“I’m Inspector Drayton, of Security. I had a short talk with Professor Maxwell the other day, on the occasion of his return to Earth, but I’m afraid that there are still some questions…”
“In that case,” said Sharp, “please take your place in line. I have business with Dr. Maxwell and I’m afraid that mine takes precedence over yours.”
“You don’t understand,” said Drayton. “I had not come here to apprehend your friend. His turning up with you is a piece of good fortune I had not expected. There is another matter in which I thought you might be helpful, a matter which came up rather unexpectedly. You see, I had heard that Professor Maxwell had been a guest at Miss Clayton’s recent party and so I went to see her-”
“Talk sense, man,” said Sharp. “What has Nancy Clayton got to do with all of this?”
“I don’t know, Harlow,” said Nancy Clayton, appearing at the doorway of the inner office. “I never intended to get involved in anything. All I ever try to do is entertain my Mends and I can’t see how there’s anything so wrong in that.”
“ Nancy, please,” said Sharp. “First tell me what is going on. Why are you here and why is Inspector Drayton here and-”
“It’s Lambert,” Nancy said.
“You mean the man who painted the picture that you have.”
“I have three of them,” said Nancy proudly.
“But Lambert has been dead more than five hundred years.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” said Nancy, “but he turned up tonight. He said that he was lost.”
A man stepped from the inner room, urging Nancy to one side-a tall and rugged man with sandy hair and deep lines in his face.
“It appears, gentlemen,” he said, “that you are discussing me. Would you mind if I spoke up for myself?”
There was a strange twang to the way he spoke his words and he stood there, beaming at them, in a good-natured manner, and there was not much that one could find in him to make one dislike the man.
“You are Albert Lambert?” Maxwell asked.
“Indeed I am,” said Lambert, “and I hope I don’t intrude, but I have a problem.”
“And you’re the only one?” asked Sharp.
“I’m sure that I don’t know,” said Lambert. “I suppose there are many other persons who are faced with problems. When you have a problem, however, the question is of where to go to have it solved.”
“Mister,” said Sharp, “I am in the same position and I am seeking answers just the same as you are.”
“But don’t you see,” Maxwell said to Sharp, “that Lambert has the right idea. He has come to the one place where his problem can be solved.”
“If I were you, young fellow,” Drayton said, “I wouldn’t be so sure. You were pretty foxy the other day, but now I’m onto you. There are a lot of things.”
“Inspector, will you please keep out of this,” said Sharp. “Things are bad enough without you complicating them. The Artifact is gone and the museum is wrecked and Shakespeare has disappeared.”
“But all I want,” said Lambert reasonably, “is to get back home again. Back to 2023.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Sharp commanded. “You are out of line. I don’t-”
“ Harlow,” Maxwell said, “I explained it all to you. Just this afternoon. And I asked you about Simonson. Surely you recall.”
“Simonson? Yes, I remember now.” Sharp looked at Lambert. “You are the man who painted the canvas that shows the Artifact.”
“Artifact?”
“A big block of black stone set atop a hill.”
Lambert shook his head. “No, I haven’t painted it. Although I suppose I will. In fact, it seems I must, for Miss Clayton showed it to me and it’s undeniably something that I would have done. And I must say, who shouldn’t, that it is not so bad.”
“Then you actually saw the Artifact back in Jurassic days?”
“Jurassic?”
“Two hundred million years ago.”
Lambert looked surprised. “So it was that long ago. I knew it was pretty far. There were dinosaurs.”
“But you must have known. You were traveling in time.”
“The trouble is,” said Lambert, “the time unit has gone haywire. I never seem to be able to go to the time I want.”
Sharp put up his hands and held his head between them. Then he took them away and said: “Now, let’s go at this slowly. One thing at a time. First one step and then another, till we get to the bottom of it.”
“I explained to you,” said Lambert, “that there’s just one thing that I want. It’s very simple really, all I want is to get home again.”
“Where is your time machine?” asked Sharp. “Where did you leave it. We can have a look at it.”
“I didn’t leave it anywhere. There’s no place I could leave it. It goes everywhere with me. It’s inside my head.”
“In your head!” yelled Sharp. “A time unit in your head. But that’s impossible.”
Maxwell grinned at Sharp. “When we were talking this afternoon,” he said, “you told me that Simonson revealed very little about his time machine. Now it appears-”
“I did tell you that,” Sharp agreed, “but who in their right mind would suspect that a time unit could be installed in a subject’s brain. It must a new principle. Something that we missed entirely.” He said to Lambert, “Do you have any idea how it works.”
“Not the slightest,” Lambert said. “The only thing I know is that when it was put into my head-a rather major surgical operation, I can assure you-I gained the ability to travel in time. I simply have to think of where I want to go, using certain rather simple coordinates, and I am there. But something has gone wrong. No matter what I think, I go banging back and forth, like a yo-yo, from one time to yet another, none of which are the times I want to be.”
“It would have advantages,” said Sharp, speaking musingly and more to himself than to the rest of them. “It would admit of independent action and it would be small, much smaller than the mechanism that we have to use. It would have to be to go inside the brain and… I don’t suppose, Lambert, that you know too much about it?”
“I told you,” Lambert said. “Not a thing. I wasn’t really interested in how it worked. Simonson happens to be a friend of mine…”
“But why here? Why did you come here? To this particular place and time?”
“An accident, that’s all. And once I arrived it looked a lot more civilized than a lot of places I had been and I started inquiring around to orient myself. Apparently I had never been so far into the future before, for one of the first things I learned was that you did have time travel and that there was a Time College. Then I heard that Miss Clayton had a painting of mine, and thinking that if she had a painting I had done she might be disposed favorably toward me, I sought her out. In hope, you see, of finding out how to contact the people who might be able to use their good offices to send me home again. And it was while I was there that Inspector Drayton arrived.”
“Now, Mr. Lambert,” Nancy said, “before you go any further, there is something that I want to ask you. Why didn’t you, when you were back in the Jurassic or wherever it was that Harlow said you were, and you painted this picture-”
“You forget,” Lambert told her. “I haven’t painted it yet. I have some sketches and someday I expect-”
“Well, then, when you get around to painting that picture, why don’t you put in dinosaurs. There aren’t any dinosaurs in it and you just said you knew you were a long way in the past because there were dinosaurs.”
“I put no dinosaurs in the painting,” said Lambert, “for a very simple reason. There were no dinosaurs.”
“But you said…”
“You must realize,” Lambert explained patiently, “that I paint only what I see. I never subtract anything. I never add anything. And there were no dinosaurs because the creatures in the painting had chased them all away. So I put in no dinosaurs, nor any of the others.”
“Any of the others?” asked Maxwell. “What are you talking about now? What were these others?”