GALACTIC POT HEALER

13

"Oh god," Mali said, standing close to Joe. "It's the Black One. Coming to meet him."

From the sea the Black Glimmung ascended, meeting the authentic Glimmung in midair. Feathers flew in all directions as the two creatures raked each other with their claws; then, almost at once, the tangled mass of the two of them dropped like a stone into the water. On the surface they thrashed momentarily, and it seemed to Joe—unless it was an illusion—that the authentic Glimmung was struggling to extricate himself.

Both Glimmungs disappeared. Out of sight, into the depths of Mare Nostrum.

"It pulled him under," Mali whispered in a stricken voice. To the robot, Joe said, "Is there anything we can do? To help him? To get him free?" He's drowning, Joe realized. This will kill him.

"He will emerge," the robot said.

"You can't be sure of that," Joe said; Mali, beside him, echoed his words. "Has this ever happened before?" Joe demanded. "Glimmung pulled under?" Instead of lifting Heldscalla up, he realized, Glimmung had been dragged down... to join the Black Glimmung and the Black Cathedral forever. Like my corpse; a lifeless thing floating about in the form of mere debris. Dwelling in a box.

"I can fire an HB cartridge into the water," the robot said. "But a warhead like that would kill him, too."

"No," Mali said emphatically.

"This did happen once before," Willis said, reflecting. "In Terran time—" It calculated. "Late in 1936. About the time of the summer Olympics, held in Berlin, that year."

Mali said, "And he made it back up?"

"Yes, Mrs. Lady," Willis answered. "And the Black One slid back down to the bottom again. Where it has remained until now. By coming here, Glimmung took a calculated risk; he knew it might disturb the Black One. That's why he said, ‘You've forced my hand.' You did. It's been forced; he's down there now."

Flashing his torch out onto the water, Joe saw something bobbing about. An object which reflected light. "Do you have a power boat?" he asked Willis.

"Yes, Mr. Sir," the robot said. "Do you want to go out there? What if they come boiling up?"

"I want to see what that is out there," Joe said. He already had a good idea.

Grudgingly, the robot went off in search of the boat.

A few minutes later the three of them put-putted their way out onto the dark and turbulent surface of Mare Nostrum.

"There it is," Joe said. "A few yards to the right." He held the object fixed with his torch as the boat approached it. Reaching out, he groped for the thing; his fingers closed over its handle and he lifted it back, into the boat.

A large bottle. And, in the bottle, a note.

"Another message from Glimmung," Joe said acidly as he unscrewed the lid of the bottle and dumped the note out; it fluttered onto the bottom of the boat and he retrieved carefully. Holding it in the light of the torch he read it.

Watch this place for hourly progress reports. Cordially, Glimmung. P.S. If I'm not up by morning, notify everybody that the Project has been scrubbed. Get back to your own planets as best you can. My best to you all. G.

"Why does he do this?" Joe asked the robot. "Why does he leave notes in bottles and reach people via radio programs and—"

"An idiosyncratic method of interpersonal communication," the robot answered as they put-putted back toward the staging center. "As long as I've known him he's dribbled out opaque, elliptical chunks of information in indirect ways. In your opinion, how ought he to communicate? By satellite?"

"He might as well," Joe said, and felt gloom descend over him in a morbid, taciturn cloud. He withdrew silently into himself; shivering with cold he awaited their arrival back at the staging area.

"He's going to die," Mali said quietly.

"Glimmung?" Joe asked.

She nodded. In the dim light her face seemed ghostly; across it vague shadows flitted, like ebbing tides.

"Did I ever tell you about The Game?" Joe said.

"I'm sorry; at this moment I—"

"It works this way. You take a book title, preferably one well known, and you feed it orally into a computer in Japan, which translates it into Japanese. Then you—"

"Is that what you're going back to?" Mali asked.

"Yes it is," he said.

"I should feel sorry for you," Mali said. "But I can't. You brought this on all of us—you've destroyed Glimmung, who meant to save you from your puerile pastimes. He meant to restore the dignity of work to you in a heroic enterprise, a joint enterprise involving hundreds of us, from a multitude of planets."

"But Mr. Sir had to go below," the robot said.

"Exactly," Mali said.

"The Book of the Kalends made me do it," Joe said.

"No it didn't," the robot said. "You had it in your mind to go below Mare Nostrum before the Kalend showed up and got you to read that passage in The Book."

"A man must do what aids his humanity," Joe said.

"What does that mean?" Mali demanded.

"A figure of speech," Joe said lamely. "What I mean is: like with the mountain climbers... it is there." And now, he thought, I have killed Glimmung, as The Book foretold. The Kalend was right. The Kalends are always right. Glimmung is dying as we sit here in this boat, put-putting back to the staging area. Without me, without my descent into Mare Nostrum, he would be alive and functioning. They are right. It's my fault—as Glimmung himself said, there at the end, before the Black Glimmung rose from the sea to do battle with him.

"How do you feel, Joe Fernwright?" Mali asked him. "Knowing what you did, knowing what you are responsible for?"

"Well," Joe said, "I suggest we keep watching the hourly progress reports." It sounded weak even to him; as he said it his voice faded away, ebbed at last into silence. The three of them continued on, no one speaking, until they reached the dock of the staging area and Willis was securing the boat.

"'The hourly progress reports,'" Mali said sardonically as they climbed up onto the wharf. The bright lights of the staging area blazed around them, giving Mali and Willis an unnatural cast, a kind of blanched-lead aspect, as if they were mimicking human life in a macabre, unnatural way. Or, he thought, as if I've killed them, too, and these are their corpses. But a robot, he decided, does not have a corpse. It's the lighting and the fact that I'm tired. He had never felt such exhaustion in his life; as he climbed he wheezed for air, his lungs aching. It was as if he had tried, by his own muscles, to lift Glimmung out of the sea and back onto dry land—and safety.

Which, he thought, Glimmung deserves.

"It's an interesting story," Joe said, to change the subject, "about how Glimmung first contacted me. I was sitting in my cubicle, with nothing to do, and the mail light lit up. I pressed the button, and down the pipe came—"

"Look," Mali interrupted quietly; her voice was low but deeply intense. She pointed out over the water, and Joe turned his torch in that direction. "It's frothing. From the struggle underneath. The Black Glimmung swallows Glimmung; the Black Cathedral swallows the cathedral; Amalita and Borel are forgotten, and so is Glimmung. Nothing survives; nothing comes back up out of the water." She turned her back and continued on into the staging area.

"Just a moment," the robot said. "I think a call is coming through for Mr. Sir. As before, an official call." The robot became silent and then it said, "Glimmung's personal secretary. She wants to talk to you once again." The door of the robot's chest swung open and, as before, on its tray appeared the audio telephone. "Please pick up the receiver," the robot instructed.

Once again Joe picked up the receiver. He felt weights, attached to his arms, drag him down; he had to struggle to hold the receiver up high enough so that he could hear.

"Mr. Fernwright?" The professional, adequate, female voice. "This is Hilda Reiss, again. Is Glimmung there with you?"

"Tell her," Mali said. "Tell her the truth."

Joe said, "He's at the bottom of Mare Nostrum."

"Is that so, Mr. Fernwright? Do I understand you correctly?"

"He went down into the Aquatic Sub-World," Joe said. "All of a sudden. None of us expected it."

"I don't think I'm understanding you properly," Miss Reiss said. "You seem to be saying—"

"He's fighting with everything he's got," Joe said. "I'm sure he'll emerge eventually. He says he'll be sending up hourly progress reports. So I don't think there's really too much to worry about."

"Mr. Fernwright," Miss Reiss said briskly, "Glimmung only sends out hourly progress reports when he's in distress."

"Hmm," Joe said.

"Do you understand me?" Miss Reiss snapped.

"Yes." Joe nodded.

"Did he go under voluntarily or was he dragged under?"

"A little bit of both," Joe said. "There was a confrontation." He gesticulated, finding it difficult to bring forth the right words. "Between the two of them. But Glimmung decidedly seemed to have the upper hand. Or should I say pseudopodium?"

"Let me talk to her," Mali said; she seized the phone, tugged it from his hand, and spoke into it. "This is Miss Yojez." An interval of silence. "Yes, Miss Reiss; I know that. Yes, I know that, too. Well, as Mr. Fernwright says, he may emerge victorious. We must have faith, as the Bible says." Again a prolonged period of listening. Then she glanced up at Joe, held her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, said, "She wants us to try to get a message down to Glimmung."

"What message?" Joe said.

Into the phone Mali said, "What message?"

"No message," Joe said to Willis, "is going to be of any help to him. There isn't anything we can do." He felt utterly impotent, more so than at any other time of his life. The sense of the proximity of death, which had haunted him during his depressed periods, dilated in him, and in undismayed fury; he felt it numb his guts, his heart, his nervous system. Awareness of guilt clung to him like a satin, ornate cloak. Shame so pure that it had virtually an archetypal quality to it, as if he were reexperiencing the primordial shame of Adam, the first sense of conspicuousness before the sight of God. He felt hatred for himself, for the fecklessness of his conduct; he had brought his benefactor into jeopardy—and the entire planet as well. I'm a Jonah, he said to himself. The Kalends are right; I have come here to blight this planet with my presence. And Glimmung must have known... yet, he brought me here anyhow. Perhaps because I needed this; for my sake. Christ, he thought. And this is now the end. Look how I've paid him back: with death.

Mali hung up the phone. Her face, strained and taut, moved until she confronted Joe Fernwright directly; she gazed at him without blinking for a long, long time. She gazed at him with fire-swollen intensity, and then, spent, she shuddered and ducked her head down, as if swallowing. "Joe," she said huskily, "Miss Reiss says for us to give up. To leave here and go back to the Olympia Hotel for our things. And then—" She paused, her face knotting profoundly. "And then leave Plowman's Planet and return to our own worlds."

"Why?" Joe said.

"Because there's no hope. And once Glimmung is—" She made a convulsive gesture. "Is dead, then the scourge will descend on everybody on the planet. So we should get... you know... out."

Joe said, "But the note in the bottle said to watch for hourly progress reports."

"There will be no progress reports."

"Why not?"

She said nothing; she did not amplify.

Chilled with fear, Joe said, "Is she going to leave?"

"Yes, but first Miss Reiss will be staying behind to route everybody to the spaceport. There's an intersystem ship that can begin loading at any time. She hopes to have everyone on it within the next hour." To Willis, Mali said, "Call me a taxi."

"You have to say, ‘Willis, call me a taxi,' "the robot said.

"Willis, call me a taxi."

"You're leaving?" Joe asked. He felt surprise and, in addition, a further sinking of his life sense.

"We've been told to," Mali said simply.

Joe said, "We've been told to watch for hourly progress reports."

"You damn fool," Mali said.

"I intend to stay here," Joe said.

"All right, stay here." To Willis she said, "Did you call for a cab?"

"You have to say—"

"Willis, did you call for a cab?"

"They're all busy," the robot said. "Shuttling people from every corner of this rusty old world of ours to the spaceport."

Joe said, "Let her have the vehicle you and I came here in."

"Then you're sure you don't intend to leave?" the robot asked.

"I'm sure," Joe said.

"I think I can follow your reasoning," Mali said. "It was you who made this come about, this trouble crisis. So you feel it would be immoral to leave, to save yourself."

"No," he said. Truthfully, he said, "I'm too tired. I can't face going back home. I'll take a calculated risk. If Glimmung returns to dry land then we can continue with the raising of Heldscalla. If not—" He shrugged.

"Fake bravery," Mali said.

"Fake nothing. Just weariness. Get going; take off for the spaceport. The end could come any minute, as you well know."

"Well, anyhow that's what Miss Reiss told me," Mali said, somewhat apologetically. She loitered, clearly divided in her mind as to what to do. "If I stay—" she began, but Joe cut her off.

"You're not staying. You and everyone else. Except me."

"May I interpose a point?" Willis inquired. Neither of them replied, so it continued. "It was never Glimmung's intention that anyone die with him. Hence Miss Reiss's instructions to all of you; she is following his dictates. Undoubtedly he left a standing order with her that if he were killed she would get everyone off the planet, hopefully in time. Do you see, Mr. Sir?"

"I see," Joe said.

"Then you'll leave with Miss Lady?"

"No," Joe said.

"Terrans are known for their stupidity," Mali said scathingly. "Willis, drive me to the spaceport direct; I'll leave my things in my apartment. Let's go."

"Goodby, Mr. Sir," Willis said to Joe.

"Rots of ruck," Joe said.

"What does that mean?" Mali demanded.

"Nothing. An archaic drollery." He walked away from the two of them, to the wharf; standing there he gazed sightlessly down at the moored boat, and, in it, the bottle and note. Rots of ruck to me, too, he thought. "It was never a very good drollery anyhow," he said to no one in particular. To Glimmung, he thought. Luck to him. Down in Mare Nostrum, where I ought to be. Where we all should be. Fighting, as he is fighting, the Black Entities that have never lived. Death on the move, he thought; animated death. Death with an appetite.

He said aloud, " ‘Cursed with an appetite keen I am.'"

They had gone. He stood alone in the staging center. And, presently, he heard rockets, a low murmur of power that shook the building: they had taken off.

"From Princess Ida," he said, to no one. "Sung by Cyril, in act two, in the gardens of Castle Adamant." He was silent, then, listening. He could no longer hear rockets. What a hell of a thing, he thought. A really lousy hell of a thing. And I brought it on. The Book made a pool ball out of me, an object set in motion, as in Aristotle's view of the world. One moving pool ball hits the next; it hits a third; that is the essence of life.

Would Mali and Willis have known what he was quoting from? Mali no... but Willis was familiar with Yeats. Surely it would be equally familiar with W. S. Gilbert. Yeats. He then thought this:

Q. Do you like Yeats?

A. I don't know, I've never tried any.

For a time his mind was empty and then he thought this:

Q. Do you like Kipling?

A. I don't know, I've never kippled.

Anguish and despair filled him as these thoughts passed through his brain. I've gone mad, he said to himself. Only rubbish occupies my attention; I am flattened by pain. What is going on down there?

He stood on the dock, gazing out across the water. Firm and smooth—the surface hid anything beneath; he could get no idea from what he saw, no understanding. And then--.

A quarter mile from the staging area the water began violently to churn. Something huge rose to the surface, thrashed about, and then tore itself loose. The vast object spread wings which beat ineffectually; the wings continued beating, slowly, as if the creature were exhausted. And then, in a ragged, careening flight, the thing rose up. It pumped its wings up and down, and yet it did not rise more than a few feet from the surface.

Glimmung? He strained to see as the thing drew closer; it pumped and flapped until it reached a dome of the staging area. It did not land, however; laboriously it continued past; he heard and felt it go by overhead in the night's darkness.

At the same time an autonomic alarm, triggered by the thing's proximity, tripped on; a recorded, stentorian voice began to speak from horns here and there throughout the structure.

"Attention! A false Glimmung is active! Take emergency procedures under condition Three! Attention! A false Glimmung—" It boomed on and on.

The flailing, thrashing object which had risen from the sea was not Glimmung.