“Not so idle,” said the stranger. “There are other planets and there
are other people. I am one of them.”
“But you …” cried Enoch, then was stricken into silence.
For the stranger’s face had split and began to fall away and beneath it
he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face.
And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great
sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of
thunder seemed to shake the land and from far off he heard the rushing rain
as it charged across the hills.
7
That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The
campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic
charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star.
Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things
as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were
people.
He looked back at the entry for October 16, 1931, and ran through it
swiftly. There, near the end of it was the sentence:
Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest
mathematicians in the galaxy. They have developed, it seems, a numeration
system superior to any in existence, especially valuable in the handling of
statistics.
He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the
statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans’ work. Perhaps they did, he
thought, for certainly some of the math they used was unconventional.
He pushed the record book to one side and dug into a desk drawer,
bringing out his chart. He spread it flat on the desk before him and puzzled
over it. If he could be sure, he thought. If he only knew the Mizar
statistics better. For the last ten years or more he had labored at the
chart, checking and rechecking all the factors against the Mizar system,
testing again and again to determine whether the factors he was using were
the ones he should be using.
He raised a clenched fist and hammered at the desk. If he only could be
certain. If he could only talk with someone. But that had been something
that he had shrank from doing, for it would be equivalent to showing the
very nakedness of the human race.
He still was human. Funny, he thought, that he should stay human, that
in a century of association with these beings from the many stars he should
have, through it all, remained a man of Earth.
For in many ways, his ties with Earth were cut. Old Winslowe Grant was
the only human he ever talked with now. His neighbors shunned him, and there
were no others, unless one could count watchers, and those he seldom
saw-only glimpses of them, only the places they had been.
Only old Winslowe Grant and Mary and the other people from the shadow
who came occasionally to spend lonely hours with him.
That was all of Earth he had, old Winslowe and the shadow people and
the homestead acres that lay outside the house-but not the house itself, for
the house was alien now.
He shut his eyes and remembered how the house had been in the olden
days. There had been a kitchen, in this same area where he was sitting, with
the iron cook-stove, black and monstrous, in its corner, showing its row of
fiery teeth along the slit made by the grate. Pushed against the wall had
been the table where the three of them had eaten, and he could remember how
the table looked, with the vinegar cruet and the glass that held the spoons
and the Lazy Susan with the mustard, horseradish, and chili sauce sitting in
a group, a sort of centerpiece in the miple of the red checkered cloth that
the table wore.
There had been a winter night and he had been, it seemed, no more than
three or four. His mother was busy at the stove with supper. He was sitting
on the floor in the center of the kitchen, playing with some blocks, and
outside he could hear the muffled howling of the wind as it prowled along
the eaves. His father had come in from milking at the barn, and a gust of
wind and a swirl of snow had come into the room with him. Then he’d shut the
door and the wind and snow were gone, shut outside this house, condemned to
the outer darkness and the wilderness of night. His father had set the pail
of milk that he had been carrying on the kitchen sink and Enoch saw that his
beard and eyebrows were coated with snow and there was frost on the whiskers
all around his mouth.
He held that picture still, the three of them like historic manikins
posed in a cabinet in a museum-his father with the frost upon his whiskers
and the great felt boots that came up to his knees; his mother with her face
flushed from working at the stove and with the lace cap upon her head, and
himself upon the floor, playing with the blocks.
There was one other thing that he remembered, perhaps more clearly than
all the rest of it. There was a great lamp sitting on the table, and on the
wall behind it hung a calendar, and the glow of the lamp fell like a
spotlight upon the picture on the calendar. There was old Santa Claus,
riding in his sleigh along a woodland track and all the little woodland
people had turned out to watch him pass. A great moon hung above the trees
and there was thick snow on the ground. A pair of rabbits sat there, gazing
soulfully at Santa, and a deer beside the rabbits, with a raccoon just a
little distance off, ringed tail wrapped about his feet, and a squirrel and
chickadee side by side upon an overhanging branch. Old Santa had his whip
raised high in greeting and his cheeks were red and his smile was merry and
the reindeer hitched to his sled were fresh and spirited and proud.
Through all the years this mid-nineteenth-century Santa had ripen down
the snowy aisles of time, with his whip uplifted in happy greeting to the
woodland creatures. And the golden lamplight had ripen with him, still
bright upon the wall and the checkered tablecloth.
So, thought Enoch, some things do endure-the memory and the thought and
the snug warmness of a childhood kitchen on a stormy winter night.
But the endurance was of the spirit and the mind, for nothing else
endured. There was no kitchen now, nor any sitting room with its
old-fashioned sofa and the rocking chair; no back parlor with its stuffy
elegance of brocade and silk, no guest bedroom on the first and no family
bedrooms on the second floor.
It all was gone and now one room remained. The second-story floor and
all partitions had been stripped away. Now the house was one great room. One
side of it was the galactic station and the other side the living space for
the keeper of the station. There was a bed over in one corner and a stove
that worked on no principle known on Earth and a refrigerator that was of
alien make. The walls were lined with cabinets and shelves, stacked with
magazines and books and journals.
There was just one thing left from the early days, the one thing Enoch
had not allowed the alien crew that had set up the station to strip away-the
massive old fireplace of brick and native stone that had stood against one
wall of the sitting room. It still stood there, the one reminder of the days
of old, the one thing left of Earth, with its great, scarred oak mantel that
his father had carved out with a broadax from a massive log and had smoothed
by hand with plane and draw-shave.
On the fireplace mantel and strewn on shelf and table were articles and
artifacts that had no earthly origin and some no earthly names-the steady
accumulation through the years of the gifts from friendly travelers.
Some of them were functional and others were to look at only, and there
were other things that were entirely useless because they had little
application to a member of the human race or were inoperable on Earth, and
many others of the purpose of which he had no idea, accepting them,
embarrassed, with many stumbling thanks, from the well-meaning folks who had
brought them to him.
And on the other side of the room stood the intricate mass of
machinery, reaching well up into the open second story, that wafted
passengers through the space that stretched from star to star.
An inn, he thought, a stopping place, a galactic crossroads.
He rolled up the chart and put it back into the desk. The record book