It was the first time, in all the years, that he had forgotten.
“I am sorry, Mary. I should not have done that.”
Her eyes were bright with tears.
“I wish you could,” she said. “Oh, how I wish you could!”
“David,” he said, not turning his head.
“David left,” said Mary.
“He won’t be back,” said Enoch.
Mary shook her head.
“What is the matter, Mary? What is it all about? What have I done!”
“Nothing,” Mary said, “except that you made us too much like people. So that we became more human, until we were entirely human. No longer puppets, no longer pretty dolls, but really actual people. I think David must resent it—not that he is people, but that being people, he is still a shadow. It did not matter when we were dolls or puppets, for we were not human then. We had no human feelings.”
“Mary, please,” he said. “Mary, please forgive me.”
She leaned toward him and her face was lighted by deep tenderness. “There is nothing to forgive,” she said. “Rather, I suppose, we should thank you for it. You created us out of a love of us and a need of us and it is wonderful to know that you are loved and needed.”
“But I don’t create you any more,” Enoch pleaded. “There was a time, long ago, I had to. But not any longer. Now you come to visit me of your own free will.”
How many years, he wondered. It must be all of fifty. And Mary had been the first, and David had been second. Of all the others of them, they had been the first and were the closest and the dearest.
And before that, before he’d even tried, he’d spent other years in studying that nameless science stemming from the thaumaturgists of Alphard XXII.
There had been a day and a state of mind when it would have been black magic, but it was not black magic. Rather, it was the orderly manipulation of certain natural aspects of the universe as yet quite unsuspected by the human race. Perhaps aspects that Man never would discover. For there was not, at least at the present moment, the necessary orientation of the scientific mind.
“David felt,” said Mary, “that we could not go on forever, playing out our little sedate visits. There had to be a time when we faced up to what we really are.”
“And the rest of them?”
“I am sorry, Enoch. The rest of them as well.”
“But you? How about you, Mary?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It is different with me. I love you very much.”
“And I . . .”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Don’t you understand? I’m in love with you.”
HE SAT stricken, staring at her. There was a great roaring in the world, as if he were standing still and the world and time were rushing swiftly past him.
“If it only could have stayed,” she said, “the way it was at first. Then we were glad of our existence. Our emotions were so shallow; we seemed to be so happy. Like little children, running in the sun. But then we all grew up. And I think I the most of all.” She smiled at him and tears were in her eyes.
“Don’t take it so hard, Enoch. We can . . .”
“My dear,” he said, “I’ve been in love with you since the first day that I saw you. I think, maybe, even before that.”
He reached out a hand to her, then pulled it back, remembering.
“I did not know,” she said. “I should not have told you. You could live with it until you knew I loved you, too.”
He nodded, dumbly.
She bowed her head. “Dear God, we don’t deserve this. We have done nothing to deserve it.”
She raised her head and looked at him. “If I could only touch you.”
“We can go on,” he said, “as we have always done. You can come to see me any time you want. We can . . .”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work,” she said. “Neither of us could stand it.”
He knew that she was right. He knew that it was done. For fifty years she and the others had been dropping in to visit. And they’d come no more. For the fairyland was shattered and the magic spell was broken. He’d be left alone—more alone than ever, more alone than before he’d ever known her.
She would not come again and he could never bring himself to call her up again, even if he could. And his shadow world and his shadow love, the only love he’d ever really had, would be gone forever.
“Good-by, my dear,” he said.
But it was too late. She was already gone.
And from far off, it seemed, he heard the moaning whistle that said a message had come in.
—CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
TO BE CONTINUED
CONCLUSION
He was mankind’s only hope for a place among the races of the stars—if he was still human!
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
Enoch Wallace was a strange man living in a strange world. He had lived in it for more than a century, since that first day when the alien creature who called himself Ulysses appeared to him and offered him the secret task of maintaining a transfer-point on Earth for the use of the galactic civilization.
The offer had certain advantages. For one thing, it conferred nearimmortality. For another, it offered a chance to discover truths beyond the horizon of Earth. Enoch accepted, and began a life that shut him off from all his friends and neighbors—but brought him new ones.
First were the star travelers themselves, creatures of a thousand races who passed through the Earth station en route from one alien planet to another. Some were so strange and inhuman that Enoch could not communicate with them. Others were very like him . . . in every respect except appearance. Shrunken or huge, tentacled or shapeless, these visitors became friends, almost the only friends he had.
His other friends were stranger still. They were the creatures of his mind—the lovely woman named Mary, the dashing Civil War officer who was Enoch’s imaginary ideal of a friend—who were summoned out of his own subconscious to give him companionship, and given form through the arts of the galactic civilization.
Enoch could no longer think of the place he lived in as “home”; it had been only “The Station” for so many years. It too changed. Its outward appearance was the same as the century-old farmhouse in which he had spent his boyhood. But it had been altered inside, to provide the communications equipment and the matter-transmitting tanks that served its function; its outside too was changed, though imperceptibly, to make it the most secure fortress Earth had ever seen. No human thing could pierce those walls. No man or woman could open its doors except Enoch himself.
His life of mystery was a challenge to the neighbors on the little farms nearby, especially to the family of the strange, mute girl named Lucy who was almost his only contact with the outside world. Even more it challenged the men from the United States government who had come to investigate rumors of strange goings-on . . . and found mysteries far beyond the rumors. Every move Enoch made was watched. The world was closing in on him. And at the same time there was trouble in the galactic civilization itself, a trouble that centered around the queer, symbolic object called The Talisman. Enoch could not understand what was happening; he could only wonder, and retreat to the company of his own mind-companions . . .
But even they seemed to be turning against him.
They knew what they were: figments of his imagination, and nothing more. And they would not let him forget it.
XI
MARY HAD said that they must face up to the kind of things they were.
And what were they? Not what did he think they were, but what were they actually? What did they think themselves to be? For perhaps they knew much better than did he.
Where had Mary gone? When she left this room, into what kind of limbo did she disappear? Did she still exist? And if so, what kind of an existence would it be? Would she be stored away somewhere as a little girl would store away her doll in a box pushed back into the closet with all the other dolls?
He tried to imag
ine limbo. It I was a nothingness; and if that were true, a being pushed into limbo would be an existence within a non-existence. There would be nothing—not space nor time, nor light, nor air. No color and no vision; just a never-ending nothing, that must lie at some point outside the universe.
He cried inside himself, Mary, what have I done to you!
And the answer lay there, hard and naked.
He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. The fact of the matter was that he had understood enough to make the concept work, but not enough to know its consequences.
With creation went responsibility. He was not equipped to assume responsibility for what he had done.
They hated him and resented him. He did not blame them. He’d led them out and shown them the promised land of humanity—and then had led them back. He had given them everything that a human being had with one exception: the ability to exist within the human world.
They all hated him but Mary, and for Mary it was worse than hate. For she was condemned to love the monster who had created her.
Hate me, Mary! he pleaded. Hate me like the others!
HE HAD thought of them as shadow people, but the label had been wrong. They were neither shadowy or ghost-like. To the eyes they were solid and substantial, as real as any people. It was only when you tried to touch them that they were not real—for when you tried to touch them, there was nothing there.
A figment of his mind, he’d thought at first, but now he was not sure. At first they’d come only when he’d called them up, using the knowledge and the techniques that he had acquired in his study of work done by the thaumaturgists of Alphard XXII. But in recent years he had not called them up. There had been no occasion to. They anticipated him, and came.
David Ransome was himself, as he had dreamed himself to be, as he had wished himself to be—but, of course, as he had never been. He was the dashing Union officer, of not so high a rank as to be stiff and stodgy, but a fair cut above the man of ordinary standing. He was trim and debonair and definitely dare-devilish, loved by all the women, admired by all the men. He was a born leader and a good fellow all at once, at home alike in the field or drawing room.
And Mary? Funny, he thought, he had never called her anything but Mary. There had never been a surname. She had been simply Mary.
And she was at least two women, if not more than that. She was Sally Brown, who once had lived just down the road—and how long had it been, he wondered, since he’d thought of Sally Brown? And she was as well a tall, stately daughter of the South, the woman he had seen for a few moments only as he marched a dusty road in the hot Virginia sun. There had been a mansion, one of those great plantation houses, set back from the road, and she had been standing on the portico, beside one of the great white pillars, watching the enemy march past. Her hair was black and her complexion whiter than the pillar and she had stood so straight and proud, so defiant and imperious that he had remembered her and thought of her, dreamed of her—although he never spoke to her or knew her name.
So Mary had been both of these—Sally Brown and the unknown Virginia belle standing by the pillar to watch the troops march by—the shadow of them and perhaps of many others as yet unrealized by him, a composite of all he had ever known or seen or admired in women. She had been an ideal and perfection. She had been his perfect woman, created in his mind. And now, like Sally Brown, resting in her grave; like the Virginia belle, lost in the mists of time; like all the others who may have contributed to his molding of her, she was gone from him.
If he only could be sure, he thought, of where she might be now. If he only could be certain that she was in a semblance of death and untortured by her thoughts.
To believe that she was sentient was more than one could bear.
HE HEARD the hooting of the whistle that said a message waited and he took his head out of his hands. But he did not get up off the sofa.
Numbly his hand reached out to the coffee table that stood before the sofa, its top covered with some of the more colorful of the geegaws and gimcracks that had been left as gifts by travelers.
He picked up a cube of something that might have been some strange sort of glass or translucent stone—he had never been able to decide which it was, if either—and cupped it in his hands. Staring into it, he saw a tiny picture, three dimensional and detailed, of a faery world. It was a prettily grotesque place, set inside what might have been a forest glade, surrounded by what appeared to be flowering toadstools. Drifting down through the air, as if it might have been a part of the air itself, came what looked for all the world like a shower of jeweled snow, sparkling and glinting in the violet light of a great blue sun.
There were things dancing in the glade. They looked more like flowers than animals, but they moved with a grace and poetry that fired one’s blood to watch. Then the faery place was wiped out and there was another place—a wild and dismal place, with grim, gaunt, beetling cliffs rearing high against a red and angry sky, while great flying things that looked like flapping dishrags beat their way up and down the cliffs, and there were others of them roosting, most obscenely, upon the scraggly projections that must have been some sort of misshapen trees growing from the very wall of rock. And from far below, from some distance that one could only guess, came the lonesome thundering of a rushing river.
He put the cube back upon the table.
He wondered what it was that one saw within its depths. It was like turning the pages of a book, with each page a picture of a different place, but never anything to tell where that place might be. When he first had been given it, he had spent fascinated hours, watching the pictures change as he held it in his hands. There had never been a picture that looked even faintly like any other picture and there was no end to them. One got the feeling that these were not pictures, actually, but that one were looking at the scene itself and that at any moment one might lose his perch upon wherever he was roosting and plunge head-first down into the place itself.
But it had finally palled upon him. It was a senseless business, gawking at a long series of places that had no identity. Senseless to him, of course, he thought; but not senseless, certainly, to that native of Enif V who had given it to him. It might, for all he knew, Enoch told himself, be of great significance and a treasure of great value.
That was the way it was with so many of the things he had. Even the ones that had given pleasure, he knew, he might be using wrongly, or, at least, in a way that had not been intended.
BUT THERE were some—a few, perhaps—that did have a value he could understand and appreciate, although in many instances their functions were of little use to him. There was the tiny clock that gave the local times for all the sectors of the galaxy. There was the perfume mixer—which was as close as he could come in naming it—which allowed a person to create the specific scent desired. Just get the mixture that one wanted and turn it on, and the room took on that scent until one should turn it off. He’d had some fun with it; one bitter winter day when, after long experimenting, he had achieved the scent of apple blossoms, and had lived a day in spring while a blizzard howled outside.
He reached out and picked up another piece—a beautiful thing that always had intrigued him, but for which he had never found a use. If, indeed, it had a use. It might be no more than a piece of art, a pretty thing that was meant to look at only. But it had a certain feel (if that were the word) which had led him to believe that it might have some specific function.
It was a pyramid of spheres, succeeding smaller spheres set on larger spheres. Some fourteen inches tall, it was a graceful piece, with each of the spheres a different color. Not just a color painted on; each color so deep and true that one knew instinctively the color was intrinsic to each sphere, that the entire sphere, from the center of it out to the surface, was all of its particular color.
There was nothing to indicate that any glue-like medium had been used to m
ount the spheres and hold them in their places. It looked for all the world as if someone had simply piled the spheres, one atop the other . . . and they had stayed that way.
Holding it in his hands, he tried to recall who had given it to him, but he had no memory of it.
The whistle of the message machine still was calling and there was work to do. He could not sit here, he told himself, mooning the afternoon away. He put the pyramid of spheres back on the table top, and rising, went across the room.
The message said: NO. 406,302 TO STATION 18327. NATIVE OF VEGA XXI ARRIVING AT 16532.82. DEPARTURE INDETERMINATE. NO LUGGAGE. CABINET ONLY, LOCAL CONDITIONS. CONFIRM.
Enoch felt a glow of happiness, looking at the message. It would be good to have a Hazer once again. It had been a month or more since one had passed through the station.
He could remember back to that first day he had ever met a Hazer, when the five of them had come. It must have been, he thought, back in 1914 or, maybe, 1915. World War I, which everyone then was calling the Great War, was underway, he knew.
The Hazer would be arriving at about the same time as Ulysses and the three of them could spend a pleasant evening. It was not often that two good friends visited here at once.
He stood a bit aghast at thinking of the Hazer as a friend, for more than likely the being itself was one he had never met. But that made little difference. A Hazer, any Hazer, would turn out to be a friend.
He got the cabinet in position beneath a materializer unit and double-checked to be sure that everything was exactly as it should be, then went back to the message machine and sent off the confirmation.
And all the time his memory kept on nagging at him. Had it been 1914, or perhaps a little later?
At the catalogue cabinet, he pulled out a drawer and found Vega XXI and the first date listed was July 12, 1915. He found the record book on the shelf and pulled it out and brought it to the desk. He leafed through it rapidly until he found the date.
The Complete Serials Page 91
