“Professor Maxwell,” Longfellow said, “there is no use, it seems, to beat about the bush. You’re a persistent man and, I suspect, a rather stubborn one, and with a man of that bent it is often best to lay it on the line. The president won’t see you. He can’t afford to see you.”
“Because there seems to have been two of me? Because one of me is dead?”
“The press will be full of it this morning. All the headlines shouting about a man come back from the dead. Have you heard the radio, perhaps, or watched television?”
“No,” Maxwell said, “I haven’t.”
“Well, when you got around to it you’ll find that you’ve been made a three-ring circus. I don’t mind telling you that it is embarrassing.”
“You mean a scandal?”
“I suppose you could call it that. And administration has trouble enough without identifying itself with a situation such as yours. There is this matter of Shakespeare, for example. We can’t duck that one, but we can duck you.”
“But surely,” said Maxwell, “administration can’t be too concerned with Shakespeare and myself as compared to all the other problems that it faces. There is the uproar over the revival of dueling at Heidelberg and the dispute over the ethics of employing certain alien students on the football squads and-”
“But can’t you see,” walled Longfellow, “that what happens on this particular campus are the things that matter.”
“Because administration was transferred here? When Oxford and California and Harvard and half a dozen others-”
“If you ask me,” Longfellow declared stiffly, “it was a piece of poor judgment on the part of the board of regents. It has made things very difficult for administration.”
“What would happen,” asked Maxwell, “if I just walked up the hill and into administration and started pounding desks?”
“You know well enough. You’d be thrown out.”
“But if I brought along a corps of the newspaper and television boys and they were outside watching?”
“I suppose then you wouldn’t be thrown out. You might even get to see the president. But I can assure you that under circumstances such as those you’d not get whatever it may be you want.”
“So,” said Maxwell, “I’d lose, no matter how I went about it.”
“As a matter of fact,” Longfellow told him, “I had come this morning on quite a different mission. I was bringing happy news.”
“I can imagine that you were,” said Maxwell. “What kind of sop are you prepared to throw me to make me disappear?”
“Not a sop,” said Longfellow, much aggrieved. “I was told to offer you the post of dean at the experimental college the university is establishing out on Gothic IV.”
“You mean that planet with all the witches and the warlocks?”
“It would be a splendid opportunity for a man in your field,” Longfellow insisted. “A planet where wizardry developed without the intervention of other intelligences, as is the case on Earth.”
“A hundred and fifty light-years distant,” said Maxwell. “Somewhat remote and I would think it might be dreary. But I suppose the salary would be good.”
“Very good indeed.”
“No, thanks,” said Maxwell. “I’m satisfied with my job, right here.”
“Job?” asked Longfellow.
“Why, yes. In case you have forgotten, I’m on the faculty.”
Longfellow shook his head. “Not any longer,” he said. “Have you, by any chance, forgotten? You died, more than three weeks ago. We can’t let vacancies go unfilled.”
“You mean I’ve been replaced?”
“Why, most certainly,” Longfellow told him nastily. “As it stands right now, you are unemployed.”
The waiter brought the scrambled eggs and bacon, poured the coffee, then went away and left Maxwell at the table. Through the wide expanse of window, Lake Mendota stretched away, a sheet of glassy blue, with the faint suggestion of purple hills on the other shore. A squirrel ran down the bole of the gnarled oak tree that stood just outside the window and halted, head downward, to stare with beady eyes at the man sitting at the table. A brown and red oak leaf planed down deliberately, from branch to ground, wobbling in the tiny thermal currents of air. On the rocky shore a boy and girl walked slowly, hand in hand, through the lakeshore’s morning hush.
It would have been civilized and gracious, Maxwell told himself, to have accepted Longfellow’s invitation to eat breakfast with him, but by that time he had had all that he could take of the appointments secretary and all that he wanted, at the moment, was to be alone, to gain a little time to sort out the situation and to do some thinking-although probably he could not afford the time for thinking.
Oop had been right; it was apparent now that to see the university president would be no easy task, not only because of that official’s busy schedule and his staff’s obsession of doing things through channels, but because for some reason, not entirely understood, this matter of twin Peter Maxwells had assumed the proportions of a scandal from which Arnold had the fervent wish to be disassociated. Maxwell wondered, sitting there and gazing out the window at the popeyed, staring squirrel, whether this attitude of the administration might go back to the interview with Drayton. Had Security zeroed in on Arnold? It didn’t seem too likely, but it was, Maxwell admitted, a possibility. But be that as it may, the depth of Arnold ’s jittery attitude was emphasized by the hurried offer of the post on Gothic IV. Not only did administration want nothing to do with this second Peter Maxwell, it wanted him off the Earth as well, buried on a planet where in the space of a little time he would be forgotten.
It was understandable that his post at Supernatural had been filled after the death of the other Peter Maxwell. After all, classes must go on. Gaps could not be left in the faculty. But even so, there were other positions that could have been found for him. The fact that this had not been done, that the Gothic IV position had been so quickly offered, was evidence enough that he was not wanted on the Earth.
Yet, it all was strange. Administration could not have known until sometime yesterday that two Peter Maxwells had existed. There could not have been a problem, there’d have been no basis for a problem, until that word had been received. Which meant, Maxwell told himself, that someone had gotten to administration fast-someone who wanted to get rid of him, someone who was afraid that he would interfere. But interfere in what? And the answer to that seemed so glib and easy that he felt, instinctively, that it must be wrong. But search as he might, there was one answer only-that someone else knew of the hoard of knowledge on the crystal planet and was working to get hold of it.
There was one name to go on. Carol had said Churchill-that Churchill somehow was involved in the offer that had been made to Time for the Artifact. Was it possible that the Artifact was the price of the crystal planet’s knowledge? One couldn’t count on that, of course, although it might be so, for no one knew what the Artifact might be.
That Churchill was working on the deal was no surprise at all. Not for himself, of course, but for someone else. For someone who could not afford to have his identity revealed. It was in deals such as this that Churchill might prove useful. The man was a professional fixer and knew his way around. He had contacts and through long years of operation undoubtedly had laid out various pipelines of information into many strange and powerful places.
And if such were the case, Maxwell realized, his job became much harder. Not only must he guard against the rumormongering that was implicit in administration channels, he must now be doubly sure that none of his information fell into other hands where it might be used against him.
The squirrel had gone on down the tree trunk and now was busily scrounging on the slope of lawn that ran down to the lake, rustling through the fallen leaves in search of an acorn he might somehow have missed before. The boy and girl had walked out of sight and now a hesitant breeze was softly rumpling the surface of the lake.