He put up both his hands and tried to wipe the gravy off his face. From somewhere above him he heard Oop’s raging bellows.
Able to see again, but with his face and hair still dripping gravy, Maxwell managed to crawl from beneath the table and stagger to his feet.
Carol sat flat upon the floor amid the litter of the food. Beer bottles were rolling back and forth across the floor. Framed in the kitchen door stood the cook, a mighty woman with chubby arms and tousled Kair and her hands upon her hip. Sylvester was crouched above the roast, ripping it apart and rapidly swallowing great mouthfuls of meat before anyone could stop him.
Oop came limping back from the door.
“No sign of them,” he said. “No sign of either one of them.”
He reached down a hand to haul Carol to her feet.
“That God damned Ghost,” he said bitterly. “Why couldn’t he keep still? Even if he knew. . . .”
“But he didn’t know,” said Carol. “Not until just now. It took this confrontation to jar it out of him. Something Shakespeare said, perhaps. It’s something he’s been wondering about all these years. And then suddenly it hit him.”
“This tears it,” Oop declared. “Shakespeare never will quit running. There’ll be no finding him.”
“Maybe that is what Ghost is doing now,” said Maxwell. “That is where he went. To follow Shakespeare and stop him and bring him back to us.”
“Stop him, how?” asked Oop.
“If Shakespeare sees him following, he’ll set new track records.”
XXIV
They sat dejectedly about Oop’s rough lumber table. Sylvester lay on his back on the hearthstone, with his front paws folded neatly on his chest, his back feet thrust up into the air.
He wore a silly grin of satisfaction pasted on his face.
Oop shoved the fruit jar along the boards to Carol. She picked it up and sniffed. “It smells like kerosene,” she said, “and, as I remember it, it tastes like kerosene.” She lifted the jar with both her hands and drank, then pushed it across to Maxwell.
“I do believe,” she said, “that after a time one could become accustomed to drinking kerosene.”
“That is good booze,” said Oop, defensively. “Although,” he admitted, “it could do with just a touch more aging. Seems that it gets drunk up quicker than I can get it made.”
Maxwell lifted the jar and drank moodily. The hooch burned its way fiercely down his gullet and exploded in his stomach, but the explosion did no good. He still stayed moody and aware. There were times, he told himself, when there was no such things as getting drunk. Pour it in two-fisted and you still stayed sober. And right now, he thought, he would dearly love to get sodden drunk and stay that way for a day or so. Maybe when he sobered up life wouldn’t seem so bad.
“What I can’t understand,” said Oop, “is why Old Bill should take this business of his ghost so bad. He did, of course. He was scared pink with purple spots. But the thing that bothers me is that he wasn’t upset with Ghost. Oh, a little jittery at first, as one might expect of a sixteenth-century man. But once we had explained it to him, he seemed rather pleased with it. He accepted Ghost much more readily than would have been the case, say, with a twentieth-century man. In the sixteenth century they believed in ghosts. Ghosts were something that could be accepted. He never got the wind up until he found that Ghost was his ghost and then. . . .”
“He was quite intrigued,” said Carol, “by our relations with the Little Folk. He made us promise we’d take him down to the reservation so he could get acquainted with them. As with ghosts, he believed in them implicitly.” Maxwell took another hooker out of the jar and slid it across to Oop. He wiped his mouth on the back of his band. “Being free and easy with a ghost, with just any ghost,” he said, “would come under a different heading than meeting up with one particular ghost that turned out to be your ghost. It is impossible for a man to accept, to actually accept and believe in, his own death. Even knowing what a ghost is. . . .”
“Oh, don’t please start that up again,” said Carol.
Oop grinned. “He sure went out of there like a shot,” he said. “Like you’d tied a firecracker on his tail. He went through that door without even touching the latch. He just busted through it.”
“I didn’t see,” said Maxwell. “I had a bowl of gravy in my face.”
“There wasn’t anyone got anything out of the whole mess,” said Oop, “except that saber-toother over there. He got a haunch of beef. Rare, the way he likes it.”
“The cat’s an opportunist,” Carol observed. “He always comes out smelling pretty.” Maxwell stared at her. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. How do you come to be mixed up with us? I thought you washed your hands of us last night after the affair with the Wheeler.”
Oop chuckled. “She was worried about you. Also, she is nosey.”
“There’s something else as well,” said Maxwell. “How come you are mixed up in it at all? Let’s take it from the first. You were the one who tipped us off about the Artifact being sold.”
“I didn’t tip you off. I misspoke. It just came out.”
“You tipped us off,” Maxwell declared. “I think you meant to do it. What do you know about the Artifact? You must have known something to not have wanted it sold.”
“Yeah, that is right,” said Oop. “Sister, you better start telling us what it is all about.”
“A couple of bullies!”
“No,” said Maxwell, “let’s not turn it to a joke. This is important.”
“Well, I had heard about it being sold, as I told you. I wasn’t supposed to know. And I was worried about it and I didn’t like the sound of it. Not that there was anything really wrong with the sale of it, legally, I mean.
Time had title to it and could sell it if it wished. But it didn’t seem to me that a thing like the Artifact should be sold, even for umpteen-billion dollars. Because I did know something about it—something that no one else knew about it and I was afraid to try to tell anyone what I knew. Then, that night, when you two talked about it and were so interested. . . .”
“You thought maybe we could help.”
“Well, I don’t know what I thought. But you were the first ones who had shown any interest in it.”
“Were you working with the Artifact? Is that how—”
“Well, no,” she said, “not working with it. But one day when I stopped to look at it—like any tourist, you understand, just walking through the inner court of the museum and stopping to have a look at it, because it was an interesting object and a mysterious one as well—I saw something. Or thought I saw something. . . .”
She stopped and looked from one to the other of them. Neither spoke. They sat silent, waiting for her to go on.
“I can’t be sure,” she said. “Not now.”
“Go ahead,” said Oop. “Tell us the best you can.”
She nodded soberly. “It was just for an instant. So quick, so fast, and yet at the time there was no doubt I had really seen it. The sun was shining through the windows, and the sunlight was falling on the Artifact. Maybe no one had ever looked at the Artifact before when the sunlight had been shining on it at precisely the angle it shone on it that day. I don’t know. But it seemed to me I saw something inside the Artifact. Well, really not inside of it; rather, as if the Artifact was something that had been pressed or shaped into an oblong block, but you couldn’t know this except when the sun shone just right upon it. It seemed to me that I could see an eye. And it was alive and watching me.”
“But that can’t be!” yelled Oop. “The Artifact is like a stone. Like a piece of metal.”
“A funny piece of metal,” said Maxwell. “Something that you can’t pry into.”
“It’s only fair to say,” Carol reminded them, “that now I can’t be sure. It might have been only my imagination.”
“We’ll never know,” said Maxwell. “The Wheeler will haul off the Artifact tomorrow.”
“And buy the c
rystal planet with it,” said Oop. “It seems to me we shouldn’t just be sitting here.”
He picked up the jar, put it to his mouth and drained it, got up and went to the hideout in the floor and got another jar. Ponderously, he unscrewed the lid and handed the jar to Carol.
“Leave us settle down,” he suggested, “to building up a hangover. The newsmen will be here by morning, and I got to work up the strength to throw them out.”
“Now, wait a second,” said Maxwell. “I feel an idea coming on.
They sat and waited for the idea to come on.
“The translator,” said Maxwell. “The one I used to read the records on the crystal planet. I found it in my bag.”
“Yes?” asked Oop.
“What if the Artifact were simply another record?”
“But Carol says. . . .”
“I know what Carol says. But she can’t be sure. She only thinks she saw that eye staring out at her. And it seems improbable.”
“That’s right,” said Carol. “I can’t be absolutely sure. And what Pete says does make a crooked sort of sense. If he’s right, it would have to be a very important record—and a rather massive one. Perhaps a whole new world of knowledge. Maybe something the crystal planet left here on Barth, believing that no one would ever think of looking for it here. A sort of hidden record.”
“Even if that should be the case,” said Oop, “what good will it do us? The museum is locked, and Harlow Sharp is not about to open it for us.”
“I could get us in,” said Carol.
“I could phone the guard and say I had to get in and do some work. Or that I had left something there and wanted to pick it up. I have clearance for that sort of thing.”
“And lose your job,” suggested Oop.
She shrugged. “There are other jobs. And if we worked it right. . . .”
“But there’s so little point to it,” protested Maxwell. “It’s no better than a million to one shot. Maybe less than that. I don’t deny I’d like to have a try at it, but—”
“What if you found that it was really something important?” asked Carol. “Then we could get hold of Sharp and explain it to him and maybe—”
“I don’t know,” said Maxwell. “I doubt that we could find anything so important that Harlow would renege upon the deal.”
“Hell,” said Oop, “let’s not waste time sitting here and talking about it. Let us be about it.” Maxwell looked at Carol. “I think so, Pete,” She said. “I think it’s worth the chance.”
Oop reached out and took the jar of moonshine from in front of her and screwed on the cap.
XXV
The past surrounded them, the cabineted and cased and pedestaled past. All around were the lost and forgotten and unknown, snatched out of time by the far-ranging field expeditions that had probed into the hidden comers of mankind’s history. Art and folklore objects that had been undreamed of until men went back and found them; still new pottery that had theretofore been known only as scattered shards, if even that; bottles out of ancient Egypt with the salves and ointments still prisoned, fresh, within them; ancient iron weapons new from the forge; the scrolls from the Alexandrian library which should have burned, but didn’t, because men Had been sent back in time to snatch them from flames at the moment before they would have been destroyed; the famed tapestry of Ely that had disappeared from the ken of man in a long-gone age—all these and many more, a treasure trove of articles snatched from the bowels of time.
The place was misnamed, Maxwell thought. Not Time Museum, but rather the Museum of No Time, a place where all ages came together, where there was no time distinction. In this building all the accomplishments and dreams of mankind might eventually be gathered, not aged things, but all fresh and new and shiny, fashioned only yesterday. And here one would not have to guess from old and scattered evidence what it had been like back there, but could pick up and hold and manipulate the tools and instruments and gadgets that had been made and used through all the days of man’s development.
Standing beside the pedestal which held the Artifact, he listened to the footsteps of the guard as he tramped away again on his regular rounds.
Carol had managed it. There had been a time he had doubted she would be able to, but everything had gone well. She’d phoned the guard and told him she and a couple of. friends had wanted one last look at the Artifact before it was carted off, and he had been waiting to let them in at the little entryway set into one of the large doors that were opened when the museum was open to the public.
“Don’t take too long,” he grumbled. “I’m not sure I should let you do this.”
“It’s all right,” she’d told him. “There is no need for you to worry.”
He had shuffled off, mumbling to himself.
A bank of overhead spotlights shone down on the black block that was the Artifact.
Maxwell ducked beneath the velvet rope that guarded the pedestal and clambered up beside the Artifact, crouching down beside it, fumbling in his pocket for the interpreting apparatus.
It was a crazy hunch, he told himself. It was no hunch at all. It simply was an idea born of desperation. He was wasting his time, more than likely making himself ridiculous. Even if this wild venture should prove to have some point, there was nothing that he could do about it at this late hour. Tomorrow the Wheeler would take possession of the Artifact and of the knowledge stored on the crystal planet As far as the human race might be concerned that would be the end of fifty billion years of knowledge dredged most laboriously and devotedly from two universes—knowledge that should have belonged to the University of Earth, but that now would be lost forever to an enigmatic cultural bloc which might, in turn, prove to be that potential cosmic enemy Earth had always feared would be found in space.
His start had been too late.
Given a bit more time and he could have turned the deal, could have found the people who would have listened to him, could have gained some backing. But everything had worked against Him, and now it was too late.
He slid the interpreter onto his head and fumbled with it. It didn’t want to fit.
“Let me help,” said Carol. He felt her fingers manipulating it deftly, straightening out the straps, sliding them into place.
Glancing down, he saw Sylvester, seated on the floor beside the pedestal, snearing up at Oop.
Oop caught Maxwell’s look. “That cat doesn’t like me,” said the Neanderthaler. “He senses that I’m his natural enemy. Some day he’ll work up his nerve to have a go at me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” snapped Carol. “He’s just a little putty cat.”
“Like hell,” said Oop.
Maxwell reached up and pulled the assemblage of the interpreter down across his eyes.
And looked down at the Artifact.
There was something there in that block of black. Lines. Forms. A strangeness. No longer just a block of unimaginable blackness, rejecting all influence from outside, tolerating nothing and giving up nothing, as if it might be a thing that stood apart, sufficient to itself within the universe.
He twisted his head to try to catch the angle from which it might be possible to untangle what he saw. No lines of writing, surely—it was something else. He reached up to the headpiece and pushed over the wheel that increased the power, fiddled for a moment with the adjustment for the sensor.
“What is it?” Carol asked Him.
“I don’t—”
“Then suddenly he did know. He saw. Imprisoned in one comer of the block was a talon, with iridescent flesh or hide or scale and gleaming claws that looked as if they had been carved from diamonds. A talon that moved and struggled to be free so it could reach out for him.
He flinched away, moving back to get out of reach, and he lost his balance. Falling, he tried to twist to one side so he wouldn’t land flat upon his back. One shoulder struck the velvet rope and the standards that held the rope in place went over with a clatter. The floor came up and smacked him hard. St
riking the rope had served to twist him to one side, and He came down Heavily on one shoulder, but His Head was protected from the floor. He struck at his forehead with an open hand, knocking the interpreter off to one side to free his eyes.
And there, above him, the Artifact was Changing. Out of it something was rising—rearing up out of the oblong of blackness, jerking itself free. Something that was alive, athrob with vitality and glittering in its beauty.
A slender, dainty head, with an elongated snout, and a sharp serrated crest that ran from the forepart of the head along the length of neck. A barrel-like chest and body, with a pair of wings half-folded, and shapely forelegs, armed with the diamond claws. It glittered blindingly in the spotlights that pointed at the Artifact—or, rather, where the Artifact had been. Each gleaming scale was a point of hard white light striking off the bronze and gold, the yellow and the blue.
A dragon! Maxwell thought. A dragon rising from the blackness of the Artifact! A dragon, finally risen, after long eons of being prisoned in that block of blackness.
A dragon! After all the years he’d hunted one, after all the years of wonder, here finally was a dragon. But not as he’d pictured it in his mind. This was no prosaic thing of flesh and scale, but a thing of glorious symbolism. A symbol of the heyday of the crystal planet, perhaps of the universe that had died so that this present universe could be born anew—ancient and fabulous, a fellow of those strange tribes of beings of which the trolls and goblins, the fairies and the banshees were the stunted and pitiful survivors. A thing the name of which had been handed down through generations that numbered into thousands, but never seen by any member of humanity until this very moment.
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