"His name is Enoch Wallace. Chronologically, he is one hundred and twenty-four years old. He was born on a farm a few miles from the town of Millville in Wisconsin, April 22, 1840, and he is the only child of Jedediah and Amanda Wallace. He enlisted among the first of them when Abe Lincoln called for volunteers. He was with the Iron Brigade, which was virtually wiped out at Gettysburg in 1863.”
Claude Lewis is an intelligence agent working for the United States who has stumbled across a seemingly impossible situation. This fellow Enoch Wallace has apparently been around more than a century, but looks like a young man. Somehow or another he has managed to live in the same Wisconsin home on a backwoods farm without aging while his neighbors have come and gone without his becoming either famous or infamous. What’s the deal here? This quote appears very early on the story, setting up what passes for the central conflict in what is really a rather conflict-light story. The reader does not need to wait long for the answer to what is going on. As for Claude Lewis’ wait, however, well, that’s something entirely different.
Funny about Ulysses, he thought. They had liked each other from the very first, from that afternoon of the thunderstorm when they had been sitting on the steps and the mask of human form had peeled off the alien's face. It had been a grisly face, graceless and repulsive. The face, Enoch had thought, of a cruel clown.
Ulysses is the one alien who continually passes through the way station with whom Enoch develops a close relationship. His name is not actually Ulysses; in fact, he has no name because his species have no use for names. Enoch gives him the name Ulysses because it means leader of men and he views the strange alien as a being who, were he a human, would be just that. It is also clear that across the vast expanse of the universe there is just one positive thing about earth which stands out from all the rest: the invention of hot coffee.
One was tempted to say that this was as far as a tool could go, that it was the ultimate in the ingenuity possessed by any brain. But that would be a dangerous way of thinking, for perhaps there was no limit, there might, quite likely, be no such condition as the ultimate; there might be no time when any creature or any group of creatures could stop at any certain point and say, this is as far as we can go, there is no use of trying to go farther.
The novel is slotted into the genre of science fiction, but it belongs to the thinner edges of the extremity of that broad generic classification. It does not feature a showdown between an alien enemy race looking at earth for the purpose of conquest. This is an example of the more philosophical and contemplative sort of science fiction that is dependent upon the act of thinking rather than action. Some may find it slow-going or without enough excitement, but those looking for a novel existing in the action of ideas, it will make for a satisfying reading experience.
