Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

“No,” said Enoch, so calmly he surprised himself. “No, when you have a thing to face, you face it. I learned that in the war.”

A piteous little wind was lamenting in the gingerbread high up in the gables and through the windows he could see battalions of tattered clouds fleeing in ragged retreat across the moon, which had climbed halfway up the eastern sky.

Decision should be based on weighing and on measuring and he had weighed and measured nothing.

How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny.

But it did not matter, Enoch thought, for the words were graven on more than stone alone.