Free Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

said. “Of all the drinks that I have drank on all the planets I have visited, the coffee is the best.”
    They went into-the kitchen and Enoch stirred up the coals in the kitchen range and then put in new wood. He took the coffeepot over to the sink and ladled in some water from the water pail and put it on to boil. He went into the pantry to get some eggs and down into the cellar to bring up the ham.
    Ulysses sat stiffly in a kitchen chair and watched him as he worked.
    “You eat ham and eggs?” asked Enoch.
    “I eat anything,” Ulysses said. “My race is most adaptable. That is the reason I was sent to this planet as a-what do you call it?-a looker-out, perhaps.”
    “A scout,” suggested Enoch.
    “That is it, a scout.”
    He was an easy thing to talk with, Enoch told himself-almost like another person, although, God knows, he looked little like a person. He looked, instead, like some outrageous caricature of a human being.
    “You have lived here, in this house,” Ulysses said, “for a long, long time. You feel affection for it.”
    “It has been my home,” said Enoch, “since the day that I was born. I
    was gone from it for almost four years, but it was always home.”
    “I’ll be glad,” Ulysses told him, “to be getting home again myself.
    I’ve been away too long. On a mission such as this one, it always is too long.”
    Enoch put down the knife he had been using to cut a slice of ham and sat down heavily in a chair. He stared at Ulysses, across the table from him.
    “You?” he asked. “You are going home?”
    “Why, of course,” Ulysses told him. “Now that my job is nearly done. I
    have got a home. Did you think I hadn’t?”
    “I don’t know,” said Enoch weakly. “I had never thought of it.”
    And that was it, he knew. It had not occurred to him to connect a being such as this with a thing like home. For it was only human beings that had a file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (26 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]
     
    file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt place called home.
    “Some day,” Ulysses said, “I shall tell you about my home. Some day you may even visit me.”
    “Out among the stars,” said Enoch.
    “It seems strange to you now,” Ulysses said. “It will take a while to get used to the idea. But as you come to know us-all of us-you will understand. And I hope you like us. We are not bad people, really. Not any of the many different kinds of us.”
    The stars, Enoch told himself, were out there in the loneliness of space and how far they were he could not even guess, nor what they were nor why. Another world, he thought-no, that was wrong-many other worlds. There were people there, perhaps many other people; a different kind of people, probably, for every different star. And one of them sat here in this very kitchen, waiting for the coffeepot to boil, for the ham and eggs to fry.
    “But why?” he asked. “But why?”
    “Because,” Ulysses said, “we are a traveling people. We need a travel station here. We want to turn this house into a station and you to keep the station.”
    “This house?”
    “We could not build a station, for then we’d have people asking who was building it and what it might be for. So we are forced to use an existing structure and change it for our needs. But inside only. We leave the outside as it is, in appearance, that is. For there must be no questions asked.
    There must be …”
    “But traveling …”
    “From star to star,” Ulysses said. “Quicker than the thought of it.
    Faster than a wink. There is what you would call machinery, but it is not machinery-not the same as the machinery you think of.”
    “You must excuse me,” Enoch said, confused. “It seems so impossible.”
    “You remember when the railroad came to Millville?”
    “Yes, I can remember that. I was just a kid.”
    “Then think of it this way. This is just another railroad and the Earth is