Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

His name, of course, was not Ulysses. As a matter of fact, he had no name at all.

And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years.”

Years that had been satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it had all been laid out before him.

there was interference now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher, and before too long whoever it might be might start closing in.

He did not see the traveler until he turned in at the gate.

There was something about this traveler that disturbed him.

probably this stranger’s ears were just a bit too pointed at the top,

the stranger was not sweating. He appeared as fresh and cool as if he had been lying at his ease beneath a tree in springtime.

I have been looking for a man and I think that man is you.

“I 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.”

“There are other planets and there are other people. I am one of them.”

That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago.

Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star.

For in many ways, his ties with Earth were cut. Old Winslowe Grant was the only human he ever talked with now.

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

That was all of Earth he had, old Winslowe and the shadow people and the homestead acres that lay outside the house—but not the house itself, for the house was alien now.

Through all the years this mid-nineteenth-century Santa had ridden down the snowy aisles of time, with his whip uplifted in happy greeting to the woodland creatures. And the golden lamplight had ridden with him, still bright upon the wall and the checkered tablecloth.

Beautiful writing.

Now the house was one great room.

First use?

He glanced at the galactic clock upon the wall and it was time to go.

This was the Earth, he thought—a planet made for Man. But not for Man alone, for it was as well a planet for the fox and owl and weasel, for the snake, the katydid, the fish, for all the other teeming life that filled the air and earth and water.

Beautiful.

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 ache was there, the ache that had been growing, the ache to tell all mankind those things that he had learned. Not so much the specific things, although there were some of them that mankind well could use, but the general things, 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.

There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far look and the clear air and the feeling of detachment that touched almost on greatness of the spirit.

one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it,

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

Wow.

Lucy Fisher, the deaf-mute daughter of Hank Fisher, who lived down in the river bottoms.

There were many who got along on sign languages alone and others who could communicate only by a written or pictographic system, including some who carried chemical blackboards built into their bodies.

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.

Although, when one considered it, they were not bad neighbors.

said Winslowe, “you got a letter this time.”

that Fisher girl, the dummy, she can charm off warts.” “So I’ve heard,” said Enoch. And more than that, he thought. She can fix a butterfly.

“I have something else for you.”

“It’s something that I made for you.”

Enoch tore off the paper and there it was, a full-figure wood carving of himself. It was in a blond, honey-colored wood and some twelve inches tall. It shone like golden crystal in the sun.

“You don’t know,” said Enoch, “how much this means to me.”

“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.

he wondered at the deep, heart-warming, soul-satisfying pleasure that he got from the mailman’s gift.

It was not, he knew, because he was seldom given gifts. Scarcely a week went past that the alien travelers did not leave several with him.

Perhaps it was, he told himself, because this was a gift from Earth, from one of his own kind.

He frowned as he saw the flash and

It was one of the watchers, he knew, using a pair of binoculars to keep watch upon the station. The flash he had seen had been the reflection of the sun upon the glasses.

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

Are you really, they would ask, that same Enoch Wallace who marched off in 1861 to fight for old Abe Lincoln?

Yes, he’d have to say, I am that same man.

he could not tell them that he did not age inside the station, that he only aged when he stepped out of it,

A slab of bacon or a dozen eggs could be sent to another station and remain there as a master pattern for the pattern impulses, being sent to him on order as he needed them.

Food replicators.

With the cosmopolitanism of the galaxy at his fingertips, it might even be provincial of him to be so intent upon his continuing identification with the old home planet.

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