Way Station

  “Maybe that’s not so bad,” said David. “We may not be ready to join the ones in space.”

  “Perhaps not,” Enoch admitted. “I rather doubt we are. But we could be some day. And that day would be shoved far into the future if we fight another war. You have to make some pretense of being civilized to join those other races.”

  “Maybe,” Mary said, “they might never know. About a war, I mean. They go no place but this station.”

  Enoch shook his head. “They would know. I think they’re watching us. And anyhow, they would read the papers.”

  “The papers you subscribe to?”

  “I save them for Ulysses. That pile over in the corner. He takes them back to Galactic Central every time he comes. He’s very interested in Earth, you know, from the years he spent here. And from Galactic Central, once he’d read them, I have a hunch they travel to the corners of the galaxy.”

  “Can you imagine,” David asked, “what the promotion departments of those newspapers might have to say about it if they only knew their depth of circulation.”

  Enoch grinned at the thought of it.

  “There’s that paper down in Georgia,” David said, “that covers Dixie like the dew. They’d have to think of something that goes with galaxy.”

  “Glove,” said Mary quickly. “Covers the galaxy like a glove. What do you think of that?”

  “Excellent,” said David.

  “Poor Enoch,” Mary said contritely. “Here we make our jokes and Enoch has his problems.”

  “Not mine to solve, of course,” Enoch told her. “I’m just worried by them. All I have to do is stay inside the station and there are no problems. Once you close the door here, the problems of the world are securely locked outside.”

  “But you can’t do that.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Enoch.

  “I think you may be right,” said David, “in thinking that these other races may be watching us. With an eye, perhaps, to some day inviting the human race to join them. Otherwise, why would they have wanted to set up a station here on Earth?”

  “They’re expanding the network all the time,” said Enoch. “They needed a station in this solar system to carry out their extension into this spiral arm.”

  “Yes, that’s true enough,” said David, “but it need not have been the Earth. They could have built a station out on Mars and used an alien for a keeper and still have served their purpose.”

  “I’ve often thought of that,” said Mary. “They wanted a station on the Earth and an Earthman as its keeper. There must be a reason for it.”

  “I had hoped there was,” Enoch told her, “but I’m afraid they came too soon. It’s too early for the human race. We aren’t grown up. We still are juveniles.”

  “It’s a shame,” said Mary. “We’d have so much to learn. They know so much more than we. Their concept of religion, for example.”

  “I don’t know,” said Enoch, “whether it’s actually a religion. It seems to have few of the trappings we associate with religion. And it is not based on faith. It doesn’t have to be. It is based on knowledge. These people know, you see.”

  “You mean the spiritual force.”

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

  “But don’t you think,” asked David, “that the human race may sense this? They don’t know it, but they sense it. And are reaching out to touch it. They haven’t got the knowledge, so they must do the best they can with faith. And that faith goes back a far way. Back, perhaps, deep into the prehistoric days. A crude faith, then, but a sort of faith, a grasping for faith.”

  “I suppose so,” Enoch said. “But it actually wasn’t the spiritual force I was thinking of. There are all the other things, the material things, the methods, the philosophies that the human race could use. Name almost any branch of science and there is something there for us, more than what we have.”

  But his mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force. There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English language which closely approximated it. “Talisman” was the closest, but Talisman was too crude a word. Although that had been the word that Ulysses had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it.

  There were so many things, so many concepts, he thought, out in the galaxy which could not be adequately expressed in any tongue on Earth. The Talisman was more than a talisman and the machine which had been given the name was more than a mere machine. Involved in it, as well as certain mechanical concepts, was a psychic concept, perhaps some sort of psychic energy that was unknown on Earth. That and a great deal more. He had read some of the literature on the spiritual force and on the Talisman and had realized, he remembered, in the reading of it, how far short he fell, how far short the human race must fall, in an understanding of it.

  The Talisman could be operated only by certain beings with certain types of minds and something else besides (could it be, he wondered, with certain kinds of souls?). “Sensitives” was the word he had used in his mental translation of the term for these kinds of people, but once again, he could not be sure if the word came close to fitting. The Talisman was placed in the custody of the most capable, or the most efficient, or the most devoted (whichever it might be) of the galactic sensitives, who carried it from star to star in a sort of eternal progression. And on each planet the people came to make personal and individual contact with the spiritual force 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 shuddered 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 head. “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 III 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 closet 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 nodded 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 head. “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.

  13

  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.