And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
- D. H. Lawrence
His father had been a pot-healer before him. And so he, too, healed pots, in fact any kind of ceramic ware left over from the Old Days, before the war, when objects had not always been made out of plastic. A ceramic pot was a wonderful thing, and each that he healed became an object which he loved, which he never forgot; the shape of it, the texture of it and its glaze, remained with him on and on.
However, almost no one needed his work, his services. Too few ceramic pieces remained, and those persons who owned them took great care to see that they did not break.
I am Joe Fernwright, he said to himself. I am the best pot-healer on Earth. I, Joe Fernwright, am not like other men.
Around in his office, cartons—empty—lay piled. Steel cartons, within which to return the healed pot. But on the incoming side—almost nothing. For seven months his bench had been bare.
During those months he had thought many things. He had thought that he ought to give up and take some other line of work onto himself—any line of work, so that he could go off the war veterans’ dole. He had thought, My work isn’t good enough; I have virtually no clients because they are sending their bro ken pots to other firms to fix. He had thought of suicide. Once, he had thought of a major crime, of killing someone high up in the hierarchy of the Peaceful International World Senate. But what good would that do? And anyhow life wasn’t absolutely worth nothing, because there was one good thing which remained, even though everything else had evaded or ignored him. The Game.
On the roof of his rooming house, Joe Fernwright waited, lunch pail in hand, for the rapid-transit hover blimp to arrive. The cold morning air nipped and touched him; he shivered. It’ll show up any time now, Joe informed himself. Except that it’ll be full. And so it won’t stop; it’ll blipple on by, crammed to the brim. Well, he thought, I can always walk.
He had become accustomed to walking. As in every other field the government had failed miserably in the matter of public transportation. Damn them, Joe said to himself. Or rather, he thought, damn us. After all, he, too, was a part of the planetwide Party apparatus, the network of tendrils which had penetrated and then in loving convulsion clasped them in a hug of death as great as the entire world.
“I give up,” the man next to him said with an irritable twitch of shaved and perfumed jowls. “I’m going to slide down the slide to ground level and walk. Lots of luck.” The man pushed his way through the throng of those waiting for the hover blimp; the throng flowed together once more, behind him, and he was gone from sight.
Me, too, Joe decided. He headed for the slide, and so did several other grumpy commuters.
At street level he straddled a cracked and unrepaired sidewalk, took a deep angry breath, and then, via his personal legs, started north.
A police cruiser soared down to linger a little above Joe’s head. “You’re walking too slow,” the uniformed officer informed him, and pointed a Walters & Jones laser pistol at him. “Pick up speed or I’ll book you.”
“I swear to god,” Joe said, “that I’ll hurry. Just give me time to pick up my pace; I just now started.” He speeded up, phased himself with the other swiftly striding peds—those others lucky enough, like himself, to have jobs, to have somewhere to go on this dingy Thursday morning in early April 2046, in the city of Cleveland in the Communal North American Citizens’ Republic. Or, he thought, at least to have something that looks like a job anyhow. A place, a talent, experience, and, one day soon, an order to fill.
His office and workroom—a cubicle, really—contained a bench, tools, the piles of empty metal boxes, a small desk, and his ancient chair, a leather-covered rocking chair which had belonged to his grandfather and then, at last, his father. And now he himself sat on that chair—sat day in, day out, month in, month out. He had, also, a single ceramic vase, short and portly, finished in a free-dripping dull blue glaze over the white biscuit; he had found it years ago and recognized it as seventeenth-century Japanese. He loved it. And it had never been broken, not even during the war.
He seated himself now in this chair and felt it give here and there as it adjusted itself to a familiar body. The chair knew him as well as he knew the chair; it had known him all his life. Then he reached to press the button which would bring the morning’s mail sliding down the tube to his desk—reached, but then waited. What if there’s nothing? he asked himself. There never is. But this could be different; it’s like a batter: when he hasn’t hit for a long time you say, “He’s due any time now,” and so he is. Joe pressed the button.
Three bills slid out.
And, with them, the dingy gray packet containing today’s government money, his daily dole. Government paper money, in the form of odd and ornate and nearly worthless inflationary trading stamps. Each day, when he received his gray packet of newly printed notes, he hiked as rapidly as possible to GUB, the nearest all-purpose supershoppingredemptioncenter, and transacted hasty business: he swapped the notes, while they still had any worth, for food, magazines, pills, a new shirt--_anything_, in fact, tangible. Everyone did it. Everyone had to; holding onto government notes for even twenty-four hours was a self-imposed disaster, a kind of mortal suicide. Roughly, in two days government money dropped eighty percent in its redemptive power.
The man in the cubicle next to his called, “To the President’s healthful longevity.” A routine greeting.
“Yeah,” Joe answered reflexively. Other cubicles, lots of them, level upon level. Suddenly a thought came to him. Exactly how many cubicles were there in the building? A thousand? Two or two-point-five thousand? I can do that today, he said to himself; I can investigate and find out how many other cubicles there are in addition to mine. Then I’ll know how many people are with me here in this building . . . excluding those who are off sick or have died.
But first, a cigarette. He got out a package of tobacco cigarettes—highly illegal, due to the health hazard and the addictive nature of the plant in question—and started to light up.
At that moment his gaze fell, as always, on the smoke sensor mounted on the wall across from him. One puff, ten poscreds, he said to himself. Therefore he returned, then, the cigarettes to his pocket, rubbed his forehead ruthlessly, trying to fathom the craving lodged deep within him, the need which had caused him to break that law several times. What do I really yearn for? he asked himself. That for which oral gratification is a surrogate. Something vast, he decided; he felt the primordial hunger gape, huge-jawed, as if to cannibalize everything around him. To place what was outside inside.
Thus he played; this had created, for him, The Game.
Pressing the red button he lifted the receiver and waited while the creaking, slow relay machinery fed his phone an outside line.
“Squeeg,” the phone said. Its screen displayed nonobjective colors and segments. Electronic crosstalk made blurrily visible.
From memory he dialed. Twelve numbers, starting with the three which connected him with Moscow.
“Vice-Commissioner Saxton Gordon’s staff calling,” he said to the Russian switchboard officer whose face glowered at him from the miniature screen. “More games, I suppose,” the operator said.
Joe said, “A humanoid biped cannot maintain metabolic processes by means of plankton flour merely.”
After a glare of puritanical disapproval, the officer connected him with Gauk. The lean, bored face of the minor Soviet official confronted him. Boredom at once gave way to interest. “A preslávni vityaz,” Gauk intoned. “Dostoini konovód tolpi byezmozgloi, prestóopnaya—“
“Don’t make a speech,” Joe interrupted, feeling impatient. As well as surly. This was his customary morning mood.
“Prostitye,” Gauk apologized.
“Do you have a title for me?” Joe asked; he held his pen ready.
“The Tokyo translating computer has been tied up all morning,” Gauk answered. “So I put it through the smaller one at Kobe. In some respects Kobe is more—how shall I put it?--quaint than Tokyo.” He paused, consulting a slip of paper; his office, like Joe’s, consisted of a cubicle, containing only a desk, a phone, a straight-backed chair made of plastic and a note pad. “Ready?”
“Ready.” Joe made a random scratch-mark with his pen. Gauk cleared his throat and read from his slip of paper, a taut grin on his face; it was a sleek expression, as if he were certain of himself on this one. “This originated in your language,” Gauk explained, honoring one of the rules which all of them together had made up, the bunch of them scattered here and there across the map of Earth, in little offices, in puny positions, with nothing to do, no tasks or sorrows or difficult problems. Nothing but the harsh vacuity of their collective society, which each in his own way objected to, which all of them, in collaboration, circumvented by means of The Game. “Book title,” Gauk continued. “That’s the only clue I’ll give you.”
“Is it well known?” Joe asked.
Ignoring his question, Gauk read from the slip of paper.
‘The Lattice-work Gun-stinging Insect.’
“Gun-slinging?” Joe asked.
“No. Gun-stinging.”
“’Lattice-work,’” Joe said, pondering. “Network. ‘Stinging Insect.’ Wasp?” He scratched with his pen, stumped. “And you got this from the translation computer at Kobe? Bee,” he decided. “ ‘Gun,’ so Gun-bee. Heater-bee. Laserbee. Rod-bee. Gat.” He swiftly wrote that down. “Gat-wasp, gat-bee. Gatsby. ‘Lattice-work.’ That would be a grating. Grate.” He had it now. “_The Great Gatsby_, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.” He tossed down his pen in triumph.
“Ten points for you,” Gauk said. He made a tally. “That puts you even with Hirshmeyer in Berlin and slightly ahead of Smith in New York. You want to try another?”
Joe said, “I have one.” From his pocket he got out a folded sheet; spreading it out on his desk he read from it, “ ‘The Male Offspring in Addition Gets Out of Bed.’ “ He eyed Gauk then, feeling the warmth of knowledge that he had gotten a good one—this, from the larger language-translating computer in downtown Tokyo.
“A phononym,” Gauk said effortlessly. “Son, sun. The Sun Also Rises. Ten points for me.” He made a note of that.
Angrily, Joe said, “Those for Which the Male Homosexual Exacts Transit Tax.”
“Another by Serious Constricting-path,” Gauk said, with a wide smile. “_For Whom the Bell Tolls_.”
“’Serious Constricting-path’?” Joe echoed wonderingly.
“Ernest Hemingway.”
“I give up,” Joe said. He felt weary; Gauk, as usual, was far ahead of him in their mutual game of retranslating computer translations back into the original tongue.
“Want to try another?” Gauk asked silkily, his face bland.
“One more,” Joe decided.
“Quickly Shattered at the Quarreling Posterior.”
“Jesus,” Joe said, with deep and timid bewilderment. It rang no bell, no bell at all. “ ‘Quickly shattered.’ Broken, maybe. Broke, break. _Quick_--that would be fast. Breakfast. But ‘Quarreling Posterior’?” He cogitated quickly, in the Roman sense. “Fighting. Arguing. Spat.” In his mind no solution appeared. “ ‘Posterior.’ Rear end. Ass. Butt.” For a time he meditated in silence, in the Yoga fashion. “No,” he said finally. “I can’t make it out. I give up.”
“So soon?” Gauk inquired, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, there’s no use sitting here the rest of the day working that one over.”
“Fanny,” Gauk said.
Joe groaned.
“You groan?” Gauk said. “At one you missed that you should have got? Are you tired, Fernwright? Does it wear you out to sit there in your cubbyhole, doing nothing hour after hour, like the rest of us? You’d rather sit alone in silence and not talk to us? Not try anymore?” Gauk sounded seriously upset; his face had become dark.
“It’s just that it was an easy one,” Joe said lamely. But he could see that his colleague in Moscow was not convinced. “Okay,” he continued. “I’m depressed. I can’t stand this much longer. Do you know what I mean? You do know.” He waited. A faceless moment poured past in which neither of them spoke. “I’m ringing off,” Joe said, and began to hang up.
“Wait,” Gauk said rapidly. “One more.”
Joe said, “No.” He hung up, sat emptily staring. On his unfolded sheet of paper he had several more, but—
It’s gone, he said to himself, bitterly. The energy, the capacity to fiddle away a lifetime without dignified work, and, in its place, the performance of the trivial, even the voluntarily trivial, as we have constructed here in The Game. Contact with others, he thought; through The Game our isolation is lanced and its body broken. We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month. Because, he thought, I am too hollowed out to participate any longer. Even if they—the others who play The Game—need me, need my corny contribution.
And yet, as he gazed sightlessly down at his piece of paper, he felt dim action occurring within him, a kind of photosynthesis. A gathering of remaining powers, on an instinctive basis. Left alone, functioning in its sightless way, the biological effort of his body asserted itself physically; he began to jot a further title.
Dialing his phone, he obtained a satellite relay to Japan; he raised Tokyo and gave the digits for the Tokyo translating computer. With the skill of long habit he obtained a direct line to the great, clanking, booming construct; he bypassed its host of attendants.
“Oral transmission,” he informed it.
The hulking GX9 computer clicked over to oral, rather than visual, reception.
“_The Corn Is Green_,” Joe said. He turned on the recording unit of his phone.
At once the computer answered, giving the Japanese equivalent.
“Thank you and out,” Joe said, and rang off. He then dialed the translating computer at Washington, D.C. Rewinding the tape of his phone recorder he fed the Japanese words—again in oral form—to the computer segment which would translate the Japanese utterance into English.
The computer said, “The cliché is inexperienced.”
“Pardon?” Joe said, and laughed. “Repeat, please.”
“The cliché is inexperienced,” the computer said with godlike nobility and patience.
“That’s an exact translation?” Joe inquired.
“The cliché is—“
“Okay,” Joe said. “Sign off.” He hung up and sat grinning; his energy, aroused by human amusement, surged up and invigorated him.
For a moment he sat hesitating, deciding, and then he dialed good ol’ Smith in New York.
“Office of Procurement and Supply, Wing Seven,” Smith said; his beaglelike face, haunted by ennui, manifested itself on the little gray screen. “Oh, hey there, Fernwright. Got something for me?”
“An easy one,” Joe said. “ ‘The Cliché Is—‘”
“Wait’ll you hear mine,” Smith interrupted. “Me first; come on, Joe—this is a great one. You’ll never get it. Listen.” He read swiftly, stammering over the words. “Bogish Persistentisms. By Shaft Tackapple.”
“No,” Joe said.
“No what?” Smith glanced up, frowning. “You haven’t tried; you just sit there. I’ll give you time. The rules say five minutes; you’ve got five minutes.”
Joe said, “I’m quitting.”
“Quitting what? The Game? But you’re way up there!”
“I’m quitting my profession,” Joe said. “I’m going to give up this work area and I’m going to cancel on my phone. I won’t be here; I won’t be able to play.” He took a plunging breath, then spoke on. “I’ve saved up sixty-five quarters. Prewar. It took me two years.”
“_Coins?_” Smith gaped at him. “_Metal_ money?”
“It’s in an asbestos sack under the radiator in my housing room,” Joe said. I’ll consult it today, he said to himself.
“There’s a booth down the street from my room, at the intersection,” he said to Smith. I wonder, he thought, if in the final analysis I have enough coins. They say Mr. Job gives so little; or, put another way, costs so much. But sixty-five quarters, he thought; that’s plenty. That’s equal to—he had to calculate it on his note pad. “Ten million dollars in trading stamps,” he told Smith. “As per the exchange rate of today, as posted in the morning newspaper. . . which is official.”
After a grinding pause, Smith said slowly, “I see. Well, I wish you luck. You’ll get twenty words from it, for what you’ve saved up. Maybe two sentences. ‘Go to Boston. Ask for—‘ and then it clicks off; then it’ll cap the lid. The coinbox will rattle; your quarters will be down there in that maze of viaducts, rolling under hydraulic pressure to the central Mr. Job in Oslo.” He rubbed beneath his nose, as if wiping away moisture, like a schoolboy heavy with rote-labor. “I envy you, Fernwright. Maybe two sentences from it will be enough. I consulted it, once. I handed fifty quarters over to it. ‘Go to Boston,’ it said. ‘Ask for—‘ and then it shut off, and I felt as if it enjoyed it. That it liked to shut off, as if my quarters had stirred it to pleasure, the kind of pleasure a pseudolife-form would relish. But go ahead.”
“Okay,” Joe said stoically.
“When it’s used up your quarters—“ Smith continued, but Joe broke in, his voice blistered with harshness.
“I get your point,” Joe said.
Smith said, “No prayers—“
“Okay,” Joe said.
There was a pause as the two of them faced each other.
“No prayers,” Smith said at last, “no nothing, will get that godbedamned machine to spit out one additional word.”
“Hmm,” Joe said. He tried to sound casual, but Smith’s words had had their effect; he felt himself cool off. He experienced the winds, the howling gales, of fright. Anticipation, he thought, of winding up with nothing. A truncated partial statement from Mr. Job, and then, as Smith says—blam. Mr. Job, turning itself off, is the ultimate visage of black iron, old iron from antediluvian times. The ultimate rebuff. If there is a supernatural deafness, he thought, it is that: when the coins you are putting into Mr. Job run out.
Smith said, “Can I—hurriedly—give you one more I’ve got? This came via the Namangan translator. Listen.” He pawed feverishly with long, classic fingers at his own folded sheet of paper. “ ‘The Chesspiece Made Insolvent.’ Famous movie circa—“
“_The Pawnbroker_,” Joe said tonelessly.
“Yes! You’re right there on it, Fernwright, really right there and swinging both arms and a tail as well. Another? Don’t hang up! I have a truly good one, here!”
“Give it to Hirshmeyer in Berlin,” Joe said, and hung up.
I am dying, he said to himself.
Seated there, in the tattered, antiquated chair, he saw, dully, that the red warning light of his mail tube had come on, presumably as of the last few minutes. Odd, he thought. There’s no delivery until one-fifteen this afternoon. He thought, Special delivery? And punched the button.
A letter rolled out. Special delivery.
He opened it. Inside, a slip of paper. It said:
POT-HEALER, I NEED YOU. AND I WILL PAY.
No signature. No address except his, as destination. My god, he thought, this is something real and big. I know it.
He carefully moved his chair around so that he faced the red warning light of the mail tube. And prepared to wait. Until it comes, he said to himself. Unless I physically starve to death first. I will not voluntarily die, now, he thought harshly. I want to stay alive. And wait. And wait.
He waited.
Nothing more came down the mail tube that day and Joe Fernwright trudged “home.”
“Home” consisted of a room on a subsurface level of a huge apartment building. Once, the Jiffi-view Company of Greater Cleveland came by every six months and created a 3-D projection, animated, of a view of Carmel, California. This “view” filled his room’s “window,” or ersatz window. However, of late, due to his bad financial situation, Joe had given up trying to imagine that he lived on a great hill with a view of the sea and of towering redwoods; he had become content—or rather resigned—to face blank, inert, black glass. And in addition, if that wasn’t enough, he had let his psycho-lease lapse: the encephalic gadget installed in a closet of his room which, while he was “home,” compelled his brain to believe that his ersatz view of Carmel was authentic.
The delusion was gone from his brain and the illusion was gone from his window. Now, “home” from work, he sat in a state of depression, reflecting, as always, on the futile aspects of his life.
Once, the Cleveland Historical Artifacts Museum had sent him regular work. His hot-needle device had melded many fragments, had re-created into a single homogeneous unit one ceramic item after another as his father had before him. But that was over, now; all the ceramic objects owned by the museum had been healed.
Here, in his lonely room, Joe Fernwright contemplated the lack of ornamentation. Time after time, wealthy owners of precious and broken pots had come to him, and he had done what they wanted; he had healed their pots, and they had gone away. Nothing remained after them; no pots to grace his room in place of the window. Once, seated like this, he had pondered the heat-needle which he made use of. If I press this little device against my breast, he had ruminated, and turn it on, and put it near my heart, it would put an end to me in less than a second. It is, in some ways, a powerful tool. The failure which is my life, he had thought again and again, would cease. Why not?
But there was the strange note which he had received in the mail. How had the person—or persons—heard of him? To get clients he ran a perpetual small ad in Ceramics Monthly . . . and via this ad the thin trickle of work, throughout the years, had come. Had come and now, really, had gone. But this. The strange note!
He picked up the receiver of his phone, dialed, and in a few seconds faced his ex-wife, Kate. Blond and hard lined, she glared at him.
“Hi,” he said, in a friendly sort of fashion.
“Where’s last month’s alimony check?” Kate said.
Joe said, “I’m onto something. I’ll be able to pay all my back alimony if this—“
“This what?” Kate interrupted. “Some new nuthead idea dredged out of the depths of what you call your brain?”
“A note,” he said. “I want to read it to you to see if you can infer anything more from it than I can.” His ex-wife, although he hated her for it—and for a lot more—had a quick mind. Even now, a year after their divorce, he still relied on her powerful intellect. It was odd, he had once thought, that you could hate a person and never want to see them again, and yet at the same time seek them out and ask their advice. Irrational. Or, he thought, is it a sort of superrationality? To rise above hate . . .
Wasn’t it the hate which was irrational? After all, Kate had never done anything to him—nothing except make him excessively aware, intently aware, always aware, of his inability to bring in money. She had taught him to loathe himself, and then, having done that, she had left him.
And he still called up and asked for her advice.
He read her the note.
“Obviously it’s illegal,” Kate said. “But you know your business affairs don’t interest me. You’ll have to work it out by yourself or with whoever you’re currently sleeping with, probably some eighteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know any better, who doesn’t have any basis for comparison as an older woman would have.”
“What do you mean ‘illegal’?” he asked. “What kind of pot is illegal?”
“Pornographic pots. The kind the Chinese made during the war.”
“Oh Christ,” he said; he hadn’t thought of that. Who but Kate would remember those! She had been lewdly fascinated by the one or two of them which had passed through his hands.
“Call the police,” Kate said.
“I—“
“Anything else on your mind?” Kate said. “Now that you’ve interrupted my dinner and the dinner of everyone who’s over here tonight?”
“Could I come over?” he said; loneliness crept through him and edged his question with the fear which Kate had always detected: the fear that she would retract into her implacable chesspiece fort, the fort of her own mind and body out of which she ventured to inflict a wound, or two, and then disappear back in, leaving an expressionless mask to greet him. And, by means of that mask, she used his own failings to injure him.
“No,” Kate said.
“Why not?”
“Because you have nothing to offer anyone in the way of talk or discussion or ideas. As you’ve said many times, your talent is in your hands. Or did you intend to come over and break one of my cups, my Royal Albert cups with the blue glaze, and then heal it? As a sort of magical incantation designed to throw everyone into fits of laughter.”
Joe said, “I can contribute verbally.”
“Give me an example.”
“What?” he said, staring at her face on the screen of the phone.
“Say something profound.”
“You mean right now?”
Kate nodded.
“Beethoven’s music is firmly rooted in reality. That’s what makes him unique. On the other hand, genius as he was, Mozart—“
“Shove it,” Kate said and hung up; the screen went blank. I shouldn’t have asked if I could come over, Joe realized with acute misery. It gave her that opening, that foot-in-thepsychic-door that she uses, that she preys on. Christ, he thought. Why did I ask? He got up and wandered drearily about his room; his motion became more and more aimless until at last he stopped and simply stood. I have to think about what really matters, he told himself. Not that she hung up or said anything nasty, but whether or not that note I got in the mail today means anything. Pornographic pots, he said to himself. She’s probably right. And it’s illegal to heal a pornographic pot, so there goes that.
I should have realized it as soon as I read the note, he said to himself. But that’s the difference between Kate and me. She would know right away. I probably wouldn’t have known until I had finished healing it and then taken a good firm look at it. I’m just not bright, he said to himself. Compared to her. Compared to the world.
“The arithmetical total ejaculated in a leaky flow,” he thought fiercely. My best. At least I’m good at The Game. So what? he asked himself. So what?
Mr. Job, he thought, help me. The time has come. Tonight. Going rapidly into the tiny bathroom attached to his room he grabbed up the lid of the water closet of the toilet. Nobody, he had often thought, looks into a toilet. There hung the asbestos sack of quarters.
And, in addition, a small plastic container floated. He had never seen it before in his life.
Lifting it from the water he saw, with disbelief, that it contained a rolled up piece of paper. A note, floating in the water closet of his toilet, like a bottle launched at sea. Oh, this can’t really be, he thought, and felt like laughing. I mean Christ; it just can’t. But he did not laugh, because he felt fear. Fear that bordered on dread. It’s another communication, he said to himself. Like the one in the mail tube today. But nobody communicates this way; it isn’t human!
He unscrewed the lid of the small plastic container and groped the enclosed piece of paper out. Yes, it had writing on it; he was right. He read the writing and then he read it again.
I WILL PAY YOU THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND CRUMBLES
What in god’s name is a crumble? he asked himself, and the dread sharpened into panic; he felt undernourished, strangulated heat rise to the back of his neck, a weak response somatically: his body, as well as his mind, was trying to adjust to this; it could not be done on a mental level alone, not this.
Returning to the main room he picked up the receiver of the phone and dialed the twenty-four-hour-a-day dictionary service.
“What’s a crumble?” he asked, when the robot monitor answered.
“A crumbling substance,” the computer fed to the monitor. “In other words fine debris. A small crumb or particle. Introduced into English 1577.”
“Other languages?” Joe asked.
“Middle English kremelen. Old English gecrymian. Middle High Gothic—“
“What about non-Terran languages?”
“On Betelgeuse seven in the Urdian tongue it means a small opening of a temporary nature: a wedge which—“
“That’s not it,” Joe said.
“On Rigel two it means a small life-form which scuttles—“
“Not that either,” Joe said.
“On Sirius five, in the Plabkian tongue ‘crumble’ is a monetary unit.”
“That’s it,” Joe said. “Now tell me how much in Earth money thirty-five thousand crumbles represents.”
The dictionary robot said, “I am sorry, sir, but you will have to consult the banking service for that answer. Please look in your phone book for the number.” It clicked off; the screen died away.
He looked up the number and dialed the banking service. “We are closed for the night,” the banking-service robot monitor informed him.
“All over the world?” Joe said in amazement.
“Everywhere.”
“How long do I have to wait?”
“Four hours.”
“My life, my entire future—“ But he was talking into a dead phone. The banking-service system had abolished the contact.
What I’ll do, he decided, is lie down and sleep for four hours. It was now seven o’clock; he could set the alarm for eleven.
A pressing of the proper button brought the bed sliding out from the wall, virtually to fill the room; it had been his living room and now it was his bedroom. Four hours, he said to himself as he set the mechanism of the bed’s clock. He lay down, made himself comfortable—as much so as the inadequate bed permitted—and groped for the toggle switch that induced immediately and powerfully the most profound sleep state possible.
A buzzer sounded.
The damn dream circuit, he said to himself. Even early like this do I have to use it? He leaped up, opened the cabinet beside the bed and got out the instructions. Yes, mandatory dreaming was required at any time he used the bed . . . unless, of course, he threw the sex lever. I’ll do that, he said to himself. I’ll tell it I’m having knowledge in the Biblical sense of a female person.
Once more he lay down and activated the sleep switch.
“You weigh one hundred and forty pounds,” the bed said. “And there is exactly that weight extended over me. Therefore you are not engaged in copulation.” The mechanism voided his throwing of the sleep toggle switch, and at the same time the bed began to warm up; the heating coils in it blatantly glowed beneath him.
He could not argue with an angry bed. So he turned on the sleep-dream interaction and shut his eyes, resignedly.
Sleep came at once; it always did: the mechanism was perfect. And, at once, the dream—which everyone anywhere in the world who was now asleep was also dreaming—clicked on.
One dream for everyone. But, thank god, a different dream each night.
“Hello, there,” a cheerful dream-voice declared. “Tonight’s dream was written by Reg Baker and is called In Memory Engraved. Now remember, folks; send in your dream ideas and win huge cash prizes! And if your dream is used you receive an all-expense paid trip off Earth entirely—in any direction you desire!”
The dream began.
Joe Fernwright stood before the Supreme Fiduciary Council in a state of trembling awe. The Secretary of the S.F.C. read from a prepared statement. “Mr. Fernwright,” he declared in a solemn voice, “you have, in your engraving shop, created the plates from which the new money will be printed. Your design, out of over one hundred thousand presented to us, and many of them created with what must be called fantastic cunning, has won. Congratulations, Mr. Fernwright.” The Secretary beamed at him in a fatherly manner, reminding him a little of the Padre presence, which he now and then made use of.
“I am pleased and honored,” Joe responded, “by this award, and I know that I have done my part to restore fiscal stability to the world as we know it. It little matters to me that my face will be pictured on the brightly colored new money, but since it is so, let me express my pleasure at this honor.”
“Your signature, Mr. Fernwright,” the Secretary reminded him, in the fashion of a wise father. “Your signature, not your face, will appear on the currency notes. Where did you get the idea that it would be your likeness as well?”
“Perhaps you don’t understand me,” Joe said. “Unless my face appears on the new currency I will withdraw my design, and the entire economic structure of the Earth will collapse, seeing as how you’ll have to go on using the old inflationary money which has by now become virtually waste paper to be thrown away at the first opportunity.”
The Secretary pondered. “You would withdraw your design?”
“You read me loud and clear,” Joe, in his dream, in their dream, said. At this same moment roughly one billion other people on Earth were withdrawing their designs as he now was doing. But of course he had no thought of that; he only knew this: without him the system, the whole nature of their corporate state, would break apart. “And as to my signature, I will, as that great dead hero of the past Ché Guevara did, that noble person, that fine man who died for his friends, because of memory of him I will merely write ‘Joe’ on the bills. But my face must be of several colors. Three at least.”
“Mr. Fernwright,” the Secretary said, “you strike a hard bargain. You are a firm man. You do, in fact, remind me of Ché, and I think all the millions watching on TV will agree. Let’s hear it now for Joe Fernwright and Ché Guevara both together!” The Secretary threw aside his prepared statement and began to clap. “Let’s hear it out there from all you good people; this is a hero of the state, a new firm-minded man who has spent years working to—“
Joe’s alarm woke him up.
Christ, he said to himself; he sat up groggily. What was that about? Money? Already it had become hazy in his mind. “I made the money,” he said aloud, blinking. “Or printed it.” Who cares? he said to himself. A dream. Compensation, by the state, for reality. Night after night. It’s almost worse than being awake.
No, he decided. Nothing is worse than being awake.
He picked up the phone and dialed the bank.
“Interplan Corn and Wheat People’s Collective Bank.”
“How much are thirty-five thousand crumbles worth in terms of our dollars?” Joe asked.
“Crumbles as in the Plabkian tongue of Sirius five?”
“Right.”
“The banking service momentarily was silent and then it said, “$200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00.”
“Really?” Joe said.
“Would I lie to you?” the bank robot-voice said. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“Are there any other crumbles?” Joe said. “That is, the word ‘crumble’ used as a monetary unit in any other enclave, civilization, tribe, cult, or society in the known universe?”
“There is a defunct crumble known several thousand years ago in the—“
“No,” Joe said. “This is your active crumble. Thank you and off.” He hung up, his ears ringing; he felt as if he had wandered into a titanic auditorium filled with bells of terrible and grand sizes. This must be what they mean by a mystical experience, he said to himself.
His front door opened and two Quietude Civil Authority policemen made their way into the room. As they walked, their keen, frigid glance took in everything inhabiting the room.
“QCA Hymes and Perkin,” one of them said as he briefly let Joe see his identification plaque. “You’re a pot-healer, Mr. Fernwright; correct? And you’re also on the vet-dole; am I right? Yes I’m right,” he finished, answering his own question. “What would you say your daily income amounts to, your dole and money received for the alleged work you do?”
The other QCA man pushed open the door of the bathroom. “Something interesting here. The top of the tank, the toilet tank, is off. And he’s got a bag of metal coins hanging in there; I should guess about eighty quarters. You’re a frugal man, Mr. Fernwright.” The QCA man came back into the main room. “How long—“
“Two years,” Joe said. “And I’m not breaking any law; I checked with Mr. Attorney before I began.”
“What’s this about thirty-five thousand Plabkian crumbles?”
Joe hesitated.
It was not an unusual phenomenon, his attitude toward the QCA and their men. They had such neat suits, such good gray and brown weaves. Each carried a briefcase. All looked like highly reputable businessmen—prosperous and responsible, able to make decisions: they were not mere bureaucrats to whom orders were given and who merely carried out orders like pseudorobots . . . and yet they had an inhumanity about them, for no particular reason that he could make out. But then he thought, Ah—I have it. No one could ever imagine a QCA man holding a door open for a lady; that was it; that explained his feeling. A small thing, perhaps, but it seemed to be a comprehension of the severe essence of the QCA throughout. Never hold a door, Joe thought, never take off your hat in an elevator. The ordinary laws of charity did not apply to them, and these laws they did not follow. Ever. But how well shaved they were. How greatly neat.
Strange, he thought, how thinking this could give me the feeling that at last I understand them. But I do. In symbolic form, maybe. But the comprehension is there and it will never go away.
“I got a note,” Joe said. “I’ll show it to you.” He handed them the note which he had found bobbing about in its plastic bottle in the water closet of his facility.
“Who wrote this?” one of the QCA men asked.
“God knows,” Joe said.
“Is that a joke?”
Joe said, “You mean is the note a joke, or what I said in answer to your question in saying, ‘God knows—‘ “He broke off, because one of the QCA men was bringing out a teep rod, a receptor which would pick up and record his thoughts for police inspection. “You,” Joe said, “will see. That it’s true.”
The rod, wandlike, hovered over his head for several minutes. No one spoke. Then the QCA man returned the rod to his pocket and stuffed a little speaker into his ear; he played back the tape of Joe’s thoughts, listening intently.
“It’s so,” the QCA man said, and stopped the tape transport, which was located, of course, in his briefcase. “He doesn’t know anything about this note, who put it there or why. Sorry, Mr. Fernwright. You know, naturally, that we monitor all phone calls. This one interested us because—as you can probably appreciate—the sum involved is so large.”
His companion cop said, “Report to us once a day about this matter.” He handed Joe a card. “The number you’re to call is on the card. You don’t have to ask for anyone in particular; tell whoever answers the call what’s developed.”
The first QCA man said, “There isn’t anything legal that you could do to get paid thirty-five thousand Plabkian crumbles, Mr. Fernwright. It has to be illegal. That’s how we see it.”
“Maybe there’re a hell of a lot of broken pots on Sirius five,” Joe said.
“Bit of humor, there,” the first QCA man said tartly. He nodded to his companion, and the two of them opened the door and departed from his room. The door closed behind them.
“Maybe it’s one gigantic pot,” Joe said loudly. “A pot the size of a planet. With fifty glazes and—“ He gave up; they probably couldn’t hear him anyhow. And originally ornamented by the greatest graphic artist in Plabkian history, he thought. And it’s the only product of his genius left, and an earthquake has broken the pot, which is locally worshiped. So the whole Plabkian civilization has collapsed.
Plabkian civilization. Hmm, he thought. Just how far developed are they on Sirius five? he asked himself. A good question.
Going to the phone he dialed the encyclopedia number.
“Good evening,” a robotic voice said. “What info do you require, sir or madam?”
Joe said, “Give me a brief description of the social development on Sirius five.”
Without the passing of even a tenth second the artificial voice said, “It is an ancient society which has seen better days. The current dominant species on the planet consists of what is called a Glimmung. This shadowy, enormous entity is not native to the planet; it migrated there several centuries ago, taking over from the feeble species such as wubs, werjes, klakes, trobes, and printers left over when the once-ruling master species, the so-called Fog-Things of antiquity, passed away.”
“Glimmung—the Glimmung—is all-powerful?” Joe asked.
“His power,” the encyclopedia’s voice said, “is sharply curtailed by a peculiar book, probably nonexistent, in which, it is alleged, everything which has been, is, and will be, is recorded.”
Joe said, “Where did this book come from?”
“You have used up your allotted quantity of information,” the voice said. And clicked off.
Joe waited exactly three minutes and then redialed the number.
“Good evening. What info do you require, sir or madam?”
“The book on Sirius five,” Joe said. “Which is alleged to tell everything that has been—“
“Oh, it’s you again. Well, your trick won’t work anymore; we store voice patterns now.” It rang off.
That’s right, Joe realized. I remember reading in the newspaper about that. It was costing the government too much money the way it was—when we did what I tried to do just now. Nuts, he said to himself. Twenty-four hours before he could get any more free information. Of course, he could go to a private enterprise encyclopedia booth, to Mr. Encyclopedia. But it would cost as much as he had stored in his asbestos bag: the government, when licensing the nonstateowned enterprises such as Mr. Attorney and Mr. Encyclopedia and Mr. Job, had seen to that.
I think I got aced out, Joe Fernwright said to himself. As usual.
Our society, he thought broodingly, is the perfect form of government. Everyone is aced out, in the end.
When he reached his work cubicle the next morning he found a second special delivery letter waiting for him.
SHIP OUT TO PLOWMAN’S PLANET, MR. FERNWRIGHT, WHERE
YOU ARE NEEDED. YOUR LIFE WILL SIGNIFY SOMETHING; YOU
WILL CREATE A PERMANENT ENDEAVOR WHICH WILL OUTLAST
ME AS WELL AS YOU.
Plowman’s Planet, Joe reflected. It rang a bell, although dimly. Absentmindedly, he dialed the encyclopedia’s number.
“Is Plowman’s Planet—“ he began, but the artificial voice interrupted him.
“Not for another twelve hours. Goodby.”
“Just one fact?” he said angrily. “I just want to find out if Sirius five and Plowman’s—“ Click. The robot mechanism had rung off. Bastards, he thought. All robot servo-mechanisms and all computers are bastards.
Who can I ask? he asked himself, that would know, offhand, if Plowman’s Planet is Sirius five? Kate. Kate would know.
But, he thought as he started to dial her office number, if I’m going to emigrate to Plowman’s Planet I don’t want her to know; she’ll be able to trace me re my back alimony payments.
Once more he picked up the unsigned note, studied it. And, in a gradual, seeping fashion, a realization concerning it suffused his mind and entered into his field of awareness. There were more words on the note in some kind of semiinvisible ink. Runic writing? he wondered; he felt a sort of wicked, animal excitement, as if he had found a carefully protected trail.
He dialed Smith’s number. “If you got a letter,” Joe said, “with semi-invisible runic writing on it, how would you—you in particular—go about making it visible?”
“I’d hold it over a heat source,” Smith said.
“Why?” Joe said.
“Because it’s most likely written in milk. And writing in milk turns black over a heat source.”
“Runic writing in milk?” Joe said angrily.
“Statistics show—“
“I can’t imagine it. I simply can’t imagine it. Runic writing in milk.” He shook his head. “Anyway, what statistics are there on runic writing? This is absurd.” He got out his cigarette lighter and held it beneath the sheet of paper. At once, black letters became visible.
WE SHALL RAISE HELDSCALLA.
“What’s it say?” Smith asked.
Joe said, “Listen, Smith; you haven’t used the encyclopedia in the last twenty-four hours, have you?”
“No,” Smith said.
Joe said, “Call it. Ask it if Plowman’s Planet is another name for Sirius five. And ask it what ‘Heldscalla’ consists of.” I guess I could ask the dictionary that, he said to himself. “What a mess,” he said. “Is this any way to conduct business?” He felt fear overlaid with nausea; it did not appeal to him. It did not seem effective nor funny; it was merely strange. And, he thought, I have to report this to the police, so I’ll be back cloistered with them again, and now there’s probably already a file on me—hell, he thought, there has been since my birth—but now the file has new entries. Which always was bad. As every citizen knew.
Heldscalla, he thought. An odd and somehow impressive verbal integer. It appealed to him; it seemed totally opposed to such conditions as cubicles, phones, walking to work through endless crowds, fiddling his life away on the veterans’ dole, meanwhile playing The Game. I am here, he thought, when I should be there.
“Call me back, Smith,” he said into the phone. “As soon as you’ve talked to the encyclopedia. Bye.” He rang off, paused, then dialed the dictionary. “Heldscalla,” he said. “What does it mean?”
The dictionary—or rather its artificial voice—said, “Heldscalla is the ancient cathedral of the once-ruling Fog-Things of Sirius five. It sank under the sea centuries ago and has never been placed back, intact and functioning, with its old, holy artifacts and relics, on dry land.”
“Are you hooked into the encyclopedia right now?” Joe asked. “That’s an awful lot of definition.”
“Yes, sir or madam; I am hooked into the encyclopedia.”
“Then can you tell me any more?”
“No more.”
“Thank you,” Joe Fernwright said huskily. And hung up.
He could see it. Glimmung—or the Glimmung, if that was correct; evidently there was only one of them—intended to raise the ancient cathedral Heldscalla, and to do so, the Glimmung needed a wide span of skills. Such as his own, for example; his ability to heal ceramic ware. Heldscalla obviously contained pots—enough of them to cause the Glimmung to approach him. . . and to offer him a good sum for his work.
By now he’s probably recruited two hundred skills from two hundred planets, Joe realized. I’m not the only one getting peculiar letters et cetera. He saw in his mind a great cannon being fired, and out of it special delivery letters, thousands of them, addressed to various life-form individuals throughout the galaxy.
And oh god, he thought. The police are spotting it; they barged into my room minutes after I consulted the bank. Last night, those two; they knew already what these letters and weird note floating in the water closet of the toilet mean. They could have told me. But of course they wouldn’t; that would be too natural, too humane.
His phone buzzed. He lifted the receiver.
“I contacted the encyclopedia,” Smith said, as his image appeared on the screen. “Plowman’s Planet is space argot for Sirius five. Since I had hold of the encyclopedia I took the opportunity of asking it more. I thought you might appreciate it.”
“Yes,” Joe said.
“One vast old creature lives there. Apparently infirm.”
“You mean it’s sick?” Joe asked.
“Well, you know . . . age and such like. Dormant; that’s what it’s been.”
“Is it menacing?”
“How could it be menacing if it’s dormant as well as infirm? It’s senile. Yes, that’s the word—senile.”
Joe asked, “Has it ever said anything?”
“Not really.”
“Not even the time of day?”
“Ten years ago it came to briefly and asked for an orbiting weather-station satellite.”
“What did it pay for it with?”
“It didn’t. It’s indigent. We contributed it free, and we threw in a news type satellite along with the weather one.”
“Broke and senile,” Joe said. He felt glum. “Well,” he said, “I guess I won’t be getting any money out of it.”
“Why? Were you suing it?”
“Goodby, Smith,” Joe said.
“Wait!” Smith said. “There’s a new game. You want to join? It consists of speed-scanning the newspaper archives to come up with the funniest headline. Real headline, you realize; not made up. I have a good one; it’s from 1962. You want to hear it?”
“Okay,” Joe said, still feeling glum. His glumness had oozed throughout him, leaving him inert and spongelike; he responded reflexively. “Let’s hear your headline.”
“ELMO PLASKETT SINKS GIANTS,” Smith read from his slip of paper.
“Who the hell was Elmo Plaskett?”
“He came up from the minors and—“
“I have to go, now,” Joe said, standing up. “I have to leave my office.” He hung up. Home, he said to himself. To get my bag of quarters.
Along the sidewalks of the city the vast animallike gasping entity which was the mass of Cleveland’s unemployed—and unemployable—gathered and stood, stood and waited, waited and fused together into a lump both unstable and sad. Joe Fernwright, carrying his sack of coins, rubbed against their collective flank as he pushed his way toward the corner and the Mr. Job booth. He smelled the familiar vinegarlike penetrating scent of their presence, their overheated and yet plaintively disappointed massiveness. On all sides of him their eyes contemplated his forward motion, his determination to get past them.
“Excuse me,” he said to a slender Mexican-looking youth who had become wedged, among all the others, directly ahead of him.
The youth blinked nervously, but did not move. He had seen the asbestos bag which Joe held; beyond any doubt he knew what Joe had and where Joe was going and what Joe intended to do.
“Can I get by?” Joe asked him. It seemed an impasse of permanent proportions. Behind him, the throng of inactive humanity had closed in, blocking any chance of retreat. He could not go back and he could make no progress forward. I guess the next thing, he thought, is that they’ll grab my quarters and that will be that. His heart hurt, as if he had climbed a ridge, a final ridge of life itself, a terrible hill strewn with skulls. He saw, about him, gaping eye sockets; he experienced a weird visual distortion, as if the ultimate disposition of these people had made its appearance palpably . . . as if, he thought, it can’t wait; it must have them now.
The Mexican youth said, “Could I look at your coins, sir?” It was hard to know what to do. The eyes—or rather the hollow sockets—continued to press in at him in a complete circle; he felt them encompass him and his asbestos bag. I am shrinking, he thought in surprise. Why? He felt weak and glum, but not guilty. It was his money. They knew it and he knew it. And yet the vacant eyes made him small. As if, he thought, it doesn’t matter what I do, whether I get to the Mr. Job booth or not; what I do, what becomes of me—it won’t change things for these people.
And yet, on a conscious level, he didn’t care. They had their lives; he had his, and his included a sack of carefully saved-up metal coins. Can they contaminate me? he asked himself. Drag me down into their inertial storm? This is their problem, not mine, he thought. I’m not going to sink with the system; this is my first decision, to ignore the two special delivery letters and do this: take this journey with this sack of quarters. This is the start of my escape, and there will be no new bondage.
“No,” he said.
“I won’t take any,” the youth said.
A strange impulse overcame Joe Fernwright. Opening the bag he rummaged, got out a quarter; he held it out toward the Mexican youth. As the boy accepted it other hands appeared, on all sides; the ring of hopeless eyes had become a ring of outstretched, open hands. But there was no greed conspiring against him; none of the hands tried to grab his sack of coins. The hands were simply there, merely waiting. Waiting in a silence made up of trust, as his own earlier waiting at the mail tube had been. Horrible, Joe thought. These people think I’m going to give them a present, as if they’ve been waiting for the universe to do this: the universe has given them nothing all their lives and they have accepted that as silently as now. They see me as a kind of supernatural deity. But no, he thought. I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t do anything for them.
But even as he realized this he found himself digging into the cloth sack; he found himself putting a quarter into one palm after another.
Overhead, a police cruiser whistled loudly as it lowered, like a great lid, its two occupants in their slick, bright uniforms, wearing riot helmets that sparkled, holding, each of them, a laser rifle. One of the two cops said, “Get out of this man’s way.”
The pressing circle began to melt back. The extended hands disappeared, as if into a numbed, intolerable darkness.
“Don’t stand there,” the other cop said to Joe in his thick cop’s voice. “Get moving. Get those coins out of here or I’ll write you out a citation after which you won’t have one goddam coin left.”
Joe walked on.
“What do you think you are?” the other cop said to him, as the cruiser followed after him, holding its position directly above his head. “Some sort of privately endowed philanthropic organization?”
Saying nothing, Joe continued on.
“You’re required by law to answer me,” the cop said.
Reaching into his asbestos cloth sack, Joe got out a quarter. He handed it up toward the nearer of the two cops. And, at the same time, saw with amazement that only a few quarters remained.
My coins, he realized, are gone! So there is only one door open to me—the mail tube and what it has brought in the last two days. Whether I like it or not—by what I’ve done just now it’s been decided.
“Why did you hand me this coin?” the cop asked.
“As a tip,” Joe said. And, at the same time, felt his head burst as the laser beam, on stun, hit him directly between his eyes.
At the police station the swank young police official, blondhaired, blue-eyed, slim, in his swank clean uniform, said, “We’re not going to book you, Mr. Fernwright, although technically you’re guilty of a crime against the people.”
“The state,” Joe said; he sat hunched over, rubbing his forehead, trying to make the pain stop. “Not the people,” he managed to say. He shut his eyes and the pain flooded over him, radiating out from the spot where the beam had touched him.
“What you’re saying,” the young police official said, “constitutes in itself a felony and we could book you on that, too. We could even turn you over to the Political Control Bureau as an enemy of the working class, engaged in a conspiracy to advocate agitation against the people and the servants of the people, such as ourselves. But your record heretofore—“ He studied Joe with professional intensity. “A sane man doesn’t start handing coins out to total strangers.” The police official examined a document which had come unreeling itself out of a slot of his desk. “Obviously you acted without deliberation.”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Without deliberation.” He felt nothing in the way of emotions; he experienced only bodily discomfort, acute and still growing. It had preempted any feeling, any mental activity.
“However, we’re going to impound your remaining coins. For the present at least. And you’ll be on probation for a year, during which time you will report here, once a week, and give us an account, a full account, of your activities.”
“Without a trial?” Joe said.
“Do you want to be tried?” the police official eyed him keenly.
“No,” Joe said. He went on rubbing his head. The QCA material apparently hasn’t been fed to their computers yet, he decided. But eventually it’ll all be combined. They’ll put it all together, my tipping the cop, my finding notes in the water closet of my toilet. I’m a nut, he said to himself. I’ve gone mad from inactivity; the last seven months have destroyed me. And now, when I made my move, when I took my coins to Mr. Job--_I couldn’t do it_.
“Wait a minute,” another cop said. “Here’s something on him from QCA. It just rolled down the circuit from their computer bank central.”
Turning, Joe ran toward the door of the police station. Toward the mass of people outside. As if to bury himself among them; to cease to be a finite part.
Two cops appeared ahead of him and they lunged toward him as he ran; they came closer unnaturally rapidly, as if on video tape speeded up. And then, suddenly, they were under water; they, like slender silver fish, gaped at him and rhythmically maneuvered themselves among—good god! coral and seaweed. And yet he himself felt nothing, no water; but here was a tank of water, instead of the police station, all the furniture like sunken wrecks, half-buried in sand. And the police twisted and streaked by him, lovely in their glittering gliding movements. But they could not touch him, because he, although standing in the center, was not in the tank. And he heard no sound. Their mouths moved, but only silence reached him.
Bobbing and undulating, a squid swept past him; it was, he thought, like the soul of the sea. The squid all at once ejected clouds of darkness, as if meant to efface everything. He saw no police officers, now; the darkness propagated itself until it filled up the panorama and then it became more intense, as if it were not opaque enough before. But I can breathe, Joe said. “Hey,” he said aloud—and heard his own voice. I’m just not in the water, he realized, like they are. I can identify myself; I’m split off, a separate entity. But why?
What if I try to move? he wondered. He took one step, another, and then clunk; he rebounded off a wall-like surface. Another way, he said; he turned and took a step to his right. Clunk. In panic he thought, I’m in a box like a coffin! Did they kill me? he asked himself. When I tried to run for the door. He reached his arms out, into the darkness, groping . . . and something was placed in his right hand. Small, square. With two disklike knobs.
A transistor radio.
He turned it on.
“Hi there, folks!” a happy, tinny voice sounded in the darkness. “This is Cavorting Cary Karns here with six phones sitting in front of me and twenty switchboard circuits going, so that I can hear you all, all of you good people who want to discuss something, anything. The number is 394-950-911111, so call in, folks, about anything at all, whatever’s on your mind, good, bad, indifferent, interesting, or dull—just call Cavorting Cary Karns at 394-950-911111 and the whole radio audience out there will hear you and what you have to say, your opinion, a fact that you know that you think everyone else should know—“ From the speaker of the transistor radio came the sound of a phone ringing. “Hello—we’ve got a caller already!” Cavorting Cary Karns declared. “Yes sir. Yes ma’am, I mean.”
“Mr. Karns,” a shrill female voice said, “there ought to be a stop sign placed at the intersection of Fulton Avenue and Clover, where all the little schoolchildren, and I see them every day—“
Something hard, some dense object, bumped Joe’s left hand. He took hold of it. A phone.
Sitting down, he placed the phone and the transistor radio in front of him and then he got out his cigarette lighter and zipped the butane flame on. It illuminated a meager circle, but within the circle he could make out the phone and the transistor radio. A Zenith transistor radio, he noted. Evidently a good one, from the size of it.
“Okay, folks out there,” Cavorting Cary Karns merrily prattled. “The number is 394-950-911111; that’s where you’ll reach me and through me the whole world of—“
Joe dialed. At last he had painstakingly dialed the whole number. He held the receiver to his ear, listened to a busy signal for a moment, and then heard, from both the receiver and the radio, the voice of Cavorting Cary Karns. “Yes sir, or is it ma’am?” Karns asked.
“Where am I?” Joe said into the phone.
“Hey there!” Karns said. “We’ve got somebody out there, some poor soul, who’s lost. Your name is, sir?”
“Joseph Fernwright,” Joe said.
“Well, Mr. Fernwright, it’s a downright pleasure to talk to you. Your question is, Where are you? Does anybody know where Mr. Joseph Fernwright of Cleveland—you are in Cleveland, aren’t you, Mr. Fernwright?--does anybody out there know where he is, at this moment? I think this is a valid question on Mr. Fernwright’s part; I’d like to hold the lines open for anyone who can call in and give us some idea, at least a general idea, of the vicinity in which Mr. Fernwright is currently. So you other people, who don’t know where Mr. Fernwright is, could you not call in until we’ve located Mr. Fernwright? Mr. Fernwright, it shouldn’t be long; we’ve got a ten million audience and a fifty-thousand-watt transmitter going and—wait! A call.” Tinny sound of a phone ringing. “Yes sir or ma’am. Sir. Your name, sir?”
A male voice, from the radio and from Joe’s phone, said, “My name is Dwight L. Glimmung of 301 Pleasant Hill Road, and I know where Mr. Fernwright is. He’s in my basement. Slightly to the right and a little behind my furnace. He’s in a wooden packing crate that came with an air-conditioning unit that I ordered from People’s Sears, last year.”
“You hear that, Mr. Fernwright?” Cavorting Cary Karns whooped. “You’re in a packing crate in Mr. Dwight L.—what was the rest of your name, sir?”
“Glimmung.”
“Mr. Dwight L. Glimmung’s basement of 301 Pleasant Hill Road. So all your troubles are over, Mr. Fernwright. Simply get out of the packing crate and you’ll be just fine!”
“I don’t want him to bust the crate, though,” Dwight L. Glimmung said. “Maybe I better go down there into that basement and pry a few boards loose and let him out.”
“Mr. Fernwright,” Karns said, “just for the edification of our radio audience, how did you happen to get into an empty packing crate in the basement of Mr. Dwight L. Glimmung of 301 Pleasant Hill Road? I’m sure our audience would like to know.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said.
“Well, perhaps then Mr. Glimmung—Mr. Glimmung? He seems to have rung off. Evidently he’s on his way down into the basement to let you out, Mr. Fernwright. What a lucky thing for you it was, sir, that Mr. Glimmung happened to be listening to this show! Otherwise you probably would be in that crate until doomsday. And now let’s turn to another listener; hello?” The phone clicked in Joe’s ear. The circuit had been broken.
Sounds. From around him. A creaking noise and something wide bent back; light flooded into the box wherein Joe Fernwright sat with his cigarette lighter, his phone, and his transistor radio.
“I got you out of the police barracks the best way I could,” a male voice—the same that Joe had heard on the radio—said.
“A strange way,” Joe said.
“To you strange. Strange to me have been a number of things you’ve done since the time I first became aware of you.,,
Joe said, “Like giving away my coins.”
“No, I understood that. What strikes me as odd is your having sat for all those months in your work cubicle, waiting.” A second slat slid away; more light flooded in at Joe and he blinked. He tried to see Glimmung, but he still could not. “Why didn’t you go to a nearby museum and break a number of their pots anonymously . . . and you would have got their business. And the pots would be healed as new. Nothing would have been lost and you would have been active and productive over these days.” The last slat fell away, and Joe Fernwright saw, up in the full light, the creature from Sirius five, the life-form which the encyclopedia had described as being senile and penniless.
He saw a great hoop of water spinning on a horizonal axis, and, within it, on a vertical axis, a transversal hoop of fire. Hanging over and behind the two elemental hoops a curtain draped and floated, a billowing fabric which he saw, with amazement, was Paisley.
And—one more aspect: an image embedded at the nucleus of the revolving hoops of fire and water. The pleasant, pretty face of a brown-haired teen-age girl. It hung suspended, and it smiled at him . . . an ordinary face, easily forgotten but always encountered. It was, he thought, a composite mask, as if drawn on a blank sidewalk with colored chalk. A temporary and not very impressive visage, through which Glimmung apparently meant to encounter him. But the hoop of water, he thought. The basis of the universe. As was the hoop of fire. And they revolved on and on, at a perfectly regulated speed. A superb and eternal self-perpetuating mechanism, he thought, except for the flimsy Paisley shawl and the immature female face. He felt bewildered. Did what he see add up to strength? Certainly it gave no aura of senility, and yet he had the impression that, despite the jejune face, it was very old. As to its financial status, he could make no estimate at this time. That would have to come later, if at all.
“I bought this house seven years ago,” Glimmung—or at least a voice—said. “When there was a buyers’ market.”
Joe, looking for the source of the voice, distinguished an oddity which twitched his blood and made him cold, as if ice and fire had mixed together in him, a pale analog of Glimmung.
The voice. It came from an ancient wind-up Victrola, on which a record played at a peculiar high speed. Glimmung’s voice was on the record.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Joe said. “Seven years ago was a good time to buy. You do your recruiting from here?”
“I work here,” Glimmung’s voice—from the ancient windup Victrola—answered. “I work many other places as well . . . in many star systems. Now let me tell you where you stand, Joe Fernwright. To the police you simply turned and walked out of the building, and for some reason they seemed unable, at the time, to stop you. But an APB has been sent out regarding you, so you can’t go back to your rooming house or your work cubicle.”
“Without being caught by the police,” Joe said.
“Do you want that?”
“Maybe it has to be,” Joe said stoically.
“Nonsense. Your police are feral and malicious. I want you to see Heldscalla, as it was before it sank. Youuuuuuuuu,” and the phonograph ran down. Joe, via the handcrank, wound it up again, feeling a mixture of feelings, each of which he would probably, if asked, be unable to describe. “You will find a viewing instrument on the table to your right,” Glimmung said, the record now playing at its proper speed. “A depth-perception mechanism originating here on your own planet.”
Joe searched—and found an antique stereoscope viewer, circa 1900, with a set of black-and-white cards to be put into it. “Couldn’t you do better than this?” he demanded. “A film sequence, or stereo video tape. Why, this thing was invented before the automobile.” It came to him, then. “You are broke,” he said. “Smith was right.”
“That’s a calumny,” Glimmung said. “I am merely parsimonious. It is an inherited characteristic of my order. As a product of your socialistic society you are used to great waste. I, however, am still on the free enterprise plan. ‘A penny saved—‘
“Oh Christ,” Joe groaned.
“If you want me to quit,” Glimmung said, “merely lift the mica-disk playback head-and-needle assembly from the record.”
“What happens when the record comes to an end?” Joe said.
“It will never do so.”
“Then it’s not a real record.”
“It’s a real record. The grooves form a loop.”
“What do you really look like?” Joe said.
Glimmung said, “What do you really look like?”
Nettled, Joe said, gesticulating, “It depends on whether you accept Kant’s division of phenomena from the Ding an sich, the thing in itself which like Leibnitz’s windowless monad—“
He halted, because the phonograph had run down again; the record had ceased to turn. As he rewound it, Joe thought, He probably didn’t hear anything I said. And probably on purpose.
“I missed your philosophical discourse,” the phonograph declared, when he had finished rewinding it.
“What I’m saying,” Joe said, “is that a phenomenon perceived is done so in the structural percept-system of the perceiver. Much of what you see in perceiving me—“ He pointed to himself for emphasis. “—is a projection from your own mind. To another percept-system I would appear quite different. To the police, for instance. There’re as many worldviews as there are sentient creatures.”
“Hmm,” Glimmung said.
“You understand the distinction I’m making,” Joe said.
“Mr. Fernwright, what do you really want? The time has come for you to choose, to act. To participate—or not participate—in a great historical moment. At this moment, Mr. Fernwright, I am in a thousand places, committing or helping to commit an enormous variety of engineers and artisans . . . you are one craftsman out of many. I can’t wait for you any longer.”
“Am I vital to the project?” Joe asked.
“A pot-healer is vital, yes. You or someone else.”
Joe said, “When do I get my thirty-five thousand crumbles? In advance?”
“You will get them whennnnnn,” Glimmung began to say, but again the old Victrola became unwound; the record slowed to a halt.
Cagey bastard, Joe said to himself grimly as he rewound the phonograph.
“When,” Glimmung said, “and if, only if, the cathedral is raised once more as it was centuries ago.”
That’s what I thought, Joe thought.
“Will you go to Plowman’s Planet?” Glimmung asked.
For a time Joe considered. In his mind he considered his room, the cubicle in which he worked, the loss of his coins, the police—he thought about it all and tried to make it add up. What ties me here? he asked himself. The known, he decided. The fact that I am used to it. You can get used to anything, and even learn to like it. Pavlov’s theory of learned reflex is correct; I am held by habit. And nothing more.
“Could I have just a few crumbles in advance?” he asked Glimmung. “I want to buy a cashmere sports jacket and a new pair of wash-and-wear shoes.”
The phonograph split apart; pieces of it rained everywhere, lancing Joe’s arms and face. And, in the center of the hoops of water and of fire, a huge contorted furious face manifested itself; the feeble female countenance disappeared, and what glared at Joe now glared with the force of a sun. The face cursed at him, cursed in a language he did not know. He shrank back, appalled by the anger of Glimmung; the ordinary objects through which Glimmung had up to now manifested himself disintegrated into bits, the Paisley shawl, even the two elemental hoops. The basement itself began to crack apart, like a declining ruin; pieces of cement fell to the floor and then the floor itself broke like dried clay.
Jesus, Joe thought. And Smith said it was senile. Now huge chunks of the house were dropping around him; a section of pipe banged him on the head and he heard a thousand voices singing a thousand songs of fear. “I’ll go,” he said aloud, his eyes shut, hands enwrapping his head. “You’re right; it’s not a joke. I’m sorry. I know this has great importance to you.”
The fist of Glimmung clutched him around the waist; it lifted him up as it squeezed him like a roll of newspaper. He saw for an instant the raging, melting, burning eye—a single eye!--and then the firestorm ebbed. The pressure around his waist relaxed, just a trifle. But enough. He thought, I probably didn’t get any ribs cracked. I better get a medical examination before I leave Earth, though. Just to be sure.
“I will set you down in the main lounge of the Cleveland Spaceport,” Glimmung said. “You will find that you have enough money for a ticket to Plowman’s Planet. Take the next flight; do not go back to your room for your things—the police are waiting for you there. Take this.” Glimmung thrust something into his hand; in the light it reflected many colors; the colors blended into one shape and then trickled out in threadlike streams to re-form in another pattern. And then another, which leaped up at him wildly.
“A potsherd,” Glimmung said.
“This is a piece of a broken vase of the cathedral?” Joe said. “Why didn’t you show it to me right away?” I would have gone, he thought, if I had seen this . . . if I had had any idea.
“Now you know,” Glimmung said, “what you will be healing with your talent.”
A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they—all of them—had been genuine angels, and at that time they, had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.
Seated on the plush plastic bench at the Cleveland Spaceport, waiting for his flight, Joe felt weak and unsure of himself, and ahead of him lay a terrible job—terrible in the sense that it would put inordinate demands on his waning strength. I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puffball, on and on.
Strength. The strength of being, he thought, and opposite to that the peace of nonbeing. Which was better? Strength wore out in the end, every time; so perhaps that was the answer and no more was needed. Strength—being—was temporary. And peace—nonbeing—was eternal; it had existed prior to his birth and would resume for him after his death. The period of strength, in between, was merely an episode, a short flexing of borrowed muscles—a body which would have to be returned . . . to the real owner.
Had he not met Glimmung he would never have thought this—realized it. But in Glimmung he witnessed eternal, selfrenewing strength. Glimmung, like a star, fed on himself, and was never consumed. And, like a star, he was beautiful; he was a fountain, a meadow, an empty twilight street over which dwelt a fading sky. The sky would fade; the twilight would become darkness, but Glimmung would blaze on, as if burning out the impurities of everyone and everything around him. He was the light who exposed the soul and all its decayed parts. And, with that light, he scorched out of existence those decayed portions, here and there: mementos of a life not asked for.
Seated there in the waiting room of the spaceport, seated upon the unpleasant plastic chair, Joe heard rocket motors winding up. He turned his head, saw through the great window an LB-4 rise upward, shaking the building and everything in it. And then, in a matter of seconds, it had gone; nothing remained.
I gaze across the silence of the marshes, he thought, and out of them, mysterious and wild, pops the sound of giant vehicles.
Getting to his feet he crossed the waiting room to the Padre booth; seated inside he put a dime into the slot and dialed at random. The marker came to rest at Zen.
“Tell me your torments,” the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion. And slowly; it spoke as if there were no rush, no pressure. All was timeless.
Joe said, “I haven’t worked for seven months and now I’ve got a job that takes me out of the Sol System entirely, and I’m afraid. What if I can’t do it? What if after so long I’ve lost my skill?”
The Padre’s weightless voice floated reassuringly back to him. “You have worked and not worked. Not working is the hardest work of all.”
That’s what I get for dialing Zen, Joe said to himself. Before the Padre could intone further he switched to Puritan Ethic.
“Without work,” the Padre said, in a somewhat more forceful voice, “a man is nothing. He ceases to exist.”
Rapidly, Joe dialed Roman Catholic.
“God and God’s love will accept you,” the Padre said in a faraway gentle voice. “You are safe in His arms. He will never—“
Joe dialed Allah.
“Kill your foe,” the Padre said.
“I have no foe,” Joe said. “Except for my own weariness and fear of failure.”
“Those are enemies,” the Padre said, “which you must overcome in a jihad; you must show yourself to be a man, and a man, a true man, is a fighter who fights back.” The Padre’s voice was stern.
Joe dialed Judaism.
“A bowl of Martian fatworm soup—“ the Padre began soothingly, but then Joe’s money wore out; the Padre closed down, inert and dead—or anyhow dormant.
Fatworm soup, Joe reflected. The most nourishing food known. Maybe that’s the best advice of all, he thought. I’ll head for the spaceport’s restaurant.
There, on a stool, he seated himself and picked up the menu.
“Care for a tobacco cigarette?” the man next to him said.
Horrified, Joe stared at him and said, “My god—you can’t smoke a cigarette out in the open—especially here.” He turned toward the man in agitation; he started to speak on. And then he realized whom he was speaking to.
In human form Glimmung sat beside him.
“I never intended,” Glimmung said, “for you to be so troubled. Your work is good; I’ve told you that. I picked you because I consider you the finest pot-healer on Earth; I’ve told you that, too. The Padre was right; you need something to eat and a chance to calm down. I’ll order for you.”
Glimmung nodded to the robot mechanism from which the food came—nodded as he openly smoked his tobacco cigarette.
“Can’t they see the cigarette?” Joe asked.
“No,” Glimmung said. “And evidently the food-dispensing mechanism can’t see me either.” Turning toward Joe he said, “You order.”
After he had eaten his bowl of fatworm soup and had drunk his caffeine-free (it had to be so, by law) coffee, Joe said, “I don’t think you understand. To someone like you—“
“What am I like?” Glimmung said.
“Don’t you know?” Joe said.
“No creature knows itself,” Glimmung said. “You don’t know yourself; you don’t have any knowledge, none at all, of your most basic potentials. Do you understand what the Raising will mean for you? Everything that has been latent, has been potential, in you—all of it will become actualized. Everyone who conspires in the Raising, everyone involved, from a hundred planets tossed here and there in the galaxy—everyone will be. You have never been, Joe Fernwright. You merely exist. To be is to do. And we will do a great thing, Joe Fernwright.” Glimmung’s voice rang like steel.
“Did you come here to talk me out of my doubts?” Joe asked. “Is that why you’re at the spaceport? To make sure I don’t change my mind and drop out at the last moment?” It couldn’t be that; he was not that important. Glimmung, stretched between fifteen worlds, would not be lowering himself to this, to an attempt to restore the confidence of one meager pot-healer from Cleveland; Glimmung had too much to do: there were larger matters.
Glimmung said, “This is a ‘larger matter.’”
“Why?”
“Because there are no small matters. Just as there is no small life. The life of an insect, a spider; his life is as large as yours, and yours is as large as mine. Life is life. You wish to live as much as I do; you have spent seven months of hell, waiting day after day for what you needed . . . the way a spider waits. Think about the spider, Joe Fernwright. He makes his web. Then he makes a little silk cave at the end of the web to sit in. He holds strands that lead to every part of the web, so that he will know when something to eat, something he must have to live, arrives. He waits. A day goes by. Two days. A week. He waits on; there is nothing he can do but wait. The little fisherman of the night . . . and perhaps something comes, and he lives, or nothing comes, and he waits and he thinks, ‘It won’t come in time. It is too late.’ And he is right; he dies still waiting.”
“But for me,” Joe said, “something came in time.”
“I came,” Glimmung said.
Joe said, “Did you pick me because of—“ He hesitated. “Out of pity?”
“Never,” Glimmung said. “The Raising will take great skill, many skills, many knowings and crafts, vast numbers of arts. Do you still have that potsherd with you?”
Joe got the small divine fragment from his coat pocket; he put it down on the lunch counter, beside the empty bowl of soup.
“Thousands of them,” Glimmung said. “You have, I should guess, a hundred more years of life. It can’t be done in a hundred years; you will step among them, the beautiful little pieces, until the day you die. And you will get your wish; you will be, until the end. And, having been, you will always exist.” Glimmung looked at the Omega wristwatch that circled his humanoid wrist. “They will be announcing your flight in two minutes.”
After he had been strapped to his couch, and the pressure helmet had been screwed over his head, he managed to twist around so that he could hopefully see his flight companion, the person beside him.
Mali Yojez, the tag read. He squinted and saw that it was a girl, non-Terran but humanoid.
And then the first thrust rockets ignited and the ship began to rise.
He had never been off Earth before, and he realized this starkly as the weight on him grew. This—is—not—like—going—f rom—New York—to Tokyo, he said to himself gaspingly. With incalculable effort he managed to turn his head so that he could once again see the non-Terran girl. She had become blue. Maybe it’s natural to her race, Joe thought. Maybe I’ve turned blue, too. Maybe I’m dying, he said to himself, and then the booster rockets came on . . . and Joe Fernwright passed out.
When he awoke he heard only the sound of the Mahler “Fourth” and a low murmur of voices. I’m the last to come out of it, he said to himself gloomily. The pert, dark-haired stewardess busily unscrewed his pressure helmet and shut off his separate supply of oxygen.
“Feeling better, Mr. Fernwright?” the stewardess inquired as she delicately recombed his hair. “Miss Yojez has been reading the biographical material you gave us before flighttime, and she is very interested in meeting you. There; now your hair looks just ever so fine. Don’t you think so, Miss Yojez?”
“How do you do, Mr. Fernwright?” Miss Yojez asked him in a heavily accented voice. “I have been glad to know you very. In the lengthitude of our trip I am surprised not to talk to you, because I think we in common much have.”
“May I see Miss Yojez’s biographical material?” Joe asked the stewardess; it was handed to him and he scanned it rapidly. Favorite animal: a squimp. Favorite color: rej. Favorite game: Monopoly. Favorite music: koto, classical and Kimio Eto. Born in the Prox system, which made her a pioneer, of sorts.
“I think,” Miss Yojez said, “we are in the same undertaking, several of us with the inclusion of I and me.”
“You and me,” Joe said.
“You’re natural Earth?”
“I’ve never been off Earth in my life,” Joe said.
“Then this is your first space flight.”
“Yes,” he said. He eyed her covertly and found her attractive; her short-clipped bronze hair formed an effective contrast to her light gray skin. In addition, she had one of the smallest waists he had ever seen, and in the permo-form spray-foam blouse and pants this as well as the rest of her stood cleanly revealed. “You’re a marine biologist,” he said, reading more of her biographical material.
“Indeed. I am to determine the depth of coral investation of—“ She paused, brought forth a small dictionary and looked up a word. “Submerged artifacts.”
He felt curiosity toward one point; he asked, “How did Glimmung manifest himself to you?”
“’Manifest,’ “ Miss Yojez echoed; she searched through her small dictionary.
“Materializing,” the stewardess said brightly. “There is a circuit of the ship linking us with a translation computer back on Earth. At each couch is an earphone and microphone. Here are yours, Mr. Fernwright, and here are yours, Miss Yojez.”
“My Terran linguistic skills are returning,” Miss Yojez said, rejecting the earphone. To Joe she said, “What did you—“
“How did Glimmung appear to you?” Joe asked. “Physically what did he look like? Big? Short? Portly?”
Miss Yojez said, “Glimmung initially manifests himself in an aquatic framework, inasmuch as he, proper, often rests at the bottom of the oceans of his planet, in the—“ She culled her mind. “The vicinity of the sunken cathedral.”
That explained the oceanic transformation at the police station. “But subsequently how did he appear?” he asked. “The same?”
“The second time he came to I,” Miss Yojez said, “he manifested himself as a laundry of basket.”
Can she mean that? Joe wondered. A basket of laundry? He thought, then, of The Game; the old preoccupation abruptly stirred into life inside him. “Miss Yojez,” he said, “perhaps we could make use of the computer translator . . . they can be very interesting. Let me tell you about an incident that occurred in automated translating of a Soviet article on engineering years ago. The term—“
“Please,” Miss Yojez said, “I can’t follow you and additionally we have things other to discuss. We must ask everyone and find out how many has been employed by Mr. Glimmung.” She fitted the earphone to the side of her head, lifted the microphone and pressed all the buttons on the translation console beside her. “Would everyone who is going to Plowman’s Planet to work in Mr. Glimmung’s undertaking raise their hands, please?”
“So anyway,” Joe said, “this article on engineering, when the computer translated it into English, had one strange term in it that appeared over and over. ‘Water sheep.’ What the hell does that mean? they all asked. I dunno, they all said. Well, what finally they—“
Miss Yojez broke in, “Of the forty-five of us aboard this ship thirty are in Glimmung’s pay.” She laughed. “Perhaps now is the time for us to establish a union and work collectively.”
A stern-looking gray-haired man at the front end of the section said, “That’s not a half bad idea, actually.”
“But he’s already paying so much,” a timid little fellow on the left side pointed out.
“Is it in writing?” the gray-haired man said. “He’s made oral promises to us and then he’s threatened us, or at least so I gather. Anyhow he threatened me. He came on like the day of judgment; it really took the wind out of my sails, and if you knew me you’d know it’s rare when anyone can do that to Harper Baldwin.”
“So anyhow,” Joe said, “they finally managed to trace it back to the original paper, in Russian, and you know what it was? It was ‘hydraulic ram.’ And it came out in English as ‘water sheep.’ Now, on the basis of this, I and a number of distinguished colleagues—“
“Oral promises,” a sharp-faced middle-aged woman toward the rear of the section said, “are not enough. Before we do any work for him we should have written contracts. Basically, when you get down to it, he’s gotten us on this ship by intimidation.”
“Then think what a threat he’ll be when we get to Plowman’s Planet,” Miss Yojez pointed out.
All the passengers were silent for a moment.
“We just call it The Game,” Joe said.
“In addition,” the gray-haired man said, “we must remember that we’re only a small part of the work force that Glimmung’s been recruiting all over the galaxy. I mean, we can act collective to hell and gone, and what does it matter? We’re just a drop in the bucket, we here. Or eventually we’ll be, when he gets the others onto his damn planet, which could be any time.”
“What we’ll have to do,” Miss Yojez said, “is to organize ourselves here, and then, when we reach Plowman’s Planet, we’ll probably be staying at one of the major hotels, and once there we can contact some or all of the others he’s recruited and then possibly we can form a union effective.”
A heavyset red-faced man said, “But isn’t Glimmung a—“ He gestured. “A supernatural creature? A deity?”
“There are no deities,” the timid little fellow on the left side of the compartment said. “I used to put strong faith in them at an earlier age of my life, but after keen and very recurrent frustration and disappointment and disillusionment I gave up.”
The red-faced man said, “In terms of what he can do. What does it matter what you call it?” Vigorously, he declared, “In relation to us, Glimmung has the power and nature of a deity. For example, he can manifest himself simultaneously on ten or fifteen planets all over the galaxy, and yet still remain on Plowman’s Planet. Yes, he manifested himself to me in a scary fashion, as that gentleman up front just pointed out. But I’m convinced it’s the real thing. Glim mung made us come here; he coerced us—I know he did. In my case the police became peculiarly interested in my affairs about the same time that Glimmung first approached me. The way it worked out was that I more or less wound up having a choice between picking up on Glimmung’s proposition or going to jail as a political prisoner.”
In the name of god, Joe thought. Perhaps Glimmung played a hand in getting the QCA to drop in on me. And then the harness bulls who hung over me when I was giving away quarters, the cops who busted me—they may have been steered there by Glimmung!
Several people were talking at once, now. Listening intently, Joe made out the general drift of their discourses; they, too, were telling about rescues from police vehicles and stations by Glimmung. This changes everything, Joe said to himself.
“He got me to do an illegal act,” a matronly woman was saying. “He got me to write a check to one of the government’s beneficial organizations in a fit of passion. The check bounced and of course the police pulled me right in. When I got on this ship I jumped bail. I’m amazed they let me go, the QCA, I mean; I thought they’d stop me at the spaceport.”
That is strange, Joe reflected. The QCA could have stopped all of us; Glimmung didn’t take us to Plowman’s Planet by some vast display of his power: he had us take a regular flight—was himself, in fact, at the spaceport, apparently to see that we didn’t back out. Does that mean, Joe asked himself, that there is no genuine antagonism between Glimmung and the QCA?
He tried to remember the current law dealing with knowledge and skills of unusual value. It was a felony, he recalled, for a person to leave Earth if that person had skills which couldn’t be made available to the government or “people” in his absence. My statement as to my skills and knowledge was routinely okayed, he remembered; they just glanced at it and stamped it and went on to the next one . . . and the next one was probably someone else, with a special and highly useful skill, on his way to Plowman’s Planet. And they okayed him, too, it would seem.
He felt a deep and abiding insecurity, thinking this. A common basis between Glimmung and the police—if that were the case he was, for all intents and purposes, as much in the hands of the authorities as he would have been if he had remained at the police station. Perhaps even more so; on Plowman’s Planet he would not be covered by the modicum of statutes protecting the accused. As someone had said already, once they reached Plowman’s Planet they would be entirely in Glimmung’s possession, for whatever he wanted done. They would be, in essence, extensions of Glimmung; it was another corporate existence toward which he was heading, and he had in no sense escaped from anyone or anything. And this would be true for all the others; hundreds or perhaps even thousands of them, flowing to Plowman’s Planet from all over the galaxy. Jesus, he thought in despair. But then he thought of something, something that Glimmung, in humanoid form, had said in the restaurant of the spaceport. “There are no small lives.” And the little fisherman of the night, as Glimmung had called the lowly spider.
“Listen,” Joe said aloud into his microphone, and he had all the buttons down; everyone in the compartment was hearing him, whether they wanted to or not. “Glimmung told me something,” he said, “at the spaceport. He told me about life waiting for something to come along and sustain it, and that thing, that event, never coming for many lives. He said that this Undertaking, this Raising of Heldscalla, was that thing, that event, for me.” In his mind he felt his conviction grow until it became absolute and powerful, and he felt it change him; it woke him up until, by now, he could say, as Glimmung put it, I am. “ ‘Everything that has been latent,’ Glimmung said, ‘that has potential—all of it will be actualized.’ I felt—“ Joe hesitated, trying to find the exact word he wanted. “He knew,” he said finally, as the other passengers listened in silence. “About my life. He knew it from the inside, as if he were inside it with me, looking out.”
“He’s telepathic,” the timid little fellow piped up. There was a general stir of agreement.
“It was more than that,” Joe said. “Hell, the police have equipment that manufactures telepathy and they use it all the time. They used it on me yesterday.”
Miss Yojez said, “I experienced that also.” To the others she said, “Mr. Fernwright is correct. Glimmung looked into the basis of my life; it was as if he saw all the way back through my life, saw it all pass along and lead here, to this point. And he saw that at this point it isn’t worth living. Except for this.”
“But he conspired with the police—“ the gray-haired man said, but Miss Yojez interrupted him.
“We don’t know that he did. I think we’re experiencing panic. I think Glimmung planned this Undertaking to save us. I think he saw us all, the futilities of our various lives, and where they were leading, and he loved us, because we were alive. And he did what he could to help us. The Raising of Heldscalla is only a pretext; all of us—and there may be thousands—are the real purpose of this.” She paused a moment and then said, “Three days ago I tried to kill myself. I attached the tube of my vacuum cleaner to the tailpipe of my surface car, and then I put the other end of the tube inside the car and I got in and started the motor.”
“And then you changed your mind?” a slender girl with wispy, cornsilk hair asked.
“No,” Miss Yojez said. “The turbine misfired and knocked the tube loose. I sat for an hour in the cold for nothing.” Joe said, “Would you have tried again?”
“I planned to do it today,” she said levelly. “And this time in a fashion that wouldn’t fail.”
The red-faced red-haired man said, “Hear what I have to say, for what it’s worth.” He sighed, a ragged, hoarse noise of resignation and unease. “I was going to do it, too.”
“Not me,” the gray-haired man said; he looked exceedingly angry; Joe felt the strength of the man’s wrath. “I signed on because there was a great deal of money involved. Do you know what I am?” He glanced around at all of them.
“I’m a psychokineticist, the best psychokineticist on Earth.” Grimly he reached out his arm and a briefcase at the rear of the compartment flew directly toward him. Fiercely, he grabbed it, squeezing it.
Squeezing it, Joe thought, the way Glimmung squeezed me.
“Glimmung is here,” Joe said. “Among us.” To the grayhaired man he said, “You are Glimmung and yet you’re violently arguing against our trusting him. You.”
The gray-haired man smiled. “No, friend. I’m not Glimmung. I’m Harper Baldwin, psychokineticist consultant for the government. As of yesterday, anyhow.”
“But Glimmung is here somewhere,” a plump woman with tangled doll-hair said; she was knitting and had said nothing up until now. “He’s right, that man there.”
“Mr. Fernwright,” the stewardess offered helpfully. “May I introduce you to one another? This attractive girl beside Mr. Fernwright is Miss Mali Yojez. And this gentleman . . She droned on, but Joe did not listen; names weren’t important, except, perhaps, the name of the girl seated beside him. He had, during the last forty minutes, become more and more favorably inclined toward her spare, sparse, even bleak beauty. Nothing at all like Kate, he thought to himself. The opposite. This is a truly feminine woman; Kate’s a frustrated man. And that’s the kind which castrates right and left.
Harper Baldwin, the introductions over, said in his overbearing, ultrafirm voice, “I think our status, our true status, is that of slaves. Let’s stop a minute and review this whole matter, how we happen to be here. The stick and the carrot. Am I right?” He glanced from side to side, seeking confirmation.
“Plowman’s Planet,” Miss Yojez spoke out, “is not a backward, deprived planet. It has an advanced society active and evolving on it; true, it’s not yet a civilization in the strict sense of the word, but it’s not herds of food-gatherers nor even clans of food-planters. It has cities. Laws. A variety of arts ranging from the dance to a modified form of 4-D chess.”
“That’s not true,” Joe said, with scathing anger. Everyone turned toward him, startled by his tone. “One vast old creature lives there. Apparently infirm. Nothing about an advanced city society.”
“Wait a minute,” Harper Baldwin said. “If there’s one thing Glimmung is not it’s infirm. Where’d you get your information, Fernwright? From the government encyclopedia?”
Joe said uncomfortably, “Yes.” And secondhand, too.
“If the encyclopedia described Glimmung as infirm,” Miss Yojez said evenly, “I’d be interested to know what else it said. I’m just curious to see how far your knowledge of Plowman’s Planet departs from the reality situation.”
With growing discomfort, Joe said, “Dormant. Advanced age; hence senile. Hence harmless.” And harmlessness had not been apparent in Glimmung, at least as he had appeared to Joe. And to the others.
Standing, Mali Yojez said, “If you’ll please excuse me—I think I’ll go sit in the lounge and perhaps read a magazine or nap.” In brisk, short steps she departed from the passenger compartment.
“I think,” the plump woman busily knitting said, without looking up from her work, “that Mr. Fernwright ought to go to the lounge and apologize to Miss Whateverhernameis.”
His ears red, and the back of his neck prickling, Joe got to his feet and followed after Mali Yojez.
As he descended the three carpeted steps an eerie feeling came over him. As if, he thought, I’m going to my death. Or is it life, for the first time? The process of being born?
Someday he would know. But not now.
He found Miss Yojez, as she had declared, seated in one of the great soft couches of the lounge, reading Ramparts. She did not look up at him, but he took it for granted that she was aware of him. Therefore he said, “How—do you happen to know so much about Plowman’s Planet, Miss Yojez? I mean, you didn’t get your knowledge out of the encyclopedia. Obviously. As I did.”
Reading on, she said nothing.
After a pause Joe seated himself near her, hesitated, then, wondering what to say. Why had her statements about the society on Plowman’s Planet angered him so? He didn’t know; it seemed as irrational to him now as it had seemed to the others. “We have a new game,” he said, finally. She continued reading. “You search the archives for the funniest headlines ever printed, each player topping the others.” She still did not speak. “I’ll tell you the headline that struck me as the funniest,” he said. “It was hard to find; I had to look all the way back to 1962.”
Mali glanced up. Her face showed no great emotion, no resentment. Merely detached curiosity, of a social nature. No more. “And what was your headline, Mr. Fernwright?”
“ELMO PLASKETT SINKS GIANTS,” Joe said.
“Who was Elmo Plaskett?”
“That’s the point,” Joe said. “He came up from the minors; nobody ever heard of him. That’s what makes it funny. I mean, Elmo Plaskett—he came up for one day, hit one home run—“
“Basketball?” Miss Yojez asked.
“Baseball.”
“Oh yes. The game of inches.”
Joe said, “You have been on Plowman’s Planet?”
For a moment she did not answer and then she said, simply, “Yes.” He noticed that she had rolled the magazine into a tight cylinder, holding it with both hands, very tightly. And her face showed severe stress.
“So you know firsthand what it’s like. And you encountered Glimmung?”
“Not really. We knew he was there, half-dead or half-alive; whichever way you’d put it . . . I don’t know. Excuse me.” She turned away.
Joe started to say something further. And then he saw, in a corner of the lounge, what appeared to be an SSA machine. Getting to his feet he went over to it and inspected it.
“May I be of help, sir?” a stewardess said, and approached him. “Would you like me to seal the lounge off so that you and Miss Yojez can make love?”
“No,” he said. “I’m interested in this.” He touched the control panel of the SSA machine. “How much does it cost to use it?”
“SSA service is free during your flight for one time,” the stewardess said. “After that it takes two genuine dimes. Do you want me to set it up for you and Miss Yojez?”
“I’m uninterested,” Mali Yojez spoke up.
“How unfair to Mr. Fernwright,” the stewardess said, still smiling, but, in her voice, conveying a reprimand. “He can’t use it alone, you understand.”
“What do you stand to lose?” Joe asked Mali Yojez.
“You and I has no future together,” she answered.
“But that’s the whole point of the SSA machine,” Joe protested. “To find out what—“
“I know what it finds out,” Mali Yojez interrupted. “I’ve used they before. Okay,” she said abruptly. “So you can see how it works. As a—“ She searched for the word. “Experience.”
“Thanks,” Joe said.
The stewardess began setting up the SSA machine in a rapid, efficient fashion, meanwhile explaining it. “SSA stands for sub specie aeternitatis; that is, something seen outside of time. Now, many individuals imagine that an SSA machine can see into the future, that it is precognitive. This is not true. The mechanism, basically a computer, is attached via electrodes to both your brains and it swiftly stores up immense quantities of data about each of you. It then synthesizes these data and, on a probability basis, extrapolates as to what would most likely become of you both if you were, for example, joined in marriage, or perhaps living together. I will have to shave two spots of hair on both your heads, please, in order to attach the electrodes.” She brought out a little stainless steel instrument. “How far ahead are you interested in?” she asked as she shaved the two spots on Joe’s skull and then on Mali Yojez’s. “A year? Ten years? You’re free to choose, but the less timeelapse you pick, the more accurate the extrapolation will be.”
“A year,” Joe said. Ten years seemed too remote; probably he would not even be alive, then.
“Is that agreeable to you, Miss Yojez?” the stewardess asked.
“Yes.”
“It will take the computer fifteen to seventeen minutes to gather, store, and process all the data,” the stewardess said, as she attached two electrodes to Joe’s scalp and then two to Mali Yojez’s. “Merely sit still and relax; there is of course no discomfort; you won’t feel a thing.”
Mali Yojez said tartly, “You and I, Mr. Fernwright. Together a whole year. What a mellow, friendly year.”
“You did this before?” Joe asked. “With another man?”
“Yes, Mr. Fernwright.”
“And the extrapolation was unfavorable?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry I rubbed you the wrong way, back there,” Joe said, feeling humble and profusely apologetic.
“You called me a—“ Mali Yojez flipped through her dictionary. “A liar. In front of all. And I have been there and you have not.”
“What I meant to say—“ he began, but the stewardess interrupted him.
“The SSA computer is gathering data from your minds, now. It would be best if you would relax and not quarrel for a time. If you could sort of gently free-float . . . let your minds open, open wide and let the probes gather data. Think of nothing in particular.”
That’s hard to do, Joe reflected. Under these circumstances. Maybe, he thought, Kate was right about me; in ten minutes I managed to insult Miss Yojez, my flight companion and an attractive girl. . . . He felt gloomy and oppressed. All I have to offer her is ELMO PLASKEIT SINKS GIANTS. But maybe, he thought suddenly, she would be interested in pot-healing. Why didn’t I talk about that the first time around? he asked himself. After all, that’s the basis on which we’re here: our skills, experience, knowledge, training.
“I’m a pot-healer,” he said aloud.
“I know,” Mali Yojez said. “I read your biographical material; remember?” But she did not sound so miffed, now. Her hostility, conjured up by his ineptness, had abated.
“Are you interested in pot-healing?” Joe asked.
“I’m fascinated by it,” she answered. “That’s why I so—“ She gestured, then again consulted her dictionary. “Delighted. To sit and talk with you. Tell me—is the pots perfect again? Not mended but . . . like you say; healed.”
Joe said, “A healed ceramic piece is in the exact condition as before it broke. Everything fuses; everything flows. Of course, I have to have all the pieces; I can’t do it with a fraction of the pot not present.” I’m beginning to talk like she does, he said to himself. She must be a strong personality and I’m subconsciously sensing this. As Jung pointed out, there is the anima archetype, which men experience when they encounter women. The archetypal image projected onto first one woman and then the next, giving them a charismatic power. I had better be careful, he reflected. After all, my involvement with Kate suggests that my anima-figure is strong-willed and dominating, rather than receptive and passive. I don’t want to make the same mistake all over again, he said to himself. The mistake called Katherine Hurley Blame.
“The SSA computer has obtained the data,” the stewardess informed him and Mali Yojez. She removed the electrodes from their scalps. “It will take two or three minutes for it to process them.”
“What form does its extrapolation take?” Joe asked. “Written on a paper ribbon in punch form, or—“
“You will be presented pictorially with a representative moment of your two lives entwined together a year from now,” the stewardess said. “Projected in 3-D and color on the far wall.” She lowered the lights in the lounge.
“Can I smoke?” Mali Yojez said. “We’re not bound by Terran law out here.”
“The smoking of tobacco cigarettes is forbidden on the ship during its entire flight,” the stewardess said. “Because of the high oxygen content of the retained atmosphere.”
The lights dimmed; everything around Joe sank into cloudy darkness, and each object became indistinct, including the girl beside him. A moment passed, and then an illuminated square materialized, in depth, near the SSA machine. Colors flashed by; colors and variegated images: he saw himself at work healing pots; he saw himself eating dinner; he saw her seated at her vanity table combing her hair. The images continued to flutter past, and then, all at once, the visual representation locked into place.
He saw, in 3-D and in color, himself and Mali holding hands and walking, slowly, along the twilight beach of some deserted, other world. The fish-eye lens-system zoomed in, and he saw his own face and hers. Both their faces expressed the most tender love possible. He knew at once, seeing his expression a year from now, that he had never had such a look on his face; life had never held anything like that before for him. Perhaps, he thought, it had never held this for her either. He glanced toward her but could not make out her features; he could not see how she was taking this.
“My, but you two look happy,” the stewardess said.
Mali Yojez said, “Please leave us. Now.”
“Well,” the stewardess said. “I’m very sorry I was here at all.” She left the lounge; the door clicked after her.
“They’re everywhere,” Mali Yojez said, by way of explanation. “The entire flight. They never leave you. Leave alone.”
“But she showed us how the mechanism worked,” Joe said. “Hell, I can make a SSA machine work; I’ve it several times done.” She sounded cross and tense, as if what she saw did not appeal to her.
“It looks like we’d be good for each other,” Joe offered.
“Oh Christ!” Mali Yojez screeched; she banged her fist down on the arm of her chair. “That’s what it said before. I and Ralf. Perfect outworking in everywhere. And it were not!” Her voice sank to a husky growl; her anger pervaded the lounge, as palpable as animal musk. He felt her glowering next to him; he intuited her immense emotional reaction to the representative scene projected by the machine.
“As the stewardess explained,” Joe said, “the SSA mechanism can’t see the future; it can only put together all the data from my mind and yours and work out a trend of greatest probability.”
“Why then use it at all?” Mali Yojez countered.
“Consider it like fire insurance,” Joe said. “You’re sort of putting yourself in the position of claiming fraud because your rooming house didn’t burn down after all, in other words that you really didn’t need the insurance.”
“The analogy is imperfect.”
Joe said, “Sorry.” He, too, felt irritable, now. And, as before, at her.
“Do you think,” Mali said bitingly, “that I’m to go to bed with you because of this scene of us holding our hands? Tunuma mokimo hilo, kei dei bifo ditikar sewat,” she said in her own tongue; obviously profanity.
There sounded a knock on the door. “Hey, you two,” Harper Baldwin bawled. “We’re working out the logistics of our collective employment; we need both of you.”
Joe got up and made his way through the darkness of the lounge to the door.
For two hours they haggled. And at no time did they reach any kind of joint conclusion.
“We just don’t know enough about Glimmung,” Harper Baldwin complained, looking weary. He then scrutinized Mali Yojez intently. “I have the feeling that you know more about Glimmung than any of us, and a lot more than you’ll admit. Hell, you even kept back from us the fact that you ever were on Plowman’s Planet; if you hadn’t mentioned it to Fernwright—“
“Nobody asked her,” Joe said. “Until I did. And she said so, straight out.”
A muffled, gangly youth asked, “What do you think, Miss Yojez? Is Glimmung trying to help us, or has he in effect created a slave population of experts for his own ends? Because if it’s the latter we better get this ship turned around before we get any closer to Plowman’s Planet.” His voice squeaked with nervousness.
Seated beside Joe, Mali Yojez leaned toward him and said in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here; let’s go back to the lounge. We are getting nowhere and I want to talk to you farther.”
“Okay,” he said, pleased; he stood up and so did she. Together they made their way down the aisle toward the lounge.
“There they go,” Harper Baldwin complained. “What’s the great attraction about the lounge, Miss Yojez?”
Mali paused and said, “We besport ourself amorously.” She then continued on.
“You shouldn’t have told them that,” Joe said as he and she entered the lounge and closed the door. “They probably believed you.”
“But it’s true,” Mali said. “A person doesn’t normally use the SSA machine unless he’s serious. To the other person, in this case I.” She seated herself on the couch of the lounge and reached up her arms toward him.
He locked the lounge door first. It seemed, all circumstances considered, a reasonable thing to do.
Joys too fierce, he thought, too fierce to be expressed. Whoever said that understood.
In orbit around Plowman’s Planet, the ship began firing its retrorockets, cutting its velocity. They would be landing in half an hour.
Meanwhile, Joe Fernwright amused himself in a mordant way: by reading The Wall Street Journal; he had found over the years that this newspaper, out of all of them, contained the most chilling and the most recent oddities. Reading the Journal was like taking a little trip into the future—six months or so.
A new deep-depth rooming house in New Jersey, designed especially for geriatric persons, has built into it a novel circuit, designed to make the transfer of the room easy and without delay. When a roomer dies, electronic detectors in the wall register his lack of pulse, and send swift circuits into action. The deceased is grappled by standard waldoes, drawn into the wall of the room, where on the spot his remains are incinerated within an asbestos chamber, thus permitting the new tenant, also a geriatric case, to take possession by noon.
He ceased reading, tossed down the newspaper. We must be better off out here, he decided. If that’s what they’ve got planned for us back on Earth.
“I’ve verified our reservations,” Mali said matter-of-factly. “We all have rooms at the Olympia Hotel in the largest city on the planet; Diamond Head, it’s called, because it’s on a winding prominence that goes fifty milies out into Mare Nostrum.”
“What’s ‘Mare Nostrum’?” Joe asked.
“’Our Ocean.’”
He showed the item in the Journal to her and then, silently, to the rest of the passengers. They all read it and then they all looked at one another for sign of a reaction.
“We made the right choice,” Harper Baldwin said. The others nodded. “That’s good enough for me,” Baldwin said. He shook his head and scowled, disgust and anger contorting his face. “And we built such a society,” he rasped.
Strong-armed members of the ship’s crew manually unscrewed the hatch; outside air eddied in, smelling odd and cold. It seemed to Joe that the ocean was close; he sensed it in the air. Shielding his eyes he gazed out against a weak sun; he distinguished the outline of a reasonably modernlooking city, and, past it, hills in a mixture of brown and gray. But the ocean is somethere nearby, he said to himself. Mali is right; this is a planet dominated by an ocean. And it is in the ocean that we will find everything that matters.
Smiling with mechanical courtesy, the stewardesses escorted them to the open hatch and the flight of stairs which led down to the damp surface of the field. Joe Fernwright took Mali by the arm and led her down; neither of them spoke for a time—Mali seemed absorbed in herself, taking no notice of the other people or the spaceport buildings. Bad memories, Joe reflected. Maybe what happened to her happened here.
And for me, he thought; look what this is for me. The first interplanetary or intersystem flight in my life. This ground under me is not Earth. A very strange and important thing is happening to me. He smelled the air. Another world and another atmosphere. It feels strange, he decided.
“Don’t say,” Mali said, “that you find this place ‘unearthly.’ Please, for my sake.”
“I don’t get it,” Joe said. “It is unearthly. It’s completely different.”
“Never mind,” Mali said. “A little game Ralf and I had. A long time ago. Thingisms, we called them. Let’s see if I can remember some of them. He thought all of them up. ‘The book business is hidebound.’ That’s one. ‘Plants are taking over the world sporadically.’ Let’s see. ‘The operator let me off the hook.’ I always liked that; it made me think of a giant hook, in fact a whole giant phone. ‘In 1945 the discovery of atomic energy electrified the world.’ Do you see?” She glanced at him. “You don’t,” she said. “Never mind.”
“They’re all true statements,” Joe said. “As far as I can make out. What’s the game part?”
‘The senate inquiry into modern use of side arms was muzzled.’ How do you like that one? I saw that in a newspaper. I think Ralf found the others in newspapers or heard them over TV; I think all they were real.” She added somberly, “Everything about Ralf was real. For the beginning. But then later, no.”
A careful, brown, large creature resembling a rat approached Joe and Mali. It held what appeared to be an armload of books.
“Spiddles,” Mali said, pointing to the careful ratlike creature, and to a second one which had accosted Harper Baldwin. “One of the native life-forms, here. Unlike Glimmung. You will find—let me see.” She counted on her fingers. “Spiddles, wubs, werjes, klakes, trobes, and printers. Left over from the old days . . . all of them older species, when the Fog-Things of antiquity passed away. It wants you to buy a book.”
The spiddle touched a tiny tape recorder mounted on its belt; the tape began to speak for the spiddle. “Fully documented history of a fascinating world,” it said in English, and then evidently repeated this in a variety of other tongues; anyhow it had stopped speaking in English.
“Buy it,” Mali said.
“Pardon?” Joe said.
“Buy its book.”
“You know this book? What book is it?”
Mali said, with rigorous patience, “There is only one book. In this world.”
“By ‘world,’ “Joe said, “you mean ‘planet,’ or in the larger sense—“
“On Plowman’s Planet,” Mali said, “there is just this one book.”
“Don’t the people get tired of reading it?”
“It changes,” Mali said. She handed the spiddle a dime, which it accepted gratefully; a copy of the book was passed to her and she in turn passed it to Joe.
Examining it, Joe said, “It has no title. And no author.”
“It is written,” Mali said, as they walked on toward the spaceport buildings, “by a group of creatures or entities—I don’t the English know—that records everything that passes on Plowman’s Planet. Everything. Great and small.”
“Then it’s a newspaper.”
Mali halted; she turned to face him, her eyes burning with exasperation. “_It is recorded first_,” she said, as steadily as she could manage. “The Kalends spin the story; they enter it in the ever-changing book without a title, and it comes to about, finally.”
“Precognitive,” Joe said.
“That raises a question. Which is cause? Which is effect? The Kalends wove in their altering, evolving script that the Fog-Things would pass away. They did pass away. Did then the Kalends make them pass away? The spiddles think so.” She added, “But the spiddles are very superstitious. They naturally believe that.”
Joe opened the book at random. The text was not in English; he did not recognize the language or even the letters of its alphabet. But then, as he leafed through it, he came to a short section in English, embedded in the mass of alienlooking entries.
The girl Mali Yojez is an expert at removing coral deposits from submerged artifacts. Other individuals brought from various systems throughout the galaxy include geologists, structural engineers, hydraulic engineers, seismologists; one specializes in underwater robot operations and another, an archaeologist, is a master at locating buried, ancient cities. A peculiar many-armed bivalve lives in a tank of salt water and functions well in supervising the raising of sunken ships for salvage purposes. A gastropod, capable of
At that point the text lapsed into another language; he shut the book, pondered. “Maybe I’m mentioned in here somewhere,” he said, as they reached the moving sidewalk leading to the concourse sections of the spaceport terminal building-complex.
“Of course,” Mali said calmly. “If you long look enough you will find it. How will you make it—pardon. How will it make you feel?”
“Eerie,” he said, still pondering.
A surface car, acting as a taxi, transported them to their hotel. Joe Fernwright, on the short trip, continued to examine the untitled book; it preoccupied him, preempting the colorful shops which the taxi passed, and the several lifeforms bustling about here and there—he was aware of the city street, its people, and buildings, but only dimly. Because he had already found another passage in English.
Obviously, the Undertaking involves the locating of and the raising and repair of an underwater structure, probably—due to the number of engineers involved—of great magnitude. Almost certainly an entire city or even an entire civilization, very likely of some remote past age.
And then, once again, the text lapsed into a foreign script resembling dots and dashes, a sort of binary system of annotation.
Joe said to the girl beside him in the taxi, “The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla.”
“Yes,” Mali said shortly.
“But where’s the precognition?” Joe demanded. “This is remarkably up to date—right up to this minute, give or take an hour—but that’s all.”
“You will find it,” Mali said, “when you have looked a long time. It is buried. Among the different texts, which are all translations of one primary text, one line like a thread. The thread of the past entering the present, then entering the future. Somewhere in that book, Mr. Fernwright, the future of Heldscalla is written. The future of Glimmung. The future of us. We are all woven in by the yarn of the Kalends’ time, their time-outside-of-time.”
Joe said, “And you already knew about this book, before the spiddle sold it to you.”
“I saw it before when Ralf and I were here. The SSA machine extrapolated we’d be joyous, and the Kalends’ book, this book, said Ralf would—“ She paused. “He killed himself. First he tried to kill me. But—he wasn’t able to.”
“And the Kalends’ book said that.”
“Yes. Exactly that. I remember it, Ralf and I reading in the text about ourselves and not believing. Still under the idea that the SSA mechanism was scientific data-analysis and this book was tale by old wife, a lot of old wives, seeing doom when we and the SSA machine saw happihood.”
“Why did the SSA machine miss?”
“It missed because it didn’t have one datum. Whitney’s Syndrome. Psychotic reaction to amphetamines by Ralf. Paranoia and murderous hostility. He thought himself overweight; he took them as—“ She hunted for the word.
“Appetite suppressants,” Joe said. “Like alcohol.” Good for some people, he thought; lethal for others. And Whitney’s Syndrome didn’t require overdoses; even a small amount triggered it off. If the latent illness was already there. Just as, for an alcoholic, the smallest drink meant defeat and bitter, utter, final destruction. “Too bad,” he murmured.
The taxi pulled up to the curb. Its driver, a beaverlike creature with wicked, cutting teeth, said several words in a language which Joe did not understand; Mali, however, nodded and gave the beaverish individual a sum of metal money from her purse, and then she and Joe stepped from the taxi onto the sidewalk.
Joe, looking around him, said, “It’s like going back a hundred and fifty years.” Surface cars, carbon arc lighting . . . this could be Earth in the days of President Franklin Roosevelt, he thought to himself, both enticed and amused. He liked it. The pace, he realized; it’s slower. And the density of population—relatively few organisms propelled themselves up and down the street, either on foot (or a reasonable substitute) or in cars.
“You can see why I got angry at you,” Mali said, catching his reaction. “For your defaming Plowman’s Planet, my home for six years. And now—“ She gestured. “I’m back. And doing again what I did then: believing faith in a SSA mechanism.”
“Let’s go inside the hotel,” Joe said, “and have a drink.” Together, they passed through the revolving door, into the Olympia Hotel, with its wooden floors, carved hardwood decorations, polished brass doorknobs and railings, and thick red carpet. And its antique elevator, which Joe had already caught sight of. Nonautomatic, he discovered. The elevator required an attendant.
In his hotel room, with its dresser, splotched mirror, iron bed, and canvas windowshade elegance, Joe Fernwright sat on an overstuffed, faded chair and studied The Book.
Not long ago he had been preoccupied with The Game. And now—The Book. But this consisted of something quite different, and the more he read of The Book the more he realized it. Gradually, as he nosed among its pages, he began to assemble, in his mind, the totality of the English text; he had begun to put the separate bits in superimposition over one another.
“I’m going to take a bath,” Mali said. She had already opened her suitcase and had laid most of her clothes out on the bed in her room. “Isn’t it strange, Joe Fernwright?” she called. “That we have to keep two rooms. Like a century ago.”
“Yes,” he said.
She entered the room, wearing only her tight pants; bare from the waist up, he saw. Small-breasted but dense and tall, with fine muscle tone. The body of a dancer, he said to himself, or—a Cro-Magnon female, a hunter, an astute, supple person accustomed to long, lean, even fruitless marches. There was not a gram of useless flesh on her, as he had already discovered in the locked lounge of the ship. He had clutched it then; now he saw it. However, he thought morbidly, Kate had—actually still has—as good a figure. That made him depressed. He returned to reading The Book.
“Would you have wanted to go to sleep with me,” Mali said, “if I were a cyclops?” She pointed to a spot above her nose. “One eye there. Polyphemus; the cyclops in The Odyssey. They put his one eye out with a burning stick, I think.”
Joe said, “Listen to this.” He read aloud from The Book. ‘The current, dominant species on the planet consists of what is called a Glimmung. This shadowy, enormous entity is not native to the planet; it migrated here several centuries ago, taking over from the weak species left over when the once-ruling master species, the so-called Fog-Things of antiquity, vanished.’ “ Joe waved her to come and look. “’Glimmung’s power, however, is sharply curtailed by a mysterious book in which, it is alleged, everything which has been, is, and will be is recorded.’ “ He snapped the book shut. “It’s talking about itself.”
Coming over to his chair, Mali bent to read the text. “Let me see what else it says,” she said.
“That’s all. The English part ended there.”
Taking The Book from him, Mali began to glance through it. She had begun to frown; her face was tense and stern. “Well here you are, Joe,” she said at last. “As I told. You’re in here by name.”
He took The Book from her and read rapidly.
Joseph Fernwright learns that Glimmung considers the Kalends and their Book his antagonist, and is said to be plotting to undermine the Kalends once and for all. How he will do this, though, is not known. Here the rumors begin to differ.
“Let me turn the pages,” Mali said; she examined the subsequent pages and then, her face darkening, paused. “In my language,” she said. For a long, long time she studied the passage, and as she read and reread it, her expression became more intense, shadowed by her own intense urgency into starkness. “It says,” she said at last, “that Glimmung’s Undertaking is the raising of the cathedral Heldscalla to dry land once more. And that he will fail.”
“Is there more?” Joe said. He had a feeling there was; her face showed it.
Mali said, “It says that most of those recruited to help Glimmung will be destroyed. When the Undertaking fails.” She corrected herself. “Toojic. Damaged or made to unexist. Maimed; that’s it. They will be permanently altered, beyond immediate repair.”
“Do you think Glimmung knows about these passages?” Joe said. “That he’ll fail and we’ll be—“
“Of course he knows. It’s there in the text, in that section you read. ‘Glimmung considers the Kalends and their book his antagonist and plots to undermine them.’ And, ‘He’s raising Heldscalla to undermine them.’
“It didn’t say that,” Joe said. “It reads, ‘How he will do this, though, is not known; here the rumors begin to differ.’”
“But obviously it’s the raising of Heldscalla.” She paced about the room in agitation, her hands clasped tightly together. “You said it yourself. ‘The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla.’ All you have to do is put the two passages together. I told you it was all there, our future, Heldscalla’s, Glimmung’s. And ours is to unexist, to die.” She halted, stared at him frantically. “That’s the way the Fog-Things perished. They challenged the Book of the Kalends. As the spiddles can tell you; the spiddles are still chattering about it.”
Joe said, “We had better tell the rest of the people here at the hotel about it.”
A knock sounded on the door; it opened, and Harper Baldwin peered apologetically into the room. “I’m sorry to bother the two of you,” he rumbled, “but we’ve been reading this book.” He held up his copy of the Book of the Kalends. “There’s stuff in it about all of us. I’m having the hotel management notify all its guests to meet in the main conference room in half an hour.”
“We’ll be there,” Joe said, and, beside him, Mali Yojez nodded, her partially disclosed body rigid with concern.
Half an hour later all of them, a hotelful of sentient organisms of forty kinds, filled the main conference room. Joe, looking about at the enormous variety of life-forms, saw, among them, several which he had eaten, back on Earth. Most of the forms he did not recognize. Glimmung had in fact gone to many star-systems to get the talent he wanted. More than Joe had realized.
“I think,” Joe said quietly to Mali, “that we ought to prepare ourselves for a full manifestation of Glimmung. He’ll probably show up here as he really is.”
Mali grated, “He weighs forty thousand tons. If he manifested himself here as he really is he’d collapse the building; he’d fall through the floor and down to the basement.”
“Then in some other form. Such as that of a bird.”
On the stage, at the microphone, Harper Baldwin rapped for silence. “Come on, folks,” he said, and, in all that vast variety of tongues needed, his words were translated into each earphone.
“You mean such as a chicken?” Mali said.
Joe said, “That’s not a bird; a chicken is fowl, barnyard fowl. I mean like a soaring great long-winged albatross.”
“Glimmung isn’t above lowly things,” Mali said. “Once he manifested himself to me—“ She broke off. “Never mind.”
“What this meeting is about, folks,” Harper Baldwin continued, “has to do with a book they have here that we’ve run across; now, those of you who’ve been on this planet longer probably know about it. If so, you’ve already formed your own—“
A multilegged gastropod rose up and spoke into its microphone. “Of course we are familiar with The Book. The spiddles sell it at the spaceport.”
Mali said into her own mike, “Our edition, being later than yours, may contain material you haven’t read.”
“We buy a new edition each day,” the gastropod said.
“Then you know it says that—the raising of Heldscalla will fail,” Joe said. “And that we’ll be killed.”
“It does not precisely say that,” the gastropod answered. “It says that those he employs will suffer, will receive some sort of blow which will permanently change them.”
An immense dragonfly took the floor by the simple expedient of flying up to Harper Baldwin’s entrenchment and landing on his shoulder. Challenging the gastropod it said, “There is no doubt, however, that the Book of the Kalends predicts the failure of the attempt to raise Heldscalla.”
The gastropod yielded the floor to a reddish jelly supported by a metal frame that held it upright; hence it could join in the discussion. As it spoke it flushed darkly, obviously very shy. “The burden of the text seems to state that the raising of the cathedral will fail. ‘Seems to state,’ I put it to you. I am a linguist, brought here by Mr. Glimmung for that reason; under the water in the cathedral there are countless documents. The key sentence, ‘The Undertaking will fail,’ appears one hundred and twenty-three times in The Book. I have read each of the translations and I submit that the text most properly means, ‘There will be failure after the Undertaking,’ that it will lead to failure, rather than it will fail.”
“I don’t see the difference,” Harper Baldwin said, frowning. “Anyhow the part that’s important for us is the part about our being killed or injured—not the failure of the Undertaking. Isn’t this Book always right? The creature that sold it to me said it was.”
The reddish jelly said, “The creature who sold that Book gets forty percent of the purchase price for itself. Naturally it says The Book is accurate.”
Stung by the jibe, Joe hopped to his feet. “Then by the same token you could indict all the doctors in the universe on the grounds that they make money when you’re sick, so they’re responsible for your being sick when you’re sick.”
Laughing, Mali tugged him back down into his seat. “Oh god,” she said, covering her mouth. “I don’t think anyone’s defended the spiddles in two hundred years. Now they have a—let’s see. A champagne.”
“Champion,” Joe growled, still feeling the heat of resentment. “It’s our lives,” he said to her, “that we’re talking about. This isn’t a political debate or a taxpayers’ meeting about the local transportation.”
An undercurrent of muttering moved about the room. The craftsmen and scientists were talking among themselves.
“I move,” Harper Baldwin brayed, “that we act collectively, that we form a permanent organization with officers who can deal as a deputation with Glimmung for the rights of us all. But before that, all of you friends and coworkers seated here today, or flying around the room here today, I suggest that we take an initial vote as to whether we want to work on the Undertaking at all. Maybe we don’t want to. Maybe we want to go home. Maybe we ought to go home. Let’s see how we feel collectively about it. Now, how many vote to go ahead and work—“ He broke off. A vast rumbling shook the conference room; Harper Baldwin’s voice had become inaudible. Talk, for any of them, was now out of the question.
Glimmung had come.
It must be the true manifestation, Joe decided as he watched and listened. It was in all respects the real Glimmung, Glimmung as he actually was. And so--.
Like the sound often thousand junked, rusty automobiles being stirred by one giant wooden spoon, Glimmung heaved himself up and onto the raised stage at the far end of the conference room. His body quivered and shuddered, and from deep inside him a moan became audible. The moan grew, rose, until it became a shriek. An animal, Joe thought. Caught, perhaps in a trap. One paw. And it’s trying to get loose but the trap is too complicated. And, at the same time, a great spewing forth of brackish sea water, trash fish, aquatic mammals, sea kelp—the room reeked with the roar and shock of the sea. And, in the center of all of it, the churning lump which was Glimmung.
“The hotel people aren’t going to like this,” Joe said half aloud. Good god—the huge mass of fluttering extremities, the whipping, writhing arms which flung themselves at every spot on the gigantic carcass . . . the whole thing heaved, and then, with a furious roar, it collapsed the floor beneath it; the mass disappeared from sight, leaving remnants of the sea all over the room. From the gaping chasm smokelike tendrils, probably steam, fizzled upward. But Glimmung was gone. As Mali had predicted, his weight had been too great. Glimmung was down in the basement of the hotel, ten floors below them.
Shaken, Harper Baldwin said into his microphone, “A-a-apparently we’ll have to go downstairs to talk to him.” Several life-forms hurried over to him; he listened, then straightened up and said, “I understand he’s in the cellar rather than on the next floor. He—“ Baldwin gestured in agitation. “—evidently went the whole way down.”
“I knew it would happen,” Mali said. “If he tried to come here. Well, we’ll have to conduct our words with him in the cellar.” She and Joe both got to their feet; they joined the crowd of life-forms gathered at the elevators.
Joe said, “He should have come as an albatross.”