The Goblin Reservation

“You think it wasn’t an accident? That it may have been a murder?”

“I don’t know. The thought has occurred to me. There was one fu

“But who could have known there were two of me?”

“The people on that other planet. If there were people…”

“There were people,” Maxwell said. “It was a most amazing place.…”

It all came back as he sat there talking, almost as if he were there again. A crystal place-or that had been what it had looked to be when he first had seen it. An extensive crystal plain that ran on and on and a crystal sky with crystal pillars reaching from the plain and upward, apparently to the sky, although the tops of them were lost in the milkiness of sky-pillars soaring upward to hold the sky in place. An empty place, to make one think of a deserted ballroom of extensive size, all cleaned and polished for a ball, waiting for the music and the dancers who had never come and now would never come, leaving the ballroom empty through all eternity, shining in all its polished glitter and its wasted graciousness.

A ballroom, but a ballroom without any walls, ru

He stood astounded in the vast immensity, an immensity not of boundless sky, for the sky was far from boundless, nor from great distances, for the distances were not great, but immensity that was measured as a room would be, as if one were in a giant’s house and lost and were looking for a door, and without a clue as to where a door might be. A place with no distinguishing features, with each pillar like the next, with no cloud in the sky (if it were a sky), with each foot, each mile like every other foot and mile, level and paved with a crystal paving that stretched out in all directions.

He wanted to cry out, to ask if anyone were there, but was afraid to cry out-perhaps in the fear, although he did not realize it then and only thought it later, that a single sound would send all this cold and shining splendor shimmering into a cloud of frosty dust. For the place was silent, with no slightest whisper of a sound. Silent and cold and lonely, all its splendor and its whiteness lost in the loneliness.

Slowly, carefully, fearing that the scuff of his moving feet might bring this whole world into dust, he pivoted and out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse-not of motion, but the flickering sense of motion, as if something had been there, but had moved so fast that his eye had failed to catch it. He halted, the short hairs prickling on the back of his neck, engulfed by the sense of utter strangeness rather than of actual danger, apprehensive of a strangeness so distorted and so twisted out of the normal human context that a man gazing at it might go mad before he had a chance to jerk his eyes away.

Nothing happened and he moved again, pivoting inch by cautious inch, and now he saw that he had been standing with his back turned on what appeared to be an assemblage of some sort-an engine? an instrument? a machine?

And all at once he knew. Here was the strange contraption that had brought him here, this crazy crystal world’s equivalent of a matter transmitter and receiver.

But this, he knew at once, was not the Coonskin system. It was no place he had ever heard of. Nowhere in the known universe was there a place like this. Something had gone wrong and he had been hurled, not to the Coonskin planet which had been his destination, but to some far, forgotten corner of the universe, to some area, perhaps, where man would not penetrate for another million years, so far away from Earth that the distances involved became unimaginable.

Now again there were flickering motions, as if living shadows moved against the crystal background. As he watched, the flickering flowed into shifting shape and form and he could see that there were many moving shapes, all of them, strangely, separate entities that seemed to hold, within the flicker of them, individual personalities. As if, he thought in horror, they were things that had once been people-as if they might be alien ghosts.

“And I accepted them,” he said to Oop. “I accepted them-on faith, perhaps. It was either that or reject them and be left there, standing all alone upon that crystal plain. A man of a century ago, perhaps, would not have accepted them. He would have been inclined to sweep them out of his mind as pure imagination. But I had spent too many hours with Ghost to gag at the thought of ghosts. I had worked too long with supernatural phenomena to quibble at the idea of creatures and of circumstances beyond the human pale.

“And the strange thing about it, the comforting thing about it, is that they sensed that I accepted them.”

“And that is it?” asked Oop. “A planet full of ghosts?” Maxwell nodded, “Perhaps that’s one way of looking at it. But let me ask you-what really is a ghost?”

“A spook,” said Oop. “A spirit.”

“But what do you mean by spook? Define a spirit for me.”

“I know,” said Oop regretfully. “I was being a bit facetious and there was no excuse for it. We don’t know what a ghost is. Even Ghost doesn’t know exactly what he is. He simply knows that he exists-and if anyone should know, he should. He has mulled over it a lot. He’s thought about it deeply. He has communed with fellow ghosts and there is no evidence. So you fall back upon the supernatural…”

“Which is not understood,” said Maxwell.

“A mutation of some sort,” suggested Oop.

“Collins thought so,” said Maxwell. “But he stood alone. I know I didn’t agree with him, but that was before I was on the crystal planet. Now I’m not so sure. What happens when a race reaches an end, when, as a race, it has passed through childhood and middle age and now has reached old age? A race dying as a man does, dying of old age. What does it do, then? It could die, of course. That’s what one would expect of it. But suppose there was a reason that it couldn’t die, suppose it had to hang on, had to stay alive for some overriding reason, that it could not allow itself to die?”

“If ghostliness really is a mutation,” said Oop, “if they knew it was a mutation, if they were so far advanced they could control mutation-”

He stopped and looked at Maxwell. “You think that’s what might have happened?”

“I think it might,” said Maxwell. “I am begi

Oop handed across the fruit jar. “You need a drink,” he said. “And when you’re through with it, I’ll have one, myself.”

Maxwell took the jar, holding it, not drinking right away. Oop reached out to the stack of wood, lifted a chunk in one massive fist and threw it on the fire. A spray of sparks gushed up the chimney. Outside the night wind moaned along the eaves.

Maxwell lifted the jar and drank. The splash of liquid ran down his gullet like a torrent of lava. He choked, wishing that he could drink the stuff, just once, without choking on it. He handed the jar back to Oop. Oop lifted it, then took it down again without drinking. He squinted across its rim at Maxwell.

“You said something to live for. Some reason that they couldn’t die-that they had to keep on existing, any way they could.”

“That’s right,” said Maxwell. “Information. Knowledge. A planet crammed with knowledge. A storehouse of knowledge-and I would doubt that a tenth of it duplicates our own. The rest of it is new, unknown. Some of it material we have never dreamed of. Knowledge that we may not ferret out short of a million years, if we ever ferret it. It is stored, electronically I suppose-arranging atoms in such a ma