With an energetic Talisman would the moral laxity and the driving greed been
possible to motivate the deed?
But that was ended now. The Talisman had been restored and a new
custodian had been found – a deaf – mute girl of Earth, the humblest of
humans. And there would be peace on Earth and in time the Earth would join
the confraternity of the galaxy.
There were no problems now, he thought. No decisions to be made. Lucy
had taken the decisions from the hands of everyone.
The station would remain and he could unpack the boxes he had packed
and put the journals back on the shelves again. He could go back to the
station once again and settle down and carry on his work.
I am sorry, he told the hupled shape that lay among the boulders. I am
sorry that mine was the hand that had to do it to you.
He turned away and walked out to where the cliff dropped straight down
to the river flowing at its foot. He raised the rifle and held it for a
moment motionless and then he threw it out and watched it fall, spinning end
for end, the moonlight glinting off the barrel, saw the tiny splash it made
as it struck the water. And far below, he heard the smug, contented gurgling
of the water as it flowed past this cliff and went on, to the further ends
of Earth.
There would be peace on Earth, he thought; there would be no war. With
Lucy at the conference table, there could be no thought of war. Even if some
ran howling from the fear inside themselves, a fear and guilt so great that
it overrode the glory and the comfort of the Talisman, there still could be
no war.
But it was a long trail yet, a long lonesome way, before the brightness
of real peace would live in the hearts of man.
Until no man ran howling, wild with fear (any kind of fear), would
there be actual peace. Until the last man threw away his weapon (any sort of
weapon), the tribe of Man could not be at peace. And a rifle, Enoch told
himself, was the least of the weapons of the Earth, the least of man’s
inhumanity to man, no more than a symbol of all the other and more deadly
weapons.
He stood on the rim of the cliff and looked out across the river and
the dark shadow of the wooded valley. His hands felt strangely empty with
the rifle gone, but it seemed that somewhere, back there just a way, he had
stepped into another field of time, as if an age or day had dropped away and
he had come into a place that was shining and brand new and unsullied by any
past mistakes.
The river rolled below him and the river did not care. Nothing mattered
to the river. It would take the tusk of mastodon, the skull of sabertooth,
the rib cage of a man, the dead and sunken tree, the thrown rock or rifle
and would swallow each of them and cover them in mud or sand and roll
gurgling over them, hiding them from sight.
A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years
to come there might be no river – but in a million years from now there
would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of
the universe, Enoch told himself – a thing that went on caring.
He turned slowly from the cliff edge and clambered through the
boulders, to go walking up the hill. He heard the tiny scurrying of small
life rustling through the fallen leaves and once there was the sleepy
peeping of an awakened bird and through the entire woods lay the peace and
comfort of that glowing light – not so intense, not so deep and bright and
so wonderful as when it actually had been there, but a breath of it still
left.
He came to the edge of the woods and climbed the field and ahead of him
the station stood foursquare upon its ridgetop. And it seemed that it was no
longer a station only, but his home as well. Many years ago it had been a
home and nothing more and then it had become a way station to the galaxy.
But now, although way station still, it was home again.
36
He came into the station and the place was quiet and just a little
ghostly in the quietness of it. A lamp burned on his desk and over on the
coffee table the little pyramid of spheres was flashing, throwing its many –
colored lights, like the crystal balls they’d used in the Roaring Twenties
to turn a dance hall into a place of magic. The tiny flickering colors went
flitting all about the room, like the dance of a zany band of Technicolor
fireflies.
He stood for a moment, indecisive, not knowing what to do. There was
something missing and all at once he realized what it was. During all the
years there’d been a rifle to hang upon its pegs or to lay across the desk.
And now there was no rifle.
He’d have to settle down, he told himself, and get back to work. He’d
have to unpack and put the stuff away. He’d have to get the journals written
and catch up with his reading. There was a lot to do.
Ulysses and Lucy had left an hour or two before, bound for Galactic
Central, but the feeling of the Talisman still seemed to linger in the room.
Although, perhaps, he thought, not in the room at all, but inside himself.
Perhaps it was a feeling that he’d carry with him no matter where he went.
He walked slowly across the room and sat down on the sofa. In front of
him the pyramid of spheres was splashing out its crystal shower of colors.
He reached out a hand to pick it up, then drew it slowly back. What was the
use, he asked himself, of examining it again? If he had not learned its
secret the many times before, why should he expect to now?
A pretty thing, he thought, but useless.
He wondered how Lucy might be getting on and knew she was all right.
She’d get along, he told himself anywhere she went.
Instead of sitting here, he should be getting back to work. There was a
lot of catching up to do. And his time would not be his own from now on, for
the Earth would be pounding at the door. There would be conferences and
meetings and a lot of other things and in a few hours more the newspapers
might be here. But before it happened, Ulysses would be back to help him,
and perhaps there would be others, too.
In just a little while he’d rustle up some food and then he’d get to
work. If he worked far into the night, he could get a good deal done.
Lonely nights, he told himself, were good for work. And it was lonely
now, when it should not be lonely. For he no longer was alone, as he had
thought he was alone just a few short hours before. Now he had the Earth and
the galaxy, Lucy and Ulysses, Winslowe and Lewis and the old philosopher out
in the apple orchard. He rose and walked to the desk and picked up the
statuette Winslowe had carved of him. He held it beneath the desk lamp and
turned it slowly in his hands. There was, he saw now, a loneliness in that
figure, too – the essential loneliness of a man who walked alone.
But he’d had to walk alone. There’d been no other way. There had been
no choice. It had been a one – man job. And now the job was – no, not done,
for there still was much that must be done. But the first phase of it now
was over and the second phase was starting.
He set the statuette back on the desk and remembered that he had not
given Winslowe the piece of wood the Thuban traveler had brought. Now he
could tell Winslowe where all the wood had come from. They could go through
the journals and find the dates and the origin of every stick of it. That
would please old Winslowe.
He heard the silken rustle and swung swiftly round.
“Mary!” he cried.
She stood just at the edge of shadow and the flitting colors from the
flashing pyramid made her seem like someone who had stepped from fairyland.
And that was right, he was thinking wildly, for his lost fairyland was back.
“I had to come,” she said. “You were lonely, Enoch, and I could not
stay away.”
She could not stay away – and that might be true, be thought. For