A Deadly Shade of Gold by John D. MacDonald Page A

et cetera.
    Gold and silver. Um?"
    "Then there isn't much left?"
    "Museums. Late finds. Overlooked. Uh... less archeological significance than one would think.
    Have the forms in clay, carvings, bone, et cetera. Duplication. Um?"
    "But a museum would be interested in the thing I described?"
    "Of course. Highly. Not scholarship. Museum traffic. Publicity."
    "What about a collection of twenty-eight little stattuettes like that, some bigger and some smaller, all goId, and from different places? Aztec, Inca, some East Indian."
    He shrugged. "Ancient man made little ceremonial figures. Handy materials. Ivory, bone, wood, stone, clay, gold, silver, iron, lead. Gods, spirits, demons, fetishes, from very crude to very elegant. Merely being of gold, it would not be a museum collection. A museum could assemble perhaps such a showing from other specific collections. Egypt. China. Not very professional."

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    "Then such a collection would be a private collection?"
    "Possibly. Pack rats. Something shiny. No scholarship. Um? Acquisition. Most unprofessional.
    Hampers the work of professionals. Probably very valuable items all over the world, locked away. Valuable keys. Connectives. Take Egypt. Thieves looted tombs, sold to tourists. Same in Mexico. All changed now. But damage done. They should will collections to museums. Let the professionals sort them out."
    "But such a collection would be valuable?"
    "In money? Um? Oh yes."
    "Who would know if such a collection exists, Professor?"
    Again he went searching among the chaotic debris. He dug into a low cupboard. He took out correspondence files, put them back. Finally he extracted a letter from a folder, tore the letterhead from it and put it back. He brought me the letterhead. Borlika Galleries, 511 Madison Avenue, New York.
    "They might know," he said. "Supply collectors. Hunt for things on assignment. Special items.
    Jades, African sculpture, ancient weapons, bronze artifacts, all periods, all cultures. Purveyors to pack rats. Sometimes they deal with museums, but not when they can get more elsewhere. Buy collections, break them up, sell items to the rich. Hunt all over the world. They might know.
    Business on an international scale."
    He was bent to his lonely work again before I had reached the door of his office. My car was a quarter mile away, parked at the Administration Building. It was dusk on the big busy sprawl of campus. By now all the young heroes would be showering, savagely hungry, after all the intricate business of learning how best to drop an inflated ball through a hoop and net. The class day was over, and all the jolly business of the evening charged the air with expectancy. Gaggles of soft young girls hurried by making little cawing sounds at each other.
    I marveled at the strange and tenuous link between them and Professor Warner B. Gifford. We are doing something wrong. We haven't found out what it is yet. But somehow we have turned all these big glossy universities into places which the thinking young ones, the mavericks, the ones we need the most, cannot endure. So all the campuses are in the hands of the unaware, the incurably, unconsciously second class kids with second class minds and that ineffably second class goal of reasonable competence, reasonable security, reasonable happiness.
    Perhaps this is the proper end product to people a second class world. All mavericks ever do, anyway, is make the sane, normal, industrious people feel uncomfortable. They ask the wrong questions. Such as-What is the meaning of all this. So weed them out. They are cultural mistakes.
    Leave the world to the heroes and the semi-heroes, and their rumpy little soft-eyed girls, racing like lemmings toward the warm sea of the Totally Adjusted Community.
    Miss Agnes seemed glad to take me away from there. We made our stately way through snitty little clots of sports cars and Detroit imitations thereof, and were soon whispering toward home, through a hundred miles of cold February