“Lead on, old friend,” said Maxwell. “We shall match our steps with yours most willingly. It has been too long since we have quaffed October ale together.”
“Yes, by all means,” said Churchill, somewhat weakly. They started up the path. Before them, looming on the ridge, the ruined castle stood gaunt against the paleness of the sky.
“I must beforehand apologize,” said Mr. O’Toole, “for the condition of the castle. It is a very drafty place, conducive to colds and sinus infections and other varied miseries. The winds blow through it wickedly and it smells of damp and mold. I do not understand in fullness why you humans, once you build the castles for us, do not make them weathertight and comfortable. Because we, beforetimes, dwelt in ruins, does not necessarily mean that we have forsook all comfort and convenience. We dwelt in them, forsooth, because they were the best poor Europe had to offer.”
He paused to gulp for breath, then went on again. “I can well recall, two thousand years ago or more, we dwelt in brand-new castles, poor enough, of course, for the rude humans of that time could not build the better, being all thumbs and without proper tools and no machinery at all and being, in general, a slabsided race of people. And us forced to hide in the nooks and crannies of the castles since the benighted humans of that day feared and detested us in all their ignorance, and sought, in their ignorance, to erect great spells against us.
“Although,” he said, with some satisfaction, “mere humans were not proficient with the spells. We, with no raising of the sweat, could afford them spades and clubs and beat their spells, hands down.”
“Two thousand years?” asked Churchill. “You don’t mean to say-”
Maxwell made a quick motion of his head in an attempt to silence him.
Mr. O’Toole stopped in the middle of the path and threw Churchill a withering glance.
“I can recall,” he said, “when the barbarians first came, most rudely, from that fenny forest you now call Central Europe to knock with the hilts of their crude iron swords upon the very gates of Rome. We heard of it in the forest depths where we made our homes and there were others then, but dead long since, who had heard the news, some weeks after its transpirance, from Thermopylae.”
“I am sorry,” Maxwell said. “Not every one is as well acquainted with the Little Folk…”
“Please,” said Mr. O’Toole, “you acquaint him, then.”
“It’s the truth,” Maxwell said to Churchill, “or, at least, it could be. Not immortal, for they eventually do die. But long-lived beyond anything we know. Births are few-very few, indeed, for if they weren’t there’d not be room for them on Earth. But they live to an extremely ripe old age.”
“It is,” said Mr. O’Toole, “because we burrow deep to the heart of nature and do not waste precious vitality of spirit upon those petty concerns which make wreckage of the lives and hopes of humans.”
“But these,” he said, “are dolorous topics on which to waste so glorious an autumn afternoon. So let us fasten our thoughts, rather, with great steadfastness, upon the foaming ale that awaits us on the hilltop.”
He lapsed into silence and started up the path again at a more rapid pace than he had set before.
Scuttling down the path toward them came a tiny goblin, his multicolored, too-large shirt whipping in the wind of his headlong running.
“The ale!” he screamed. “The ale!”
He skidded to a halt in front of the three toiling up the path.
“What of the ale?” panted Mr. O’Toole. “Do you mean to confess to me that you have been the sampling of it?”
“It has gone sour,” wailed the little goblin. “The whole bewitched mess of it is sour.”
“But ale can’t go sour,” protested Maxwell, grasping some sense of the tragedy that had taken place.
Mr. O’Toole bounced upon the path in devastating anger. His face turned from brown to red to purple. His breath came gushing out in wheezing gasps.
“It can, bedamned,” he shouted, “with a spell of wizardry!”
He turned around and started rapidly down the path, trailed by the little goblin.
“Leave me at them filthy trolls!” shouted Mr. O’Toole.
“Leave me wrap my paws around their guzzles. I will dig them out with these two hands and hang them in the sun to dry. I will skin them all entire. I will teach them lessons they never will unlearn…”
His bellowing dwindled with distance to unintelligible rumbling as he scrambled swiftly down the path, heading for the bridge beneath which the trolls hung out.
The two humans stood watching, filled with admiration and wonder at such ponderous, towering wrath.
“Well,” said Churchill, “there goes our chance at sweet October ale.”
The clock in Music Hall began striking the hour of six as Maxwell reached the outskirts of the campus, riding from the airport on one of the slower, outer belts of the roadway. Churchill had taken another roadway and Maxwell had been glad of that. Not only that he felt a faint distaste for the man, but from the wish to be alone. He wanted to ride slowly, with the windshield down, in silence, without the need of conversation, to soak up the sight and feel of those few square miles of buildings and of malls-coming home again to the one place that he loved.
Dusk sifted through the campus like a mist of benediction, softening the outlines of the buildings, turning the malls into areas that could have been romantic etchings out of storybooks.
Knots of students stood about the malls, talking quietly, carrying their satchels or with books tucked beneath their arms. A white-haired man sat on a bench, watching a pair of squirrels playing on the lawn. Two reptilian aliens hunched along one of the misty walks, moving slowly and engrossed in talk. A human student strode smartly along the sidewalk, whistling as he went, the whistle waking echoes in the quiet angles of the buildings. Meeting and passing the reptiles, be lifted an arm in grave salute. And everywhere the trees, great and ancient elms that had stood since time forgotten, the sturdy sentinels of many generations.
Then the great clock started the ringing of the hour, the bronze clangor of it beating far across the land, and it seemed to Maxwell that in the clock the campus was bidding him hello. The clock was a friend, he thought-not to him alone, but to all within the hearing of it, the voice of the campus. Lying in bed, before he went to sleep, he had listened, night after night, to its chiming, its ringing out of time. And more, perhaps, than the ringing out of time. Rather a watchman in the night crying all was well.
Ahead of him the mighty complex of Time College loomed out of the dusk-looming up to dwarf the roadway and the mall, great blocks of plastic and of glass, with lights burning in many of its windows. Squatted at the base of the complex crouched the museum and across its front Maxwell saw the wind-fluttered whiteness of a sign painted on white fabric. In the dusk and distance he could make out only one word: SHAKESPEARE.
He grinned to himself, thinking of it. English Lit would be beside itself. Old Chenery and all the rest of them had never quite forgiven Time for establishing, two or three years ago, that the Earl of Oxford, not Shakespeare, had been the author of the plays. And this personal appearance of the man from Stratford-on-Avon would be rubbing salt into wounds that were far from healed.
Far ahead, sitting on its bill at the west end of the campus, Maxwell could make out the great hulk of the administration section, etched darkly against the last faint brushing of red in the western sky.
The belt moved on, past Time College and its squatting museum with the sign fluttering in the wind. The clock ended its telling of the time, the last notes of the chimes fading far into the distance.
Six o’clock. In another few minutes he would be getting off the belt and heading for the Winston Arms, which had been his home for the last four-no, the last five years. He put his hand into the right-hand pocket of his jacket and his fingers traced the hard outlines of the small ring of keys tucked into the small key pocket inside the jacket pocket.