“I only came,” the Banshee told him, “to tell you that the place you call the crystal planet has been notified.”
“And they want the dragon?” Maxwell asked. “You’ll have to give us the coordinates.”
“The coordinates,” said the Banshee, “will be given to Transportation Central. You will want to go there, you and many others, to transfer the data.
But the dragon stays on Earth, here on Goblin Reservation.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maxwell. “They wanted…”
“The Artifact,” the Banshee said, “to set the dragon free. He had been caged too long.”
“Since the Jurassic,” said Maxwell. “I agree. That is far too long.”
“But we did not plan so long,” the Banshee said. “You moved him before we could set him free and we thought that we had lost him. The Artifact was only to preserve and hide him until the colony on Earth could become established, until it could protect him.”
“But protect him? Why did he need protection?”
“Because,” the Banshee said, “he is the last of his race and therefore very precious. He is the last of the-I find it hard to say-you have creatures you call dogs and cats?”
“Yes,” said Carol. “We have one of them right here.”
“Pets,” the Banshee said. “And yet much more than pets. Creatures that have walked the Earth with you from the very early days. The dragon is the pet, the last pet, of the people of the crystal planet. They grow old, they will soon be gone. They cannot leave their pet behind uncared for; he must be delivered into loving hands.”
“The goblins will take care of him,” said Carol. “And the trolls and fairies and all the rest of them. They will be proud of him. They will spoil him rotten.”
“And the humans, too?”
“And the humans, too,” she said.
They did not see him go. But he was no longer there. There was not even a dirty dishcloth flapping in the sky. The tree stood empty.
A pet, thought Maxwell. Not a god, but a simple pet. And yet, perhaps, not so simple as it sounded. When men had first made the bio-mechs, what had they created? Not other men, at least at first, not livestock, not freaks engineered to specific purposes. They had created pets.
Carol stirred against his arm. “What are you thinking, Pete?”
“About a date,” he said. “Yes, I guess I was thinking of a dinner date with you. We had one once, but it never quite came off. Would you like to try again?”
“At the Pig and Whistle?”
“If that is what you want.”
“Without Oop and Ghost. Without any troublemakers.”
“But with Sylvester, of course.”
Inspector Drayton sat, solidly planted behind the desk, and waited. He was a rawboned man with a face that looked as if it might have been hacked, by a dull hatchet, out of a block of gnarled wood. His eyes were points of flint and at times they seemed to glitter, and he was angry and upset. But such a man, Peter Maxwell knew, would never give way to any kind of anger. There was, behind that anger, a bulldog quality that would go plodding on, undisturbed by anger.
And this was just the situation, Maxwell told himself, that he had hoped would not come about. Although, as now was evident, it had been too much to hope. He had known, of course, that his failure to arrive at his proper destination, some six weeks before, would have created some consternation back here on the Earth; the thought that he might be able to slip home unobserved had not been realistic. And now here he was, facing this man across the desk and he’d have to take it easy.
He said to the man behind the desk: “I don’t believe I entirely understand why my return to Earth should be a matter for Security. My name is Peter Maxwell and I’m a member of the faculty of the College of Supernatural Phenomena on Wisconsin Campus. You have seen my papers…”
“I am quite satisfied,” said Drayton, “as to who you are. Puzzled, perhaps, but entirely satisfied. It’s something else that bothers me. Would you mind, Professor Maxwell, telling me exactly where you’ve been?”
“There’s not very much that I can tell you,” Peter Maxwell said. “I was on a planet, but I don’t know its name or its coordinates. It may be closer than a light-year or out beyond the Rim?’
“In any event,” said Drayton, “you did not arrive at the destination you indicated on your travel ticket.”
“I did not,” said Maxwell.
“Can you explain what happened?”
“I can only guess. I had thought that perhaps my wave pattern was diverted, perhaps intercepted and diverted. At first I thought there had been transmitter error, but that seems impossible. The transmitters have been in use for hundreds of years. All the bugs should have been ironed out of them by now.”
“You mean that you were kidnapped?”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“And still will tell me nothing?”
“I have explained there’s not much to tell.”
“Could this planet have anything to do with the Wheelers?”
Maxwell shook his head “I couldn’t say for sure, but I don’t believe it did. Certainly there were none of them around. There was no indication they had anything to do with it.”
“Professor Maxwell, have you ever seen a Wheeler?”
“Once. Several years ago. One of them spent a month or two at Time. I caught sight of it one day.”
“So you would know a Wheeler, if you saw one?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Maxwell.
“I see you started out for one of the planets in the Coonskin system.”
“There was the rumor of a dragon,” Maxwell told him. “Not substantiated. In fact, the evidence was quite sketchy. But I decided it might be worth investigating…”
Drayton cocked an eyebrow. “A dragon?” he demanded.
“I suppose,” said Maxwell, “that it may be hard for someone outside my field to grasp the importance of a dragon. But the fact of the matter is that there is no scrap of evidence to suggest such a creature at any time existed. This despite the fact that the dragon legend is solidly embedded in the folklore of the Earth and some of the other planets. Fairies, goblins, trolls, banshees-we have all of these, in the actual flesh, but no trace of a dragon. The funny thing about it is that the legend here on Earth is not basically a human legend. The Little Folk, as well, have the dragon legend. I sometimes think they may have been the ones who transmitted it to us. But the legend only. There is no evidence…”
He stopped, feeling a little silly. What could this stolid policeman who sat across the desk care about the dragon legend?
“I’m sorry, Inspector,” he said. “I let my enthusiasm for a favorite subject run away with me.”
“I have heard it said that the dragon legend might have risen from ancestral memories of the dinosaur.”
“I have heard it, too,” said Maxwell, “but it seems impossible. The dinosaurs were extinct long before mankind had evolved.”
“Then the Little Folk…”
“Possibly,” said Maxwell, “but it seems unlikely. I know the Little Folk and have talked with them about it. They are ancient, certainly much more ancient than we humans, but there is no indication they go back that far. Or if they do, they have no memory of it. And I would think that their legends and folk tales would easily carry over some millions of years. They are extremely long-lived, not quite immortal, but almost, and in a situation such as that, mouth-to-mouth tradition would be most persistent.”
Drayton gestured, brushing away the dragons and the Little Folk.
“You started for the Coonskin,” he said, “and you didn’t get there.”
“That is right. There was this other planet. A roofed-in, crystal planet.”
“ Crystal?”
“Some sort of stone. Quartz, perhaps. Although I can’t be sure. It could be metal. There was some metal there.”
Drayton asked smoothly. “You wouldn’t have known, when you started out, that you’d wind up on this planet?”