Clifford D. Simak - Waystation

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Clifford D.Simak. Way Station
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original copyright year: 1963
Date of e-text: June 26, 1999
Prepared by: Anada Sucka
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1
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.
2
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 ..."
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"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
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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?"
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"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
traveling was slow. Then he went back to the war. So far as I can find, it
was his only furlough. The old man lived alone and worked the farm, batching
it and getting along all right. From what I can pick up, he was a good
farmer, an exceptionally good farmer for his day. He subscribed to some farm
journals and was progressive in his ideas. He paid attention to such things
as crop rotation and the prevention of erosion. The farm wasn't much of a
farm by modern standards, but it made him a living and a little extra he
managed to lay by.
"Then Enoch came home from the war and they farmed the place together
for a year or so. The old man bought a mower-one of those horse-drawn
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contraptions with a sickle bar to cut hay or grain. It was the progressive
thing to do. It beat a scythe all hollow.
"Then one afternoon the old man went out to mow a hayfield. The horses
ran away. Something must have scared them. Enoch's father was thrown off the
seat and forward, in front of the sickle bar. It was not a pretty way to
die."
Hardwicke made a grimace of distaste. "Horrible," he said.
"Enoch went out and gathered up his father and got the body to the
house. Then he took a gun and went hunting for the horses. He found them
down in the corner of the pasture and he shot the two of them and he left
them. I mean exactly that. For years their skeletons lay there in the
pasture, where he'd killed them, still hitched to the mower until the
harness rotted.
"Then he went back to the house and laid his father out. He washed him
and he dressed him in the good black suit and laid him on a board, then went
out to the barn and carpentered a coffin. And after that, he dug a grave
beside his mother's grave. He finished it by lantern light, then went back
to the house and sat up with his father. When morning came, he went to tell
the nearest neighbor and that neighbor notified the others and someone went
to get a preacher. Late in the afternoon they had the funeral, and Enoch
went back to the house. He has lived there ever since, but he never farmed
the land. Except the garden, that is."
"You told me these people wouldn't talk to strangers. You seem to have
learned a lot."
"It took two years to do it. I infiltrated them. I bought a beat-up car
and drifted into Millville and I let it out that I was a ginseng hunter."
"A what?"
"A ginseng hunter. Ginseng is a plant."
"Yes, I know. But there's been no market for it for years."
"A small market and an occasional one. Exporters will take on some of
it. But I hunted other medicinal plants as well and pretended an extensive
knowledge of them and their use. 'Pretended' isn't actually the word; I
boned up plenty on them."
"The kind of simple soul," said Hardwicke, "those folks could
understand. A sort of cultural throwback. And inoffensive, too. Perhaps not
quite right in the head."
Lewis noped. "It worked even better than I thought. I just wandered
around and people talked to me. I even found some ginseng. There was one
family in particular-the Fisher family. They live down in the river bottoms
below the Wallace farm, which sits on the ridge above the bluffs. They've
lived there almost as long as the Wallace family, but a different stripe
entirely. The Fishers are a coon-hunting, catfishing, moonshine-cooking
tribe. They found a kindred spirit in me. I was just as shiftless and
no-account as they were. I helped them with their moonshine, both in the
making and the drinking and once in a while the pepling. I went fishing with
them and hunting with them and I sat around and talked and they showed me a
place or two where I might find some ginseng-'sang' is what they call it. I
imagine a social scientist might find a gold mine in the Fishers. There is
one girl-a deaf-mute, but a pretty thing, and she can charm off warts ..."
"I recognize the type," said Hardwicke. "I was born and raised in the
southern mountains."
"They were the ones who told me about the team and mower. So one day I
went up in that corner of the Wallace pasture and did some digging. I found
a horse's skull and some other bones."
"But no way of knowing if it was one of the Wallace horses."
"Perhaps not," said Lewis. "But I found part of the mower as well. Not
much left of it, but enough to identify."
"Let's get back to the history," suggested Hardwicke. "After the
father's death, Enoch stayed on at the farm. He never left it?"
Lewis shook his head. "He lives in the same house. Not a thing's been
changed. And the house apparently has aged no more than the man."
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"You've been in the house?"
"Not in it. At it. I will tell you how it was."
3
He had an hour. He knew he had an hour, for he had timed Enoch Wallace
during the last ten days. And from the time he left the house until he got
back with his mail, it had never been less than an hour. Sometimes a little
longer, when the mailman might be late, or they got to talking. But an hour,
Lewis told himself, was all that he could count on.
Wallace had disappeared down the slope of ridge, heading for the point
of rocks that towered above the bluff face, with the Wisconsin River running
there below. He would climb the rocks and stand there, with the rifle tucked
beneath his arm, to gaze across the wilderness of the river valley. Then he
would go back down the rocks again and trudge along the wooded path to
where, in proper season, the pink lady's-slippers grew, and from there up
the hill again to the spring that gushed out of the hillside just below the
ancient field that had lain fallow for a century or more, and then along the
slope until he hit the almost overgrown road and so down to the mailbox.
In the ten days that Lewis had watched him, his route had never varied.
It was likely, Lewis told himself, that it had not varied through the years.
Wallace did not hurry. He walked as if he had all the time there was. And he
stopped along the way to renew acquaintances with old friends of his-a tree,
a squirrel, a flower. He was a rugged man and there still was much of the
soldier in him-old tricks and habits left from the bitter years of
campaigning under many leaders. He walked with his head held high and his
shoulders back and he moved with the easy stride of one who had known hard
marches.
Lewis came out of the tangled mass of trees that once had been an
orchard and in which a few trees, twisted and gnarled and gray with age,
still bore their pitiful and bitter crop of apples.
He stopped at the edge of the copse and stood for a moment to stare up
at the house on the ridge above, and for a single instant it seemed to him
the house stood in a special light, as if a rare and more distilled essence
of the sun had crossed the gulf of space to shine upon this house and to set
it apart from all other houses in the world. Bathed in that light, the house
was somehow unearthly, as if, indeed, it might be set apart as a very
special thing. And then the light, if it ever had been there, was gone and
the house shared the common sunlight of the fields and woods.
Lewis shook his head and told himself that it had been foolishness, or
perhaps a trick of seeing. For there was no such thing as special sunlight
and the house was no more than a house, although wondrously preserved.
It was the kind of house one did not see too often in these days. It
was rectangular, long and narrow and high, with old-fashioned gingerbread
along the eaves and gables. It had a certain gauntness that had nothing to
do with age; it had been gaunt the day it had been built-gaunt and plain and
strong, like the people that it sheltered. But gaunt as it might be, it
stood prim and neat, with no peeling paint, with no sign of weathering, and
no hint of decay.
Against one end of it was a smaller building, no more than a shed, as
if it were an alien structure that had been carted in from some other place
and shoved against its end, covering the side door of the house. Perhaps the
door, thought Lewis, that led into the kitchen. The shed undoubtedly had
been used as a place to hang outdoor clothing and to leave overshoes and
boots, with a bench for milk cans and buckets, and perhaps a basket in which
to gather eggs. From the top of it extended some three feet of stovepipe.
Lewis went up to the house and around the shed and there, in the side
of it, was a door ajar. He stepped up on the stoop and pushed the door wide
open and stared in amazement at the room.
For it was not a simple shed. It apparently was the place where Wallace
lived.
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The stove from which the stovepipe projected stood in one corner, an
ancient cookstove, smaller than the old-fashioned kitchen range. Sitting on
its top was a coffeepot, a frying pan, and a griple. Hung from hooks on a
board behind it were other cooking implements. Opposite the stove, shoved
against the wall, was a three-quarter-size four-poster bed, covered with a
lumpy quilt, quilted in one of the ornate patterns of many pieces of
many-colored cloth, such as had been the delight of ladies of a century
before. In another corner was a table and a chair, and above the table, hung
against the wall, a small open cupboard in which were stacked some dishes.
On the table stood a kerosene lantern, battered from much usage, but with
its chimney clean, as if it had been washed and polished as recently as this
morning.
There was no door into the house, no sign there had ever been a door.
The clapboard of the house's outer wall ran unbroken to form the fourth wall
of the shed.
This was incredible, Lewis told himself-that there should be no door,
that Wallace should live here, in this shed, when there was a house to live
in. As if there were some reason he should not occupy the house, and yet
must stay close by it. Or perhaps that he might be living out a penance of
some sort, living here in this shed as a medieval hermit might have lived in
a woodland hut or in a desert cave.
He stood in the center of the shed and looked around him, hoping that
he might find some clue to this unusual circumstance. But there was nothing,
beyond the bare, hard fact of living, the very basic necessities of
living-the stove to cook his food and heat the place, the bed to sleep on,
the table to eat on, and the lantern for its light. Not even so much as an
extra hat (although, come to think of it, Wallace never wore a hat) or an
extra coat.
No sign of magazines or papers, and Wallace never came home from the
mailbox empty-handed. He subscribed to the New York Times, the Wall Street
Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Star, as well as
many scientific and technical journals. But there was no sign of them here,
nor of the many books he bought. No sign, either, of the bound record books.
Nothing at all on which a man could write.
Perhaps, Lewis told himself, this shed, for some baffling reason, was
no more than a show place, a place staged most carefully to make one think
that this was where Wallace lived. Perhaps, after all, he lived in the
house. Although, if that were the case, why all this effort, not too
successful, to make one think he didn't?
Lewis turned to the door and walked out of the shed. He went around the
house until he reached the porch that led up to the front door. At the foot
of the steps, he stopped and looked around. The place was quiet. The sun was
midmorning-high and the day was warming up and this sheltered corner of the
earth stood relaxed and hushed, waiting for the heat.
He looked at his watch and he had forty minutes left, so he went up the
steps and across the porch until he came to the door. Reaching out his hand,
he grasped the knob and turned-except he didn't turn it; the knob stayed
exactly where it was and his clenched fingers went half around it in the
motion of a turn.
Puzzled, he tried again and still he didn't turn the knob. It was as if
the knob was covered with some hard, slick coating, like a coat of brittle
ice, on which the fingers slipped without exerting any pressure on the knob.
He bent his head close to the knob and tried to see if there were any
evidence of coating, and there was no evidence. The knob looked perfectly
all right-too all right, perhaps. For it was clean, as if someone had wiped
and polished it. There was no dust upon it, and no weather specks.
He tried a thumbnail on it, and the thumbnail slipped but left no mark
behind it. He ran his palm over the outer surface of the door and the wood
was slick. The rubbing of the palm set up no friction. The palm slid along
the wood as if the palm were greased, but there was no sign of grease. There
was no indication of anything to account for the slickness of the door.
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Lewis moved from the door to the clapboard and the clapboard also was
slick. He tried palm and thumbnail on it and the answer was the same. There
was something covering this house which made it slick and smooth-so smooth
that dust could not cling upon its surface nor could weather stain it.
He moved along the porch until he came to a window, and now, as he
stood facing the window, he realized something he had not noticed before,
something that helped make the house seem gaunter than it really was. The
windows were black. There were no curtains, no drapes, no shades; they were
simply black rectangles, like empty eyes staring out of the bare skull of
the house.
He moved closer to the window and put his face up to it, shading the
sides of his face, next to the eyes, with his upheld hands to shield out the
sunlight. But even so, he could not see into the room beyond. He stared,
instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had
no reflective qualities. He could not see himself reflected in the glass. He
could see nothing but the blackness, as if the light hit the window and was
absorbed by it, sucked in and held by it. There was no bouncing back of
light once it had hit that window.
He left the porch and went slowly around the house, examining it as he
went. The windows were all blank, black pools that sucked in the captured
light, and all the exterior was slick and hard.
He pounded the clapboard with his fist, and it was like the pounding of
a rock. He examined the stone walls of the basement where they were exposed,
and the walls were smooth and slick. There were mortar gaps between the
stones and in the stones themselves one could see uneven surfaces, but the
hand rubbed across the wall could detect no roughness.
An invisible something had been laid over the roughness of the stone,
just enough of it to fill in the pits and uneven surfaces. But one could not
detect it. It was almost as if it had no substance.
Straightening up from his examination of the wall, Lewis looked at his
watch. There were only ten minutes left. He must be getting on.
He walked down the hill toward the tangle of old orchard. At its edge
he stopped and looked back, and now the house was different. It was no
longer just a structure. It wore a personality, a mocking, leering look, and
there was a malevolent chuckle bubbling inside of it, ready to break out.
Lewis ducked into the orchard and worked his way in among the trees.
There was no path and beneath the trees the grass and weeds grew tall. He
ducked the drooping branches and walked around a tree that had been uprooted
in some windstorm of many years before.
He reached up as he went along, picking an apple here and there,
scrubby things and sour, taking a single bite out of each one of them, then
throwing it away, for there was none of them that was fit to eat, as if they
might have taken from the neglected soil a certain basic bitterness.
At the far side of the orchard he found the fence and the graves that
it enclosed. Here the weeds and grass were not so high and the fence showed
signs of repair made rather recently, and at the foot of each grave,
opposite the three crude native limestone headstones, was a peony bush, each
a great straggling mass of plants that had grown, undisciplined, for years.
Standing before the weathered picketing, he knew that he had stumbled
on the Wallace family burial plot.
But there should have been only the two stones. What about the third?
He moved around the fence to the sagging gate and went into the plot.
Standing at the foot of the graves, he read the legends on the stones. The
carving was angular and rough, giving evidence of having been executed by
unaccustomed hands. There were no pious phrases, no lines of verse, no
carvings of angels or of lambs or of other symbolic figures such as had been
customary in the 1 860s. There were just the names and dates.
On the first stone: Amanda Wallace 1821-1863
And on the second stone: Jedediah Wallace 1816-1866
And on the third stone-
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4
"Give me that pencil, please," said Lewis.
Hardwicke quit rolling it between his palms and banded it across.
"Paper, too?" he asked.
"If you please," said Lewis.
He bent above the desk and drew rapidly.
"Here," he said, handing back the paper.
Hardwicke wrinkled his brow.
"But it makes no sense," he said. "Except for that figure underneath."
"The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for
infinity."
"But the rest of it?"
"I don't know," said Lewis. "it is the inscription on the tombstone. I
copied it ..."
"And you know it now by heart."
"I should. I've studied it enough."
"I've never seen anything like it in my life," said Hardwicke. "Not
that I'm an authority. I really know little at all in this field."
"You can put your mind at rest. It's nothing that anyone knows anything
about. It bears no resemblance, not even the remotest, to any language or
any known inscription. I checked with men who know. Not one, but a dozen of
them. I told them I'd found it on a rocky cliff. I am sure that most of them
think I am a crackpot. One of those people who are trying to prove that the
Romans or the Phoenicians or the Irish or whatnot had pre-Colombian
settlements in America."
Hardwicke put down the sheet of paper.
"I can see what you mean," he said, "when you say you have more
questions now than when you started. Not only the question of a young man
more than a century old, but likewise the matter of the slickness of the
house and the third gravestone with the undecipherable inscription. You say
you've never talked with Wallace?"
"No one talks to him. Except the mailman. He goes out on his daily
walks and he packs this gun."
"People are afraid to talk with him?"
"Because of the gun, you mean."
"Well, yes, I suppose that was in the back of my mind. I wondered why
he carried it."
Lewis shook his head. "I don't know. I've tried to tie it in, to find
some reason he always has it with him. He has never fired the rifle so far
as I can find. But I don't think the rifle is the reason no one talks with
him. He's an anachronism, something living from another age. No one fears
him, I am sure of that. He's been around too long for anyone to fear him.
Too familiar. He's a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no
one feels quite comfortable with him, either. I would imagine that most of
them, if they should come face to face with him, would feel uncomfortable.
For he's something they are not-something greater than they are and at the
same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his
own humanity. I think that, secretly, many of his neighbors may be a bit
ashamed of him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly,
side-stepped growing old, one of the penalties, but perhaps, as well, one of
the rights of all humankind. And perhaps this secret shame may contribute in
some part to their unwillingness to talk about him."
"You spent a good deal of time watching him?"
"There was a time I did. But now I have a crew. They watch on regular
shifts. We have a dozen spots we watch from, and we keep shifting them
around. There isn't an hour, day in, day out, that the Wallace house isn't
under observation."
"This business really has you people bugged."
"I think with reason," Lewis said. "There is still one other thing."
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He bent over and picked up the brief case he had placed beside his
chair. Unsnapping it, he took out a sheaf of photographs and handed them to
Hardwicke.
"What do you make of these?" he asked. Hardwicke picked them up.
Supenly he froze. The color drained out of his face. His hands began to
tremble and he laid the pictures carefully on the desk. He had looked at
only the top one; not any of the others.
Lewis saw the question in his face.
"In the grave," he said. "The one beneath the headstone with the funny
writing."
5
The message machine whistled shrilly, and Enoch Wallace put away the
book in which he had been writing and got up from his desk. He walked across
the room to the whistling machine. He punched a button and shoved a key and
the whistling stopped.
The machine built up its hum and the message began to form on the
plate, faint at first and then becoming darker until it stood out clearly.
It read:
NO. 406301 TO STATION 18327. TRAVELER AT 16097.38. NATIVE THUBAN VI. NO
BAGGAGE. NO. 3 LIQUID TANK. SOLUTION 27. DEPART FOR STATION 12892 AT
16439.16.
CONFIRM.
Enoch glanced up at the great galactic chronometer hanging on the wall.
There was almost three hours to go.
He touched a button, and a thin sheet of metal bearing the message
protruded from the side of the machine. Beneath it the duplicate fed itself
into the record file. The machine chuckled and the message plate was clear
once more and waiting.
Enoch pulled out the metal plate, threaded the holes in it through the
double filing spindle and then dropped his fingers to the keyboard and
typed: NO. 406301 RECEIVED. CONFIRM MOMENTARILY. The message came into being
on the plate and he left it there.
Thuban VI? Had there been, he wondered, one of them before? As soon as
he got the chores done, he would go to the filing cabinet and check.
It was a liquid tank case and those, as a rule, were the most
uninteresting of all. They usually were hard ones to strike up a
conversation with, because too often their concept of language was too
difficult to handle. And as often, too, their very thinking processes proved
too divergent to provide much common ground for communication.
Although, he recalled, that was not always true. There had been that
tank traveler several years ago, from somewhere in Hydra (or had it been the
Hyades?), he'd sat up the whole night with and almost failed of sending off
on time, yarning through the hours, their communication (you couldn't call
it words) tumbling over one another as they packed into the little time they
had a lot of fellowship and, perhaps, some brotherhood.
He, or she, or it-they'd never got around to that- had not come back
again. And that was the way it was, thought Enoch; very few came back. By
far the greater part of them were just passing through.
But he had he, or she, or it (whichever it might be) down in black and
white, as he had all of them, every single blessed one of them, down in
black and white. It had taken him, he remembered, almost the entire
following day, crouched above his desk, to get it written down; all the
stories he'd been told, all the glimpses he had caught of a far and
beautiful and tantalizing land (tantalizing because there was so much of it
he could not understand), all the warmth and comradeship that had flowed
between himself and this misshapen, twisted, ugly living being from another
world. And any time he wished, any day he wished, he could take down the
journal from the row of journals and relive that night again. Although he
never had. It was strange, he thought, how there was never time, or never
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