Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

the massive old fireplace of brick and native stone that had stood against one wall of the sitting room.

An inn, he thought, a stopping place, a galactic crossroads.

He picked the rifle off the supports that held it on the wall and then he faced the wall itself and said the single word that he had

to say. The wall slid back silently and he stepped through it into the little shed with its sparse furnishings.

Behind him the section of the wall slid back and there was nothing there to indicate it was...

And not these natives alone, but for other beings that called other earths their home, other planets that far light-years distant were basically the same as Earth. For Ulysses and the Hazers and all the rest of them who could live upon this planet, if need be, if they wished, with no discomfort and no artificial aids.

the unspecific central fact that there was intelligence throughout the universe, that Man was not alone, that if he only found the way he need never be alone again.

Old, ancient water, he

glaciers that came and stayed and left, creeping back toward the pole inch by stubborn inch, carrying the melting water from those very glaciers in a flood that filled this valley with a tide such as now is never known;

I could help, thought Enoch. I could not give the answers but I could help Man in his scramble after them. I could give him faith and hope and I could give purpose such as he has not had before. But he knew he dare not do it.

worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it.

pink lady’s-slippers,

She had a world, he thought, a world of her very own, one to which she was accustomed and knew how to get along in. In that world she was no cripple, as she most surely would have been a cripple if she had been pushed, part way, into the normal human world.

What good to her the hand alphabet or the reading of the lips if they should take from her some strange inner serenity of spirit?

Sign Languages

It had been, he recalled, twelve years or more ago that he first had seen her, a little fairy person of ten years or so, a wild thing running in the woods. They had become friends, he recalled, only after a long time, although he saw her often, for she roamed the hills and valley as if they were a playground for her—which, of course, they were.

he’d not been mistaken back there, he told himself, no matter how it may have seemed on second look. The butterfly’s wing had been torn and crumpled and drab from the lack of dust. It had been a crippled thing and then it had been whole again and had flown away.

The Fishers were, for a fact, Enoch told himself, a truly shiftless outfit.

“Enoch,” Winslowe said, “I like you. I don’t know what you are and I ain’t about to ask, but anyhow I like you.” “I wish that I could tell you what I am,” said Enoch.

“it don’t matter much what any of us are, just so we get along with one another. If some of the nations would only take a lesson from some small neighborhood like ours—a lesson in how to get along—the world would be a whole lot better.”

It was from one of these vantage points that Enoch caught the flash from a clump of trees at the edge of the old field, not too far from the spring where he had found Lucy.

Who were they? he wondered. And why should they be

watching? It had been going on for some time now but, strangely, there had been nothing but the watching.

it also might be as well that the watchers had not attempted contact with him. For so long as there was no contact, he still was fairly safe. So long as there were no questions, there need not be any answers.

there was one thing the aliens could not provide—the human contacts he’d maintained through Winslowe and the mail.

was the walks, he thought, more than anything, perhaps, that had kept him human and a citizen of Earth.

A man, he told himself, must belong to something, must

have some loyalty and some identity. The galaxy was too big a place for any being to stand naked and alone.

NO. 406,302 TO STATION 18327. WILL ARRIVE EARLY EVENING YOUR TIME. HAVE THE COFFEE HOT. ULYSSES.

he saw the eyes and they canceled all the rest. They were large and had a softness and the light of understanding in them, and they reached out to him, as another being might hold out its hands in friendship.

“You do not think I just came walking in here cold? I know about you, Enoch. Almost as much, perhaps, as you know about yourself. Probably even more.”

am glad you chose it,” said this Ulysses, standing on the porch. “To my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, as friends of the first names, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years.”

“Delectable,” Ulysses said. “Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.”

“we are a traveling people. We need a travel station here. We want to turn this house into a station and you to keep the station.” “This house?” “We could not build a station, for then we’d have people asking who was building it and what it might be for. So we are forced to use an existing structure and change it for our needs.

This is just another railroad and the Earth is just another town and this house will be the station for this new and different railroad. The only difference is that no one on Earth but you will know the railroad’s here. For it will be no more than a resting and a switching point. No one on the Earth can buy a ticket to travel on the railroad.”

For he remembered now how he had been sitting on the steps thinking how he was alone and about a new beginning, knowing that he could not escape a new beginning, that he must start from scratch and build his life anew. And here, suddenly, was that new beginning—more wondrous and fearsome than anything he could have dreamed even in an insane moment.

It was a hopeless thing, he thought, this obsession of his to present the people of the Earth as good and reasonable. For in many ways they were neither good nor reasonable; perhaps because they had not as yet entirely grown up. They were smart and quick and at times compassionate and even understanding, but they failed lamentably in many other ways.

But someone else who had taken notice, who had felt a twinge of wonder at the same man subscribing to a magazine for more than eighty years.

some of it an extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man had not as yet imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own.

the impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost instantaneously to the receiver of this station, where the pattern had been used to duplicate the body and the mind and memory and the life of that creature now lying dead many light years distant. And in the tank the new body and the new

mind and memory and life had taken almost instant form—an entirely new being, but exactly like the old one, so that the identity continued and the consciousness (the very thought no more than momentarily interrupted), so that to all intent and purpose the being was the same.

Winslowe, he knew, must have wondered many times where the wood came from and how his friend could have gotten it. But he had never asked. And he knew as well, of course, that there was something very strange

about this man who came out to the mailbox every day to meet him. But he had never asked that, either. And that was friendship, Enoch told himself.

the worst of it, Enoch told himself, was that the most of them were manufactured crises, with one side or the other pushing for advantage in the relentless chess game of power politics which had been under way since the end of World War II.

his translations had done no violence to the concept, then the Earth was headed straight for another major war, for a holocaust of nuclear destruction.

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 drank an extra cup of coffee, sitting idly in the chair, thinking about those good old days when the band of Hazers came.

For she wasn’t really there.

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.

“There is no sense,” said David angrily, “in pretending we are people.” “But you are,” said Enoch tensely. “You are people to me. You are the only people that I have. What is the matter, David?” “I think,” said David, “that the time has come to say what we really are. That we are illusion. That we are created and