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through the intervention and the agency of the Talisman and its custodian.
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.
"What is the trouble, Enoch?" Mary asked.
"Nothing," he said. "I was just thinking. I am sorry. I will pay
attention now."
"You were talking," David said, "about what we could find in the
galaxy. There was, for one thing, that strange sort of math. You were
telling us of it once and it was something ..."
"The Arcturus math, you mean," said Enoch. "I know little more than
when I told you of it. It is too involved. It is based on behavior
symbolism."
There was some doubt, he told himself, that you could even call it
math, although, by analysis, that was probably what it was. It was something
that the scientists of Earth, no doubt, could use to make possible the
engineering of the social sciences as logically and as efficiently as the
common brand of math had been used to build the gadgets of the Earth.
"And the biology of that race in Andromeda," Mary said. "The ones who
colonized all those crazy planets."
"Yes, I know. But Earth would have to mature a bit in its intellectual
and emotional outlook before we'd venture to use it as the Andromedans did.
Still, I suppose that it would have its applications."
He shupered inwardly as he thought of how the Andromedans used it. And
that, he knew, was proof that he still was a man of Earth, kin to all the
bias and the prejudice and the shibboleths of the human mind. For what the
Andromedans had done was only common sense. If you cannot colonize a planet
in your present shape, why, then you change your shape. You make yourself
into the sort of being that can live upon the planet and then you take it
over in that alien shape into which you have changed yourself. If you need
to be a worm, then you become a worm-or an insect or a shellfish or whatever
it may take. 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.
"There are all the drugs," said Mary, "and the medicines. The medical
knowledge that could apply to Earth. There was that little package Galactic
Central sent you."
"A packet of drugs," said Enoch, "that could cure almost every ill on
Earth. That, perhaps, hurts me most of all. To know they're up there in the
cupboard, actually on this planet, where so many people need them."
"You could mail out samples," David said, "to medical associations or
to some drug concern."
Enoch shook his bead. "I thought of that, of course. But I have the
galaxy to consider. I have an obligation to Galactic Central. They have
taken great precautions that the station not be known. There are Ulysses and
all my other alien friends. I cannot wreck their plans. I cannot play the
traitor to them. For when you think of it, Galactic Central and the work
it's doing is more important than the Earth."
"Divided loyalties," said David with slight mockery in his tone.
"That is it, exactly. There had been a time, many years ago, when I
thought of writing papers for submissions to some of the scientific
journals. Not the medical journals, naturally, for I know nothing about
medicine. The drugs are there, of course, lying on the shelf, with
directions for their use, but they are merely so many pills or powders or
ointments, or whatever they may be. But there were other things I knew of,
other things I'd learned. Not too much about them, naturally, but at least
some hints in some new directions. Enough that someone could pick them up
and go on from there. Someone who might know what to do with them."
"But look here," David said, "that wouldn't have worked out. You have
no technical nor research background, no educational record. You're not tied
up with any school or college. The journals just don't publish you unless
you can prove yourself."
"I realize that, of course. That's why I never wrote the papers. I knew
there was no use. You can't blame the journals. They must be responsible.
Their pages aren't open to just anyone. And even if they had viewed the
papers with enough respect to want to publish them, they would have had to
find out who I was. And that would have led straight back to the station."
"But even if you could have gotten away with it," David pointed out,
"you'd still not have been clear. You said a while ago you had a loyalty to
Galactic Central."
"If," said Enoch, "in this particular case I could have got away with
it, it might have been all right. If you just threw out ideas and let some
Earth scientists develop them, there'd be no harm done Galactic Central. The
main problem, of course, would be not to reveal the source."
"Even so," said David, "there'd be little you actually could tell them.
What I mean is that generally you haven't got enough to go on. So much of
this galactic knowledge is off the beaten track."
"I know," said Enoch. "The mental engineering of Mankalinen III, for
one thing. If the Earth could know of that, our people undoubtedly could
find a clue to the treatment of the neurotic and the mentally disturbed. We
could empty all the institutions and we could tear them down or use them for
something else. There'd be no need of them. But no one other than the people
out on Mankalinen Ill could ever tell us of it. I only know they are noted
for their mental engineering, but that is all I know. I haven't the faintest
inkling of what it's all about. It's something that you'd have to get from
the people out there."
"What you are really talking of," said Mary, "are all the nameless
sciences-the ones that no human has ever thought about."
"Like us, perhaps," said David.
"David!" Mary cried.
"There is no sense," said David angrily, "in pretending we are people."
"But you are," said Enoch tensely. "You are people to me. You are the
only people that I have. What is the matter, David?"
"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."
"Mary," Enoch cried, "you don't think that way, too! You can't think
that way!"
He reached out his arms to her and then he let them drop-terrified at
the realization of what he'd been about to do. It was the first time he'd
ever tried to touch her. It was the first time, in all the years, that he
had forgotten.
"I am sorry, Mary. I should not have done that."
Her eyes were bright with tears.
"I wish you could," she said. "Oh, how I wish you could!"
"David," he said, not turning his head.
"David left," said Mary.
"He won't be back," said Enoch.
Mary shook her head.
"What is the matter, Mary? What is it all about? What have I done!"
"Nothing," Mary said, "except that 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. I think David must resent
it-not that he is people, but that being people, he is still a shadow. It
did not matter when we were dolls or puppets, for we were not human then. We
had no human feeling."
"Mary, please," he said. "Mary, please forgive me." She leaned toward
him and her face was lighted by deep tenderness. "There is nothing to
forgive," she said. "Rather, I suppose, we should thank you for it. You
created us out of a love of us and a need of us and it is wonderful to know
that you are loved and needed."
"But I don't create you any more," Enoch pleaded. "There was a time,
long ago, I had to. But not any longer. Now you come to visit me of your own
free will."
How many years? he wondered. It must be all of fifty. And Mary had been
the first, and David had been second. Of all the others of them, they had
been the first and were the closest and the dearest.
And before that, before he'd even tried, he'd spent other years in
studying that nameless science stemming from the thaumaturgists of Alphard
XXII.
There had been a day and a state of mind when it would have been black
magic, but it was not black magic. Rather, it was the orderly manipulation
of certain natural aspects of the universe as yet quite unsuspected by the
human race. Perhaps aspects that Man never would discover. For there was
not, at least at the present moment, the necessary orientation of the
scientific mind to initiate the research that must precede discovery.
"David felt," said Mary, "that we could not go on forever, playing out
our little sedate visits. 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."
"But you? How about you, Mary?"
"I don't know," she said. "It is different with me. I love you very
much."
"And I ..."
"No, that's not what I mean. Don't you understand! I'm in love with
you."
He sat stricken, staring at her, and there was a great roaring in the
world, as if he were standing still and the world and time were rushing
swiftly past him.
"If it only could have stayed," she said, "the way it was at first.
Then we were glad of our existence and our emotions were so shallow and we
seemed to be so happy. Like little happy children, running in the sun. But
then we all grew up. And I think I the most of all."
She smiled at him and tears were in her eyes.
"Don't take it so hard, Enoch. We can ..."
"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.
"I did not know," she said. "I should not have told you. You could live
with it until you knew I loved you, too."
He noped dumbly.
She bowed her head. "Dear God, we don't deserve this. We have done
nothing to deserve it."
She raised her head and looked at him. "If I could only touch you."
"We can go on," he said, "as we have always done. You can come to see
me any time you want. We can..."
She shook her bead. "It wouldn't work," she said. "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.
For the fairyland was shattered and the magic spell was broken. He'd be left
alone-more alone than ever, more alone than before he'd ever known her.
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.
"Good bye, my dear," he said.
But it was too late. She was already gone.
And from far off, it seemed, he heard the moaning whistle that said a
message had come in.
She had said that they must face up to the kind of things they were.
And what were they? Not, what did he think they were, but what were
they, actually? What did they think themselves to be? For perhaps they knew
much better than did he.
Where had Mary gone? When she left this room, into what kind of limbo
did she disappear? Did she still exist? And if so, what kind of an existence
would it be? Would she be stored away somewhere as a little girl would store
away her doll in a box pushed back into the closet with all the other dolls?
He tried to imagine limbo and it was a nothingness, and if that were
true, a being pushed into limbo would be an existence within a
non-existence. There would be nothing-not space nor time, nor light, nor
air, no color, and no vision, just a never ending nothing that of necessity
must lie at some point outside the universe.
Mary! he cried inside himself. Mary, what have I done to you?
And the answer lay there, hard and naked.
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.
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.
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.
Hate me, Mary, he pleaded. Hate me like the others! He had thought of
them as shadow people, but that had been just a name he'd thought up for
himself, for his own convenience, a handy label that he had tagged them with
so that he would have some way of identifying them when he thought of them.
But the label had been wrong, for they were not shadowy or ghostlike.
To the eyes they were solid and substantial, as real as any people. It was
only when you tried to touch them that they were not real-for when you tried
to touch them, there was nothing there.
A figment of his mind, he'd thought at first, but now he was not sure.
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. But in recent years he had not called them
up. There had been no occasion to. They had anticipated him and come before
he could call them up. They sensed his need of them before he knew the need
himself. And they were there, waiting for him, to spend an hour or evening.
Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them,
perhaps at the time unconsciously, not knowing why he shaped them so, but in
recent years he'd known, although he had tried not to know, would have been
the better satisfied if he had not known. For it was a knowledge that he had
not admitted, but kept pushed back, far within his mind. But now, when all
was gone, when it no longer mattered, he finally did admit it.
David Ransome was himself, as he had dreamed himself to be, as he had
wished himself to be-but, of course, as he had never been. He was the
dashing Union officer, of not so high a rank as to be stiff and stodgy, but
a fair cut above the man of ordinary standing. He was trim and debonair and
definitely dare-devilish, loved by all the women, admired by all the men. He
was a born leader and a good fellow all at once, at home alike in the field
or drawing room.
And Mary? Funny, he thought, he had never called her anything but Mary.
There had never been a surname. She had been simply Mary.
And she was at least two women, if not more than that. She was Sally
Brown, who had lived just down the road-and how long had it been, he
wondered, since he'd thought of Sally Brown? It was strange, he knew, that
he had not thought of her, that he now was shocked by the memory of a
one-time neighbor girl named Sally Brown. For the two of them once had been
in love, or only thought, perhaps, that they had been in love. For even in
the later years, when he still remembered her, he had never been quite
certain, even through the romantic mists of time, if it had been love or no
more than the romanticism of a soldier marching off to war. It had been a
shy and fumbling, an awkward sort of love, the love of the farmer's daughter
for the next-door farmer's son. They had decided to be married when he came
home from war, but a few days after Gettysburg he had received the letter,
then more than three weeks written, which told him that Sally Brown was dead
of diphtheria. He had grieved, he now recalled, but he could not recall how
deeply, although it probably had been deeply, for to grieve long and deeply
was the fashion in those days.
So Mary very definitely was partly Sally Brown, but not entirely Sally.
She was as well that tall, stately daughter of the South, the woman he had
seen for a few moments only as he marched a dusty road in the hot Virginia
sun. There had been a mansion, one of those great plantation houses, set
back from the road, and she had been standing on the portico, beside one of
the great white pillars, watching the enemy march past. Her hair was black
and her complexion whiter than the pillar and she had stood so straight and
proud, so defiant and imperious, that he had remembered her and thought of
her and dreamed of her-although he never knew her name-through all the
dusty, sweaty, bloody days of war. Wondering as he thought and dreamed of
her if the thinking and the dreaming might be unfaithful to his Sally.
Sitting around the campfire, when the talk grew quiet, and again, rolled in
his blankets, staring at the stars, he had built up a fantasy of how, when
the war was ended, he'd go back to that Virginia house and find her. She
might be there no longer, but he still would roam the South and find her.
But he never did; he had never really meant to find her. It had been a
campfire dream.
So Mary had been both of these-she had been Sally Brown and the unknown
Virginia belle standing by the pillar to watch the troops march by. She had
been the shadow of them and perhaps of many others as yet unrealized by him,
a composite of all he had ever known or seen or admired in women. She had
been an ideal and perfection. She had been his perfect woman, created in his
mind. And now, like Sally Brown, resting in her grave; like the Virginia
belle, lost in the mists of time; like all the others who may have
contributed to his molding of her, she was gone from him.
And he had loved her, certainly, for she had been a compounding of his
loves-a cross section, as it were, of all the women he had ever loved (if he
actually had loved any) or the ones he had thought he loved, even in the
abstract.
But that she should love him was something that had never crossed his
mind. And until he knew her love for him, it had been quite possible to
nurse his love of her close inside the heart, knowing that it was a hopeless
love and impossible, but the best that he could manage.
He wondered where she might be now, where she had retreated-into the
limbo he had attempted to imagine or into some strange non-existence,
waiting all unknowing for the time she'd come to him again.
He put up his hands and lowered his head in them and sat in utter
misery and guilt, with his face cupped in his fingers.
She would never come again. He prayed she'd never come. It would be
better for the both of them if she never came.
If he only could be sure, he thought, of where she might be now. If he
only could be certain that she was in a semblance of death and untortured by
her thoughts. To believe that she was sentient was more than one could bear.
He heard the hooting of the whistle that said a message waited and he
took his head out of his hands. But he did not get up off the sofa.
Numbly his hand reached out to the coffee table that stood before the
sofa, its top covered with some of the more colorful of the gewgaws and
gimcracks that had been left as gifts by travelers.
He picked up a cube of something that might have been some strange sort
of glass or of translucent stone-he had never been able to decide which it
was, if either-and cupped it in his hands. Staring into it, he saw a tiny
picture, three-dimensional and detailed, of a faery world. It was a prettily
grotesque place set inside what might have been a forest glade surrounded by
what appeared to be flowering toadstools, and drifting down through the air,
as if it might have been a part of the air itself, came what looked for all
the world like a shower of jeweled snow, sparkling and glinting in the
violet light of a great blue sun. There were things dancing in the glade and
they looked more like flowers than animals, but they moved with a grace and
poetry that fired one's blood to watch. Then the faery place was wiped out
and there was another place-a wild and dismal place, with grim, gaunt,
beetling cliffs rearing high against a red and angry sky, while great flying
things that looked like flapping dishrags beat their way up and down the
cliffs, and there were others of them roosting, most obscenely, upon the
scraggly projections that must have been some sort of misshapen trees
growing from the very wall of rock. And from far below, from some distance
that one could only guess, came the lonesome thundering of a rushing river.
He put the cube back upon the table. He wondered what it was that one
saw within its depths. It was like turning the pages of a book, with each
page a picture of a different place, but never anything to tell where that
place might be. When he first had been given it, he had spent fascinated
hours, watching the pictures change as he held it in his hands. There had
never been a picture that looked even faintly like any other picture and
there was no end to them. One got the feeling that these were not pictures,
actually, but that one was looking at the scene itself and that at any
moment one might lose his perch upon wherever he was roosting and plunge
head first down into the place itself.
But it had finally palled upon him, for it bad been a senseless
business, gawking at a long series of places that had no identity. Senseless
to him, of course, he thought, but not senseless, certainly, to that native
of Enif V who had given it to him. It might, for all he knew, Enoch told
himself, be of great significance and a treasure of great value.
That was the way it was with so many of the things he had. Even the
ones that had given pleasure, he knew, be might be using wrongly, or, at
least, in a way that had not been intended.
But there were some-a few, perhaps-that did have a value he could
understand and appreciate, although in many instances their functions were
of little use to him. There was the tiny clock that gave the local times for
all the sectors of the galaxy, and while it might be intriguing, and even
essential under certain circumstances, it had little value to him. And there
was the perfume mixer, which was as close as he could come in naming it,
which allowed a person to create the specific scent desired. Just get the
mixture that one wanted and turn it on and the room took on that scent until
one should turn it off. He'd had some fun with it, remembering that bitter
winter day when, after long experimenting, he had achieved the scent of
apple blossoms, and had lived a day in spring while a blizzard howled
outside.
He reached out and picked up another piece-a beautiful thing that
always had intrigued him, but for which he had never found a use-if, indeed,
it had a use. It might be, he told himself, no more than a piece of art, a
pretty thing that was meant to look at only. But it had a certain feel (if
that were the word) which had led him to believe that it might have some
specific function.
It was a pyramid of spheres, succeeding smaller spheres set on larger
spheres. Some fourteen inches tall, it was a graceful piece, with each of
the spheres a different color-and not just a color painted on, but each
color so deep and true that one knew instinctively the color was intrinsic
to each sphere, that the entire sphere, from the center of it out to the
surface, was all of its particular color.
There was nothing to indicate that any gluelike medium had been used to
mount the spheres and hold them in their places. It looked for all the world
as if someone had simply piled the spheres, one atop the other, and they had
stayed that way.
Holding it in his hands, he tried to recall who had given it to him,
but he had no memory of it.
The whistle of the message machine still was calling and there was work
to do. He could not sit here, he told himself, mooning the afternoon away.
He put the pyramid of spheres back on the table top, and rising, went across
the room.
The message said:
NO. 406,302 TO STATION 18327. NATIVE OF VEGA XXI ARRIVING AT 16532.82.
DEPARTURE INDETERMINATE. NO LUGGAGE. CABINET ONLY, LOCAL CONDITIONS.
CONFIRM.
Enoch felt a glow of happiness, looking at the message. It would be
good to have a Hazer once again. It had been a month or more since one had
passed through the station.
He could remember back to that first day he had ever met a Hazer, when
the five of them had come. It must have been, he thought, back in 1914 or
maybe 1915. World War I, which everyone then was calling the Great War, was
under way, he knew.
The Hazer would be arriving at about the same time as Ulysses and the
three of them could spend a pleasant evening. It was not too often that two
good friends ever visited here at once.
He stood a bit aghast at thinking of the Hazer as a friend, for more
than likely the being itself was one he had never met. But that made little
difference, for a Hazer, any Hazer, would turn out to be a friend.
He got the cabinet in position beneath a materializer unit and
double-checked to be sure that everything was exactly as it should be, then
went back to the message machine and sent off the confirmation.
And all the time his memory kept on nagging at him. Had it been 1914,
or perhaps a little later?
At the catalogue cabinet, he pulled out a drawer and found Vega XXI and
the first date listed was July 12, 1915. He found the record book on the
shelf and pulled it out and brought it to the desk. He leafed through it
rapidly until he found the date.
July 12, 1915-Arrived this afternoon (3:20 P.M.) five beings from Vega
XXI, the first of their kind to pass through this station. They are biped
and humanoid, and one gains the impression that they are not made of
flesh-that flesh would be too gross for the kind of things they are-but, of
course, they are made of flesh the same as anyone. They glow, not with a
visible light, but there is about them an aura that goes with them wherever
they may be.
They were, I gathered, a sexual unit, the five of them, although I am
not so certain I understand, for it is most confusing. They were happy and
friendly and they carried with them an air of faint amusement, not at
anything in particular, but at the universe itself, as if they might have
enjoyed some sort of cosmic and very private joke that was known to no one
else. They were on a holiday and were en route to a festival (although that
may not be the precise word for it) on another planet, where other life
forms were gathering for a week of carnival. Just how they had been invited
or why they had been invited I was unable to determine. It must surely have
been a great honor for them to be going there, but so far as I could see
they did not seem to think so, but took it as their right. They were very
happy and without a care and extremely self-assured and poised, but thinking
back on it, I would suppose that they are always that way. I found myself
just a little envious at not being able to be as carefree and gay as they
were, and trying to imagine how fresh life and the universe must seem to
them, and a little resentful that they could be, so unthinkingly, as happy
as they were.
I had, according to instructions, hung hammocks so that they could
rest, but they did not use them. They brought with them hampers that were
filled with food and drink and sat down at my table and began to talk and
feast. They asked me to sit with them and they chose two dishes and a
bottle, which they assured me would be safe for me to eat and drink, the
rest of their fare being somewhat doubtful for a metabolism such as mine.
The food was delicious and of a kind I had never tasted-one dish being
rather like the rarest and most delicate of old cheeses, and the other of a
sweetness that was heavenly. The drink was somewhat like the finest of
brandies, yellow in color and no heavier than water.
They asked me about myself and about my planet and they were courteous
and seemed genuinely interested and they were quick of understanding in the
things I told them. They told me they were headed for a planet the name of
which I had not heard before, and they talked among themselves, gaily and
happily, but in such a way that I did not seem to be left out. From their
talk I gained the fact that some form of art was being presented at the
festival on this planet. The art form was not alone of music or painting,
but was composed of sound and color and emotion and form and other qualities
for which there seem to be no words in the language of the Earth, and which
I do not entirely recognize, only gaining the very faintest inkling of what
they were talking of in this particular regard. I gained the impression of a
three-dimensional symphony, although this is not entirely the right
expression, which had been composed, not by a single being, but by a team of
beings. They talked of the art form enthusiastically and I seemed to
understand that it would last for not only several hours, but for days, and
that it was an experience rather than a listening or seeing and that the
spectators or audience did not merely sit and listen, but could, if they
wished, and must, to get the most out of it, be participants. But I could
not understand how they participated and felt I should not ask. They talked
of the people they would meet and when they had met them last and gossiped
considerably about them, although in kindly fashion, leaving the impression
that they and many other people went from planet to planet for some happy
purpose. But whether there was any purpose other than enjoyment in their
going, I could not determine. I gathered that there might be.
They spoke of other festivals and not all of them were concerned with
the one art form, but with other more specialized aspects of the arts, of
which I could gain no adequate idea. They seemed to find a great and
exuberant happiness in the festivals and it seemed to me that some certain
significances aside from the art itself contributed to that happiness. I did
not join in this part of their conversation, for, frankly, there was no
opportunity. I would have liked to ask some questions, but I had no chance.
I suppose that if I had, my questions must have sounded stupid to them, but
given the chance, that would not have bothered me too much. And yet in spite
of this, they managed somehow to make me feel I was included in their
conversation. There was no obvious attempt to do this, and yet they made me
feel I was one with them and not simply a station keeper they would spend a
short time with. At times they spoke briefly in the language of their
planet, which is one of the most beautiful I have ever heard, but for the
most part they conversed in the vernacular used by a number of the humanoid
races, a sort of pidgin language made up for convenience, and I suspect that
this was done out of courtesy to me, and a great courtesy it was. I believe
that they were truly the most civilized people I have ever met.
I have said they glowed and I think by that I mean they glowed in
spirit. It seemed that they were accompanied, somehow, by a sparkling golden
haze that made happy everything it touched-almost as if they moved in some
special world that no one else had found. Sitting at the table with them, I
seemed to be included in this golden haze and I felt strange, quiet, deep
currents of happiness flowing in my veins. I wondered by what route they and
their world had arrived at this golden state and if my world could, in some
distant time, attain it.
But back of this happiness was a great vitality, the bubbling
effervescent spirit with an inner core of strength and a love of living that
seemed to fill every pore of them and every instant of their time.
They had only two hours' time and it passed so swiftly that I had to
finally warn them it was time to go. Before they left, they placed two
packages on the table and said they were for me and thanked me for my table
(what a strange way for them to put it) then they said good bye and stepped
into the cabinet (extra-large one) and I sent them on their way. Even after
they were gone, the golden haze seemed to linger in the room and it was
hours before all of it was gone. I wished that I might have gone with them
to that other planet and its festival.
One of the packages they left contained a dozen bottles of the
brandy-like liquor and the bottles themselves were each a piece of art, no
two of them alike, being formed of what I am convinced is diamond, but
whether fabricated diamond or carved from some great stones, I have no idea.
At any rate, I would estimate that each of them is priceless, and each
carved in a disturbing variety of symbolisms, each of which, however, has a
special beauty of its own. And in the other box was a-well, I suppose that,
for lack of other name, you might call it a music box. The box itself is
ivory, old yellow ivory that is as smooth as satin, and covered by a mass of
diagrammatic carving which must have some significance which I do not
understand. On the top of it is a circle set inside a graduated scale and
when I turned the circle to the first graduation there was music and through
all the room an interplay of many-colored light, as if the entire room was
filled with different kinds of color, and through it all a far-off
suggestion of that golden haze. And from the box came, too, perfumes that
filled the room, and feeling, emotion-whatever one may call it-but something
that took hold of one and made one sad or happy or whatever might go with
the music and the color and perfume. Out of that box came a world in which
one lived out the composition or whatever it might be-living it with all
that one had in him, all the emotion and belief and intellect of which one
is capable. And here, I am quite certain, was a recording of that art form
of which they had been talking. And not one composition alone, but 206 of
them, for that is the number of the graduation marks and for each mark there
is a separate composition. In the days to come I shall play them all and
make notes upon each of them and assign them names, perhaps, according to
their characteristics, and from them, perhaps, can gain some knowledge as
well as entertainment.
The twelve diamond bottles, empty long ago, stood in a sparkling row
upon the fireplace mantel. The music box, as one of his choicest
possessions, was stored inside one of the cabinets, where no harm could come
to it. And Enoch thought rather ruefully, in all these years, despite
regular use of it, he had not as yet played through the entire list of
compositions. There were so many of the early ones that begged for a
replaying that he was not a great deal more than halfway through the
graduated markings.
The Hazers had come back, the five of them, time and time again, for it
seemed that they found in this station, perhaps even in the man who operated
it, some quality that pleased them. They had helped him learn the Vegan
language and had brought him scrolls of Vegan literature and many other
things, and had been, without any doubt, the best friends among the aliens
(other than Ulysses) that he had ever had. Then one day they came no more
and he wondered why, asking after them when other Hazers showed up at the
station. But he had never learned what had happened to them.
He knew far more now about the Hazers and their art forms, their
traditions and their customs and their history, than he'd known that first
day he'd written of them, back in 1915. But he still was far from grasping
many of the concepts that were commonplace with them.
There had been many of them since that day in 1915 and there was one he
remembered in particular-the old, wise one, the philosopher, who had died on
the floor beside the sofa.
They had been sitting on the sofa, talking, and he even could remember
the subject of their talk. The old one had been telling of the perverse code
of ethics, at once irrational and comic, which had been built up by that
curious race of social vegetables he had encountered on one of his visits to
an off-track planet on the other side of the galactic rim. The old Hazer had
a drink or two beneath his belt and he was in splendid form, relating
incident after incident with enthusiastic gusto.
Supenly, in mid-sentence, he had stopped his talking, and had slumped
quietly forward. Enoch, startled, reached for him, but before he could lay a
hand upon him, the old alien had slid slowly to the floor.
The golden haze had faded from his body and slowly flickered out and
the body lay there, angular and bony and obscene, a terribly alien thing
there upon the floor, a thing that was at once pitiful and monstrous. More
monstrous, it seemed to Enoch, than anything in alien form he had ever seen
before.
In life it had been a wondrous creature, but now, in death, it was an
old bag of hideous bones with a scaly parchment stretched to hold the bones
together. It was the golden haze, Enoch told himself, gulping, in something
near to horror, that had made the Hazer seem so wondrous and so beautiful,
so vital, so alive and quick, so filled with dignity. The golden haze was
the life of them and when the haze was gone, they became mere repulsive
horrors that one gagged to look upon.
Could it be, he wondered, that the goldenness was the Hazers' life
force and that they wore it like a cloak, as a sort of over-all disguise?
Did they wear that life force on the outside of them while all other
creatures wore it on the inside?
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.
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.
Enoch turned from the body and walked stiffly across the room to the
message machine. He put in a call for a connection direct with Galactic
Central, then stood waiting, gripping the sides of the machine with both his
hands.
GO AHEAD, said Galactic Central.
Briefly, as objectively as he was able, Enoch reported what had
happened.
There was no hesitation and there were no questions from the other end.
Just the simple directions (as if this was something that happened all the
time) of how the situation should be handled. The Vegan must remain upon the
planet of its death, its body to be disposed of according to the local
customs obtaining on that planet. For that was the Vegan law, and, likewise,
a point of honor. A Vegan, when he fell, must stay where he fell, and that
place became, forever, a part of Vega XXI. There were such places, said
Galactic Central, all through the galaxy.
THE CUSTOM HERE [typed Enoch] IS TO INTER THE DEAD.
THEN INTER THE VEGAN.
WE READ A VERSE OR TWO FROM OUR HOLY BOOK.
READ ONE FOR THE VEGAN, THEN. YOU CAN DO ALL THIS?
YES. BUT WE USUALLY HAVE IT DONE BY A PRACTITIONER OF RELIGION. UNDER
THE PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES, HOWEVER, THAT MIGHT BE UNWISE.
AGREED [said Galactic Central] YOU CAN DO AS WELL YOURSELF?
I CAN.
IT IS BEST, THEN, THAT YOU DO.
WILL THERE BE RELATIVES OR FRIENDS ARRIVING FOR THE RITES?
NO.
YOU WILL NOTIFY THEM?
FORMALLY, OF COURSE. BUT THEY ALREADY KNOW.
HE ONLY DIED A MOMENT OR TWO AGO.
NEVERTHELESS, THEY KNOW.
WHAT ABOUT A DEATH CERTIFICATE?
NONE IS NEEDED. THEY KNOW OF WHAT HE DIED.
HIS LUGGAGE? THERE IS A TRUNK.
KEEP IT. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TOKEN FOR THE SERVICES YOU PERFORM FOR
THE HONORED DEAD. THAT ALSO IS THE LAW.
BUT THERE MAY BE IMPORTANT MATTERS IN IT.
YOU WILL KEEP THE TRUNK. TO REFUSE WOULD INSULT THE MEMORY OF THE DEAD.
ANYTHING ELSE? [asked Enoch] THAT IS ALL?
THAT IS ALL. PROCEED AS IF THE VEGAN WERE ONE OF YOUR OWN.
Enoch cleared the machine and went back across the room. He stood above
the Hazer, getting up his nerve to bend and lift the body to place it on the
sofa. He shrank from touching it. It was so unclean and terrible, such a
travesty on the shining creature that had sat there talking with him.
Since he met the Hazers he had loved them and admired them, had looked
forward to each visit by them-by any one of them. And now he stood, a
shivering coward who could not touch one dead.
It was not the horror only, for in his years as keeper of the station,
he had seen much of pure visual horror as portrayed in alien bodies. 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 was something else, he knew, some other unknown factor quite apart
from horror, that he felt. And yet this thing, he reminded himself, was a
friend of his. And as a dead friend, it demanded honor from him, it demanded
love and care.
Blindly he drove himself to the task. He stooped and lifted it. It had
almost no weight at all, as ii in death it had lost a dimension of itself,
had somehow become a smaller thing and less significant. Could it be, he
wondered, that the golden haze might have a weight all of its own?
He laid the body on the sofa and straightened it as best he could. Then
he went outside and, lighting the lantern in the shed, went down to the
barn.
It had been years since he had been there, but nothing much had
changed. Protected by a tight roof from the weather, it had stayed snug and
dry. There were cobwebs hanging from the beams and dust was everywhere.
Straggling clumps of ancient hay, stored in the mow above, hung down through
the cracks in the boards that floored the mow. The place had a dry, sweet,
dusty smell about it, all the odors of animals and manure long gone.
Enoch hung the lantern on the peg behind the row of stanchions and
climbed the laper to the mow. Working in the dark, for he dared not bring
the lantern into this dust heap of dried-out hay, he found the pile of oaken
boards far beneath the eaves.
Here, he remembered, underneath these slanting eaves, had been a
pretended cave in which, as a boy, he had spent many happy rainy days when
he could not be outdoors. He had been Robinson Crusoe in his desert island
cave, or some now nameless outlaw hiding from a posse, or a man holed up
against the threat of scalp-hunting Indians. He had had a gun, a wooden gun
that he had sawed out of a board, working it down later with draw-shave and
knife and a piece of glass to scrape it smooth. It had been something he had
cherished through all his boyhood days-until that day, when he had been
twelve, that his father, returning home from a trip to town, had handed him
a rifle for his very own.
He explored the stack of boards in the dark, determining by the feel
the ones that he would need. These he carried to the laper and carefully
slid down to the floor below.
Climbing down the laper, he went up the short flight of stairs to the
granary, where the tools were stored. He opened the lid of the great tool
chest and found that it was filled with long deserted mice nests. Pulling
out handfulls of the straw and hay and grass that the rodents had used to
set up their one-time housekeeping, he uncovered the tools. The shine had
gone from them, their surface grayed by the soft patina that came from long
disuse, but there was no rust upon them and the cutting edges still retained
their sharpness.
Selecting the tools he needed, he went back to the lower part of the
barn and fell to work. A century ago, he thought, he had done as he was
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.
"What is the trouble, Enoch?" Mary asked.
"Nothing," he said. "I was just thinking. I am sorry. I will pay
attention now."
"You were talking," David said, "about what we could find in the
galaxy. There was, for one thing, that strange sort of math. You were
telling us of it once and it was something ..."
"The Arcturus math, you mean," said Enoch. "I know little more than
when I told you of it. It is too involved. It is based on behavior
symbolism."
There was some doubt, he told himself, that you could even call it
math, although, by analysis, that was probably what it was. It was something
that the scientists of Earth, no doubt, could use to make possible the
engineering of the social sciences as logically and as efficiently as the
common brand of math had been used to build the gadgets of the Earth.
"And the biology of that race in Andromeda," Mary said. "The ones who
colonized all those crazy planets."
"Yes, I know. But Earth would have to mature a bit in its intellectual
and emotional outlook before we'd venture to use it as the Andromedans did.
Still, I suppose that it would have its applications."
He shupered inwardly as he thought of how the Andromedans used it. And
that, he knew, was proof that he still was a man of Earth, kin to all the
bias and the prejudice and the shibboleths of the human mind. For what the
Andromedans had done was only common sense. If you cannot colonize a planet
in your present shape, why, then you change your shape. You make yourself
into the sort of being that can live upon the planet and then you take it
over in that alien shape into which you have changed yourself. If you need
to be a worm, then you become a worm-or an insect or a shellfish or whatever
it may take. 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.
"There are all the drugs," said Mary, "and the medicines. The medical
knowledge that could apply to Earth. There was that little package Galactic
Central sent you."
"A packet of drugs," said Enoch, "that could cure almost every ill on
Earth. That, perhaps, hurts me most of all. To know they're up there in the
cupboard, actually on this planet, where so many people need them."
"You could mail out samples," David said, "to medical associations or
to some drug concern."
Enoch shook his bead. "I thought of that, of course. But I have the
galaxy to consider. I have an obligation to Galactic Central. They have
taken great precautions that the station not be known. There are Ulysses and
all my other alien friends. I cannot wreck their plans. I cannot play the
traitor to them. For when you think of it, Galactic Central and the work
it's doing is more important than the Earth."
"Divided loyalties," said David with slight mockery in his tone.
"That is it, exactly. There had been a time, many years ago, when I
thought of writing papers for submissions to some of the scientific
journals. Not the medical journals, naturally, for I know nothing about
medicine. The drugs are there, of course, lying on the shelf, with
directions for their use, but they are merely so many pills or powders or
ointments, or whatever they may be. But there were other things I knew of,
other things I'd learned. Not too much about them, naturally, but at least
some hints in some new directions. Enough that someone could pick them up
and go on from there. Someone who might know what to do with them."
"But look here," David said, "that wouldn't have worked out. You have
no technical nor research background, no educational record. You're not tied
up with any school or college. The journals just don't publish you unless
you can prove yourself."
"I realize that, of course. That's why I never wrote the papers. I knew
there was no use. You can't blame the journals. They must be responsible.
Their pages aren't open to just anyone. And even if they had viewed the
papers with enough respect to want to publish them, they would have had to
find out who I was. And that would have led straight back to the station."
"But even if you could have gotten away with it," David pointed out,
"you'd still not have been clear. You said a while ago you had a loyalty to
Galactic Central."
"If," said Enoch, "in this particular case I could have got away with
it, it might have been all right. If you just threw out ideas and let some
Earth scientists develop them, there'd be no harm done Galactic Central. The
main problem, of course, would be not to reveal the source."
"Even so," said David, "there'd be little you actually could tell them.
What I mean is that generally you haven't got enough to go on. So much of
this galactic knowledge is off the beaten track."
"I know," said Enoch. "The mental engineering of Mankalinen III, for
one thing. If the Earth could know of that, our people undoubtedly could
find a clue to the treatment of the neurotic and the mentally disturbed. We
could empty all the institutions and we could tear them down or use them for
something else. There'd be no need of them. But no one other than the people
out on Mankalinen Ill could ever tell us of it. I only know they are noted
for their mental engineering, but that is all I know. I haven't the faintest
inkling of what it's all about. It's something that you'd have to get from
the people out there."
"What you are really talking of," said Mary, "are all the nameless
sciences-the ones that no human has ever thought about."
"Like us, perhaps," said David.
"David!" Mary cried.
"There is no sense," said David angrily, "in pretending we are people."
"But you are," said Enoch tensely. "You are people to me. You are the
only people that I have. What is the matter, David?"
"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."
"Mary," Enoch cried, "you don't think that way, too! You can't think
that way!"
He reached out his arms to her and then he let them drop-terrified at
the realization of what he'd been about to do. It was the first time he'd
ever tried to touch her. It was the first time, in all the years, that he
had forgotten.
"I am sorry, Mary. I should not have done that."
Her eyes were bright with tears.
"I wish you could," she said. "Oh, how I wish you could!"
"David," he said, not turning his head.
"David left," said Mary.
"He won't be back," said Enoch.
Mary shook her head.
"What is the matter, Mary? What is it all about? What have I done!"
"Nothing," Mary said, "except that 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. I think David must resent
it-not that he is people, but that being people, he is still a shadow. It
did not matter when we were dolls or puppets, for we were not human then. We
had no human feeling."
"Mary, please," he said. "Mary, please forgive me." She leaned toward
him and her face was lighted by deep tenderness. "There is nothing to
forgive," she said. "Rather, I suppose, we should thank you for it. You
created us out of a love of us and a need of us and it is wonderful to know
that you are loved and needed."
"But I don't create you any more," Enoch pleaded. "There was a time,
long ago, I had to. But not any longer. Now you come to visit me of your own
free will."
How many years? he wondered. It must be all of fifty. And Mary had been
the first, and David had been second. Of all the others of them, they had
been the first and were the closest and the dearest.
And before that, before he'd even tried, he'd spent other years in
studying that nameless science stemming from the thaumaturgists of Alphard
XXII.
There had been a day and a state of mind when it would have been black
magic, but it was not black magic. Rather, it was the orderly manipulation
of certain natural aspects of the universe as yet quite unsuspected by the
human race. Perhaps aspects that Man never would discover. For there was
not, at least at the present moment, the necessary orientation of the
scientific mind to initiate the research that must precede discovery.
"David felt," said Mary, "that we could not go on forever, playing out
our little sedate visits. 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."
"But you? How about you, Mary?"
"I don't know," she said. "It is different with me. I love you very
much."
"And I ..."
"No, that's not what I mean. Don't you understand! I'm in love with
you."
He sat stricken, staring at her, and there was a great roaring in the
world, as if he were standing still and the world and time were rushing
swiftly past him.
"If it only could have stayed," she said, "the way it was at first.
Then we were glad of our existence and our emotions were so shallow and we
seemed to be so happy. Like little happy children, running in the sun. But
then we all grew up. And I think I the most of all."
She smiled at him and tears were in her eyes.
"Don't take it so hard, Enoch. We can ..."
"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.
"I did not know," she said. "I should not have told you. You could live
with it until you knew I loved you, too."
He noped dumbly.
She bowed her head. "Dear God, we don't deserve this. We have done
nothing to deserve it."
She raised her head and looked at him. "If I could only touch you."
"We can go on," he said, "as we have always done. You can come to see
me any time you want. We can..."
She shook her bead. "It wouldn't work," she said. "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.
For the fairyland was shattered and the magic spell was broken. He'd be left
alone-more alone than ever, more alone than before he'd ever known her.
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.
"Good bye, my dear," he said.
But it was too late. She was already gone.
And from far off, it seemed, he heard the moaning whistle that said a
message had come in.
She had said that they must face up to the kind of things they were.
And what were they? Not, what did he think they were, but what were
they, actually? What did they think themselves to be? For perhaps they knew
much better than did he.
Where had Mary gone? When she left this room, into what kind of limbo
did she disappear? Did she still exist? And if so, what kind of an existence
would it be? Would she be stored away somewhere as a little girl would store
away her doll in a box pushed back into the closet with all the other dolls?
He tried to imagine limbo and it was a nothingness, and if that were
true, a being pushed into limbo would be an existence within a
non-existence. There would be nothing-not space nor time, nor light, nor
air, no color, and no vision, just a never ending nothing that of necessity
must lie at some point outside the universe.
Mary! he cried inside himself. Mary, what have I done to you?
And the answer lay there, hard and naked.
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.
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.
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.
Hate me, Mary, he pleaded. Hate me like the others! He had thought of
them as shadow people, but that had been just a name he'd thought up for
himself, for his own convenience, a handy label that he had tagged them with
so that he would have some way of identifying them when he thought of them.
But the label had been wrong, for they were not shadowy or ghostlike.
To the eyes they were solid and substantial, as real as any people. It was
only when you tried to touch them that they were not real-for when you tried
to touch them, there was nothing there.
A figment of his mind, he'd thought at first, but now he was not sure.
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. But in recent years he had not called them
up. There had been no occasion to. They had anticipated him and come before
he could call them up. They sensed his need of them before he knew the need
himself. And they were there, waiting for him, to spend an hour or evening.
Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them,
perhaps at the time unconsciously, not knowing why he shaped them so, but in
recent years he'd known, although he had tried not to know, would have been
the better satisfied if he had not known. For it was a knowledge that he had
not admitted, but kept pushed back, far within his mind. But now, when all
was gone, when it no longer mattered, he finally did admit it.
David Ransome was himself, as he had dreamed himself to be, as he had
wished himself to be-but, of course, as he had never been. He was the
dashing Union officer, of not so high a rank as to be stiff and stodgy, but
a fair cut above the man of ordinary standing. He was trim and debonair and
definitely dare-devilish, loved by all the women, admired by all the men. He
was a born leader and a good fellow all at once, at home alike in the field
or drawing room.
And Mary? Funny, he thought, he had never called her anything but Mary.
There had never been a surname. She had been simply Mary.
And she was at least two women, if not more than that. She was Sally
Brown, who had lived just down the road-and how long had it been, he
wondered, since he'd thought of Sally Brown? It was strange, he knew, that
he had not thought of her, that he now was shocked by the memory of a
one-time neighbor girl named Sally Brown. For the two of them once had been
in love, or only thought, perhaps, that they had been in love. For even in
the later years, when he still remembered her, he had never been quite
certain, even through the romantic mists of time, if it had been love or no
more than the romanticism of a soldier marching off to war. It had been a
shy and fumbling, an awkward sort of love, the love of the farmer's daughter
for the next-door farmer's son. They had decided to be married when he came
home from war, but a few days after Gettysburg he had received the letter,
then more than three weeks written, which told him that Sally Brown was dead
of diphtheria. He had grieved, he now recalled, but he could not recall how
deeply, although it probably had been deeply, for to grieve long and deeply
was the fashion in those days.
So Mary very definitely was partly Sally Brown, but not entirely Sally.
She was as well that tall, stately daughter of the South, the woman he had
seen for a few moments only as he marched a dusty road in the hot Virginia
sun. There had been a mansion, one of those great plantation houses, set
back from the road, and she had been standing on the portico, beside one of
the great white pillars, watching the enemy march past. Her hair was black
and her complexion whiter than the pillar and she had stood so straight and
proud, so defiant and imperious, that he had remembered her and thought of
her and dreamed of her-although he never knew her name-through all the
dusty, sweaty, bloody days of war. Wondering as he thought and dreamed of
her if the thinking and the dreaming might be unfaithful to his Sally.
Sitting around the campfire, when the talk grew quiet, and again, rolled in
his blankets, staring at the stars, he had built up a fantasy of how, when
the war was ended, he'd go back to that Virginia house and find her. She
might be there no longer, but he still would roam the South and find her.
But he never did; he had never really meant to find her. It had been a
campfire dream.
So Mary had been both of these-she had been Sally Brown and the unknown
Virginia belle standing by the pillar to watch the troops march by. She had
been the shadow of them and perhaps of many others as yet unrealized by him,
a composite of all he had ever known or seen or admired in women. She had
been an ideal and perfection. She had been his perfect woman, created in his
mind. And now, like Sally Brown, resting in her grave; like the Virginia
belle, lost in the mists of time; like all the others who may have
contributed to his molding of her, she was gone from him.
And he had loved her, certainly, for she had been a compounding of his
loves-a cross section, as it were, of all the women he had ever loved (if he
actually had loved any) or the ones he had thought he loved, even in the
abstract.
But that she should love him was something that had never crossed his
mind. And until he knew her love for him, it had been quite possible to
nurse his love of her close inside the heart, knowing that it was a hopeless
love and impossible, but the best that he could manage.
He wondered where she might be now, where she had retreated-into the
limbo he had attempted to imagine or into some strange non-existence,
waiting all unknowing for the time she'd come to him again.
He put up his hands and lowered his head in them and sat in utter
misery and guilt, with his face cupped in his fingers.
She would never come again. He prayed she'd never come. It would be
better for the both of them if she never came.
If he only could be sure, he thought, of where she might be now. If he
only could be certain that she was in a semblance of death and untortured by
her thoughts. To believe that she was sentient was more than one could bear.
He heard the hooting of the whistle that said a message waited and he
took his head out of his hands. But he did not get up off the sofa.
Numbly his hand reached out to the coffee table that stood before the
sofa, its top covered with some of the more colorful of the gewgaws and
gimcracks that had been left as gifts by travelers.
He picked up a cube of something that might have been some strange sort
of glass or of translucent stone-he had never been able to decide which it
was, if either-and cupped it in his hands. Staring into it, he saw a tiny
picture, three-dimensional and detailed, of a faery world. It was a prettily
grotesque place set inside what might have been a forest glade surrounded by
what appeared to be flowering toadstools, and drifting down through the air,
as if it might have been a part of the air itself, came what looked for all
the world like a shower of jeweled snow, sparkling and glinting in the
violet light of a great blue sun. There were things dancing in the glade and
they looked more like flowers than animals, but they moved with a grace and
poetry that fired one's blood to watch. Then the faery place was wiped out
and there was another place-a wild and dismal place, with grim, gaunt,
beetling cliffs rearing high against a red and angry sky, while great flying
things that looked like flapping dishrags beat their way up and down the
cliffs, and there were others of them roosting, most obscenely, upon the
scraggly projections that must have been some sort of misshapen trees
growing from the very wall of rock. And from far below, from some distance
that one could only guess, came the lonesome thundering of a rushing river.
He put the cube back upon the table. He wondered what it was that one
saw within its depths. It was like turning the pages of a book, with each
page a picture of a different place, but never anything to tell where that
place might be. When he first had been given it, he had spent fascinated
hours, watching the pictures change as he held it in his hands. There had
never been a picture that looked even faintly like any other picture and
there was no end to them. One got the feeling that these were not pictures,
actually, but that one was looking at the scene itself and that at any
moment one might lose his perch upon wherever he was roosting and plunge
head first down into the place itself.
But it had finally palled upon him, for it bad been a senseless
business, gawking at a long series of places that had no identity. Senseless
to him, of course, he thought, but not senseless, certainly, to that native
of Enif V who had given it to him. It might, for all he knew, Enoch told
himself, be of great significance and a treasure of great value.
That was the way it was with so many of the things he had. Even the
ones that had given pleasure, he knew, be might be using wrongly, or, at
least, in a way that had not been intended.
But there were some-a few, perhaps-that did have a value he could
understand and appreciate, although in many instances their functions were
of little use to him. There was the tiny clock that gave the local times for
all the sectors of the galaxy, and while it might be intriguing, and even
essential under certain circumstances, it had little value to him. And there
was the perfume mixer, which was as close as he could come in naming it,
which allowed a person to create the specific scent desired. Just get the
mixture that one wanted and turn it on and the room took on that scent until
one should turn it off. He'd had some fun with it, remembering that bitter
winter day when, after long experimenting, he had achieved the scent of
apple blossoms, and had lived a day in spring while a blizzard howled
outside.
He reached out and picked up another piece-a beautiful thing that
always had intrigued him, but for which he had never found a use-if, indeed,
it had a use. It might be, he told himself, no more than a piece of art, a
pretty thing that was meant to look at only. But it had a certain feel (if
that were the word) which had led him to believe that it might have some
specific function.
It was a pyramid of spheres, succeeding smaller spheres set on larger
spheres. Some fourteen inches tall, it was a graceful piece, with each of
the spheres a different color-and not just a color painted on, but each
color so deep and true that one knew instinctively the color was intrinsic
to each sphere, that the entire sphere, from the center of it out to the
surface, was all of its particular color.
There was nothing to indicate that any gluelike medium had been used to
mount the spheres and hold them in their places. It looked for all the world
as if someone had simply piled the spheres, one atop the other, and they had
stayed that way.
Holding it in his hands, he tried to recall who had given it to him,
but he had no memory of it.
The whistle of the message machine still was calling and there was work
to do. He could not sit here, he told himself, mooning the afternoon away.
He put the pyramid of spheres back on the table top, and rising, went across
the room.
The message said:
NO. 406,302 TO STATION 18327. NATIVE OF VEGA XXI ARRIVING AT 16532.82.
DEPARTURE INDETERMINATE. NO LUGGAGE. CABINET ONLY, LOCAL CONDITIONS.
CONFIRM.
Enoch felt a glow of happiness, looking at the message. It would be
good to have a Hazer once again. It had been a month or more since one had
passed through the station.
He could remember back to that first day he had ever met a Hazer, when
the five of them had come. It must have been, he thought, back in 1914 or
maybe 1915. World War I, which everyone then was calling the Great War, was
under way, he knew.
The Hazer would be arriving at about the same time as Ulysses and the
three of them could spend a pleasant evening. It was not too often that two
good friends ever visited here at once.
He stood a bit aghast at thinking of the Hazer as a friend, for more
than likely the being itself was one he had never met. But that made little
difference, for a Hazer, any Hazer, would turn out to be a friend.
He got the cabinet in position beneath a materializer unit and
double-checked to be sure that everything was exactly as it should be, then
went back to the message machine and sent off the confirmation.
And all the time his memory kept on nagging at him. Had it been 1914,
or perhaps a little later?
At the catalogue cabinet, he pulled out a drawer and found Vega XXI and
the first date listed was July 12, 1915. He found the record book on the
shelf and pulled it out and brought it to the desk. He leafed through it
rapidly until he found the date.
July 12, 1915-Arrived this afternoon (3:20 P.M.) five beings from Vega
XXI, the first of their kind to pass through this station. They are biped
and humanoid, and one gains the impression that they are not made of
flesh-that flesh would be too gross for the kind of things they are-but, of
course, they are made of flesh the same as anyone. They glow, not with a
visible light, but there is about them an aura that goes with them wherever
they may be.
They were, I gathered, a sexual unit, the five of them, although I am
not so certain I understand, for it is most confusing. They were happy and
friendly and they carried with them an air of faint amusement, not at
anything in particular, but at the universe itself, as if they might have
enjoyed some sort of cosmic and very private joke that was known to no one
else. They were on a holiday and were en route to a festival (although that
may not be the precise word for it) on another planet, where other life
forms were gathering for a week of carnival. Just how they had been invited
or why they had been invited I was unable to determine. It must surely have
been a great honor for them to be going there, but so far as I could see
they did not seem to think so, but took it as their right. They were very
happy and without a care and extremely self-assured and poised, but thinking
back on it, I would suppose that they are always that way. I found myself
just a little envious at not being able to be as carefree and gay as they
were, and trying to imagine how fresh life and the universe must seem to
them, and a little resentful that they could be, so unthinkingly, as happy
as they were.
I had, according to instructions, hung hammocks so that they could
rest, but they did not use them. They brought with them hampers that were
filled with food and drink and sat down at my table and began to talk and
feast. They asked me to sit with them and they chose two dishes and a
bottle, which they assured me would be safe for me to eat and drink, the
rest of their fare being somewhat doubtful for a metabolism such as mine.
The food was delicious and of a kind I had never tasted-one dish being
rather like the rarest and most delicate of old cheeses, and the other of a
sweetness that was heavenly. The drink was somewhat like the finest of
brandies, yellow in color and no heavier than water.
They asked me about myself and about my planet and they were courteous
and seemed genuinely interested and they were quick of understanding in the
things I told them. They told me they were headed for a planet the name of
which I had not heard before, and they talked among themselves, gaily and
happily, but in such a way that I did not seem to be left out. From their
talk I gained the fact that some form of art was being presented at the
festival on this planet. The art form was not alone of music or painting,
but was composed of sound and color and emotion and form and other qualities
for which there seem to be no words in the language of the Earth, and which
I do not entirely recognize, only gaining the very faintest inkling of what
they were talking of in this particular regard. I gained the impression of a
three-dimensional symphony, although this is not entirely the right
expression, which had been composed, not by a single being, but by a team of
beings. They talked of the art form enthusiastically and I seemed to
understand that it would last for not only several hours, but for days, and
that it was an experience rather than a listening or seeing and that the
spectators or audience did not merely sit and listen, but could, if they
wished, and must, to get the most out of it, be participants. But I could
not understand how they participated and felt I should not ask. They talked
of the people they would meet and when they had met them last and gossiped
considerably about them, although in kindly fashion, leaving the impression
that they and many other people went from planet to planet for some happy
purpose. But whether there was any purpose other than enjoyment in their
going, I could not determine. I gathered that there might be.
They spoke of other festivals and not all of them were concerned with
the one art form, but with other more specialized aspects of the arts, of
which I could gain no adequate idea. They seemed to find a great and
exuberant happiness in the festivals and it seemed to me that some certain
significances aside from the art itself contributed to that happiness. I did
not join in this part of their conversation, for, frankly, there was no
opportunity. I would have liked to ask some questions, but I had no chance.
I suppose that if I had, my questions must have sounded stupid to them, but
given the chance, that would not have bothered me too much. And yet in spite
of this, they managed somehow to make me feel I was included in their
conversation. There was no obvious attempt to do this, and yet they made me
feel I was one with them and not simply a station keeper they would spend a
short time with. At times they spoke briefly in the language of their
planet, which is one of the most beautiful I have ever heard, but for the
most part they conversed in the vernacular used by a number of the humanoid
races, a sort of pidgin language made up for convenience, and I suspect that
this was done out of courtesy to me, and a great courtesy it was. I believe
that they were truly the most civilized people I have ever met.
I have said they glowed and I think by that I mean they glowed in
spirit. It seemed that they were accompanied, somehow, by a sparkling golden
haze that made happy everything it touched-almost as if they moved in some
special world that no one else had found. Sitting at the table with them, I
seemed to be included in this golden haze and I felt strange, quiet, deep
currents of happiness flowing in my veins. I wondered by what route they and
their world had arrived at this golden state and if my world could, in some
distant time, attain it.
But back of this happiness was a great vitality, the bubbling
effervescent spirit with an inner core of strength and a love of living that
seemed to fill every pore of them and every instant of their time.
They had only two hours' time and it passed so swiftly that I had to
finally warn them it was time to go. Before they left, they placed two
packages on the table and said they were for me and thanked me for my table
(what a strange way for them to put it) then they said good bye and stepped
into the cabinet (extra-large one) and I sent them on their way. Even after
they were gone, the golden haze seemed to linger in the room and it was
hours before all of it was gone. I wished that I might have gone with them
to that other planet and its festival.
One of the packages they left contained a dozen bottles of the
brandy-like liquor and the bottles themselves were each a piece of art, no
two of them alike, being formed of what I am convinced is diamond, but
whether fabricated diamond or carved from some great stones, I have no idea.
At any rate, I would estimate that each of them is priceless, and each
carved in a disturbing variety of symbolisms, each of which, however, has a
special beauty of its own. And in the other box was a-well, I suppose that,
for lack of other name, you might call it a music box. The box itself is
ivory, old yellow ivory that is as smooth as satin, and covered by a mass of
diagrammatic carving which must have some significance which I do not
understand. On the top of it is a circle set inside a graduated scale and
when I turned the circle to the first graduation there was music and through
all the room an interplay of many-colored light, as if the entire room was
filled with different kinds of color, and through it all a far-off
suggestion of that golden haze. And from the box came, too, perfumes that
filled the room, and feeling, emotion-whatever one may call it-but something
that took hold of one and made one sad or happy or whatever might go with
the music and the color and perfume. Out of that box came a world in which
one lived out the composition or whatever it might be-living it with all
that one had in him, all the emotion and belief and intellect of which one
is capable. And here, I am quite certain, was a recording of that art form
of which they had been talking. And not one composition alone, but 206 of
them, for that is the number of the graduation marks and for each mark there
is a separate composition. In the days to come I shall play them all and
make notes upon each of them and assign them names, perhaps, according to
their characteristics, and from them, perhaps, can gain some knowledge as
well as entertainment.
The twelve diamond bottles, empty long ago, stood in a sparkling row
upon the fireplace mantel. The music box, as one of his choicest
possessions, was stored inside one of the cabinets, where no harm could come
to it. And Enoch thought rather ruefully, in all these years, despite
regular use of it, he had not as yet played through the entire list of
compositions. There were so many of the early ones that begged for a
replaying that he was not a great deal more than halfway through the
graduated markings.
The Hazers had come back, the five of them, time and time again, for it
seemed that they found in this station, perhaps even in the man who operated
it, some quality that pleased them. They had helped him learn the Vegan
language and had brought him scrolls of Vegan literature and many other
things, and had been, without any doubt, the best friends among the aliens
(other than Ulysses) that he had ever had. Then one day they came no more
and he wondered why, asking after them when other Hazers showed up at the
station. But he had never learned what had happened to them.
He knew far more now about the Hazers and their art forms, their
traditions and their customs and their history, than he'd known that first
day he'd written of them, back in 1915. But he still was far from grasping
many of the concepts that were commonplace with them.
There had been many of them since that day in 1915 and there was one he
remembered in particular-the old, wise one, the philosopher, who had died on
the floor beside the sofa.
They had been sitting on the sofa, talking, and he even could remember
the subject of their talk. The old one had been telling of the perverse code
of ethics, at once irrational and comic, which had been built up by that
curious race of social vegetables he had encountered on one of his visits to
an off-track planet on the other side of the galactic rim. The old Hazer had
a drink or two beneath his belt and he was in splendid form, relating
incident after incident with enthusiastic gusto.
Supenly, in mid-sentence, he had stopped his talking, and had slumped
quietly forward. Enoch, startled, reached for him, but before he could lay a
hand upon him, the old alien had slid slowly to the floor.
The golden haze had faded from his body and slowly flickered out and
the body lay there, angular and bony and obscene, a terribly alien thing
there upon the floor, a thing that was at once pitiful and monstrous. More
monstrous, it seemed to Enoch, than anything in alien form he had ever seen
before.
In life it had been a wondrous creature, but now, in death, it was an
old bag of hideous bones with a scaly parchment stretched to hold the bones
together. It was the golden haze, Enoch told himself, gulping, in something
near to horror, that had made the Hazer seem so wondrous and so beautiful,
so vital, so alive and quick, so filled with dignity. The golden haze was
the life of them and when the haze was gone, they became mere repulsive
horrors that one gagged to look upon.
Could it be, he wondered, that the goldenness was the Hazers' life
force and that they wore it like a cloak, as a sort of over-all disguise?
Did they wear that life force on the outside of them while all other
creatures wore it on the inside?
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.
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.
Enoch turned from the body and walked stiffly across the room to the
message machine. He put in a call for a connection direct with Galactic
Central, then stood waiting, gripping the sides of the machine with both his
hands.
GO AHEAD, said Galactic Central.
Briefly, as objectively as he was able, Enoch reported what had
happened.
There was no hesitation and there were no questions from the other end.
Just the simple directions (as if this was something that happened all the
time) of how the situation should be handled. The Vegan must remain upon the
planet of its death, its body to be disposed of according to the local
customs obtaining on that planet. For that was the Vegan law, and, likewise,
a point of honor. A Vegan, when he fell, must stay where he fell, and that
place became, forever, a part of Vega XXI. There were such places, said
Galactic Central, all through the galaxy.
THE CUSTOM HERE [typed Enoch] IS TO INTER THE DEAD.
THEN INTER THE VEGAN.
WE READ A VERSE OR TWO FROM OUR HOLY BOOK.
READ ONE FOR THE VEGAN, THEN. YOU CAN DO ALL THIS?
YES. BUT WE USUALLY HAVE IT DONE BY A PRACTITIONER OF RELIGION. UNDER
THE PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES, HOWEVER, THAT MIGHT BE UNWISE.
AGREED [said Galactic Central] YOU CAN DO AS WELL YOURSELF?
I CAN.
IT IS BEST, THEN, THAT YOU DO.
WILL THERE BE RELATIVES OR FRIENDS ARRIVING FOR THE RITES?
NO.
YOU WILL NOTIFY THEM?
FORMALLY, OF COURSE. BUT THEY ALREADY KNOW.
HE ONLY DIED A MOMENT OR TWO AGO.
NEVERTHELESS, THEY KNOW.
WHAT ABOUT A DEATH CERTIFICATE?
NONE IS NEEDED. THEY KNOW OF WHAT HE DIED.
HIS LUGGAGE? THERE IS A TRUNK.
KEEP IT. IT IS YOURS. IT IS A TOKEN FOR THE SERVICES YOU PERFORM FOR
THE HONORED DEAD. THAT ALSO IS THE LAW.
BUT THERE MAY BE IMPORTANT MATTERS IN IT.
YOU WILL KEEP THE TRUNK. TO REFUSE WOULD INSULT THE MEMORY OF THE DEAD.
ANYTHING ELSE? [asked Enoch] THAT IS ALL?
THAT IS ALL. PROCEED AS IF THE VEGAN WERE ONE OF YOUR OWN.
Enoch cleared the machine and went back across the room. He stood above
the Hazer, getting up his nerve to bend and lift the body to place it on the
sofa. He shrank from touching it. It was so unclean and terrible, such a
travesty on the shining creature that had sat there talking with him.
Since he met the Hazers he had loved them and admired them, had looked
forward to each visit by them-by any one of them. And now he stood, a
shivering coward who could not touch one dead.
It was not the horror only, for in his years as keeper of the station,
he had seen much of pure visual horror as portrayed in alien bodies. 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 was something else, he knew, some other unknown factor quite apart
from horror, that he felt. And yet this thing, he reminded himself, was a
friend of his. And as a dead friend, it demanded honor from him, it demanded
love and care.
Blindly he drove himself to the task. He stooped and lifted it. It had
almost no weight at all, as ii in death it had lost a dimension of itself,
had somehow become a smaller thing and less significant. Could it be, he
wondered, that the golden haze might have a weight all of its own?
He laid the body on the sofa and straightened it as best he could. Then
he went outside and, lighting the lantern in the shed, went down to the
barn.
It had been years since he had been there, but nothing much had
changed. Protected by a tight roof from the weather, it had stayed snug and
dry. There were cobwebs hanging from the beams and dust was everywhere.
Straggling clumps of ancient hay, stored in the mow above, hung down through
the cracks in the boards that floored the mow. The place had a dry, sweet,
dusty smell about it, all the odors of animals and manure long gone.
Enoch hung the lantern on the peg behind the row of stanchions and
climbed the laper to the mow. Working in the dark, for he dared not bring
the lantern into this dust heap of dried-out hay, he found the pile of oaken
boards far beneath the eaves.
Here, he remembered, underneath these slanting eaves, had been a
pretended cave in which, as a boy, he had spent many happy rainy days when
he could not be outdoors. He had been Robinson Crusoe in his desert island
cave, or some now nameless outlaw hiding from a posse, or a man holed up
against the threat of scalp-hunting Indians. He had had a gun, a wooden gun
that he had sawed out of a board, working it down later with draw-shave and
knife and a piece of glass to scrape it smooth. It had been something he had
cherished through all his boyhood days-until that day, when he had been
twelve, that his father, returning home from a trip to town, had handed him
a rifle for his very own.
He explored the stack of boards in the dark, determining by the feel
the ones that he would need. These he carried to the laper and carefully
slid down to the floor below.
Climbing down the laper, he went up the short flight of stairs to the
granary, where the tools were stored. He opened the lid of the great tool
chest and found that it was filled with long deserted mice nests. Pulling
out handfulls of the straw and hay and grass that the rodents had used to
set up their one-time housekeeping, he uncovered the tools. The shine had
gone from them, their surface grayed by the soft patina that came from long
disuse, but there was no rust upon them and the cutting edges still retained
their sharpness.
Selecting the tools he needed, he went back to the lower part of the
barn and fell to work. A century ago, he thought, he had done as he was