The key slid smoothly into the lock of his apartment and when he twisted it the door came open. He stepped into the darkened room. Behind him the door swung shut automatically, with a snicking of the lock, and he reached out his hand toward the panel to snap on the light.
But with his hand poised to press, he stopped. For there was something wrong. A feeling, a sense of something, a certain smell, perhaps. That was it-a smell. The faint, delicate odor of a strange perfume.
He smashed his hand against the panel and the lights came up.
The room was not the same. The furniture was different and the screaming paintings on the wall-he had never had, he would never have paintings such as that!
Behind him the lock snicked again and he spun around. The door swung open and a saber-tooth stalked in.
At the sight of Maxwell, the big cat dropped into a crouch and snarled, exposing six-inch stabbing fangs.
Gingerly, Maxwell backed away. The cat crept closer by a foot, still snarling. Maxwell took another backward step, felt the sudden blow above the ankle, tried to twist away, but was unable to, and knew that he was falling. He had seen the hassock, he should have remembered it was there-but he hadn’t. He’d backed into it and tripped himself and now he was going over flat upon his back. He tried to force his body to relax against striking on the floor-but he didn’t hit the floor. His back smashed down into a yielding softness and he knew he’d landed on the couch that stood behind the hassock.
The cat was sailing through the air in a graceful leap, its ears laid back, its mouth half open, its massive paws outstretched to form a battering ram. Maxwell raised his arms in a swift defensive gesture, but they were brushed aside as if they’d not been there and the paws smashed down into his chest, pinning him against the couch. The great cat’s head, with its gleaming fangs, hung just above his face. Slowly, almost gently, the cat lowered its head and a long pink tongue came out and slathered, raspingly, across Maxwell’s face.
The cat began to purr.
“Sylvester!” cried a voice from the doorway. “Sylvester, cut that out!”
The cat raked Maxwell’s face once again with its moist and rasping tongue, then sat back upon its haunches, with a half-grin on its face and its ears tipped forward, regarding Maxwell with a friendly and enthusiastic interest.
Maxwell struggled to a half-sitting posture, with the small of his back resting on the seat cushions and his shoulders propped against the couch’s back.
“And who might you be?” asked the girl standing in the doorway.
“Why, I…”
“You’ve got your nerve,” she said. Sylvester purred loudly. “I’m sorry, miss,” said Maxwell. “But I live here. Or at least, I did. Isn’t this Seven-twenty-one?”
“It is, indeed,” she said. “I rented it just a week ago.”
Maxwell shook his head. “I should have known,” he said. “The furniture was wrong.”
“I had the landlord throw out the stuff,” she said. “It was simply atrocious.”
“Let me guess,” said Maxwell. “An old green lounger, somewhat the worse for wear-”
“And a walnut liquor cabinet,” said the girl, “and a monstrous seascape, and…”
Maxwell lifted his head wearily.
“That’s enough,” he said. “That was my stuff that you had thrown out.”
“I don’t understand,” said the girl. “The landlord said the former occupant was dead. An accident, I think.”
Maxwell got slowly to his feet. The big cat stood up, moved closer, rubbed affectionately against his legs.
“Stop that, Sylvester,” said the girl.
Sylvester went on rubbing.
“You mustn’t mind him,” she said. “He’s just a great big baby.”
“A bio-mech?”
She nodded. “The cutest thing alive. He goes everywhere with me. He seldom is a bother. I don’t know what’s got into him. It seems that he must like you.”
She had been looking at the cat, but now she glanced up sharply.
“Is there something wrong with you?” she asked.
Maxwell shook his head.
“You’re sort of frosty around the gills.”
“A bit of shock,” he told her. “I suppose that’s it. What I told you was the truth. I did, at one time, live here. Up until a few weeks ago. There was a mix-up somehow…”
“Sit down,” she said. “Could you use a drink?”
“I suspect I could,” he said. “My name is Peter Maxwell and I’m a member of the faculty-”
“Wait a moment. You said Maxwell? Peter Maxwell. I remember now. That’s the name…”
“Yes, I know,” said Maxwell. “Of the man who died.”
He sat down carefully on the couch.
“I’ll get the drink,” the girl said.
Sylvester slid closer and gently laid his massive head in Maxwell’s lap. Maxwell scratched him behind an ear and, purring loudly, Sylvester turned his head a bit to show Maxwell where it itched.
The girl came with the drink and sat down beside him. “I still don’t understand,” she told him. “If you’re the man who…”
“The whole thing,” Maxwell told her, “becomes somewhat complicated.”
“I must say you’re taking it rather well. Shaken up a bit, perhaps, but not stricken in a heap.”
“Well, the fact of the matter is,” said Maxwell, “that I halfway knew it. I’d been told, you see, but I didn’t quite believe it. I suppose the truth is that I wouldn’t let myself believe it.”
He raised the glass. “You’re not drinking?”
“If you’re all right,” she said. “If you feel OK, I’ll get one for myself.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” said Maxwell. “I’ll manage to survive.”
He looked at her and for the first time really saw her-sleek and trim, with bobbed black hair, long eyelashes, high cheekbones, and eyes that smiled at him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I am Carol Hampton. A historian at Time.”
“Miss Hampton,” he said, “I apologize for the situation. I have been away-off planet. Just returned. And I had a key and it fit the door and when I’d left it had been my place…”
“No need to explain,” she said.
“We’ll have the drink,” he said. “Then I’ll get up and go. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you’d be willing to have dinner with me. Let’s call it a way for me to repay your understanding. You could have run out shrieking.”
“If this was all a pitch!” she said. “If you-”
“It couldn’t be,” he said. “I’d be too stupid to get it figured out. And, besides, how come I had the key?”
She looked at him for a moment, then said, “It was silly of me. But Sylvester will have to go with us. He won’t be left alone.”
“Why,” said Maxwell, “I wouldn’t think of leaving him. He and I are pals.”
“It’ll cost you a steak,” she warned. “He is always hungry and he eats nothing but good steaks. Big ones- raw.”
The Pig and Whistle was dark and clamorous and smoky. The tables were jammed together, with narrow lanes between them. Candles burned with flickering flames. The murmurous din of many voices, seemingly talking all at once, filled the low-ceilinged room.
Maxwell stopped and peered, trying to locate a table that might be vacant. Perhaps, he thought, they should have gone somewhere else, but he had wanted to eat here, for the place, a hangout of students and some members of the faculty, spelled the campus to him.
“Perhaps,” he said to Carol Hampton, “we should go somewhere else.”
“There’ll be someone along in just a minute,” she said, “to show us to a table. Everyone seems so busy. There must have been a rush-Sylvester, cut that out!”
