suffrance. It was a present and an actual peace, the peace of mind that came
with the calmness of a sunset after a long, hot day, or the sparkling, ghost
– like shimmer of a springtime dawn. You felt it inside of you and all about
you, and there was the feeling that it was not only here but that the peace
extended on and out in all directions, to the farthest reaches of infinity,
and that it had a depth which would enable it to endure until the final gasp
of all eternity.
Slowly, remembering, Enoch turned back to face the field and the men
were there, at the edge of the light cast by the Talisman, a gray, hupled
group, like a pack of chastened wolves that slunk at the faint periphery of
a campfire’s light.
And as he watched, they melted back – back into the deeper dark from
which they had paped in the dust track of the road.
Except for one who turned and bolted, plunging down the hill in the
darkness toward the woods, howling in mapened terror like a frightened dog.
“There goes Hank,” said Winslowe. “That is Hank running down the hill.”
“I am sorry that we frightened him,” said Enoch soberly. “No man should
be afraid of this.”
“It is himself that he is frightened of,” the mailman said. “He lives
with a terror in him.”
And that was true, thought Enoch. That was the way with Man; it had
always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was
afraid of had always been himself.
34
The grave was filled and mounded and the five of them stood for a
moment more, listening to the restless wind that stirred in the moon –
drenched apple orchard, while from far away, down in the hollows above the
river valley, the whippoorwills talked back and forth through the silver
night.
In the moonlight Enoch tried to read the graven line upon the rough –
hewn tombstone, but there was not light enough. Although there was no need
to read it; it was in his mind:
Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him,
for in death he belongs to the universe.
When you wrote that, the Hazer diplomat had told him, just the night
before, you wrote as one of us. And he had not said so, but the Vegan had
been wrong. For it was not a Vegan sentiment alone; it was human, too.
The words were chiseled awkwardly and there was a mistake or two in
spelling, for the Hazer language was not an easy one to master. The stone
was softer than the marble or the granite most commonly used for gravestones
and the lettering would not last. In a few more years the weathering of sun
and rain and frost would blur the characters, and in some years after that
they would be entirely gone, with no more than the roughness of the stone
remaining to show that words had once been written there. But it did not
matter, Enoch thought, for the words were graven on more than stone alone.
He looked across the grave at Lucy. The Talisman was in its bag once
more and the glow was softer. She still held it clasped tight against
herself and her face was still exalted and unnoticing – as if she no longer
lived in the present world, but had entered into some other place, some
other far dimension where she dwelled alone and was forgetful of all past.
“Do you think,” Ulysses asked, “that she will go with us? Do you think
that we can have her? Will the Earth…”
“The Earth,” said Enoch, “has not a thing to say. We Earth people are
free agents. It is up to her.”
“You think that she will go?”
“I think so,” Enoch said. “I think maybe this has been the moment she
had sought for all her life. I wonder if she might not have sensed it, even
with no Talisman.”
For she always had been in touch with something outside of human ken.
She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could
not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had
fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off
the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other
acts that she performed unseen.
“Her parent?” Ulysses asked. “The howling one that ran away from us?”
“I’ll handle him,” said Lewis. “I’ll have a talk with him. I know him
fairly well.”
“You want her to go back with you to Galactic Central?” Enoch asked.
“If she will,” Ulysses said. “Central must be told at once.”
“And from there throughout the galaxy?”
“Yes,” Ulysses said. “We need her very badly.”
“Could we, I wonder, borrow her for a day or two.”
“Borrow her?”
“Yes,” said Enoch. “For we need her, too. We need her worst of all.”
“Of course,” Ulysses said. “But I don’t …” “Lewis,” Enoch asked, “do
you think our government – the Secretary of State, perhaps – might be
persuaded to appoint one Lucy Fisher as a member of our peace conference
delegation?”
Lewis stammered, made a full stop, then began again: “I think it could
possibly be managed.”
“Can you imagine,” Enoch asked, “the impact of this girl and the
Talisman at the conference table?”
“I think I can,” said Lewis. “But the Secretary undoubtedly would want
to talk with you before he arrived at his decision.”
Enoch half turned toward Ulysses, but he did not need to phrase his
question.
“By all means,” Ulysses said to Lewis. “Let me know and I’ll sit in on
the meeting. And you might tell the good Secretary, too, that it would not
be a bad idea to begin the formation of a world committee.”
“A world committee?”
“To arrange,” Ulysses said, “for the Earth becoming one of us. We
cannot accept a custodian, can we, from an outside planet?”
35
In the moonlight the tumbled boulder pile gleamed whitely, like the
skeleton of some prehistoric beast. For here, near the edge of the cliff
that towered above the river, the heavy trees thinned out and, the rocky
point stood open to the sky.
Enoch stood beside one of the massive boulders and gazed down at the
hupled figure that lay among the rocks. Poor, tattered bungler, he thought,
dead so far from home and, so far as he, himself, must be concerned, to so
little purpose
Although perhaps neither poor nor tattered, for in that brain, now
broken and spattered beyond recovery, must surely have lain a scheme of
greatness – the kind of scheme that the brain of an earthly Alexander or
Xerxes or Napoleon may have held, a dream of some great power, cynically
conceived, to be attained and held at whatever cost, the dimensions of it so
grandiose that it shoved aside and canceled out all moral considerations.
He tried momentarily to imagine what the scheme might be, but knew,
even as he tested his imagination, how foolish it was to try, for there
would be factors, he was sure, that he would not recognize and
considerations that might lie beyond his understanding.
But however that might be, something had gone wrong, for in the plan
itself Earth could have had no place other than as a hideout which could be
used if trouble struck. This creature’s lying here, then, was a part of
desperation, a last – ditch gamble that had not worked out.
And, Enoch thought, it was ironic that the key of failure lay in the
fact that the creature, in its fleeing, had carried the Talisman into the
backyard of a sensitive, and on a planet, too, where no one would have
thought to look for a sensitive. For, thinking back on it, there could be
little doubt that Lucy had sensed the Talisman and had been drawn to it as
truly as a magnet would attract a piece of steel. She had known nothing
else, perhaps, than that the Talisman had been there and was something she
must have, that it was something she had waited for in all her loneliness,
without knowing what it was or without hope of finding it. Like a child who
sees, quite supenly, a shiny, glorious bauble on a Christmas tree and knows
that it’s the grandest thing on Earth and that it must be hers.
This creature lying here, thought Enoch, must have been able and
resourceful. For it would have taken great ability and resourcefulness to
have stolen the Talisman to start with, to keep it hipen for years, to have
penetrated into the secrets and the files of Galactic Central. Would it have
been possible, he wondered, if the Talisman had been in effective operation?