Way Station

26

Enoch met the mailman halfway down the road that led into the station. The old jalopy was traveling fast, bumping over the grassy ruts, swishing through the overhanging bushes that grew along the track.

Wins braked to a halt when he caught sight of Enoch and sat waiting for him.

"You got on a detour," Enoch said, coming up to him. "Or have you changed your route?"

"You weren't waiting at the box," said Wins, "and I had to see you."

"Some important mail?"

"Nope, it isn't mail. It's old Hank Fisher. He is down in Millville, setting up the drinks in Epie's tavern and shooting off his face."

"It's not like Hank to be buying drinks."

"He's telling everyone that you tried to kidnap Lucy."

"I didn't kidnap her," Enoch said. "Hank had took a bull whip to her and I hid her out until he got cooled down."

"You shouldn't have done that, Enoch."

"Maybe. But Hank was set on giving her a beating. He already had hit her a lick or two."

"Hank's out to make you trouble."

"He told me that he would."

"He says you kidnapped her, then got scared and brought her back. He says you had her bid out in the house and when he tried to break in and get her, he couldn't do it. He says you have a funny sort of house. He says he broke an ax blade on a window pane."

"Nothing funny about it," Enoch said. "Hank just imagines things."

"It's all right so far," said the mailman. "None of them, in broad daylight and their right senses, will do anything about it. But come night they'll be liquored up and won't have good sense. There are some of them might be coming up to see you."

"I suppose he's telling them I've got the devil in me."

"That and more," said Wins. "I listened for a while before I started out."

He reached into the mail pouch and found the bundle of papers and handed them to Enoch.

"Enoch, there's something that you have to know. Something you may not realize. It would be easy to get a lot of people stirred up against you-the way you live and all. You are strange. No, I don't mean there's anything wrong with you-I know you and I know there isn't-but it would be easy for people who didn't know you to get the wrong ideas. They've let you alone so far because you've given them no reason to do anything about you. But if they get stirred up by all that Hank is saying…"

He did not finish what he was saying. He left it hanging in midair.

"You're talking about a posse," Enoch said.

Wins nodded, saying nothing.

"Thanks," said Enoch. "I appreciate your warning me."

"Is it true," asked the mailman, "that no one can get inside your house9"

"I guess it is," admitted Enoch. "They can't break into it and they can't burn it down. They can't do anything about it."

"Then, if I were you, I'd stay close tonight. I'd stay inside. I'd not go venturing out."

"Maybe I will. It sounds like a good idea."

"Well," said Wins, "I guess that about covers it. I thought you'd ought to know. Guess I'll have to back out to the road. No chance of turning around."

"Drive up to the house. There's room there."

"It's not far back to the road," said Wins. "I can make it easy."

The car started backing slowly.

Enoch stood watching.

He lifted a hand in solemn salute as the car began rounding a bend that would take it out of sight. Wins waved back and then the car was swallowed by the scrub that grew close against both sides of the road.

Slowly Enoch turned around and plodded back toward the station.

A mob, he thought-good God, a mob!

A mob howling about the station, hammering at the doors and windows, peppering it with bullets, would wipe out the last faint chance-if there still remained a chance-of Galactic Central standing off the move to close the station. Such a demonstration would add one more powerful argument to the demand that the expansion into the spiral arm should be abandoned.

Why was it, he wondered, that everything should happen all at once? For years nothing at all had happened and now everything was happening within a few hours' time. Everything, it seemed, was working out against him.

If the mob showed up, not only would it mean that the fate of the station would be sealed, but it might mean, as well, that he would have no choice but to accept the offer to become the keeper of another station. It might make it impossible for him to remain on Earth, even if he wished. And he realized, with a start, that it might just possibly mean that the offer of another station for him might be withdrawn. For with the appearance of a mob howling for his blood, he, himself, would become involved in the charge of barbarism now leveled against the human race in general.

Perhaps, he told himself, he should go down to the spring and see Lewis once again. Perhaps some measures could be taken to hold off the mob. But if he did, he knew, there'd be an explanation due and he might have to tell too much. And there might not be a mob. No one would place too much credence in what Hank Fisher said and the whole thing might peter out without any action being taken.

He'd stay inside the station and hope for the best. Perhaps there'd be no traveler in the station at the time the mob arrived-if it did arrive-and the incident would pass with no galactic notice. If he were lucky it might work out that way. And by the law of averages, he was owed some luck. Certainly he'd had none in the last few days.

He came to the broken gate that led into the yard and stopped to look up at the house, trying for some reason he could not understand, to see it as the house he had known in boyhood.

It stood the same as it had always stood, unchanged, except that in the olden days there had been ruffled curtains at each window. The yard around it had changed with the slow growth of the years, with the clump of lilacs thicker and more rank and tangled with each passing spring, with the elms that his father had planted grown from six-foot whips into mighty trees, with the yellow rose bush at the kitchen corner gone, victim of a long-forgotten winter, with the flower beds vanished and the small herb garden, here beside the gate, overgrown and smothered out by grass.

The old stone fence that had stood on each side of the gate was now little more than a humpbacked mound. The heaving of a hundred frosts, the creep of vines and grasses, the long years of neglect, had done their work and in another hundred years, he thought, it would be level, with no trace of it left. Down in the field, along the slope where erosion had been at work, there were long stretches where it had entirely disappeared.

All of this had happened and until this moment he had scarcely noticed it. But now he noticed it and wondered why he did. Was it because he now might be returning to the Earth again-he who had never left its soil and sun and air, who had never left it physically, but who had, for a longer time than most men had allotted to them, walked not one, but many planets, far among the stars?

He stood there, in the late summer sun, and shivered in the cold wind that seemed to be blowing out of some unknown dimension of unreality, wondering for the first time (for the first time he ever had been forced to wonder at it) what kind of man he was. A haunted man who must spend his days neither completely alien nor completely human, with divided loyalties, with old ghosts to tramp the years and miles with him no matter which life he might choose, the Earth life or the stars? A cultural half-breed, understanding neither Earth nor stars, owing a debt to each, but paying neither one? A homeless, footless, wandering creature who could recognize neither right nor wrong from having seen so many different (and logical) versions of the right and wrong?

He had climbed the hill above the spring, filled with the rosy inner glow of a regained humanity, a member of the human race again, linked in a boy-like conspiracy with a human team. But could he qualify as human-and if he qualified as human, or tried to qualify, then what about the implied hundred years' allegiance to Galactic Central? Did he, he wondered, even want to qualify as human?

He moved slowly through the gate, and the questions still kept hammering in his brain, that great, ceaseless flow of questions to which there were no answers. Although that was wrong, he thought. Not no answers, but too many answers.

Perhaps Mary and David and the rest of them would come visiting tonight and they could talk it over-then he suddenly remembered.

They would not be coming. Not Mary, not David, nor any of the others. They had come for years to see him, but they would come no longer, for the magic had been dimmed and the illusion shattered and he was alone.

As he had always been alone, he told himself, with a bitter taste inside his brain. It all had been illusion; it never had been real. For years he'd fooled himself-most eagerly and willingly he had fooled himself into peopling the little corner by the fireplace with these creatures of his imagination. Aided by an alien technique, driven by his loneliness for the sight and sound of humankind, he had brought them into a being that defied every sense except the solid sense of touch.

And defied as well every sense of decency.

Half-creatures, he thought. Poor pitiful half-creatures, neither of the shadow or the world.

Too human for the shadows, too shadowy for Earth.

Mary, if I had only known — if I had known, I never would have started.

I'd have stayed with loneliness.

And he could not mend it now. There was nothing that would help.

What is the matter with me? he asked himself.

What has happened to me?

What is going on?

He couldn't even think in a straight line any more. He'd told himself that he'd stay inside the station to escape the mob that might be showing up-and he couldn't stay inside the station, for Lewis, sometime shortly after dark, would be bringing back the Hazer's body.

And if the mob showed up at the same time Lewis should appear, bringing back the body, there'd be unsheeted hell to pay.

Stricken by the thought, he stood undecided.

If he alerted Lewis to the danger, then he might not bring the body.

And he had to bring the body. Before the night was over the Hazer must be secure within the grave.

He decided that he would have to take a chance. The mob might not show up. Even if it did, there had to be a way that he could handle it.

He'd think of something, he told himself.

He'd have to think of something.