GALACTIC POT HEALER

1

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.