thundering once again, in a blind red haze of fury and of helplessness, down
the road to war.
He went on with his eating and the fruit was even better than it had
been at first bite. “Next time,” the being had said, “I will bring you
more.” But it might be a long time before he came again, and he might never
come. There were many of them who passed through only once, although there
were a few who showed up every week or so-old, regular travelers who had
become close friends.
And there had been, he recalled, that little group of Hazers who, years
ago, had made arrangements for extra long stopovers at the station so they
could sit around this very table and talk the hours away, arriving laden
with hampers and with baskets of things to eat and drink, as if it were a
picnic.
But finally they had stopped their coming and it had been years since
he’d seen any one of them. And he regretted it, for they’d been the best of
companions.
He drank an extra cup of coffee, sitting idly in the chair, thinking
about those good old days when the band of Hazers came.
His ears caught the faint rustling and he glanced quickly up to see her
sitting on the sofa, dressed in the demure hoop skirts of the 1860s.
“Mary!” he said, surprised, rising to his feet.
She was smiling at him in her very special way and she was beautiful,
he thought, as no other woman ever had been beautiful.
“Mary,” he said, “it’s so nice to have you here.”
And now, leaning on the mantelpiece, dressed in Union blue, with his
belted saber and his full black mustache, was another of his friends.
“Hello, Enoch,” David Ransome said. “I hope we don’t intrude.”
“Never,” Enoch told him. “How can two friends intrude?”
He stood beside the table and the past was with him, the good and
restful past, the rose-scented and unhaunted past that had never left him.
Somewhere in the distance was the sound of fife and drum and the jangle
of the battle harness as the boys marched off to war, with the colonel
glorious in his full-dress uniform upon the great black stallion, and the
regimental flags snapping in the stiff June breeze.
He walked across the room and over to the sofa. He made a little bow to
Mary.
“With your permission, ma’am,” he said.
“Please do,” she said. “If you should happen to be busy …”
“Not at all,” he said. “I was hoping you would come.”
He sat down on the sofa, not too close to her, and he saw her hands
were folded, very primly, in her lap. He wanted to reach out and take her
hands in his and hold them for a moment, but he knew he couldn’t.
For she wasn’t really there.
“It’s been almost a week,” said Mary, “since I’ve seen you. How is your
work going, Enoch?”
He shook his head. “I still have all the problems. The watchers still
are out there. And the chart says war.”
David left the mantel and came across the room. He sat down in a chair
and arranged his saber.
“War, the way they fight it these days,” he declared, “would be a sorry
business. Not the way we fought it, Enoch.”
“No,” said Enoch, “not the way we fought it. And while a war would be
bad enough itself, there is something worse. If Earth fights another war,
our people will be barred, if not forever, at least for many centuries, from
the cofraternity of space.”
“Maybe that’s not so bad,” said David. “We may not be ready to join the
ones in space.”
“Perhaps not,” Enoch admitted. “I rather doubt we are. But we could be
some day. And that day would be shoved far into the future if we fight
another war. You have to make some pretense of being civilized to join those
other races.”
“Maybe,” Mary said, “they might never know. About a war, I mean. They
go no place but this station.”
Enoch shook his head. “They would know. I think they’re watching us.
And anyhow, they would read the papers.”
“The papers you subscribe to?”
“I save them for Ulysses. That pile over in the corner. He takes them
back to Galactic Central every time he comes. He’s very interested in Earth,
you know, from the years he spent here. And from Galactic Central, once he’d
read them, I have a hunch they travel to the corners of the galaxy.”
“Can you imagine,” David asked, “what the promotion departments of
those newspapers might have to say about it if they only knew their depth of
circulation.”
Enoch grinned at the thought of it.
“There’s that paper down in Georgia,” David said, “that covers Dixie
like the dew. They’d have to think of something that goes with galaxy.”
“Glove,” said Mary quickly. “Covers the galaxy like a glove. What do
you think of that?”
“Excellent,” said David.
“Poor Enoch,” Mary said contritely. “Here we make our jokes and Enoch
has his problems.”
“Not mine to solve, of course,” Enoch told her. “I’m just worried by
them. All I have to do is stay inside the station and there are no problems.
Once you close the door here, the problems of the world are securely locked
outside.”
“But you can’t do that.”
“No, I can’t,” said Enoch.
“I think you may be right,” said David, “in thinking that these other
races may be watching us. With an eye, perhaps, to some day inviting the
human race to join them. Otherwise, why would they have wanted to set up a
station here on Earth?”
“They’re expanding the network all the time,” said Enoch. “They needed
a station in this solar system to carry out their extension into this spiral
arm.”
“Yes, that’s true enough,” said David, “but it need not have been the
Earth. They could have built a station out on Mars and used an alien for a
keeper and still have served their purpose.”
“I’ve often thought of that,” said Mary. “They wanted a station on the
Earth and an Earthman as its keeper. There must be a reason for it.”
“I had hoped there was,” Enoch told her, “but I’m afraid they came too
soon. It’s too early for the human race. We aren’t grown up. We still are
juveniles.”
“It’s a shame,” said Mary. “We’d have so much to learn. They know so
much more than we. Their concept of religion, for example.”
“I don’t know,” said Enoch, “whether it’s actually a religion. It seems
to have few of the trappings we associate with religion. And it is not based
on faith. It doesn’t have to be. It is based on knowledge. These people
know, you see.”
“You mean the spiritual force.”
“It is there,” said Enoch, “just as surely as all the other forces that
make up the universe. There is a spiritual force, exactly as there is time
and space and gravitation and all the other factors that make up the
immaterial universe. It is there and they can establish contact with it …”
“But don’t you think,” asked David, “that the human race may sense
this? They don’t know it, but they sense it. And are reaching out to touch
it. They haven’t got the knowledge, so they must do the best they can with
faith. And that faith goes back a far way. Back, perhaps, deep into the
prehistoric days. A crude faith, then, but a sort of faith, a grasping for
faith.”
“I suppose so,” Enoch said. “But it actually wasn’t the spiritual force
I was thinking of. There are all the other things, the material things, the
methods, the philosophies that the human race could use. Name almost any
branch of science and there is something there for us, more than what we
have.”
But his mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force
and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of
which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force.
There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English
language which closely approximated it. “Talisman” was the closest, but
Talisman was too crude a word. Although that had been the word that Ulysses
had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it.
There were so many things, so many concepts, he thought, out in the
galaxy which could not be adequately expressed in any tongue on Earth. The
Talisman was more than a talisman and the machine which had been given the
name was more than a mere machine. Involved in it, as well as certain
mechanical concepts, was a psychic concept, perhaps some sort of psychic
energy that was unknown on Earth. That and a great deal more. He had read
some of the literature on the spiritual force and on the Talisman and had