was, not stirring for a moment, soaking in its warmth. There was a good,
hard, feeling to the sunlight, a reassuring touch, and for a moment he held
off the worry and the questioning. But he sensed its nearness and he closed
his eyes again. Perhaps if he could sleep some more it might go away and
lose itself somewhere and not be there when he awakened later.
But there was something wrong, something besides the worry and the
questioning.
His neck and shoulders ached and there was a strange stiffness in his
body and the pillow was too hard.
He opened his eyes again and pushed with his hands to sit erect and he
was not in bed. He was sitting in a chair and his head, instead of resting
on a pillow, had been laid upon the desk. He opened and shut his mouth to
taste it, and it tasted just as bad as he knew it would.
He got slowly to his feet, straightening and stretching, trying to work
out the kinks that had tied themselves into joints and muscles. As he stood
there, the worry and the trouble and the dreadful need of answers seeped
back into him, from wherever they’d been hiding. But he brushed them to one
side, not an entirely successful brush, but enough to make them retreat a
little and crouch there, waiting to close in again.
He went to the stove and looked for the coffeepot, then remembered that
last night he’d set it on the floor beside the coffee table. He went to get
it. The two cups still stood on the table, the dark brown dregs of coffee
covering the bottoms of them. And in the mass of gadgets that Ulysses had
pushed to one side to make room for the cups, the pyramid of spheres lay
tilted on its side, but it still was sparkling and glinting, each successive
sphere revolving in an opposite direction to its fellow spheres.
Enoch reached out and picked it up. His fingers carefully explored the
base upon which the spheres were set, seeking something-some lever, some
indentation, some trip, some button-by which it might be turned either on or
off. But there was nothing he could find. He should have known, he told
himself, that there would be nothing. For he had looked before. And yet
yesterday Lucy had done something that had set it operating and it still was
operating. It had operated for more than twelve hours now and no results had
been obtained. Check that, he thought-no results that could be recognized.
He set it back on the table on its base and stacked the cups, one
inside the other, and picked them up. He stooped to lift the coffeepot off
the floor. But his eyes never left the pyramid of spheres.
It was mapening, he told himself. There was no way to turn it on and
yet, somehow, Lucy had turned it on. And now there was no way to turn it
off-although it probably did not matter if it were off or on.
He went back to the sink with the cups and coffeepot.
The station was quiet-a heavy, oppressive quietness; although, he told
himself, the impression of oppressiveness probably was no more than his
imagination.
He crossed the room to the message machine and the plate was blank.
There had been no messages during the night. It was silly of him, he
thought, to expect there would be, for if there were, the auditory signal
would be functioning, would continue to sound off until he pushed the lever.
Was it possible, he wondered, that the station might already have been
abandoned, that whatever traffic that happened to be moving was being
detoured around it? That, however, was hardly possible, for the abandonment
of Earth station would mean, as well that those beyond it must also be
abandoned. There were no shortcuts in the network extending out into the
spiral arm to make rerouting possible. It was not unusual for many hours,
even for a day, to pass without any traffic. The traffic was irregular and
had no pattern to it. There were times when scheduled arrivals bad to be
held up until there were facilities to take care of them, and there were
other times when there would be none at all, when the equipment would sit
idle, as it was sitting now.
Jumpy, he thought. I am getting jumpy.
Before they closed the station, they would let him know. Courtesy, if
nothing else, would demand that they do that.
He went back to the stove and started the coffeepot. In the
refrigerator he found a package of mush made from a cereal grown on one of
the Draconian jungle worlds. He took it out, then put it back again and took
out the last two eggs of the dozen that Wins, the mailman, had brought out
from town a week or so ago.
He glanced at his watch and saw that he had slept later than he
thought. It was almost time for his daily walk.
He put the skillet on the stove and spooned in a chunk of butter. He
waited for the butter to melt, then broke in the eggs.
Maybe, he thought, he’d not go on the walk today. Except for a time or
two when a blizzard had been raging, it would be the first time he had ever
missed his walk. But because he always did it, he told himself,
contentiously, was no sufficient reason that he should always take it. He’d
just skip the walk and later on go down and get the mail. He could use the
time to catch up on all the things he’d failed to do yesterday. The papers
still were piled upon his desk, waiting for his reading. He’d not written in
his journal, and there was a lot to write, for he must record in detail
exactly what had happened and there had been a good deal happening.
It had been a rule he’d set himself from the first day, that the
station had begun its operation-that he never skimped the journal. He might
be a little late at times in getting it all down, but the fact that he was
late or that he was pressed for time had never made him put down one word
less than he had felt might be required to tell all there was to tell.
He looked across the room at the long rows of record books that were
crowded on the shelves and thought, with pride and satisfaction, of the
completeness of that record. Almost a century of writing lay between the
covers of those books and there was not a single day that he had ever
skipped.
Here was his legacy, he thought; here was his bequest to the world,
here would be his entrance fee back into the human race; here was all he’d
seen and heard and thought for almost a hundred years of association with
those alien peoples of the galaxy.
Looking at the rows of books, the questions that he had shoved aside
came rushing in on him and this time there was no denying them. For a short
space of time he had held them off, the little time he’d needed for his
brain to clear, for his body to become alive again He did not fight them now
He accepted them, for there was no dodging them.
He slid the eggs out of the skillet onto the waiting plate He got the
coffeepot and sat down to his breakfast.
He glanced at his watch again.
There still was time to go on his daily walk.
25
The ginseng man was waiting at the spring.
Enoch saw him while still some distance down the trail and wondered,
with a quick flash of anger, if he might be waiting there to tell him that
he could not return the body of the Hazer, that something had come up, that
he had run into unexpected difficulties.
And thinking that, Enoch remembered how he’d threatened the night
before to kill anyone who held up the return of the body. Perhaps, he told
himself, it had not been smart to say that. Wondering whether he could bring
himself to kill a man-not that it would be the first man he had ever killed.
But that had been long ago and it had been a matter then of kill or being
killed.
He shut his eyes for a second and once again could see that slope below
him, with the long lines of men advancing through the drifting smoke,
knowing that those men were climbing up the ridge for one purpose only, to
kill himself and those others who were atop the ridge.
And that had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all
the years of killing boiled down in essence to that single moment-not the
time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he had watched