“That and more,” said Wins. “I listened for a while before I started
out.”
He reached into the mail pouch and found the bundle of papers and
handed them to Enoch.
“Enoch, there’s something that you have to know. Something you may not
realize. It would be easy to get a lot of people stirred up against you-the
way you live and all. You are strange. No, I don’t mean there’s anything
wrong with you-I know you and I know there isn’t-but it would be easy for
people who didn’t know you to get the wrong ideas. They’ve let you alone so
far because you’ve given them no reason to do anything about you. But if
they get stirred up by all that Hank is saying…”
He did not finish what he was saying. He left it hanging in midair.
“You’re talking about a posse,” Enoch said.
Wins noped, saying nothing.
“Thanks,” said Enoch. “I appreciate your warning me.”
“Is it true,” asked the mailman, “that no one can get inside your
house9”
“I guess it is,” admitted Enoch. “They can’t break into it and they
can’t burn it down. They can’t do anything about it.”
“Then, if I were you, I’d stay close tonight. I’d stay inside. I’d not
go venturing out.”
“Maybe I will. It sounds like a good idea.”
“Well,” said Wins, “I guess that about covers it. I thought you’d ought
to know. Guess I’ll have to back out to the road. No chance of turning
around.”
“Drive up to the house. There’s room there.”
“It’s not far back to the road,” said Wins. “I can make it easy.”
The car started backing slowly.
Enoch stood watching.
He lifted a hand in solemn salute as the car began rounding a bend that
would take it out of sight. Wins waved back and then the car was swallowed
by the scrub that grew close against both sides of the road.
Slowly Enoch turned around and ploped back toward the station.
A mob, he thought-good God, a mob!
A mob howling about the station, hammering at the doors and windows,
peppering it with bullets, would wipe out the last faint chance-if there
still remained a chance-of Galactic Central standing off the move to close
the station. Such a demonstration would ap one more powerful argument to the
demand that the expansion into the spiral arm should be abandoned.
Why was it, he wondered, that everything should happen all at once? For
years nothing at all had happened and now everything was happening within a
few hours’ time. Everything, it seemed, was working out against him.
If the mob showed up, not only would it mean that the fate of the
station would be sealed, but it might mean, as well, that he would have no
choice but to accept the offer to become the keeper of another station. It
might make it impossible for him to remain on Earth, even if he wished. And
he realized, with a start, that it might just possibly mean that the offer
of another station for him might be withdrawn. For with the appearance of a
mob howling for his blood, he, himself, would become involved in the charge
of barbarism now leveled against the human race in general.
Perhaps, he told himself, he should go down to the spring and see Lewis
once again. Perhaps some measures could be taken to hold off the mob. But if
he did, he knew, there’d be an explanation due and he might have to tell too
much. And there might not be a mob. No one would place too much credence in
what Hank Fisher said and the whole thing might peter out without any action
being taken.
He’d stay inside the station and hope for the best. Perhaps there’d be
no traveler in the station at the time the mob arrived-if it did arrive-and
the incident would pass with no galactic notice. If he were lucky it might
work out that way. And by the law of averages, he was owed some luck.
Certainly he’d had none in the last few days.
He came to the broken gate that led into the yard and stopped to look
up at the house, trying for some reason he could not understand, to see it
as the house he had known in boyhood.
It stood the same as it had always stood, unchanged, except that in the
olden days there had been ruffled curtains at each window. The yard around
it had changed with the slow growth of the years, with the clump of lilacs
thicker and more rank and tangled with each passing spring, with the elms
that his father had planted grown from six-foot whips into mighty trees,
with the yellow rose bush at the kitchen corner gone, victim of a
long-forgotten winter, with the flower beds vanished and the small herb
garden, here beside the gate, overgrown and smothered out by grass.
The old stone fence that had stood on each side of the gate was now
little more than a humpbacked mound. The heaving of a hundred frosts, the
creep of vines and grasses, the long years of neglect, had done their work
and in another hundred years, he thought, it would be level, with no trace
of it left. Down in the field, along the slope where erosion had been at
work, there were long stretches where it had entirely disappeared.
All of this had happened and until this moment he had scarcely noticed
it. But now he noticed it and wondered why he did. Was it because he now
might be returning to the Earth again-he who had never left its soil and sun
and air, who had never left it physically, but who had, for a longer time
than most men had allotted to them, walked not one, but many planets, far
among the stars?
He stood there, in the late summer sun, and shivered in the cold wind
that seemed to be blowing out of some unknown dimension of unreality,
wondering for the first time (for the first time he ever had been forced to
wonder at it) what kind of man he was. A haunted man who must spend his days
neither completely alien nor completely human, with divided loyalties, with
old ghosts to tramp the years and miles with him no matter which life he
might choose, the Earth life or the stars? A cultural half-breed,
understanding neither Earth nor stars, owing a debt to each, but paying
neither one? A homeless, footless, wandering creature who could recognize
neither right nor wrong from having seen so many different (and logical)
versions of the right and wrong?
He had climbed the hill above the spring, filled with the rosy inner
glow of a regained humanity, a member of the human race again, linked in a
boy-like conspiracy with a human team. But could he qualify as human-and if
he qualified as human, or tried to qualify, then what about the implied
hundred years’ allegiance to Galactic Central? Did he, he wondered, even
want to qualify as human?
He moved slowly through the gate, and the questions still kept
hammering in his brain, that great, ceaseless flow of questions to which
there were no answers. Although that was wrong, he thought. Not no answers,
but too many answers.
Perhaps Mary and David and the rest of them would come visiting tonight
and they could talk it over-then he supenly remembered.
They would not be coming. Not Mary, not David, nor any of the others.
They had come for years to see him, but they would come no longer, for the
magic had been dimmed and the illusion shattered and he was alone.
As he had always been alone, he told himself, with a bitter taste
inside his brain. It all had been illusion; it never had been real. For
years he’d fooled himself-most eagerly and willingly he had fooled himself
into peopling the little corner by the fireplace with these creatures of his
imagination. Aided by an alien technique, driven by his loneliness for the
sight and sound of humankind, he had brought them into a being that defied
every sense except the solid sense of touch.
And defied as well every sense of decency.
Half-creatures, he thought. Poor pitiful half-creatures, neither of the
shadow or the world.
Too human for the shadows, too shadowy for Earth.
Mary, if I had only known – if I had known, I never would have started.
I’d have stayed with loneliness.
And he could not mend it now. There was nothing that would help.
What is the matter with me? he asked himself.
What has happened to me?
What is going on?
He couldn’t even think in a straight line any more. He’d told himself
that he’d stay inside the station to escape the mob that might be showing
up-and he couldn’t stay inside the station, for Lewis, sometime shortly
after dark, would be bringing back the Hazer’s body.