Oop shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not this time. Primal necessity—no, I guess that’s not the phrase. When a man is hungry he has a right to food anywhere he finds it. That was the law back in prehistoric days. I imagine you still might make a case of it in a court of law. Besides, tomorrow I’ll go back and explain what happened. By the way,” he said to Maxwell, “have you any money?”
“I’m loaded,” Maxwell told him. “I carried expense money for the Coonskin trip and I never spent a cent of it.”
“On this other planet you were a guest,” said Carol.
“I suppose I was,” said Maxwell. “I never did figure out our exact relationship.”
“They were nice people?”
“Well. Yes, nice—but people, I don’t know.”
He turned to Oop. “How much will you need?”
“I figure a hundred ought to settle it. There is the meat and the busted door, not to mention the bruised feelings of our friend, the butcher.”
Maxwell took his billfold from his pocket and, counting out some bills, handed them to Oop.
“Thanks,” said Oop. “Some day I’ll pay you back.”
“No,” said Maxwell. “The party is on me. I started out to take Carol to dinner, and things got somewhat upset.”
On the hearth, Sylvester stretched and yawned, then went back to sleep, lying on his back now, with his legs sticking in the air.
Ghost asked, “You’re on a visit here, Miss Hampton?”
“No,” said Carol, surprised. “I work here. What gave you that idea?”
“The tiger,” said Ghost. “A bio-mech, you said. I thought, naturally, you were with Biomech.”
“I see,” said Carol. “Vienna or New York.”
“There is a center also,” said Ghost, “somewhere in Asia. Ulan Bator, if my memory is correct.”
“You’ve been there?”
“No,” said Ghost. “I only heard of it.”
“But he could,” said Oop. “He can go anywhere. In the blinking of an eyelash. That’s why the folks at Supernatural continue to put up with him. They hope that some day they can come up with whatever he has got. But Old Ghost is cagey. He’s not telling them.”
“The real reason for his silence,” said Maxwell, “is that he’s on Transport payroll. It’s worth their while to keep him quiet. If he revealed his traveling techniques, Transport would go broke. No more need of them. People just up and go anywhere they wished, on their own—a mile or a million light-years.”
“And he’s the soul of tact,” said Oop. “What he was getting at back there was that unless you are in Bio-mech and can cook Up something for yourself, it costs money to have something like that saber-toother.”
“Oh, I see,” said Carol. “I guess there’s truth in that. They do cost a lot of money. But I haven’t got that kind of money. My father, before he retired, was in Bio-mech. New York. Sylvester was a joint project of a seminar he headed. The students gave him to my Dad.”
“I still don’t believe,” said Oop, “that cat’s a bio-mech. He’s got that dirty glitter in his eyes when he looks at me.”
“As a matter of fact,” Carol told him, “there is a lot more bio than mech in all of them today. The name originated when what amounted to a highly sophisticated electronic brain and nervous system was housed in specific protoplasms. But today about the only mechanical things about them are those organs that are likely to wear out if they were made of tissue. The heart, the kidneys, the lungs, things like that. What is being done at Biomech today is the actual creations of specific life forms—but you all know that, of course.”
“There are some strange stories,” Maxwell said. “A group of supermen, kept under lock and key. You have heard of that?”
“Yes, heard of it,” she said. “There are always rumors.”
“The best one that I’ve heard in recent days,” said Oop, “really is a lulu. Someone told me Supernatural has made contact with the Devil. How about that, Pete?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Maxwell. “I suppose someone has tried. I’m almost sure someone must have tried. It’s such an obvious thing for one to have a go at.”
“You mean,” asked Carol, “that there might really be a Devil?”
“Two centuries ago,” said Maxwell, “people asked, in exactly the same tone of voice you are now, if there actually were such things as trolls and goblins.”
“And ghosts,” said Ghost.
“You’re serious!” Carol cried.
“Not serious,” said Maxwell. “Just not ready to foreclose even on the Devil.”
“This is a marvelous age,” declared Oop, “as I am sure you’ve heard me indicate before. You’ve done away with superstition and old wives’ tales. You search in them for truth. But my people knew there were trolls and goblins and all the rest of them. The stories of them, you understand, were always based on fact. Except that later on, when he outgrew his savage simplicity, if you can call it that, man denied the fact; could not allow himself to believe these things that he knew were true. So he varnished them over and hid them safe away in the legend and the myth and when the human population kept on increasing, these creatures went into deep hiding. As well they might have, for there was a time when they were not the engaging creatures you seem to think they are today.”
Ghost asked: “And the Devil?”
“I’m not sure,” said Oop. “Maybe. But I can’t be sure. There were all these things you have lured out and rediscovered and sent to live on their reservations. But there were many more. Some fearful, all a nuisance.”
“You don’t seem to have liked them very well,” Carol observed.
“Miss,” said Oop, “I didn’t. I hated the little bastards’ guts.”
“It would seem to me,” said Ghost, “that this would be a fertile field for some Time investigation. Apparently there were many different kinds of these—would you call them primates?”
“I think you might,” said Maxwell.
“Primates of a different stripe than the apes and man.”
“Of a very different stripe,” said Oop. “Vicious little stinkers.”
“Some day, I’m sure,” said Carol, “Time will get around to it. They know it, of course?”
“They should,” said Oop. “I’ve told them often enough, with appropriate description.”
“Time has too much to do,” Maxwell reminded them. “Too many areas of interest. And the entire past to cover.”
“And no money to do it with,” said Carol.
“There,” declared Maxwell, “speaks a loyal Time staff member.”
“But it’s true,” she cried. “The other disciplines could learn so much by time investigation. You can’t rely on written history. It turns out, in many cases, to be different than it actually was. A matter of emphasis or bias or of just poor interpretation, embalmed forever in the written form. But do these other departments provide any funds for time investigations? I’ll answer that. They don’t. A few of them, of course. The College of Law has co-operated splendidly, but not many of the others. They’re afraid. They don’t want their comfortable little worlds upset. Take this matter of Shakespeare, for example. You’d think English Lit would be grateful to find that Oxford wrote the plays. After all, it had been a question which had been talked about for many years—who really wrote the plays? But, after all of that, they resented it when Time found out.”
“And now,” said Maxwell, “Time is bringing Shakespeare forward to lecture about how he didn’t write the plays. Don’t you think that’s rubbing it in just a bit too much?”
“That’s not the point of it, at all,” said Carol. “The point is that Time is forced to make a sideshow out of history to earn a little money. That’s the way it is all the time. All sorts of schemes for raising money. Earning a lousy reputation as a bunch of clowns. You can’t believe Dean Sharp enjoys—”
“I know Harlow Sharp,” said Maxwell. “Believe me, he enjoys every minute of it.”
“That is blasp
hemy,” Oop said, in mock horror. “Don’t you know that you can be crucified for blabbing off like that?”
“You’re making fun of me,” said Carol. “You make fun of everyone, of everything. You, too, Peter Maxwell.”
“I apologize for them,” said Ghost, “since neither one of them could summon up the grace to apologize, themselves. You have to live with them for ten or fifteen years to understand they really mean no harm.”
“But the day will come,” said Carol, “when Time will have the funds to do whatever it may want. All their pet projects and to hell with all the other colleges. When the deal goes—”
She stopped abruptly. She sat frozen, not moving. One could sense that she wanted to put her hand up to her mouth and was refraining from it only by iron will.
“What deal?” asked Maxwell.
“I think I know,” said Oop. “I heard a rumor, just a tiny little rumor and I paid no attention to it. Although, come to think of it, these dirty little rumors are the ones that turn out to be true. The great big, ugly, noisy ones—”
“Oop, not a speech,” said Ghost. “Just tell us what you heard.”
“It’s incredible,” said Oop. “You never would believe it. Not in all your born days.”
“Oh, stop it!” Carol exclaimed. They all looked at her and waited.
“I made a slip,” she said “I got all worked up and made a slip. Can I ask the three of you just please to forget it? I’m not even sure it’s true.”
“Certainly,” said Maxwell. “You’ve been exposed this evening to rough company and ill manners and. . . .”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not any good to ask. I have no right to ask. I’ll simply have to tell you and trust to your discretion. And I’m pretty sure it’s true. Time has made an offer for the Artifact.”
Silence reverberated in the room as the other three sat motionless, scarcely breathing. She looked from one to the other of them, not quite understanding.
Finally Ghost stirred slightly, and there was a rustling in the silence of the room, as if his white sheet had been an actual sheet that rustled when he moved.
“You do not comprehend,” he said, “the attachment that we three hold to the Artifact.”
“You struck us in a heap,” said Oop.
“The Artifact,” said Maxwell, softly. “The Artifact, the one great mystery, the one thing in the world that has baffled every one. . . .”
“A funny stone,” said Oop.
“Not a stone,” said Ghost.
“Then, perhaps,” said Carol, “you’ll tell me what it is.”
And that was the one thing, Maxwell told himself, that Ghost nor no one else could do. Discovered ten years or so ago by Time investigators on a hilltop in the Jurassic Age, it had been brought back to the present at a great expenditure of funds and ingenuity. Its weight had demanded energy far beyond anything so far encountered to kick it forward into time, an energy requirement which had made necessary the projection backward in time of a portable nuclear generator, transported in many pieces and assembled on the site. And then the further task of bringing back the generator, since nothing of that sort, as a matter of simple ethics, could be abandoned in the past—even in the past of the far Jurassic.
“I cannot tell you,” said Ghost. “There is no one who can tell you.”
Ghost was right. No one had been able to make any sense of it at all. A massive block of some sort of material that now appeared to be neither stone nor metal, although at one time it had been thought to be a stone, and later on, a metal. It had defied all investigation. Six feet long, four feet on each side, it was a mass of blackness that absorbed no energy and emitted none, that bounced all light and other radiation from its surface, that could not be cut or dented, stopping a laser beam as neatly as if the beam had not existed. There was nothing that could scratch it, nothing that could probe it. It gave up no information of any sort at all. It rested on its raised base in the forecourt of Time Museum, the one thing in the world about which no one could even make a valid guess.
“Then,” asked Carol, “why the consternation?”
“Because,” said Oop, “Pete here has the hunch it may, at one time, have been the god of the Little Folk. That is, if the lousy little stinkers had the capacity to recognize a god.”
“I’m sorry,” Carol said. “I am truly sorry. I didn’t know. Perhaps if Time knew . . .”
“There’s not enough data,” Maxwell said, “to make any talk about it. Just a hunch is all. Just a feeling from certain things I’ve heard among the Little Folk. But even they don’t know. It was go long ago.”
So long ago, he thought. For the love of God, almost two hundred million years ago!!
VIII
“This Oop,” said Carol. “I can’t get over him. That funny house he has out at the end of nowhere.”
“He’d be offended,” said Maxwell, “if he heard you calling it a house. It’s a shack, and he’s proud of it—as a shack. The jump from cave to house would have been too great for him. He’d have felt uncomfortable.”
“A cave? He really lived in a cave?”
“Let me tell you something about old friend Oop,” said Maxwell. “He is an awful liar. You can’t believe all the stories that he tells. The cannibalism, for instance. . . .”
“That makes me feel a little better. People eating one another!”
“Oh, there was cannibalism, all right. There is no doubt of that. But whether Oop himself was headed for the pot is another matter. On items of general information, he is reliable enough. It’s only when he gets to yarning about his personal experiences that you should begin to doubt him.”
“It’s funny,” said Carol. “I’ve seen him around and have wondered a bit about him, but I never thought I’d meet him. Never really wanted to, in fact. Certain people I can draw a line at, and he was one of them. I imagined he would be uncouth—”
“Oh, he’s uncouth,” said Maxwell.
“But charming, too,” said Carol.
Clear autumn stars shone frostily deep in the darkened sky. The roadway, almost unoccupied, wound its way along the ridge. Far below gleamed the far-spreading campus lights. The wind, blowing up the ridge, carried the faint smell of burning leaves.
“The fire was nice,” said Carol. “Why is it, Peter, that we don’t have fires? It would be so simple. A fireplace wouldn’t be so hard to build.”
“There was a time, several hundred years ago,” said Maxwell, “when every house, or almost every house, had at least one fireplace. Sometimes several. The whole thing of having fires was a throwback, of course. Back to the days when fire was a protection and a warmth. But finally we outgrew it.”
“I don’t think we did,” she said. “We just walked away, is all. Turned our back upon this one segment of our past. We still have need of fire. A psychological need, perhaps. I found that out tonight. It was so exciting and so comfortable. Primal, maybe, but there still must be some of the primal in us.”
“Oop,” he told her, “couldn’t live without a fire. The lack of a fire was the thing that bugged him most when Time brought him back. He had to be held captive for a time, of course, when he first was brought here—closely watched over if not actually confined. But when he became his own master, so to speak, he got hold of a piece of land out at the edge of the campus and built himself the shack. Rough, the way he Wanted it. And, of course, a fireplace. And a garden. You should see his garden. The idea of growing food was something new to him. Something that no one back in his day had ever thought about. Nails and saws and hammers, and even lumber, also were new to him, as was everything. But he was highly adaptable. He took to the new tools and ideas without a single hitch. Nothing astonished him. He used hammer and saw and lumber and all the rest of it to build the shack. But I think it was the garden that seemed the most wonderful to him—to grow one’s food and not hunt for it. I suppose you noticed—even now he is impressed with the sheer bulk and the easy availability of foo
d.”
“And of liquor,” said Carol. Maxwell laughed. “Another new idea that he took to. A hobby of his, you might almost say. He makes his own. He’s got a still out in the back of his woodshed, and he runs off some of the worst moonshine that ever trickled down your throat. Pretty vile stuff.”
“But not to guests,” said Carol. “That was whiskey tonight.”
“You have to be a friend of his,” said Maxwell, “before he’ll allow you to drink his moon. Those fruit jars he set out. . . .”
“I wondered about those. They seemed to have nothing in them.”
“Clear, rotgut moonshine, that was what was in them.”
“You said he was a captive once. And now? Just how closely is he tied to Time?”
“A ward of the college. Not really tied at all. But you couldn’t drive him off. He’s a more loyal partisan of Time than you are.”
“And Ghost? He lives here at Supernatural? He’s a ward of Supernatural?”
“Hardly. Ghost is a stray cat He goes anywhere he wishes. He’s got friends all over the planet. He’s big stuff, I understand, at the College of Comparative Religions on the Himalayan Campus. But he manages to drop in here on a fairly regular basis. He and Oop hit it off from the moment Supernatural made its first contact with Ghost.”
“Pete, you call him Ghost. What is he, really?”
“Why, he is a ghost.”
“But what’s a ghost?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does.”
“But you’re with Supernatural.”
“Oh, sure, but all my work has been with the Little Folk, with emphasis on goblins, although I have an interest in every one of them. Even banshees, and there’s nothing that comes meaner or more unreasonable than a banshee.”
“There must be specialists in ghosts, then. What do they have to say about it?”
“I guess they have a few ideas. There are tons of literature on spookery, but I’ve never had the time to go into it. I know that back in the early ages it was believed that everyone, when they died, turned into a ghost, but now, I understand, that no longer is believed. There are certain special circumstances that give rise to ghosts, but I don’t know what they are.”
The Complete Serials Page 105