he put away in its proper place among all the other record books upon the
shelf.
He glanced at the galactic clock upon the wall and it was time to go.
He pushed the chair tight against the desk and shrugged into the jacket
that hung upon the chair back. He picked the rifle off the supports that
held it on the wall and then he faced the wall itself and said the single
word that he had to say. The wall slid back silently and he stepped through
it into the little shed with its sparse furnishings. Behind him the section
of the wall slid back and there was nothing there to indicate it was
anything but a solid wall.
Enoch stepped out of the shed and it was a beautiful late summer day.
In a few weeks now, he thought, there’d be the signs of autumn and a strange
chill in the air. The first goldenrods were blooming now and he’d noticed,
just the day before, that some of the early asters down in the ancient fence
row had started to show color.
He went around the corner of the house and headed toward the river,
striding down the long deserted field that was overrun with hazel brush and
occasional clumps of trees.
This was the Earth, he thought-a planet made for Man. But not for Man
alone, for it was as well a planet for the fox and owl and weasel, for the
snake, the katydid, the fish, for all the other teeming life that filled the
air and earth and water. And not these natives alone, but for other beings
that called other earths their home, other planets that far light-years
distant were basically the same as Earth. For Ulysses and the Hazers and all
the rest of them who could live upon this planet, if need be, if they
wished, with no discomfort and no artificial aids.
Our horizons are so far, he thought, and we see so little of them. Even
now, with flaming rockets striving from Canaveral to break the ancient
bonds, we dream so little of them.
The ache was there, the ache that had been growing, the ache to tell
all mankind those things that he had learned. Not so much the specific
things, although there were some of them that mankind well could use, but
the general things, the unspecific central fact that there was intelligence
throughout the universe, that Man was not alone, that if he only found the
way he need never be alone again.
He went down across the field and through the strip of woods and came
out on the great outthrust of rock that stood atop the cliff that faced the
river. He stood there, as he had stood on thousands of other mornings, and
stared out at the river, sweeping in majestic blue-and-silverness through
the wooded bottom land.
Old, ancient water, he said, talking silently to the river, you have
seen it happen-the mile-high faces of the glaciers that came and stayed and
left, creeping back toward the pole inch by stubborn inch, carrying the
melting water from those very glaciers in a flood that filled this valley
with a tide such as now is never known; the mastodon and the sabertooth and
the bear-sized beaver that ranged these olden hills and made the night
clamorous with trumpeting and screaming; the silent little bands of men who
trotted in the woods or clambered up the cliffs or papled on your surface,
woods-wise and water-wise, weak in body, strong in purpose, and persistent
in a way no other thing ever was persistent, and just a little time ago that
other breed of men who carried dreams within their skulls and cruelty in
their hands and the awful sureness of an even greater purpose in their
hearts. And before that, for this is ancient country beyond what is often
found, the other kinds of life and the many turns of climate and the changes
that came upon the Earth itself. And what think you of it? he asked the
river. For yours is the memory and the perspective and the time and by now
you should have the answers, or at least some of the answers.
As Man might have some of the answers had he lived for several million
years-as he might have the answers several million years from this very
summer morning if be still should be around.
I could help, thought Enoch. I could not give the answers but I could
help Man in his scramble after them. I could give him faith and hope and I
could give purpose such as he has not had before.
But he knew he dare not do it.
Far below a hawk swung in lazy circles above the highway of the river.
The air was so clear that Enoch imagined, if he strained his eyes a little,
he could see every feather in those outspread wings.
There was almost a fairy quality to this place, he thought. The far
look and the clear air and the feeling of detachment that touched almost on
greatness of the spirit. As if this were a special place, one of those
special places that each man must seek out for himself, and count himself as
lucky if he ever found it, for there were those who sought and never found
it. And worst of all, there were even those who never hunted for it.
He stood upon the rock and stared out across the river, watching the
lazy hawk and the sweep of water and the green carpeting of trees, and his
mind went up and out to those other places until his mind was dizzy with the
thought of it. And then he called it home.
He turned slowly and went back down the rock and moved off among the
trees, following the path he’d beaten through the years.
He considered going down the hill a way to look in on the patch of pink
lady’s-slippers, to see how they might be coming, to try to conjure up the
beauty that would be his again in June, but decided that there’d be little
point to it, for they were well hipen in an isolated place, and nothing
could have harmed them. There had been a time, a hundred years ago, when
they had bloomed on every hill and he had come trailing home with great
armloads of them, which his mother had put in the great brown jug she had,
and for a day or two the house had been filled with the heaviness of their
rich perfume. But they were hard to come by now. The trampling of the
pastured cattle and flower-hunting humans had swept them from the hills.
Some other day, he told himself, some day before first frost, he would
visit them again and satisfy himself that they’d be there in the spring.
He stopped a while to watch a squirrel as it frolicked in an oak. He
squatted down to follow a snail which had crossed his path. He stopped
beside a massive tree and examined that pattern of the moss that grew upon
the trunk. And he traced the wanderings of a silent, flitting songbird as it
fluttered tree to tree.
He followed the path out of the woods and along the edge of field until
he came to the spring that bubbled from the hillside.
Sitting beside the spring was a woman and he recognized her as Lucy
Fisher, the deaf-mute daughter of Hank Fisher, who lived down in the river
bottoms.
He stopped and watched her and thought how full she was of grace and
beauty, the natural grace and beauty of a primitive and lonely creature.
She was sitting by the spring and one hand was uplifted and she held in
it, at the tips of long and sensitive fingers, something that glowed with
color. Her head was held high, with a sharp look of alertness, and her body
was straight and slender, and it also had that almost startled look of quiet
alertness.
Enoch moved slowly forward and stopped not more than three feet behind
her, and now he saw that the thing of color on her fingertips was a
butterfly, one of those large gold and red butterflies that come with the
end of summer. One wing of the insect stood erect and straight, but the
other was bent and crumpled and had lost some of the dust that lent sparkle
to the color.
She was, he saw, not actually holding the butterfly. It was standing on
one fingertip, the one good wing fluttering very slightly every now and then
to maintain its balance.
But he had been mistaken, he saw, in thinking that the second wing was
injured, for now he could see that somehow it had been simply bent and
distorted in some way. For now it was straightening slowly and the dust (if
it ever had been gone) was back on it again, and it was standing up with the