Way Station (7 page)

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 file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (22 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt 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 ploping 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 file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (23 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt 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 human 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 ploped 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.

He walked into the yard and turned around to look back toward the clump of trees from which the flash had come, but there was nothing now to indicate that anyone was there.

Inside the station, the message machine was whistling plaintively.

Enoch hung up his gun, dropped the mail and statuette upon his desk and strode across the room to the whistling machine. He pushed the button and punched the lever and the whistling stopped.

Upon the message plate he read:

NO. 406,302 TO STATION 18327. WILL ARRiVE EARLY EVENING YOUR TIME. HAVE

THE COFFEE HOT. ULYSSES.

Enoch grinned. Ulysses and his coffee! He was the only one of the aliens who had ever liked any of Earth’s foods or drinks. There had been others who had tried them, but not more than once or twice.

Funny about Ulysses, he thought. They had liked each other from the very first, from that afternoon of the thunderstorm when they had been sitting on the steps and the mask of human form had peeled off the alien’s face.

It had been a grisly face, graceless and repulsive. The face, Enoch had thought, of a cruel clown. Wondering, even as he thought it, what had put that particular phrase into his head, for clowns were never cruel. But here was one that could be-the colored patchwork of the face, the hard, tight set of jaw, the thin slash of the mouth.

Then he saw the eyes and they canceled all the rest. They were large and had a softness and the light of understanding in them, and they reached file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (24 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt out to him, as another being might hold out its hands in friendship.

The rain had come hissing up the land to thrum across the machine-shed roof, and then it was upon them, slanting sheets of rain that hammered angrily at the dust which lay across the yard, while surprised, bedraggled chickens ran frantically for cover.

Enoch sprang to his feet and grasped the other’s arm, pulling him to the shelter of the porch.

They stood facing one another, and Ulysses had reached up and pulled the split and loosened mask away, revealing a bullet head without a hair upon it-and the painted face. A face like a wild and rampaging Indian, painted for the warpath, except that here and there were touches of the clown, as if the entire painting job had been meant to point up the inconsistent grotesqueries of war. But even as he stared, Enoch knew it was not paint, but the natural coloration of this thing which had come from somewhere among the stars.

Whatever other doubt there was, or whatever wonder, Enoch had no doubt at all that this strange being was not of the Earth. For it was not human.

It might be in human form, with a pair of arms and legs, with a head and face. But there was about it an essence of inhumanity, almost a negation of humanity.

In olden days, perhaps, he thought, it might have been a demon, but the days were past (although, in some areas of the country, not entirely past)

when one believed in demons or in ghosts or in any of the others of that ghastly tribe which, in man’s imagination, once had walked the Earth.

From the stars, he’d said. And perhaps he was. Although it made no sense. It was nothing one ever had imagined even in the purest fantasy.

There was nothing to grab hold of, nothing to hang on to. There was no yardstick for it and there were no rules. And it left a sort of blank spot in one’s thinking that might fill in, come time, but now was no more than a tunnel of great wonder that went on and on forever.

“Take your time,” the alien said. “I know it is not easy. And I do not know of a thing that I can do to make it easier. There is, after all, no way for me to prove I am from the stars.”

“But you talk so well.”

“In your tongue, you mean. It was not too difficult. If you only knew of all the languages in the galaxy, you would realize how little difficult.

Your language is not hard. It is a basic one and there are many concepts with which it need not deal.”

And, Enoch conceded, that could be true enough. “If you wish,” the alien said, “I can walk off somewhere for a day or two. Give you time to think. Then I could come back. You’d have thought it out by then.”

Enoch smiled, woodenly, and the smile had an unnatural feel upon his face.

“That would give me time,” he said, “to spread alarm throughout the countryside. There might be an ambush waiting for you.”

The alien shook its head. “I am sure you wouldn’t do it. I would take the chance. If you want me to …”

“No,” said Enoch, so calmly he surprised himself. “No, when you have a thing to face, you face it. I learned that in the war.”

“You’ll do,” the alien said. “You will do all right. I did not misjudge you and it makes me proud.”

“Misjudge me?”

“You do not think I just came walking in here cold? I know about you, Enoch. Almost as much, perhaps, as you know about yourself. Probably even more.”

“You know my name?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, that is fine,” said Enoch. “And what about your own?”

“I am seized with great embarrassment,” the alien told him. “For I have no name as such. Identification, surely, that fits the purpose of my race, but nothing that the tongue can form.”

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Supenly, for no reason, Enoch remembered that slouchy figure perching on the top rail of a fence, with a stick in one hand and a jackknife in the other, whittling placidly while the cannon balls whistled overhead and less than half a mile away the muskets snarled and crackled in the billowing powder smoke that rose above the line.