GALACTIC POT HEALER

8

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."