Way Station (10 page)

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.

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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.”

“Maybe that’s not so bad,” said David. “We may not be ready to join the ones in space.”

“Perhaps not,” Enoch admitted. “I rather doubt we are. But we could be some day. And that day would be shoved far into the future if we fight another war. You have to make some pretense of being civilized to join those other races.”

“Maybe,” Mary said, “they might never know. About a war, I mean. They go no place but this station.”

Enoch shook his head. “They would know. I think they’re watching us.

And anyhow, they would read the papers.”

“The papers you subscribe to?”

“I save them for Ulysses. That pile over in the corner. He takes them back to Galactic Central every time he comes. He’s very interested in Earth, you know, from the years he spent here. And from Galactic Central, once he’d read them, I have a hunch they travel to the corners of the galaxy.”

“Can you imagine,” David asked, “what the promotion departments of those newspapers might have to say about it if they only knew their depth of circulation.”

Enoch grinned at the thought of it.

“There’s that paper down in Georgia,” David said, “that covers Dixie like the dew. They’d have to think of something that goes with galaxy.”

“Glove,” said Mary quickly. “Covers the galaxy like a glove. What do you think of that?”

“Excellent,” said David.

“Poor Enoch,” Mary said contritely. “Here we make our jokes and Enoch has his problems.”

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“Not mine to solve, of course,” Enoch told her. “I’m just worried by them. All I have to do is stay inside the station and there are no problems.

Once you close the door here, the problems of the world are securely locked outside.”

“But you can’t do that.”

“No, I can’t,” said Enoch.

“I think you may be right,” said David, “in thinking that these other races may be watching us. With an eye, perhaps, to some day inviting the human race to join them. Otherwise, why would they have wanted to set up a station here on Earth?”

“They’re expanding the network all the time,” said Enoch. “They needed a station in this solar system to carry out their extension into this spiral arm.”

“Yes, that’s true enough,” said David, “but it need not have been the

Earth. They could have built a station out on Mars and used an alien for a keeper and still have served their purpose.”

“I’ve often thought of that,” said Mary. “They wanted a station on the

Earth and an Earthman as its keeper. There must be a reason for it.”

“I had hoped there was,” Enoch told her, “but I’m afraid they came too soon. It’s too early for the human race. We aren’t grown up. We still are juveniles.”

“It’s a shame,” said Mary. “We’d have so much to learn. They know so much more than we. Their concept of religion, for example.”

“I don’t know,” said Enoch, “whether it’s actually a religion. It seems to have few of the trappings we associate with religion. And it is not based on faith. It doesn’t have to be. It is based on knowledge. These people know, you see.”

“You mean the spiritual force.”

“It is there,” said Enoch, “just as surely as all the other forces that make up the universe. There is a spiritual force, exactly as there is time and space and gravitation and all the other factors that make up the immaterial universe. It is there and they can establish contact with it …”

“But don’t you think,” asked David, “that the human race may sense this? They don’t know it, but they sense it. And are reaching out to touch it. They haven’t got the knowledge, so they must do the best they can with faith. And that faith goes back a far way. Back, perhaps, deep into the prehistoric days. A crude faith, then, but a sort of faith, a grasping for faith.”

“I suppose so,” Enoch said. “But it actually wasn’t the spiritual force

I was thinking of. There are all the other things, the material things, the methods, the philosophies that the human race could use. Name almost any branch of science and there is something there for us, more than what we have.”

But his mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force.

There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English language which closely approximated it. “Talisman” was the closest, but

Talisman was too crude a word. Although that had been the word that Ulysses had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it.

There were so many things, so many concepts, he thought, out in the galaxy which could not be adequately expressed in any tongue on Earth. The

Talisman was more than a talisman and the machine which had been given the name was more than a mere machine. Involved in it, as well as certain mechanical concepts, was a psychic concept, perhaps some sort of psychic energy that was unknown on Earth. That and a great deal more. He had read some of the literature on the spiritual force and on the Talisman and had realized, he remembered, in the reading of it, how far short he fell, how far short the human race must fall, in an understanding of it.

The Talisman could be operated only by certain beings with certain types of minds and something else besides (could it be, he wondered, with file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (35 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt certain kinds of souls?). “Sensitives” was the word he had used in his mental translation of the term for these kinds of people, but once again, he could not be sure if the word came close to fitting. The Talisman was placed in the custody of the most capable, or the most efficient, or the most devoted (whichever it might be) of the galactic sensitives, who carried it from star to star in a sort of eternal progression. And on each planet the people came to make personal and individual contact with the spiritual force through the intervention and the agency of the Talisman and its custodian.

He found that he was shivering at the thought of it-the pure ecstasy of reaching out and touching the spirituality that flooded through the galaxy and, undoubtedly, through the universe. The assurance would be there, he thought, the assurance that life had a special place in the great scheme of existence, that one, no matter how small, how feeble, how insignificant, still did count for something in the vast sweep of space and time.

“What is the trouble, Enoch?” Mary asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking. I am sorry. I will pay attention now.”

“You were talking,” David said, “about what we could find in the galaxy. There was, for one thing, that strange sort of math. You were telling us of it once and it was something …”

“The Arcturus math, you mean,” said Enoch. “I know little more than when I told you of it. It is too involved. It is based on behavior symbolism.”

There was some doubt, he told himself, that you could even call it math, although, by analysis, that was probably what it was. It was something that the scientists of Earth, no doubt, could use to make possible the engineering of the social sciences as logically and as efficiently as the common brand of math had been used to build the gadgets of the Earth.

“And the biology of that race in Andromeda,” Mary said. “The ones who colonized all those crazy planets.”

“Yes, I know. But Earth would have to mature a bit in its intellectual and emotional outlook before we’d venture to use it as the Andromedans did.

Still, I suppose that it would have its applications.”

He shupered inwardly as he thought of how the Andromedans used it. And that, he knew, was proof that he still was a man of Earth, kin to all the bias and the prejudice and the shibboleths of the human mind. For what the

Andromedans had done was only common sense. If you cannot colonize a planet in your present shape, why, then you change your shape. You make yourself into the sort of being that can live upon the planet and then you take it over in that alien shape into which you have changed yourself. If you need to be a worm, then you become a worm-or an insect or a shellfish or whatever it may take. And you change not your body only, but your mind as well, into the kind of mind that will be necessary to live upon that planet.

“There are all the drugs,” said Mary, “and the medicines. The medical knowledge that could apply to Earth. There was that little package Galactic

Central sent you.”

“A packet of drugs,” said Enoch, “that could cure almost every ill on

Earth. That, perhaps, hurts me most of all. To know they’re up there in the cupboard, actually on this planet, where so many people need them.”

“You could mail out samples,” David said, “to medical associations or to some drug concern.”

Enoch shook his bead. “I thought of that, of course. But I have the galaxy to consider. I have an obligation to Galactic Central. They have taken great precautions that the station not be known. There are Ulysses and all my other alien friends. I cannot wreck their plans. I cannot play the traitor to them. For when you think of it, Galactic Central and the work it’s doing is more important than the Earth.”

“Divided loyalties,” said David with slight mockery in his tone.

“That is it, exactly. There had been a time, many years ago, when I

thought of writing papers for submissions to some of the scientific file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (36 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]

file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt journals. Not the medical journals, naturally, for I know nothing about medicine. The drugs are there, of course, lying on the shelf, with directions for their use, but they are merely so many pills or powders or ointments, or whatever they may be. But there were other things I knew of, other things I’d learned. Not too much about them, naturally, but at least some hints in some new directions. Enough that someone could pick them up and go on from there. Someone who might know what to do with them.”