Clifford D. Simak

“I’m all right. For the present. Oop took me in and I have some money. If I had to, I could pick up some sort of job. Harlow Sharp would help me out if I needed something. Go on one of his field trips, if nothing else. I think I might like that.”

“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 connection-although there needn’t be. Nancy used to invite me on occasion.”

Preston grinned. “Why, you’re a celebrity. You’d be quite a catch for Nancy.”

“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.