side-stepped growing old, one of the penalties, but perhaps, as well, one of
the rights of all humankind. And perhaps this secret shame may contribute in
some part to their unwillingness to talk about him.”
“You spent a good deal of time watching him?”
“There was a time I did. But now I have a crew. They watch on regular
shifts. We have a dozen spots we watch from, and we keep shifting them
around. There isn’t an hour, day in, day out, that the Wallace house isn’t
under observation.”
“This business really has you people bugged.”
“I think with reason,” Lewis said. “There is still one other thing.”
He bent over and picked up the brief case he had placed beside his
chair. Unsnapping it, he took out a sheaf of photographs and handed them to
Hardwicke.
“What do you make of these?” he asked. Hardwicke picked them up.
Supenly he froze. The color drained out of his face. His hands began to
tremble and he laid the pictures carefully on the desk. He had looked at
only the top one; not any of the others.
Lewis saw the question in his face.
“In the grave,” he said. “The one beneath the headstone with the funny
writing.”
5
The message machine whistled shrilly, and Enoch Wallace put away the
book in which he had been writing and got up from his desk. He walked across
the room to the whistling machine. He punched a button and shoved a key and
the whistling stopped.
The machine built up its hum and the message began to form on the
plate, faint at first and then becoming darker until it stood out clearly.
It read:
NO. 406301 TO STATION 18327. TRAVELER AT 16097.38. NATIVE THUBAN VI. NO
BAGGAGE. NO. 3 LIQUID TANK. SOLUTION 27. DEPART FOR STATION 12892 AT
16439.16.
CONFIRM.
Enoch glanced up at the great galactic chronometer hanging on the wall.
There was almost three hours to go.
He touched a button, and a thin sheet of metal bearing the message
protruded from the side of the machine. Beneath it the duplicate fed itself
into the record file. The machine chuckled and the message plate was clear
once more and waiting.
Enoch pulled out the metal plate, threaded the holes in it through the
double filing spindle and then dropped his fingers to the keyboard and
typed: NO. 406301 RECEIVED. CONFIRM MOMENTARILY. The message came into being
on the plate and he left it there.
Thuban VI? Had there been, he wondered, one of them before? As soon as
he got the chores done, he would go to the filing cabinet and check.
It was a liquid tank case and those, as a rule, were the most
uninteresting of all. They usually were hard ones to strike up a
conversation with, because too often their concept of language was too
difficult to handle. And as often, too, their very thinking processes proved
too divergent to provide much common ground for communication.
Although, he recalled, that was not always true. There had been that
tank traveler several years ago, from somewhere in Hydra (or had it been the
Hyades?), he’d sat up the whole night with and almost failed of sending off
on time, yarning through the hours, their communication (you couldn’t call
it words) tumbling over one another as they packed into the little time they
had a lot of fellowship and, perhaps, some brotherhood.
He, or she, or it-they’d never got around to that- had not come back
again. And that was the way it was, thought Enoch; very few came back. By
far the greater part of them were just passing through.
But he had he, or she, or it (whichever it might be) down in black and
white, as he had all of them, every single blessed one of them, down in
black and white. It had taken him, he remembered, almost the entire
following day, crouched above his desk, to get it written down; all the
stories he’d been told, all the glimpses he had caught of a far and
beautiful and tantalizing land (tantalizing because there was so much of it
he could not understand), all the warmth and comradeship that had flowed
between himself and this misshapen, twisted, ugly living being from another
world. And any time he wished, any day he wished, he could take down the
journal from the row of journals and relive that night again. Although he
never had. It was strange, he thought, how there was never time, or never
seemed to be the time, to thumb through and reread in part what he’d
recorded through the years.
He turned from the message machine and rolled a No. 3 liquid tank into
place beneath the materializer, positioning it exactly and locking it in
place. Then he pulled out the retracting hose and thumbed the selector over
to No. 27. He filled the tank and let the hose slide back into the wall.
Back at the machine, he cleared the plate and sent off his confirmation
that all was ready for the traveler from Thuban, got back double
confirmation from the other end, then threw the machine to neutral, ready to
receive again.
He went from the machine to the filing cabinet that stood next to his
desk and pulled out a drawer jammed with filing cards. He looked and Thuban
VI was there, keyed to August 22, 1931. He walked across the room to the
wall filled with books and rows of magazines and journals, filled from floor
to ceiling, and found the record book he wanted. Carrying it, he walked back
to his desk.
August 22, 1931, he found, when he located the entry, had been one of
his lighter days. There had been one traveler only, the one from Thuban VI.
And although the entry for the day filled almost a page in his small,
crabbed writing, he had devoted no more than one paragraph to the visitor.
Came today [it read] a blob from Thuban VI. There is no other way in
which one might describe it. It is simply a mass of matter, presumably of
flesh, and this mass seems to go through some sort of rhythmic change in
shape, for periodically it is globular, then begins to flatten out until it
lies in the bottom of the tank, somewhat like a pancake. Then it begins to
contract and to pull in upon itself, until finally it is a ball again. This
change is rather slow and definitely rhythmic, but only in the sense that it
follows the same pattern. It seems to have no relation to time. I tried
timing it and could detect no time pattern. The shortest period needed to
complete the cycle was seven minutes and the longest was eighteen. Perhaps
over a longer period one might be able to detect a time rhythm, but I didn’t
have the time. The semantic translator did not work with it, but it did emit
for me a series of sharp clicks, as if it might be clicking claws together,
although it had no claws that I could see. When I looked this up in the
pasimology manual I learned that what it was trying to say was that it was
all right, that it needed no attention, and please leave it alone. Which I
did thereafter.
And at the end of the paragraph, jammed into the little space that had
been left, was the notation: See Oct. 16, 1931.
He turned the pages until he came to October 16 and that had been one
of the days, he saw, that Ulysses had arrived to inspect the station.
His name, of course, was not Ulysses. As a matter of fact, he had no
name at all. Among his people there was no need of names; there was other
identifying terminology which was far more expressive than mere names. But
this terminology, even the very concept of it, was such that it could not be
grasped, much less put to use, by human beings.
“I shall call you Ulysses,” Enoch recalled telling him, the first time
they had met. “I need to call you something.”
“It is agreeable,” said the then strange being (but no longer strange).
“Might one ask why the name Ulysses?”
“Because it is the name of a great man of my race.”
“I am glad you chose it,” said the newly christened being. “To my
hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I
shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us
shall work together for many of your years.”
And it had been many years, thought Enoch, with the record book open to
that October entry of more than thirty years ago. Years that had been
satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it
had all been laid out before him.