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.
2
Nothing more came down the mail tube that day and Joe Fernwright trudged “home.”
“Home” consisted of a room on a subsurface level of a huge apartment building. Once, the Jiffi-view Company of Greater Cleveland came by every six months and created a 3-D projection, animated, of a view of Carmel, California. This “view” filled his room’s “window,” or ersatz window. However, of late, due to his bad financial situation, Joe had given up trying to imagine that he lived on a great hill with a view of the sea and of towering redwoods; he had become content—or rather resigned—to face blank, inert, black glass. And in addition, if that wasn’t enough, he had let his psycho-lease lapse: the encephalic gadget installed in a closet of his room which, while he was “home,” compelled his brain to believe that his ersatz view of Carmel was authentic.
The delusion was gone from his brain and the illusion was gone from his window. Now, “home” from work, he sat in a state of depression, reflecting, as always, on the futile aspects of his life.
Once, the Cleveland Historical Artifacts Museum had sent him regular work. His hot-needle device had melded many fragments, had re-created into a single homogeneous unit one ceramic item after another as his father had before him. But that was over, now; all the ceramic objects owned by the museum had been healed.
Here, in his lonely room, Joe Fernwright contemplated the lack of ornamentation. Time after time, wealthy owners of precious and broken pots had come to him, and he had done what they wanted; he had healed their pots, and they had gone away. Nothing remained after them; no pots to grace his room in place of the window. Once, seated like this, he had pondered the heat-needle which he made use of. If I press this little device against my breast, he had ruminated, and turn it on, and put it near my heart, it would put an end to me in less than a second. It is, in some ways, a powerful tool. The failure which is my life, he had thought again and again, would cease. Why not?
But there was the strange note which he had received in the mail. How had the person—or persons—heard of him? To get clients he ran a perpetual small ad in Ceramics Monthly…and via this ad the thin trickle of work, throughout the years, had come. Had come and now, really, had gone. But this. The strange note!
He picked up the receiver of his phone, dialed, and in a few seconds faced his ex-wife, Kate. Blond and hard lined, she glared at him.
“Hi,” he said, in a friendly sort of fashion.
“Where’s last month’s alimony check?” Kate said.
Joe said, “I’m onto something. I’ll be able to pay all my back alimony if this—”
“This what?” Kate interrupted. “Some new nuthead idea dredged out of the depths of what you call your brain?”
“A note,” he said. “I want to read it to you to see if you can infer anything more from it than I can.” His ex-wife, although he hated her for it—and for a lot more—had a quick mind. Even now, a year after their divorce, he still relied on her powerful intellect. It was odd, he had once thought, that you could hate a person and never want to see them again, and yet at the same time seek them out and ask their advice. Irrational. Or, he thought, is it a sort of super-rationality? To rise above hate…
Wasn’t it the hate which was irrational? After all, Kate had never done anything to him—nothing except make him excessively aware, intently aware, always aware, of his inability to bring in money. She had taught him to loathe himself, and then, having done that, she had left him.
And he still called up and asked for her advice.
He read her the note.
“Obviously it’s illegal,” Kate said. “But you know your business affairs don’t interest me. You’ll have to work it out by yourself or with whoever you’re currently sleeping with, probably some eighteen-year-old girl who doesn’t know any better, who doesn’t have any basis for comparison as an older woman would have.”
“What do you mean ‘illegal’?” he asked. “What kind of pot is illegal?”
“Pornographic pots. The kind the Chinese made during the war.”
“Oh Christ,” he said; he hadn’t thought of that. Who but Kate would remember those! She had been lewdly fascinated by the one or two of them which had passed through his hands.
“Call the police,” Kate said.
“Anything else on your mind?” Kate said. “Now that you’ve interrupted my dinner and the dinner of everyone who’s over here tonight?”
“Could I come over?” he said; loneliness crept through him and edged his question with the fear which Kate had always detected: the fear that she would retract into her implacable chesspiece fort, the fort of her own mind and body out of which she ventured to inflict a wound, or two, and then disappear back in, leaving an expressionless mask to greet him. And, by means of that mask, she
used his own failings to injure him.
“No,” Kate said.
“Why not?”
“Because you have nothing to offer anyone in the way of talk or discussion or ideas. As you’ve said many times, your talent is in your hands. Or did you intend to come over and break one of my cups, my Royal Albert cups with the blue glaze, and then heal it? As a sort of magical incantation designed to throw everyone into fits of laughter.”
Joe said, “I can contribute verbally.”
“Give me an example.”
“What?” he said, staring at her face on the screen of the phone.
“Say something profound.”
“You mean right now?”
Kate nodded.
“Beethoven’s music is firmly rooted in reality. That’s what makes him unique. On the other hand, genius as he was, Mozart—”
“Shove it,” Kate said and hung up; the screen went blank.
I shouldn’t have asked if I could come over, Joe realized with acute misery. It gave her that opening, that foot-in-the-psychic-door that she uses, that she preys on. Christ, he thought. Why did I ask? He got up and wandered drearily about his room; his motion became more and more aimless until at last he stopped and simply stood. I have to think about what really matters, he told himself. Not that she hung up or said anything nasty, but whether or not that note I got in the mail today means anything. Pornographic pots, he said to himself. She’s probably right. And it’s illegal to heal a pornographic pot, so there goes that.
I should have realized it as soon as I read the note, he said to himself. But that’s the difference between Kate and me. She would know right away. I probably wouldn’t have known until I had finished healing it and then taken a good firm look at it. I’m just not bright, he said to himself. Compared to her. Compared to the world.
“The arithmetical total ejaculated in a leaky flow,” he thought fiercely. My best. At least I’m good at The Game. So what? he asked himself. So what?
Mr. Job, he thought, help me. The time has come. Tonight.
Going rapidly into the tiny bathroom attached to his room he grabbed up the lid of the water closet of the toilet. Nobody, he had often thought, looks into a toilet. There hung the asbestos sack of quarters.
And, in addition, a small plastic container floated. He had never seen it before in his life.
Lifting it from the water he saw, with disbelief, that it contained a rolled up piece of paper. A note, floating in the water closet of his toilet, like a bottle launched at sea. Oh, this can’t really be, he thought, and felt like laughing. I mean Christ; it just can’t. But he did not laugh, because he felt fear. Fear that bordered on dread. It’s another communication, he said to himself. Like the one in the mail tube today. But nobody communicates this way; it isn’t human!
He unscrewed the lid of the small plastic container and groped the enclosed piece of paper out. Yes, it had writing on it; he was right. He read the writing and then he read it again.
I WILL PAY YOU THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND CRUMBLES
What in god’s name is a crumble? he asked himself, and the dread sharpened into panic; he felt undernourished, strangulated heat rise to the back of his neck, a weak response somatically: his body, as well as his mind, was trying to adjust to this; it could not be done on a mental level alone, not this.
Returning to the main room he picked up the receiver of the phone and dialed the twenty-four-hour-a-day dictionary service.
“What’s a crumble?” he asked, when the robot monitor answered.
“A crumbling substance,” the computer fed to the monitor. “In other words fine debris. A small crumb or particle. Introduced into English 1577.”
“Other languages?” Joe asked.
“Middle English kremelen. Old English gecrymian. Middle High Gothic—”
“What about non-Terran languages?”
“On Betelgeuse seven in the Urdian tongue it means a small opening of a temporary nature: a wedge which—”
“That’s not it,” Joe said.
“On Rigel two it means a small life-form which scuttles—”
“Not that either,” Joe said.
“On Sirius five, in the Plabkian tongue ‘crumble’ is a monetary unit.”
“That’s it,” Joe said. “Now tell me how much in Earth money thirty-five thousand crumbles represents.”
The dictionary robot said, “I am sorry, sir, but you will have to consult the banking service for that answer. Please look in your phone book for the number.” It clicked off; the screen died away.
He looked up the number and dialed the banking service.
“We are closed for the night,” the banking-service robot monitor informed him.
“All over the world?” Joe said in amazement.
“Everywhere.”
“How long do I have to wait?”
“Four hours.”
“My life, my entire future—” But he was talking into a dead phone. The banking-service system had abolished the contact.
• • •
What I’ll do, he decided, is lie down and sleep for four hours. It was now seven o’clock; he could set the alarm for eleven.
A pressing of the proper button brought the bed sliding out from the wall, virtually to fill the room; it had been his living room and now it was his bedroom. Four hours, he said to himself as he set the mechanism of the bed’s clock. He lay down, made himself comfortable—as much so as the inadequate bed permitted—and groped for the toggle switch that induced immediately and powerfully the most profound sleep state possible.
A buzzer sounded.
The damn dream circuit, he said to himself. Even early like this do I have to use it? He leaped up, opened the cabinet beside the bed and got out the instructions. Yes, mandatory dreaming was required at any time he used the bed…unless, of course, he threw the sex lever. I’ll do that, he said to himself. I’ll tell it I’m having knowledge in the Biblical sense of a female person.
Once more he lay down and activated the sleep switch.
“You weigh one hundred and forty pounds,” the bed said. “And there is exactly that weight extended over me. Therefore you are not engaged in copulation.” The mechanism voided his throwing of the sleep toggle switch, and at the same time the bed began to warm up; the heating coils in it blatantly glowed beneath him.
He could not argue with an angry bed. So he turned on the sleep-dream interaction and shut his eyes, resignedly.
Sleep came at once; it always did: the mechanism was perfect. And, at once, the dream—which everyone anywhere in the world who was now asleep was also dreaming—clicked on.
One dream for everyone. But, thank god, a different dream each night.
“Hello, there,” a cheerful dream-voice declared. “Tonight’s dream was written by Reg Baker and is called In Memory Engraved. Now remember, folks; send in your dream ideas and win huge cash prizes! And if your dream is used you receive an all-expense paid trip off Earth entirely—in any direction you desire!”
The dream began.
Joe Fernwright stood before the Supreme Fiduciary Council in a state of trembling awe. The Secretary of the S.F.C. read from a prepared statement. “Mr. Fernwright,” he declared in a solemn voice, “you have, in your engraving shop, created the plates from which the new money will be printed. Your design, out of over one hundred thousand presented to us, and many of them created with what must be called fantastic cunning, has won. Congratulations, Mr. Fernwright.” The Secretary beamed at him in a fatherly manner, reminding him a little of the Padre presence, which he now and then made use of.
“I am pleased and honored,” Joe responded, “by this award, and I know that I have done my part to restore fiscal stability to the world as we know it. It little matters to me that my face will be pictured on the brightly colored new money, but since it is so, let me express my pleasure at this honor.”
“Your signature, Mr. Fernwright,” the Secretary reminded him, in the fashion of a wise father. “You
r signature, not your face, will appear on the currency notes. Where did you get the idea that it would be your likeness as well?”
“Perhaps you don’t understand me,” Joe said. “Unless my face appears on the new currency I will withdraw my design, and the entire economic structure of the Earth will collapse, seeing as how you’ll have to go on using the old inflationary money which has by now become virtually waste paper to be thrown away at the first opportunity.”
The Secretary pondered. “You would withdraw your design?”
“You read me loud and clear,” Joe, in his dream, in their dream, said. At this same moment roughly one billion other people on Earth were withdrawing their designs as he now was doing. But of course he had no thought of that; he only knew this: without him the system, the whole nature of their corporate state, would break apart. “And as to my signature, I will, as that great dead hero of the past Ché Guevara did, that noble person, that fine man who died for his friends, because of memory of him I will merely write ‘Joe’ on the bills. But my face must be of several colors. Three at least.”
“Mr. Fernwright,” the Secretary said, “you strike a hard bargain. You are a firm man. You do, in fact, remind me of Ché, and I think all the millions watching on TV will agree. Let’s hear it now for Joe Fernwright and Ché Guevara both together!” The Secretary threw aside his prepared statement and began to clap. “Let’s hear it out there from all you good people; this is a hero of the state, a new firm-minded man who has spent years working to—”
Joe’s alarm woke him up.
Christ, he said to himself; he sat up groggily. What was that about? Money? Already it had become hazy in his mind. “I made the money,” he said aloud, blinking. “Or printed it.” Who cares? he said to himself. A dream. Compensation, by the state, for reality. Night after night. It’s almost worse than being awake.