He saw, in 3-D and in color, himself and Mali holding hands and walking, slowly, along the twilight beach of some deserted, other world. The fish-eye lens-system zoomed in, and he saw his own face and hers. Both their faces expressed the most tender love possible. He knew at once, seeing his expression a year from now, that he had never had such a look on his face; life had never held anything like that before for him. Perhaps, he thought, it had never held this for her either. He glanced toward her but could not make out her features; he could not see how she was taking this.
“My, but you two look happy,” the stewardess said.
Mali Yojez said, “Please leave us. Now.”
“Well,” the stewardess said. “I’m very sorry I was here at all.” She left the lounge; the door clicked after her.
“They’re everywhere,” Mali Yojez said, by way of explanation. “The entire flight. They never leave you. Leave alone.”
“But she showed us how the mechanism worked,” Joe said.
“Hell, I can make a SSA machine work; I’ve it several times done.” She sounded cross and tense, as if what she saw did not appeal to her.
“It looks like we’d be good for each other,” Joe offered.
“Oh Christ!” Mali Yojez screeched; she banged her fist down on the arm of her chair. “That’s what it said before. I and Ralf. Perfect outworking in everywhere. And it were not!” Her voice sank to a husky growl; her anger pervaded the lounge, as palpable as animal musk. He felt her glowering next to him; he intuited her immense emotional reaction to the representative scene projected by the machine.
“As the stewardess explained,” Joe said, “the SSA mechanism can’t see the future; it can only put together all the data from my mind and yours and work out a trend of greatest probability.”
“Why then use it at all?” Mali Yojez countered.
“Consider it like fire insurance,” Joe said. “You’re sort of putting yourself in the position of claiming fraud because your rooming house didn’t burn down after all, in other words that you really didn’t need the insurance.”
“The analogy is imperfect.”
Joe said, “Sorry.” He, too, felt irritable, now. And, as before, at her.
“Do you think,” Mali said bitingly, “that I’m to go to bed with you because of this scene of us holding our hands? Tunuma mokimo hilo, kei dei bifo ditikar sewat,” she said in her own tongue; obviously profanity.
There sounded a knock on the door. “Hey, you two,” Harper Baldwin bawled. “We’re working out the logistics of our collective employment; we need both of you.”
Joe got up and made his way through the darkness of the lounge to the door.
For two hours they haggled. And at no time did they reach any kind of joint conclusion.
“We just don’t know enough about Glimmung,” Harper Baldwin complained, looking weary. He then scrutinized Mali Yojez intently. “I have the feeling that you know more about Glimmung than any of us, and a lot more than you’ll admit. Hell, you even kept back from us the fact that you ever were on Plowman’s Planet; if you hadn’t mentioned it to Fernwright—”
“Nobody asked her,” Joe said. “Until I did. And she said so, straight out.”
A muffled, gangly youth asked, “What do you think, Miss Yojez? Is Glimmung trying to help us, or has he in effect created a slave population of experts for his own ends? Because if it’s the latter we better get this ship turned around before we get any closer to Plowman’s Planet.” His voice squeaked with nervousness.
Seated beside Joe, Mali Yojez leaned toward him and said in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here; let’s go back to the lounge. We are getting nowhere and I want to talk to you farther.”
“Okay,” he said, pleased; he stood up and so did she. Together they made their way down the aisle toward the lounge.
“There they go,” Harper Baldwin complained. “What’s the great attraction about the lounge, Miss Yojez?”
Mali paused and said, “We besport ourself amorously.” She then continued on.
“You shouldn’t have told them that,” Joe said as he and she entered the lounge and closed the door. “They probably believed you.”
“But it’s true,” Mali said. “A person doesn’t normally use the SSA machine unless he’s serious. To the other person, in this case I.” She seated herself on the couch of the lounge and reached up her arms toward him.
He locked the lounge door first. It seemed, all circumstances considered, a reasonable thing to do.
Joys too fierce, he thought, too fierce to be expressed. Whoever said that understood.
7
In orbit around Plowman’s Planet, the ship began firing its retrorockets, cutting its velocity. They would be landing in half an hour.
Meanwhile, Joe Fernwright amused himself in a mordant way: by reading The Wall Street Journal; he had found over the years that this newspaper, out of all of them, contained the most chilling and the most recent oddities. Reading the Journal was like taking a little trip into the future—six months or so.
A new deep-depth rooming house in New Jersey, designed especially for geriatric persons, has built into it a novel circuit, designed to make the transfer of the room easy and without delay. When a roomer dies, electronic detectors in the wall register his lack of pulse, and send swift circuits into action. The deceased is grappled by standard waldoes, drawn into the wall of the room, where on the spot his remains are incinerated within an asbestos chamber, thus permitting the new tenant, also a geriatric case, to take possession by noon.
He ceased reading, tossed down the newspaper. We must be better off out here, he decided. If that’s what they’ve got planned for us back on Earth.
“I’ve verified our reservations,” Mali said matter-of-factly. “We all have rooms at the Olympia Hotel in the largest city on the planet; Diamond Head, it’s called, because it’s on a winding prominence that goes fifty milies out into Mare Nostrum.”
“What’s ‘Mare Nostrum’?” Joe asked.
“‘Our Ocean.’”
He showed the item in the Journal to her and then, silently, to the rest of the passengers. They all read it and then they all looked at one another for sign of a reaction.
“We made the right choice,” Harper Baldwin said. The others nodded. “That’s good enough for me,” Baldwin said. He shook his head and scowled, disgust and anger contorting his face. “And we built such a society,” he rasped.
Strong-armed members of the ship’s crew manually unscrewed the hatch; outside air eddied in, smelling odd and cold. It seemed to Joe that the ocean was close; he sensed it in the air. Shielding his eyes he gazed out against a weak sun; he distinguished the outline of a reasonably modern-looking city, and, past it, hills in a mixture of brown and gray. But the ocean is somethere nearby, he said to himself. Mali is right; this is a planet dominated by an ocean. And it is in the ocean that we will find everything that matters.
Smiling with mechanical courtesy, the stewardesses escorted them to the open hatch and the flight of stairs which led down to the damp surface of the field. Joe Fernwright took Mali by the arm and led her down; neither of them spoke for a time—Mali seemed absorbed in herself, taking no notice of the other people or the spaceport buildings. Bad memories, Joe reflected. Maybe what happened to her happened here.
And for me, he thought; look what this is for me. The first interplanetary or intersystem flight in my life. This ground under me is not Earth. A very strange and important thing is happening to me. He smelled the air. Another world and another atmosphere. It feels strange, he decided.
“Don’t say,” Mali said, “that you find this place ‘unearthly.’ Please, for my sake.”
“I don’t get it,” Joe said. “It is unearthly. It’s completely different.”
“Never mind,” Mali said. “A little game Ralf and I had. A long time ago. Thingisms, we called them. Let’s see if I can remember some of them. He thought all of them up. ‘The book business is hidebound.’ Tha
t’s one. ‘Plants are taking over the world sporadically.’ Let’s see. ‘The operator let me off the hook.’ I always liked that; it made me think of a giant hook, in fact a whole giant phone. ‘In 1945 the discovery of atomic energy electrified the world.’ Do you see?” She glanced at him. “You don’t,” she said. “Never mind.”
“They’re all true statements,” Joe said. “As far as I can make out. What’s the game part?”
“‘The senate inquiry into modern use of side arms was muzzled.’ How do you like that one? I saw that in a newspaper. I think Ralf found the others in newspapers or heard them over TV; I think all they were real.” She added somberly, “Everything about Ralf was real. For the beginning. But then later, no.”
A careful, brown, large creature resembling a rat approached Joe and Mali. It held what appeared to be an armload of books.
“Spiddles,” Mali said, pointing to the careful ratlike creature, and to a second one which had accosted Harper Baldwin. “One of the native life-forms, here. Unlike Glimmung. You will find—let me see.” She counted on her fingers. “Spiddles, wubs, werjes, klakes, trobes, and printers. Left over from the old days … all of them older species, when the Fog-Things of antiquity passed away. It wants you to buy a book.”
The spiddle touched a tiny tape recorder mounted on its belt; the tape began to speak for the spiddle. “Fully documented history of a fascinating world” it said in English, and then evidently repeated this in a variety of other tongues; anyhow it had stopped speaking in English.
“Buy it,” Mali said.
“Pardon?” Joe said.
“Buy its book.”
“You know this book? What book is it?”
Mali said, with rigorous patience, “There is only one book. In this world.”
“By ‘world,’” Joe said, “you mean ‘planet,’ or in the larger sense—”
“On Plowman’s Planet,” Mali said, “there is just this one book.”
“Don’t the people get tired of reading it?”
“It changes,” Mali said. She handed the spiddle a dime, which it accepted gratefully; a copy of the book was passed to her and she in turn passed it to Joe.
Examining it, Joe said, “It has no title. And no author.”
“It is written,” Mali said, as they walked on toward the spaceport buildings, “by a group of creatures or entities—I don’t the English know—that records everything that passes on Plowman’s Planet. Everything. Great and small.”
“Then it’s a newspaper.”
Mali halted; she turned to face him, her eyes burning with exasperation. “It is recorded first,” she said, as steadily as she could manage. “The Kalends spin the story; they enter it in the ever-changing book without a title, and it comes to about, finally.”
“Precognitive,” Joe said.
“That raises a question. Which is cause? Which is effect? The Kalends wove in their altering, evolving script that the Fog-Things would pass away. They did pass away. Did then the Kalends make them pass away? The spiddles think so.” She added, “But the spiddles are very superstitious. They naturally believe that.”
Joe opened the book at random. The text was not in English; he did not recognize the language or even the letters of its alphabet. But then, as he leafed through it, he came to a short section in English, embedded in the mass of alien-looking entries.
The girl Mali Yojez is an expert at removing coral deposits from submerged artifacts. Other individuals brought from various systems throughout the galaxy include geologists, structural engineers, hydraulic engineers, seismologists; one specializes in underwater robot operations and another, an archaeologist, is a master at locating buried, ancient cities. A peculiar many-armed bivalve lives in a tank of salt water and functions well in supervising the raising of sunken ships for salvage purposes. A gastropod, capable of
At that point the text lapsed into another language; he shut the book, pondered. “Maybe I’m mentioned in here somewhere,” he said, as they reached the moving sidewalk leading to the concourse sections of the spaceport terminal building-complex.
“Of course,” Mali said calmly. “If you long look enough you will find it. How will you make it—pardon. How will it make you feel?”
“Eerie,” he said, still pondering.
A surface car, acting as a taxi, transported them to their hotel. Joe Fernwright, on the short trip, continued to examine the untitled book; it preoccupied him, preempting the colorful shops which the taxi passed, and the several life-forms bustling about here and there—he was aware of the city street, its people, and buildings, but only dimly. Because he had already found another passage in English.
Obviously, the Undertaking involves the locating of and the raising and repair of an underwater structure, probably—due to the number of engineers involved—of great magnitude. Almost certainly an entire city or even an entire civilization, very likely of some remote past age.
And then, once again, the text lapsed into a foreign script resembling dots and dashes, a sort of binary system of annotation.
Joe said to the girl beside him in the taxi, “The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla.”
“Yes,” Mali said shortly.
“But where’s the precognition?” Joe demanded. “This is remarkably up to date—right up to this minute, give or take an hour—but that’s all.”
“You will find it,” Mali said, “when you have looked a long time. It is buried. Among the different texts, which are all translations of one primary text, one line like a thread. The thread of the past entering the present, then entering the future. Somewhere in that book, Mr. Fernwright, the future of Heldscalla is written. The future of Glimmung. The future of us. We are all woven in by the yarn of the Kalends’ time, their time-outside-of-time.”
Joe said, “And you already knew about this book, before the spiddle sold it to you.”
“I saw it before when Ralf and I were here. The SSA machine extrapolated we’d be joyous, and the Kalends’ book, this book, said Ralf would—” She paused. “He killed himself. First he tried to kill me. But—he wasn’t able to.”
“And the Kalends’ book said that.”
“Yes. Exactly that. I remember it, Ralf and I reading in the text about ourselves and not believing. Still under the idea that the SSA mechanism was scientific data-analysis and this book was tale by old wife, a lot of old wives, seeing doom when we and the SSA machine saw happihood.”
“Why did the SSA machine miss?”
“It missed because it didn’t have one datum. Whitney’s Syndrome. Psychotic reaction to amphetamines by Ralf. Paranoia and murderous hostility. He thought himself overweight; he took them as—” She hunted for the word.
“Appetite suppressants,” Joe said. “Like alcohol.” Good for some people, he thought; lethal for others. And Whitney’s Syndrome didn’t require overdoses; even a small amount triggered it off. If the latent illness was already there. Just as, for an alcoholic, the smallest drink meant defeat and bitter, utter, final destruction. “Too bad,” he murmured.
The taxi pulled up to the curb. Its driver, a beaverlike creature with wicked, cutting teeth, said several words in a language which Joe did not understand; Mali, however, nodded and gave the beaverish individual a sum of metal money from her purse, and then she and Joe stepped from the taxi onto the sidewalk.
Joe, looking around him, said, “It’s like going back a hundred and fifty years.” Surface cars, carbon arc lighting…this could be Earth in the days of President Franklin Roosevelt, he thought to himself, both enticed and amused. He liked it. The pace, he realized; it’s slower. And the density of population—relatively few organisms propelled themselves up and down the street, either on foot (or a reasonable substitute) or in cars.
“You can see why I got angry at you,” Mali said, catching his reaction. “For your defaming Plowman’s Planet, my home for six years. And now—” She gestured. “I’m back. And doing again what I did then: bel
ieving faith in a SSA mechanism.”
“Let’s go inside the hotel,” Joe said, “and have a drink.”
Together, they passed through the revolving door, into the Olympia Hotel, with its wooden floors, carved hardwood decorations, polished brass doorknobs and railings, and thick red carpet. And its antique elevator, which Joe had already caught sight of. Nonautomatic, he discovered. The elevator required an attendant.
In his hotel room, with its dresser, splotched mirror, iron bed, and canvas windowshade elegance, Joe Fernwright sat on an overstuffed, faded chair and studied The Book.
Not long ago he had been preoccupied with The Game. And now—The Book. But this consisted of something quite different, and the more he read of The Book the more he realized it. Gradually, as he nosed among its pages, he began to assemble, in his mind, the totality of the English text; he had begun to put the separate bits in superimposition over one another.
“I’m going to take a bath,” Mali said. She had already opened her suitcase and had laid most of her clothes out on the bed in her room. “Isn’t it strange, Joe Fernwright?” she called. “That we have to keep two rooms. Like a century ago.”
“Yes,” he said.
She entered the room, wearing only her tight pants; bare from the waist up, he saw. Small-breasted but dense and tall, with fine muscle tone. The body of a dancer, he said to himself, or—a Cro-Magnon female, a hunter, an astute, supple person accustomed to long, lean, even fruitless marches. There was not a gram of useless flesh on her, as he had already discovered in the locked lounge of the ship. He had clutched it then; now he saw it. However, he thought morbidly, Kate had—actually still has—as good a figure. That made him depressed. He returned to reading The Book.
“Would you have wanted to go to sleep with me,” Mali said, “if I were a cyclops?” She pointed to a spot above her nose. “One eye there. Polyphemus; the cyclops in The Odyssey. They put his one eye out with a burning stick, I think.”