The Goblin Reservation

“But don’t you have to have some sort of Time degree?”

“Not if you go as a working member of the expedition. To hold a supervisory post of some sort, it would take one, I suppose.”

“Before I start moving,” Preston said, “I’ll have to know the details. Everything that happened.”

“I’ll write out a statement for you. Have it notarized. Anything you want.”

“Seems to me,” said Preston, “we might file action against Transportation. They put you in this mess.”

Maxwell hedged. “Not right now,” he said. “We can think of it later on.”

“You get that statement put together,” Preston told him. “And in the meantime, I’ll do some thinking and look up some law. Then we can make a start. Have you seen the papers or looked at television?”

Maxwell shook his head. “I haven’t had the time.”

“They’re going wild,” said Preston. “It’s a wonder they haven’t cornered you. They must be looking for you. All they have as yet is conjecture. You were seen last night at the Pig and Whistle. A lot of people apparently spotted you there last night, or thought they did. The line right now is that you’ve come back from the dead. If I were you, I’d keep out of their way. If they should catch up with you, tell them absolutely nothing.”

“I have no intention to,” said Maxwell.

They sat in the quiet office, looking silently at one another.”

“What a mess!” said Preston, finally. “What a lovely mess! I believe, Pete, I might just enjoy this.”

“By the way,” said Maxwell, “Nancy Clayton invited me to a party tonight. I’ve been wondering if there might be some co

Preston gri

“I’m not too sure of that,” said Maxwell. “She must have heard I had shown up. She’d be curious, of course.”

“Yes,” said Preston dryly, “she would be curious.”

Maxwell expected that he might find newsmen lying in wait for him at Oop’s shack, but there was no one there. Apparently the word hadn’t spread that he was staying there.

The shack stood in the drowsiness of late afternoon, with the autumn sunlight pouring like molten gold over the weatherbeaten lumber scraps of which it had been built. A few bees buzzed lazily in a bed of asters that grew outside the door, and down the stretch of hillside above the roadway a few yellow butterflies drifted in the hazy afternoon.

Maxwell opened the door and stuck in his head. There was no one there. Oop was off prowling somewhere and there was no sign of Ghost. A banked fire glowed redly in the fireplace. Maxwell shut the door and sat down on the bench that stood before the shack.

Far to the west one of the campus four lakes shone as a thin blue lens. The countryside was painted brown and yellow by dead sedges and dying grasses. Here and there little islands of color flared in scattered groups of trees.

Warm and soft, thought Maxwell. A land that one could dream in. Unlike those violent, gloomy landscapes that Lambert had painted so many years ago.

He sat wondering why those landscapes should stick so tightly, like a bur against his mind. Wondering, too, how the artist could have known how the ghostly inhabitants of the crystal planet flickered. It could not be merely happenstance; it was not the sort of thing a man might readily imagine. Reason said that Lambert must have known about those ghostly people, reason just as plainly said it was impossible.

And what about all those other creatures, all those other grotesque monstrosities Lambert had spread with an insane, vicious brush across the canvasses? Where did they fit in? Where might they have come from? Or were they simply mad figments of imagination, torn raw and bleeding from a strangely tortured mind? Were the people of the crystal planet the only authentic creatures Lambert had depicted? It did not seem too likely. Somewhere or other, somehow or other, Lambert must have seen these other creatures, too. And was the landscape pure imagination, brushed in to maintain the mood established by the creatures, or might it have been the landscape of the crystal planet at some other time, before it had been fixed forever in the floor and roof that shut it in against the universe? But that, he told himself, was impossible, for the planet had been enclosed before the present universe was born. Ten billion years at least, perhaps as much as fifty billion.

Maxwell stirred uneasily. It made no sense at all. None of it made any sort of sense. He had trouble enough, he told himself, without worrying about Lambert’s paintings. He had lost his job, his estate was locked in probate, be didn’t have a legal standing as a human being.

But none of that mattered too much, not right now, anyhow. First came the matter of the hoard of knowledge on the crystal planet. It was a knowledge the university must have-a body of knowledge that most certainly was greater than the total of all knowledge in the known galaxy. Some of it would duplicate what was already known, of course, but there would be, he was certain, other huge areas of understanding which were yet unthought of. The little that he had had the time to see bolstered that belief.

Once again, it seemed, he was hunkered down before the table, almost like a coffee table, on which he’d piled the metal sheets he had taken from the shelves, and with the contraption that was a reader, an interpreter, call it what one might, fastened to his head.

There had been the sheet of metal that talked about the mind, not in metaphysical or philosophic terms, but as a mechanism, employing terms and concepts that he could not grasp. He had struggled with the terminology, he remembered, for he knew that here was a treatise on an area of understanding no one yet had touched, but after a time had put it to one side, for it was beyond him. And there was that other piece of metal, that other book, which appeared to be a basic text on the application of certain mathematical principles to the social sciences, although some of the social sciences that were mentioned he could only guess at, groping after the concepts as a blind man might grope after flitting butterflies. There had been histories, he recalled, not of one universe, but two, and natural history which had told of life forms so fantastic in their basic principles and their functions that they seemed unbelievable, and a very thin sheet of metal, so thin it bent and twisted, like a sheet of paper, when he handled it, that had been so far beyond his understanding that he could not quite be sure what it was about. And a thicker piece of metal, a much thicker piece, wherein he read the thoughts and philosophies of creatures and of cultures long since gone to dust that had sent him reeling back, frightened, disgusted, outraged and dismayed, but still full of a fearful wonder, at the utter inhumanity expressed m those philosophies.

All that and more, much more, a trillion times more, was waiting out there on the crystal planet.

It was important, he reminded himself, that he carry out the assignment that he had been given. It was vital that the library of the crystal planet be attained and, probably, although no time limit had been placed, that it be done quickly. For if he failed there was, he felt sure, a good possibility that the planet would go elsewhere to seek another market, to offer what it had, out into another sector of the galaxy, perhaps out of the galaxy entirely.

The Artifact, he told himself, could be the price, although he could not be sure of that. The fact that an offer had been made for it, and that Churchill somehow was involved in it, made that seem reasonable. But at the moment he could not be sure. The Artifact might be wanted by someone for some other purpose, perhaps by someone who might finally have figured out exactly what it was. He tried to imagine exactly what they might have found, but he had no facts to go on, and he failed.