He tossed off the rest of his drink and I finished mine.
“That pretty much summarizes things,” he said. “Let me fix us a couple more of these, then you tell me what you know.”
“Go ahead.”
I lit a cigarette and pondered. There had to be a pattern to all this, and it seemed likely that the star-stone was the key. There were too many subsidiary actions to try to separate, analyze, follow up individually. If I knew more about the stone, though, I felt that these recent happenings might begin to drift into truer perspective. Thus began my list of priorities.
Hal returned with the drinks, gave me mine, reseated himself.
“All right,” he said, “considering everything that’s been happening here. I’m ready to believe anything you’ve got to tell me.”
So I told him most of what had occurred since my departure.
“I don’t believe you,” he said when I had finished.
“I can’t lend you my memories in any better condition.”
“Okay, okay,” he said “It’s weird. But then, so are you. No offense. Let me fog my brain a little more and I’ll try to consider it. Right back.”
He went and freshened the drinks again. I was beyond caring. I had lost count during the time I’d been talking.
“You were being serious?” he finally said.
“Yes.”
“Then those fellows are probably still back at the apartment.”
“Possibly.”
“Why not call the police?”
“Hell, for all I know they may be the police.”
“Toasting the Queen that way?”
“Could be their old alma maters Homecoming Queen. I don’t know. I’d just as soon no one knew I’m back till I’ve learned more and done more thinking.”
“Okay. Silence here. What can I do to help?”
“Think. You’ve been known to have an original idea every now and then. Come up with one.”
“All right,” he said. “I have been thinking about it. Everything seems to go back to the star-stone facsimile. What is it about the thing that makes it so important?”
“I give up. Tell me.”
“I don’t know. But let’s consider everything that is known about it.”
“Okay. The original came to us on loan as part of that cultural exchange deal we’ve joined. It was described as a relic, a specimen of unknown utility-but most likely decorative-found among the ruins of a dead civilization. Seems to be synthetic. If so, it may be the oldest intelligently fashioned object in the galaxy.”
“Which makes it priceless.”
“Naturally.”
“If it were lost or destroyed here, we could be kicked out of the exchange program.”
“I suppose that is possible … ”
“ ‘Suppose,’ hell! We can. I looked it up. The library now has a full translation of the agreement, and I got curious enough to see what it said. A hearing would be held, and the other members would vote on the matter of our expulsion.”
“Good thing it hasn’t been lost or destroyed.”
“Yeah. Great.”
“How could Byler have gotten access to it?”
“My guess is still the UN itself-that they approached him to create a duplicate for display purposes, he did it and then there was a mixup.”
“I can’t see the mixup on something that important.”
“Then suppose it was intentional.”
“How so?”
“Say they loaned it to him, and instead of returning the original and a copy he returned two copies. I can see him as wanting to hang onto it and study it for as long as he could. He could have given it back when he was finished or caught, whichever came first, and claimed he had made a simple error. No fuss could be raised, with the entire enterprise that clandestine. Or perhaps I am being too devious. Maybe he’d had it on a legitimate loan all the while, studying it at their request. Whichever, let us suppose that he’d had the original up until a while back.”
“All right, say that.”
“Then it vanished. Either it got mixed in and thrown out with some of the inferior replicas, or it was the one given to us in error … ”
“To you, to you,” I said, “and not in error.”
“Paul arrived at this conclusion, too,” he continued, ignoring the assignment of guilt. “He panicked, went looking and roughed us up in the process.”