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no name at all. Among his people there was no need of names; there was other identifying terminology which was far more expressive than mere names. But this terminology, even the very concept of it, was such that it could not be grasped, much less put to use, by human beings.
    “I shall call you Ulysses,” Enoch recalled telling him, the first time they had met. “I need to call you something.”
    “It is agreeable,” said the then strange being (but no longer strange).
    “Might one ask why the name Ulysses?”
    “Because it is the name of a great man of my race.”
    “I am glad you chose it,” said the newly christened being. “To my hearing it has a dignified and noble sound and, between the two of us, I
    shall be glad to bear it. And I shall call you Enoch, for the two of us shall work together for many of your years.”
    And it had been many years, thought Enoch, with the record book open to that October entry of more than thirty years ago. Years that had been satisfying and enriching in a way that one could not have imagined until it had all been laid out before him.
    And it would go on, he thought, much longer than it already had gone on-for many centuries more, for a thousand years, perhaps. And at the end of file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (11 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]
     
    file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt that thousand years, what would he know then?
    Although, perhaps, he thought, the knowing was not the most important part of it.
    And none of it, he knew, might come to pass, for there was interference now. There were watchers, or at least a watcher, and before too long whoever it might be might start closing in. What he’d do or how he’d meet the threat, he had no idea until that moment came. It was something that had been almost bound to happen. It was something he had been prepared to have happen all these years. There was some reason to wonder, he knew, that it had not happened sooner.
    He had told Ulysses of the danger of it that first day they’d met. He’d been sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, and thinking of it now, he could remember it as clearly as if it had been only yesterday.

6
    He was sitting on the steps and it was late afternoon. He was watching the great white thunderheads that were piling up across the river beyond the
    Iowa hills. The day was hot and sultry and there was not a breath of moving air. Out in the barnyard a half a dozen bedraggled chickens scratched listlessly, for the sake, it seemed, of going through the motions rather than from any hope of finding food. The sound of the sparrows’ wings, as they flew between the gable of the barn and the hedge of honeysuckle that bordered the field beyond the road, was a harsh, dry sound, as if the feathers of their wings had grown stiff with heat.
    And here he sat, he thought, staring at the thunderheads when there was work to do-corn to be plowed and hay to be gotten in and wheat to reap and shock.
    For despite whatever might have happened, a man still had a life to live, days to be gotten through the best that one could manage. It was a lesson, he reminded himself, that he should have learned in all its fullness in the last few years. But war, somehow, was different from what had happened here. In war you knew it and expected it and were ready when it happened, but this was not the war. This was the peace to which he had returned. A man had a right to expect that in the world of peace there really would be peace fencing out the violence and the horror.
    Now he was alone, as he’d never been alone before. Now, if ever, could be a new beginning; now, perhaps, there had to be a new beginning. But whether it was here, on the homestead acres, or in some other place, it still would be a beginning of bitterness and anguish.
    He sat on the steps, with his wrists resting on his knees, and watched the thunderheads piling in the west. It might