Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

For 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. And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of thunder seemed to shake the land and from far off he heard the rushing rain as it charged across the hills.

He still was human. Funny, he thought, that he should stay human, that in a century of association with these beings from the many stars he should have, through it all, remained a man of Earth.

Our horizons are so far, he thought, and we see so little of them. Even now, with flaming rockets striving from Canaveral to break the ancient bonds, we dream so little of them.

He had grieved, he now recalled, but he could not recall how deeply, although it probably had been deeply, for to grieve long and deeply was the fashion in those days.

“You said back there in the station,” the Hazer said, “that you tried to understand the rest of us. Perhaps, for a change, at least one of us should try understanding you.”

That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

In the Babel of the galaxy, it was easy to misunderstand or simply not to know.