Clifford Simak - Way Station

He walked over to the shelving and leaned his rifle against the wall.

Stooping he pulled the trunk clear of its resting place.

Once before, prior to carrying it down the stairs and storing it here beneath the shelves, he had gone through its contents, but at the time, he recalled, he'd not been too interested. Now, suddenly, he felt an absorbing interest in it.

He lifted the lid carefully and tilted it back against the shelves.

Crouching above the open trunk, and without touching anything to start with, he tried to catalogue the upper layer of its contents.

There was a shimmering cloak, neatly folded, perhaps some sort of ceremonial cloak, although he could not know. And atop the cloak lay a tiny bottle that was a blaze of reflected light, as if someone had taken a large-sized diamond and hollowed it out to make a bottle of it. Beside the cloak lay a nest of balls, deep violet and dull, with no shine at all, looking for all the world like a bunch of table-tennis balls that someone had cemented together to make a globe. But that was not the way it was, Enoch remembered, for that other time he had been entranced by them and had picked them up, to find that they were not cemented, but could be freely moved about, although never outside the context of their shape. One ball could not be broken from the mass, no matter how hard one might try, but would move about, as if buoyed in a fluid, among all the other balls. One could move any, or all, of the balls, but the mass remained the same. A calculator of some sort, Enoch wondered, but that seemed only barely possible, for one ball was entirely like another, there was no way in which they could be identified. Or at least, no way to identify them by the human eye. Was it possible, he wondered, that identification might be possible to a Hazer's eye? And if a calculator, what kind of a calculator? Mathematical? Or ethical? Or philosophical? Although that was slightly foolish, for who had ever heard of a calculator for ethics or philosophy? Or, rather, what human had ever heard? More than likely it was not a calculator, but something else entirely. Perhaps a sort of game-a game of solitaire?

Given time, a man might finally get it figured out. But there was no time and no incentive at the moment to spend upon one particular item any great amount of time when there were hundreds of other items equally fantastic and incomprehensible. For while one puzzled over a single item, the edges of his mind would always wonder if he might not be spending time on the most insignificant of the entire lot.

He was a victim of museum fatigue, Enoch told himself, overwhelmed by the many pieces of the unknown scattered all about him.

He reached out a hand, not for the globe of balls, but for the shining bottle that lay atop the cloak. As he picked it up and brought it closer, he saw that there was a line of writing engraved upon the glass (or diamond?) of the bottle. Slowly he studied out the writing. There had been a time, long ago, when he had been able to read the Hazer language, if not fluently, at least well enough to get along. But he had not read it for some years now and he had lost a good deal of it and he stumbled haltingly from one symbol to another. Translated very freely, the inscription on the bottle read: To be taken when the first symptoms occur.

A bottle of medicine! To be taken when the first symptoms occur. The symptoms, perhaps, that had come so quickly and built up so rapidly that the owner of this bottle could make no move to reach it and so had died, falling from the sofa.

Almost reverently, he put the bottle back in its place atop the cloak, fitting it back into the faint impression it had made from lying there.

So different from us in so many ways, thought Enoch, and then in other little ways so like us that it is frightening. For that bottle and the inscription on its face was an exact parallel of the prescription bottle that could be compounded by any corner drugstore.

Beside the globe of balls was a box, and he reached out and lifted it. It was made of wood and had a rather simple clasp to hold it shut. He flipped back the lid and inside he saw the metallic sheen of the material the Hazers used as paper.

Carefully he lifted out the first sheet and saw that it was not a sheet, but a long strip of the material folded in accordion fashion. Underneath it were more strips, apparently of the same material.

There was writing on it, faint and faded, and Enoch held it close to read it.

To my —,- friend: (although it was not "friend."

"Blood brother," perhaps, or "colleague." And the adjectives which preceded it were such as to escape his sense entirely.)

The writing was hard to read. It bore some resemblance to the formalized version of the language, but apparently bore the imprint of the writer's personality, expressed in curlicues and flourishes which obscured the form. Enoch worked his way slowly down the paper, missing much of what was there, but picking up the sense of much that had been written.

The writer had been on a visit to some other planet, or possibly just some other place. The name of the place or planet was one that Enoch did not recognize. While he had been there he had performed some sort of function (although exactly what it was was not entirely clear) which had to do with his approaching death.

Enoch, startled, went back over the phrase again. And while much of the rest of what was written was not clear, that part of it was. My approaching death, he had written, and there was no room for mistranslation. All three of the words were clear.

He urged that his good (friend?) do likewise. He said it was a comfort and made clear the road.

There was no further explanation, no further reference. Just the calm declaration that he had done something which he felt must be arranged about his death. As if he knew death was near and was not only unafraid, but almost unconcerned.

The next passage (for there were no paragraphs) told about someone he had met and how they'd talked about a certain matter which made no sense at all to Enoch, who found himself lost in a terminology he did not recognize.

And then: I am most concerned about the mediocrity (incompetence? inability? weakness?) of the recent custodian of (and then that cryptic symbol which could be translated, roughly, as the Talisman.) For (a word, which from the context, seemed to mean a great length of time), ever since the death of the last custodian, the Talisman has been but poorly served. It has been, in all reality, (another long time term), since a true (sensitive?) has been found to carry out its purpose. Many have been tested and none has qualified, and for the lack of such a one the galaxy has lost its close identification with the ruling principle of life. We here at the (temple? sanctuary?) all are greatly concerned that without a proper linkage between the people and (several words that were not decipherable) the galaxy will go down in chaos (and another line that he could not puzzle out).

The next sentence introduced a new subject-the plans that were going forward for some cultural festival which concerned a concept that, to Enoch, was hazy at the best.

Enoch slowly folded up the letter and put it back into the box. He felt a faint uneasiness in reading what he had, as if he'd pried into a friendship that he had no right to know. We here at the temple, the letter had said. Perhaps the writer had been one of the Hazer mystics, writing to his old friend, the philosopher. And the other letters, quite possibly, were from that same mystic-letters that the dead old Hazer had valued so highly that he took them along with him when he went traveling.

A slight breeze seemed to be blowing across Enoch's shoulders; not actually a breeze, but a strange motion and a coldness to the air.

He glanced back into the gallery and there was nothing stirring, nothing to be seen.