e girl carrying her beloved pussy cat.
"Never for a century," said Ulysses, "perhaps for many centuries,
perhaps never, has it glowed so well. I myself cannot remember when it was
like this. It is wonderful, is it not?"
"Yes," said Enoch. "It is wonderful."
"Now we shall be one again," Ulysses said. "Now we shall feel again.
Now we shall be a people instead of many people..."
"But the creature that had it ..."
"A clever one," Ulysses said. "He was holding it for ransom."
"It had been stolen, then."
"We do not know all the circumstances," Ulysses told him. "We will find
out, of course."
They tramped on in silence through the woods and far in the east one
could see, through the treetops, the first flush in the sky that foretold
the rising moon.
"There is something," Enoch said.
"Ask me," said Ulysses.
"How could that creature back there carry it and not feel - feel no
part of it? For if he could have, he would not have stolen it."
"There is only one in many billions," Ulysses said, "who can - how do
you say it? - tune in on it, perhaps. To you and I it would be nothing. It
would not respond to us. We could hold it in our hands forever and there
would nothing happen. But let that one in many billions lay a finger on it
and it becomes alive. There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity - I don't
know how to say it - that forms a bridge between this strange machine and
the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine, itself, you understand,
that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature's
mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us."
A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool - technological brother to
the hoe, the wrench, the hammer - and yet as far a cry from these as the
human brain was from that first amino acid which had come into being on this
planet when the Earth was very young. One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say
that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the
ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of
thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no
such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or
any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as
far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther. For each new
development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many
other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road
there were more paths to follow. There'd never be an end, he thought - no
end to anything.
They reached the edge of the field and headed up across it toward the
station. From its upper edge came the sound of running feet.
"Enoch!" a voice shouted out of the darkness. "Enoch, is that you?"
Enoch recognized the voice.
"Yes, Winslowe. What is wrong?"
The mailman burst out of the darkness and stopped, panting with his
running, at the edge of light.
"Enoch, they are coming! A couple of carloads of them. But I put a
crimp in them. Where the road turns off into your lane - that narrow place,
you know. I dumped two pounds of roofing nails along the ruts. That'll hold
them for a while."
"Roofing nails?" Ulysses asked.
"It's a mob," Enoch told him. "They are after me. The nails ...
"Oh, I see," Ulysses said "The deflation of the tires."
Winslowe took a slow step closer, his gaze riveted on the glow of the
shielded Talisman.
"That's Lucy Fisher, ain't it?"
"Of course it is," said Enoch.
"Her old man came roaring into town just a while ago and said she was
gone again. Up until then everything had quieted down and it was all right.
But old Hank, he got them stirred up again. So I went down to the hardware
store and got them roofing nails and I beat them here."
"This mob?" Ulysses asked. "I don't ..."
Winslowe interrupted him, gasping in his eagerness to tell all his
information. "That ginseng man is up there, waiting at the house for you. He
has a panel truck."
"That," said Enoch, "would be Lewis with the Hazer's body."
"He is some upset," said Winslowe. "He said you were expecting him."
"Perhaps," suggested Ulysses, "we shouldn't just be standing here. It
seems to my poor intellect that many things, indeed, may be coming to a
crisis."
"Say," the mailman yelled, "what is going on here? What is that thing
Lucy has and who's this fellow with you?"
"Later," Enoch told him. "I'll tell you later. There's no time to tell
you now."
"But, Enoch, there's the mob."
"I'll deal with them," said Enoch grimly, "when I have to deal with
them. Right now there's something more important."
They ran up the slope, the four of them, dodging through the waist -
high clumps of weeds Ahead of them the station reared dark and angular
against the evening sky.
"They're down there at the turnoff," Winslowe gasped, wheezing with his
running. "That flash of light down the ridge. That was the headlights of a
car."
They reached the edge of the yard and ran toward the house. The black
bulk of the panel truck glimmered in the glow cast by the Talisman. A figure
detached itself from the shadow of the truck and hurried out toward them.
"Is that you, Wallace?"
"Yes," said Enoch. "I'm sorry that I wasn't here."
"I was a bit upset," said Lewis, "when I didn't find you waiting."
"Something unforeseen," said Enoch. "Something that must be taken care
of."
"The body of the honored one?" Ulysses asked. "It is in the truck?"
Lewis noped. "I am happy that we can restore it."
"We'll have to carry him down to the orchard," Enoch said. "You can't
get a car in there."
"The other time," Ulysses said, "you were the one who carried him."
Enoch noped.
"My friend," the alien said, "I wonder if on this occasion I could be
allowed the honor."
"Why, yes, of course," said Enoch. "He would like it that way."
And the words came to his tongue, but he choked them back, for it would
not have done to say them - the words of thanks for lifting from him the
necessity of complete recompense, for the gesture which released him from
the utter letter of the law.
At his elbow, Winslowe said: "They are coming. I can hear them down the
road."
He was right.
From down the road came the soft sound of footsteps paping in the dust,
not hurrying, with no need to hurry, the insulting and deliberate treading
of a monster so certain of its prey that it need not hurry.
Enoch swung around and half lifted his rifle, training it toward the
paping that came out of the dark.
Behind him, Ulysses spoke softly: "Perhaps it would be most proper to
bear him to the grave in the full glory and unshielded light of our restored
Talisman."
"She can't hear you," Enoch said. "You must remember she is deaf. You
will have to show her."
But even as he said it, a blaze leaped out that was blinding in its
brightness.
With a strangled cry Enoch half turned back to face the little group
that stood beside the truck, and the bag that had enclosed the Talisman, he
saw, lay at Lucy's feet and she held the glowing brightness high and proudly
so that it spread its light across the yard and the ancient house, and some
of it as well spilled out into the field.
There was a quietness. As if the entire world had caught its breath and
stood attentive and in awe, waiting for a sound that did not come, that
would never come but would always be expected.
And with the quietness came an abiding sense of peace that seemed to
seep into the very fiber of one's being. It was no synthetic thing - not as
if someone had invoked a peace and peace then was allowed to exist by
suffrance. It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came
with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost
- like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about
you, and there was the feeling that it was not only here but that the peace
extended on and out in all directions, to the farthest reaches of infinity,
and that it had a depth which would enable it to endure until the final gasp
of all eternity.
Slowly, remembering, Enoch turned back to face the field and the men
were there, at the edge of the light cast by the Talisman, a gray, hupled
group, like a pack of chastened wolves that slunk at the faint periphery of
a campfire's light.
And as he watched, they melted back - back into the deeper dark from
which they had paped in the dust track of the road.
Except for one who turned and bolted, plunging down the hill in the
darkness toward the woods, howling in mapened terror like a frightened dog.
"There goes Hank," said Winslowe. "That is Hank running down the hill."
"I am sorry that we frightened him," said Enoch soberly. "No man should
be afraid of this."
"It is himself that he is frightened of," the mailman said. "He lives
with a terror in him."
And that was true, thought Enoch. That was the way with Man; it had
always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was
afraid of had always been himself.
34
The grave was filled and mounded and the five of them stood for a
moment more, listening to the restless wind that stirred in the moon -
drenched apple orchard, while from far away, down in the hollows above the
river valley, the whippoorwills talked back and forth through the silver
night.
In the moonlight Enoch tried to read the graven line upon the rough -
hewn tombstone, but there was not light enough. Although there was no need
to read it; it was in his mind:
<I>Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him,
for in death he belongs to the universe.</I>
When you wrote that, the Hazer diplomat had told him, just the night
before, you wrote as one of us. And he had not said so, but the Vegan had
been wrong. For it was not a Vegan sentiment alone; it was human, too.
The words were chiseled awkwardly and there was a mistake or two in
spelling, for the Hazer language was not an easy one to master. The stone
was softer than the marble or the granite most commonly used for gravestones
and the lettering would not last. In a few more years the weathering of sun
and rain and frost would blur the characters, and in some years after that
they would be entirely gone, with no more than the roughness of the stone
remaining to show that words had once been written there. But it did not
matter, Enoch thought, for the words were graven on more than stone alone.
He looked across the grave at Lucy. The Talisman was in its bag once
more and the glow was softer. She still held it clasped tight against
herself and her face was still exalted and unnoticing - as if she no longer
lived in the present world, but had entered into some other place, some
other far dimension where she dwelled alone and was forgetful of all past.
"Do you think," Ulysses asked, "that she will go with us? Do you think
that we can have her? Will the Earth..."
"The Earth," said Enoch, "has not a thing to say. We Earth people are
free agents. It is up to her."
"You think that she will go?"
"I think so," Enoch said. "I think maybe this has been the moment she
had sought for all her life. I wonder if she might not have sensed it, even
with no Talisman."
For she always had been in touch with something outside of human ken.
She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could
not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had
fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off
the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other
acts that she performed unseen.
"Her parent?" Ulysses asked. "The howling one that ran away from us?"
"I'll handle him," said Lewis. "I'll have a talk with him. I know him
fairly well."
"You want her to go back with you to Galactic Central?" Enoch asked.
"If she will," Ulysses said. "Central must be told at once."
"And from there throughout the galaxy?"
"Yes," Ulysses said. "We need her very badly."
"Could we, I wonder, borrow her for a day or two."
"Borrow her?"
"Yes," said Enoch. "For we need her, too. We need her worst of all."
"Of course," Ulysses said. "But I don't ..." "Lewis," Enoch asked, "do
you think our government - the Secretary of State, perhaps - might be
persuaded to appoint one Lucy Fisher as a member of our peace conference
delegation?"
Lewis stammered, made a full stop, then began again: "I think it could
possibly be managed."
"Can you imagine," Enoch asked, "the impact of this girl and the
Talisman at the conference table?"
"I think I can," said Lewis. "But the Secretary undoubtedly would want
to talk with you before he arrived at his decision."
Enoch half turned toward Ulysses, but he did not need to phrase his
question.
"By all means," Ulysses said to Lewis. "Let me know and I'll sit in on
the meeting. And you might tell the good Secretary, too, that it would not
be a bad idea to begin the formation of a world committee."
"A world committee?"
"To arrange," Ulysses said, "for the Earth becoming one of us. We
cannot accept a custodian, can we, from an outside planet?"
35
In the moonlight the tumbled boulder pile gleamed whitely, like the
skeleton of some prehistoric beast. For here, near the edge of the cliff
that towered above the river, the heavy trees thinned out and, the rocky
point stood open to the sky.
Enoch stood beside one of the massive boulders and gazed down at the
hupled figure that lay among the rocks. Poor, tattered bungler, he thought,
dead so far from home and, so far as he, himself, must be concerned, to so
little purpose
Although perhaps neither poor nor tattered, for in that brain, now
broken and spattered beyond recovery, must surely have lain a scheme of
greatness - the kind of scheme that the brain of an earthly Alexander or
Xerxes or Napoleon may have held, a dream of some great power, cynically
conceived, to be attained and held at whatever cost, the dimensions of it so
grandiose that it shoved aside and canceled out all moral considerations.
He tried momentarily to imagine what the scheme might be, but knew,
even as he tested his imagination, how foolish it was to try, for there
would be factors, he was sure, that he would not recognize and
considerations that might lie beyond his understanding.
But however that might be, something had gone wrong, for in the plan
itself Earth could have had no place other than as a hideout which could be
used if trouble struck. This creature's lying here, then, was a part of
desperation, a last - ditch gamble that had not worked out.
And, Enoch thought, it was ironic that the key of failure lay in the
fact that the creature, in its fleeing, had carried the Talisman into the
backyard of a sensitive, and on a planet, too, where no one would have
thought to look for a sensitive. For, thinking back on it, there could be
little doubt that Lucy had sensed the Talisman and had been drawn to it as
truly as a magnet would attract a piece of steel. She had known nothing
else, perhaps, than that the Talisman had been there and was something she
must have, that it was something she had waited for in all her loneliness,
without knowing what it was or without hope of finding it. Like a child who
sees, quite supenly, a shiny, glorious bauble on a Christmas tree and knows
that it's the grandest thing on Earth and that it must be hers.
This creature lying here, thought Enoch, must have been able and
resourceful. For it would have taken great ability and resourcefulness to
have stolen the Talisman to start with, to keep it hipen for years, to have
penetrated into the secrets and the files of Galactic Central. Would it have
been possible, he wondered, if the Talisman had been in effective operation?
With an energetic Talisman would the moral laxity and the driving greed been
possible to motivate the deed?
But that was ended now. The Talisman had been restored and a new
custodian had been found - a deaf - mute girl of Earth, the humblest of
humans. And there would be peace on Earth and in time the Earth would join
the confraternity of the galaxy.
There were no problems now, he thought. No decisions to be made. Lucy
had taken the decisions from the hands of everyone.
The station would remain and he could unpack the boxes he had packed
and put the journals back on the shelves again. He could go back to the
station once again and settle down and carry on his work.
<I>I am sorry</I>, he told the hupled shape that lay among the boulders. <I>I am
sorry that mine was the hand that had to do it to you.</I>
He turned away and walked out to where the cliff dropped straight down
to the river flowing at its foot. He raised the rifle and held it for a
moment motionless and then he threw it out and watched it fall, spinning end
for end, the moonlight glinting off the barrel, saw the tiny splash it made
as it struck the water. And far below, he heard the smug, contented gurgling
of the water as it flowed past this cliff and went on, to the further ends
of Earth.
There would be peace on Earth, he thought; there would be no war. With
Lucy at the conference table, there could be no thought of war. Even if some
ran howling from the fear inside themselves, a fear and guilt so great that
it overrode the glory and the comfort of the Talisman, there still could be
no war.
But it was a long trail yet, a long lonesome way, before the brightness
of real peace would live in the hearts of man.
Until no man ran howling, wild with fear (any kind of fear), would
there be actual peace. Until the last man threw away his weapon (any sort of
weapon), the tribe of Man could not be at peace. And a rifle, Enoch told
himself, was the least of the weapons of the Earth, the least of man's
inhumanity to man, no more than a symbol of all the other and more deadly
weapons.
He stood on the rim of the cliff and looked out across the river and
the dark shadow of the wooded valley. His hands felt strangely empty with
the rifle gone, but it seemed that somewhere, back there just a way, he had
stepped into another field of time, as if an age or day had dropped away and
he had come into a place that was shining and brand new and unsullied by any
past mistakes.
The river rolled below him and the river did not care. Nothing mattered
to the river. It would take the tusk of mastodon, the skull of sabertooth,
the rib cage of a man, the dead and sunken tree, the thrown rock or rifle
and would swallow each of them and cover them in mud or sand and roll
gurgling over them, hiding them from sight.
A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years
to come there might be no river - but in a million years from now there
would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of
the universe, Enoch told himself - a thing that went on caring.
He turned slowly from the cliff edge and clambered through the
boulders, to go walking up the hill. He heard the tiny scurrying of small
life rustling through the fallen leaves and once there was the sleepy
peeping of an awakened bird and through the entire woods lay the peace and
comfort of that glowing light - not so intense, not so deep and bright and
so wonderful as when it actually had been there, but a breath of it still
left.
He came to the edge of the woods and climbed the field and ahead of him
the station stood foursquare upon its ridgetop. And it seemed that it was no
longer a station only, but his home as well. Many years ago it had been a
home and nothing more and then it had become a way station to the galaxy.
But now, although way station still, it was home again.
36
He came into the station and the place was quiet and just a little
ghostly in the quietness of it. A lamp burned on his desk and over on the
coffee table the little pyramid of spheres was flashing, throwing its many -
colored lights, like the crystal balls they'd used in the Roaring Twenties
to turn a dance hall into a place of magic. The tiny flickering colors went
flitting all about the room, like the dance of a zany band of Technicolor
fireflies.
He stood for a moment, indecisive, not knowing what to do. There was
something missing and all at once he realized what it was. During all the
years there'd been a rifle to hang upon its pegs or to lay across the desk.
And now there was no rifle.
He'd have to settle down, he told himself, and get back to work. He'd
have to unpack and put the stuff away. He'd have to get the journals written
and catch up with his reading. There was a lot to do.
Ulysses and Lucy had left an hour or two before, bound for Galactic
Central, but the <I>feeling</I> of the Talisman still seemed to linger in the room.
Although, perhaps, he thought, not in the room at all, but inside himself.
Perhaps it was a feeling that he'd carry with him no matter where he went.
He walked slowly across the room and sat down on the sofa. In front of
him the pyramid of spheres was splashing out its crystal shower of colors.
He reached out a hand to pick it up, then drew it slowly back. What was the
use, he asked himself, of examining it again? If he had not learned its
secret the many times before, why should he expect to now?
A pretty thing, he thought, but useless.
He wondered how Lucy might be getting on and knew she was all right.
She'd get along, he told himself anywhere she went.
Instead of sitting here, he should be getting back to work. There was a
lot of catching up to do. And his time would not be his own from now on, for
the Earth would be pounding at the door. There would be conferences and
meetings and a lot of other things and in a few hours more the newspapers
might be here. But before it happened, Ulysses would be back to help him,
and perhaps there would be others, too.
In just a little while he'd rustle up some food and then he'd get to
work. If he worked far into the night, he could get a good deal done.
Lonely nights, he told himself, were good for work. And it was lonely
now, when it should not be lonely. For he no longer was alone, as he had
thought he was alone just a few short hours before. Now he had the Earth and
the galaxy, Lucy and Ulysses, Winslowe and Lewis and the old philosopher out
in the apple orchard. He rose and walked to the desk and picked up the
statuette Winslowe had carved of him. He held it beneath the desk lamp and
turned it slowly in his hands. There was, he saw now, a loneliness in that
figure, too - the essential loneliness of a man who walked alone.
But he'd had to walk alone. There'd been no other way. There had been
no choice. It had been a one - man job. And now the job was - no, not done,
for there still was much that must be done. But the first phase of it now
was over and the second phase was starting.
He set the statuette back on the desk and remembered that he had not
given Winslowe the piece of wood the Thuban traveler had brought. Now he
could tell Winslowe where all the wood had come from. They could go through
the journals and find the dates and the origin of every stick of it. That
would please old Winslowe.
He heard the silken rustle and swung swiftly round.
"Mary!" he cried.
She stood just at the edge of shadow and the flitting colors from the
flashing pyramid made her seem like someone who had stepped from fairyland.
And that was right, he was thinking wildly, for his lost fairyland was back.
"I had to come," she said. "You were lonely, Enoch, and I could not
stay away."
She could not stay away - and that might be true, be thought. For
within the conditioning he'd set up there might have been the inescapable
compulsion to come whenever she was needed.
It was a trap, he thought, from which neither could escape. There was
no free will here, but instead the deadly precision of this blind mechanism
he had shaped himself.
She should not come to see him and perhaps she knew this as well as he,
but could not help herself. Would this be, he wondered, the way it would be,
forever and forever?
He stood there, frozen, torn by the need of her and the emptiness of
her unreality, and she was moving toward him.
She was close to him and in a moment she would stop, for she knew the
rules as well as he; she, no more than he, could admit illusion.
But she did not stop. She came so close that he could smell the apple -
blossom fragrance of her. She put out a hand and laid it on his arm.
It was no shadow touch and it was no shadow hand. He could feel the
pressure of her fingers and the coolness of them.
He stood rigid, with her hand upon his arm.
The flashing light! he thought. The pyramid of spheres!
For now he remembered who had given it to him - one of those aberrant
races of the Alphard system. And it had been from the literature of that
system that he had learned the art of fairyland. They had tried to help him
by giving him the pyramid and he had not understood. There had been a
failure of communication - but that was an easy thing to happen. In the
Babel of the galaxy, it was easy to misunderstand or simply not to know.
For the pyramid of spheres was a wonderful, and yet a simple,
mechanism. It was the fixation agent that banished all illusion, that made a
fairyland for real. You made something as you wanted it and then turned on
the pyramid and you had what you had made, as real as if it had never been
illusion.
Except, he thought, in some things you couldn't fool yourself. You knew
it was illusion, even if it should turn real.
He reached out toward her tentatively, but her hand dropped from his
arm and she took a slow step backward.
In the silence of the room - the terrible, lonely silence - they stood
facing one another while the colored lights ran like playing mice as the
pyramid of spheres twirled its everlasting rainbow.
"I am sorry," Mary said, "but it isn't any good. We can't fool
ourselves."
He stood mute and shamed.
"I waited for it," she said. "I thought and dreamed about it."
"So did I," said Enoch. "I never thought that it would happen."
And that was it, of course. So long as it could not happen, it was a
thing to dream about. It was romantic and far - off and impossible. Perhaps
it had been romantic only because it had been so far - off and so
impossible.
"As if a doll had come to life," she said, "or a beloved Tepy bear. I
am sorry, Enoch, but you could not love a doll or a Tepy bear that had come
to life. You always would remember them the way they were before. The doll
with the silly, painted smile; the Tepy bear with the stuffing coming out of
it."
"No!" cried Enoch. "No!"
"Poor Enoch," she said. "It will be so bad for you. I wish that I could
help. You'll have so long to live with it."
"But you!" he cried. "But you? What can you do now?"
It had been she, he thought, who had the courage. The courage that it
took to face things as they were.
How, he wondered, had she sensed it? How could she have known?
"I shall go away," she said. "I shall not come back. Even when you need
me, I shall not come back. There is no other way."
"But you can't go away," he said. "You are trapped the same as I."
"Isn't it strange," she said, "how it happened to us. Both of us
victims of illusion ..."
"But you," he said. "Not you."
She noped gravely. "I, the same as you. You can't love the doll you
made or I the toymaker. But each of us thought we did; each of us still
think we should and are guilty and miserable when we find we can't."
"We could try," said Enoch. "If you would only stay."
"And end up by hating you? And, worse than that, by your hating me. Let
us keep the guilt and misery. It is better than the hate."
She moved swiftly and the pyramid of spheres was in her hand and
lifted.
"No, not that!" 'he shouted. "No, Mary ..."
The pyramid flashed, spinning in the air, and crashed against the
fireplace. The flashing lights went out. Something - glass? metal? stone? -
tinkled on the floor.
"Mary!" Enoch cried, striding forward in the dark.
But there was no one there.
"Mary!" he shouted, and the shouting was a whimper.
She was gone and she would not be back.
Even when he needed her, she would not be back.
He stood quietly in the dark and silence, and the voice of a century of
living seemed to speak to him in a silent language.
All things are hard, it said. There is nothing easy.
There had been the farm girl living down the road, and the southern
beauty who had watched him pass her gate, and now there was Mary, gone
forever from him.
He turned heavily in the room and moved forward, groping for the table.
He found it and switched on the light.
He stood beside the table and looked about the room. In this corner
where he stood there once had been a kitchen, and there, where the fireplace
stood, the living room, and it all had changed - it had been changed for a
long time now. But he still could see it as if it were only yesterday.
All the days were gone and all the people in them.
Only he was left.
He had lost his world. He had left his world behind him.
And, likewise, on this day, had all the others - all the humans that
were alive this moment.
They might not know it yet, but they, too, had left their world behind
them. It would never be the same again.
You said good bye to so many things, to so many loves, to so many
dreams.
"Good bye, Mary," he said. Forgive me and God keep you."
He sat down at the table and pulled the journal that lay upon its top
in front of him. He flipped it open, searching for the pages he must fill.
He had work to do.
Now he was ready for it.
He had said his last good bye.