"I have a feeling," Maxwell said, "that I can bear up under your ingratitude."
"There is a certain advantage, sir," warned Mr. Marmaduke, "in being on the winning side."
Something big and moving swiftly brushed past Maxwell and out of the corner of his eye he caught the sudden flash of gleaming teeth and the streak of tawny body.
"No, Sylvester!" Maxwell shouted. "Leave him alone, Sylvester!"
Mr. Marmaduke moved swiftly. His wheels blurred as he spun and swept in a quick half-circle, skirting Sylvester's rushing charge and heading for the door. Sylvester's claws screeched as he turned, swapping end for end. Maxwell, seeing the Wheeler bearing down upon him, ducked out of the way, but a wheel grazed his shoulder and brushed him roughly to one side. With a swish, Mr. Marmaduke went streaking out the door. Behind him came Sylvester, long and lithe, a tawny shape that seemed to flow smoothly through the air.
"No Sylvester!" Maxwell screamed, flinging himself through the door and making a quick turn in the hall, his legs pumping rapidly as he skidded on the turn.
Ahead of him the Wheeler was rolling smoothly down the hall, with Sylvester close behind him. Maxwell wasted no more breath in yelling at the cat, but drove his body forward in pursuit.
At the far end of the hall, Mr. Marmaduke swung smoothly to the left and Sylvester, almost on top of him, lost precious seconds as he fought, and failed, to make as smooth a turn. Warned of the turning in the hall, Maxwell took it in his stride and ahead of him he saw a lighted corridor that led to a short marble staircase and beyond the staircase a crowd of people standing about in little knots, with glasses in their hands.
Mr. Marmaduke was heading for the staircase, going very fast. Sylvester was one leap ahead of Maxwell, perhaps three leaps behind the Wheeler.
Maxwell tried to yell a warning, but he didn't have the breath and, in any case, events were moving much too fast.
The Wheeler hit the top step of the staircase and Maxwell launched his body through the air, arms outstretched. He came down on top of the saber-tooth and wrapped his arms around its neck. The two of them sprawled to the floor and out of the corner of his eye, as he and Sylvester cartwheeled down the corridor, Maxwell saw the Wheeler bouncing high on the second step and beginning to tip over.
And then, suddenly, there was the screaming of frightened women and the yells of startled men and the crash of breaking glasses. For once, thought Maxwell grimly, Nancy was getting a bigger boot out of her party than she had bargained for.
He piled up against a wall, at the far edge of the staircase, and somehow or other, Sylvester was perched on top of him and reaching down to lap fondly at his face.
"Sylvester," he said, "this was the time you did it. You got us in a mess."
Sylvester went on lapping and a rasping purr rumbled in his chest.
Maxwell pushed the cat away and managed to slide up the wall to a sitting position.
Out on the floor of the room beyond the staircase, Mr. Marmaduke lay upon his side, both wheels spinning crazily, the friction of the wheel that was bottom-most making him rotate lopsidedly.
Carol came running up the steps and stopped, with fists firmly on her hips, to stare down at Maxwell and the cat.
"The two of you!" she cried, then choked with anger.
"We're sorry," Maxwell said.
"The guest of honor," she screamed at them, almost weeping. "The guest of honor and you two hunting him down the halls as if he were a moose."
"Apparently we didn't hurt him much," said Maxwell. "I see he is intact. I wouldn't have been surprised if his belly broke and all those bugs of his were scattered on the floor.”
"What will Nancy think?" Carol asked accusingly.
"I imagine," Maxwell told her, "that she'll be delighted. There hasn't been this much ruckus at one of her parties since the time the fire-breathing amphibian out of the Nettle system set the Christmas tree on fire."
"You make those things up," said Carol, "I don't believe it happened."
"Cross my heart," said Maxwell. "I was here and saw it. Helped put out the fire."
Out on the floor some of the guests had laid hold of Mr. Marmaduke and were pulling him over to stand upright on his wheels. Little serving robotics were scurrying about, picking up the broken glass and mopping up the floor where the drinks had spilled.
Maxwell got to his feet and Sylvester moved over close beside him, rubbing against his legs and purring.
Nancy had arrived from somewhere and was talking with Mr. Marmaduke. A large circle of guests stood around and listened to the talk.
"If I were you," suggested Carol, "I'd skin out of here the best way that I could. I can't imagine that you'll be welcome here."
"On the contrary," Maxwell told her, "I'm always welcome here."
He started walking down the staircase, with Sylvester pacing regally beside him. Nancy turned and saw him, broke through the circle and came across the floor to meet him.
"Pete!" she cried. "Then it's really true. You are back again."
"Why, of course," said Maxwell.
"I saw it in the papers, but I didn't quite believe it. I thought it was a hoax or a gag of some sort."
"But you invited me," said Maxwell.
"Invited you?"
She wasn't kidding him. He could see she wasn't kidding.
"You mean you didn't send the Shrimp..." "The Shrimp?"
"Well, a thing that looked like an overgrown shrimp."
She shook her head and, watching her face, Maxwell saw, with something of a shock, that she was growing old. There were many tiny wrinkles around the corners of her eyes that cosmetics failed to hide.
"A thing that looked like a shrimp," he said. "Said it was running errands for you. It said I was invited to the party. It said a car would be sent to fetch me. It even brought me clothes, because it said—”
"Pete," said Nancy, "please believe me. I did none of this. I did not invite you, but I'm glad you're here."
She moved closer and lay a hand upon his arm. Her face crinkled in a giggle. "And I'll be interested in hearing about what happened between you and Mr. Marmaduke."
"That I'm sorry about," said Maxwell.
"No need to be. He's my guest, of course, and one must be considerate of guests, but he's a really terrible person. Pete, he's basically a bore and a snob and—”
"Not now," Maxwell warned her softly.
Mr. Marmaduke had disengaged himself from the circle of guests and was wheeling across the floor toward them. Nancy turned to face him.
"You're all right?" she asked. "You really are all right?"
"Very right," said Mr. Marmaduke.
He wheeled close to Maxwell and an arm extruded from the top of his roly-poly body—a ropelike, flexible arm more like a tentacle than arm, with three clawlike fingers on the end of it. He reached out with it and draped it around Maxwell's shoulders. At the pressure of it, Maxwell had the instinct to shrink away, but with an exercise of conscious will, forced himself not to stir.
"I thank you, sir," said Mr. Marmaduke. "I am most grateful to you. You saved my life perhaps. Just as I fell I saw you leap upon the beast. It was most heroic."
Pressed tight against Maxwell's side, Sylvester lifted his head, dropped his lower jaw, exhibiting his fangs in a silent snarl.
"He would not have hurt you, sir," said Carol. "He's as gentle as a kitten. If you had not run, he'd not have chased you. He had the fool idea that you were playing with him. Sylvester likes to play."
Sylvester yawned, with a fine display of teeth.
"This play," said Mr. Marmaduke, "I do not care about."
"When I saw you fall," said Maxwell, "I was fearful for you. I thought for a moment you would burst wide open."
"Oh, no need of fear," said Mr. Marmaduke. "I am extremely resilient. The body is made of excellent material. It is strong and has a bouncing quality."
He removed his arm from Maxwell's shoulder and it ran like an oily rope, writhing in the air, to plop
back into his body. There was no mark on the body surface, Maxwell noticed, to indicate where it might have disappeared.
"You'll excuse me, please," said Mr. Marmaduke. "There's someone I must see." He wheeled about and rolled rapidly away.
Nancy shuddered. "He gives me the creeps," she said. "Although I must admit he is a great attraction. It isn't every hostess who can snag a Wheeler. I don't mind telling you, Pete, that I pulled a lot of wires to get him for a house guest and now I wish I hadn't. There's a slimy feel about him."
"Do you know why he'd be here—here on Earth, I mean?"
"No, I don't. I get the impression that he's a simple tourist. Although I don't imagine such a creature could be a simple tourist."
"I think you're right," said Maxwell.
"Pete," she said, "tell me about yourself. The papers say—”
He grinned. "I know. That I came back from the dead."
"But you didn't, really. I know that's not possible. Who was that we buried? Everyone, you must understand, simply everyone, was at the funeral and we all thought it was you. But it couldn't have been you. Whatever could have—”
"Nancy," said Maxwell, "I came back only yesterday. I found that I was dead and that my apartment had been rented and that I had lost my job and—”
"It seems impossible," said Nancy. "Such things just don't happen. I don't see how this happened."
"I'm not entirely clear about it all myself," Maxwell told her. "Later, I suppose, I'll find out more about it."
"Anyway," said Nancy, "you are here and everything's all right and if you don't want to talk about it, I'll circulate the word that you would rather not."
"That's kind of you," said Maxwell, "but it wouldn't work."
"You don't need to worry about newspapermen," said Nancy. "There are no newspaper people here. I used to let them come. A handpicked few, ones I thought that I could trust. But you can't trust any of them. I found that out the hard way. So you won't be bothered with them."
"I understand you have a painting..."
"You know about the painting, then. Let's go and look at it. It's the proudest thing I have. Imagine it, a Lambert! And one that had dropped entirely out of sight. I'll tell you later how it happened to be found, but I won't tell you what it cost me. I won't tell anyone. I'm ashamed of what it cost me."
"Much or little?"
"Much," said Nancy, "and you have to be so careful. It's so easy to be swindled. I wouldn't even talk of buying it until I had it examined by an expert. In fact, two experts. One to check against the other, although I suppose that was unnecessary."
"But there's no doubt it is a Lambert?"
"No doubt at all. I was almost sure, myself. No one else ever painted quite like Lambert. But he could be copied, of course, and I had to be sure."
"What do you know about Lambert?" Maxwell asked. "Something more than the rest of us? Something that's not found its way into books?"
"No. Really not a great deal. Not about the man himself. Why do you ask?"
"Because you are so excited."
"Well, really! Just finding an unknown Lambert is enough, of course. I have two other paintings of his, but this one is something special because it had been lost. Well, actually I don't know if lost is the word or not. Never known, perhaps, would be better. No record of his ever painting it. No record that survived, at least. And it is one of his so-called grotesques. You would hardly think one of them could be lost or mislaid or whatever happened to it. One of his earlier ones, that might be understandable."
They worked their way across the floor, skirting the little clustered groups of guests.
"Here it is," said Nancy.
They had pushed their way through a crowd that had been grouped in front of the wall on which the painting hung. Maxwell tilted his head to stare up at it.
It was somehow different than the color plates he had seen in the library that morning. This was because, he told himself, of the larger size of the painting, the brilliance and the clarity of color, some of which had been lost in the color plates. But this, he realized, was not all of it. The landscape was different and the creatures in it. A more Earth-like landscape—the sweet of gray hills and the brown of the shrubby vegetation that lay upon the land, the squatty fernlike trees. A troop of creatures that could be gnomes wended their way across a distant hill; a goblinlike creature sitting at the base of a tree leaned back against the bole, apparently asleep, with some sort of hat pulled down across his eyes. And others—fearsome, leering creatures, with obscene bodies and faces that made the blood run cold.
On the crest of a distant, flat-topped hill, about the base of which clustered a large crowd of many kinds of creatures, a small black blob stood outlined against the grayness of the sky.
Maxwell drew in his breath in a startled gasp, took a quick step closer, then halted and stood stiff and straight, afraid to give himself away.
It seemed impossible that no one else could have noticed it, he told himself. Although, perhaps, someone had and had not thought it worth the mention, or had been unsure and thus reluctant to say anything about it.
But for Maxwell there could be no doubt. He was sure of what he saw. That small black blob on the distant hilltop was the Artifact!
15
Maxwell found a secluded corner, a couple of chairs screened by a huge flowering plant of some sort, planted in a marble tub of generous proportions. There was no one there and he sat down.
Out beyond the corner where he sat, the party was drawing to its close, beginning to dwindle down. Some people had left and those who still were there seemed to be less noisy. And if one more person asked him what had happened to him, Maxwell told himself, he'd belt them in the jaw.
I'll explain, he had told Carol when she had asked the night before—I'll explain over and over again. And that was what he'd done, not entirely truthfully, and no one had believed him. They'd looked at him with glassy eyes and they had figured that either he was drunk or was making fools of them.
And he, he realized, had really been the one who had been made a fool. He had been invited to the party, but not by Nancy Clayton. Nancy had not sent him clothes to wear and had not sent the car that had let him out at the back door to walk down the hall, past the door where the Wheeler waited. And ten to one, the dogs had not been Nancy's either, although he had not thought to ask her.
Someone, he realized, had gone to a lot of trouble in a very awkward and involved manner to make sure the Wheeler had a chance to talk with him. It was all so melodramatic, stinking so of cloak and dagger, that it was ridiculous. Except that, somehow, he couldn't quite bring himself to think of it as ridiculous.
He coddled his drink with both his hands and listened to the clatter of the dying party.
He peered out around the greenery of the plant roosting in the tub and he could not see the Wheeler, although the Wheeler had been around for a good part of the evening.
He passed the drink, absentmindedly, from one hand to the other, and he knew he didn't want it, that he'd had a touch too much to drink—not so much, perhaps, too much to drink, as the wrong place to be drinking it, not with a warm, tight group of friends in a friendly room, but with too many people who were either strangers or only slightly known, and in a room that was too large and too impersonal. He was tired, more weary than he'd known. In just a little while, he'd get up on his feet and say good night to Nancy, if she were around, and stumble back to Oop's shack, the best way that he could.
And tomorrow? he asked himself. Tomorrow there were things that he should do. But he'd not think of them tonight; he'd wait until tomorrow.
He lifted the drink over the rim of the marble tub and poured it on the soil.
"Cheers," he told the plant.
Carefully, bending slowly so as not to lose his balance, he set the glass upon the floor.
"Sylvester," asked a voice, "do you see what we have here?"
He twisted around and there, on the reverse side of the plant, stood Ca
rol, Sylvester close beside her.
"Come on in," he invited them. "It's a hideaway I found. If the two of you stay very quiet..."
"I've been trying to get you by yourself all evening," Carol told him, "but there never was a chance. I want to know what was this routine of you and Sylvester hunting down the Wheeler?"
She came farther back into the corner and stood waiting for his answer.
"You were no more surprised than I was," he said. "Sylvester's showing up fairly left me gasping. I had no idea—”
"I get invited around a lot," said Carol coldly. "Not for myself, of course, since I suppose you're wondering, but because of Sylvester. He makes a good conversation piece."
"Well, good for you," said Maxwell. "You're one up on me. I was not invited."
"But you got here just the same."
"But don't ask me how. I would be somewhat pressed for an explanation."
"Sylvester has always been a decent cat," she said accusingly. "Perhaps a little greedy sometimes, but a gentleman."
"Oh, I know," said Maxwell. "I'm a bad influence on almost everyone."
She came all the way around the plant and sat down in the other chair. "Are you going to tell me what I asked?"
He shook his head. "I don't know if I can. It was somewhat confusing."
"I don't know," she said, "that I've met a more exasperating man. I don't think you're being fair."
"By the way," he said, "you saw the painting, didn't you?"
"Why, of course I did. That was what the party was all about. The painting and that funny Wheeler."
"Did you notice anything unusual?"
"Unusual?"
"Yes, about the painting."
"I don't think I did."
"Up on the hill there was a tiny cube. Black, sitting on the hill. It looked like the Artifact."
"I missed it. I didn't look that closely at it."
"You saw the gnomes, I presume."
"Yes, I noticed them. Or, at least, they looked like gnomes."
"And those other creatures," Maxwell said. "They looked different, somehow."
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