Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

Funny, he thought, that he should think of it as station rather than as home, but it had been a station longer than it had been a home.

They could not chip it and they could not gouge it and they could not break it down.

it could survive anything except a thermonuclear explosion—and maybe even that.

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

might one ask why the name Ulysses?” “Because it is the name,” said Enoch, “of a great man of my race.”

“I eat anything,” Ulysses said. “My race is most adaptable. That is the reason I was sent to this planet as a—what do you call it?—a looker-out, perhaps.”

“It has been my home,” said Enoch, “since the day that I was born. I was gone from it for almost four years, but it was always home.”

“Some day,” Ulysses said, “I shall tell you about my home. Some day you may even visit me.” “Out among the stars,” said Enoch.

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.

The government should be told.

the official and emergency materializer was exactly what its name implied. It was used only for official visits by personnel of Galactic Center or for possible emergencies and its operation was entirely outside that of the local station.

he probably should tell Ulysses about the watch that had been put upon the station.

I am one of several editors of the British journal, Nature, to which you have been a subscriber for these many years.

I have wondered if you, yourself, have subscribed to our publication for this length of time,

Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in another station and the materializer had built up a pattern of it—not only of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life.

Then 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.

an entirely new being, but exactly like the old one, so that the identity continued and the consciousness

under certain conditions the patterns tended to break down and this was why there must be many stations—many thousands of them.

Enoch wondered how many dead bodies of the creature that now rested in the tank had been left behind at other stations in the course of the journey it was making—as this body in a few hours’ time would lie dead within this tank when the creature’s pattern was sent out again, riding on the impulse waves.

each to be destroyed by a wash of acid and flushed into deep-lying tanks,

What would Winslowe think, he wondered, if he could only know that the statuettes he carved were made of woods that had grown on unknown planets,

The statistical method developed by the mathematicians of Mizar, he knew, would work anywhere, on anything, if applied correctly.

then the Earth was headed straight for another major war, for a holocaust of nuclear destruction.

Ugh. Tedious zeitgeist.

There were many of them who passed through only once, although there were a few who showed up every week or so—old, regular travelers who had become close friends.

If Earth fights another war, our people will be barred, if not forever, at least for many centuries, from the cofraternity of space.”

They could have built a station out on Mars and used an alien for a keeper and still have served their purpose.”

“They wanted a station on the Earth and an Earthman as its keeper. There must be a reason for it.”

I’m afraid they came too soon. It’s too early for the human race. We aren’t grown up. We still are juveniles.”

Yawn.

There is a spiritual force, exactly as there is time and space and gravitation and all the other factors that make up the immaterial universe. It is there and they can establish contact with it …”

He found that he was shivering at the thought of it—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.

Love this.

the Andromedans had done was only common sense. If you cannot colonize a planet in your present shape, why, then you change your shape.

And you change not your body only, but your mind as well, into the kind of mind that will be necessary to live upon that planet.

I have an obligation to Galactic Central. They have taken great precautions that the station not be known.

“I think,” said David, “that the time has come to say what we really are. That we are illusion. That we are created and called up. That we exist only for one purpose, to come and talk with you, to fill in for the real people that you cannot have.”

you made us too much like people. So that we became more human, until we were entirely human. No longer puppets, no longer pretty dolls, but really actual people.

“Mary, please forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” she said. “Rather, I suppose, we should thank you for it. You created us out of a love

There had to be a time when we faced up to what we really are.”

“And the rest of them?” “I am sorry, Enoch. The rest of them as well.”

How about you, Mary?” “I don’t know,” she said. “It is different with me....

“No, that’s not what I mean. Don’t you understand! I’m ...

“My dear,” he said, “I’ve been in love with you since the first day that I saw you. I think maybe even before that.” He reached out a hand to her, then pulled it back, remembering.

“There could neither of us stand it.” He knew that she was right. He knew that it was done. For fifty years she and the others had been dropping in to visit. And they’d come no more.

She would not come again and he could never bring himself to call her up again, even if he could, and his shadow world and his shadow love, the only love he’d ever really had, would be gone forever.

They all hated him but Mary, and for Mary it was worse than hate. For she was condemned, by the very virtue of the humanity he had given her, to love the monster who had created her.

Not buying it.

He had thought of them as shadow people, but that had been just a name he’d thought up for himself,

But the label had been wrong, for they were not shadowy or ghostlike.

At first they’d come only when he’d called them up, using the knowledge and the techniques that he had acquired in his study of the work done by the thaumaturgists of Alphard XXII.

They had anticipated him and come before he could call them up.

And there was the perfume mixer,

Just get the mixture that one wanted and turn it on and the room took on that scent until one should turn it off.