American Science Fiction

by Gary K. Wolfe

  And as he watched, they melted back—back into the deeper dark from which they had padded in the dust track of the road.

  Except for one who turned and bolted, plunging down the hill in the darkness toward the woods, howling in maddened terror like a frightened dog.

  “There goes Hank,” said Winslowe. “That is Hank running down the hill.”

  “I am sorry that we frightened him,” said Enoch soberly. “No man should be afraid of this.”

  “It is himself that he is frightened of,” the mailman said. “He lives with a terror in him.”

  And that was true, thought Enoch. That was the way with Man; it had always been that way. He had carried terror with him. And the thing he was afraid of had always been himself.

  34

  THE GRAVE was filled and mounded and the five of them stood for a moment more, listening to the restless wind that stirred in the moon-drenched apple orchard, while from far away, down in the hollows above the river valley, the whippoorwills talked back and forth through the silver night.

  In the moonlight Enoch tried to read the graven line upon the rough-hewn tombstone, but there was not light enough. Although there was no need to read it; it was in his mind:

  Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.

  When you wrote that, the Hazer diplomat had told him, just the night before, you wrote as one of us. And he had not said so, but the Vegan had been wrong. For it was not a Vegan sentiment alone; it was human, too.

  The words were chiseled awkwardly and there was a mistake or two in spelling, for the Hazer language was not an easy one to master. The stone was softer than the marble or the granite most commonly used for gravestones and the lettering would not last. In a few more years the weathering of sun and rain and frost would blur the characters, and in some years after that they would be entirely gone, with no more than the roughness of the stone remaining to show that words had once been written there. But it did not matter, Enoch thought, for the words were graven on more than stone alone.

  He looked across the grave at Lucy. The Talisman was in its bag once more and the glow was softer. She still held it clasped tight against herself and her face was still exalted and unnoticing—as if she no longer lived in the present world, but had entered into some other place, some other far dimension where she dwelled alone and was forgetful of all past.

  “Do you think,” Ulysses asked, “that she will go with us? Do you think that we can have her? Will the Earth . . .”

  “The Earth,” said Enoch, “has not a thing to say. We Earth people are free agents. It is up to her.”

  “You think that she will go?”

  “I think so,” Enoch said. “I think maybe this has been the moment she had sought for all her life. I wonder if she might not have sensed it, even with no Talisman.”

  For she always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen.

  “Her parent?” Ulysses asked. “The howling one that ran away from us?”

  “I’ll handle him,” said Lewis. “I’ll have a talk with him. I know him fairly well.”

  “You want her to go back with you to Galactic Central?” Enoch asked.

  “If she will,” Ulysses said. “Central must be told at once.”

  “And from there throughout the galaxy?”

  “Yes,” Ulysses said. “We need her very badly.”

  “Could we, I wonder, borrow her for a day or two.”

  “Borrow her?”

  “Yes,” said Enoch. “For we need her, too. We need her worst of all.”

  “Of course,” Ulysses said. “But I don’t . . .”

  “Lewis,” Enoch asked, “do you think our government—the Secretary of State, perhaps—might be persuaded to appoint one Lucy Fisher as a member of our peace conference delegation?”

  Lewis stammered, made a full stop, then began again: “I think it could possibly be managed.”

  “Can you imagine,” Enoch asked, “the impact of this girl and the Talisman at the conference table?”

  “I think I can,” said Lewis. “But the Secretary undoubtedly would want to talk with you before he arrived at his decision.”

  Enoch half turned toward Ulysses, but he did not need to phrase his question.

  “By all means,” Ulysses said to Lewis. “Let me know and I’ll sit in on the meeting. And you might tell the good Secretary, too, that it would not be a bad idea to begin the formation of a world committee.”

  “A world committee?”

  “To arrange,” Ulysses said, “for the Earth becoming one of us. We cannot accept a custodian, can we, from an outside planet?”

  35

  IN THE moonlight the tumbled boulder pile gleamed whitely, like the skeleton of some prehistoric beast. For here, near the edge of the cliff that towered above the river, the heavy trees thinned out and the rocky point stood open to the sky.

  Enoch stood beside one of the massive boulders and gazed down at the huddled figure that lay among the rocks. Poor, tattered bungler, he thought, dead so far from home and, so far as he, himself, must be concerned, to so little purpose.

  Although perhaps neither poor nor tattered, for in that brain, now broken and spattered beyond recovery, must surely have lain a scheme of greatness—the kind of scheme that the brain of an earthly Alexander or Xerxes or Napoleon may have held, a dream of some great power, cynically conceived, to be attained and held at whatever cost, the dimensions of it so grandiose that it shoved aside and canceled out all moral considerations.

  He tried momentarily to imagine what the scheme might be, but knew, even as he tested his imagination, how foolish it was to try, for there would be factors, he was sure, that he would not recognize and considerations that might lie beyond his understanding.

  But however that might be, something had gone wrong, for in the plan itself Earth could have had no place other than as a hideout which could be used if trouble struck. This creature’s lying here, then, was a part of desperation, a last-ditch gamble that had not worked out.

  And, Enoch thought, it was ironic that the key of failure lay in the fact that the creature, in its fleeing, had carried the Talisman into the backyard of a sensitive, and on a planet, too, where no one would have thought to look for a sensitive. For, thinking back on it, there could be little doubt that Lucy had sensed the Talisman and had been drawn to it as truly as a magnet would attract a piece of steel. She had known nothing else, perhaps, than that the Talisman had been there and was something she must have, that it was something she had waited for in all her loneliness, without knowing what it was or without hope of finding it. Like a child who sees, quite suddenly, a shiny, glorious bauble on a Christmas tree and knows that it’s the grandest thing on Earth and that it must be hers.

  This creature lying here, thought Enoch, must have been able and resourceful. For it would have taken great ability and resourcefulness to have stolen the Talisman to start with, to keep it hidden for years, to have penetrated into the secrets and the files of Galactic Central. Would it have been possible, he wondered, if the Talisman had been in effective operation? With an energetic Talisman would the moral laxity and the driving greed have been possible to motivate the deed?

  But that was ended now. The Talisman had been restored and a new custodian had been found—a deaf-mute girl of Earth, the humblest of humans. And there would be peace on Earth and in time the Earth would join the cofraternity of the galaxy.

  There were no problems now, he thought. No decisions to be made. Lucy had taken the decisions from
the hands of everyone.

  The station would remain and he could unpack the boxes he had packed and put the journals back on the shelves again. He could go back to the station once again and settle down and carry on his work.

  I am sorry, he told the huddled shape that lay among the boulders. I am sorry that mine was the hand that had to do it to you.

  He turned away and walked out to where the cliff dropped straight down to the river flowing at its foot. He raised the rifle and held it for a moment motionless and then he threw it out and watched it fall, spinning end for end, the moonlight glinting off the barrel, saw the tiny splash it made as it struck the water. And far below, he heard the smug, contented gurgling of the water as it flowed past this cliff and went on, to the further ends of Earth.

  There would be peace on Earth, he thought; there would be no war. With Lucy at the conference table, there could be no thought of war. Even if some ran howling from the fear inside themselves, a fear and guilt so great that it overrode the glory and the comfort of the Talisman, there still could be no war.

  But it was a long trail yet, a long and lonesome way, before the brightness of real peace would live in the hearts of man.

  Until no man ran howling, wild with fear (any kind of fear), would there be actual peace. Until the last man threw away his weapon (any sort of weapon), the tribe of Man could not be at peace. And a rifle, Enoch told himself, was the least of the weapons of the Earth, the least of man’s inhumanity to man, no more than a symbol of all the other and more deadly weapons.

  He stood on the rim of the cliff and looked out across the river and the dark shadow of the wooded valley. His hands felt strangely empty with the rifle gone, but it seemed that somewhere, back there just a way, he had stepped into another field of time, as if an age or day had dropped away and he had come into a place that was shining and brand new and unsullied by any past mistakes.

  The river rolled below him and the river did not care. Nothing mattered to the river. It would take the tusk of mastodon, the skull of sabertooth, the rib cage of a man, the dead and sunken tree, the thrown rock or rifle and would swallow each of them and cover them in mud or sand and roll gurgling over them, hiding them from sight.

  A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river—but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing. And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself—a thing that went on caring.

  He turned slowly from the cliff edge and clambered through the boulders, to go walking up the hill. He heard the tiny scurrying of small life rustling through the fallen leaves and once there was the sleepy peeping of an awakened bird and through the entire woods lay the peace and comfort of that glowing light—not so intense, not so deep and bright and so wonderful as when it actually had been there, but a breath of it still left.

  He came to the edge of the woods and climbed the field and ahead of him the station stood foursquare upon its ridgetop. And it seemed that it was no longer a station only, but his home as well. Many years ago it had been a home and nothing more and then it had become a way station to the galaxy. But now, although way station still, it was home again.

  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, he 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 that 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. H
e 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.