“I had thought so,” Maxwell said. “In just the last few hours.”
“You should have Known,” the Banshee said. “You were on the elder planet.”
Maxwell gasped. “How did you know that?”
“How do you breathe air?” the Banshee asked. “How do you see? With me, communicating with that ancient planet is as natural as is breath and sight with you. I am not told; I know.”
So that was it, thought Maxwell. The Banshee had been the source of the Wheeler’s knowledge, and it must have been Churchill, who had tipped the Wheeler to the fact that the Banshee had the information, who had guessed the Banshee might have knowledge no one else suspected.
“And the others? The trolls, the—”
“No,” the Banshee said. “The Banshees were the only ones to whom the road was open. That was our job and our only purpose. We were the links with the elder planet. We were communicators. When the elder planet sent out colonies, it was necessary that some means of communicating should be established. We all were specialists, although the specialties have little meaning now, and nearly all of the specialists are gone. The first ones were the specialists. The ones who came later simply were settlers meant to fill the land.”
“You mean the trolls and goblins?”
“The trolls and goblins and the rest of them. With abilities, of course, but not specialized. We were the engineers, they the workers. There was a gulf between us. That is why they will not come to sit with me. The old gulf still exists.”
“You tire yourself,” said A Maxwell. “You should conserve your strength.”
“It does not matter. Energy drains out of me and; when the energy is gone, life is gone as well. This dying I am doing has no concern with matter or with body, for I never really had a body. I was all energy. And it does not matter. For the elder planet dies as well; you have seen my planet and you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said Maxwell.
“It would have been so different if there had been no humans. When we first came here there were scarcely any mammals, let alone a primate. We could have prevented it—this rising of the primates. We could have pinched them in the bud. There was some discussion of it, for this planet Had proved promising, and we were reluctant at the thought that we must give it up. But there was the ancient rule. Intelligence is too seldom found for one to stand in the way of its development. If is a precious thing. Even when we stepped aside for it most reluctantly, we still had to recognize that if was a precious thing.”
“But you stayed on,” said Maxwell. “You may Have stepped aside, but you still stayed on.”
“It was too late,” the Banshee told him. “There was no place for us to go. The elder planet was dying even then. There was no point in going back. And this planet, strange as it may seem, had become home for us.”
“You must hate us Humans.”
“At one time we did. But hate can burn out in time. Almost. And perhaps even in our hatred we held some pride in you. Otherwise, why should the elder planet have offered you its knowledge?”
“But you offered it to the Wheeler, too.”
“The Wheeler? OH, yes, I know who you mean. But we did not really offer it. The Wheeler had heard about the elder planet, apparently from some rumor heard far in space. And that the planet had something that it wished to sell. It came to me and asked one question only—what was the price of this commodity. I don’t know if if knew what might be for sale. It only said commodity.”
“And you told it the price was the Artifact.”
“Of course I told it that. For at the time I did not know of you. It was only later I knew I should communicate the price to you.”
“And, of course,” said Maxwell, “you were about to Ho this?”
“Yes,” said the Banshee, “I was about to Ho it. And now I’ve done it, and the matter’s closed.”
“You can tell me one tiling more. What is the Artifact?”
“That,” the Banshee said, “I cannot do.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Won’t,” the Banshee said.
Sold out, Maxwell fold himself. The human race sold out by this dying thing which, despite what it might say, had never meant to communicate the price to him. This thing which through long millenia had nursed cold hatred against the human race. And now that it was gone beyond all reaching, telling him and mocking him so that he might know how the humans had been sold out, so that the human race might know, now that it was too late, exactly what had happened.
“And you told the Wheeler about me as well,” he said. “That’s how Churchill happened to be waiting at the station when I returned to Earth. He said he’d been on a trip, but there had been no trip.”
He surged angrily to his feet. “And what about the one of me who died?”
He swung upon the tree, and the tree was empty. The dark cloud that had seethed around its trunk was gone. The branches stood out in sharp and natural relief against the western sky.
Gone, Maxwell thought. Not dead, but gone. The substance of an elemental creature gone back to the elements, the unimaginable bonds that had held it together in strange semblance of life, finally weakening to let the last of it slip away, blowing off into the air and sunlight like a pinch of thrown dust.
Alive the Banshee had been a hard thing to get along with.
Dead it was no easier. For a short space of time he had felt compassion for it, as a man must feel for anything that dies. But he knew the compassion had been wasted, for the Banshee must have died in silent laughter at the human race.
There was just one hope, to persuade Time to hold up the sale of the Artifact so he could have the time to contact Arnold and tell his story to him, persuade him, somehow, that what he told was true. A story, Maxwell realized, that now became even more fantastic than it had been before.
He turned about and started down the ravine. Before he reached the wood, he stopped and looked back up the slope. The thorn tree stood squat against the sky, sturdy and solid, braced solid in the soil.
When he passed the fairy dancing green a gang of trolls were grumpily at work, raking and smoothing out the ground, laying new sod to replace that which had been gouged out by the bouncing stone. Of the stone there was no sign.
XXI
Maxwell was halfway back to Wisconsin Campus when Ghost materialized and took the seat next to him.
“I have a message from Oop,” he said, ignoring any preliminary approach to conversation. “You are not to return to the shack. The newspaper people seem to have sniffed you out. When they came to inquire, Oop went into action, without, I would guess, too much thought or judgment. He put the bum’s rush on them, but they’re still hanging around, on the lookout for you.”
“Thanks,” said Maxwell. “I appreciate being told. Although as a matter of fact, I don’t imagine it makes too much difference now.”
“Events,” asked Ghost, “do not march too well?”
“They barely march at all,” Maxwell told him. He hesitated, then said, “I suppose Oop has told you what is going on.”
“Oop and I are as one,” said Ghost. “Yes, of course he’s told me. He seemed to take it for granted that you knew He would. But you may be rest assured. . . . .”
“It’s not that,” said Maxwell. “I was only wondering if I had to recite it all again for you. You know, then, that I went to the reservation to check on the Lambert painting.”
“Yes,” said Ghost. “The one that Nancy Clayton has.”
“I have a feeling,” Maxwell told him, “that I may have found out more than I Had expected to. I did find out one thing that doesn’t help at all. It was the Banshee who tipped off the Wheeler about the price the crystal planet wanted. The Banshee was supposed to tell me, but he told the Wheeler instead. He claims he told the Wheeler before he knew about me, but I have some doubt of that. The Banshee was dying when he told me, but that doesn’t mean that he told the truth. He always was a slippery customer.”
“The
Banshee dying?”
“He’s dead now. I sat with him until he died. I didn’t show him the photo of the painting. I didn’t Have the Heart to intrude.”
“But despite this he told you about the Wheeler.”
“Only to let me know that he had hated the human race since it first began its evolutionary climb. And to let me know that he was finally getting even. He would have liked to have said that the goblins and the rest of the Little Folk hated us as well, but he never quite got around to that. Knowing, perhaps, that I would not believe it. Although something that the O’Toole had said earlier made me realize that there is some ancestral resentment. Resentment, but probably not any real hatred. But the Banshee did confirm that a deal is being made for the Artifact and that the Artifact actually is the price for the crystal planet.”
“It looks fairly hopeless, then,” Ghost observed. “My good friend, I am very sorry for this. Is there anything that we can do to Kelp? Oop, me, and perhaps even that girl who drank with you and Oop so staunchly. The one who has the cat.”
“It looks hopeless,” Maxwell told him, “but there are a couple of things that I still can do—go to Harlow Sharp at Time and try to convince him to hold up the deal, then crash in a door or two up at Administration and back Arnold into a comer. If I can talk Arnold into duplicating the Wheeler’s offer in funding for Harlow’s Time projects, I am sure that Harlow will turn down the Wheeler.”
“You will make a noble effort, I am sure,” said Ghost. “But I fear for the results. Not from Harlow Sharp, for he’s a friend of yours. But President Arnold is a friend of no one. And he will not relish the breaking of doors.”
“You know what I think?” said Maxwell. “I think you are right. But you can’t tell until you try. It may be that Arnold will have a lapse of moral fiber and will, for once, set prejudice and stuff-shirtedness aside.”
“I must warn you,” said Ghost. “Harlow Sharp may have little time for you or for anyone. He has worries. Shakespeare arrived this morning.”
“Shakespeare!” yelled Maxwell. “For the love of God, I’d forgotten about him coming. But I do remember he speaks tomorrow night. Of all the lousy breaks. It would have to be at a time like this.”
“It would seem,” said Ghost, “that William Shakespeare is not any easy man to handle. He wanted at once to go out and have a look at this new age of which he’d been told so much. Time had a rough time persuading him to change his Elizabethan dress for what we wear today, but they positively refused to let him go until he agreed to it And now Time is sweating out what might happen to him. They have to keep him in tow, but they can’t do anything that will get his back up. They have sold the hall down to the last inch of standing room and they can’t take a chance that anything will happen.”
“How did you hear all this?” asked Maxwell. “Seems to me you manage to come up with campus gossip ahead of anyone.”
Ghost said modestly, “I get around a lot.”
“Well, it’s not good,” said Maxwell, “but I have to take the chance. Time is running out for me. Harlow will see me if he’ll see anyone.”
“It seems incredible,” said Ghost sadly, “that such a dire combination of circumstances should have arisen to block what you try to do. Impossible that through sheer stupidity, the University and Earth should fail to obtain the knowledge of two universes.”
“It was the Wheeler,” Maxwell said.
“His offer puts the pressure on, sets up a time limit. If I only had more time, I could work it out. I could talk to Harlow, could finally get a hearing from Arnold. And if nothing else, I probably could talk Harlow into a deal with Time, rather than the University, buying the planet’s library. But there isn’t any time. Ghost, what do you know about the Wheelers? Anything the rest of us don’t know?”
“I doubt it. Just that they could be that hypothetical enemy we’ve always figured we would finally meet in space. Their actions argue that they, at least potentially, are that enemy. And their motives, their moves, their ethics, their entire outlook On life, must be different than ours. We probably have less in common with them than a man would with a spider or a wasp. Although they are clever—and that is the worst of it.
They Have by now absorbed enough of our viewpoints and manners that they can mix with us, can pass with us, can do business with us—as they have demonstrated in the deal they are trying to make for the Artifact. My friend, it is this cleverness of theirs, this flexibility, that I fear above all. I doubt if the positions were reversed that man could do as well.”
“You are right, I think,” said Maxwell. “And that is why we can’t afford to let them have what the crystal planet has to offer. God knows what’s to be found in that library. I had a whack at it, but I could do no more than sample it, could barely touch the edge of it. And there was material that I couldn’t come within ten light-years of understanding. Which doesn’t mean that given time and skills that I haven’t got, that perhaps I’ve not even heard of, man wouldn’t be able to understand it. I think man could. I think the Wheelers can. Vast areas of new knowledge that we haven’t any inkling of. That knowledge might just be the margin between us and the Wheelers. If man and the Wheelers ever come into collision, the crystal planet’s knowledge just possibly could be the difference between our victory or defeat. And it might mean as well that the Wheelers, knowing that we had this knowledge, might never allow that collision to happen. It might spell the difference between peace and war.”
He sat crouched in the seat and through the warmth of the autumn afternoon felt a chill that blew from somewhere other than the colorful land and the sky of China-silk that enclosed this portion of the earth.
“You talked with the Banshee,” said Ghost. “Just before he died. He mentioned the Artifact. Did he give you any clue as to what it really is? If we knew what it really was. . . .”
“No, Ghost. Not in so many words. But I got the impression—no, the hunch—that the Artifact is something from that other universe, the one before this one, from the earlier universe in which the crystal planet was formed. A precious thing, preserved through all the eons since that other universe. And maybe the Banshee and the other Old Ones that Oop remembers were natives of that other universe as well, related somehow to the creatures on the crystal planet. Life forms that rose and developed and evolved in that past universe and came here, and to other planets as well, as colonists, in an attempt to establish a new civilization which could follow in the crystal planet’s tracks. But something happened. All of those colonization attempts failed. Here on earth because man developed. For other reasons, perhaps, on the other planets. And I think that I know why some of those other attempts failed. Maybe races just die out.”
“It sounds reasonable,” said Ghost. “That the colonies died out, I mean. If there had been a successful colony anywhere in the universe, it would seem likely the crystal planet would pass on its heritage to it instead of offering it to us or the Wheelers, to some race that had no connection with the crystal planet.”
“What bothers me,” said Maxwell, “is why the people of the crystal planet, so close to death that they are no more than shadows, should want the Artifact. What good will it do them? What use can they make of it?”
“Maybe if we knew what it was,” said Ghost. “You’re sure that you have no idea? Nothing that you heard or saw or—”
“No,” said Maxwell.
XXII
Harlow Sharp had a harried look about him.
“Sorry you had to wait so long,” he told Maxwell. “This is a hectic day.”
“I was glad to get in any way at all,” said Maxwell. “That watchdog of yours out at the desk was not about to let me.”
“I’ve been expecting you,” said Sharp. “Figured you’d turn up soon or late. Been hearing some strange stories.”
“Most of them are true,” said Maxwell. “But that’s not what I’m here for. This is business, not a social visit. I won’t take much time.
“Okay, then,�
�� said Sharp, “what can I do for you?”
“You’re selling the Artifact,” said Maxwell.
Sharp nodded. “I’m sorry about that, Pete. I know you and a few others had an interest in it. But it’s been out there in the museum for years and, except as a curiosity to be stared at by visitors and tourists, it’s done no one any good. And Time needs money. Surely you know that. The University holds the purse strings fast. The other colleges just feed us tiny driblets for specific programs and—”
“Harlow, I know all that. I suppose it’s yours to sell. I recall the University, at the time you brought it forward, would have no part of it. The cost of moving it was yours—”
“We’ve had to scrape and beg and borrow,” said Sharp. “We’ve worked up project after project—good sound, solid projects that would pay off in knowledge and new data—and submitted them and no one’s buying them. Can you imagine it! With all the past to dig around in and no one interested. Afraid, perhaps that we’ll upset some of their pet theories they have worked out so nicely. But we have to get money somehow to carry on our work. Do you think I’ve liked some of the things we’ve done to get some extra money? Like this Shakespeare circus. It’s degraded our image. Pete, you can’t imagine the trouble that we have. This Shakespeare’s out there somewhere, like a God-damned tourist, casing the joint, and me sitting back here with my nails chewed to the elbow imagining all the things that could happen to him. Can you envision the ruckus there would be if a man like Shakespeare should not be returned to his proper age?” Maxwell broke in to head him off. “I’m not arguing with you, Harlow. I didn’t come to—”
“And then, suddenly,” said Sharp, interrupting him, “there, was this chance to sell the Artifact. For more money than we’ll ever get from this crummy University in a hundred years. You must realize what this sale meant to us. A chance to do the job we’ve not been able to do because of the lack of finance. Sure, I know about the Wheelers. When Churchill came sucking around to sound us out, I knew he was working for someone behind the scenes, but I wasn’t dealing with anyone behind the scenes. I nailed Churchill hard and refused to talk business until I knew who it was he was fronting for. And when he told me, I gagged a bit, but I went ahead, because I knew it was our only chance to set up a decent fund. I’d have done business with the Devil, Pete, to get that kind of money.”
The Complete Serials Page 113