Clifford D. Simak

Mr. O’Toole stopped in the middle of the path and threw Churchill a withering glance.

“I can recall,” he said, “when the barbarians first came, most rudely, from that fenny forest you now call Central Europe to knock with the hilts of their crude iron swords upon the very gates of Rome. We heard of it in the forest depths where we made our homes and there were others then, but dead long since, who had heard the news, some weeks after its transpirance, from Thermopylae.”

“I am sorry,” Maxwell said. “Not every one is as well acquainted with the Little Folk…”

“Please,” said Mr. O’Toole, “you acquaint him, then.”

“It’s the truth,” Maxwell said to Churchill, “or, at least, it could be. Not immortal, for they eventually do die. But long-lived beyond anything we know. Births are few-very few, indeed, for if they weren’t there’d not be room for them on Earth. But they live to an extremely ripe old age.”

“It is,” said Mr. O’Toole, “because we burrow deep to the heart of nature and do not waste precious vitality of spirit upon those petty concerns which make wreckage of the lives and hopes of humans.”

“But these,” he said, “are dolorous topics on which to waste so glorious an autumn afternoon. So let us fasten our thoughts, rather, with great steadfastness, upon the foaming ale that awaits us on the hilltop.”

He lapsed into silence and started up the path again at a more rapid pace than he had set before.

Scuttling down the path toward them came a tiny goblin, his multicolored, too-large shirt whipping in the wind of his headlong running.

“The ale!” he screamed. “The ale!”

He skidded to a halt in front of the three toiling up the path.

“What of the ale?” panted Mr. O’Toole. “Do you mean to confess to me that you have been the sampling of it?”

“It has gone sour,” wailed the little goblin. “The whole bewitched mess of it is sour.”

“But ale can’t go sour,” protested Maxwell, grasping some sense of the tragedy that had taken place.

Mr. O’Toole bounced upon the path in devastating anger. His face turned from brown to red to purple. His breath came gushing out in wheezing gasps.

“It can, bedamned,” he shouted, “with a spell of wizardry!”

He turned around and started rapidly down the path, trailed by the little goblin.

“Leave me at them filthy trolls!” shouted Mr. O’Toole.

“Leave me wrap my paws around their guzzles. I will dig them out with these two hands and hang them in the sun to dry. I will skin them all entire. I will teach them lessons they never will unlearn…”

His bellowing dwindled with distance to unintelligible rumbling as he scrambled swiftly down the path, heading for the bridge beneath which the trolls hung out.

The two humans stood watching, filled with admiration and wonder at such ponderous, towering wrath.

“Well,” said Churchill, “there goes our chance at sweet October ale.”

The clock in Music Hall began striking the hour of six as Maxwell reached the outskirts of the campus, riding from the airport on one of the slower, outer belts of the roadway. Churchill had taken another roadway and Maxwell had been glad of that. Not only that he felt a faint distaste for the man, but from the wish to be alone. He wanted to ride slowly, with the windshield down, in silence, without the need of conversation, to soak up the sight and feel of those few square miles of buildings and of malls-coming home again to the one place that he loved.

Dusk sifted through the campus like a mist of benediction, softening the outlines of the buildings, turning the malls into areas that could have been romantic etchings out of storybooks.

Knots of students stood about the malls, talking quietly, carrying their satchels or with books tucked beneath their arms. A white-haired man sat on a bench, watching a pair of squirrels playing on the lawn. Two reptilian aliens hunched along one of the misty walks, moving slowly and engrossed in talk. A human student strode smartly along the sidewalk, whistling as he went, the whistle waking echoes in the quiet angles of the buildings. Meeting and passing the reptiles, be lifted an arm in grave salute. And everywhere the trees, great and ancient elms that had stood since time forgotten, the sturdy sentinels of many generations.

Then the great clock started the ringing of the hour, the bronze clangor of it beating far across the land, and it seemed to Maxwell that in the clock the campus was bidding him hello. The clock was a friend, he thought-not to him alone, but to all within the hearing of it, the voice of the campus. Lying in bed, before he went to sleep, he had listened, night after night, to its chiming, its ringing out of time. And more, perhaps, than the ringing out of time. Rather a watchman in the night crying all was well.