He raised the glass. “You’re not drinking?”
“If you’re all right,” she said. “If you feel OK, I’ll get one for myself.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Maxwell. “I’ll manage to survive.”
He looked at her and for the first time really saw her-sleek and trim, with bobbed black hair, long eyelashes, high cheekbones, and eyes that smiled at him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I am Carol Hampton. A historian at Time.”
“Miss Hampton,” he said, “I apologize for the situation. I have been away-off planet. Just returned. And I had a key and it fit the door and when I’d left it had been my place…”
“No need to explain,” she said.
“We’ll have the drink,” he said. “Then I’ll get up and go. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you’d be willing to have dinner with me. Let’s call it a way for me to repay your understanding. You could have run out shrieking.”
“If this was all a pitch!” she said. “If you-”
“It couldn’t be,” he said. “I’d be too stupid to get it figured out. And, besides, how come I had the key?”
She looked at him for a moment, then said, “It was silly of me. But Sylvester will have to go with us. He won’t be left alone.”
“Why,” said Maxwell, “I wouldn’t think of leaving him. He and I are pals.”
“It’ll cost you a steak,” she warned. “He is always hungry and he eats nothing but good steaks. Big ones-raw.”
The Pig and Whistle was dark and clamorous and smoky. The tables were jammed together, with narrow lanes between them. Candles burned with flickering flames. The murmurous din of many voices, seemingly talking all at once, filled the low-ceilinged room.
Maxwell stopped and peered, trying to locate a table that might be vacant. Perhaps, he thought, they should have gone somewhere else, but he had wanted to eat here, for the place, a hangout of students and some members of the faculty, spelled the campus to him.
“Perhaps,” he said to Carol Hampton, “we should go somewhere else.”
“There’ll be someone along in just a minute,” she said, “to show us to a table. Everyone seems so busy. There must have been a rush-Sylvester, cut that out!”
She spoke appealingly to the people at the table beside which they stood. “You’ll excuse him, please. He has no manners, none at all. Especially table manners. He snatches everything in sight.”
Sylvester licked his chops, looking satisfied.
“Think nothing of it, miss,” said the man with the bushy beard. “I really didn’t want it. To order steak is just compulsive with me.”
Someone shouted across the room. “Pete! Pete Maxwell!”
Maxwell peered into the gloom. At a far table, inserted in a corner, someone had risen and was waving his arms. Maxwell finally made him out. It was Alley Oop and beside him sat the white-shrouded figure of Ghost.
“Friends of yours?” asked Carol.
“Yes. Apparently they want us to join them. Do you mind?”
“The Neanderthaler?” she asked.
“You know him?”
“No. I just see him around at times. But I’d like to meet him. And that is the Ghost?”
“The two are inseparable,” said Maxwell.
“Well, let’s go over, then.”
“We can say hello and go somewhere else.”
“Not on your life,” she said. “This place looks interesting.”
“You’ve never been here before?”
“I’ve never dared,” she said.
“I’ll break the path,” he told her.
He forged slowly among the tables, trailed by the girl and cat.
Alley Oop lunged out into the aisle to meet him, flung his arms around him, hugged him, then grasped him by the shoulders and thrust him out at arm’s length to stare into his face.
“You are Old Pete?” he asked. “You aren’t fooling us?”
“I am Pete,” said Maxwell. “Who do you think I am?”
“Well, what I want to know then,” said Oop, “is who it was we buried three weeks ago last Thursday. Both me and Ghost were there. And you owe us twenty bucks refund on the flowers we sent. That is what they cost us.”
“Let us sit down,” said Maxwell.
“Afraid of creating a scene,” said Oop. “This place is made for scenes. There are fist fights every hour on schedule and there’s always someone jumping up on a table and making a speech.”
“Oop,” said Maxwell, “there is a lady present and I want you to tame down and get civilized. Miss Carol Hampton, and this great oaf is Alley Oop.”
“I am delighted to meet you, Miss Hampton,” said Alley Oop. “And what is that you have there with you? As I live and breathe, a saber-toother! I’ll have to tell you about the time, during a blizzard, I sought shelter in a cave and this big cat was there and me with nothing but a dull stone knife. I had lost my club, you see, when I met the bear, and-”
“Some other time,” said Maxwell. “At least, let us sit down. We are hungry. We don’t want to get thrown out.”
“Pete,” said Alley Oop, “it is a matter of some large distinction to be heaved out of this joint. You ain’t arrived socially until you’ve been thrown out of here.”
But, muttering under his breath, he led the way back to the table and held a chair for Carol. Sylvester planted himself between Maxwell and Carol, propped his chin on the table and glared balefully at Oop.
“That cat don’t like me,” Oop declared. “Probably he knows how many of his ancestors I wiped out back in the Old Stone Age.”
“He’s only a bio-mech,” said Carol. “He couldn’t possibly.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Oop. “That critter is no bio-mech. He’s got the dirty meanness in his eyes all saber-toothers have.”
“Please, Oop,” said Maxwell. “Just a moment, please. Miss Hampton, this gentleman is Ghost. A long-time friend of mine.”
“I am pleased to meet you, Mr. Ghost,” said Carol.
“Not Mister,” said Ghost. “Just plain Ghost. That is all I am. And the terrible thing about it is that I don’t know who I am the ghost of. I’m most pleased to meet you. It is so comfortable with four around the table. There is something nice and balanced in the number four.”
“Well,” said Oop, “now that we know one another, leave us proceed to business. Let us do some drinking. It’s lonesome for a man to drink all by himself. I love Ghost, of course, for his many sterling qualities, but I hate a man who doesn’t drink.”
“You know I can’t drink,” said Ghost. “Nor eat, either. Or smoke. There’s not much a ghost can do. But I wish you wouldn’t keep pointing it out to everyone we meet.”
Oop said to Carol, “You seem to be surprised that a barbaric Neanderthaler can sling the language around with the facility I command.”
“Not surprised,” said Carol. “Astounded.”
“Oop,” Maxwell told her, “has soaked up more education in the last twelve years than most ordinary men. Started out virtually in kindergarten and now is working on his doctorate. And the thing about it is that he intends to keep right on. He is, you might say, one of our most notable professional students.”
Oop raised his arm and waved it, bellowing at a waiter. “Over here,” he shouted. “There are people here who wish to patronize you. All dying of slow thirst.”
“The thing,” said Ghost, “I have always admired about him is his shy, retiring nature.”
“I keep on studying,” said Oop, “not so much that I hunger after knowledge as for the enjoyment I get from the incredulous astonishment on the faces of those stuffed-shirt professors and those goofy students. Not,” he said to Maxwell, “that I maintain all professors are stuffed shirts.”
“Thank you,” Maxwell said.
“There are those who seem to think,” said Oop, “that Homo sapiens neanderthalensis can be nothing other than a stupid brute. After all, he became extinct, he couldn’t hold his own-which in itself is prime evidence that he was very second-rate. I’m afraid that I’ll continue to devote my life to proving-”