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night.
    But the endurance was of the spirit and the mind, for nothing else endured. There was no kitchen now, nor any sitting room with its old-fashioned sofa and the rocking chair; no back parlor with its stuffy elegance of brocade and silk, no guest bedroom on the first and no family bedrooms on the second floor.
    It all was gone and now one room remained. The second-story floor and all partitions had been stripped away. Now the house was one great room. One side of it was the galactic station and the other side the living space for the keeper of the station. There was a bed over in one corner and a stove that worked on no principle known on Earth and a refrigerator that was of alien make. The walls were lined with cabinets and shelves, stacked with magazines and books and journals.
    There was just one thing left from the early days, the one thing Enoch had not allowed the alien crew that had set up the station to strip away-the massive old fireplace of brick and native stone that had stood against one wall of the sitting room. It still stood there, the one reminder of the days of old, the one thing left of Earth, with its great, scarred oak mantel that his father had carved out with a broadax from a massive log and had smoothed by hand with plane and draw-shave.
    On the fireplace mantel and strewn on shelf and table were articles and file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (15 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]
     
    file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt artifacts that had no earthly origin and some no earthly names-the steady accumulation through the years of the gifts from friendly travelers.
    Some of them were functional and others were to look at only, and there were other things that were entirely useless because they had little application to a member of the human race or were inoperable on Earth, and many others of the purpose of which he had no idea, accepting them, embarrassed, with many stumbling thanks, from the well-meaning folks who had brought them to him.
    And on the other side of the room stood the intricate mass of machinery, reaching well up into the open second story, that wafted passengers through the space that stretched from star to star.
    An inn, he thought, a stopping place, a galactic crossroads.
    He rolled up the chart and put it back into the desk. The record book he put away in its proper place among all the other record books upon the shelf.
    He glanced at the galactic clock upon the wall and it was time to go.
    He pushed the chair tight against the desk and shrugged into the jacket that hung upon the chair back. He picked the rifle off the supports that held it on the wall and then he faced the wall itself and said the single word that he had to say. The wall slid back silently and he stepped through it into the little shed with its sparse furnishings. Behind him the section of the wall slid back and there was nothing there to indicate it was anything but a solid wall.
    Enoch stepped out of the shed and it was a beautiful late summer day.
    In a few weeks now, he thought, there’d be the signs of autumn and a strange chill in the air. The first goldenrods were blooming now and he’d noticed, just the day before, that some of the early asters down in the ancient fence row had started to show color.
    He went around the corner of the house and headed toward the river, striding down the long deserted field that was overrun with hazel brush and occasional clumps of trees.
    This was the Earth, he thought-a planet made for Man. But not for Man alone, for it was as well a planet for the fox and owl and weasel, for the snake, the katydid, the fish, for all the other teeming life that filled the air and earth and water. And not these natives alone, but for other beings that called other earths their home, other planets that far light-years distant were basically the same as Earth. For Ulysses and the Hazers and all the rest of them who could