tank when the creature’s pattern was sent out again, riding on the impulse
waves.
A long trail of dead, he thought, left across the stars, each to be
destroyed by a wash of acid and flushed into deep-lying tanks, but with the
creature itself going on and on until it reached its final destination to
carry out the purpose of its journey.
And those purposes, Enoch wondered-the many purposes of the many
creatures who passed through the stations scattered wide in space? There had
been certain instances when, chatting with the travelers, they had told
their purpose, but with the most of them he never learned the purpose-nor
had he any right to learn it. For he was the keeper only.
Mine host, he thought, although not every time, for there were many
creatures that had no use for hosts. But the man, at any rate, who watched
over the operation of the station and who kept it going, who made ready for
the travelers and who sent them on their way again when that time should
come. And who performed the little tasks and courtesies of which they might
stand in need.
He looked at the block of wood and thought how pleased Winslowe would
be with it. It was very seldom that one came upon a wood that was as black
or finegrained as this.
What would Winslowe think, he wondered, if he could only know that the
statuettes he carved were made of woods that had grown on unknown planets
many light years distant. Winslowe, he knew, must have wondered many times
where the wood came from and how his friend could have gotten it. But he had
never asked. And he knew as well, of course, that there was something very
strange about this man who came out to the mailbox every day to meet him.
But he had never asked that, either.
And that was friendship, Enoch told himself.
This wood, too, that he held in his hands, was another evidence of
friendship-the friendship of the stars for every humble keeper of a remote
and backwoods station stuck out in one of the spiral arms, far from the
center of the galaxy.
The word had spread, apparently, through the years and throughout
space, that this certain keeper was a collector of exotic woods-and so the
woods came in. Not only from those races he thought of as his friends, but
from total strangers, like the blob that now rested in the tank.
He put the wood down on a table top and went to the refrigerator. From
it he took a slab of aged cheese that Winslowe had bought for him several
days ago, and a small package of fruit that a traveler from Sirrah X had
brought the day before.
“Analyzed,” it had told him, “and you can eat it without hurt. It will
play no trouble with your metabolism. You’ve had it before, perhaps? So you
haven’t. I am sorry. It is most delicious. Next time, you like it, I shall
bring you more.”
From the cupboard beside the refrigerator he took out a small, flat
loaf of bread, part 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