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of the things about him was that he must have looked up at the stars and wondered what they were.”
    “Yes,” said Enoch, “that is something I have done. On many nights, camping in the field, I have lain in my blankets and looked up at the sky, looking at the stars and wondering what they were and how they’d been put up there and, most important of all, why they had been put up there. I have heard some say that each of them is another sun like the sun that shines on
    Earth, but I don’t know about that. I guess there is no one who knows too much about them.”
    “There are some,” the stranger said, “who know a deal about them.”
    “You, perhaps,” said Enoch, mocking just a little, for the stranger did not look like a man who’d know much of anything.
    “Yes, I,” the stranger said. “Although I do not know as much as many others do.”
    “I’ve sometimes wondered,” Enoch said, “if the stars are other suns, might there not be other planets and other people, too.”
    He remembered sitting around the campfire of a night, jawing with the file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt (13 of 103) [1/19/03 4:01:51 PM]
     
    file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Waystation.txt other fellows to pass away the time. And once he’d mentioned this idea of maybe other people on other planets circling other suns and the fellows all had jeered him and for days afterward had made fun of him, so he had never mentioned it again. Not that it mattered much, for he had no real belief in it himself; it had never been more than campfire speculation.
    And now he’d mentioned it again and to an utter stranger. He wondered why he had.
    “You believe that?” asked the stranger.
    Enoch said, “It was just an idle notion.”
    “Not so idle,” said the stranger. “There are other planets and there are other people. I am one of them.”
    “But you …” cried Enoch, then was stricken into silence.
    For the stranger’s face had split and began to fall away and beneath it he caught the glimpse of another face that was not a human face.
    And even as the false human face sloughed off that other face, a great sheet of lightning went crackling across the sky and the heavy crash of thunder seemed to shake the land and from far off he heard the rushing rain as it charged across the hills.

7
    That was how it started, Enoch thought, almost a hundred years ago. The campfire fantasy had turned into fact and the Earth now was on galactic charts, a way station for many different peoples traveling star to star.
    Strangers once, but now there were no strangers. There were no such things as strangers. In whatever form, with whatever purpose, all of them were people.
    He looked back at the entry for October 16, 1931, and ran through it swiftly. There, near the end of it was the sentence:
    Ulysses says the Thubans from planet VI are perhaps the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy. They have developed, it seems, a numeration system superior to any in existence, especially valuable in the handling of statistics.
    He closed the book and sat quietly in the chair, wondering if the statisticians of Mizar X knew of the Thubans’ work. Perhaps they did, he thought, for certainly some of the math they used was unconventional.
    He pushed the record book to one side and dug into a desk drawer, bringing out his chart. He spread it flat on the desk before him and puzzled over it. If he could be sure, he thought. If he only knew the Mizar statistics better. For the last ten years or more he had labored at the chart, checking and rechecking all the factors against the Mizar system, testing again and again to determine whether the factors he was using were the ones he should be using.
    He raised a clenched fist and hammered at the desk. If he only could be certain. If he could only talk with someone. But that had been something that he had shrank from doing, for it would be equivalent to showing the very