Oop's massive figure moved out from one of the tables in the rear. He waved an arm at them. There were, Maxwell saw, only a half dozen or so other people in the place.
"Over here!" yelled Oop. "Someone for you to meet." Followed by Ghost, Maxwell made his way across the room. From the table, Carol's face looked up at him. And another face, a bearded, shadowed face—the face of someone that Maxwell felt he should remember.
"Our guest tonight," said Oop. "Master William Shakespeare."
Shakespeare got up and held out his hand to Maxwell. A white-toothed smile flashed above the beard.
"I deem me fortunate," he said, "to have fallen in with such rough and rowdy fellows."
"The Bard is thinking of staying here," said Oop. "Of settling down among us."
"Nay, not the Bard," said Shakespeare. "I will not have you call me it. I be no more than an honest butcher and a dealer in the wool."
"A mere slip of the tongue," Oop assured him. "We have grown so accustomed..."
"Aye, aye, I know," said Shakespeare. "One mistake treads hard upon the footsteps of the one it follows."
"But stay here," said Maxwell. He shot a swift glance at Oop. "Does Harlow know he's here?"
"I think not," said Oop. "We took some pains he wouldn't."
"I slipped the leash," said Shakespeare, grinning, pleased with himself. "But with assistance, for which I acknowledge gratitude."
"Assistance," said Maxwell. "I just bet there was. Will you clowns ever learn..."
"Pete, don't carry on," said Carol. "I think it very noble of Oop. Here was this poor fellow from another time and all he wanted was to see how the people lived and—”
"Let's sit down," said Ghost to Maxwell. "You have the look of a man who could stand a good stiff drink."
Maxwell sat down, next to Shakespeare, Ghost taking the chair on the other side of him. Oop picked up a bottle and handed it across the table to him.
"Go ahead," he urged. "Don't stand on ceremony. Don't bother with a glass. We're informal here."
Maxwell tilted the bottle to his mouth and let it gurgle. Shakespeare watched him with admiration. When he took it down, Shakespeare said, "I cannot but admire your fortitude. I essayed a drink of it and it fair to shriveled me."
"After a time you get used to it," said Maxwell.
"But this ale," said Shakespeare, touching with a finger a half-filled bottle of beer. "Now, there is stuff soft to the palate and pleasing to the stomach."
Sylvester wormed his way behind Shakespeare's chair, squeezed in beside Maxwell and laid his head in Maxwell's lap. Maxwell scratched behind his ears.
"Is that cat bothering you again?" asked Carol.
"Sylvester and I are comrades," Maxwell told her. "We've been through wars together. We took on the Wheeler last night, you must remember, and we vanquished him."
"You bear a cheerful countenance," Shakespeare said to Maxwell. "I would presume that the business you have been about, and which had detained you until now, has gone favorably."
"The business did not go at all," said Maxwell. "The only reason I have a cheerful countenance is because I am in such good company."
"You mean Harlow turned you down!" exploded Oop. "That he wouldn't give you a day or two of time."
"There was nothing else for him to do," Maxwell explained. "He's already been paid and the Wheeler carts off the Artifact tomorrow."
"We have the means," Oop declared darkly, "to make him change his mind."
"Not any longer," said Maxwell. "He can't pull out now. The deal is done. He won't give back the money, be won't break his word. And if what you have in mind is what I think it is, all he needs to do is call off the lecture and refund the money for the tickets."
"I suppose you're right," Oop agreed. "We hadn't known the deal had gone so far. We figured we might pick up a little bargaining strength."
"You did the best you could," said Maxwell, "and I thank you for it."
"We had figured," said Oop, "that if we could buy a day or two, then all of us could go marching up the hill and bust in on Arnold and explain things to him by hand. But it's all over now, I guess—so have another drink and pass it over to me."
Maxwell had another drink and passed the bottle to him. Shakespeare finished off his beer and thumped the bottle back onto the table. Carol took the bottle from Oop and poured a couple of inches into her glass.
"I don't care how the rest of you conduct yourselves," she said. "I will not go utterly barbaric. I insist on drinking from a glass."
"Beer!" yelled Oop. "More beer for our distinguished guest."
"I thank you, sir," said Shakespeare.
"How did you ever find this dump?" asked Maxwell. "I know," said Oop, "many of the backwaters of this campus."
"It was exactly what we wanted," said Ghost. "Time will be beating the bushes for our friend. Did Harlow tell you he had disappeared?"
"No," said Maxwell, "but he seemed somewhat on edge. He mentioned that he was worried, but you couldn't tell it on him. He's the kind who can sit on the edge of an exploding volcano and never turn a hair."
"How about the newsmen?" Maxwell asked. "Still covering the shack?"
Oop shook his head. "But they'll be back. We'll have to find some other place for you to bunk."
"I suppose I might as well face them," Maxwell said. "The story will have to be told someday."
"They'll tear you apart," warned Carol. "And Oop tells me you are without a job and Longfellow's sore at you. You can't stand bad publicity right now."
"None of it really matters," Maxwell told her. "The only problem is how much of it I should tell them."
"All of it," said Oop. "Tear the thing wide open. Let the galaxy know exactly what was lost."
"No," said Maxwell. "Harlow is my friend. I can't do anything to hurt him."
A waiter brought a bottle of beer and put it down. "One bottle!" raged Oop. "What do you mean, one bottle? Go back and get an armload of it. Our friend here has a dry on."
"You didn't say," the waiter said. "How was I to know?"
He shuffled off to gather up more beer.
"Your hospitality," said Shakespeare, "is beyond reproach. But I fear I am intruding in a time of trouble."
"Trouble, yes," Ghost told him. "But you are not intruding. We are glad to have you."
"What was this Oop said about your staying here?" asked Maxwell. "About your settling down."
"My teeth are bad," said Shakespeare. "They hang loosely in the jaw and at times pain exceedingly. I have intelligence that hereabout are marvelous mechanics who can extract them with no pain and fabricate a set to replace the ones I have."
"That can be done, indeed," said Ghost.
"I left at home," said Shakespeare, "a wife with a nagging tongue and I would be rather loath to return to her. Likewise, the ale that you call beer is wondrous above any I have drunk and I hear tell that you have arrived at understanding with goblins and with fairies, which is a marvelous thing. And to sit at meat with a ghost is past all understanding, although one has the feeling here he must dig close at the root of truth."
The waiter arrived with an armload of beer bottles and dumped them on the table.
"There!" he said, disgusted. "That'll hold you for a while. Cook says the food is coming up."
"You don't intend," Maxwell asked Shakespeare, "to appear for your lecture?"
"Forsooth, and if I did," said Shakespeare, "they would forthwith, once that I had finished, whisk me home again."
"And they would, too," said Oop. "If they ever get their paws on him, they'll never let him go."
"But how will you earn a living?" Maxwell asked. "You have no skills to fit this world."
"I," said Shakespeare, "will surely devise something. A man's wits, driven to it, will come up with answers."
The waiter arrived with a cart, laden with food. He began putting it on the table.
"Sylvester!" Carol cried.
Sylvester had risen swiftly, put his two paws
on the table and reached to grab two slabs of rare roast beef which had been carved off a standing roast of ribs.
Sylvester disappeared beneath the table, with the meat hanging from his jaws.
"The pussy cat is hungry," Shakespeare said. "He harvests what he can."
"In the matter of food," Carol complained, "he has no manners whatsoever."
From beneath the table came the sound of crunching bones.
"Master Shakespeare," said Ghost, "you came from England. From a town upon the Avon."
"A goodly country to the eye," said Shakespeare, "but filled with human riffraff. There be poachers, thieves, murderers, footpads, and all sort of loathsome folk..."
"But I recall," said Ghost, "the swans upon the river and the willows growing on its banks and—”
"You what?" howled Oop. "How can you recall?" Ghost rose slowly to his feet and there was something about his rising that made all of them fix their eyes upon him. He raised a hand, although there was no hand, just the sleeves of his robe, if robe it was.
His voice, when it came, was hollow, as if it might have come from an empty place far distant.
"But I do recall," he told them. "After all these years, I do recall. I either had forgotten or I had never known. But now I do... "
"Master Ghost," said Shakespeare, "you act exceeding strange. What queer distemper could have seized upon you?"
"I know now who I am," said Ghost triumphantly. "I know who I am the ghost of."
"Well, thank God for that," said Oop. "It will put an end to all this maundering of yours about your heritage."
"And who, pray," asked Shakespeare, "might you be the ghost of?"
"Of you," Ghost keened. "I know now—I know now—I am William Shakespeare's ghost!"
For an instant they all sat silent, stricken, and then from Shakespeare's throat came a strangled sound of moaning fright. With a sudden surge, he came out of his chair and leaped to the tabletop, heading for the door. The table went over with a crash. Maxwell's chair tipped back and he went sprawling with it. The edge of the tipping table pinned him to the floor and a bowl of gravy, skating off its edge, caught him in the face.
He put up both his hands and tried to wipe the gravy off his face. From somewhere above him he heard Oop's raging bellows.
Able to see again, but with his face and hair still dripping gravy, Maxwell managed to crawl from beneath the table and stagger to his feet.
Carol sat flat upon the floor amid the litter of the food. Beer bottles were rolling back and forth across the floor. Framed in the kitchen door stood the cook, a mighty woman with chubby arms and tousled hair, and her hands upon her hips. Sylvester was crouched above the roast, ripping it apart and rapidly swallowing great mouthfuls of meat before anyone could stop him.
Oop came limping back from the door.
"No sign of them," he said. "No sign of either one of them."
He reached down a hand to haul Carol to her feet.
"That rotten Ghost," he said bitterly. "Why couldn't he keep still? Even if he knew..."
"But he didn't know," said Carol. "Not until just now. It took this confrontation to jar it out of him. Something Shakespeare said, perhaps. It's something he's been wondering about all these years and when suddenly it hit him..."
"This tears it," Oop declared. "Shakespeare never will quit running. There'll be no finding him."
"Maybe that is what Ghost is doing now," said Maxwell. "That is where he went. To follow Shakespeare and stop him and bring him back to us."
"Stop him, how?", asked Oop. "If Shakespeare sees him following he'll set new records running."
21
They sat dejectedly about Oop's rough-lumber table. Sylvester lay on his back on the hearthstone, with his front paws folded neatly on his chest, his back feet thrust up into the air. He wore a silly grin of satisfaction pasted on his face.
Oop shoved the fruit jar along the boards to Carol. She picked it up and sniffed. "It smells like kerosene," she said, "and, as I remember it, it tastes like kerosene." She lifted the jar with both her hands and drank, then pushed it across to Maxwell.
"I do believe," she said, "that after a time one could become accustomed to drinking kerosene."
"That is good booze," said Oop defensively. "Although," he admitted, "it could do with just a touch more aging. Seems that it gets drunk up quicker than I can get it made."
Maxwell lifted the jar and drank moodily. The hooch burned its way fiercely down his gullet and exploded in his stomach, but the explosion did no good. He still stayed moody and aware. There were times, he told himself, when there was no such thing as getting drunk. Pour it in two-fisted and you still stayed sober. And right now, he thought, he would dearly love to get sodden drunk and stay that way for a day or so. Maybe when he sobered up, life wouldn't seem so bad.
"What I can't understand," said Oop, "is why Old Bill should take this business of his ghost so bad. He did, of course. He was scared pink with purple spots. But the thing that bothers me is that he wasn't upset with Ghost. Oh, a little jittery at first, as one might expect of a sixteenth-century man. But once we had explained it to him, he seemed rather pleased with it. He accepted Ghost much more readily than would have been the case, say, with a twentieth-century man. In the sixteenth century they believed in ghosts and ghosts were something that could be accepted. He never got the wind up until he found that Ghost was his ghost and then..."
"He was quite intrigued," said Carol, "by our relations with the Little Folk. He made us promise we'd take him down to the reservation so he could get acquainted with them. As was the case with ghosts, he believed in them implicitly."
Maxwell took another hooker out of the jar and slid it across to Oop. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "Being free and easy with a ghost, with just any ghost," he said, "would come under a different heading than meeting up with one particular ghost that turned out to be your ghost. It is impossible for a man to accept, to actually accept and believe in, his own death. Even knowing what a ghost is..."
"Oh, don't please start that up again," said Carol.
Oop grinned. "He sure went out of there like a shot," he said. "Like you'd tied a firecracker to his tail. He went through that door without even touching the latch. He just busted through it."
"I didn't see," said Maxwell. "I had a bowl of gravy in my face."
"There wasn't anyone got anything out of the whole mess," said Oop, "except that saber-toother over there. He got a haunch of beef. Rare, the way he likes it."
"The cat's an opportunist," Carol observed. "He always comes out smelling pretty."
Maxwell stared at her. "I've been meaning to ask you. How do you come to be mixed up with us? I thought you washed your hands of us last night after the affair with the Wheeler."
Oop chuckled. "She was worried about you. Also, she is nosy."
"There's something else as well," said Maxwell. "How come you are mixed up in it at all? Let's take it from the first. You were the one who tipped us off about the Artifact—about it being sold."
"I didn't tip you off. I misspoke. It just—”
"You tipped us off," Maxwell declared. "I think you meant to do it. What do you know about the Artifact? You must have known something to not have wanted it sold."
"Yeah, that is right," said Oop. "Sister, you better start telling us what it is all about."
"A couple of bullies..."
"No," said Maxwell, "let's not turn it to a joke. This is something that's important."
"Well, I had heard about it being sold, as I told you. I wasn't supposed to know. And I was worried about it and I didn't like the sound of it. Not that there was anything really wrong with the sale of it, legally, I mean. I understood that Time had title to it and could sell it if it wished. But it didn't seem to me that a thing like the Artifact should be sold, even for umpteen billion dollars. Because I did know something about it—something that no one else knew about it and I was afraid to try to tell anyone what I knew. An
d when I mentioned how important the Artifact was to other people, I could see that they couldn't care less. Then, that night, when you two talked about it and were so interested—”
"You thought maybe we could help."
"Well, I don't know what I thought. But you were the first ones who had shown any interest in it. Although I couldn't tell you. I couldn't come right out and tell you, because, you see, I wasn't supposed to know it and there was a matter of being loyal to Time and I was all mixed up."
"Were you working with the Artifact? Is that how..."
"Well, no," she said, "not working with it. But one day when I stopped to look at it—like any tourist, you understand, just walking through the inner court of the museum and stopping to have a look at it, because it was an interesting object and a mysterious one as well—and I saw something, or thought I saw something. I don't know now. I can't be sure. Although at the time, I remembered I was sure, I was absolutely certain that I saw this thing about it no one had ever noticed, or if they had noticed..."
She stopped and looked from one to the other of them. Neither spoke. They sat silent, waiting for her to go on.
"I can't be sure," she said. "Not now. Now I can't be sure."
"Go ahead," said Oop. "Tell us the best you can."
She nodded soberly. "It was just for an instant. So quick, so fast, and yet at the time there was no doubt I had really seen it. The sun was shining through the windows and the sunlight was falling on the Artifact. Maybe no one had ever looked at the Artifact before when the sunlight had been shining on it at precisely the angle it shone on it that day. I don't know. That could be the explanation, I suppose. But it seemed to me I saw something inside the Artifact. Well, really not inside of it, either. Rather, as if the Artifact was something that had been pressed or shaped into an oblong block, but you couldn't know this except when the sun shone just right upon it. It seemed to me that I could see an eye, and for just an instant, when I saw that eye, I knew that it was alive and that it was watching me and—”
"But that can't be!" yelled Oop. "The Artifact is like a stone. Like a piece of metal."