Excellent recreation. Occupies the mind.”

  “You mean you do not use it?”

  “Oh, yes, once use it. But no need for use any more. Got all we need to use, very long ago. Recreation now.”

  “I have heard of your system of numerical notation.”

  “Very different,” clicked the Thuban. “Very better concept.”

  “You can tell me of it?”

  “You know notation system used by people of Polaris VII?”

  “No, I don’t,” tapped Enoch.

  “Then no use to tell you of our own. Must know Polaris first.”

  So that was that, thought Enoch. He might have known. There was so much knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of the little that he knew.

  There were men on Earth who could make sense of it. Men who would give anything short of their very lives to know the little that he knew, and could put it all to use.

  Out among the stars lay a massive body of knowledge, some of it an extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man had not as yet imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own.

  Another hundred years, thought Enoch. How much would he learn in another hundred years? In another thousand?

  “I rest now,” said the Thuban. “Nice to talk with you.”

  12

  Enoch turned from the tank and picked up the block of wood. A little puddle of liquid had drained off it and lay glistening on the floor.

  He carried the block across the room to one of the windows and examined it. It was heavy and black and close-grained and at one corner of it a bit of bark, remained. It had been sawed. Someone had cut it into a size that would fit the tank where the Thuban rested.

  He recalled an article he had read in one of the daily papers just a day or two before in which a scientist had contended that no great intelligence ever could develop on a liquid world.

  But that scientist was wrong, for the Thuban race had so developed and there were other liquid worlds which were members of the galactic cofraternity. There were a lot of things, he told himself, that Man would have to unlearn, as well as things to learn, if he ever should become aware of the galactic culture.

  The limitation of the speed of light, for one thing.

  For if nothing moved faster than the speed of light, then the galactic transport system would be impossible.

  But one should not censure Man, he reminded himself, for setting the speed of light as a basic limitation. Observations were all that Man—or anyone, for that matter—could use as data upon which to base his premises. And since human science had so far found nothing which consistently moved faster than the speed of light, then the assumption must be valid that nothing could or did consistently move faster. But valid as an assumption only and no more than that.

  For the impulse patterns which carried creatures star to star were almost instantaneous, no matter what the distance.

  He stood and thought about it and it still was hard, he admitted to himself, for a person to believe.

  Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another station and the materializer had built up a pattern of it—not only of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life. Then the impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost instantaneously to the receiver of this station, where the pattern had been used to duplicate the body and the mind and memory and the life of that creature now lying dead many light years distant. And in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory and life had taken almost instant form—an entirely new being, but exactly like the old one, so that the identity continued and the consciousness (the very thought no more than momentarily interrupted), so that to all intent and purpose the being was the same.

  There were limitations to the impulse patterns, but this had nothing to do with speed, for the impulses could cross the entire galaxy with but little lag in time. But under certain conditions the patterns tended to break down and this was why there must be many stations—many thousands of them. Clouds of dust or gas or areas of high ionization seemed to disrupt the patterns and in those sectors of the galaxy where these conditions were encountered, the distance jumps between the stations were considerably cut down to keep the pattern true. There were areas that had to be detoured because of high concentrations of the distorting gas and dust.

  Enoch wondered how many dead bodies of the creature that now rested in the tank had been left behind at other stations in the course of the journey it was making—as this body in a few hours’ time would lie dead within this tank when the creature’s pattern was sent out again, riding on the impulse waves.

  A long trail of dead, he thought, left across the stars, each to be destroyed by a wash of acid and flushed into deep-lying tanks, but with the creature itself going on and on until it reached its final destination to carry out the purpose of its journey.

  And those purposes, Enoch wondered—the many purposes of the many creatures who passed through the stations scattered wide in space? There had been certain instances when, chatting with the travelers, they had told their purpose, but with the most of them he never learned the purpose—nor had he any right to learn it. For he was the keeper only.

  Mine host, he thought, although not every time, for there were many creatures that had no use for hosts. But the man, at any rate, who watched over the operation of the station and who kept it going, who made ready for the travelers and who sent them on their way again when that time should come. And who performed the little tasks and courtesies of which they might stand in need.
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br />   He looked at the block of wood and thought how pleased Winslowe would be with it. It was very seldom that one came upon a wood that was as black or fine-grained as this.

  What would Winslowe think, he wondered, if he could only know that the statuettes he carved were made of woods that had grown on unknown planets, many light years distant. Winslowe, he knew, must have wondered many times where the wood came from and how his friend could have gotten it. But he had never asked. And he knew as well, of course, that there was something very strange about this man who came out to the mailbox every day to meet him. But he had never asked that, either.

  And that was friendship, Enoch told himself.

  This wood, too, that he held in his hands, was another evidence of friendship—the friendship of the stars for every humble keeper of a remote and backwoods station stuck out in one of the spiral arms, far from the center of the galaxy.

  The word had spread, apparently, through the years and throughout space, that this certain keeper was a collector of exotic woods—and so the woods came in. Not only from those races he thought of as his friends, but from total strangers, like the blob that now rested in the tank.

  He put the wood down on a table top and went to the refrigerator. From it he took a slab of aged cheese that Winslowe had bought for him several days ago, and a small package of fruit that a traveler from Sirrah X had brought the day before.

  “Analyzed,” it had told him, “and you can eat it without hurt. It will play no trouble with your metabolism. You’ve had it before, perhaps? So you haven’t. I am sorry. It is most delicious. Next time, you like it, I shall bring you more.”

  From the cupboard beside the refrigerator he took out a small, flat loaf of bread, part of the ration regularly provided him by Galactic Central. Made of a cereal unlike any known on Earth, it had a distinctly nutty flavor with the faintest hint of some alien spice.

  He put the food on what he called the kitchen table, although there was no kitchen. Then he put the coffee maker on the stove and went back to his desk.

  The letter still lay there, spread out, and he folded it together and put it in a drawer.

  He stripped the brown folders off the papers and put them in a pile. From the pile he selected the New York Times and moved to his favorite chair to read.

  NEW PEACE CONFERENCE AGREED UPON, said the lead-off headline.

  The crisis had been boiling for a month or more, the newest of a long series of crises which had kept the world on edge for years. And the worst of it, Enoch told himself, was that the most of them were manufactured crises, with one side or the other pushing for advantage in the relentless chess game of power politics which had been under way since the end of World War II.

  The stories in the Times bearing on the conference had a rather desperate, almost fatalistic, ring, as if the writers of the stories, and perhaps the diplomats and all the rest involved, knew the conference would accomplish nothing—if, in fact, it did not serve to make the crisis deeper.

  Observers in this capital [wrote one of the Times’s Washington bureau staff] are not convinced the conference will serve, in this instance, as similar conferences sometimes have served in the past, to either delay a showdown on the issues or to advance the prospects for a settlement. There is scarcely concealed concern in many quarters that the conference will, instead, fan the flames of controversy higher without, by way of compensation, opening any avenues by which a compromise might seem possible. A conference is popularly supposed to provide a time and place for the sober weighing of the facts and points of arguments, but there are few who see in the calling of this conference any indications that this may be the case.

  The coffee maker was going full blast now and Enoch threw the paper down and strode to the stove to snatch it off. From the cupboard he got a cup and went to the table with it.

  But before he began to eat, he went back to the desk and, opening a drawer, got out his chart and spread it on the table. Once again he wondered just how valid it might be, although in certain parts of it, at times, it seemed to make a certain sort of sense.

  He had based it on the Mizar theory of statistics and had been forced, because of the nature of his subject, to shift some of the factors, to substitute some values. He wondered now, for the thousandth time, if he had made an error somewhere. Had his sifting and substitution destroyed the validity of the system? And if so, how could he correct the errors to restore validity?

  Here the factors were, he thought: the birth rate and the total population of the Earth, the death rate, the values of currencies, the spread of living costs, attendance of places of worship, medical advances, technological developments, industrial indices, the labor market, world trade trends—and many others, including some that at first glance might not seem too relevant: the auction price of art objects, vacation preferences and movements, the speed of transportation, the incidence of insanity.

  The statistical method developed by the mathematicians of Mizar, he knew, would work anywhere, on anything, if applied correctly. But he had been forced to twist it in translating an alien planet’s situation to fit the situation here on Earth—and in consequence of that twisting, did it still apply?

  He shuddered as he looked at it. For if he’d made no mistake, if he’d handled everything correctly, if his translations had done no violence to the concept, then the Earth was headed straight for another major war, for a holocaust of nuclear destruction.

  He let loose of the corners of the chart and it rolled itself back into a cylinder.

  He reached for one of the fruits the Sirrah being had brought him and bit into it. He rolled it on his tongue, savoring the delicacy of the taste. It was, he decided, as good as that strange, birdlike being had guaranteed it would be.

  There had been a time, he remembered, when he had held some hope that the chart based on the Mizar theory might show, if not a way to end all war, at least a way to keep the peace. But the chart had never given any hint of the road to peace. Inexorably, relentlessly, it had led the way to war.

  How many other wars, he wondered, could the people of the Earth endure?

  No man could say, of course, but it might be just one more. For the weapons that would be used in the coming conflict had not as yet been measured and there was no man who could come close to actually estimating the results these weapons would produce.

  War had been bad enough when men faced one another with their weapons in their hands, but in any present war great payloads of destruction would go hurtling through the skies to engulf whole cities—aimed not at military concentrations, but at total populations.

  He reached out his hand for the chart again, then pulled it back. There was no further need of looking at it. He knew it all by heart. There was no hope in it. He might study it and puzzle over it until the crack of doom and it would not change a whit. There was no hope at all. The world was thundering once again, in a blind red haze of fury and of helplessness, down the road to war.

  He went on with his eating and the fruit was even better than it had been at first bite. “Next time,” the being had said, “I will bring you more.” But it might be a long time before he came again, and he might never come. There were many of them who passed through only once, although there were a few who showed up every week or so—old, regular travelers who had become close friends.

  And there had been, he recalled, that little group of Hazers who, years ago, had made arrangements for extra long stopovers at the station so they could sit around this very table and talk the hours away, arriving laden with hampers and with baskets of things to eat and drink, as if it were a picnic.

  But finally they had stopped their coming and it had been years since he’d seen any one of them. And he regretted it, for they’d been the best of companions.

  He drank an extra cup of coffee, sitting idly in the chair, thinking about those good old days when the band of Hazers came.

  His ears caught the faint rustling and he glanced quickly up to see her sitting
on the sofa, dressed in the demure hoop skirts of the 1860s.

  “Mary!” he said, surprised, rising to his feet.

  She was smiling at him in her very special way and she was beautiful, he thought, as no other woman ever had been beautiful.

  “Mary,” he said, “it’s so nice to have you here.”

  And now, leaning on the mantelpiece, dressed in Union blue, with his belted saber and his full black mustache, was another of his friends.

  “Hello, Enoch,” David Ransome said. “I hope we don’t intrude.”

  “Never,” Enoch told him. “How can two friends intrude?”

  He stood beside the table and the past was with him, the good and restful past, the rose-scented and unhaunted past that had never left him.

  Somewhere in the distance was the sound of fife and drum and the jangle of the battle harness as the boys marched off to war, with the colonel glorious in his full-dress uniform upon the great black stallion, and the regimental flags snapping in the stiff June breeze.

  He walked across the room and over to the sofa. He made a little bow to Mary.

  “With your permission, ma’am,” he said.

  “Please do,” she said. “If you should happen to be busy…”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I was hoping you would come.”

  He sat down on the sofa, not too close to her, and he saw her hands were folded, very primly, in her lap. He wanted to reach out and take her hands in his and hold them for a moment, but he knew he couldn’t.

  For she wasn’t really there.

  “It’s been almost a week,” said Mary, “since I’ve seen you. How is your work going, Enoch?”

  He shook his head. “I still have all the problems. The watchers still are out there. And the chart says war.”

  David left the mantel and came across the room. He sat down in a chair and arranged his saber.

  “War, the way they fight it these days,” he declared, “would be a sorry business. Not the way we fought it, Enoch.”

  “No,” said Enoch, “not the way we fought it. And while a war would be bad enough itself, there is something worse. If Earth fights another war, our people will be barred, if not forever, at least for many centuries, from the cofraternity of space.”