"You kind beyond expectation," it piped. "There is one further information. Occasion for party is unveiling of painting, recently acquired. Painting lost and gone for very long. By Albert Lambert, Esquire. Great triumph for Miss Clayton."
"I just bet it is," said Maxwell. "Miss Clayton is a specialist in triumphs."
"She, as employer, is gracious," said the Shrimp reprovingly.
"I am sure of that," said Maxwell.
The creature shifted swiftly and galloped from the room.
Listening to its departure, Maxwell heard it clatter up the stairs to the street level of the building.
Maxwell got up and headed for the stairs himself. If he were going to witness the unveiling of a painting, he told himself, he'd better bone up on the artist. Which was exactly, he thought with a grin, what almost every other person invited to Nancy's party would be doing before the day was out.
Lambert? The name held a slight ring of recognition. He had read somewhere about him, probably long ago. An article in a magazine, perhaps, to help pass an idle hour.
11
Maxwell opened the book.
"Albert Lambert," said the opening page of text, "was born in Chicago, Illinois, January 11, 1973. Famed as a portrayer of grotesque symbolism, his early years gave no promise of his great accomplishments. His initial work, while it was competent and showed a skillful craftsmanship and a deep insight into his subject matter, was not particularly outstanding. His grotesque period came after his fiftieth year and, rather than developing, burst into full flower almost overnight, as if the artist had developed it secretly and did not show his canvasses of this period until he was satisfied with this new phase of his work. But there is no evidence that this actually was the case; rather, there seems to be some evidence that it was not..."
Maxwell flipped over the text pages to reach the color plates and leafed quickly through examples of the artist's early work. And there, in the space of one page to the next, the paintings changed—the artistic concept, the color, even, it seemed to Maxwell, the very craftsmanship.
As if the work had been that of two different artists, the first tied intellectually to some inner need of orderly expression, the second engulfed, obsessed, ridden by some soul-shaking experience of which he tried to cleanse himself by spreading it on canvas.
Stark, dark, terrible beauty beat out of the page and in the dusky silence of the library reading room it seemed to Maxwell that he could hear the leathery whisper of black wings. Outrageous creatures capered across the outrageous landscape, and yet the landscape and the creatures, Maxwell sensed at once, were not mere fantasy, were no whimsical product of a willful unhinging of the mind, but seemed to be solidly based upon some outre geometry predicated upon a logic and an outlook alien to anything he had ever seen. The form, the color, the approach and the attitude were not merely twisted human values; one had the instant feeling that they might be, instead, the prosaic representation of a situation in an area entirely outside any human value. Grotesque symbolism, the text had said, and it might be there, of course, but if so, Maxwell told himself, a symbolism that could only be arrived at most tortuously after painful study.
He turned the page and there it was again, that complete divergence from humanity—a different scene with different creatures against a different landscape, but carrying, as had that first plate, the shattering impact of actuality, no figment of the artist's mind, but the representation of a scene he once had gazed upon and sought now to expurgate from mind and memory. As a man might wash his hands, Maxwell thought, lathering them fiercely with a bar of strong, harsh soap, scrubbing them again and yet again, endlessly, in a desperate attempt to remove by physical means a psychic stain that he had incurred. A scene that he had gazed upon, perhaps, not through human eyes, but through the alien optics of a lost and unguessed race.
Maxwell sat fascinated, staring at the page, wanting to pull his eyes away, but unable to, trapped by the weird and awful beauty, by some terrible, hidden purpose that he could not understand. Time, the Shrimp had said, was something that his race had never thought of, a universal factor that had not impinged upon his culture, and here, captured in these color plates, was something that man had never thought of, had never even dreamed.
He reached out his hand to grasp the book and close it, but he hesitated as if there were some reason he should not close the book, some compelling reason to continue staring at the plate.
And in that hesitancy, he became aware of a certain strangeness that might keep him staring at the page—a puzzling factor that he had not recognized consciously, but that had been nagging at him.
He took his hands away and sat staring at the plate, then slowly turned the page and as he glanced at that third plate, the strangeness leaped out at him—a brushed-in flickering, an artistic technique that made an apparent shimmer, as if something of substance were there and twinkling, seen one moment, not quite seen the next.
He sat, slack-jawed, and watched the flickering—a trick of the eye, most likely, a trick of the eye encouraged by the mastery of the artist over paint and brush. But trick of the eye or not, easy of recognition by anyone who had seen the ghostly race of the crystal planet.
And through the hushed silence of the dusky room one question hammered at him: How could Albert Lambert have known about the people of the crystal planet?
12
"I had heard about you," Allen Preston said, "and it seemed incredible, of course. But the source of my information seemed unimpeachable and I made an effort to get in touch with you. I'm a bit worried over this situation, Pete. As an attorney, I'd say you were in trouble."
Maxwell sat down in the chair in front of Preston's desk. "I suppose I am," he said. "For one thing, it appears I've lost my job. Is there such a thing as tenure in a case like mine?"
"A case like yours?" the attorney asked. "Just what is the situation? No one seems to know. Everyone is talking about it, but no one seems to know. I, myself..."
Maxwell grinned wryly. "Sure. You'd like to know. You're puzzled and confused and not quite sure you're sane. You sit there wondering if I'm really Peter Maxwell."
"Well, are you?" Preston asked.
"I am sure I am. I wouldn't blame you, or anyone, if you doubted it. There were two of us. Something happened to the wave pattern. One of us went to the Coonskin system, the other somewhere else. The one who went to Coonskin came back to Earth and died. I came back yesterday."
"And found that you were dead."
Maxwell nodded. "My apartment had been rented, my possessions all are gone. The university tells me my position has been filled and I'm without a job. That's why I asked about the tenure situation."
Preston leaned back in his chair and squinted thoughtfully at Maxwell. "Legally," he said, "I think we'd find that the university stands on solid ground. You are dead, you see. You have no tenure now. Not, at least, until it can be reestablished."
"Through a long process at law?"
"Yes, I would suspect so. I can't give you an honest answer. There is no precedent. Oh, sure there are precedents in the case of mistaken identity—someone who is dead being mistakenly identified as someone who is still alive. But with you, there's no mistake. A man who undeniably was Peter Maxwell is undeniably dead, and there is no precedent for reestablishing identity in a situation such as that. We'd have to set our own precedent as we went along, a very laborious beating through the thickets of legal argument. It might take years. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure where or how to start. Oh, it could be developed, it could be carried forward, but it would take a lot of work and thought. First, of course, we'd have to establish, legally, who you are."
"Who I really am? For God's sake, Al, we know who I am."
"But the law doesn't. The law wouldn't recognize you as you are today. You have no legal being. Absolutely none. All your identification cards have been turned in to Records and have been filed by now—”
"But I have those cards," said Maxwell quietly.
"Right here in my pocket."
Preston stared at him. "Yes, come to think of it, I suppose you have. Oh Lord, what a mess!"
He got up and walked across the room, shaking his head. At the wall, he turned around and came back. He sat down again.
"Let me think about it," he said. "Give me a little time. I can dig up something. We have to dig up something. And there's a lot to do. There's the matter of your will..."
"My will? I'd forgot about the will. Never thought of it."
"It's in probate. But I can get a stay of some sort."
"I willed everything to my brother, who's with the Exploratory Service. I could get in touch with him, although it might be quite a chore. He's usually out with the fleet. But the point is that there'll be no trouble there. As soon as he knows what happened..."
"Not with him," said Preston, "but the court's a different, matter. It can be done, of course, but it may take time. Until it's cleared, you'll have no claim to your estate. You own nothing except the clothes you stand in and what is in your pockets."
"The university offered me a post on Gothic IV. Dean of a research unit. But at the moment, I'm not about to take it."
"How are you fixed for cash?"
"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 ofjob. 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."
13
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 inhu
manity 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.
A flight of blackbirds came swirling down out of the sky, skimming just above the roof of the shack, sailing over the roadway. Maxwell watched them settle into the dying vegetation of a stretch of marsh, balancing their bodies delicately on the bending stems of rank-growing weeds, come there to feed for an hour or so before flying off to roost in some secluded woodland they had picked as a bivouac on their migration southward.
Maxwell got up and stretched. The peace and the quiet of the tawny afternoon had soaked into his body. He'd like a nap, he thought. After a time Oop would come back home and wake him and they'd have something to eat and talk for a while before he went off to Nancy's.
He opened the door and went into the shack, crossing the floor to sit upon the bed. Maybe, he thought, he ought to see if he still had a clean shirt and an extra pair of socks to don before the party. He reached out and hauled his bag off the floor and dumped it on the bed.