Galactic Pot-Healer (7 page)

“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. Glimmung
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 OCA 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
tiling, 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 gray-haired 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.”