“I apologize for them,” said Ghost, “since neither one of them could summon up the grace to apologize, themselves. You have to live with them for ten or fifteen years to understand they really mean no harm.”
“But the day will come,” said Carol, “when Time will have the funds to do whatever it may want. All their pet projects and to heck with all the other colleges. When the deal goes-”
She stopped abruptly. She sat frozen, not moving. One could sense that she wanted to put her hand up to her mouth and was refraining from it only by iron will.
“What deal?” asked Maxwell.
“I think I know,” said Oop. “I heard a rumor, just a tiny little rumor, and I paid no attention to it. Although, come to think of it, these dirty little rumors are the ones that turn out to be true. The great big, ugly, noisy ones-”
“Oop, not a speech,” said Ghost. “Just tell us what you heard.”
“It’s incredible,” said Oop. “You never would believe it. Not in all your born days.”
“Oh, stop it!” Carol exclaimed.
They all looked at her and waited.
“I made a slip,” she said. “I got all worked up and made a slip. Can I ask the three of you just please to forget it. I’m not even sure it’s true.”
“Certainly,” said Maxwell. “You’ve been exposed this evening to rough company and ill manners and…”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not any good to ask. I have no right to ask. I’ll simply have to tell you and trust to your discretion. And I’m pretty sure it’s true. Time has been made an offer for the Artifact.”
Silence reverberated in the room as the other three sat motionless, scarcely breathing. She looked from one to the other of them, not quite understanding.
Finally Ghost stirred slightly and there was a rustling in the silence of the room, as if his white sheet had been an actual sheet that rustled when he moved.
“You do not comprehend,” he said, “the attachment that we three hold to the Artifact.”
“You struck us in a heap,” said Oop.
“The Artifact,” said Maxwell softly. “The Artifact, the one great mystery, the one thing in the world that has baffled everyone…”
“A funny stone,” said Oop.
“Not a stone,” said Ghost.
“Then, perhaps,” said Carol, “you’ll tell me what it is.”
And that was the one thing, Maxwell told himself, that neither Ghost nor any one else could do. Discovered ten years or so ago by Time investigators on a hilltop in the Jurassic Age, it had been brought back to the present at a great expenditure of funds and ingenuity. Its weight had demanded energy far beyond anything so far encountered to kick it forward into time, an energy requirement which had made necessary the projection backward into time of a portable nuclear generator, transported in many pieces and assembled on the site. And then the further task of bringing back the generator, since nothing of that sort, as a matter of simple ethics, could be abandoned in the past-even in the past of the far Jurassic.
“I cannot tell you,” said Ghost. “There is no one who can tell you.”
Ghost was right. No one had been able to make any sense of it at all. A massive block of some sort of material that now appeared to be neither stone nor metal, although at one time it had been thought to be a stone, and later on, a metal, it had defied all investigation. Six feet long, four feet on each side, it was a mass of blackness that absorbed no energy and emitted none, that bounced all light and other radiation from its surface, that could not be cut or dented, stopping a laser beam as neatly as if the beam had not existed. There was nothing that could scratch it, nothing that could probe it-it gave up no information of any sort at all. It rested on its raised base in the forecourt of Time Museum, the one thing in the world about which no one could even make a valid guess.
“Then,” asked Carol, “why the consternation?”
“Because,” said Oop, “Pete here has the hunch it may, at one time, have been the god of the Little Folk. That is, if the lousy little stinkers had the capacity to recognize a god.”
“I’m sorry,” Carol said. “I am truly sorry. I didn’t know. Perhaps if Time knew…”
“There’s not enough data,” Maxwell said, “to make any talk about it. Just a hunch is all. Just a feeling from certain things I’ve heard among the Little Folk. But even they don’t know. It was so long ago.”
So long ago, he thought. For the love of God, almost two hundred million years ago!
“This Oop,” said Carol. “I can’t get over him. That funny house he has out at the end of nowhere.”
“He’d be offended,” said Maxwell, “if he heard you calling it a house. It’s a shack and he’s proud of it-as a shack. The jump from cave to house would have been too great for him. He’d have felt uncomfortable.”
“A cave? He really lived in a cave?”
“Let me tell you something about old friend Oop,” said Maxwell. “He is an awful liar. You can’t believe all the stories that he tells. The cannibalism, for instance…”
“That makes me feel a little better. People eating one another!”
“Oh, there was cannibalism, all right. There is no doubt of that. But whether Oop himself was headed for the pot is another matter. On items of general information, he is reliable enough. It’s only when he gets to yarning about his personal experiences that you should begin to doubt him.”
“It’s funny,” said Carol. “I’ve seen him around and have wondered a bit about him, but I never thought I’d meet him. Never really wanted to, in fact. Certain people I can draw a line at, and he was one of them. I imagined he would be uncouth…”
“Oh, he’s uncouth,” said Maxwell.
“But charming, too,” said Carol.
Clear autumn stars shone frostily deep in the darkened sky. The roadway, almost unoccupied, wound its way along the ridge. Far below gleamed the far-spreading campus lights. The wind, blowing up the ridge, carried the faint smell of burning leaves.
“The fire was nice,” said Carol. “Why is it, Peter, that we don’t have fires? It would be so simple. A fireplace wouldn’t be so hard to build.”
“There was a time, several hundred years ago,” said Maxwell, “when every house, or almost every house, had at least one fireplace. Sometimes several. The whole thing, the whole business of having fires, was a throwback, of course. Back to the days when fire was a protection and a warmth. But, finally, we outgrew it.”
“I don’t think we did,” she said. “We just walked away, is all. Turned our back upon this one segment of our past. We still have need of fire. A psychological need, perhaps. I found that out tonight. It was so exciting and so comfortable. Primal, maybe, but there still must be some of the primal in us.”
“Oop,” he told her, “couldn’t live without a fire. The lack of a fire was the thing that bugged him most when Time brought him back. He had to be held captive for a time, of course, when he first was brought here-closely watched over, if not actually confined. But when be became his own master, so to speak, he got hold of a piece of land out at the edge of the campus and built himself the shack. Rough, the way he wanted it. And, of course, a fireplace. And a garden. You should see his garden. The idea of growing food was something new to him. Something that no one back in his day had ever thought about. Nails and saws and hammers, and even lumber, also were new to him, as was everything. But he was highly adaptable. He took to the new tools and ideas without a single hitch. Nothing astonished him. He used hammer and saw and lumber and all the rest of it to build the shack. But I think it was the garden that seemed the most wonderful to him-to grow one’s food and not hunt for it. I suppose you noticed-even now he is impressed with the sheer bulk and the easy availability of food.”
“And of liquor,” said Carol.
Maxwell laughed. “Another new idea that he took to. A hobby of his, you might almost say. He makes his own. He’s got a still out in the back of his woodshed and be runs off some of the worst moonshine that ever trickled down your throat. Pretty vile stuff.”