Simak, Clifford D - Way Station

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Way Station

Clifford D. Simak

The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog

above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that

had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence,

if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while

before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate

and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart,

exhausted.

For endless time, it seemed, there had been belching thunder rolling

from horizon to horizon and the gouted earth that had spouted in the sky and

the screams of horses and the hoarse bellowing of men; the whistling of

metal and the thud when the whistle ended; the flash of searing fire and the

brightness of the steel; the bravery of the colors snapping in the battle

wind.

Then it all had ended and there was a silence.

But silence was an alien note that held no right upon this field or

day, and it was broken by the whimper and the pain, the cry for water, and

the prayer for death- the crying and the calling and the whimpering that

would go on for hours beneath the summer sun. Later the hupled shapes would

grow quiet and still and there would be an odor that would sicken all who

passed, and the graves would be shallow graves.

There was wheat that never would be harvested, trees that would not

bloom when spring came round again, and on the slope of land that ran up to

the ridge the words unspoken and the deeds undone and the sopen bundles that

cried aloud the emptiness and the waste of death.

There were proud names that were the prouder now, but now no more than

names to echo down the ages Ö the Iron Brigade, the 5th New Hampshire, the

1st Minnesota, the 2nd Massachusetts, the 16th Maine.

And there was Enoch Wallace.

He still held the shattered musket and there were blisters on his

hands. His face was smudged with powder. His shoes were caked with dust and

blood.

He was still alive.

Dr. Erwin Hardwicke rolled the pencil back and forth between his palms,

an irritating business. He eyed the man across the desk from him with some

calculation.

"What I can't figure out," said Hardwicke, "is why you should come to

us."

"Well, you're the National Academy and I thought ..."

"And you're Intelligence."

"Look, Doctor, if it suits you better, let's call this visit

unofficial. Pretend I'm a puzzled citizen who dropped in to see if you could

help."

"It's not that I wouldn't like to help, but I don't see how I can. The

whole thing is so hazy and so hypothetical."

"Damn it, man," Claude Lewis said, "you can't deny the proof-the little

that I have."

"All right, then," said Hardwicke, "let's start over once again and

take it piece by piece. You say you have this man ..."

"His name," said Lewis, "is Enoch Wallace. Chronologically, he is one

hundred and twenty-four years old. He was born on a farm a few miles from

the town of Millville in Wisconsin, April 22, 1840, and he is the only child

of Jedediah and Amanda Wallace. He enlisted among the first of them when Abe

Lincoln called for volunteers. He was with the Iron Brigade, which was

virtually wiped out at Gettysburg in 1863. But Wallace somehow managed to

get transferred to another fighting outfit and fought down across Virginia

under Grant. He was in on the end of it at Appomattox ...

"You've run a check on him."

"I've looked up his records. The record of enlistment at the State

Capitol in Madison. The rest of it, including discharge here in Washington."

"You say he looks like thirty."

"Not a day beyond it. Maybe even less than that."

"But you haven't talked with him."

Lewis shook his head.

"He may not be the man. If you had fingerprints ...

"At the time of the Civil War," said Lewis, "they'd not thought of

fingerprints."

"The last of the veterans of the Civil War," said Hardwicke, "died

several years ago. A Confederate drummer boy, I think. There must be some

mistake."

Lewis shook his head. "I thought so myself, when I was assigned to it."

"How come you were assigned? How does Intelligence get involved in a

deal like this?"

"I'll admit," said Lewis, "that it's a bit unusual. But there were so

many implications ..."

"Immortality, you mean."

"It crossed our mind, perhaps. The chance of it. But only incidentally.

There were other considerations. It was a strange setup that bore some

looking into."

"But Intelligence ..."

Lewis grinned. "You are thinking, why not a scientific outfit?

Logically, I suppose it should have been. But one of our men ran afoul of

it. He was on vacation. Had relatives back in Wisconsin. Not in that

particular area, but some thirty miles away. He heard a rumor-just the

vaguest rumor, almost a casual mention. So he nosed around a bit. He didn't

find out too much but enough to make him think there might be something to

it."

"That's the thing that puzzles me," said Hardwicke. "How could a man

live for one hundred and twenty-four years in one locality without becoming

a celebrity that the world would hear about? Can you imagine what the

newspapers could do with a thing like this?"

"I shuper," Lewis said, "when I think about it."

"You haven't told me how."

"This," said Lewis, "is a bit hard to explain. You'd have to know the

country and the people in it. The southwestern corner of Wisconsin is

bounded by two rivers, the Mississippi on the west, the Wisconsin on the

north. Away from the rivers there is flat, broad prairie land, rich land,

with prosperous farms and towns. But the land that runs down to the river is

rough and rugged; high hills and bluffs and deep ravines and cliffs, and

there are certain areas forming bays or pockets that are isolated. They are

served by inadequate roads and the small, rough farms are inhabited by a

people who are closer, perhaps, to the pioneer days of a hundred years ago

than they are to the twentieth century. They have cars, of course, and

radios, and someday soon, perhaps, even television. But in spirit they are

conservative and clannish-not all the people, of course, not even many of

them, but these little isolated neighborhoods.

"At one time there were a lot of farms in these isolated pockets, but

today a man can hardly make a living on a farm of that sort. Slowly the

people are being squeezed out of the areas by economic circumstances. They

sell their farms for whatever they can get for them and move somewhere else,

to the cities mostly, where they can make a living."

Hardwicke noped. "And the ones that are left, of course, are the most

conservative and clannish."

"Right. Most of the land now is held by absentee owners who make no

pretense of farming it. They may run a few head of cattle on it, but that is

all. It's not too bad as a tax write-off for someone who needs that sort of

thing. And in the land-bank days a lot of the land was put into the bank."

"You're trying to tell me these backwoods people-is that what you'd

call them?-engaged in a conspiracy of silence."

"Perhaps not anything," said Lewis, "as formal or elaborate as that. It

is just their way of doing things, a holdover from the old, stout pioneer

philosophy. They minded their own business. They didn't want folks

interfering with them and they interfered with no one else. If a man wanted

to live to be a thousand, it might be a thing of wonder, but it was his own

damned business. And if he wanted to live alone and be let alone while he

was doing it, that was his business, too. They might talk about it among

themselves, but to no one else. They'd resent it if some outsider tried to

talk about it.

"After a time, I suppose, they came to accept the fact that Wallace

kept on being young while they were growing old. The wonder wore off it and

they probably didn't talk about it a great deal, even among themselves. New

generations accepted it because their elders saw in it nothing too

unusual-and anyhow no one saw much of Wallace because he kept strictly to

himself.

"And in the nearby areas the thing, when it was thought of at all, grew

to be just a sort of legend- another crazy tale that wasn't worth looking

into. Maybe just a joke among those folks down Dark Hollow way. A Rip Van

Winkle sort of business that probably didn't have a word of truth in it. A

man might look ridiculous if he went prying into it."

"But your man looked into it."

"Yes. Don't ask me why."

"Yet he wasn't assigned to follow up the job."

"He was needed somewhere else. And besides he was known back there."

"And you?"

"It took two years of work."

"But now you know the story."

"Not all of it. There are more questions now than there were to start

with."

"You've seen this man."

"Many times," said Lewis. "But I've never talked with him. I don't

think he's ever seen me. He takes a walk each day before he goes to get the

mail. He never moves off the place, you see. The mailman brings out the

little stuff he needs. A bag of flour, a pound of bacon, a dozen eggs,

cigars, and sometimes liquor."

"But that must be against the postal regulations."

"Of course it is. But mailmen have been doing it for years. It doesn't

hurt a thing until someone screams about it. And no one's going to. The

mailmen probably are the only friends he has ever had."

"I take it this Wallace doesn't do much farming."

"None at all. He has a little vegetable garden, but that is all he

does. The place has gone back pretty much to wilderness."

"But he has to live. He must get money somewhere."

"He does," said Lewis. "Every five or ten years or so he ships off a

fistful of gems to an outfit in New York."

"Legal?"

"If you mean, is it hot, I don't think so. If someone wanted to make a

case of it, I suppose there are illegalities. Not to start with, when he

first started sending them, back in the old days. But laws change and I

suspect both he and the buyer are in defiance of any number of them."

"And you don't mind?"

"I checked on this firm," said Lewis, "and they were rather nervous.

For one thing, they'd been stealing Wallace blind. I told them to keep on

buying. I told them that if anyone came around to check, to refer them

straight to me. I told them to keep their mouths shut and not change

anything."

"You don't want anyone to scare him off," said Hardwicke.

"You're damned right, I don't. I want the mailman to keep on acting as

a delivery boy and the New York firm to keep on buying gems. I want

everything to stay just the way it is. And before you ask me where the

stones come from, I'll tell you I don't know."

"He maybe has a mine."

"That would be quite a mine. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds, all out

of the same mine."

"I would suspect, even at the prices that he gets from them, he picks

up a fair income."

Lewis noped. "Apparently he only sends a shipment in when he runs out

of cash. He wouldn't need too much. He lives rather simply, to judge from

the grub he buys. But he subscribes to a lot of daily papers and news

magazines and to dozens of scientific journals. He buys a lot of books."

"Technical books?"

"Some of them, of course, but mostly keeping up with new developments.

Physics and chemistry and biology-all that sort of stuff."

"But I don't ..."

"Of course you don't. Neither do I. He's no scientist. Or at least he

has no formal education in the sciences. Back in the days when he went to

school there wasn't much of it-not in the sense of today's scientific

education. And whatever he learned then would be fairly worthless now in any

event. He went through grade school-one of those one-room country

schools-and spent one winter at what was called an academy that operated for

a year or two down in Millville village. In case you don't know, that was

considerably better than par back in the 1850s. He was, apparently, a fairly

bright young man."

Hardwicke shook his head. "It sounds incredible. You've checked on all

of this?"

"As well as I could. I had to go at it gingerly. I wanted no one to

catch on. And one thing I forgot-he does a lot of writing. He buys these

big, bound record books, in lots of a dozen at the time. He buys ink by the

pint."

Hardwicke got up from his desk and paced up and down the room.

"Lewis," he said, "if you hadn't shown me your credentials and if I

hadn't checked on them, I'd figure all of this to be a very tasteless joke."

He went back and sat down again. He picked up the pencil and started

rolling it between his palms once more.

"You've been on the case two years," he said. "You have no ideas?"

"Not a one," said Lewis. "I'm entirely baffled. That is why I'm here."

"Tell me more of his history. After the war, that is."

"His mother died," said Lewis, "while he was away. His father and the

neighbors buried her right there on the farm. That was the way a lot of

people did it then. Young Wallace got a furlough, but not in time to get

home for the funeral. There wasn't much embalming done in those days and the

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WayStationCliffordD.Simak1Thenoisewasendednow.Thesmokedriftedlikethin,graywispsoffogabovethetorturedearthandtheshatteredfencesandthepeachtreesthathadbeenwhittledintotoothpicksbythecannonfire.Foramomentsilence,ifnotpeace,felluponthosefewsquaremilesofgroundwherejustawhilebeforemenhadscreamedandtornato...

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Simak, Clifford D - Way Station

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