publications can boast such long time interest on the part of any man.
May I assure, you, sir, of my utmost respect.
Sincerely yours.
And then the signature.
Enoch shoved the letter from him.
And there it was again, he told himself. Here was another watcher,
although discreet and most polite and unlikely to cause trouble.
But someone else who had taken notice, who had felt a twinge of wonder
at the same man subscribing to a magazine for more than eighty years.
As the years went on, there would be more and more. It was not only the
watchers encamped outside the station with whom he must concern himself, but
those potential others. A man could be as self-effacing as he well could
manage and still he could not hide. Soon or late the world would catch up
with him and would come crowding around his door, agog to know why he might
be hiding.
It was useless, he knew, to hope for much further time. The world was
closing in.
Why can’t they leave me alone? he thought. If he only could explain how
the situation stood, they might leave him alone. But he couldn’t explain to
them. And even if he could, there would be some of them who’d still come
crowding in.
Across the room the materializer beeped for attention and Enoch swung
around.
The Thuban had arrived. He was in the tank, a shadowy globular blob of
substance, and above him, riding sluggishly in the solution, was a cube of
something.
Luggage, Enoch wondered. But the message had said there would be no
luggage.
Even as he hurried across the room, the clicking came to him-the Thuban
talking to him.
“Presentation to you,” said the clicking. “Deceased vegetation.”
Enoch peered at the cube floating in the liquid.
“Take him,” clicked the Thuban. “Bring him for you.”
Fumblingly, Enoch clicked out his answer, using tapping fingers against
the glass side of the tank: “I thank you, gracious one.” Wondering as he did
it, if he were using the proper form of apress to this blob of matter. A
man, he told himself, could get terribly tangled up on that particular point
of etiquette. There were some of these beings that one apressed in flowery
language (and even in those cases, the floweriness would vary) and others
that one talked with in the simplest, bluntest terms.
He reached into the tank and lifted out the cube and be saw that it was
a block of heavy wood, black as ebony and so close-grained it looked very
much like stone. He chuckled inwardly, thinking how, in listening to
Winslowe, he had grown to be an expert in the judging of artistic wood.
He put the wood upon the floor and turned back to the tank.
“Would you mind,” clicked the Thuban, “revealing what you do with him?
To us, very useless stuff.”
Enoch hesitated, searching desperately through his memory. What, he
wondered, was the code for “carve?”
“Well?” the Thuban asked.
“You must pardon me, gracious one. I do not use this language often. I
am not proficient.”
“Drop, please, the ‘gracious one.’ I am a common being.”
“Shape it,” Enoch tapped. “Into another form. Are you a visual being?
Then I show you one.”
“Not visual,” said the Thuban. “Many other things, not visual.”
It had been a globe when it had arrived and now it was beginning to
flatten out.
“You,” the Thuban clicked, “are a biped being.”
“That is what I am.”
“Your planet. It is a solid planet?”
Solid? Enoch wondered. Oh, yes, solid as opposed to liquid.
“One-quarter solid,” he tapped. “The rest of it is liquid.”
“Mine almost all liquid. Only little solid. Very restful world.”
“One thing I want to ask you,” Enoch tapped.
“Ask,” the creature said.
“You are a mathematician. All you folks, I mean.”
“Yes,” the creature said. “Excellent recreation. Occupies the mind.”
“You mean you do not use it?”
“Oh, yes, once use it. But no need for use any more. Got all we need to
use, very long ago. Recreation now.”
“I have heard of your system of numerical notation.”
“Very different,” clicked the Thuban. “Very better concept.”
“You can tell me of it?”
“You know notation system used by people of Polaris VII?”
“No, I don’t,” tapped Enoch.
“Then no use to tell you of our own. Must know Polaris first.”
So that was that, thought Enoch. He might have known. There was so much
knowledge in the galaxy and he knew so little of it, understood so little of
the little that he knew.
There were men on Earth who could make sense of it. Men who would give
anything short of their very lives to know the little that he knew, and
could put it all to use.
Out among the stars lay a massive body of knowledge, some of it an
extension of what mankind knew, some of it concerning matters which Man had
not yet suspected, and used in ways and for purposes that Man had not as yet
imagined. And never might imagine, if left on his own.
Another hundred years, thought Enoch. How much would he learn in
another hundred years? In another thousand?
“I rest now,” said the Thuban. “Nice to talk with you.”
12
Enoch turned from the tank and picked up the block of wood. A little
puple of liquid had drained off it and lay glistening on the floor.
He carried the block across the room to one of the windows and examined
it. It was heavy and black and close-grained and at one corner of it a bit
of bark remained. It had been sawed. Someone had cut it into a size that
would fit the tank where the Thuban rested.
He recalled an article he had read in one of the daily papers just a
day or two before in which a scientist had contended that no great
intelligence ever could develop on a liquid world.
But that scientist was wrong, for the Thuban race had so developed and
there were other liquid worlds which were members of the galactic
cofraternity. There were a lot of things, he told himself, that Man would
have to unlearn, as well as things to learn, if he ever should become aware
of the galactic culture.
The limitation of the speed of light, for one thing.
For if nothing moved faster than the speed of light, then the galactic
transport system would be impossible.
But one should not censure Man, he reminded himself, for setting the
speed of light as a basic limitation. Observations were all that Man-or
anyone, for that matter-could use as data upon which to base his premises.
And since human science had so far found nothing which consistently moved
faster than the speed of light, then the assumption must be valid that
nothing could or did consistently move faster. But valid as an assumption
only and no more than that.
For the impulse patterns which carried creatures star to star were
almost instantaneous, no matter what the distance.
He stood and thought about it and it still was hard, he admitted to
himself, for a person to believe.
Moments ago the creature in the tank had rested in another tank in
another station and the materializer had built up a pattern of it-not only
of its body, but of its very vital force, the thing that gave it life. Then
the impulse pattern had moved across the gulfs of space almost
instantaneously to the receiver of this station, where the pattern had been
used to duplicate the body and the mind and memory and the life of that
creature now lying dead many light years distant. And in the tank the new
body and the new mind and memory and life had taken almost instant form-an
entirely new being, but exactly like the old one, so that the identity
continued and the consciousness (the very thought no more than momentarily
interrupted), so that to all intent and purpose the being was the same.
There were limitations to the impulse patterns, but this had nothing to
do with speed, for the impulses could cross the entire galaxy with but
little lag in time. But under certain conditions the patterns tended to
break down and this was why there must be many stations-many thousands of
them. Clouds of dust or gas or areas of high ionization seemed to disrupt
the patterns and in those sectors of the galaxy where these conditions were
encountered, the distance jumps between the stations were considerably cut
down to keep the pattern true. There were areas that had to be detoured
because of high concentrations of the distorting gas and dust.
Enoch wondered how many dead bodies of the creature that now rested in
the tank had been left behind at other stations in the course of the journey
it was making-as this body in a few hours’ time would lie dead within this