art of the ration regularly provided him by Galactic
Central. Made of a cereal unlike any known on Earth, it had a distinctly
nutty flavor with the faintest hint of some alien spice.
He put the food on what he called the kitchen table, although there was
no kitchen. Then he put the coffee maker on the stove and went back to his
desk.
The letter still lay there, spread out, and he folded it together and
put it in a drawer.
He stripped the brown folders off the papers and put them in a pile.
From the pile he selected the New York Times and moved to his favorite chair
to read.
NEW PEACE CONFERENCE AGREED UPON,
said the lead-off headline.
The crisis had been boiling for a month or more, the newest of a long
series of crises which had kept the world on edge for years. And the worst
of it, Enoch told himself, was that the most of them were manufactured
crises, with one side or the other pushing for advantage in the relentless
chess game of power politics which had been under way since the end of World
War II.
The stories in the Times bearing on the conference had a rather
desperate, almost fatalistic, ring, as if the writers of the stories, and
perhaps the diplomats and all the rest involved, knew the conference would
accomplish nothing-if, in fact, it did not serve to make the crisis deeper.
Observers in this capital [wrote one of the Times's Washington bureau
staff] are not convinced the conference will serve, in this instance, as
similar conferences sometimes have served in the past, to either delay a
showdown on the issues or to advance the prospects for a settlement. There
is scarcely concealed concern in many quarters that the conference will,
instead, fan the flames of controversy higher without, by way of
compensation, opening any avenues by which a compromise might seem possible.
A conference is popularly supposed to provide a time and place for the sober
weighing of the facts and points of arguments, but there are few who see in
the calling of this conference any indications that this may be the case.
The coffee maker was going full blast now and Enoch threw the paper
down and strode to the stove to snatch it off. From the cupboard he got a
cup and went to the table with it.
But before he began to eat, he went back to the desk and, opening a
drawer, got out his chart and spread it on the table. Once again he wondered
just how valid it might be, although in certain parts of it, at times, it
seemed to make a certain sort of sense.
He had based it on the Mizar theory of statistics and had been forced,
because of the nature of his subject, to shift some of the factors, to
substitute some values. He wondered now, for the thousandth time, if he had
made an error somewhere. Had his shifting and substitution destroyed the
validity of the system? And if so, how could he correct the errors to
restore validity?
Here the factors were, he thought: the birth rate and the total
population of the Earth, the death rate, the values of currencies, the
spread of living costs, attendance of places of worship, medical advances,
technological developments, industrial indices, the labor market, world
trade trends-and many others, including some that at first glance might not
seem too relevant: the auction price of art objects, vacation preferences
and movements, the speed of transportation, the incidence of insanity.
The statistical method developed by the mathematicians of Mizar, he
knew, would work anywhere, on anything, if applied correctly. But he had
been forced to twist it in translating an alien planet's situation to fit
the situation here on Earth-and in consequence of that twisting, did it
still apply?
He shupered as he looked at it. For if he'd made no mistake, if he'd
handled everything correctly, if his translations had done no violence to
the concept, then the Earth was headed straight for another major war, for a
holocaust of nuclear destruction.
He let loose of the corners of the chart and it rolled itself back into
a cylinder.
He reached for one of the fruits the Sirrah being had brought him and
bit into it. He rolled it on his tongue, savoring the delicacy of the taste.
It was, he decided, as good as that strange, birdlike being had guaranteed
it would be.
There had been a time, he remembered, when he had held some hope that
the chart based on the Mizar theory might show, if not a way to end all war,
at least a way to keep the peace. But the chart had never given any hint of
the road to peace. Inexorably, relentlessly, it had led the way to war.
How many other wars, he wondered, could the people of the Earth endure?
No man could say, of course, but it might be just one more. For the
weapons that would be used in the coming conflict had not as yet been
measured and there was no man who could come close to actually estimating
the results these weapons would produce.
War had been bad enough when men faced one another with their weapons
in their hands, but in any present war great payloads of destruction would
go hurtling through the skies to engulf whole cities-aimed not at military
concentrations, but at total populations.
He reached out his hand for the chart again, then pulled it back. There
was no further need of looking at it. He knew it all by heart. There was no
hope in it. He might study it and puzzle over it until the crack of doom and
it would not change a whit. There was no hope at all. The world was
thundering once again, in a blind red haze of fury and of helplessness, down
the road to war.
He went on with his eating and the fruit was even better than it had
been at first bite. "Next time," the being had said, "I will bring you
more." But it might be a long time before he came again, and he might never
come. There were many of them who passed through only once, although there
were a few who showed up every week or so-old, regular travelers who had
become close friends.
And there had been, he recalled, that little group of Hazers who, years
ago, had made arrangements for extra long stopovers at the station so they
could sit around this very table and talk the hours away, arriving laden
with hampers and with baskets of things to eat and drink, as if it were a
picnic.
But finally they had stopped their coming and it had been years since
he'd seen any one of them. And he regretted it, for they'd been the best of
companions.
He drank an extra cup of coffee, sitting idly in the chair, thinking
about those good old days when the band of Hazers came.
His ears caught the faint rustling and he glanced quickly up to see her
sitting on the sofa, dressed in the demure hoop skirts of the 1860s.
"Mary!" he said, surprised, rising to his feet.
She was smiling at him in her very special way and she was beautiful,
he thought, as no other woman ever had been beautiful.
"Mary," he said, "it's so nice to have you here."
And now, leaning on the mantelpiece, dressed in Union blue, with his
belted saber and his full black mustache, was another of his friends.
"Hello, Enoch," David Ransome said. "I hope we don't intrude."
"Never," Enoch told him. "How can two friends intrude?"
He stood beside the table and the past was with him, the good and
restful past, the rose-scented and unhaunted past that had never left him.
Somewhere in the distance was the sound of fife and drum and the jangle
of the battle harness as the boys marched off to war, with the colonel
glorious in his full-dress uniform upon the great black stallion, and the
regimental flags snapping in the stiff June breeze.
He walked across the room and over to the sofa. He made a little bow to
Mary.
"With your permission, ma'am," he said.
"Please do," she said. "If you should happen to be busy ..."
"Not at all," he said. "I was hoping you would come."
He sat down on the sofa, not too close to her, and he saw her hands
were folded, very primly, in her lap. He wanted to reach out and take her
hands in his and hold them for a moment, but he knew he couldn't.
For she wasn't really there.
"It's been almost a week," said Mary, "since I've seen you. How is your
work going, Enoch?"
He shook his head. "I still have all the problems. The watchers still
are out there. And the chart says war."
David left the mantel and came across the room. He sat down in a chair
and arranged his saber.
"War, the way they fight it these days," he declared, "would be a sorry
business. Not the way we fought it, Enoch."
"No," said Enoch, "not the way we fought it. And while a war would be
bad enough itself, there is something worse. If Earth fights another war,
our people will be barred, if not forever, at least for many centuries, from
the cofraternity of space."
"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 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.
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.
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