," 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 shreping. 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 noped 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 bill, 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 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
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.
10
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
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."
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.
"Then you need a name to call you by," he said, "and it shall be
Ulysses. I need to call you something,"
"It is agreeable," said that strange one. "But might one ask why the
name Ulysses?"
"Because it is the name," said Enoch, "of a great man of my race."
It was a crazy thing, of course. For there was no resemblance between
the two of them-that slouchy Union general whittling as he perched upon the
fence and this other who stood upon the porch.
"I am glad you chose it," said this Ulysses, standing on the porch. "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, as friends of the
first names, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years."
It was beginning to come straight now and the thought was staggering.
Perhaps it was as well, Enoch told himself, that it had waited for a while,
that he had been so dazed it had not come on him all at once.
"Perhaps," said Enoch, fighting back the realization that was crowding
in on him, crowding in too fast, "I could offer you some victuals. I could
cook up some coffee..."
"Coffee," said Ulysses, smacking his thin lips. "Do you have the
coffee?"
"I'll make a big pot of it. I'll break in an egg so it will settle
clear ..."
"Delectable," Ulysses said. "Of all the drinks that I have drank on all
the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best."
They went into-the kitchen and Enoch stirred up the coals in the
kitchen range and then put in new wood. He took the coffeepot over to the
sink and ladled in some water from the water pail and put it on to boil. He
went into the pantry to get some eggs and down into the cellar to bring up
the ham.
Ulysses sat stiffly in a kitchen chair and watched him as he worked.
"You eat ham and eggs?" asked Enoch.
"I eat anything," Ulysses said. "My race is most adaptable. That is the
reason I was sent to this planet as a-what do you call it?-a looker-out,
perhaps."
"A scout," suggested Enoch.
"That is it, a scout."
He was an easy thing to talk with, Enoch told himself-almost like
another person, although, God knows, he looked little like a person. He
looked, instead, like some outrageous caricature of a human being.
"You have lived here, in this house," Ulysses said, "for a long, long
time. You feel affection for it."
"It has been my home," said Enoch, "since the day that I was born. I
was gone from it for almost four years, but it was always home."
"I'll be glad," Ulysses told him, "to be getting home again myself.
I've been away too long. On a mission such as this one, it always is too
long."
Enoch put down the knife he had been using to cut a slice of ham and
sat down heavily in a chair. He stared at Ulysses, across the table from
him.
"You?" he asked. "You are going home?"
"Why, of course," Ulysses told him. "Now that my job is nearly done. I
have got a home. Did you think I hadn't?"
"I don't know," said Enoch weakly. "I had never thought of it."
And that was it, he knew. It had not occurred to him to connect a being
such as this with a thing like home. For it was only human beings that had a
place called home.
"Some day," Ulysses said, "I shall tell you about my home. Some day you
may even visit me."
"Out among the stars," said Enoch.
"It seems strange to you now," Ulysses said. "It will take a while to
get used to the idea. But as you come to know us-all of us-you will
understand. And I hope you like us. We are not bad people, really. Not any
of the many different kinds of us."
The stars, Enoch told himself, were out there in the loneliness of
space and how far they were he could not even guess, nor what they were nor
why. Another world, he thought-no, that was wrong-many other worlds. There
were people there, perhaps many other people; a different kind of people,
probably, for every different star. And one of them sat here in this very
kitchen, waiting for the coffeepot to boil, for the ham and eggs to fry.
"But why?" he asked. "But why?"
"Because," Ulysses said, "we are a traveling people. We need a travel
station here. We want to turn this house into a station and you to keep the
station."
"This house?"
"We could not build a station, for then we'd have people asking who was
building it and what it might be for. So we are forced to use an existing
structure and change it for our needs. But inside only. We leave the outside
as it is, in appearance, that is. For there must be no questions asked.
There must be ..."
"But traveling ..."
"From star to star," Ulysses said. "Quicker than the thought of it.
Faster than a wink. There is what you would call machinery, but it is not
machinery-not the same as the machinery you think of."
"You must excuse me," Enoch said, confused. "It seems so impossible."
"You remember when the railroad came to Millville?"
"Yes, I can remember that. I was just a kid."
"Then think of it this way. This is just another railroad and the Earth
is just another town and this house will be the station for this new and
different railroad. The only difference is that no one on Earth but you will
know the railroad's here. For it will be no more than a resting and a
switching point. No one on the Earth can buy a ticket to travel on the
railroad."
Put that way, of course, it had a simple sound, but it was, Enoch
sensed, very far from simple.
"Railroad cars in space?" he asked.
"Not railroad cars," Ulysses told him. "It is something else. I do not
know how to begin to tell you ..."
"Perhaps you should pick someone else. Someone who would understand."
"There is no one on this planet who could remotely understand. No,
Enoch, we'll do with you as well as anyone. In many ways, much better than
with anyone."
"But ..."
"What is it, Enoch?"
"Nothing," Enoch said.
For he remembered now how he had been sitting on the steps thinking how
he was alone and about a new beginning, knowing that he could not escape a
new beginning, that he must start from scratch and build his life anew.
And here, supenly, was that new beginning-more wondrous and fearsome
than anything he could have dreamed even in an insane moment.
11
Enoch filed the message and sent his confirmation:
NO. 406302 RECEIVED. COFFEE ON THE FIRE. ENOCH.
Clearing the machine, he walked over to the No. 3 liquid tank he'd
prepared before he left. He checked the temperature and the level of the
solution and made certain once again that the tank was securely positioned
in relation to the materializer.
From there he went to the other materializer, the official and
emergency materializer, positioned in the corner, and checked it over
closely. It was all right, as usual. It always was all right, but before
each of Ulysses's visits he never failed to check it. There was nothing he
could have done about it had there been something wrong other than send an
urgent message to Galactic Central. In which case someone would have come in
on the regular materializer and put it into shape.
For the official and emergency materializer was exactly what its name
implied. It was used only for official visits by personnel of Galactic
Center or for possible emergencies and its operation was entirely outside
that of the local station.
Ulysses, as an inspector for this and several other stations, could
have used the official materializer at any time he wished without prior
notice. But in all the years that he had been coming to the station he had
never failed, Enoch remembered with a touch of pride, to message that he was
coming. It was, he knew, a courtesy which all the other stations on the
great galactic network might not be accorded, although there were some of
them which might be given equal treatment.
Tonight, he thought, he probably should tell Ulysses about the watch
that had been put upon the station. Perhaps he should have told him earlier,
but he had been reluctant to admit that the human race might prove to be a
problem to the galactic installation.
It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present
the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were
neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely
grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even
understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways.
But if they had the chance, Enoch told himself, if they ever got a
break, if they only could be told what was out in space, then they'd get a
grip upon themselves and they would measure up and then, in the course of
time, would be admitted into the great cofraternity of the people of the
stars.
Once admitted, they would prove their worth and would pull their
weight, for they were still a young race and full of energy-at times, maybe,
too much energy.
Enoch shook his head and went across the room to sit down at his desk.
Drawing the bundle of mail in front of him, he slid it out of the string
which Winslowe had used to tie it all together.
There were the daily papers, a news weekly, two journals-Nature and
Science-and the letter.
He pushed the papers and the journals to one side and picked up the
letter. It was, he saw, an air mail sheet and was postmarked London and the
return apress bore a name that was unfamiliar to him. He puzzled as to why
an unknown person should be writing him from London. Although, he reminded
himself, anyone who wrote from London, or indeed from anywhere, would be an
unknown person. He knew no one in London nor elsewhere in the world.
He slit the air sheet open and spread it out on the desk in front of
him, pulling the desk lamp close so the light would fall upon the writing.
<I>Dear sir</I> [he read], <I>I would suspect I am unknown to you. I am one of
several editors of the British journal, Nature, to which you have been a
subscriber for these many years. I do not use the journal's letterhead
because this letter is personal and unofficial and perhaps not even in the
best of taste.</I>
<I>You are, it may interest you to know, our eldest subscriber. We have
had you on our mailing lists for more than eighty years.</I>
<I>While I am aware that it is no appropriate concern of mine, I have
wondered if you, yourself, have subscribed to our publication for this
length of time, or if it might be possible that your father or someone close
to you may have been the original subscriber and you simply have allowed the
subscription to continue in his name.</I>
<I>My interest undoubtedly constitutes an unwarranted and inexcusable
curiosity and if you, sir, choose to ignore the query it is entirely within
your rights and proper that you do so. But if you should not mind replying,
an answer would be appreciated.</I>
<I>I can only say in my own defense that I have been associated for so
long with our publication that I feel a certain sense of pride that someone
has found it worth the having for more than eighty years. I doubt that many
publications can boast such long time interest on the part of any man.</I>
<I>May I assure, you, sir, of my utmost respect.</I>
<I>Sincerely yours.</I>
And then the signature.
Enoch shoved the letter from him.
And there it was again, he told himself. Here was another watcher,
although discreet and most polite and unlikely to cause trouble.
But someone else who had taken notice, who had felt a twinge of wonder
at the same man subscribing to a magazine for more than eighty years.
As the years went on, there would be more and more. It was not only the
watchers encamped outside the station with whom he must concern himself, but
those potential others. A man could be as self-effacing as he well could
manage and still he could not hide. Soon or late the world would catch up
with him and would come crowding around his door, agog to know why he might
be hiding.
It was useless, he knew, to hope for much further time. The world was
closing in.
Why can't they leave me alone? he thought. If he only could explain how
the situation stood, they might leave him alone. But he couldn't explain to
them. And even if he could, there would be some of them who'd still come
crowding in.
Across the room the materializer beeped for attention and Enoch swung
around.
The Thuban had arrived. He was in the tank, a shadowy globular blob of
substance, and above him, riding sluggishly in the solution, was a cube of
something.
Luggage, Enoch wondered. But the message had said there would be no
luggage.
Even as he hurried across the room, the clicking came to him-the Thuban
talking to him.
"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 apress 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 apressed 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 be 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
puple 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.
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 finegrained 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, p