Way Station

24

The sun streaming through the window woke him and he stayed where he was, not stirring for a moment, soaking in its warmth. There was a good, hard, feeling to the sunlight, a reassuring touch, and for a moment he held off the worry and the questioning. But he sensed its nearness and he closed his eyes again. Perhaps if he could sleep some more it might go away and lose itself somewhere and not be there when he awakened later.

But there was something wrong, something besides the worry and the questioning.

His neck and shoulders ached and there was a strange stiffness in his body and the pillow was too hard.

He opened his eyes again and pushed with his hands to sit erect and he was not in bed. He was sitting in a chair and his head, instead of resting on a pillow, had been laid upon the desk. He opened and shut his mouth to taste it, and it tasted just as bad as he knew it would.

He got slowly to his feet, straightening and stretching, trying to work out the kinks that had tied themselves into joints and muscles. As he stood there, the worry and the trouble and the dreadful need of answers seeped back into him, from wherever they'd been hiding. But he brushed them to one side, not an entirely successful brush, but enough to make them retreat a little and crouch there, waiting to close in again.

He went to the stove and looked for the coffeepot, then remembered that last night he'd set it on the floor beside the coffee table. He went to get it. The two cups still stood on the table, the dark brown dregs of coffee covering the bottoms of them. And in the mass of gadgets that Ulysses had pushed to one side to make room for the cups, the pyramid of spheres lay tilted on its side, but it still was sparkling and glinting, each successive sphere revolving in an opposite direction to its fellow spheres.

Enoch reached out and picked it up. His fingers carefully explored the base upon which the spheres were set, seeking something-some lever, some indentation, some trip, some button-by which it might be turned either on or off. But there was nothing he could find. He should have known, he told himself, that there would be nothing. For he had looked before. And yet yesterday Lucy had done something that had set it operating and it still was operating. It had operated for more than twelve hours now and no results had been obtained. Check that, he thought-no results that could be recognized.

He set it back on the table on its base and stacked the cups, one inside the other, and picked them up. He stooped to lift the coffeepot off the floor. But his eyes never left the pyramid of spheres.

It was maddening, he told himself. There was no way to turn it on and yet, somehow, Lucy had turned it on. And now there was no way to turn it off-although it probably did not matter if it were off or on.

He went back to the sink with the cups and coffeepot.

The station was quiet-a heavy, oppressive quietness; although, he told himself, the impression of oppressiveness probably was no more than his imagination.

He crossed the room to the message machine and the plate was blank. There had been no messages during the night. It was silly of him, he thought, to expect there would be, for if there were, the auditory signal would be functioning, would continue to sound off until he pushed the lever.

Was it possible, he wondered, that the station might already have been abandoned, that whatever traffic that happened to be moving was being detoured around it? That, however, was hardly possible, for the abandonment of Earth station would mean, as well that those beyond it must also be abandoned. There were no shortcuts in the network extending out into the spiral arm to make rerouting possible. It was not unusual for many hours, even for a day, to pass without any traffic. The traffic was irregular and had no pattern to it. There were times when scheduled arrivals bad to be held up until there were facilities to take care of them, and there were other times when there would be none at all, when the equipment would sit idle, as it was sitting now.

Jumpy, he thought. I am getting jumpy.

Before they closed the station, they would let him know. Courtesy, if nothing else, would demand that they do that.

He went back to the stove and started the coffeepot. In the refrigerator he found a package of mush made from a cereal grown on one of the Draconian jungle worlds. He took it out, then put it back again and took out the last two eggs of the dozen that Wins, the mailman, had brought out from town a week or so ago.

He glanced at his watch and saw that he had slept later than he thought. It was almost time for his daily walk.

He put the skillet on the stove and spooned in a chunk of butter. He waited for the butter to melt, then broke in the eggs.

Maybe, he thought, he'd not go on the walk today. Except for a time or two when a blizzard had been raging, it would be the first time he had ever missed his walk. But because he always did it, he told himself, contentiously, was no sufficient reason that he should always take it. He'd just skip the walk and later on go down and get the mail. He could use the time to catch up on all the things he'd failed to do yesterday. The papers still were piled upon his desk, waiting for his reading. He'd not written in his journal, and there was a lot to write, for he must record in detail exactly what had happened and there had been a good deal happening.

It had been a rule he'd set himself from the first day, that the station had begun its operation-that he never skimped the journal. He might be a little late at times in getting it all down, but the fact that he was late or that he was pressed for time had never made him put down one word less than he had felt might be required to tell all there was to tell.

He looked across the room at the long rows of record books that were crowded on the shelves and thought, with pride and satisfaction, of the completeness of that record. Almost a century of writing lay between the covers of those books and there was not a single day that he had ever skipped.

Here was his legacy, he thought; here was his bequest to the world, here would be his entrance fee back into the human race; here was all he'd seen and heard and thought for almost a hundred years of association with those alien peoples of the galaxy.

Looking at the rows of books, the questions that he had shoved aside came rushing in on him and this time there was no denying them. For a short space of time he had held them off, the little time he'd needed for his brain to clear, for his body to become alive again He did not fight them now He accepted them, for there was no dodging them.

He slid the eggs out of the skillet onto the waiting plate He got the coffeepot and sat down to his breakfast.

He glanced at his watch again.

There still was time to go on his daily walk.