Robert Silverberg - Halfway House

He breathed alien air and watched moons leaping like gazelles in a sky of strange constellations. He put his hand to his throat a thousand times a day, to feel the newness there, the warmth of fresh tissue. He ate the meat of unknown beasts. He gained strength from hour to hour.

At last they put him in a singularity chamber and rammed him through the complexities of the Fold, and he returned to Halfway House.

Vuor said, “You will begin your work at once. This will be your office.”

It was an oval room, walled with a living plastic that made it seem as warm and pink and soft as the walls of a womb. Beyond one wall was the quartz-bounded chamber used by those who traveled the Fold. Vuor showed him how to operate the switch that permitted viewing access to the chamber in either direction.`

“What will my duties be?” Alfieri asked.

“Come and tour Halfway House first,” said Vuor.

Alfieri followed. It was hard to grasp the nature of the place: Alfieri pictured it as something like a space station, an orbiting wheel of finite size divided into many chambers. But since there were no windows, he could not confirm that belief. The place seemed fairly small, no bigger than a good-sized office building. Much of it was given over to a power plant. Alfieri wished to stay and examine the generators, but Vuor hurried him on to a cafeteria, to a small room that would be his dwelling place, to some sort of chapel, to executive offices.

The alien seemed impatient. Silent figures drifted through the halls of Halfway House, beings of fifty sorts. Nearly all were oxygen breathers who could handle the all-purpose atmosphere of the place, but some were masked and mysterious. They nodded at Vuor, stared at Alfieri. Civil servants, Alfieri thought. Doing their routine work. And now I am one of them, a petty bureaucrat. But I am alive, and I will wade through a sea of bureaucratic forms to show my gratitude.

They returned to the oval office with the soft, moist pink walls.

“What will my duties be?” Alfieri asked again.

“To interview those who come to Halfway House seeking to travel beyond the Fold.”

“But that’s your job!”

“No longer,” said Vuor. “My term is up. Mine is the now-vacant position you have been recruited to fill. When you begin, I can leave.”

“You said I’d get an administrative post. To organize, to plan—”

“This is administrative work. You must judge the niceties of each applicant’s situation. You must be aware of the capacity of the facilities beyond this point. You must maintain an overview of your task: whom to send forward, whom to reject.”

Alfieri’s hands trembled. “I’m the one who’ll decide? I say, go back and rot, and you come forward? I choose life for some and death for others? No. I don’t want it. I’m not God!”

“Neither am I,” said the alien blandly. “Do you think I like this job? But now I can shrug it off. I am finished here. I have been God for five years, Alfieri. It’s your turn now.”

“Give me some other work. There must be other jobs suited for me!”

“Perhaps there are. But you are best suited for this one. You are a gifted decider. And another thing to consider, Alfieri. You are my replacement. If you do not take the job, I must remain until someone else capable of handling it is found. I have been God long enough, Alfieri.”

Alfieri was silent. He stared into the golden eyeslits, and for the first time he thought he could interpret an expression he found there. Pain. The pain of an Atlas, carrying worlds on his shoulders. Vuor was suffering. And he, Franco Alfieri, could alleviate that pain by taking the burden on himself.

Vuor said, “When your application was approved, there was an understanding that you would render service to us. The scope of your duties has been outlined to you. There is an obligation, Alfieri.”

Nodding, Alfieri saw the truth of that. If he refused to take the post, what would they do? Give him his cancer back? No. They would find another use for him. And Vuor would continue to hold this job. Alfieri owed his life to the suffering alien. If he extended Vuor’s duties by one additional hour, it would be unforgivable.

“I accept the obligation,” Alfieri said.

The look in the alien’s eyeslits could have been nothing but joy.

There were certain things Alfieri had to learn about his job, and then he was on his own. He learned them. He took up his new existence as a bureaucrat with good grace. One room to live in, instead of a cycle of mansions; food prepared by computers, not by master chefs; a long day of work, and little recreation. But he was alive. He could look to a time beyond the five years.

He sent word to Earth that he would be detained and that he would eventually return in good health to resume his position in the corporation. He authorized the commencement of Plan A for running the company in his prolonged absence. Alfieri had planned everything. Men he trusted would be stewards for him until he returned. It was made quite clear to him at Halfway House that he could not attempt to run the firm by remote control, and so he activated his plan and left the company to its new administrators. He was busy enough.

Applicants came to him.

Not all of them wished medical aid, but all had some good and compelling reason for journeying to some world beyond the Fold. Alfieri judged their cases. He had no quota; if he cared to, he could send all his applicants through to their destinations or turn them all away. But the one would be irresponsible, the other inhumane. Alfieri judged. He weighed in the balance, and some he found wanting, and others he passed on. There were only so many channels, a finite number of routes to the infinity of worlds. Alfieri thought of himself sometimes as a traffic policeman, sometimes as Maxwell’s Demon, sometimes as Rhadamanthys in Hades. Mostly he thought of the day when he could go home again.

The refusals were painful. Some of the applicants bellowed their rage at him and made threats. Some of them shrank into sobbing stupors. Some quietly warned of the grave injustice he was doing. Alfieri had made hard decisions all his life, but his soul was not yet calloused from them, and he regretted the things the applicants said to him. The job, though, had to be done, and he could not deny he had a gift for it.

He was not the only such judge at Halfway House, naturally. Streams of applicants were constantly processed through many offices. But Alfieri was, in addition to a judge, the final court of appeals for his colleagues. He maintained the overview. He controlled the general flow. It was his talent to administer things.

A day came when an auburn-skinned being with swarming subdivided tendrils stood before him, a man of Hinnerang. For a terrible moment Alfieri thought it was the surgeon who had repaired his throat. But the resemblance was only superficial. This man was no surgeon.

Alfieri said, “This is Halfway House.”

“I need help. I am Tomrik Horiman. You have my dossier?”

“I do,” Alfieri said. “You know that we give no help here, Tomrik Horiman. We simply forward you to the place where help may be obtained. Tell me about yourself.”

The tendrils writhed in anguish. “I am a grower of houses. My capital is overextended. My entire establishment is threatened. If I could go to a world where my houses would win favor, my firm would be saved. I have a plan for growing houses on Melknor. Our calculations show that there would be a demand for our product there.”

“Melknor has no shortage of houses,” Alfieri remarked.

“But they love novelty there. They’d rush to buy. An entire family is faced with ruin, kind sir! Root and branch we will be wiped out. The penalty for bankruptcy is extreme. With my honor lost, I would have to destroy myself. I have children.”