Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.

He’s an anachronism, something living from another age. No one fears him, I am sure of that. He’s been around too long for anyone to fear him. Too familiar. He’s a fixture of the land, like a tree or boulder. And yet no one feels quite comfortable with him, either.

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.

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.

As if this were a special place, one of those special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it.

Her eyes were radiant and there was, he thought, a holy look upon her face, as if she had experienced some ecstasy of the soul.

“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.”

But it was not in himself, he knew, to turn his back on Earth. It was a place he loved too well—loving it more, most likely, than those other humans who had not caught his glimpse of far and unguessed worlds.

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.

It had not occurred to him to connect a being such as this with a thing like home. For it was only human beings that had a place called home.

And here, suddenly, was that new beginning—more wondrous and fearsome than anything he could have dreamed even in an insane moment.

he had been reluctant to admit that the human race might prove to be a problem to the galactic installation.

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.

There were a lot of things, he told himself, that Man would have to unlearn, as well as things to learn, if he ever should become aware of the galactic culture.

How many other wars, he wondered, could the people of the Earth endure?

Too many:(

War had been bad enough when men faced one another with their weapons in their hands, but in any present war great payloads of destruction would go hurtling through the skies to engulf whole cities—aimed not at military concentrations, but at total populations.

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.

the pure ecstasy of reaching out and touching the spirituality that flooded through the galaxy and, undoubtedly, through the universe.

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.

He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences.

With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.

There was a coldness and a loneliness in the station—a far-reaching loneliness that stretched out and out, farther than mere Earth loneliness could go.

And yet he had learned to submerge that sense of horror, to disregard the outward appearance of it, to regard all life as brother life, to meet all things as people.

It seemed impossible, of course, but there were too many impossibilities in the galaxy which turned out, after all, to be entirely possible for a man to ever know when he stood on solid ground.

He sensed the crashing down of not only his own personal world, but of all the hopes of Earth. With the station gone, Earth once more would be left in the backwaters of the galaxy, with no hope of help, no chance of recognition, no realization of what lay waiting in the galaxy.

Standing alone and naked, the human race would go on in its same old path, fumbling its uncertain way toward a blind, mad future.

Enoch wondered, that there was no fear in her, either of Ulysses or the Hazer? Was it because, in truth, as he had said, she could see beyond the outward guise, could somehow sense the basic humanity (God help me, I cannot think, even now, except in human terms!) that was in these creatures?

And if that were true, was it because she herself was not entirely human? A human, certainly, in form and origin, but not formed and molded into the human culture—being perhaps, what a human would be if he were not hemmed about so closely by the rules of behavior and outlook that through the years had hardened into law to comprise a common human attitude.

“For years I’ve tried to understand and to conform to the ethics and ideas of all the people who have come through this station. I’ve pushed my own human instincts and training to one side. I’ve tried to understand other viewpoints and to evaluate other ways of thinking, many of which did violence to my own. I am glad of all of it, for it has given me a chance to go beyond the narrowness of Earth. I think I gained something from it all.

“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.”

“Once,” Ulysses said, “the races all were bound together. There were differences, naturally, but these differences were bridged, sometimes rather artificially and not too satisfactorily, but with both sides striving to maintain the artificial bridging and generally succeeding. Because they wanted to, you see.

There was a common purpose, the forging of a great cofraternity of all intelligences. We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques—that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing. We had our troubles, certainly, and as I have said, our differences, but we were progressing.

We brushed the small animosities and the petty differences underneath the rug and worked only on the big ones. We felt that if we could get the big ones settled, the small ones would become so small they would disappear. But it is becoming different now. There is a tendency to pull the pettiness from underneath the rug and blo...

how could one man—one man, alone—take it upon himself to play the role of God for the entire race? By what right did one man make a decision that affected all the rest, all the billions of others? Could he, if he did, ever be able, in the years to come, to justify his choice?

This particular spot, he thought, always would be peaceful, for it was off the beaten track, distant from any possible target in atomic war. Except for the remote possibility of some ancient and nonrecorded, long forgotten minor conflict in prehistoric days, no battle ever had been fought here or ever would be fought. And yet it would not escape the common fate of poisoned soil and water if the world should suddenly, in a fateful hour of fury, unleash the might of its awesome weapons.

Soon or late, the war would come to him, if not in a flash of monstrous energy, then in the snow of death falling from the skies.

There once had been a hope that Earth could be accepted as a member of the galactic family, that he might serve as the emissary to gain that recognition. But now that hope was shattered, not only by the fact that the station might be closed, but that its very closing would be based upon the barbarism of the human race.

One man alone, he thought. One man alone could not stand against both Earth and galaxy.

And that had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment—not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.

It had been in that moment that he had realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death of misery, might prove a right or uphold a principle.

Somewhere, he thought, on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a principle and had persisted in it until today that insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and immaterial, th...

He stood with the journal in his hand and stared at the page where the writing ended, the writing that he’d done the day before yesterday. Just the day before yesterday and it now was ancient writing; it even had a faded look about it. And well it might, he thought, for it had been writing done in another age. It had been the last entry he had made before his world had come crashing down about him.

Enoch felt the skin along his spine trying to roll up his back like a window shade, and the bristling of the hair along the base of his skull, obeying some primordial instinct in its striving to raise itself erect into a fighting ruff.

He knelt there, regarding himself with awe, and a little pity, too, wondering what he was, if he were even human, if, unknown to himself, he had absorbed so much of the mingled alien viewpoint to which he had been subjected that he had become some strange sort of hybrid, a queer kind of galactic half-breed.

It was something that was past all description—a mother’s love, a father’s pride, the adoration of a sweetheart, the closeness of a comrade, it was all of these and more.

It made the farthest distance near and turned the complex simple and it swept away all fear and sorrow, for all of there being a certain feeling of deep sorrow in it, as if one might feel that never in his lifetime would he know an instant like this, and that in another instant he would lose it and never would be able to hunt it out again. But that was not the way it was, for this ascendant instant kept going on and on.

One was tempted, Enoch thought, to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther. For each new development produced, as side effects, so many other possibilities, so many other roads to travel, that with each step one took down any given road there were more paths to follow. There’d never be an end, he thought—no end to anything.

There was a quietness. As if the entire world had caught its breath and stood attentive and in awe, waiting for a sound that did not come, that would never come but would always be expected.

It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost-like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about you, and there was the feeling that it was not only here but that the peace extended on and out in all directions, to the farthest reaches of infinity, and that it had a depth which would enable it to endure until the final gasp of all eternity.