“You’re all right?” she asked. “You really are all right?”
“Very right,” said Mr. Marmaduke.
He wheeled close to Maxwell and an arm extruded from the top of his rolypoly body-a ropelike, flexible arm more like a tentacle than arm, with three clawlike fingers on the end of it. He reached out with it and draped it around Maxwell’s shoulders. At the pressure of it, Maxwell had the instinct to shrink away, but with an exercise of conscious will, forced himself not to stir.
“I thank you, sir,” said Mr. Marmaduke. “I am most grateful to you. You saved my life perhaps. Just as I fell I saw you leap upon the beast. It was most heroic.”
Pressed tight against Maxwell’s side, Sylvester lifted his head, dropped his lower jaw, exhibiting his fangs in a silent snarl.
“He would not have hurt you, sir,” said Carol. “He’s as gentle as a kitten. If you had not run, he’d not have chased you. He had the fool idea that you were playing with him. Sylvester likes to play.”
Sylvester yawned, with a fine display of teeth.
“This play,” said Mr. Marmaduke, “I do not care about.”
“When I saw you fall,” said Maxwell, “I was fearful for you. I thought for a moment you would burst wide open.”
“Oh, no need of fear,” said Mr. Marmaduke. “I am extremely resilient. The body is made of excellent material. It is strong and has a bouncing quality.”
He removed his arm from Maxwell’s shoulder and it ran like an oily rope, writhing in the air, to plop back into his body. There was no mark on the body surface, Maxwell noticed, to indicate where it might have disappeared.
“You’ll excuse me, please,” said Mr. Marmaduke. “There’s someone I must see.” He wheeled about and rolled rapidly away.
Nancy shuddered. “He gives me the creeps,” she said. “Although I must admit he is a great attraction. It isn’t every hostess who can snag a Wheeler. I don’t mind telling you, Pete, that I pulled a lot of wires to get him for a house guest and now I wish I hadn’t. There’s a slimy feel about him.”
“Do you know why he’d be here-here on Earth, I mean?”
“No, I don’t. I get the impression that he’s a simple tourist. Although I don’t imagine such a creature could be a simple tourist.”
“I think you’re right,” said Maxwell.
“Pete,” she said, “tell me about yourself. The papers say-”
He grinned. “I know. That I came back from the dead.”
“But you didn’t, really. I know that’s not possible. Who was that we buried? Everyone, you must understand, simply everyone, was at the funeral and we all thought it was you. But it couldn’t have been you. Whatever could have-”
“ Nancy,” said Maxwell, “I came back only yesterday. I found that I was dead and that my apartment had been rented and that I had lost my job and-”
“It seems impossible,” said Nancy. “Such things just don’t happen. I don’t see how this happened.”
“I’m not entirely clear about it all myself,” Maxwell told her. “Later, I suppose, I’ll find out more about it.”
“Anyway,” said Nancy, “you are here and everything’s all right and if you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll circulate the word that you would rather not.”
“That’s kind of you,” said Maxwell, “but it wouldn’t work.”
“You don’t need to worry about newspapermen,” said Nancy. “There are no newspaper people here. I used to let them come. A handpicked few, ones I thought that I could trust. But you can’t trust any of them. I found that out the hard way. So you won’t be bothered with them.”
“I understand you have a painting…”
“You know about the painting, then. Let’s go and look at it. It’s the proudest thing I have. Imagine it, a Lambert! And one that had dropped entirely out of sight. I’ll tell you later how it happened to be found, but I won’t tell you what it cost me. I won’t tell anyone. I’m ashamed of what it cost me.”
“Much or little?”
“Much,” said Nancy, “and you have to be so careful. It’s so easy to be swindled. I wouldn’t even talk of buying it until I had it examined by an expert. In fact, two experts. One to check against the other, although I suppose that was unnecessary.”
“But there’s no doubt it is a Lambert?”
“No doubt at all. I was almost sure, myself. No one else ever painted quite like Lambert. But he could be copied, of course, and I had to be sure.”
“What do you know about Lambert?” Maxwell asked. “Something more than the rest of us? Something that’s not found its way into books?”
“No. Really not a great deal. Not about the man himself. Why do you ask?”
“Because you are so excited.”
“Well, really! Just finding an unknown Lambert is enough, of course. I have two other paintings of his, but this one is something special because it had been lost. Well, actually I don’t know if lost is the word or not. Never known, perhaps, would be better. No record of his ever painting it. No record that survived, at least. And it is one of his so-called grotesques. You would hardly think one of them could be lost or mislaid or whatever happened to it. One of his earlier ones, that might be understandable.”
They worked their way across the floor, skirting the little clustered groups of guests.
“Here it is,” said Nancy.
They had pushed their way through a crowd that had been grouped in front of the wall on which the painting hung. Maxwell tilted his head to stare up at it.
It was somehow different than the color plates he had seen in the library that morning. This was because, he told himself, of the larger size of the painting, the brilliance and the clarity of color, some of which had been lost in the color plates. But this, he realized, was not all of it. The landscape was different and the creatures in it. A more Earth-like landscape-the sweet of gray hills and the brown of the shrubby vegetation that lay upon the land, the squatty fernlike trees. A troop of creatures that could be gnomes wended their way across a distant hill; a goblinlike creature sitting at the base of a tree leaned back against the bole, apparently asleep, with some sort of hat pulled down across his eyes. And others-fearsome, leering creatures, with obscene bodies and faces that made the blood run cold.
On the crest of a distant, flat-topped hill, about the base of which clustered a large crowd of many kinds of creatures, a small black blob stood outlined against the grayness of the sky.
Maxwell drew in his breath in a startled gasp, took a quick step closer, then halted and stood stiff and straight, afraid to give himself away.
It seemed impossible that no one else could have noticed it, he told himself. Although, perhaps, someone had and had not thought it worth the mention, or had been unsure and thus reluctant to say anything about it.
But for Maxwell there could be no doubt. He was sure of what he saw. That small black blob on the distant hilltop was the Artifact!
Maxwell found a secluded corner, a couple of chairs screened by a huge flowering plant of some sort, planted in a marble tub of generous proportions. There was no one there and he sat down.
Out beyond the corner where he sat, the party was drawing to its close, beginning to dwindle down. Some people had left and those who still were there seemed to be less noisy. And if one more person asked him what had happened to him, Maxwell told himself, he’d belt them in the jaw.
I’ll explain, he had told Carol when she had asked the night before-I’ll explain over and over again. And that was what he’d done, not entirely truthfully, and no one had believed him. They’d looked at him with glassy eyes and they had figured that either he was drunk or was making fools of them.
And he, he realized, had really been the one who had been made a fool. He had been invited to the party, but not by Nancy Clayton. Nancy had not sent him clothes to wear and had not sent the car that had let him out at the back door to walk down the hall, past the door where the Wheeler waited. And ten to one, the dogs had not been Nancy ’s either, although he had not thought to ask her.