Galactic Pot-Healer (18 page)

“Hurry,” Joe said.

The phone’s screen showed a variety of unnatural colors, and then upon it there appeared the rugged, gray, massive
head of Harper Baldwin. “Yes, Mr. Fernwright?” He, like the tower, showed acute nervousness. “We’re just leaving. I understand a false Glimmung is headed this way. Unless we take off immediately—”

“The orders are changed,” Joe said. “Glimmung is alive and well and wants you all here at the aquatic staging center. As soon as possible.”

A cool, practical, competent face appeared on the vidscreen. A near-female face. “This is Hilda Reiss. In a situation like this our only viable alternative is to evacuate Plowman’s Planet; I thought you understood that. I told Miss Yojez—”

“But Glimmung wants you here,” Joe said. The red tape; the damn red tape. He held the note from Glimmung before the vidscreen. “You recognize his writing? As his personal, private secretary you should.”

She peered, forehead wrinkled. “‘It will no longer be necessary for anyone to leave the planet,’” she read aloud. “‘Notify them that I am all right. And tell them—’”

Joe held the next note before the screen.

“‘Get the others,’” Miss Reiss read. “I see. Well, that is certainly quite distinct.” She eyed Joe. “All right, Mr. Fernwright. We will hire werj drivers and vehicles and come to the staging center posthaste. You can expect us in ten or fifteen minutes. For a number of reasons I hope that the false Glimmung let loose will not destroy us on the way. Bye.” She rang off, then. The screen became dark, the receiver silent.

Ten minutes, Joe thought. And with the Black Glimmung over their heads. They’ll be lucky if they can get any werjes to drive them. Even the autonomic tower, a synthetic construct, had been worried.

The hope of their arriving at the aquatic staging center seemed dim.

• • •

Half an hour passed. There was no sign of a hovercraft, no manifestation of the group. It got them, Joe Fernwright said to himself. They are finished. And, meanwhile, Glimmung battles the Black Cathedral at the bottom of Mare Nostrum. Everything is being decided right now.

Why don’t they come? he asked himself violently. Did it get them? Are they corpses floating in the water or drying to bleached teeth and bones on the land? And Glimmung. What about him? Even if they get here, everything still depends on Glimmung’s victory over the Black Cathedral. If he dies then they have come here for nothing; we will all leave, leave here, leave the planet. Back to overcrowded Earth for me, with phony money, the vets’ dole, the empty cubicle where nothing happens. And The Game, the goddam Game. For the remainder of my life.

I’m not going to leave here, he said to himself. Even if Glimmung dies. But—what would this world be like without Glimmung? Ruled by the Book of the Kalends … a mechanistic world, each day cranked out by The Book; a world without freedom. The Book will tell us each day what we are going to do, and we will do it. And, eventually, The Book will tell us we are going to die, and we will—

Die. He thought, The Book was wrong; it said what I found down below the surface of the ocean would cause me to kill Glimmung.
And it didn’t
.

But Glimmung could still die; the prophecy could still come true. Two battles remain: the battle to destroy the Black Cathedral, and the battle, the terrible task, of lifting Heldscalla to the surface. Glimmung could die during either; he could be dying right now. And all our hopes with him.

He turned on the radio to see if there was any news.

“Impotent?” the radio said. “Unable to achieve an orgasm? Hardovax will turn disappointment into joy.” Another voice, then, that of a miserable male. “Gosh, Sally, I don’t know what’s been the matter with me. I know you’ve noticed
that I’m completely flaccid of late. Gosh, everyone’s noticed.” A female voice, then. “Henry, what you need is a simple pill called Hardovax. And in days you’ll be a real man.” “‘Hardovax’?” Henry echoed. “Gosh, maybe I should try it.” Then the announcer’s voice again. “At your nearby drugstore or write direct to—” Joe shut it off, at that point. Now I know what Willis meant, he said to himself.

A large hovercar landed at the miniature field of the staging center. He heard it arrive; he felt the building quiver and vibrate. So they made it, he said to himself, and hurried toward the field to meet them. His legs felt like heated thermoplastic; he could barely support himself.

Harper Baldwin, tall and stern, emerged first. “There you are, Fernwright.” Harper Baldwin shook hands cordially with Joe; he seemed relaxed, now. “It was quite a battle.”

“What happened?” Joe said, as the sharp-faced middle-aged woman stepped out. Chrissakes, he thought. Don’t just stand there; tell me. “How did you get away from it?” he asked as the reddish, heavyset man emerged, then the matronly woman, and, after her, the timid little fellow.

Mali Yojez, appearing, said, “Calm down, Joe. You get so agitated.”

Now the nonhumanoid life-forms made their way from the hovercraft onto the small field. The multilegged gastropod, the immense dragonfly, the furry ice cube, the red jelly supported by its metal frame, the univalvular cephalopod, the kindly looking bivalve Nurb K’ohl Dáq, the quasiarachnid, its chitinous shell gleaming, its many legs drumming…and then the portly, rope-tailed werj driver himself. The various forms scuttled, wiggled, walked, and haltingly slithered under the protection of the three hermetically sealed domes of the staging center, getting themselves out of the nocturnal cold. Mali, alone, remained with Joe—except for the werj driver, who loitered nearby, smoking some peculiar form of native grass. It looked pleased with itself.

“Was it that bad?” Joe asked Mali.

Still pale and tense, but, like Harper Baldwin, beginning to unwind, Mali said, “It was awful, Joe.”

“And no one is going to talk about it,” Joe said.

“I’ll talk,” Mali said. “Just give me a moment.” Holding out her hand to the werj she said, “Just give me a moment.” She trembled, then got out a cigarette, smoked rapidly, passed the cigarette to Joe. “When Ralf and I were here we got to using this. I find it helpful.” He shook his head no, and Mali nodded. “Let’s see.” She ruminated. “After your call we got out of the ship. As we were leaving the ship the Black Glimmung approached and began to circle the ship. We hailed this werj and—”

“I took off,” the werj said, proudly.

“Yes, it took off,” Mali continued. “It was told the situation, fully and completely, in case it didn’t want to take us, and it flew almost touching the ground; it flew I would say on an average of ten feet above the nearby buildings and then the open country. And, most important of all, it took a route it was familiar with.” To the werj she said, “I forget why you developed that strange anabasis. Explain again.”

The werj removed the cigarette from its gray lips and said, “Income-tax violators.”

“Yes,” Mali said to Joe, nodding. “Plowman’s Planet has a huge income tax, roughly seventy percent of earned gross income, as an average … it varies, of course, depending on the bracket. You see, the werjes usually drive that route the other way; that is, starting in a distant residential spot and zigzagging, et cetera, to the spaceport, avoiding the native police and tax agents and getting the passenger aboard a ship before he’s caught. Once on the ship he’s safe, because the ship is recognized as extranational territory, like an embassy.”

“I can always get them there,” the werj said sleekly. “Onto a ship, before they’re caught. No police cruiser, even with
radar, can spot me as I zero in on the spaceport. In ten years I’ve only been stopped once, and that time I was clean.” It grinned as it puffed on its cigarette.

Joe said, “You mean the Black Glimmung took off after you?”

“No,” Mali said. “It crashed into the ship, a few minutes after we vacated it. The ship was totally destroyed, according to what we heard over the air, and the Black Glimmung was injured.”

“Then why did you need an elaborate escape route?” Joe asked, bewildered.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Mali said. “I understand from Hilda Reiss that Glimmung is currently attacking the Black Cathedral. Have you heard any further word, since the note Miss Reiss saw over the vidphone?”

“No,” Joe said. “I haven’t looked; I was waiting for all of you to show up.”

“One more minute,” Mali said, “aboard that ship, sitting there, waiting for takeoff, and we would have been killed. It was too close, Joe. I wouldn’t want to live through it again. I think it thought the ship was alive because the ship was so large. And we were too small; it apparently never saw the hovercar.”

“Funny things happen on this planet,” the werj said. Now it was picking its teeth with its elongated thumbnail. It all at once held out its hand.

“What do you want?” Joe said. “To shake hands?”

“No,” the werj said. “I want .85 of a crumble. They said you’d pay the bill for me bringing them here over my extra-good escape type route.”

“Bill Glimmung,” Joe said.

“You don’t have .85 of a crumble?” the werj asked.

“No,” Joe said.

“Do you?” the werj said to Mali.

“None of us has been paid,” Mali said. “We’ll pay you when Glimmung pays us.”

“I could call in the police,” the werj said, but fundamentally it appeared to be reconciled. Basically, Joe decided, it’s a humble creature. It will let us pay later.

Mali took his arm and led him indoors; the werj remained behind, glowering fruitlessly. But it did not try to halt them. “I think,” Mali said, “that we’ve gained a great victory. I mean by our escape from the Black Glimmung, and its injury; I understand that it’s still there at the spaceport, and the authorities are trying to decide what to do with it. They’ll wait until Glimmung tells them what they should do. That’s the way they’ve worked for decades, in fact since Glimmung came here. At least that’s what Ralf used to say. He was very interested in the way Glimmung ran this planet; he used to say—”

“What if Glimmung does die?” Joe said.

“Then the werj won’t get paid,” Mali said.

“I’m not thinking about that,” Joe said. “I mean this: if Glimmung dies, will the Black Glimmung be patched up and allowed to rule this planet? In his place? As the next best substitute?”

“Lord knows,” Mali said. She joined the group, the variegated life-forms from a variety of planets; arms folded, she stood listening to what Harper Baldwin was saying to the kindly bivalve.

“Faust always dies,” Harper Baldwin said.

Nurb K’ohl Dáq answered, “Only in Marlowe’s play and in the legends which Marlowe drew on.”

“Everyone knows that Faust dies,” Harper Baldwin said; he surveyed the group of life-forms gathered in a circle around him and the bivalve. “Isn’t that true?” he asked them all.

Joe said, “It’s not preordained.”

“Yes it is!” Harper Baldwin said emphatically. “In the Book of the Kalends. Specifically. Look again. We’ve lost sight of it; we should have left when we could, when our ship was getting ready to fire off its launch rockets.”

“Then we would have died,” the quasiarachnid said, its
many arms waving in excitement. “The Black Glimmung would have killed every one of us, the moment it hit our ship.”

“That’s true,” Mali put in.

“Actually that’s so,” Nurb K’ohl Dáq said, in his kindly way. “We are here only because Mr. Fernwright was able to reach Miss Hilda Reiss and tell us that Glimmung wanted us to evacuate the ship, which we did, and not a moment—”

“Balls,” Harper Baldwin said angrily.

Joe picked up his torch and walked from the staging area to the wharf. He shone the helium-powered bright light out onto the surface of dark water, seeking for—something. Anything. Any sign of Glimmung’s condition. He examined his watch. Nearly an hour had passed since Glimmung had met the Black Glimmung and had dropped to the floor of Mare Nostrum, to do fatal battle with his Doppelganger, and, after that, to struggle with the Black Cathedral itself. Is he alive? Joe wondered. Would his corpse float to the surface, or, like mine, would it remain down below in the realm of decay, rotting into offal, hiding in a box or other construct, not alive and yet not totally inert? A kind of semisentient state that might continue for centuries. And—the Black Cathedral would be free to rise to the surface and onto dry land. Once Glimmung is dead then nothing can halt it.

Maybe there was a further note. He searched the water for a bottle; he whisked the light here and there, sweeping out an enormous area.

No bottle. Nothing.

Mali came up beside him. “Anything?”

“No,” he said curtly.

“Do you know what I think?” Mali said. “I think, as I’ve always thought, that he’s fated to fail. The Book is right and Harper Baldwin is right. Faust always fails and Glimmung is an incarnation of Faust. The striving, the restless intensity…it’s all there; the legend is fulfilled, in fact is being fulfilled right now as we stand here.”

“Maybe so,” Joe said, still lashing the water with shafts of white light.

Mali took his arm and nuzzled close to him. “It’s safe, now. We could leave. The Black One isn’t after us anymore.”

“I’m staying here.” Joe moved away from her, still sweeping the water with his torch. No thoughts crossed his mind; mentally he was blank, merely listening passively, waiting. Waiting for a clue, a sign.
Any
sign of what was going on below.

All at once the water stirred. He swung the torch, lit up that general area. He strained to see.

Something enormous was attempting to come to the surface. What was it? Heldscalla? Glimmung? Or—the Black Cathedral? He waited, trembling. The vast object made the water boil and hiss; clouds of steam traveled upward and the night was alive with a full roaring, a cauldron of haste and activity and titanic effort.

Mali said quietly, “It’s Glimmung. And he’s badly hurt.”

The hoop of fire had been extinguished. Only one hoop turned, the hoop of water, and it grated piercingly … as if, Joe thought, a machine is dying, not a living creature.

The others of the group made their way to the wharf. “He’s failed,” the red jelly supported by the metal frame said. “You can see; he’s beginning to die.”