The Goblin Reservation

Oop lifted the jar hastily, took a tremendous gulp, part of the liquor spraying out across his woolly chest. He let out his breath in a lusty belch.

“They can’t abandon this knowledge,” said Maxwell. “They have to pass it on to someone who can use it. They have to stay alive, somehow, until they pass it on. And that, for the love of God, is where I come in. They commissioned me to sell it for them.”

“Sell it for them! A bunch of ghosts, hanging on by their very toenails! What would they want? What’s the price they ask?”

Maxwell put up his hand and wiped his forehead, which had sprouted a sudden mist of sweat. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Don’t know? How can you sell a thing if you don’t know what it’s worth, if you don’t have an asking price?”

“They said they would tell me later. They said to get someone interested and they’d get word to me on what the price would be.”

“That,” said Oop, disgusted, “is a hell of a way to make a business deal.”

“Yes, I know,” said Maxwell.

“You have no hint of price?”

“Not the faintest. I tried to explain to them and they couldn’t understand, maybe they refused to understand. And since then I have gone over it and over it and there’s no way I can know. It all boils down, of course, to what a gang like that might want. And for the life of me, I can’t think of a thing they’d want.”

“Well,” said Oop, “they picked the right place to make their sales pitch. How do you plan to go about it?”

“I’ll go up and talk to Arnold.”

“You pick them tough,” said Oop.

“Look, I have to talk with Arnold and to no one else. This can’t go up through cha

“Pete, Arnold is nothing but a big stuffed shirt. You know that as well as I do. He’s an administrator. He’s ru

“The president of the university has to be an administrator…”

“If it could have come at any other time,” mourned Oop, “you might have had a chance. But as it stands right now, Arnold is walking on a crate of eggs. Moving the administration from New York to this jerkwater campus…”

“A campus,” put in Maxwell, “with a great liberal tradition and-”

“University politics,” declared Oop, “doesn’t care about liberal traditions or any other kind of traditions.”

“I suppose not,” said Maxwell, “but Arnold ’s the man I have to see. I could wish it were someone else. I have no admiration for the man, but he’s the one I have to work with.”

“You could have turned it down.”

“The job of negotiator? No, I couldn’t, Oop. No man could have. They’d have had to find someone else and they might get someone who’d bungle it. Not that I’m sure I won’t bungle it, but at least I’ll try. And it’s not only for us, it’s for them as well.”

“You got to like these people?”

“I’m not sure just how much I liked them. Admired them, maybe. Felt sorry for them, maybe. They’re doing what they can. They hunted for so long to find someone they could pass the knowledge on to.”

“Pass it on? You said it was for sale.”

“Only because there is something that they want or need. I wish I could figure out what it is. It would make everything easier for everyone concerned.”

“Minor question-you talked with them. How did you go about it?”

“The tablets,” said Maxwell. “I told you about the tablets. The sheets of metal that carried information. They talked with me with tablets and I talked with them the same way.”

“But how could you read…”

“They gave me a contraption, like a pair of glasses, a pair of goggles, really, but bigger than a pair of goggles. It was a sort of bulky thing. I suppose it had a lot of mechanisms in it. I’d put it on and then I could read the tablets. No script, just little jiggles in the metal. It’s hard to explain. But you looked at the jiggles through the contraption that you wore and you knew what the jiggles said. It was adjustable, I found out later, so you could read the different atomic layers. But to start with, they only wrote me messages, if wrote is the word to use. Like kids writing back and forth to one another on slates. I wrote back to them by thinking into another contraption that was tied into the pair of goggles that I wore.”

“A translator,” said Gop.

“I suppose that’s what it was. A two-way translator.”

“We’ve tried to work one out,” said Oop. “By we I mean the combined ingenuity not only of the Earth, but of what we laughingly call the known galaxy.”

“Yes, I know,” said Maxwell.

“And these folks had one. These ghosts of yours.”

“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