indicate that anyone was there.
10
Inside the station, the message machine was whistling plaintively.
Enoch hung up his gun, dropped the mail and statuette upon his desk and
strode across the room to the whistling machine. He pushed the button and
punched the lever and the whistling stopped.
Upon the message plate he read:
NO. 406,302 TO STATION 18327. WILL ARRiVE EARLY EVENING YOUR TIME. HAVE
THE COFFEE HOT. ULYSSES.
Enoch grinned. Ulysses and his coffee! He was the only one of the
aliens who had ever liked any of Earth’s foods or drinks. There had been
others who had tried them, but not more than once or twice.
Funny about Ulysses, he thought. They had liked each other from the
very first, from that afternoon of the thunderstorm when they had been
sitting on the steps and the mask of human form had peeled off the alien’s
face.
It had been a grisly face, graceless and repulsive. The face, Enoch had
thought, of a cruel clown. Wondering, even as he thought it, what had put
that particular phrase into his head, for clowns were never cruel. But here
was one that could be-the colored patchwork of the face, the hard, tight set
of jaw, the thin slash of the mouth.
Then he saw the eyes and they canceled all the rest. They were large
and had a softness and the light of understanding in them, and they reached
out to him, as another being might hold out its hands in friendship.
The rain had come hissing up the land to thrum across the machine-shed
roof, and then it was upon them, slanting sheets of rain that hammered
angrily at the dust which lay across the yard, while surprised, bedraggled
chickens ran frantically for cover.
Enoch sprang to his feet and grasped the other’s arm, pulling him to
the shelter of the porch.
They stood facing one another, and Ulysses had reached up and pulled
the split and loosened mask away, revealing a bullet head without a hair
upon it- and the painted face. A face like a wild and rampaging Indian,
painted for the warpath, except that here and there were touches of the
clown, as if the entire painting job had been meant to point up the
inconsistent grotesqueries of war. But even as he stared, Enoch knew it was
not paint, but the natural coloration of this thing which had come from
somewhere among the stars.
Whatever other doubt there was, or whatever wonder, Enoch had no doubt
at all that this strange being was not of the Earth. For it was not human.
It might be in human form, with a pair of arms and legs, with a head and
face. But there was about it an essence of inhumanity, almost a negation of
humanity.
In olden days, perhaps, he thought, it might have been a demon, but the
days were past (although, in some areas of the country, not entirely past)
when one believed in demons or in ghosts or in any of the others of that
ghastly tribe which, in man’s imagination, once had walked the Earth.
From the stars, he’d said. And perhaps he was. Although it made no
sense. It was nothing one ever had imagined even in the purest fantasy.
There was nothing to grab hold of, nothing to hang on to. There was no
yardstick for it and there were no rules. And it left a sort of blank spot
in one’s thinking that might fill in, come time, but now was no more than a
tunnel of great wonder that went on and on forever.
“Take your time,” the alien said. “I know it is not easy. And I do not
know of a thing that I can do to make it easier. There is, after all, no way
for me to prove I am from the stars.”
“But you talk so well.”
“In your tongue, you mean. It was not too difficult. If you only knew
of all the languages in the galaxy, you would realize how little difficult.
Your language is not hard. It is a basic one and there are many concepts
with which it need not deal.”
And, Enoch conceded, that could be true enough. “If you wish,” the
alien said, “I can walk off somewhere for a day or two. Give you time to
think. Then I could come back. You’d have thought it out by then.”
Enoch smiled, woodenly, and the smile had an unnatural feel upon his
face.
“That would give me time,” he said, “to spread alarm throughout the
countryside. There might be an ambush waiting for you.”
The alien shook its head. “I am sure you wouldn’t do it. I would take
the chance. If you want me to …”
“No,” said Enoch, so calmly he surprised himself. “No, when you have a
thing to face, you face it. I learned that in the war.”
“You’ll do,” the alien said. “You will do all right. I did not misjudge
you and it makes me proud.”
“Misjudge me?”
“You do not think I just came walking in here cold? I know about you,
Enoch. Almost as much, perhaps, as you know about yourself. Probably even
more.”
“You know my name?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, that is fine,” said Enoch. “And what about your own?”
“I am seized with great embarrassment,” the alien told him. “For I have
no name as such. Identification, surely, that fits the purpose of my race,
but nothing that the tongue can form.”
Supenly, for no reason, Enoch remembered that slouchy figure perching
on the top rail of a fence, with a stick in one hand and a jackknife in the
other, whittling placidly while the cannon balls whistled overhead and less
than half a mile away the muskets snarled and crackled in the billowing
powder smoke that rose above the line.
“Then you need a name to call you by,” he said, “and it shall be
Ulysses. I need to call you something,”
“It is agreeable,” said that strange one. “But might one ask why the
name Ulysses?”
“Because it is the name,” said Enoch, “of a great man of my race.”
It was a crazy thing, of course. For there was no resemblance between
the two of them-that slouchy Union general whittling as he perched upon the
fence and this other who stood upon the porch.
“I am glad you chose it,” said this Ulysses, standing on the porch. “To
my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I
shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, as friends of the
first names, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years.”
It was beginning to come straight now and the thought was staggering.
Perhaps it was as well, Enoch told himself, that it had waited for a while,
that he had been so dazed it had not come on him all at once.
“Perhaps,” said Enoch, fighting back the realization that was crowding
in on him, crowding in too fast, “I could offer you some victuals. I could
cook up some coffee…”
“Coffee,” said Ulysses, smacking his thin lips. “Do you have the
coffee?”
“I’ll make a big pot of it. I’ll break in an egg so it will settle
clear …”
“Delectable,” Ulysses said. “Of all the drinks that I have drank on all
the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.”
They went into-the kitchen and Enoch stirred up the coals in the
kitchen range and then put in new wood. He took the coffeepot over to the
sink and ladled in some water from the water pail and put it on to boil. He
went into the pantry to get some eggs and down into the cellar to bring up
the ham.
Ulysses sat stiffly in a kitchen chair and watched him as he worked.
“You eat ham and eggs?” asked Enoch.
“I eat anything,” Ulysses said. “My race is most adaptable. That is the
reason I was sent to this planet as a-what do you call it?-a looker-out,
perhaps.”
“A scout,” suggested Enoch.
“That is it, a scout.”
He was an easy thing to talk with, Enoch told himself-almost like
another person, although, God knows, he looked little like a person. He
looked, instead, like some outrageous caricature of a human being.
“You have lived here, in this house,” Ulysses said, “for a long, long
time. You feel affection for it.”
“It has been my home,” said Enoch, “since the day that I was born. I
was gone from it for almost four years, but it was always home.”
“I’ll be glad,” Ulysses told him, “to be getting home again myself.
I’ve been away too long. On a mission such as this one, it always is too
long.”
Enoch put down the knife he had been using to cut a slice of ham and