Clifford D. Simak

Oop handed him the fruit jar. “Take another slug of that, then start any time you want. What I can’t figure out is the goof by Transport. I don’t believe it happened. I would make a guess that it was something else.”

“And you’d be right,” said Maxwell. “There’s a planet out there somewhere. Fairly close, I’d guess. A freewheeling planet, not tied to any sun, although I gather that it could insert itself into a solar system any time it wishes.”

“That would take some doing. It would mess up the orbits of all the other planets.”

“Not necessarily,” said Maxwell. “It wouldn’t have to take an orbit in the same plane as the other planets. That would hold down the effect of its being there.”

He lifted the fruit jar, shut his eyes, and took a healthy gulp. The top of his head came off and his stomach bounced. He lowered the jar and leaned back against the roughness of the masonry. A wind was mewing in the chimney-a lonely sound, but a sound shut outside by the rough board walls. A log fell in the fireplace and sent up a shower of sparks. The flames danced high and ifickering shadows chased one another all about the room.

Oop reached out and took the jar out of Maxwell’s hands, but did not drink immediately. He held it, cuddled, in his lap.

“So this other planet reached out and copied your wave pattern,” he said, “and there were two of you.”

“How did you know that?”

“Deduction. It was the most logical way for it to happen. I know there were two of you. There was this other one who came back before you did. I talked with him and he was you-he was as much Pete Maxwell as you are, sitting there. He said there was no dragon, that the Coonskin business had been a wild-goose chase, and so he came home ahead of his schedule.”

“So that was it,” said Maxwell. “I had wondered why he came back early.”

“I’m hard put to it,” said Oop, “to decide if I should rejoice or mourn. Perhaps a bit of both, leaving some room for wonderment at the strange workings of human destiny. This other man was you and now he’s dead and I have lost a friend-for he was a human being and a personality and that humanity and personality came to an end with death. But now there’s you and if, before, I’d lost a friend, now I have regained that lost friend, for you are as truly Peter Maxwell as that other one.”

“I was told an accident.”

“I’m not sure,” said Oop. “I’ve been doing some thinking about it. Since you came back, I’m not so sure at all. He was getting off a roadway and he tripped and fell, hit his head…”

“You don’t trip when you’re getting off a roadway. Unless you’re drunk or crippled up or awkward. That outside belt is barely crawling.”

“I know,” said Oop. “That’s what the police thought, too. But there was no other explanation and the police, as you well know, require some sort of explanation, so they can close the file. It was in a lonely place. About halfway between here and Goblin Reservation. No one saw it. Must have happened when there was almost no one traveling. Maybe at night. He was found about ten o’clock in the morning. There would have been people traveling from six o’clock on, but probably they’d have been on the inner, faster belts. They wouldn’t have seen too much on the outside of the belt. The body could have been lying there for a long time before it was found.”

“You think it wasn’t an accident? That it may have been a murder?”

“I don’t know. The thought has occurred to me. There was one funny thing about it-something that never was explained. There was a funny smell about the body and the area. A strange sort of odor, like nothing anyone had ever smelled before. Maybe someone found out that there were two of you. For some reason, someone may not have wanted two of you.”

“But who could have known there were two of me?”

“The people on that other planet. If there were people…”

“There were people,” Maxwell said. “It was a most amazing place.…”

It all came back as he sat there talking, almost as if he were there again. A crystal place-or that had been what it had looked to be when he first had seen it. An extensive crystal plain that ran on and on and a crystal sky with crystal pillars reaching from the plain and upward, apparently to the sky, although the tops of them were lost in the milkiness of sky-pillars soaring upward to hold the sky in place. An empty place, to make one think of a deserted ballroom of extensive size, all cleaned and polished for a ball, waiting for the music and the dancers who had never come and now would never come, leaving the ballroom empty through all eternity, shining in all its polished glitter and its wasted graciousness.

A ballroom, but a ballroom without any walls, running on and on, not to a horizon, for there seemed to be no horizon, but to a point where the sky-that strange, milk-glass sky-came down to meet the crystal floor.