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 no one else. This can’t go up through channels. Can’t have a word of it leak out. On the surface, it sounds harebrained. If the communications media or the gossip-mongers got hold of it, the University wouldn’t dare to touch it. If it were known and they did consider it and the deal fell through—and, believe me, working in the dark, as I have to work, the deal could well fall through—there’d be just one loud guffaw all the way from here clear out to the Rim. It would be Arnold’s neck and my neck.”
“Pete, Arnold is nothing but a big stuffed shirt. You know that as well as I do. He’s an administrator. He’s running the business end of this University. I don’t care if he has the title of president or not, he’s just the manager. He doesn’t give a damn about the academic end of it. He won’t stick out his neck for three planets full of knowledge.”
“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.”
“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 I’m trying 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 so much 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 goggles, but big. It was a sort of bulky thing. I suppose it had a lot of mechanism 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 Oop.
“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 a 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 whereever 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 beginning of this universe we live in, the blinding flash, far off, that sent the energy streaking into space. They saw the first stars glow red; they saw the galaxies take shape. And when the galaxies had formed, they joined this new universe.
They could go to any galaxy they chose, set up an orbit about any star they wished. They could move any time they wanted to. They were universal gypsies. But the end is nearing now. The planet, I suppose, could keep on and on, for the energy machinery must still be operative. I imagine there might be a limit to the planet, but they’re not even close to that. But the race is dying out, and they have stored in
their records the knowledge of two universes.”
“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.
XI
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?” he asked Oop. “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. I’m above insult.” 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 wash basin, 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 head. “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 channels. You must understand the president is a busy man.”
“I understand all that,” said Maxwell, “and I understand as well about the channels. Innumerable delays, a request passed on from hand to hand and the knowledge of one’s communication spread among so many people—”
“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 get 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,” wailed 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?”
“You know well enough. You’d be thrown out.”
“But if I brought along a corps of the newspaper and television boys and they were outside watching?”
“I suppose then you wouldn’t be thrown out. You might even get to see the president. But I can assure you that under circumstances such as those you’d not get whatever it may be you want.”
“So,” said Maxwell, “I’d lose, no matter how I went about it.”
“As a matter of fact,” Longfellow told him, “I had come this morning on quite a different mission. I was bringing happy news.”
“I can imagine that you were,” said Maxwell. “What kind of sop are you prepared to throw me to make me disappear?”
“Not a sop,” said Longfellow, much aggrieved. “I was told to offer you the post of dean at the experimental college the university is establishing out on Gothic IV.”
“You mean that planet with all the witches and the warlocks?”
“It would be a splendid opportunity for a man in your field,” Longfellow insisted. “A planet where wizardry developed without the intervention of other intelligences, as is the case on Earth.”
“A hundred and fifty light-years distant,” said Maxwell. “Somewhat remote and I would think it might be dreary. But I suppose the salary’d be good.”
“Very good, indeed.”
“No, thanks,” said Maxwell. I’m satisfied with my job, right here.”
“What job?” asked Longfellow.
“Why, yes. I’m on the faculty.”
Longfellow shook his head. “Not any longer,” he said. “Have you, by any chance, forgotten? You died more than three weeks ago. We can’t let vacancies go unfilled.”
“You mean I’ve been replaced?”
“Why, most certainly,” Longfellow told him, nastily. “As it stands right now, you are unemployed.”
XII
The waiter brought the scrambled eggs and bacon, poured the coffee, then went away and left Maxwell at the table. Through the wide expanse of window, Lake Mendota stretched away, a sheet of glassy blue, with the faint suggestion of purple hills on the other shore. A squirrel ran down the bole of the gnarled oak tree that stood just outside the window and halted, head downward, to stare with beady eyes at the man sitting at the table. A brown and red oak leaf planed down deliberately, from branch to ground, wobbling in the tiny thermal currents of air. On the rocky shore a boy and girl walked slowly, hand in hand, through the lakeshore’s morning hush.
It would have been civilized and gracious, Maxwell told himself, to have accepted Longfellow’s invitation to eat breakfast with him. But he had had all that he could take of the appointments secretary. All he wanted was to be alone, to gain a little time to sort out the situation and to do some thinking—although probably he could not afford the time for thinking.<
br />
Oop had been right. It was apparent now that to see the university president would be no easy task, not only because of that official’s busy schedule and his staff’s obsession of doing things through channels, but because for some reason, not entirely understood, this matter of twin Peter Maxwells had assumed the proportions of a scandal from which Arnold had the fervent wish to be disassociated. Maxwell wondered, sitting there and gazing out the window at the pop-eyed, staring squirrel, whether this attitude of the administration might go back to the interview with Drayton. Had Security zeroed in on Arnold? It didn’t seem likely. But it was a possibility. The depth of Arnold’s jittery attitude was emphasized by the hurried offer of the post on Gothic IV. Not only did administration want nothing to do with this second Peter Maxwell, it wanted him off the Earth as well, buried on a planet where in the space of a little time he would be forgotten.
It was understandable that his post at Supernatural had been filled after the death of the other Peter Maxwell. After all, classes must go on. Gaps could not be left in the faculty. But even so, there were other positions that could have been found for him. The fact that this had not been done, that the Gothic IV position had been so quickly offered, was evidence enough that he was not wanted on the Earth.
Yet it all was strange. Administration could not have known until sometime yesterday that two Peter Maxwells had existed. There could not have been a problem, there’d have been no basis for a problem, until that word had been received. Which meant, Maxwell told himself, that someone had gotten to administration fast—someone who wanted to get rid of him, someone who was afraid that he would interfere.
But interfere in what? And the answer to that seemed so glib and easy that he felt, instinctively, that it must be wrong. But search as he might, there was one answer only—that someone else knew of the hoard of knowledge on the crystal planet and was working to get hold of it.
The Complete Serials Page 107
