There was one name to go on.
Carol had said Churchill—that Churchill somehow was involved in the offer that had been made to Time for the Artifact. Was it possible that the Artifact was the price of the crystal planet’s knowledge? One couldn’t count on that, of course, although it might be so, for no one knew what the Artifact might be.
That Churchill was working on the deal was no surprise at all. Not for himself, of course, but for someone else. For someone who could not afford to have his identity revealed. It was in deals such as this that Churchill might prove useful. The man was a professional fixer and knew his way around. He had contacts and through long years of operation undoubtedly had laid out various pipelines of information into many strange and powerful places.
And if such were the case, Maxwell’s job became much harder. Not only must he guard against the rumor-mongering that was implicit in administration channels, he must now be doubly sure that none of his information fell into other hands where it might be used against him.
The squirrel had gone on down the tree trunk and now was busily scrounging on the slope of lawn that ran down to the lake, rustling through the fallen leaves in search of an acorn he might somehow have missed before. The boy and girl had walked out of sight and now a hesitant breeze was softly rumpling the surface of the lake.
There were only a few others at breakfast in the room; most of those who had been there when Maxwell entered had finished now and left. From the floor above came the distant murmuring of voices, the scuffling of feet as the daily flow of students began to fill the Union, the off-hours gathering place of undergraduates.
The Union was one of the oldest structures on the campus and one of the finest. For over five hundred years it had been the meeting place, the refuge, the study hall of many generations. It had settled easily and comfortably into the functional tradition that made it a second home for many thousand students. Here could be found a quietness for reflection or for study, here the cozy comers needed for good talk, here the game rooms for billiards or for chess, here the eating places, here the meeting halls, and tucked off in odd corners little reading rooms with their shelves of books.
Maxwell pushed back his chair, but stayed sitting, finding himself somehow reluctant to get up and leave—for once he left this place, he knew, he’d plunge into the problems he must face. Outside the window lay a golden autumn day, warming as the sun rose in the sky—a day for showers of golden leaves, for blue haze on the distant hills, for the solemn glory of chrysanthemums bedded in the garden, for the quiet glow of goldenrod and aster in the fields and vacant lots.
From behind him he heard the scurrying of many hard-shod feet and when he swung around in his chair, he saw the owner of the feet advancing rapidly across the squared red tiles toward him.
It looked like an outsize; land-going shrimp, with its jointed legs, its strangely canted body with long, weird rods—apparently sensory organs—extending outward from its tiny head. Its color was an unhealthy white and its three globular black eyes bobbed on the ends of long antennae.
It came to a halt beside the table. The three antennae swiveled to aim the three eyes straight at Maxwell.
It said in a high, piping voice, the skin of its throat fluttering rapidly beneath the seemingly inadequate head, “Informed I am that you be Professor Peter Maxwell.”
“The information happens to be right,” said Maxwell. “I am Peter Maxwell.”
“I be a creature out of the world you would name Spearhead 27. Name I have is of no interest to you. I appear before you carrying out commission by my employer. Perhaps you know it by designation of Miss Nancy Clayton.”
“Indeed I do,” said Maxwell, thinking that it was very much like Nancy Clayton to employ an outlandish creature such as this as an errand boy.
“I work myself through education,” explained the Shrimp, “doing anything I find.”
“That’s commendable,” said Maxwell.
“I train in mathematics of time,” declared the Shrimp. “I concentrate on world-line configurations. I am in tizzy over it.” The Shrimp didn’t look as if it were in any sort of tizzy.
“Why all the interest?” Maxwell asked. “Something in your background? Something in your cultural heritage?”
“Oh, very much indeed. Is completely new idea. On my world, no thought of time, no appreciation such a thing as time. Am much shocked to learn of it. And excited, too. But I digress too greatly. I come here on an errand. Miss Clayton desires to know can you attend a party the evening of this day. Her place, eight by the clock.”
“I believe I can,” said Maxwell. “Tell her I always make a point of being at her parties.”
“Overjoyed,” said the Shrimp. “She so much wants you there. You are talked concerning.”
“I see,” said Maxwell.
“You hard to find. I run hard and fast. I ask in many places. Finally victorious.”
“I am sorry,” Maxwell said, “I put you to such trouble.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a bill. The creature extended one of its forward legs and grasped the bill in a pair of pincers, folded it and refolded it and tucked it into a small pouch that extruded from its chest.
“You kind beyond expectation,” it piped. “There is one further information. Occasion for party is unveiling of painting, recently acquired. Painting lost and gone for very long. By Albert Lambert, Esquire. Great triumph for Miss Clayton.”
“I just bet it is,” said Maxwell. “Miss Clayton is a specialist in triumphs.”
“She, as employer, is gracious,” said the Shrimp, reprovingly.
“I am sure of that,” said Maxwell.
The creature shifted swiftly and galloped from the room. Listening to its departure, Maxwell heard it clatter up the stairs to the street level of the building.
Maxwell got up and headed for the stairs himself. If he were going to witness the unveiling of a painting, he told himself, he’d better bone up on the artist. Which was exactly, he thought with a grin, what almost every other person invited to Nancy’s party would be doing before the day was out.
Lambert? The name held a slight ring of recognition. He had read somewhere about him, probably long ago. An article in a magazine, perhaps, to help pass an idle hour.
XIII
Maxwell opened the book. “Albert Lambert,” said the opening page of text, “was born in Chicago, Illinois, Jan. 11, 1973. Famed as a portrayer of grotesque symbolism, his early years gave no promise of his great accomplishments. His initial work was competent and showed a skillful craftsmanship and a deep insight into his subject matter, but it was not particularly outstanding. His grotesque period came after his fiftieth year. Rather than developing, it burst into full flower almost overnight, as if the artist had developed it secretly and did not show his canvasses of this period until he was satisfied with this new phase of his work. But there is no evidence that this actually was the case. Rather, there seems to be some evidence that it was not.”
Maxwell flipped over the text pages to reach the color plates and leafed quickly through examples of the artist’s early work. And there, in the space of one page to the next, the paintings changed—the artistic concept, the color, even, it seemed to Maxwell, the very craftsmanship. As if the work had been that of two different artists, the first tied intellectually to some inner need of orderly expression, the second engulfed, obsessed, ridden by some soul-shaking experience of which he tried to cleanse himself by spreading it on canvas.
Stark, dark, terrible beauty beat out of the page. In the dusky silence of the library reading room it seemed to Maxwell that he could hear the leathery whisper of black wings. Outrageous creatures capered across an outrageous landscape, and yet the landscape and the creatures, Maxwell sensed at, once, were not mere fantasy, were no whimsical product of a willful unhinging of the mind, but seemed to be solidly based upon some outre geometry predicated upon a logic and an outlook alien to anything he had ever seen. The form, the colo
r, the approach and the attitude were not merely twisted human values. One had the instant feeling that they might be, instead, the prosaic representation of a situation in an area entirely outside any human value. Grotesque symbolism, the text had said, and it might be there, of course. But if so, Maxwell told himself, it was symbolism that could only be arrived at most tortuously after painful study.
He turned the page. There it was again, that complete divergence from humanity—a different scene with different creatures against a different landscape, but carrying, as had that first plate, the shattering impact of actuality, no figment of the artist’s mind, but the representation of a scene he once had gazed upon and sought now to expurgate from mind and memory. As a man might wash his hands, Maxwell thought, lathering them fiercely with a bar of strong, harsh soap, scrubbing them again and yet again, endlessly, in a desperate attempt to remove by physical means a psychic stain that he had incurred. A scene that he had gazed upon, perhaps, not through human eyes, but through the alien optics of a lost and unguessed race.
Maxwell sat fascinated, staring at the page, wanting to pull his eyes away, but unable to. He was trapped by the weird and awful beauty, by some terrible, hidden purpose that he could not understand. Time, the Shrimp had said, was something that his race had never thought of, a universal factor that had not impinged upon his culture. And here, captured in these color plates, was something that man had never thought of, never dreamed of.
He readied out his hand to grasp the book and close it, but he hesitated as if there were some reason he should not close the book, some compelling reason to continue staring at the plate.
And in that hesitancy, he became aware of a certain strangeness that might keep him staring at the page—a puzzling factor that he had not recognized consciously, but that had been nagging at him.
He took his hands away and sat staring at the plate. Then slowly he turned the page. As he glanced at that third plate, the strangeness leaped out at him—a brushed-in flickering, an artistic technique that made an apparent flickering, as if some thing of substance were there and flickering, seen one moment, not quite seen the next.
He sat, slack-jawed, and watched the flickering. It was a trick of the eyes, most likely, encouraged by the mastery of the artist over paint and brush. But trick of the eye or not, easy of recognition by anyone who had seen the ghostly race of the crystal planet.
And through the hushed silence of the dusky room one question hammered at him: How could Albert Lambert have known about the people of the crystal planet?
“I had heard about you,” Allen Preston said. “It seemed incredible, of course. But the source of my information seemed unimpeachable, and I made an effort to get in touch with you. I’m a bit worried over this situation, Pete. As an attorney, I’d say you were in trouble.”
Maxwell sat down in the chair in front of Preston’s desk. “I suppose I am,” he said. “For one thing, it appears I’ve lost my job. Is there such a thing as tenure in a case like mine?”
“A case like yours?” the attorney asked. “Just what is the situation? No one seems to know. Everyone is talking about it, but no one seems to know. I, myself. . . .”
Maxwell grinned, wryly. “Sure. You’d like to know. You’re puzzled and confused and not quite sure you’re sane. You sit there wondering if I’m really Peter Maxwell.”
“Well, are you?” Preston asked.
“I am sure I am. I wouldn’t blame you, or anyone, if you doubted it. There were two of us. Something happened to the wave pattern. One of us went to the Coonskin system, the other somewhere else. The one who went to Coonskin came back to Earth and died. I came back yesterday.”
“And found that you were dead.”
Maxwell nodded. “My apartment had been rented, my possessions all are gone. The university tells me my position has been filled and I’m without a job.”
Preston leaned back in his chair and squinted thoughtfully at Maxwell. “Legally,” he said, “I think we’d find that the university stands on solid ground. You are dead, you see. You have no tenure now. Not, at least, until it can be re-established.”
“Through a long process at law?”
“Yes, I would suspect so. I can’t give you an honest answer. There is no precedent. Oh, there are cases of mistaken identity—someone who is dead being mistakenly identified as someone who is still alive. But with you, there’s no mistake. A man who undeniably was Peter Maxwell is undeniably dead. There is no precedent for that. We’d have to set our own precedent as we went along, a very laborious beating through the thickets of legal argument. It might take years. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure where or how to start. Oh, it could be developed, it could be carried forward, but it would take a lot of work and thought. First, of course, we’d have to establish who you are.”
“Who I really am? For God’s sake, All We know who I am.”
“But the law doesn’t. The law wouldn’t recognize you as you are today. You have no legal being. Absolutely none. All your identification cards have been turned in to Records and have been filed by now. . . .”
“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 & Whistle by a lot of people. 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 qu
iet 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, drily, “she would be curious.”
XIV
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.
The Complete Serials Page 108