The Goblin Reservation

“They have a whole lot more,” said Maxwell. “I don’t know what they have. I sampled some of what they had. At random. Just enough to convince myself they had what they said.”

“One thing still bugs me,” said Oop. “You said a planet. What about the star.”

“The planet is roofed over. There was a star, I gather, but you couldn’t see it, not from the surface. The point is, of course, that there needn’t be a star. You are acquainted, I think, with the concept of the oscillating universe.”

“The yo-yo universe,” said Oop. “The one that goes bang, and then bang, bang again.”

“That’s right,” said Maxwell. “And now we can quit wondering about it. It happens to be true. The crystal planet comes from the universe that existed before the present universe was formed. They had it figured out, you see. They knew the time would come when all the energy would be gone and all the dead matter would start moving slowly back to form another cosmic egg, so that the egg could explode again and give birth to yet another universe. They knew they were approaching the death of the universe and that unless something were done, it would be death for them as well. So they launched a project. A planetary project. They sucked in energy and stored it-don’t ask me how they extracted it from wherever they extracted it or how they stored it. Stored somehow in the very material of the planet, so that when the rest of the universe went black and dead, they still had energy. They roofed the planet in, they made a house of it. They worked out propulsion mechanisms so they could move their planet, so that they would be an independent body moving independently through space. And before the inward drifting of the dead matter of the universe began, they left their star, a dead and blackened cinder by this time, and set out on their own. That’s the way they have been since then, a holdover population riding on a planetary spaceship. They saw the old universe die, the one before this one. They were left alone in space, in space that had no hint of life, no glint of light, no quiver of energy. It may be-I don’t know-that they saw the formation of the brand-new cosmic egg. They could have been very far from it and seen it. And if they saw it, they saw the explosion that marked the begi

“Fifty billion years,” said Oop. “Fifty billion years of learning.”

“At least that much,” said Maxwell. “It could be a great deal more.”

They sat, silent, thinking of those fifty billion years. The fire mumbled in the chimney’s throat. From far off came the chiming of the clock in Music Hall, counting off the time.

Maxwell awoke. Oop was shaking him. “Someone here to see you.” Maxwell threw back the covers, hoisted his feet out on the floor, groped blindly for his trousers. Oop handed them to him.

“Who is it?”

“Said his name was Longfellow. Nasty, high-nosed gent. He’s waiting outside for you. You could see he wouldn’t risk contamination by stepping in the shack.”

“Then to hell with him,” said Maxwell, starting to crawl back into bed.

“No, no,” protested Oop. “I don’t mind at all. I’m above insult. There is nothing that can faze me.” Maxwell struggled into his trousers, slid his feet into his shoes and kicked them on.

“Any idea who this fellow is?”

“None at all,” said Oop.

Maxwell stumbled across the room to the bench set against the wall, spilled water from the bucket standing there into a washbasin, bent and sloshed water on his face.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“A little after seven.”

“Mr. Longfellow must have been in a hurry to see me.”

“He’s out there now, pacing up and down. Impatient.”

Longfellow was impatient.

As Maxwell came out of the door, he hurried up to him and held out a hand.

“Professor Maxwell,” he said, “I’m so glad I found you. It was quite a job. Someone told me you might be here,” he glanced at the shack and his long nose crinkled just a trifle, “so I took the chance.”

“Oop,” said Maxwell, quietly, “is an old and valued friend.”

“Could we, perhaps, take a stroll,” suggested Longfellow. “It is an unusually fine morning. Have you breakfasted yet? No, I don’t suppose you have.”

“It might help,” said Maxwell, “if you told me who you are.”

“I’m in Administration. Stephen Longfellow is the name. Appointments secretary to the president.”

“Then you’re just the man I want to see,” said Maxwell. “I need an appointment with the president as soon as possible.”

Longfellow shook his bead. “I would say offhand that is quite impossible.”

They fell into step and walked along the path that led down toward the roadway. Leaves of wondrous, shining yellow fell slowly through the air from a thick-branched walnut tree that stood beside the path. Down by the roadway a maple tree was a blaze of scarlet against the blueness of the morning sky. And far in that sky streamed a V-shaped flock of ducks heading southward.

“Impossible,” said Maxwell. “You make it sound final. As if you’d thought about it and come to your decision.”

“If you wish to communicate with Dr. Arnold,” Longfellow told him coldly, “there are proper cha

“I understand all that,” said Maxwell, “and I understand as well about the cha

“Professor Maxwell,” Longfellow said, “there is no use, it seems, to beat about the bush. You’re a persistent man and, I suspect, a rather stubborn one, and with a man of that bent it is often best to lay it on the line. The president won’t see you. He can’t afford to see you.”

“Because there seems to have been two of me? Because one of me is dead?”

“The press will be full of it this morning. All the headlines shouting about a man come back from the dead. Have you heard the radio, perhaps, or watched television?”

“No,” Maxwell said, “I haven’t.”

“Well, when you got around to it you’ll find that you’ve been made a three-ring circus. I don’t mind telling you that it is embarrassing.”

“You mean a scandal?”

“I suppose you could call it that. And administration has trouble enough without identifying itself with a situation such as yours. There is this matter of Shakespeare, for example. We can’t duck that one, but we can duck you.”

“But surely,” said Maxwell, “administration can’t be too concerned with Shakespeare and myself as compared to all the other problems that it faces. There is the uproar over the revival of dueling at Heidelberg and the dispute over the ethics of employing certain alien students on the football squads and-”

“But can’t you see,” walled Longfellow, “that what happens on this particular campus are the things that matter.”

“Because administration was transferred here? When Oxford and California and Harvard and half a dozen others-”

“If you ask me,” Longfellow declared stiffly, “it was a piece of poor judgment on the part of the board of regents. It has made things very difficult for administration.”

“What would happen,” asked Maxwell, “if I just walked up the hill and into administration and started pounding desks?”