“But I have those cards,” said Maxwell quietly. “Right here in my pocket.”
Preston stared at him. “Yes, come to think of it, I suppose you have. Oh Lord, what a mess!”
He got up and walked across the room, shaking his head. At the wall, he turned around and came back. He sat down again.
“Let me think about it,” he said. “Give me a little time. I can dig up something. We have to dig up something. And there’s a lot to do. There’s the matter of your will…”
“My will? I’d forgot about the will. Never thought of it.”
“It’s in probate. But I can get a stay of some sort.”
“I willed everything to my brother, who’s with the Exploratory Service. I could get in touch with him, although it might be quite a chore. He’s usually out with the fleet. But the point is that there’ll be no trouble there. As soon as he knows what happened…”
“Not with him,” said Preston, “but the court’s a different, matter. It can be done, of course, but it may take time. Until it’s cleared, you’ll have no claim to your estate. You own nothing except the clothes you stand in and what is in your pockets.”
“The university offered me a post on Gothic IV. Dean of a research unit. But at the moment, I’m not about to take it.”
“How are you fixed for cash?”
“I’m all right. For the present. Oop took me in and I have some money. If I had to, I could pick up some sort of job. Harlow Sharp would help me out if I needed something. Go on one of his field trips, if nothing else. I think I might like that.”
“But don’t you have to have some sort of Time degree?”
“Not if you go as a working member of the expedition. To hold a supervisory post of some sort, it would take one, I suppose.”
“Before I start moving,” Preston said, “I’ll have to know the details. Everything that happened.”
“I’ll write out a statement for you. Have it notarized. Anything you want.”
“Seems to me,” said Preston, “we might file action against Transportation. They put you in this mess.”
Maxwell hedged. “Not right now,” he said. “We can think of it later on.”
“You get that statement put together,” Preston told him. “And in the meantime, I’ll do some thinking and look up some law. Then we can make a start. Have you seen the papers or looked at television?”
Maxwell shook his head. “I haven’t had the time.”
“They’re going wild,” said Preston. “It’s a wonder they haven’t cornered you. They must be looking for you. All they have as yet is conjecture. You were seen last night at the Pig and Whistle. A lot of people apparently spotted you there last night, or thought they did. The line right now is that you’ve come back from the dead. If I were you, I’d keep out of their way. If they should catch up with you, tell them absolutely nothing.”
“I have no intention to,” said Maxwell.
They sat in the quiet office, looking silently at one another.”
“What a mess!” said Preston, finally. “What a lovely mess! I believe, Pete, I might just enjoy this.”
“By the way,” said Maxwell, “Nancy Clayton invited me to a party tonight. I’ve been wondering if there might be some connection-although there needn’t be. Nancy used to invite me on occasion.”
Preston grinned. “Why, you’re a celebrity. You’d be quite a catch for Nancy.”
“I’m not too sure of that,” said Maxwell. “She must have heard I had shown up. She’d be curious, of course.”
“Yes,” said Preston dryly, “she would be curious.”
Maxwell expected that he might find newsmen lying in wait for him at Oop’s shack, but there was no one there. Apparently the word hadn’t spread that he was staying there.
The shack stood in the drowsiness of late afternoon, with the autumn sunlight pouring like molten gold over the weatherbeaten lumber scraps of which it had been built. A few bees buzzed lazily in a bed of asters that grew outside the door, and down the stretch of hillside above the roadway a few yellow butterflies drifted in the hazy afternoon.
Maxwell opened the door and stuck in his head. There was no one there. Oop was off prowling somewhere and there was no sign of Ghost. A banked fire glowed redly in the fireplace. Maxwell shut the door and sat down on the bench that stood before the shack.
Far to the west one of the campus four lakes shone as a thin blue lens. The countryside was painted brown and yellow by dead sedges and dying grasses. Here and there little islands of color flared in scattered groups of trees.
Warm and soft, thought Maxwell. A land that one could dream in. Unlike those violent, gloomy landscapes that Lambert had painted so many years ago.
He sat wondering why those landscapes should stick so tightly, like a bur against his mind. Wondering, too, how the artist could have known how the ghostly inhabitants of the crystal planet flickered. It could not be merely happenstance; it was not the sort of thing a man might readily imagine. Reason said that Lambert must have known about those ghostly people, reason just as plainly said it was impossible.
And what about all those other creatures, all those other grotesque monstrosities Lambert had spread with an insane, vicious brush across the canvasses? Where did they fit in? Where might they have come from? Or were they simply mad figments of imagination, torn raw and bleeding from a strangely tortured mind? Were the people of the crystal planet the only authentic creatures Lambert had depicted? It did not seem too likely. Somewhere or other, somehow or other, Lambert must have seen these other creatures, too. And was the landscape pure imagination, brushed in to maintain the mood established by the creatures, or might it have been the landscape of the crystal planet at some other time, before it had been fixed forever in the floor and roof that shut it in against the universe? But that, he told himself, was impossible, for the planet had been enclosed before the present universe was born. Ten billion years at least, perhaps as much as fifty billion.
Maxwell stirred uneasily. It made no sense at all. None of it made any sort of sense. He had trouble enough, he told himself, without worrying about Lambert’s paintings. He had lost his job, his estate was locked in probate, be didn’t have a legal standing as a human being.
But none of that mattered too much, not right now, anyhow. First came the matter of the hoard of knowledge on the crystal planet. It was a knowledge the university must have-a body of knowledge that most certainly was greater than the total of all knowledge in the known galaxy. Some of it would duplicate what was already known, of course, but there would be, he was certain, other huge areas of understanding which were yet unthought of. The little that he had had the time to see bolstered that belief.
Once again, it seemed, he was hunkered down before the table, almost like a coffee table, on which he’d piled the metal sheets he had taken from the shelves, and with the contraption that was a reader, an interpreter, call it what one might, fastened to his head.
There had been the sheet of metal that talked about the mind, not in metaphysical or philosophic terms, but as a mechanism, employing terms and concepts that he could not grasp. He had struggled with the terminology, he remembered, for he knew that here was a treatise on an area of understanding no one yet had touched, but after a time had put it to one side, for it was beyond him. And there was that other piece of metal, that other book, which appeared to be a basic text on the application of certain mathematical principles to the social sciences, although some of the social sciences that were mentioned he could only guess at, groping after the concepts as a blind man might grope after flitting butterflies. There had been histories, he recalled, not of one universe, but two, and natural history which had told of life forms so fantastic in their basic principles and their functions that they seemed unbelievable, and a very thin sheet of metal, so thin it bent and twisted, like a sheet of paper, when he handled it, that had been so far beyond his understanding that he could not quite be sure what it was about. And a thicker piece of metal, a much thicker piece, wherein he read the thoughts and philosophies of creatures and of cultures long since gone to dust that had sent him reeling back, frightened, disgusted, outraged and dismayed, but still full of a fearful wonder, at the utter inhumanity expressed m those philosophies.
All that and more, much more, a trillion times more, was waiting out there on the crystal planet.
It was important, he reminded himself, that he carry out the assignment that he had been given. It was vital that the library of the crystal planet be attained and, probably, although no time limit had been placed, that it be done quickly. For if he failed there was, he felt sure, a good possibility that the planet would go elsewhere to seek another market, to offer what it had, out into another sector of the galaxy, perhaps out of the galaxy entirely.
The Artifact, he told himself, could be the price, although he could not be sure of that. The fact that an offer had been made for it, and that Churchill somehow was involved in it, made that seem reasonable. But at the moment he could not be sure. The Artifact might be wanted by someone for some other purpose, perhaps by someone who might finally have figured out exactly what it was. He tried to imagine exactly what they might have found, but he had no facts to go on, and he failed.
A flight of blackbirds came swirling down out of the sky, skimming just above the roof of the shack, sailing over the roadway. Maxwell watched them settle into the dying vegetation of a stretch of marsh, balancing their bodies delicately on the bending stems of rank-growing weeds, come there to feed for an hour or so before flying off to roost in some secluded woodland they had picked as a bivouac on their migration southward.
Maxwell got up and stretched. The peace and the quiet of the tawny afternoon had soaked into his body. He’d like a nap, he thought. After a time Oop would come back home and wake him and they’d have something to eat and talk for a while before he went off to Nancy ’s.
He opened the door and went into the shack, crossing the floor to sit upon the bed. Maybe, he thought, he ought to see if he still had a clean shirt and an extra pair of socks to don before the party. He reached out and hauled his bag off the floor and dumped it on the bed.
Opening the catches, he threw back the lid and took out a pair of trousers to get at the shirts that were packed beneath them. The shirts were there and so was something else, a contraption with a headband and two eyepieces folded up against it.
He stared at it in wonder, recognizing it. It was the translator which he had used on the crystal planet to read the metal tablets. He lifted it out and let it dangle in his hand. Here was the band to clamp around the head, with the power pack in the back, and the two eyepieces one flipped down into position once the device was fastened on the head.
He must have packed it by mistake, he thought, although be could not, for the life of him, remember packing it. But there it was and perhaps no harm was done. It might even be used at some future time to help substantiate his claim he had been on the planet. Although, he realized, it was not good evidence. It was just a gadget that had an ordinary look about it, although it might not, he reminded himself, seem so ordinary if someone poked around in the mechanism of it.
A light tapping came from somewhere and Maxwell, surprised by so small a noise, stiffened and held himself rigid, listening. Perhaps a windblown branch, he thought, tapping on the roof, although it had a slightly different sound than a branch against the roof.
The tapping stopped and then began again, this time not a steady rapping, but rather like a code. Three quick taps and then a pause, followed by two rapid taps and then another pause, with the pattern of the tapping repeated once again.