The Goblin Reservation

He reached the sidewalk and stood for a moment, undecided as to which direction he should go. He tried, vainly, to remember where he might find a cafe or restaurant which would not be frequented by any of the faculty who might recognize him. Tonight, of all nights, he had an aversion to facing the kind of questions they would ask.

Something rustled behind him and he turned quickly to come face to face with Ghost.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Ghost said. “You were a long time in there.”

“I had to wait. Then we got to talking.”

“Do you any good?”

“None at all. The Artifact is sold and paid for. The Wheeler hauls it away tomorrow. I’m afraid that’s the end of it. I could go up and try to see Arnold tonight, but there’s no point to it. Not any more, there isn’t.”

“Oop is holding down a table for us. I imagine you are hungry.”

“I am starved,” said Maxwell.

“Then I lead the way.”

They turned off the mall and with Ghost leading, wound their way for what seemed to Maxwell an unusually long time, through back streets and alleys.

“A place,” Ghost explained, “where we won’t be seen. But where the food is edible and the whiskey’s cheap. Oop made a point of that.”

They finally reached the place, walking down an iron staircase to reach the basement level. Maxwell pushed open the door. The interior was dim. From somewhere in the back came the smell of cooking.

“They serve family style here,” said Ghost. “Plank it down upon the table and everyone helps himself. Oop is delighted with that way of serving.”

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.”

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. And 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.”

“A funny piece of metal,” said Maxwell. “Something that you can’t pry into, something that-”

“It’s only fair to say,” Carol reminded them, “that now I can’t be sure. It might have been only my imagination.”

“We’ll never know,” said Maxwell. “The Wheeler will haul off the Artifact tomorrow.”

“And buy the crystal planet with it,” said Oop. “It seems to me we shouldn’t just be sitting here. If we could have held onto Shakespeare…”

“It wouldn’t have done a bit of good,” Maxwell told him. “This business of kidnaping Shakespeare-”

“We never kidnaped him,” said Oop, outraged at the thought. “He came along with us very peaceably. He was glad to come. He’d been figuring all the time how he could lose this escort that Time had sent along. It was really his own idea. We only helped a little.”

“Like clunking the escort on the head?”

“No, never,” declared Oop. “We were genteel about it. We created what you might have called a mild diversion.”

“Well, anyhow,” said Maxwell, “it was a bum idea. There was too much money involved. You could have kidnaped a dozen Shakespeares and you’d never got Harlow Sharp to give up his deal for the Artifact.”

“But even so,” said Carol, “there should be something that we could be doing. Like rousting Arnold out of bed.”

“The only way,” said Maxwell, “that Arnold could help us is by giving Time the kind of money the Wheeler is paying Sharp. I can’t see that, can you?”

“No, I can’t,” said Oop.

He picked up the jar, put it to his mouth and drained it, got up and went to the hideout in the floor and got another jar. Ponderously, he unscrewed the lid and handed the jar to Carol.

“Leave us settle down,” he suggested, “to building up a hangover. The newsmen will be here by morning and I got to build up the strength for throwing them all out.”

“Now, wait a second,” said Maxwell. “I feel an idea coming on.”

They sat and waited for the idea to come on.

“The translator,” said Maxwell. “The one I used to read the records on the crystal planet. I found it in my bag.”

“Yes?” asked Oop.

“What if the Artifact were simply another record?”

“But Carol says…”

“I know what Carol says. But she can’t be sure. She only thinks she saw that eye staring out at her. And it seems improbable.”

“That’s right,” said Carol. “I can’t be absolutely sure. And what Pete says does make a crooked sort of sense. If he’s right, it would have to be a very important record-and a rather massive one. Perhaps a whole new world of knowledge. Maybe something the crystal planet left here on Earth, believing that no one would ever think of looking for it here. A sort of hidden record.”

“Even if that should be the case,” said Oop, “what good will it do us. The museum is locked and Harlow Sharp is not about to open it for us.”

“I could get us in,” said Carol. “I could phone the guard and say I had to get in and do some work. Or that I had left something there and wanted to pick it up. I have clearance for that sort of thing.”

“And lose your job,” suggested Oop.

She shrugged. “There are other jobs. And if we worked it right…”

“But there’s so little point to it,” protested Maxwell. “It’s no better than a million-to-one shot. Maybe less than that. I don’t deny I’d like to have a try at it, but-”

“What if you found that it was really something important?” asked Carol. “Then we could get hold of Sharp and explain it to him and maybe…”

“I don’t know,” said Maxwell. “I would doubt that we could find anything so important that Harlow would renege upon the deal.”

“Well,” said Oop, “let’s not waste time sitting here and talking about it. Let us be about it.”

Maxwell looked at Carol. “I think so, Pete,” she said. “I think it’s worth the chance.”

Oop reached out and took the jar of moonshine from in front of her and screwed on the cap.

The past surrounded them, the cabineted and cased and pedestaled past, the lost and forgotten and unknown snatched out of time by the far-ranging field expeditions that had probed into the hidden corners of mankind’s history. Art and folklore objects that had been undreamed of until men went back and found them; still new pottery that had heretofore been known only as scattered shards, if even that; bottles out of ancient Egypt with the salves and ointments still imprisoned, fresh, within them; ancient iron weapons new-taken from the forge; the scrolls from the Alexandrian library which should have burned, but didn’t, because men had been sent back in time to snatch them from the flames at the moment before they would have been destroyed; the famed tapestry of Ely that had disappeared from the ken of man in a long-gone age-all these and many more, a treasure trove of articles, many of them no treasures in themselves, snatched from the bowels of time.

The place was misnamed, Maxwell thought. Not Time Museum, but rather the Museum of No Time, a place where all ages came together, where there was no time distinction, a building where all the accomplishments and dreams of mankind might eventually be gathered, not aged things, but all fresh and new and shiny, fashioned only yesterday. And here one would not have to guess from old and scattered evidence what it had been like back there, but could pick up and hold and manipulate the tools and instruments and gadgets that had been made and used through all the days of his development.

Standing beside the pedestal which held the Artifact he listened to the footsteps of the guard as he tramped away again on his regular rounds.

Carol had managed it, and there had been a time he had doubted she would be able to. But everything had gone OK. She’d phoned the guard and told him she and a couple of friends had wanted one last look at the Artifact before it was carted off and he had been waiting to let them in at the little entryway set into one of the large doors that were opened when the museum was open to the public.

“Don’t take too long,” he grumbled. “I’m not sure I should let you do this.”

“It’s all right,” she’d told him. “There is no need for you to worry.”

He had shuffled off, mumbling to himself.

A bank of overhead spotlights shone down on the black block that was the Artifact.

Maxwell ducked beneath the velvet rope that guarded the pedestal and clambered up beside the Artifact, crouching down beside it, fumbling in his pocket for the interpreting apparatus.

It was a crazy hunch, he told himself. It was no hunch at all. It simply was an idea born of desperation and he was wasting his time, more than likely making himself somewhat ridiculous. And even if this wild venture should prove to have some point, there was nothing that he could do, at this late hour, about it. Tomorrow the Wheeler would take possession of the Artifact and of the knowledge stored on the crystal planet and so far as the human race might be concerned that would be the end of fifty billion years of knowledge dredged most laboriously and devotedly from two universes-knowledge that should have belonged to the University of Earth, that could have belonged to the university, but that now would be lost forever to an enigmatic cultural bloc which might, in turn, prove to be that potential cosmic enemy Earth had always feared would be found in space.

His start had been too late, he knew. Given a bit more time and he could have turned the deal, could have found the people who would have listened to him, could have gained some backing. But everything had worked against him and now it was too late.

He slid the interpreter onto his head and fumbled with it, for somehow it didn’t want to fit.

“Let me help,” said Carol. He felt her fingers manipulating it deftly, straightening out the straps, sliding them into place.

Glancing down, he saw Sylvester, seated on the floor beside the pedestal, sneering up at Oop.

Oop caught Maxwell’s look. “That cat doesn’t like me,” said the Neanderthaler. “He senses that I’m his natural enemy. Some day he’ll work up his nerve to have a go at me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” snapped Carol. “He’s just a little putty cat.”

“Not the way I see it,” said Oop.

Maxwell reached up and pulled the assemblage of the interpreter down across his eyes.

And looked down at the Artifact.

There was something there, something in that block of black. Lines, forms, a strangeness. No longer just a block of unimaginable blackness, rejecting all influence from outside, tolerating nothing and giving up nothing, as if it might be a thing that stood apart, sufficient to itself within the universe.

He twisted his head to try to catch the angle from which it might be possible to untangle what he saw. No lines of writing, surely-it was something else. He reached up to the headpiece and pushed over the wheel that increased the power, fiddled for a moment with the adjustment for the sensor.

“What is it?” Carol asked.

“I don’t…” Then, suddenly, he did know. Then he saw. Imprisoned in one corner of the block was a talon, with iridescent flesh or hide or scale and gleaming claws that looked as if they had been carved from diamonds. A talon that moved and struggled to be free so it could reach out for him.

He flinched away, moving back to get out of reach, and he lost his balance. He felt himself falling and tried to twist to one side so he wouldn’t land flat upon his back. One shoulder struck the velvet rope and the standards that held the rope in place went over with a clatter. The floor came up and smacked him hard. Striking the rope had served to twist him to one side and he came down heavily on one shoulder, but his head was protected from the floor. He struck at his forehead with an open hand, knocking the interpreter off to one side to free his eyes.

And there, above him, the Artifact was changing. Out of it something was rising-rearing up out of the oblong of blackness, jerking itself free. Something that was alive, a-throb with vitality and glittering in its beauty.

A slender, dainty head, with an elongated snout, and a sharp serrated crest that ran from the forepart of the head along the length of neck. A barrel-like chest and body, with a pair of wings half-folded, and shapely forelegs, armed with the diamond claws. It glittered blindingly in the spotlights that pointed at the Artifact, or, rather, where the Artifact had been, each gleaming scale a point of hard white light striking off the bronze and gold, the yellow and the blue.

A dragon! Maxwell thought. A dragon rising from the blackness of the Artifact! A dragon, finally risen, after long aeons of being imprisoned in that block of blackness.

A dragon! After all the years he’d hunted one, after all the years of wonder, here finally was a dragon. But not as he’d pictured it in his mind-no prosaic thing of flesh and scale, but a thing of glorious symbolism. A symbol of the heyday of the crystal planet, perhaps of the universe that had died so that this present universe could be born anew-ancient and fabulous, a fellow of those strange tribes of beings of which the trolls and goblins, the fairies and the banshees were the stunted and pitiful survivors. A thing the name of which had been handed down through generations that numbered into thousands, but never seen by any member of humanity until this very moment.

Oop stood out on the floor, beyond one of the tumbled standards that had held the velvet cord, his legs more bowed than ever, as if he’d started to sink into a crouch and had frozen there, with his hamlike hands hanging at his side, his fingers hooked like claws, while he stared upward at the terror and the wonder on the pedestal. In front of him, Sylvester crouched close against the floor, knotted muscles standing out along his furry legs, his great mouth agape, with the fangs exposed and ready for attack.

Maxwell felt a hand upon his shoulder and twisted around.

“A dragon?” Carol asked.

Her words were strange, as if she had been afraid to ask them, as if she’d forced them from her throat. She was not looking at him, but upward at the dragon, which now seemed to be complete.

The dragon switched its tail, which was long and sinuous, and out on the floor Oop tumbled down ungracefully to duck the sweep of it. Sylvester squawled in anger and crept forward a foot or so.

“Cut it out, Sylvester,” Maxwell said sharply to the cat.

Oop scrambled forward hastily on his hands and knees and grabbed Sylvester by one of his hind legs.

“Talk to him,” Maxwell said to Carol. “If that fool cat tackles him, there’ll be the devil to pay.”

“Oop, you mean. He wouldn’t tackle Oop.”

“Not Oop,” said Maxwell. “The dragon. If he takes off on the dragon-”

A bellow of rage came thundering out of the darkness, and the thump of running feet.

“What is going on in here?” howled the watchman, charging from the shadows.

The dragon spun upon the pedestal and came swiftly off it, switching around to face the running watchman.

“Look out,” Oop yelled, still with a tight grip upon Sylvester’s leg.

The dragon moved forward carefully, almost mincingly, its head canted at a questioning angle. It flourished its tail and the tail swept across the top of a display table, brushing off a half dozen bowls and jugs. The pottery thudded and gleaming shards went skating across the floor.

“Hey, you cut that out!” the watchman yelped and then, apparently for the first time, saw the dragon. The yelp turned into a howl of fear. The watchman turned and fled. The dragon trotted after him, not in any hurry, but very interested. His progress was marked by a series of thudding and splintering crashes.

“If we don’t get him out of here,” said Maxwell, “there’ll be nothing left. At the rate he’s going, there won’t be a thing intact in less than fifteen minutes. He’ll have the place wiped out. And, Oop, for the love of God, hang onto that cat. We don’t want a full-fledged brawl breaking out in here.”

Maxwell got to his feet, grabbed the interpreter off his head and stuffed it in his pocket.

“I could open the doors,” Carol offered, “and we could shoo him out of here. The big doors, I mean. I think that I know how.”

“How are you, Oop,” Maxwell asked, “at dragon-herding?”

The dragon had blundered to the rear of the building and now had turned around and was coming back.

“Oop,” said Carol, “help me with these doors. I need a man with muscle.”

“What about this cat?”

“Leave him to me,” said Maxwell. “He may behave himself. Maybe he’ll mind me.”

A long chain of crashes marked the progress of the dragon. Listening to them, Maxwell moaned. Sharp would have his scalp for this. Friend or not, he would be plenty sore. The whole museum wrecked and the Artifact transformed into rampaging tons of flesh.

He took a few tentative steps across the floor toward the crashing sounds. Sylvester slunk close against his heels. In the dimness, Maxwell could make out the dim outlines of the floundering dragon.

“Nice dragon,” Maxwell said. “Take it easy, fellow.”

It sounded rather silly and somehow inadequate. How in the world, he wondered, should one talk to a dragon?

Sylvester let out a hacking growl.

“You stay out of it,” said Maxwell sharply. “Things are bad enough without you messing in.”

He wondered what had happened to the watchman. More than likely phoning the police and building up a storm.

Behind him he heard the creaking of the doors as they came open. If the dragon would only wait until those doors were open, then he could be shagged outdoors. And once the dragon had been gotten out, what would happen then? Maxwell shuddered, thinking of it-of the great beast blundering down the streets and across the malls. Maybe it would be better, after all, to keep him penned in here.

He stood indecisively for a moment, weighing the disadvantages of a dragon caged with a dragon on the loose. The museum was more or less wrecked now and perhaps the complete wrecking of it would be preferable to turning this creature loose upon the campus.

The doors still were creaking, slowly opening. The dragon had been ambling along, but now he burst into a gallop, heading for the opening portal.

Maxwell spun around. “Close those doors!” he shouted, then ducked quickly to one side as the galloping dragon came charging down upon him.

The doors were partly open and they stayed partly open. Oop and Carol were racing off in different directions, intent on leaving plenty of room for the lumbering tons of flesh that were heading for the open.

Sylvester’s thunderous roars boomed and echoed in the museum as he took off in pursuit of the running creature.

Off to one side, Carol was shrieking at him. “Cut it out, Sylvester! No, Sylvester, no!”

The dragon’s sinuous tail flicked nervously from side to side as it ran. Cabinets and tables crashed, statues were sent spinning-a path of destruction marked the dragon’s flight for freedom.

Groaning, Maxwell ran, following Sylvester and the dragon, although, for the life of him, he didn’t know exactly why he should be running. He didn’t, he was certain, want to catch the dragon.

The dragon reached the opening and went through it in a single leap, high into the air, and as it leaped, the wings unfolded and swept downward in a thrumming beat.

At the doorway Maxwell skidded to a stop. On the steps below the entrance, Sylvester also had spun to a sliding halt and now was straining upward, raging loudly at the flying dragon.

It was a sight to make one catch his breath. Moonlight on the beating wings, reflecting off the burnished scales of red and gold and blue, made a flashing rainbow that quivered in the sky.

Oop and Carol burst out of the door and stopped to stare into the sky.

“Beautiful!” said Carol.

“Yes, isn’t it,” said Maxwell.

And now, for the first time, he realized in full exactly what had happened here. There was no longer any Artifact and the Wheeler deal was dead. And, likewise, any deal that he could make in behalf of the crystal planet. The chain of events that had been started with the copying of his wave pattern when he had been launched for Coonskin had been canceled out. Now, except for that flashing rainbow in the sky, it was as if nothing at all had happened.

The dragon was higher now, wheeling in the sky, no longer anything more than the flashing of the rainbow colors.

“This tears it,” Oop declared. “What do we do now?”

“It was my fault,” said Carol.

“It was no one’s fault,” said Oop. “It’s just the way things happen.”

“Well, anyhow,” said Maxwell, “we loused up Harlow ’s deal.”

“I’ll say you did,” a voice said behind them. “Will someone please tell me what is going on?”

They turned around.

Harlow Sharp stood in the doorway. Someone had turned on all the museum lights and he stood out sharply against the lighted oblong of the doors.

“The museum is wrecked,” he said, “and the Artifact is gone and here are the two of you and I might have known. Miss Hampton, I’m astonished. I thought you had better sense than to become entangled in such low company. Although that crazy cat of yours-”

“You leave Sylvester out of this,” she said. “He never had a thing to do with it.”

“Well, Pete?” asked Sharp.

Maxwell shook his head. “I find it a bit hard to explain.”

“I would think so,” said Sharp. “Did you have all this in mind when you talked with me this evening?”

“No,” said Maxwell. “It was a sort of accident.”

“An expensive accident,” said Sharp. “It might interest you to know that you’ve set Time’s work back a century or more. Unless, of course, you somehow moved the Artifact and have it hidden out somewhere. In which case, my friend, I give you a flat five seconds to hand it back to me.”

Maxwell gulped. “I didn’t move it, Harlow. In fact, I barely touched it. I’m not sure what happened. It turned into a dragon.”

“It turned into a what?”

“A dragon. I tell you, Harlow -”

“I remember now,” said Sharp. “You always were blathering around about a dragon. You started out for Coonskin to find yourself a dragon. And now it seems you’ve found one. I hope that it’s a good one.”

“It’s a pretty one,” said Carol. “All gold and shimmery.”

“Oh, fine,” said Sharp. “Isn’t that just bully. We can probably make a fortune, taking it around on exhibition. We can whomp up a circus and give top billing to the dragon. I can see it now in great big letters: THE ONLY DRAGON IN

EXISTENCE.”

“But it isn’t here,” said Carol. “It up and flew away.”

“Oop,” said Sharp, “you haven’t said a word. What is going on? You are ordinarily fairly mouthy. What is going on?”

“I’m mortified,” said Oop.

Sharp turned away from him and looked at Maxwell.

“Pete,” he said, “you probably realize what you have done. The watchman phoned me and wanted to call the police. But I told him to hold up on calling the police and I’d come right down. I had no idea it would turn out as bad as it did turn out to be. The Artifact is gone and I can’t deliver it and that means I’ll have to hand back all that cash, and a lot of the exhibits have been smashed to smithereens-”

“The dragon did that,” Maxwell said, “before we let him out.”

“So you let him out? He didn’t actually get away. You just let him out.”

“Well, he was smashing all that stuff. I guess we weren’t thinking.”

“Tell me honest, Pete. Was there actually a dragon?”

“Yes, there was one. He was immobilized inside the Artifact. Perhaps he was the Artifact. Don’t ask me how he got there. Enchantment, I would guess.”

“Enchantment?”

“Enchantment really happens, Harlow. I don’t know how. I’ve spent years trying to find out and I don’t know much more about it now than when I started out.”

“It seems to me,” said Sharp, “that there is someone missing. When all hell breaks loose, there usually is someone else who is tied into it. Can you tell me, Oop, where Ghost, that great, good friend of yours, might be?”

Oop shook his head. “He’s a hard one to keep track of. Always slipping off.”

“That isn’t all of it,” said Sharp. “There is still another situation that we should pay some heed to. Shakespeare has come up missing. I wonder if any of you could shed some light on his disappearance.”

“He was with us for a while,” said Oop. “We were just setting down to eat when he became quite frightened and lit out of there. It happened when Ghost remembered that he was Shakespeare’s ghost. He’s been wondering all these years, you know, who he is the ghost of.”

Slowly, lowering himself one section at a time, Sharp sat down on the top step and looked slowly from one to the other of them.

“Not a thing,” he said. “You didn’t miss a thing when you started out to ruin Harlow Sharp. You made a job of it.”

“We didn’t start out to ruin you,” said Oop. “We never had a thing against you. It seemed, somehow, that things started going wrong and they never stopped.”

“By rights,” said Sharp, “I should sue every one of you for every cent you have. I should ask a judgment-and don’t fool yourself, I’d get it-that would keep all of you working for Time the rest of your natural lives. But the three of you together couldn’t offset by a fraction, during your collective lifetimes, what you cost Time tonight. So there’s no sense in doing it. Although I suppose the police will have to get into this ruckus. I don’t see how they can be kept out of it. The three of you, I’m afraid, will have to answer a lot of questions.”

“If someone would only listen to me,” said Maxwell, “I could explain it all. That’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since I got back-to find someone who would listen to me. I tried to talk to you this afternoon…”

“Then,” said Sharp, “suppose you start right now by explaining it to me. I’ll own to a slight curiosity. Let’s go across the street to my office, where we can settle down and have a talk. Or might that inconvenience you? There’s probably a thing or two you still have to do to finish up the job of bankrupting Time.”

“No, I guess there isn’t,” said Oop. “I’d say, offhand, that we’ve done about everything we can.”

Inspector Drayton rose heavily from the chair in which he had been sitting in Sharp’s outer office.

“I’m glad you finally arrived, Dr. Sharp,” he said. “Something has arisen-”

The inspector cut short his speech when he caught sight of Maxwell. “So it’s you,” said the inspector. “I am glad to see you. You’ve led me a long, hard chase.”

Maxwell made a face. “I’m not sure, Inspector, that I can reciprocate your gladness.”

If there was anyone he could get along without right now, he told himself, it was Inspector Drayton.

“And who might you be?” Sharp asked shortly. “What do you mean by busting in here.”

“I’m Inspector Drayton, of Security. I had a short talk with Professor Maxwell the other day, on the occasion of his return to Earth, but I’m afraid that there are still some questions…”

“In that case,” said Sharp, “please take your place in line. I have business with Dr. Maxwell and I’m afraid that mine takes precedence over yours.”

“You don’t understand,” said Drayton. “I had not come here to apprehend your friend. His turning up with you is a piece of good fortune I had not expected. There is another matter in which I thought you might be helpful, a matter which came up rather unexpectedly. You see, I had heard that Professor Maxwell had been a guest at Miss Clayton’s recent party and so I went to see her-”

“Talk sense, man,” said Sharp. “What has Nancy Clayton got to do with all of this?”

“I don’t know, Harlow,” said Nancy Clayton, appearing at the doorway of the inner office. “I never intended to get involved in anything. All I ever try to do is entertain my Mends and I can’t see how there’s anything so wrong in that.”

“ Nancy, please,” said Sharp. “First tell me what is going on. Why are you here and why is Inspector Drayton here and-”

“It’s Lambert,” Nancy said.

“You mean the man who painted the picture that you have.”

“I have three of them,” said Nancy proudly.

“But Lambert has been dead more than five hundred years.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” said Nancy, “but he turned up tonight. He said that he was lost.”

A man stepped from the inner room, urging Nancy to one side-a tall and rugged man with sandy hair and deep lines in his face.

“It appears, gentlemen,” he said, “that you are discussing me. Would you mind if I spoke up for myself?”

There was a strange twang to the way he spoke his words and he stood there, beaming at them, in a good-natured manner, and there was not much that one could find in him to make one dislike the man.

“You are Albert Lambert?” Maxwell asked.

“Indeed I am,” said Lambert, “and I hope I don’t intrude, but I have a problem.”

“And you’re the only one?” asked Sharp.

“I’m sure that I don’t know,” said Lambert. “I suppose there are many other persons who are faced with problems. When you have a problem, however, the question is of where to go to have it solved.”

“Mister,” said Sharp, “I am in the same position and I am seeking answers just the same as you are.”

“But don’t you see,” Maxwell said to Sharp, “that Lambert has the right idea. He has come to the one place where his problem can be solved.”

“If I were you, young fellow,” Drayton said, “I wouldn’t be so sure. You were pretty foxy the other day, but now I’m onto you. There are a lot of things.”

“Inspector, will you please keep out of this,” said Sharp. “Things are bad enough without you complicating them. The Artifact is gone and the museum is wrecked and Shakespeare has disappeared.”

“But all I want,” said Lambert reasonably, “is to get back home again. Back to 2023.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Sharp commanded. “You are out of line. I don’t-”

“ Harlow,” Maxwell said, “I explained it all to you. Just this afternoon. And I asked you about Simonson. Surely you recall.”

“Simonson? Yes, I remember now.” Sharp looked at Lambert. “You are the man who painted the canvas that shows the Artifact.”

“Artifact?”

“A big block of black stone set atop a hill.”

Lambert shook his head. “No, I haven’t painted it. Although I suppose I will. In fact, it seems I must, for Miss Clayton showed it to me and it’s undeniably something that I would have done. And I must say, who shouldn’t, that it is not so bad.”

“Then you actually saw the Artifact back in Jurassic days?”

“Jurassic?”

“Two hundred million years ago.”

Lambert looked surprised. “So it was that long ago. I knew it was pretty far. There were dinosaurs.”

“But you must have known. You were traveling in time.”

“The trouble is,” said Lambert, “the time unit has gone haywire. I never seem to be able to go to the time I want.”

Sharp put up his hands and held his head between them. Then he took them away and said: “Now, let’s go at this slowly. One thing at a time. First one step and then another, till we get to the bottom of it.”

“I explained to you,” said Lambert, “that there’s just one thing that I want. It’s very simple really, all I want is to get home again.”

“Where is your time machine?” asked Sharp. “Where did you leave it. We can have a look at it.”

“I didn’t leave it anywhere. There’s no place I could leave it. It goes everywhere with me. It’s inside my head.”

“In your head!” yelled Sharp. “A time unit in your head. But that’s impossible.”

Maxwell grinned at Sharp. “When we were talking this afternoon,” he said, “you told me that Simonson revealed very little about his time machine. Now it appears-”

“I did tell you that,” Sharp agreed, “but who in their right mind would suspect that a time unit could be installed in a subject’s brain. It must a new principle. Something that we missed entirely.” He said to Lambert, “Do you have any idea how it works.”

“Not the slightest,” Lambert said. “The only thing I know is that when it was put into my head-a rather major surgical operation, I can assure you-I gained the ability to travel in time. I simply have to think of where I want to go, using certain rather simple coordinates, and I am there. But something has gone wrong. No matter what I think, I go banging back and forth, like a yo-yo, from one time to yet another, none of which are the times I want to be.”

“It would have advantages,” said Sharp, speaking musingly and more to himself than to the rest of them. “It would admit of independent action and it would be small, much smaller than the mechanism that we have to use. It would have to be to go inside the brain and… I don’t suppose, Lambert, that you know too much about it?”

“I told you,” Lambert said. “Not a thing. I wasn’t really interested in how it worked. Simonson happens to be a friend of mine…”

“But why here? Why did you come here? To this particular place and time?”

“An accident, that’s all. And once I arrived it looked a lot more civilized than a lot of places I had been and I started inquiring around to orient myself. Apparently I had never been so far into the future before, for one of the first things I learned was that you did have time travel and that there was a Time College. Then I heard that Miss Clayton had a painting of mine, and thinking that if she had a painting I had done she might be disposed favorably toward me, I sought her out. In hope, you see, of finding out how to contact the people who might be able to use their good offices to send me home again. And it was while I was there that Inspector Drayton arrived.”

“Now, Mr. Lambert,” Nancy said, “before you go any further, there is something that I want to ask you. Why didn’t you, when you were back in the Jurassic or wherever it was that Harlow said you were, and you painted this picture-”

“You forget,” Lambert told her. “I haven’t painted it yet. I have some sketches and someday I expect-”

“Well, then, when you get around to painting that picture, why don’t you put in dinosaurs. There aren’t any dinosaurs in it and you just said you knew you were a long way in the past because there were dinosaurs.”

“I put no dinosaurs in the painting,” said Lambert, “for a very simple reason. There were no dinosaurs.”

“But you said…”

“You must realize,” Lambert explained patiently, “that I paint only what I see. I never subtract anything. I never add anything. And there were no dinosaurs because the creatures in the painting had chased them all away. So I put in no dinosaurs, nor any of the others.”

“Any of the others?” asked Maxwell. “What are you talking about now? What were these others?”

“Why,” said Lambert, “the ones with wheels.”

He stopped and looked around him at their stricken faces.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

“Oh, not at all,” Carol said sweetly. “Go right ahead, Mr. Lambert, and tell us all about the ones with wheels.”

“You probably won’t believe me,” Lambert said, “and I can’t tell you what they were. The slaves, perhaps. The work horses. The bearers of the burdens. The serfs. They were life forms, apparently-they were alive, but they went on wheels instead of feet and they were not one thing alone. Each one of them was a hive of insects, like bees or ants. Social insects, apparently. You understand, I don’t expect that you’ll believe a word I say, but I swear…”

From somewhere far away came a rumble, the low, thudding rumble of rapidly advancing wheels. And as they stood, transfixed and listening, they knew that the wheels were coming down the corridor. Nearer came the rumble, growing louder as it advanced. Suddenly it was just outside the door and slowing down to turn and all at once a Wheeler stood inside the door.

“That’s one of them!” screamed Lambert. “What is it doing here?”

“Mr. Marmaduke,” said Maxwell, “it is good to see you once again.”

“No,” the Wheeler told him. “Not Mr. Marmaduke. The so-called Mr. Marmaduke will not be seen by you again. He is in very bad disgrace. He made a vast mistake.”

Sylvester had started forward, but Oop had reached down and grabbed him by the loose skin of the neck and was holding him tightly while he struggled to break free.

“There was a contract made,” the Wheeler said, “by a humanoid that went by the name of Harlow Sharp. Which one of you would be Harlow Sharp?”

“I’m your man,” said Sharp.

“Then, sir, I must ask you what you intend to do about the fulfillment of the contract.”

“There is nothing I can do,” said Sharp. “The Artifact is gone and cannot be delivered. Your payment, of course, will be refunded promptly.”

“That, Mr. Sharp,” the Wheeler said, “will not be sufficient. It will fall far short of satisfaction. We shall bring the trial of law against you. We shall bust you, mister, with everything we can. We shall do our best to poverty you and-”

“Why, you miserable go-cart,” Sharp yelled, “there is no law for you. Galactic law does not apply with a creature such as you. If you think you can come here and threaten me…”

Ghost appeared, out of thin air, just inside the doorway.

“It’s about time,” Oop yelled angrily. “Where’ve you been all night? What did you do with Shakespeare?”

“The Bard is safe,” said Ghost, “but there is other news.” The arm of the robe raised and gestured at the Wheeler. “Others of his kind swarm in Goblin Reservation to try to trap the dragon.”

So, thought Maxwell, somewhat illogically, it had been the dragon they had wanted, after all. Could the Wheelers have known all along, he wondered, that there had been a dragon? And the answer was that, of course, they would have known, for it had been they or their far ancestors who had done the work back in Jurassic days.

In Jurassic days on Earth, and how many others times on how many other planets? The serfs, Lambert had said, the horses, the bearers of the burdens. Were they now, or had they been, inferior members of that ancient tribe of beings, or had they been, perhaps, simply domesticated animals, harnessed biologically by genetic engineering, for the jobs they were assigned?

And now these former slaves, having established an empire of their own, reached out their hands for something that they may have reason to believe should be their heritage. Theirs, since nowhere else in the universe, except, perhaps, in scattered, dying pockets, was there left any trace of the great colonization project dreamed by the crystal planet.

And perhaps, thought Maxwell-perhaps it should be theirs. For theirs had been the labor that had engineered the project. And had the dying Banshee, laden with an ancient guilt, sought to right a wrong when he had doublecrossed the crystal planet, when he had sought to help these former slaves? Or had he, perhaps, believed that it was better that the heritage should go, not to some outsider, but to a race of beings who had played a part, however menial, however small, in the great project that had crumbled into failure?

“You mean,” Sharp said to the Wheeler, “that the very moment you were standing here and threatening me, you had your bandits out…”

“He works all the angles that there are,” said Oop.

“The dragon went home,” said Ghost, “to the only home that he could recognize upon this planet. To where the Little Folk reside, so that he could see his fellows once again, flying in the clear moonlight above the river valley. And then the Wheelers attacked him in the air, trying to force him to the ground, so that he could be captured, and the dragon is fighting back most magnificently, but-”

“Wheelers can’t fly,” protested Sharp. “And you say there were a lot of them. Or you implied there were a lot of them. There can’t be. Mr. Marmaduke was the only…”

“Perhaps,” said Ghost, “they are not believed to fly, but they are truly flying. And as for the number of them, I am mystified. Perhaps here all the time, hiding from the view. Perhaps many coming in through the transport stations.”

“We can put a stop to that,” said Maxwell. “We can send word to Transportation Central. We can…”

Sharp shook his head. “No, we can’t do that. Transportation is intergalactic, not of Earth alone. We cannot interfere.”

“Mr. Marmaduke,” said Inspector Drayton, speaking in his best official voice, “or whoever you may be, I think I’d better run you in.”

“Leave off this blathering,” said Ghost. “The Little Folk need help.”

Maxwell reached out and picked up the chair. “It’s time we put an end to fooling,” he declared. He raised the chair and said to the Wheeler. “It’s time for you to start talking, friend. And if you don’t, I’ll cave you in.”

A circle of jets suddenly protruded from Wheeler’s chest and there was a hissing sound. A stench hit them in the face, a terrible fetor that struck like a clenched and savage fist, that made the stomach somersault and set the throat to gagging.

Maxwell felt himself falling to the floor, unable to control his body, which seemed tied up in knots from the fearful stink that exuded from the Wheeler. He hit the floor and rolled and his hands went to his throat and tore at it, as if to rip it open to allow himself more air-although there seemed to be no air, there was nothing but the foulness of the Wheeler.

Above him he heard a fearful screaming and when he rolled around so he could look up, he saw Sylvester suspended above him, his front claws hooked around the upper portions of the Wheeler’s body, his rear legs clawing and striking at the bulging and transparent belly in which writhed the disgusting mass of roiling insects. The Wheeler’s wheels were spinning frantically, but something had gone wrong with them. One wheel spun in one direction and the second in another, so that the Wheeler whirled about in a giddy dance, with Sylvester clinging desperately and his back legs working like driving pistons at the Wheeler’s belly. It looked for all the world, thought Maxwell, as if the two of them were engaged in a rapid and unwieldy waltz.

An unseen hand reached out and grasped Maxwell by the arm and hauled him unceremoniously across the floor. His body thumped across the threshold and some of the foulness diminished and there now was a breath of air.

Maxwell rolled over and got on his hands and knees and fought his way erect. He reached up with his fists and rubbed at his streaming eyes. The air still was heavy with the stench, but one no longer gagged.

Sharp sat propped against the wall, gasping and rubbing at his eyes. Carol was slumped upon the floor. Oop, crouched in the doorway, was tugging Nancy out of the fetid room, from which still came the screaming of the saber-tooth at work.

Maxwell staggered forward and reaching down, picked up Carol and slung her, like a sack, across one shoulder. Turning, he beat an unsteady retreat down the corridor.

Thirty feet away he stopped and turned around and as he did, the Wheeler burst out of the doorway, finally free of Sylvester and with both wheels spinning in unison. He came down the hall, wheeling crazily and lopsidedly-staggering blindly, if a thing with wheels could be said to stagger, slamming into one wall and caroming off it to smash into the other. From a great rent in his belly small whitish objects dropped and scattered all across the floor.

Ten feet from where Maxwell stood, the Wheeler finally collapsed when one wheel hit the wall and caved in. Slowly, with what seemed to be a rather strange sort of dignity, the Wheeler tipped over and out of the torn belly gushed a bushel or so of insects that piled up on the floor.

Sylvester came slinking down the hail, crouched low, his muzzle extended in curiosity, taking one slow step and then another as he crept upon his handiwork. Behind Oop and Sylvester came the rest of them.

“You can let me down now,” said Carol.

Maxwell let her down, stood her on her feet. She leaned against the wall.

“I never saw a more undignified way to be carried,” she declared. “You haven’t got a spark of chivalry to pack a girl around in a manner such as that.”

“It was all a mistake,” said Maxwell. “I should have left you there, laid out on the floor.”

Sylvester had stopped now and reaching out his neck, sniffed at the Wheeler, all the while with wrinkles of disgust and wonder etched upon his face. There was no sign of life in the Wheeler. Satisfied, Sylvester pulled back and squatted on his haunches, began to wash his face. On the floor beside the fallen Wheeler, the mound of bugs were seething. A few of them started crawling from the pile, heading out into the hall.

Sharp swung out past the Wheeler.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” The corridor still was sour with the terrible stench.

“But what is it all about?” wailed Nancy. “Why did Mr. Marmaduke…”

“Nothing but stink bugs,” Oop told her. “Can you imagine that? A galactic race of stink bugs! And they had us scared!”

Inspector Drayton lumbered forward importantly. “I’m afraid it will be necessary for you all to come with me,” he said. “I will need your statements.”

“Statements,” Sharp said viciously. “You must be out of your mind. Statements, at a time like this, with a dragon loose and…”

“But an alien has been killed,” protested Drayton. “And not just an ordinary alien. A member of a race that could be our enemies. This could have repercussions.”

“Just write down,” said Oop, “killed by a savage beast.”

“Oop,” snapped Carol, “you know better than to say a thing like that. Sylvester isn’t savage. He’s gentle as a kitten. And he is not a beast.”

Maxwell looked around. “Where is Ghost?” he asked. “He took it on the lam,” said Oop. “He always does when trouble starts. He’s nothing but a coward.”

“But he said…”

“That he did,” said Oop. “And we are wasting time. O’Toole could do with help.”

Mr. O’Toole was waiting for them when they got off the roadway.

“I knew coming you would be,” he greeted them. “Ghost, he said he would get you yet. And badly do we need someone who will talk sense to the trolls, who hide and gibber in their bridge and will listen to no reason.”

“What have the trolls got to do with it?” asked Maxwell. “For once in your life, can’t you leave the trolls alone?”

“The trolls,” Mr. O’Toole explained, “filthy as they are, may be our one salvation. They be the only ones who, from lack of any civilization whatsoever, or any niceties, remain proficient in the enchantments of old times, and they specialize in the really dirty kinds of work, the most vicious of enchantments. The fairies, naturally, also cling to the old abilities, but all of their enchantments are of the gentle sort and gentleness is something of which we do not stand in need.”

“Can you tell us,” Sharp asked, “exactly what is going on. Ghost didn’t hang around to explain much of it to us.’

“Gladly,” said the goblin, “but leave us start to walking, and walking, I’ll relate to you all the happenstance. We have but little time to waste and the trolls are stubborn souls and vast persuasion they will need to do a job for us. They lurk within the mossy stones of that senseless bridge of theirs and they titter like things which have lost their minds. Although, bitter truth to tell, them stinking trolls have little minds to lose.”

They trudged in single file up the rocky ravine which lay in the notch between the hills and in the east the dawn-light had begun to show, but the path, buried in the trees and flanked by bushes, was dark. Here and there birds woke from sleep and twittered and somewhere up the hill a raccoon was whickering.

“The dragon came home to us,” O’Toole told them as they walked, “the one place on Earth left for him to go, to be with his own kind again, and the Wheelers which, in ancient times had another name than Wheelers, have attacked him, like broomsticks flying in formation. They must not force him to the ground, for then they have him caught and can whisk him hence very rapidly. And, forsooth, he has made a noble fight of it, the fending of them off, but he is growing tired and we must hurry rapidly and with much dispatch if we are to give him aid.”

“And you’re counting,” Maxwell said, “on the trolls being able to bring the Wheelers down like they brought down the flier.”

“You apprehend most easily, my friend. That’s what lingers in my mind. But these befouled trolls make a bargain of it.”

“I never knew,” said Sharp, “that the Wheelers could fly. All I’ve seen them do was trundle.”

“Of abilities they have many,” said O’Toole. “From their bodies they can grow devices without number and beyond imagination. Nozzles for the spreading of their nasty gas, guns to shoot the lethal bolt, jets to make them broomsticks that move with amazing speed. And never are they up to any good. Full of anger and resentment after all the ages, lying out there, deep in the galaxy, with rancor eating like a cancer into their putrid minds, waiting for a chance to be what they never can be-for no more than menials they are or ever will be.”

“But why bother with the trolls?” asked Drayton, out of sorts. “I could have guns and planes…”

“Don’t try to be any more of a fool than you already are,” said Sharp. “We can’t lay a finger on them. We can’t create an incident. The humans can take no part in this. This is something between the Little Folk and their former slaves.”

“But the cat already killed-”

“The cat. Not a human. We can-”

“Sylvester,” Carol said, “was only trying to protect us.”

“Do we have to go so fast?” protested Nancy. “I’m not used to this.”

“Here,” said Lambert, “take my arm. The path does seem slightly rough.”

“Do you know, Pete,” said Nancy, bubbling, “that Mr. Lambert has agreed to be my house guest for a year or so and paint some pictures for me. Isn’t that a lovely thing for him to do?”

“Yes,” said Maxwell. “I am sure it is.”

The path had been climbing the hillside for the last hundred feet or so and now it dipped down toward the ravine, which was clogged with tumbled boulders which, in the first faint light of morning, looked like crouched, humped beasts. And spanning the ravine was the ancient bridge, a structure jerked raw from an old medieval road. Looking at it, Maxwell found it hard to believe that it had been built only a few decades ago when the reservation had been laid out.

Two days, he thought-had it been only two days since he had returned to Earth to find Inspector Drayton waiting? So much had happened that it seemed much longer than just two days ago. So many things had happened that were unbelievable, and still were happening and still unbelievable, but on the outcome of these happenings, he knew, might depend the future of all mankind and the federation that man had built among the other stars.

He tried to summon up a hatred of the Wheelers, but he found there was no hatred. They were too alien, too far removed from mankind, to inspire a hatred. They were abstractions of evil rather than actual evil beings, although that distinction, he realized, made them no less dangerous. There had been that other Peter Maxwell and surely he had been murdered by the Wheelers, for when he had been found there had been a curious, repulsive odor lingering, and now, since that moment in Sharp’s office, Maxwell knew what that odor was. Murdered because the Wheelers had believed that the first Maxwell to return had come from the crystal planet and murder had been a way to stop him from interfering with the deal with Time for the Artifact. But when the second Maxwell had appeared, the Wheelers must have been afraid of a second murder. That was why, Maxwell told himself, Mr. Marmaduke had tried to buy him off.

And there was the matter of a certain Monty Churchill, Maxwell reminded himself. When this all was finished, no matter how it might come out, he would hunt up Churchill and make certain that the score he owed him was all evened out.

They came up to the bridge and walked under it and halted.

“All right, you trashy trolls,” Mr. O’Toole yelled at the silent stone, “there is a group of us out here to hold conversation with you.”

“You hush up,” Maxwell told the goblin. “You keep out of this. You and the trolls do not get along.”

“Who,” the O’Toole demanded, “along can get with them. Obstinate things they are and without a shred of honor and of common sense bereft…”

“Just keep still,” said Maxwell. “Don’t say another word.”

They stood, all of them, in the silence of the coming dawn, and finally a squeaky voice spoke to them from the area underneath the far end of the bridge.

“Who is there?” the voice asked. “If you come to bully us, bullied we’ll not be. The loudmouthed O’Toole, for all these years, has bullied us and nagged us and no more we’ll have of it.”

“My name is Maxwell,” Maxwell told the speaker. “I do not come to bully you. I come to beg for help.”

“Maxwell? The good friend of O’Toole?”

“The good friend of all of you. Of every one of you. I sat with the dying Banshee, taking the place of those who would not come to see out his final moments.”

“But drink with O’Toole, you do. And talk with him, oh, yes. And give credence to his lies.”

The O’Toole strode forward, bouncing with wrath.

“That down your throats I’ll stuff,” he screamed. “Let me get my paws but once upon their filthy guzzles-”

His words broke off abruptly as Sharp reached out and, grabbing him by the slack of his trouser-seat, lifted him and held him, gurgling and choking in his rage.

“You go ahead,” Sharp said to Maxwell. “If this little pipsqueak so much as parts his lips, I’ll find a pool and dunk him.”

Sylvester sidled over to Sharp, thrust out his head and sniffed delicately at the dangling O’Toole. O’Toole batted at the cat with windmilling arms. “Get him out of here,” he shrieked.

“He thinks you’re a mouse,” said Oop. “He’s trying to make up his mind if you are worth the trouble.”

Sharp hauled off and kicked Sylvester in the ribs. Sylvester shied off, snarling.

“Harlow Sharp,” said Carol, starting forward, “don’t you ever dare to do a thing like that again. If you do, I’ll-”

“Shut up!” Maxwell yelled, exasperated. “Shut up, all of you. The dragon is up there fighting for his life and you stand here, wrangling.”

They all fell silent. Some of them stepped back. Maxwell waited for a moment, then spoke to the trolls. “I don’t know what’s gone on before,” he said. “I don’t know what the trouble is. But we need your help and we’re about to get it. I promise you fair dealing, but I also promise that if you aren’t reasonable we’re about to see what a couple of sticks of high explosives will do to this bridge of yours.”

A feeble, squeaky voice issued from the bridge. “But all we ever wanted, all we ever asked, was for that bigmouthed O’Toole to make for us a cask of sweet October ale.”

Maxwell turned around. “Is that right?” he asked.

Sharp set O’Toole back upon his feet so that he could answer.

“It’s the breaking of a precedent,” howled O’Toole. “That is what it is. From time immemorial us goblins are the only ones who ever brewed the gladsome ale. And drink it by ourselves. Make we cannot more than we can drink. And make it for the trolls, then the fairies will be wanting-”

“You know,” said Oop, “that the fairies would never drink the ale. All they drink is milk, and the brownies, too.”

“Athirst you would have us all,” screamed the goblin. “Hard labor it is for us to make only what we need and much time and thought and effort.”

“If it’s a simple matter of production,” suggested Sharp, “we certainly could help you.”

Mr. O’Toole bounded up and down in wrath. “And the bugs!” he shouted. “What about the bugs? Exclude them from the ale I know you would when it was brewing. All nasty sanitary. To make October ale, bugs you must have falling into it and all other matters of great uncleanliness or the flavor you will miss.”

“We’ll put in bugs,” said Oop. “We’ll go out and catch a bucket full of them and dump them into it.”

The O’Toole was beside himself with anger, his face a flaming purple. “Understand you do not,” he screamed at them. “Bugs you do not go dumping into it. Bugs fall into it with wondrous selectivity and-”

His words cut off in a gurgling shriek and Carol called out sharply, “Sylvester, cut that out!”

The O’Toole dangled, wailing and flailing his arms, from Sylvester’s mouth. Sylvester held his head high so that Mr. O’Toole’s feet could not reach the ground.

Oop was rolling on the ground in laughter, beating his hands upon the earth. “He thinks O’Toole’s a mouse!” Oop yelled. “Look at that putty cat! He caught hisself a mouse!”

Sylvester was being gentle about it. He was not hurting O’Toole, except his dignity. He was holding him lightly in his mouth, with the two fangs in his upper jaw closing neatly about his middle.

Sharp hauled off to kick the cat.

“No,” Carol yelled, “don’t you dare do that!”

Sharp hesitated.

“It’s all right, Harlow,” Maxwell said. “Let him keep O’Toole. Surely he deserves something for what he did for us back there in the office.”

“We’ll do it,” O’Toole yelled frantically. “We’ll make them their cask of ale. We’ll make two casks of it.”

“Three,” said the squeaky voice coming from the bridge.

“All right, three,” agreed the goblin.

“No weaseling out of it later on?” asked Maxwell.

“Us goblins never weasel,” said O’Toole.

“All right, Harlow,” said Maxwell. “Go ahead and belt him.”

Sharp squared off to kick. Sylvester dropped O’Toole and slunk off a pace or two.

The trolls came pouring from the bridge and went scurrying up the hillside, yelping with excitement.

The humans began scrambling up the slope, following the trolls.

Ahead of Maxwell, Carol tripped and fell. Maxwell stopped and lifted her. She jerked away from him and turned to him a face flaming with anger. “Don’t you ever touch me!” she said. “Don’t even speak to me. You told Harlow to go ahead and kick Sylvester. You yelled at me. You told me to shut up.”

She turned then and went scrambling up the hill, moving quickly out of sight.

Maxwell stood befuddled for a moment, then began the climb, skirting boulders, grabbing at bushes to pull himself along.

Up on the top of the hill he heard wild cheering and off to his right a great black globe, with its wheels spinning madly, plummeted out of the sky and crashed into the woods. He stopped and looked up and saw, through the treetops, two globes streaking through the sky on collision courses. They did not swerve or slacken speed. They came together and exploded on impact. He stood and watched the shattered pieces flying. In a few seconds there were pattering sounds among the leaves as the debris came raining down.

The cheering still was going on atop the bluff and far off, near the top of the hill that rose beyond the ravine, something that he heard, but did not see, came plunging to the earth.

There was no one else in sight as he began the climb again.

It was all over now, he told himself. The trolls had done their work and now the dragon could come down. He grinned wryly to himself. For years he’d hunted dragons and here finally was the dragon, but something more, perhaps, than he had imagined. What could the dragon be, he wondered, and why had it been enclosed within the Artifact, or made into the Artifact, or whatever might have been done with it?

Funny thing about the Artifact, he thought-resisting everything, rejecting everything until that moment when he had fastened the interpreting mechanism on his head to examine it. What had happened to release the dragon from the Artifact? Clearly the mechanism had had a part to play in the doing of it, but there still was no way of knowing what might have happened. Although the people on the crystal planet certainly would know, one of the many things they knew, one of the many arts they held which still lay outside the knowledge of others in the galaxy. Had the interpreter turned up in his luggage by design rather than by accident? Had it been planted there for the very purpose for which it had been used? Was it an interpreter, at all, or was it something else fashioned in a manner that resembled an interpreter?

He recalled that at one time he had wondered if the Artifact might not once have served as a god for the Little Folk, or for those strange creatures which early in the history of the Earth had been associated with the Little Folk? And had he been right, he wondered. Was the dragon a god from some olden time?

He began the climb again, but went slower now, for there was no need to hurry. It was the first time since he had returned from the crystal planet that there was no urgency.

He was somewhat more than halfway up the hill when he heard the music, so faint at first, so muted, that be could not be sure he heard it.

He stopped to listen and it was surely music.

The sun had just moved the top part of its disk over the horizon and a sheet of blinding light struck the treetops on the hill above him, so that they blazed with autumn color. But the hillside that he climbed still lay in morning shadow.

He listened and the music was like the sound of silver water running over happy stones. Unearthly music. Fairy music. And that was what it was. On the dancing green off to his left a fairy orchestra was playing.

A fairy orchestra and fairies dancing on the green! It was something that he had never seen and here was a chance to see it. He turned to his left and made his way, as silently as he could, toward the dancing green.

Please, he whispered to himself, please don’t go away. Don’t be frightened by me. Please stay and let me see you.

He was close now. Just beyond that boulder. And the music kept on playing.

He crawled by inches around the boulder, on guard against making any sound.

And then he saw.

The orchestra sat in a row upon a log at the edge of the green and played away, the morning light flashing off the iridescent wings and the shiny instruments.

But there were no fairies dancing on the green. Instead there were two others he never would have guessed. Two such simple souls as might dance to fairy music.

Facing one another, dancing to the music of the fairy orchestra, were Ghost and William Shakespeare.

The dragon perched upon the castle wall, its multicolored body glittering in the sun. Far below, in its valley, the Wisconsin River, blue as a forgotten summer sky, flowed between the shores of flaming forests. From the castle yard came sounds of revelry as the goblins and the trolls, for the moment with animosity laid aside, drank great tankards of October ale, banging the tankards on the tables that had been carried from the great hall, and singing ancient songs that had been composed long before there had been such a thing as Man.

Maxwell sat upon a deep-buried boulder and gazed out across the valley. A dozen feet away the edge of the bluff cut off above a hundred feet of cliff and on the edge of the cliff grew a twisted cedar tree, twisted by the winds that had howled across the valley for uncounted years, its bark a powdery silver, its foliage a light and fragrant green. Even from where he sat, Maxwell could catch the sharp tang of the foliage.

It all had come out right, he told himself. There was no Artifact to trade for the knowledge of the crystal planet, although there was the dragon and the dragon, after all, probably had been what the people on that planet wanted. But even if this should not prove to be the truth, the Wheelers had lost out, and this, in the long run, might be more important than the acquiring of the knowledge.

It all had worked out OK. Better than he could have hoped. Except that now everyone was sore at him. Carol was angry at him because he’d told Harlow to go ahead and kick Sylvester and because he’d told her to shut up. O’Toole was sore at him because he’d abandoned him to Sylvester and thereby forced him to give in to the trolls. Harlow more than likely still was plenty burned up because he had messed up the deal for the Artifact and because of all the busted pieces in the museum. But maybe the fact that he’d got Shakespeare back might make up for some of that. And there was Drayton, of course, who still might want to question him, and Longfellow, at Administration, who wouldn’t like him any better no matter what had happened.

Sometimes, he told himself, it didn’t pay to care too much about anything or to fight for anything. Maybe it was the ones like Nancy Clayton who really had it made-feather-headed Nancy with her famous house guests and her fabulous parties.

Something brushed against him and he turned to see what it might be. Sylvester reached out a rough and rasping tongue and began to wash his face.

“Cut it out,” said Maxwell. “That tongue of yours takes off hide.”

Sylvester purred contentedly and settled down beside him, leaning hard against him. The two of them sat and gazed across the valley.

“You got an easy life,” Maxwell told the cat. “You don’t have any problems. You don’t have to worry.”

A foot crunched on some stones. A voice said, “You’ve kidnaped my cat. Can I sit down and share him?”

“Sure, sit down,” said Maxwell. “I’ll move over for you. I thought you never wanted to speak to me again.”

“You were a nasty person down there,” said Carol, “and I didn’t like you much. But I suppose you had to be.”

A black cloud came to rest inside the cedar tree.

Carol gasped and shrank against Maxwell. He put out an arm and held her close against him.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It is just a banshee.”

“But he hasn’t any body. He hasn’t any face. He is just a cloud.”

“That is not remarkable,” the Banshee told her. “That is what we are, the two of us that are left. Great dirty dish-cloths flapping in the sky. And you need not be frightened, for this other human is a friend of ours.”

“I wasn’t a friend of the third one,” said Maxwell. “Nor was the human race. He sold out to the Wheelers.”

“And yet, you sat with him, when no one else would do it.”

“Yes, I did that. Even your worst enemy could demand that you do that.”

“Then, I think,” the Banshee said, “that you can understand a little. The Wheelers, after all, were us, still are us, perhaps. And ancient ties die hard.”

“I think I do understand,” said Maxwell. “What can I do for you?”

“I only came,” the Banshee told him, “to tell you that the place you call the crystal planet has been notified.”

“And they want the dragon?” Maxwell asked. “You’ll have to give us the coordinates.”

“The coordinates,” said the Banshee, “will be given to Transportation Central. You will want to go there, you and many others, to transfer the data.

But the dragon stays on Earth, here on Goblin Reservation.”

“I don’t understand,” said Maxwell. “They wanted…”

“The Artifact,” the Banshee said, “to set the dragon free. He had been caged too long.”

“Since the Jurassic,” said Maxwell. “I agree. That is far too long.”

“But we did not plan so long,” the Banshee said. “You moved him before we could set him free and we thought that we had lost him. The Artifact was only to preserve and hide him until the colony on Earth could become established, until it could protect him.”

“But protect him? Why did he need protection?”

“Because,” the Banshee said, “he is the last of his race and therefore very precious. He is the last of the-I find it hard to say-you have creatures you call dogs and cats?”

“Yes,” said Carol. “We have one of them right here.”

“Pets,” the Banshee said. “And yet much more than pets. Creatures that have walked the Earth with you from the very early days. The dragon is the pet, the last pet, of the people of the crystal planet. They grow old, they will soon be gone. They cannot leave their pet behind uncared for; he must be delivered into loving hands.”

“The goblins will take care of him,” said Carol. “And the trolls and fairies and all the rest of them. They will be proud of him. They will spoil him rotten.”

“And the humans, too?”

“And the humans, too,” she said.

They did not see him go. But he was no longer there. There was not even a dirty dishcloth flapping in the sky. The tree stood empty.

A pet, thought Maxwell. Not a god, but a simple pet. And yet, perhaps, not so simple as it sounded. When men had first made the bio-mechs, what had they created? Not other men, at least at first, not livestock, not freaks engineered to specific purposes. They had created pets.

Carol stirred against his arm. “What are you thinking, Pete?”

“About a date,” he said. “Yes, I guess I was thinking of a dinner date with you. We had one once, but it never quite came off. Would you like to try again?”

“At the Pig and Whistle?”

“If that is what you want.”

“Without Oop and Ghost. Without any troublemakers.”

“But with Sylvester, of course.”

Inspector Drayton sat, solidly planted behind the desk, and waited. He was a rawboned man with a face that looked as if it might have been hacked, by a dull hatchet, out of a block of gnarled wood. His eyes were points of flint and at times they seemed to glitter, and he was angry and upset. But such a man, Peter Maxwell knew, would never give way to any kind of anger. There was, behind that anger, a bulldog quality that would go plodding on, undisturbed by anger.

And this was just the situation, Maxwell told himself, that he had hoped would not come about. Although, as now was evident, it had been too much to hope. He had known, of course, that his failure to arrive at his proper destination, some six weeks before, would have created some consternation back here on the Earth; the thought that he might be able to slip home unobserved had not been realistic. And now here he was, facing this man across the desk and he’d have to take it easy.

He said to the man behind the desk: “I don’t believe I entirely understand why my return to Earth should be a matter for Security. My name is Peter Maxwell and I’m a member of the faculty of the College of Supernatural Phenomena on Wisconsin Campus. You have seen my papers…”

“I am quite satisfied,” said Drayton, “as to who you are. Puzzled, perhaps, but entirely satisfied. It’s something else that bothers me. Would you mind, Professor Maxwell, telling me exactly where you’ve been?”

“There’s not very much that I can tell you,” Peter Maxwell said. “I was on a planet, but I don’t know its name or its coordinates. It may be closer than a light-year or out beyond the Rim?’

“In any event,” said Drayton, “you did not arrive at the destination you indicated on your travel ticket.”

“I did not,” said Maxwell.

“Can you explain what happened?”

“I can only guess. I had thought that perhaps my wave pattern was diverted, perhaps intercepted and diverted. At first I thought there had been transmitter error, but that seems impossible. The transmitters have been in use for hundreds of years. All the bugs should have been ironed out of them by now.”

“You mean that you were kidnapped?”

“If you want to put it that way.”

“And still will tell me nothing?”

“I have explained there’s not much to tell.”

“Could this planet have anything to do with the Wheelers?”

Maxwell shook his head “I couldn’t say for sure, but I don’t believe it did. Certainly there were none of them around. There was no indication they had anything to do with it.”

“Professor Maxwell, have you ever seen a Wheeler?”

“Once. Several years ago. One of them spent a month or two at Time. I caught sight of it one day.”

“So you would know a Wheeler, if you saw one?”

“Yes, indeed,” said Maxwell.

“I see you started out for one of the planets in the Coonskin system.”

“There was the rumor of a dragon,” Maxwell told him. “Not substantiated. In fact, the evidence was quite sketchy. But I decided it might be worth investigating…”

Drayton cocked an eyebrow. “A dragon?” he demanded.

“I suppose,” said Maxwell, “that it may be hard for someone outside my field to grasp the importance of a dragon. But the fact of the matter is that there is no scrap of evidence to suggest such a creature at any time existed. This despite the fact that the dragon legend is solidly embedded in the folklore of the Earth and some of the other planets. Fairies, goblins, trolls, banshees-we have all of these, in the actual flesh, but no trace of a dragon. The funny thing about it is that the legend here on Earth is not basically a human legend. The Little Folk, as well, have the dragon legend. I sometimes think they may have been the ones who transmitted it to us. But the legend only. There is no evidence…”

He stopped, feeling a little silly. What could this stolid policeman who sat across the desk care about the dragon legend?

“I’m sorry, Inspector,” he said. “I let my enthusiasm for a favorite subject run away with me.”

“I have heard it said that the dragon legend might have risen from ancestral memories of the dinosaur.”

“I have heard it, too,” said Maxwell, “but it seems impossible. The dinosaurs were extinct long before mankind had evolved.”

“Then the Little Folk…”

“Possibly,” said Maxwell, “but it seems unlikely. I know the Little Folk and have talked with them about it. They are ancient, certainly much more ancient than we humans, but there is no indication they go back that far. Or if they do, they have no memory of it. And I would think that their legends and folk tales would easily carry over some millions of years. They are extremely long-lived, not quite immortal, but almost, and in a situation such as that, mouth-to-mouth tradition would be most persistent.”

Drayton gestured, brushing away the dragons and the Little Folk.

“You started for the Coonskin,” he said, “and you didn’t get there.”

“That is right. There was this other planet. A roofed-in, crystal planet.”

“ Crystal?”

“Some sort of stone. Quartz, perhaps. Although I can’t be sure. It could be metal. There was some metal there.”

Drayton asked smoothly. “You wouldn’t have known, when you started out, that you’d wind up on this planet?”