luminescence and the sharp, hard angles of his face, the smooth baldness of
his head, the flat, pointed ears pasted tight against the skull lent him a
vicious fearsomeness.
If one did not know him for the gentle character that he was, Enoch
told himself, he would be enough to scare a man out of seven years of
growth.
“We had been expecting you,” said Enoch. “The coffeepot is boiling.”
Ulysses took a slow step forward, then paused.
“You have another with you. A human, I would say.”
“There is no danger,” Enoch told him.
“Of another gender. A female, is it not? You have found a mate?”
“No,” said Enoch. “She is not my mate.”
“You have acted wisely through the years,” Ulysses told him. “In a
position such as yours, a mate is not the best.”
“You need not worry. There is a malady upon her. She has no
communication. She can neither hear nor speak.”
“A malady?”
“Yes, from the moment she was born. She has never heard or spoken. She
can tell of nothing here.”
“Sign language?”
“She knows no sign language. She refused to learn it.”
“She is a friend of yours.”
“For some years,” said Enoch. “She came seeking my protection. Her
father used a whip to beat her.”
“This father knows she’s here?”
“He thinks she is, but he cannot know.” Ulysses came slowly out of the
darkness and stood within the light.
Lucy was watching him, but there was no terror on her face. Her eyes
were level and untroubled and she did not flinch.
“She takes me well,” Ulysses said. “She does not run or scream.”
“She could not scream,” said Enoch, “even if she wished.”
“I must be most repugnant,” Ulysses said, “at first sight to any
human.”
“She does not see the outside only. She sees inside of you as well.”
“Would she be frightened if I made a human bow to her?”
“I think,” said Enoch, “she might be very pleased.”
Ulysses made his bow, formal and exaggerated, with one hand upon his
leathery belly, bowing from the waist.
Lucy smiled and clapped her hands.
“You see,” Ulysses cried, delighted, “I think that she may like me.”
“Why don’t you sit down, then,” suggested Enoch, “and we all will have
some coffee.”
“I had forgotten of the coffee. The sight of this other human drove
coffee from my mind.”
He sat down at the place where the third cup had been set and waiting
for him. Enoch started around the table, but Lucy rose and went to get the
coffee.
“She understands?” Ulysses asked.
Enoch shook his head. “You sat down by the cup and the cup was empty.”
She poured the coffee, then went over to the sofa. “She will not stay
with us?” Ulysses asked. “She’s intrigued by that tableful of trinkets. She
set one of them to going.”
“You plan to keep her here?”
“I can’t keep her,” Enoch said. “There’ll be a hunt for her. I’ll have
to take her home.”
“I do not like it,” Ulysses said.
“Nor do I. Let’s admit at once that I should not have brought her here.
But at the time it seemed the only thing to do. I had no time to think it
out.”
“You’ve done no wrong,” said Ulysses softly. “She cannot harm us,” said
Enoch. “Without communication …”
“It’s not that,” Ulysses told him. “She’s just a complication and I do
not like further complications. I came tonight to tell you, Enoch, that we
are in trouble.”
“Trouble? But there’s not been any trouble.”
Ulysses lifted his coffee cup and took a long drink of it.
“That is good,” he said. “I carry back the bean and make it at my home.
But it does not taste the same.”
“This trouble?”
“You remember the Vegan that died here several of your years ago.”
Enoch noped. “The Hazer.”
“The being has a proper name …”
Enoch laughed. “You don’t like our nicknames.”
“It is not our way,” Ulysses said.
“My name for them,” said Enoch, “is a mark of my affection.”
“You buried this Vegan.”
“In my family plot,” said Enoch. “As if he were my own. I read a verse
above him.”
“That is well and good,” Ulysses said. “That is as it should be. You
did very well. But the body’s gone.”
“Gone! It can’t be gone!” cried Enoch.
“It has been taken from the grave.”
“But you can’t know,” protested Enoch. “How could you know?”
“Not I. It’s the Vegans. The Vegans are the ones who know.”
“But they’re light-years distant …”
And then he was not too sure. For on that night the wise old one had
died and he’d messaged Galactic Central, he had been told that the Vegans
had known the moment he had died. And there had been no need for a death
certificate, for they knew of what he died.
It seemed impossible, of course, but there were too many
impossibilities in the galaxy which turned out, after all, to be entirely
possible for a man to ever know when he stood on solid ground.
Was it possible, he wondered, that each Vegan had some sort of mental
contact with every other Vegan? Or that some central census bureau (to give
a human designation to something that was scarcely understandable) might
have some sort of official linkage with every living Vegan, knowing where it
was and how it was and what it might be doing?
Something of the sort, Enoch admitted, might indeed be possible. It was
not beyond the astounding capabilities that one found on every hand
throughout the galaxy. But to maintain a similar contact with the Vegan dead
was something else again.
“The body’s gone,” Ulysses said. “I can tell you that and know it is
the truth. You’re held accountable.”
“By the Vegans?”
“By the Vegans, yes. And the galaxy.”
“I did what I could,” said Enoch hotly. “I did what was required. I
filled the letter of the Vegan law. I paid the dead my honor and the honor
of my planet. It is not right that the responsibility should go on forever.
Not that I can believe the body can be really gone. There is no one who
would take it. No one who knew of it.”
“By human logic,” Ulysses told him, “you, of course, are right. But not
by Vegan logic. And in this case Galactic Central would tend to support the
Vegans.”
“The Vegans,” Enoch said testily, “happen to be friends of mine. I have
never met a one of them that I didn’t like or couldn’t get along with. I can
work it out with them.”
“If only the Vegans were concerned,” said Ulysses, “I am quite sure you
could. I would have no worry. But the situation gets complicated as you go
along. On the surface it seems a rather simple happening, but there are many
factors. The Vegans, for example, have known for some time that the body had
been taken and they were disturbed, of course. But out of certain
considerations, they had kept their silence.”
“They needn’t have. They could have come to me. I don’t know what could
have been done …”
“Silent not because of you. Because of something else.”
Ulysses finished off his coffee and poured himself another cup. He
filled Enoch’s half-filled cup and set the pot aside.
Enoch waited.
“You may not have been aware of it,” said Ulysses, “but at the time
this station was established, there was considerable opposition to it from a
number of races in the galaxy. There were many reasons cited, as is the case
in all such situations, but the underlying reason, when you get down to
basics, rests squarely on the continual contest for racial or regional
advantage. A situation akin, I would imagine, to the continual bickering and
maneuvering which you find here upon the Earth to gain an economic advantage
for one group or another, or one nation and another. In the galaxy, of
course, the economic considerations only occasionally are the underlying
factors. There are many other factors than the economic.”
Enoch noped. “I had gained a hint of this. Nothing recently. But I
hadn’t paid too much attention to it.”
“It’s largely a matter of direction,” Ulysses said. “When Galactic
Central began its expansion into this spiral arm, it meant there was no time
or effort available for expansions in other directions. There is one large
group of races which has held a dream for many centuries of expanding into
some of the nearby globular clusters. It does make a dim sort of sense, of
course. With the techniques that we have, the longer jump across space to
some of the closer clusters is entirely possible. Another thing-the clusters
seem to be extraordinarily free of dust and gas, so that once we got there
we could expand more rapidly throughout the cluster than we can in many
parts of the galaxy. But at best, it’s a speculative business, for we don’t