Clifford D. Simak

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 funny stone,” said Oop.

“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 cannot tell you,” said Ghost. “There is no one who can tell you.”

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.

“Then,” asked Carol, “why the consternation?”

“Because,” said Oop, “Pete here has the hunch it may, at one time, have been the god of the Little Folk. That is, if the lousy little stinkers had the capacity to recognize a god.”

“I’m sorry,” Carol said. “I am truly sorry. I didn’t know. Perhaps if Time knew…”

“There’s not enough data,” Maxwell said, “to make any talk about it. Just a hunch is all. Just a feeling from certain things I’ve heard among the Little Folk. But even they don’t know. It was so long ago.”

So long ago, he thought. For the love of God, almost two hundred million years ago!

“This Oop,” said Carol. “I can’t get over him. That funny house he has out at the end of nowhere.”

“He’d be offended,” said Maxwell, “if he heard you calling it a house. It’s a shack and he’s proud of it-as a shack. The jump from cave to house would have been too great for him. He’d have felt uncomfortable.”

“A cave? He really lived in a cave?”

“Let me tell you something about old friend Oop,” said Maxwell. “He is an awful liar. You can’t believe all the stories that he tells. The cannibalism, for instance…”

“That makes me feel a little better. People eating one another!”

“Oh, there was cannibalism, all right. There is no doubt of that. But whether Oop himself was headed for the pot is another matter. On items of general information, he is reliable enough. It’s only when he gets to yarning about his personal experiences that you should begin to doubt him.”

“It’s funny,” said Carol. “I’ve seen him around and have wondered a bit about him, but I never thought I’d meet him. Never really wanted to, in fact. Certain people I can draw a line at, and he was one of them. I imagined he would be uncouth…”

“Oh, he’s uncouth,” said Maxwell.

“But charming, too,” said Carol.

Clear autumn stars shone frostily deep in the darkened sky. The roadway, almost unoccupied, wound its way along the ridge. Far below gleamed the far-spreading campus lights. The wind, blowing up the ridge, carried the faint smell of burning leaves.

“The fire was nice,” said Carol. “Why is it, Peter, that we don’t have fires? It would be so simple. A fireplace wouldn’t be so hard to build.”

“There was a time, several hundred years ago,” said Maxwell, “when every house, or almost every house, had at least one fireplace. Sometimes several. The whole thing, the whole business of having fires, was a throwback, of course. Back to the days when fire was a protection and a warmth. But, finally, we outgrew it.”