Way Station

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 within the conditioning he'd set up there might have been the inescapable compulsion to come whenever she was needed.

It was a trap, he thought, from which neither could escape. There was no free will here, but instead the deadly precision of this blind mechanism he had shaped himself.

She should not come to see him and perhaps she knew this as well as he, but could not help herself. Would this be, he wondered, the way it would be, forever and forever?

He stood there, frozen, torn by the need of her and the emptiness of her unreality, and she was moving toward him.

She was close to him and in a moment she would stop, for she knew the rules as well as he; she, no more than he, could admit illusion.

But she did not stop. She came so close that he could smell the apple — blossom fragrance of her. She put out a hand and laid it on his arm.

It was no shadow touch and it was no shadow hand. He could feel the pressure of her fingers and the coolness of them.

He stood rigid, with her hand upon his arm.

The flashing light! he thought. The pyramid of spheres!

For now he remembered who had given it to him — one of those aberrant races of the Alphard system. And it had been from the literature of that system that he had learned the art of fairyland. They had tried to help him by giving him the pyramid and he had not understood. There had been a failure of communication — but that was an easy thing to happen. In the Babel of the galaxy, it was easy to misunderstand or simply not to know.

For the pyramid of spheres was a wonderful, and yet a simple, mechanism. It was the fixation agent that banished all illusion, that made a fairyland for real. You made something as you wanted it and then turned on the pyramid and you had what you had made, as real as if it had never been illusion.

Except, he thought, in some things you couldn't fool yourself. You knew it was illusion, even if it should turn real.

He reached out toward her tentatively, but her hand dropped from his arm and she took a slow step backward.

In the silence of the room — the terrible, lonely silence — they stood facing one another while the colored lights ran like playing mice as the pyramid of spheres twirled its everlasting rainbow.

"I am sorry," Mary said, "but it isn't any good. We can't fool ourselves."

He stood mute and shamed.

"I waited for it," she said. "I thought and dreamed about it."

"So did I," said Enoch. "I never thought that it would happen."

And that was it, of course. So long as it could not happen, it was a thing to dream about. It was romantic and far — off and impossible. Perhaps it had been romantic only because it had been so far — off and so impossible.

"As if a doll had come to life," she said, "or a beloved Teddy bear. I am sorry, Enoch, but you could not love a doll or a Teddy bear that had come to life. You always would remember them the way they were before. The doll with the silly, painted smile; the Teddy bear with the stuffing coming out of it."

"No!" cried Enoch. "No!"

"Poor Enoch," she said. "It will be so bad for you. I wish that I could help. You'll have so long to live with it."

"But you!" he cried. "But you? What can you do now?"

It had been she, he thought, who had the courage. The courage that it took to face things as they were.

How, he wondered, had she sensed it? How could she have known?

"I shall go away," she said. "I shall not come back. Even when you need me, I shall not come back. There is no other way."

"But you can't go away," he said. "You are trapped the same as I."

"Isn't it strange," she said, "how it happened to us. Both of us victims of illusion…"

"But you," he said. "Not you."

She nodded gravely. "I, the same as you. You can't love the doll you made or I the toymaker. But each of us thought we did; each of us still think we should and are guilty and miserable when we find we can't."

"We could try," said Enoch. "If you would only stay."

"And end up by hating you? And, worse than that, by your hating me. Let us keep the guilt and misery. It is better than the hate."

She moved swiftly and the pyramid of spheres was in her hand and lifted.

"No, not that!" ‘he shouted. "No, Mary…"

The pyramid flashed, spinning in the air, and crashed against the fireplace. The flashing lights went out. Something — glass? metal? stone? — tinkled on the floor.

"Mary!" Enoch cried, striding forward in the dark.

But there was no one there.

"Mary!" he shouted, and the shouting was a whimper.

She was gone and she would not be back.

Even when he needed her, she would not be back.

He stood quietly in the dark and silence, and the voice of a century of living seemed to speak to him in a silent language.

All things are hard, it said. There is nothing easy.

There had been the farm girl living down the road, and the southern beauty who had watched him pass her gate, and now there was Mary, gone forever from him.

He turned heavily in the room and moved forward, groping for the table.

He found it and switched on the light.

He stood beside the table and looked about the room. In this corner where he stood there once had been a kitchen, and there, where the fireplace stood, the living room, and it all had changed — it had been changed for a long time now. But he still could see it as if it were only yesterday.

All the days were gone and all the people in them.

Only he was left.

He had lost his world. He had left his world behind him.

And, likewise, on this day, had all the others — all the humans that were alive this moment.

They might not know it yet, but they, too, had left their world behind them. It would never be the same again.

You said good bye to so many things, to so many loves, to so many dreams.

"Good bye, Mary," he said. Forgive me and God keep you."

He sat down at the table and pulled the journal that lay upon its top in front of him. He flipped it open, searching for the pages he must fill.

He had work to do.

Now he was ready for it.

He had said his last good bye.