And if the mob showed up at the same time Lewis should appear, bringing
back the body, there’d be unsheeted hell to pay.
Stricken by the thought, he stood undecided.
If he alerted Lewis to the danger, then he might not bring the body.
And he had to bring the body. Before the night was over the Hazer must be
secure within the grave.
He decided that he would have to take a chance. The mob might not show
up. Even if it did, there had to be a way that he could handle it.
He’d think of something, he told himself.
He’d have to think of something.
27
The station was as silent as it had been when he’d left it. There had
been no messages and the machinery was quiet, not even muttering to itself,
as it sometimes did.
Enoch laid the rifle across the desk top and dropped the bundle of
papers beside it. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the
chair.
There were still the papers to be read, not only today’s, but
yesterday’s as well, and the journal to be gotten up, and the journal, he
reminded himself, would take a lot of time. There would be several pages of
it, even if he wrote it close, and he must write it logically and
chronologically, so that it would appear he had written the happenings of
yesterday yesterday and not a full day late. He must include each event and
every facet of each happening and his own reactions to it and his thoughts
about it. For that was the way he’d always done and that was the way he must
do it now. He’d always been able to do it that way because he had created
for himself a little special niche, not of the Earth, nor of the galaxy, but
in that vague condition which one might call existence, and he had worked
inside the framework of that special niche as a medieval monk had worked
inside his cell. He had been an observer only, an intensely interested
observer who had not been content with observance only, but who had made an
effort to dig into what he had observed, but still basically and essentially
an observer who was not vitally nor personally involved in what had gone on
about him. But in the last two days, he realized, he had lost that observer
status. The Earth and the galaxy had both intruded on him, and his special
niche was gone and he was personally involved. He had lost his objective
viewpoint and no longer could command that correct and coldly factual
approach which had given him a solid basis upon which to do his writing.
He walked over to the shelf of journals and pulled out the current
volume, fluttering its pages to find where he had stopped. He found the
place and it was very near the end. There were only a few blank pages left,
perhaps not enough of them to cover the events of which he’d have to write.
More than likely, he thought, he’d come to an end of the journal before he
had finished with it and would have to start a new one.
He stood with the journal in his hand and stared at the page where the
writing ended, the writing that he’d done the day before yesterday. Just the
day before yesterday and it now was ancient writing; it even had a faded
look about it. And well it might, he thought, for it had been writing done
in another age. It had been the last entry he had made before his world had
come crashing down about him.
And what, he asked himself, was the use of writing further? The writing
now was done, all the writing that would matter. The station would be closed
and his own planet would be lost-no matter whether he stayed on or went to
another station on another planet, the Earth would now be lost.
Angrily he slammed shut the book and put it back into its place upon
the shelf. He walked back to the desk.
The Earth was lost, he thought, and he was lost as well, lost and angry
and confused. Angry at fate (if there were such a thing as fate) and at
stupidity. Not only the intellectual stupidity of the Earth, but at the
intellectual stupidity of the galaxy as well, at the petty bickering which
could still the march of the brotherhood of peoples that finally had
extended into this galactic sector. As on Earth, so in the galaxy, the
number and complexity of the gadget, the noble thought, the wisdom and
erudition might make for a culture, but not for a civilization. To be truly
civilized, there must be something far more subtle than the gadget or the
thought.
He felt the tension in him, the tension to be doing something – to
prowl about the station like a caged and pacing beast, to run outside and
shout incoherently until his lungs were empty, to smash and break, to work
off, somehow, his rage and disappointment.
He reached out a hand and snatched the rifle off the desk. He pulled
out a desk drawer where he kept the ammunition, and took out a box of it,
tearing it apart, emptying the cartridges in his pocket.
He stood there for a moment, with the rifle in his hand, and the
silence of the room seemed to thunder at him and he caught the bleakness and
the coldness of it and he laid the rifle back on the desk again.
With childishness, he thought, to take out his resentment and his rage
on an unreality. And’ when there was no real reason for resentment or for
rage. For the pattern of events was one that should be recognized and thus
accepted. It was the kind of thing to which a human being should long since
have become accustomed.
He looked around the station and the quietness and the waiting still
was there, as if the very structure might be marking time for an event to
come along on the natural flow of time.
He laughed softly and reached for the rifle once again.
Unreality or not, it would be something to occupy his mind, to ‘snatch
him for a while from this sea of problems which was swirling all about him.
And he needed the target practice. It had been ten days or more since
he’d been on the rifle range.
28
The basement was huge. It stretched out into a dim haze beyond the
lights which he had turned on, a place of tunnels and rooms, carved deep
into the rock that folded up to underlie the ridge.
Here were the massive tanks filled with the various solutions for the
tank travelers; here the pumps and the generators, which operated on a
principle alien to the human manner of generating electric power, and far
beneath the floor of the basement itself those great storage tanks which
held the acids and the soupy matter which once had been the bodies of those
creatures which came traveling to the station, leaving behind them, as they
went on to some other place, the useless bodies which then must be disposed
of.
Enoch moved across the floor, past the tanks and generators, until he
came to a gallery that stretched out into the darkness. He found the panel
and pressed it to bring on the lights, then walked down the gallery. On
either side were metal shelves which had been installed to accommodate the
overflow of gadgets, of artifacts, of all sorts of gifts which had been
brought him by the travelers. From floor to ceiling the shelves were jammed
with a junkyard accumulation from all the corners of the galaxy. And yet,
thought Enoch, perhaps not actually a junkyard, for there would be very
little of this stuff that would be actual junk. All of it was serviceable
and had some purpose, either practical or aesthetic, if only that purpose
could be learned. Although perhaps not in every instance a purpose that
would be applicable to humans.
Down at the end of the shelves was one section of shelving into which
the articles were packed more systematically and with greater care, each one
tagged and numbered, with cross-filing to a card catalogue and certain
journal dates. These were the articles of which he knew the purpose and, in
certain instances, something of the principles involved. There were some
that were innocent enough and others that held great potential value and
still others that had, at the moment, no connection whatsoever with the
human way of life-and there were, as well, those few, tagged in red, that
made one shuper to even think upon.
He went down the gallery, his footsteps echoing loudly as he trod
through this place of alien ghosts.
Finally the gallery widened into an oval room and the walls here were