Way Station

by Clifford D. Simak

But silence was an alien note that held no right upon this field or day, and it was broken by the whimper and the pain, the cry for water, and the prayer for death—the crying and the calling and the whimpering that would go on for hours beneath the summer sun.

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.

They hated him and resented him and he did not blame them, for he’d led them out and shown them the promised land of humanity and then had led them back. He had given them everything that a human being had with the one exception of that most important thing of all—the ability to exist within the human world.

For he had a world. He had a greater world than anyone outside this station had ever dreamed about. He did not need the Earth. But even as he thought it, he knew he could not make it stick. For, in a very strange and funny way, he still did need the Earth.

But could he, in reality, represent the Earth? Was he any longer a true representative of the human race? He was a nineteenth-century man and how could he, being that, represent the twentieth? How much, he wondered, does the human character change with each generation? And not only was he of the nineteenth century, but he had, as well, lived for almost a hundred years under a separate and a special circumstance.