Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

Definition of gout 1 : a metabolic disease marked by a painful inflammation of the joints, deposits of urates in and around the joints, and usually an excessive amount of uric acid in the blood 2 : a mass or aggregate especially of something fluid often gushing or bursting forth

Enoch Wallace: Chronologically, he is one hundred and twenty-four years old.

“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.”

“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?

“You’re trying to tell me these backwoods people—is that what you’d call them?—engaged in a conspiracy of silence.”

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.

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.”

has a little vegetable garden, but that is all he does.

“Every five or ten years or so he ships off a fistful of gems to an outfit in New York.”

they’d been stealing Wallace blind.

“Apparently he only sends a shipment in when he runs out of cash. He wouldn’t need too much.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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

“He lives in the same house. Not a thing’s been changed. And the house apparently has aged no more than the man.”

Wallace did not hurry. He walked as if he had all the time there was.

Bathed in that light, the house was somehow unearthly, as if, indeed, it might be set apart as a very special thing.

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.

was not a simple shed. It apparently was the place where Wallace lived.

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.

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.

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 could not see into the room beyond. He stared, instead, into a pool of blackness, and the blackness, curiously enough, had no reflective qualities.

On the first stone: Amanda Wallace 1821–1863 And on the second stone: Jedediah Wallace 1816–1866 And on the third stone—

“The figure eight, lying on its side. Yes, I know. The symbol for infinity.”

anachronism /əˈnakrəˌnizəm/ I. noun 1. a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned • everything was as it would have appeared in centuries past apart from one anachronism, a bright yellow construction crane. 2. an act of attributing a custom, event, or object to a period to which it does not belong. – origin mid 17th cent.: from Greek anakhronismos, from ana- ‘backward’ + khronos ‘time.’

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. Suddenly 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.”

Enoch glanced up at the great galactic chronometer hanging on the wall. There was almost three hours to go.

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.

And that was the way it was, thought

Enoch; very few came back. By far the greater part of them

were just passing...

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 w...

He turned from the message machine and rolled a No. 3 liquid tank into place beneath the materializer, positioning it exactly and locking it in place. Then he pulled out the retracting hose and thumbed the selector over to No. 27. He filled the tank and let the hose slide back into the wall.

He went from the machine to the filing cabinet that stood next to his desk and pulled out a drawer jammed with filing cards. He looked and Thuban VI was there, keyed to August 22, 1931.

He turned the pages until he came to October 16 and that had been one of the days, he saw, that Ulysses had arrived to inspect the station.

There were watchers, or at least a watcher, and before too long whoever it might be might start closing in. What he’d do or how he’d meet the threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had been almost bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have happen all these years. There was some reason to wonder, he knew, that it had not happened sooner.

He was a tall and gangling one and his clothes were dusty and from the appearance of him he had walked a far way.

Nothing, actually, that one could put a finger on, but a certain strangeness that was vaguely disquieting. He watched him narrowly as he pumped and decided that probably this stranger’s ears were just a bit too pointed at the top, but put it down to his imagination,

the stranger was not sweating.

was looking for a man of many different parts. One of the things about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what they were.”

the stranger’s face had split and began to fall away and beneath it he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face.

That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star.

Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy. They have developed, it seems, a numeration system superior to any in existence, especially valuable in the handling of statistics.

Old Winslowe Grant was the only human he ever talked with now. His neighbors shunned him, and there were no others, unless one could count watchers, and those he seldom saw—only glimpses of them, only the places they had been.

Only old Winslowe Grant and Mary and the other people from the shadow who came occasionally to spend lonely hours with him.

Now the house was one great room. One side of it was the galactic station and the other side the living space for the keeper of the station.