Way Station by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online Page A

she was accustomed and knew how to get along in. In that world she was no cripple, as she most surely would have been a cripple if she had been pushed, part way, into the normal human world.
    What good to her the hand alphabet or the reading of the lips if they should take from her some strange inner serenity of spirit?
    She was a creature of the woods and hills, of springtime flower and autumn flight of birds. She knew these things and lived with them and was, in some strange way, a specific part of them. She was one who dwelt apart in an old and lost apartment of the natural world. She occupied a place that
    Man long since had abandoned, if, in fact, he’d ever held it.
    And there she sat, with the wild red and gold of the butterfly poised upon her finger, with the sense of alertness and expectancy and, perhaps, accomplishment shining on her face. She was alive, thought Enoch, as no other thing he knew had ever been alive.
    The butterfly spread its wings and floated off her finger and went fluttering, unconcerned, unfrightened, up across the wild grass and the goldenrod of the field.
    She pivoted to watch it until it disappeared near the top of the hill up which the old field climbed, then she turned to Enoch. She smiled and made a fluttery motion with her hands, like the fluttering of the red and golden wings, but there was something else in it, as well-a sense of happiness and an expression of well-being, as if she might be saying that the world was going fine.
    If, Enoch thought, I could only teach her the pasimology of my galactic people-then we could talk, the two of us, almost as well as with the flow of words on the human tongue. Given the time, he thought, it might not be too hard, for there was a natural and a logical process to the galactic sign language that made it almost instinctive once one had caught the underlying principle.
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    Throughout the Earth as well, in the early days; there had been sign languages, and none so well developed as that one which obtained among the aborigines of North America, so that an Amerindian, no matter what his tongue, could express himself among many other tribes.
    But even so the sign language of the Indian was, at best, a crutch that allowed a man to hobble when he couldn’t run. Whereas that of the galaxy was in itself a language, adaptable to many different means and methods of expression. It had been developed through millennia, with many different peoples making contributions, and through the centuries it had been refined and shaken down and polished until today it was a communications tool that stood on its own merits.
    There was need for such a tool, for the galaxy was Babel. Even the galactic science of pasimology, polished as it might be, could not surmount all the obstacles, could not guarantee, in certain cases, the basic minimum of communication. For not only were there millions of tongues, but those other languages as well which could not operate on the principle of sound because the races were incapable of sound. And even sound itself failed of efficiency when the race talked in ultrasonics others could not hear. There was telepathy, of course, but for every telepath there were a thousand races that had telepathic blocks. There were many who got along on sign languages alone and others who could communicate only by a written or pictographic system, including some who carried chemical blackboards built into their bodies. And there was that sightless, deaf, and speechless race from the mystery stars of the far side of the galaxy who used what was perhaps the most complicated of all the galactic languages-a code of signals routed along their nervous systems.
    Enoch had been at the job almost a century, and even so, he thought, with the aid of the universal sign language and the semantic