The Goblin Reservation

“There are some strange stories,” Maxwell said. “A group of supermen, kept under lock and key. You have heard of that?”

“Yes, heard of it,” she said. “There are always rumors.”

“The best one that I’ve heard in recent days,” said Oop, “really is a lulu. Someone told me Supernatural has made contact with the Devil. How about that, Pete?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Maxwell. “I suppose someone has tried. I’m almost sure someone must have tried. It’s such an obvious thing for one to have a go at.”

“You mean,” asked Carol, “that there might really be a Devil?”

“Two centuries ago,” said Maxwell, “people asked, in exactly the same tone of voice you are using now, if there actually were such things as trolls and goblins.”

“And ghosts,” said Ghost.

“You’re serious!” Carol cried.

“Not serious,” said Maxwell. “Just not ready to foreclose even on the Devil.”

“This is a marvelous age,” declared Oop, “as I am sure you’ve heard me indicate before. You’ve done away with superstition and the old wives’ tales. You search in them for truth. But my people knew there were trolls and goblins and all the rest of them. The stories of them, you understand, were always based on fact. Except that later on, when he outgrew his savage simplicity, if you can call it that, man denied the fact; could not allow himself to believe these things that he knew were true. So he varnished them over and hid them safe away in the legend and the myth and when the human population kept on increasing, these creatures went into deep hiding. As well they might have, for there was a time when they were not the engaging creatures you seem to think they are today.”

Ghost asked: “And the Devil?”

“I’m not sure,” said Oop. “Maybe. But I can’t be sure. There were all these things you have lured out and rediscovered and sent to live on their reservations. But there were many more. Some of them fearful, all of them a nuisance.”

“You don’t seem to have liked them very well,” Carol observed.

“Miss,” said Qop, “I didn’t.”

“It would seem to me,” said Ghost, “that this would be a fertile field for some Time investigation. Apparently there were many different kinds of these-would you call them primates?”

“I think you might,” said Maxwell.

“Primates of a different stripe than the apes and man.”

“Of a very different stripe,” said Oop. “Vicious little stinkers.”

“Someday, I’m sure,” said Carol, “Time will get around to it. They know it, of course?”

“They should,” said Oop. “I’ve told them often enough, with appropriate description.”

“Time has too much to do,” Maxwell reminded them. “Too many areas of interest. And the entire past to cover.”

“And no money to do it with,” said Carol.

“There,” declared Maxwell, “speaks a loyal Time staff member.”

“But it’s true,” she cried. “The other disciplines could learn so much by Time investigation. You can’t rely on written history. It turns out, in many cases, to be different than it actually was. A matter of emphasis or bias or of just poor interpretation, embalmed forever in the written form. But do these other departments provide any funds for Time investigation? I’ll answer that. They don’t. A few of them, of course. The College of Law has cooperated splendidly, but not many of the others. They’re afraid. They don’t want their comfortable little worlds upset. Take this matter of Shakespeare, for example. You’d think English Lit would be grateful to find that Oxford wrote the plays. After all, it had been a question that had been talked about for many years-who really wrote the plays? But, after all of that, they resented it when Time found out who really wrote the plays.”

“And now,” said Maxwell, “Time is bringing Shakespeare forward to lecture about how he didn’t write the plays. Don’t you think that’s rubbing it in just a bit too much?”

“That’s not the point of it, at all,” said Carol. “The point is that Time is forced to make a sideshow out of history to earn a little money. That’s the way it is all the time. All sorts of schemes for raising money. Earning a lousy reputation as a bunch of clowns. You can’t believe Dean Sharp enjoys-”

“I know Harlow Sharp,” said Maxwell. “Believe me, he enjoys every minute of it.”

“That is blasphemy,” Oop said in mock horror. “Don’t you know that you can be crucified for blabbing off like that?”

“You’re making fun of me,” said Carol. “You make fun of everyone, of everything. You, too, Peter Maxwell.”

“I apologize for them,” said Ghost, “since neither one of them could summon up the grace to apologize, themselves. You have to live with them for ten or fifteen years to understand they really mean no harm.”

“But the day will come,” said Carol, “when Time will have the funds to do whatever it may want. All their pet projects and to heck with all the other colleges. When the deal goes-”

She stopped abruptly. She sat frozen, not moving. One could sense that she wanted to put her hand up to her mouth and was refraining from it only by iron will.

“What deal?” asked Maxwell.

“I think I know,” said Oop. “I heard a rumor, just a tiny little rumor, and I paid no attention to it. Although, come to think of it, these dirty little rumors are the ones that turn out to be true. The great big, ugly, noisy ones-”

“Oop, not a speech,” said Ghost. “Just tell us what you heard.”

“It’s incredible,” said Oop. “You never would believe it. Not in all your born days.”

“Oh, stop it!” Carol exclaimed.

They all looked at her and waited.

“I made a slip,” she said. “I got all worked up and made a slip. Can I ask the three of you just please to forget it. I’m not even sure it’s true.”

“Certainly,” said Maxwell. “You’ve been exposed this evening to rough company and ill ma

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not any good to ask. I have no right to ask. I’ll simply have to tell you and trust to your discretion. And I’m pretty sure it’s true. Time has been made an offer for the Artifact.”

Silence reverberated in the room as the other three sat motionless, scarcely breathing. She looked from one to the other of them, not quite understanding.

Finally Ghost stirred slightly and there was a rustling in the silence of the room, as if his white sheet had been an actual sheet that rustled when he moved.

“You do not comprehend,” he said, “the attachment that we three hold to the Artifact.”

“You struck us in a heap,” said Oop.

“The Artifact,” said Maxwell softly. “The Artifact, the one great mystery, the one thing in the world that has baffled everyone…”

“A fu

“Not a stone,” said Ghost.

“Then, perhaps,” said Carol, “you’ll tell me what it is.”

And that was the one thing, Maxwell told himself, that neither Ghost nor any one else could do. Discovered ten years or so ago by Time investigators on a hilltop in the Jurassic Age, it had been brought back to the present at a great expenditure of funds and ingenuity. Its weight had demanded energy far beyond anything so far encountered to kick it forward into time, an energy requirement which had made necessary the projection backward into time of a portable nuclear generator, transported in many pieces and assembled on the site. And then the further task of bringing back the generator, since nothing of that sort, as a matter of simple ethics, could be abandoned in the past-even in the past of the far Jurassic.

“I ca

Ghost was right. No one had been able to make any sense of it at all. A massive block of some sort of material that now appeared to be neither stone nor metal, although at one time it had been thought to be a stone, and later on, a metal, it had defied all investigation. Six feet long, four feet on each side, it was a mass of blackness that absorbed no energy and emitted none, that bounced all light and other radiation from its surface, that could not be cut or dented, stopping a laser beam as neatly as if the beam had not existed. There was nothing that could scratch it, nothing that could probe it-it gave up no information of any sort at all. It rested on its raised base in the forecourt of Time Museum, the one thing in the world about which no one could even make a valid guess.