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.”
“That’s not true,” Joe said, with scathing anger. Everyone turned toward him, startled by his tone. “One vast old creature lives there. Apparently infirm. Nothing about an advanced city society.”
“Wait a minute,” Harper Baldwin said. “If there’s one thing Glimmung is not it’s infirm. Where’d you get your information, Fernwright? From the government encyclopedia?”
r /> Joe said uncomfortably, “Yes.” And secondhand, too.
“If the encyclopedia described Glimmung as infirm,” Miss Yojez said evenly, “I’d be interested to know what else it said. I’m just curious to see how far your knowledge of Plowman’s Planet departs from the reality situation.”
With growing discomfort, Joe said, “Dormant. Advanced age; hence senile. Hence harmless.” And harmlessness had not been apparent in Glimmung, at least as he had appeared to Joe. And to the others.
Standing, Mali Yojez said, “If you’ll please excuse me—I think I’ll go sit in the lounge and perhaps read a magazine or nap.” In brisk, short steps she departed from the passenger compartment.
“I think,” the plump woman busily knitting said, without looking up from her work, “that Mr. Fernwright ought to go to the lounge and apologize to Miss Whateverhernameis.”
His ears red, and the back of his neck prickling, Joe got to his feet and followed after Mali Yojez.
As he descended the three carpeted steps an eerie feeling came over him. As if, he thought, I’m going to my death. Or is it life, for the first time? The process of being born?
Someday he would know. But not now.
6
He found Miss Yojez, as she had declared, seated in one of the great soft couches of the lounge, reading Ramparts. She did not look up at him, but he took it for granted that she was aware of him. Therefore he said, “How—do you happen to know so much about Plowman’s Planet, Miss Yojez? I mean, you didn’t get your knowledge out of the encyclopedia. Obviously. As I did.”
Reading on, she said nothing.
After a pause Joe seated himself near her, hesitated, then, wondering what to say. Why had her statements about the society on Plowman’s Planet angered him so? He didn’t know; it seemed as irrational to him now as it had seemed to the others. “We have a new game,” he said, finally. She continued reading. “You search the archives for the funniest headlines ever printed, each player topping the others.” She still did not speak. “I’ll tell you the headline that struck me as the funniest,” he said. “It was hard to find; I had to look all the way back to 1962.”
Mali glanced up. Her face showed no great emotion, no resentment. Merely detached curiosity, of a social nature. No more. “And what was your headline, Mr. Fernwright?”
“ELMO PLASKETT SINKS GIANTS,” Joe said.
“Who was Elmo Plaskett?”
“That’s the point,” Joe said. “He came up from the minors; nobody ever heard of him. That’s what makes it funny. I mean, Elmo Plaskett—he came up for one day, hit one home run—”
“Basketball?” Miss Yojez asked.
“Baseball.”
“Oh yes. The game of inches.”
Joe said, “You have been on Plowman’s Planet?”
For a moment she did not answer and then she said, simply, “Yes.” He noticed that she had rolled the magazine into a tight cylinder, holding it with both hands, very tightly. And her face showed severe stress.
“So you know firsthand what it’s like. And you encountered Glimmung?”
“Not really. We knew he was there, half-dead or half-alive; whichever way you’d put it … I don’t know. Excuse me.” She turned away.
Joe started to say something further. And then he saw, in a corner of the lounge, what appeared to be an SSA machine. Getting to his feet he went over to it and inspected it.
“May I be of help, sir?” a stewardess said, and approached him. “Would you like me to seal the lounge off so that you and Miss Yojez can make love?”
“No,” he said. “I’m interested in this.” He touched the control panel of the SSA machine. “How much does it cost to use it?”
“SSA service is free during your flight for one time,” the stewardess said. “After that it takes two genuine dimes. Do you want me to set it up for you and Miss Yojez?”
“I’m uninterested,” Mali Yojez spoke up.
“How unfair to Mr. Fernwright,” the stewardess said, still smiling, but, in her voice, conveying a reprimand. “He can’t use it alone, you understand.”
“What do you stand to lose?” Joe asked Mali Yojez.
“You and I has no future together,” she answered.
“But that’s the whole point of the SSA machine,” Joe protested. “To find out what—”
“I know what it finds out,” Mali Yojez interrupted. “I’ve used they before. Okay,” she said abruptly. “So you can see how it works. As a—” She searched for the word. “Experience.”
“Thanks,” Joe said.
The stewardess began setting up the SSA machine in a rapid, efficient fashion, meanwhile explaining it. “SSA stands for sub specie aeternitatis; that is, something seen outside of time. Now, many individuals imagine that an SSA machine can see into the future, that it is precognitive. This is not true. The mechanism, basically a computer, is attached via electrodes to both your brains and it swiftly stores up immense quantities of data about each of you. It then synthesizes these data and, on a probability basis, extrapolates as to what would most likely become of you both if you were, for example, joined in marriage, or perhaps living together. I will have to shave two spots of hair on both your heads, please, in order to attach the electrodes.” She brought out a little stainless steel instrument. “How far ahead are you interested in?” she asked as she shaved the two spots on Joe’s skull and then on Mali Yojez’s. “A year? Ten years? You’re free to choose, but the less time-elapse you pick, the more accurate the extrapolation will be.”
“A year,” Joe said. Ten years seemed too remote; probably he would not even be alive, then.
“Is that agreeable to you, Miss Yojez?” the stewardess asked.
“Yes.”
“It will take the computer fifteen to seventeen minutes to gather, store, and process all the data,” the stewardess said, as she attached two electrodes to Joe’s scalp and then two to Mali Yojez’s. “Merely sit still and relax; there is of course no discomfort; you won’t feel a thing.”
Mali Yojez said tartly, “You and I, Mr. Fernwright. Together a whole year. What a mellow, friendly year.”
“You did this before?” Joe asked. “With another man?”
“Yes, Mr. Fernwright.”
“And the extrapolation was unfavorable?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry I rubbed you the wrong way, back there,” Joe said, feeling humble and profusely apologetic.
“You called me a—” Mali Yojez flipped through her dictionary. “A liar. In front of all. And I have been there and you have not.”
“What I meant to say—” he began, but the stewardess interrupted him.
“The SSA computer is gathering data from your minds, now. It would be best if you would relax and not quarrel for a time. If you could sort of gently free-float … let your minds open, open wide and let the probes gather data. Think of nothing in particular.”
That’s hard to do, Joe reflected. Under these circumstances. Maybe, he thought, Kate was right about me; in ten minutes I managed to insult Miss Yojez, my flight companion and an attractive girl…. He felt gloomy and oppressed. All I have to offer her is ELMO PLASKETT SINKS GIANTS. But maybe, he thought suddenly, she would be interested in pot-healing. Why didn’t I talk about that the first time around? he asked himself. After all, that’s the basis on which we’re here: our skills, experience, knowledge, training.
“I’m a pot-healer,” he said aloud.
“I know,” Mali Yojez said. “I read your biographical material; remember?” But she did not sound so miffed, now. Her hostility, conjured up by his ineptness, had abated.
“Are you interested in pot-healing?” Joe asked.
“I’m fascinated by it,” she answered. “That’s why I so—” She gestured, then again consulted her dictionary. “Delighted. To sit and talk with you. Tell me—is the pots perfect again? Not mended but…like you say; healed.”
Joe said, “A healed ceramic piece is in the exact condition as
before it broke. Everything fuses; everything flows. Of course, I have to have all the pieces; I can’t do it with a fraction of the pot not present.” I’m beginning to talk like she does, he said to himself. She must be a strong personality and I’m subconsciously sensing this. As Jung pointed out, there is the anima archetype, which men experience when they encounter women. The archetypal image projected onto first one woman and then the next, giving them a charismatic power. I had better be careful, he reflected. After all, my involvement with Kate suggests that my anima-figure is strong-willed and dominating, rather than receptive and passive. I don’t want to make the same mistake all over again, he said to himself. The mistake called Katherine Hurley Blaine.
“The SSA computer has obtained the data,” the stewardess informed him and Mali Yojez. She removed the electrodes from their scalps. “It will take two or three minutes for it to process them.”
“What form does its extrapolation take?” Joe asked. “Written on a paper ribbon in punch form, or—”
“You will be presented pictorially with a representative moment of your two lives entwined together a year from now,” the stewardess said. “Projected in 3-D and color on the far wall.” She lowered the lights in the lounge.
“Can I smoke?” Mali Yojez said. “We’re not bound by Terran law out here.”
“The smoking of tobacco cigarettes is forbidden on the ship during its entire flight,” the stewardess said. “Because of the high oxygen content of the retained atmosphere.”
The lights dimmed; everything around Joe sank into cloudy darkness, and each object became indistinct, including the girl beside him. A moment passed, and then an illuminated square materialized, in depth, near the SSA machine. Colors flashed by; colors and variegated images: he saw himself at work healing pots; he saw himself eating dinner; he saw her seated at her vanity table combing her hair. The images continued to flutter past, and then, all at once, the visual representation locked into place.