Galactic Pot-Healer (17 page)

Mali hung up the phone. Her face, strained and taut, moved until she confronted Joe Fernwright directly; she gazed at him without blinking for a long, long time. She gazed at him with fire-swollen intensity, and then, spent, she shuddered and ducked her head down, as if swallowing. “Joe,” she said huskily, “Miss Reiss says for us to give up. To leave here and go back to the Olympia Hotel for our things. And then—” She paused, her face knotting profoundly. “And then leave Plowman’s Planet and return to our own worlds.”

“Why?” Joe said.

“Because there’s no hope. And once Glimmung is—” She made a convulsive gesture. “Is dead, then the scourge will descend on everybody on the planet. So we should get…you know…
out.”

Joe said, “But the note in the bottle said to watch for hourly progress reports.”

“There will be no progress reports.”

“Why not?”

She said nothing; she did not amplify.

Chilled with fear, Joe said, “Is she going to leave?”

“Yes, but first Miss Reiss will be staying behind to route everybody to the spaceport. There’s an intersystem ship that can begin loading at any time. She hopes to have everyone
on it within the next hour” To Willis, Mali said, “Call me a taxi.”

“You have to say, ‘Willis, call me a taxi,’” the robot said.

“Willis, call me a taxi.”

“You’re leaving?” Joe asked. He felt surprise and, in addition, a further sinking of his life sense.

“We’ve been told to,” Mali said simply.

Joe said, “We’ve been told to watch for hourly progress reports.”

“You damn fool,” Mali said.

“I intend to stay here,” Joe said.

“All right, stay here.” To Willis she said, “Did you call for a cab?”

“You have to say—”

“Willis, did you call for a cab?”

“They’re all busy,” the robot said. “Shuttling people from every corner of this rusty old world of ours to the spaceport.”

Joe said, “Let her have the vehicle you and I came here in.”

“Then you’re sure you don’t intend to leave?” the robot asked.

“I’m sure,” Joe said.

“I think I can follow your reasoning,” Mali said. “It was you who made this come about, this trouble crisis. So you feel it would be immoral to leave, to save yourself.”

“No,” he said. Truthfully, he said, “I’m too tired. I can’t face going back home. I’ll take a calculated risk. If Glimmung returns to dry land then we can continue with the raising of Heldscalla. If not—” He shrugged.

“Fake bravery,” Mali said.

“Fake nothing. Just weariness. Get going; take off for the spaceport. The end could come any minute, as you well know.”

“Well, anyhow that’s what Miss Reiss told me,” Mali said, somewhat apologetically. She loitered, clearly divided in her
mind as to what to do. “If I stay—” she began, but Joe cut her off.

“You’re not staying. You and everyone else. Except me.”

“May I interpose a point?” Willis inquired. Neither of them replied, so it continued. “It was never Glimmung’s intention that anyone die with him. Hence Miss Reiss’s instructions to all of you; she is following his dictates. Undoubtedly he left a standing order with her that if he were killed she would get everyone off the planet, hopefully in time. Do you see, Mr. Sir?”

“I see,” Joe said.

“Then you’ll leave with Miss Lady?”

“No,” Joe said.

“Terrans are known for their stupidity,” Mali said scathingly. “Willis, drive me to the spaceport direct; I’ll leave my things in my apartment. Let’s go.”

“Goodby, Mr. Sir,” Willis said to Joe.

“Rots of ruck,” Joe said.

“What does that mean?” Mali demanded.

“Nothing. An archaic drollery.” He walked away from the two of them, to the wharf; standing there he gazed sightlessly down at the moored boat, and, in it, the bottle and note. Rots of ruck to me, too, he thought. “It was never a very good drollery anyhow,” he said to no one in particular. To Glimmung, he thought. Luck to him. Down in Mare Nostrum, where I ought to be. Where we all should be. Fighting, as he is fighting, the Black Entities that have never lived. Death on the move, he thought; animated death. Death with an appetite.

He said aloud, “‘Cursed with an appetite keen I am.’”

They had gone. He stood alone in the staging center. And, presently, he heard rockets, a low murmur of power that shook the building: they had taken off.

“From
Princess Ida,”
he said, to no one. “Sung by Cyril, in act two, in the gardens of Castle Adamant.” He was silent,
then, listening. He could no longer hear rockets. What a hell of a thing, he thought. A really lousy hell of a thing. And I brought it on. The Book made a pool ball out of me, an object set in motion, as in Aristotle’s view of the world. One moving pool ball hits the next; it hits a third; that is the essence of life.

Would Mali and Willis have known what he was quoting from? Mali no…but Willis was familiar with Yeats. Surely it would be equally familiar with W. S. Gilbert. Yeats. He then thought this:

Q. Do you like Yeats?

A. I don’t know, I’ve never tried any. For a time his mind was empty and then he thought this:

Q. Do you like Kipling?

A. I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.

Anguish and despair filled him as these thoughts passed through his brain. I’ve gone mad, he said to himself. Only rubbish occupies my attention; I am flattened by pain. What is going on down there?

He stood on the dock, gazing out across the water. Firm and smooth—the surface hid anything beneath; he could get no idea from what he saw, no understanding. And then—

A quarter mile from the staging area the water began violently to churn. Something huge rose to the surface, thrashed about, and then tore itself loose. The vast object spread wings which beat ineffectually; the wings continued beating, slowly, as if the creature were exhausted. And then, in a ragged, careening flight, the thing rose up. It pumped its wings up and down, and yet it did not rise more than a few feet from the surface.

Glimmung? He strained to see as the thing drew closer; it pumped and flapped until it reached a dome of the staging area. It did not land, however; laboriously it continued past; he heard and felt it go by overhead in the night’s darkness.

At the same time an autonomic alarm, triggered by the
thing’s proximity, tripped on; a recorded, stentorian voice began to speak from horns here and there throughout the structure.

“Attention! A false Glimmung is active! Take emergency procedures under condition Three! Attention! A false Glimmung—” It boomed on and on.

The flailing, thrashing object which had risen from the sea was not Glimmung.

The worst alternative had come about. Glimmung had been defeated. He realized it as he heard the alarm and listened to the heavy rustle of giant, preoccupied wings. The thing had a mission. It was heading in a calculated direction. Where? Joe wondered. Reflexively he cringed; even without landing it cast its terrible weight over the planet’s surface. And over him as well. It seemed as if he bore the thing, at least momentarily. It’s not interested in me, he said to himself, as he crouched, eyes shut, his body drawn into a fetal position.

He said aloud, “Glimmung.”

There was no answer.

It’s heading toward the spaceport, he said to himself. They will never leave this planet. Going that way—he sensed the determination in its exhausted straining. Glimmung had damaged it but not destroyed it. And Glimmung lay at the bottom of Mare Nostrum, probably—almost certainly—dying.

I’ve got to go below, Joe realized. I have to dive once more, to see if there’s anything I can do for him. Frantically, he began collecting his previous diving gear; he found oxygen
tanks, the transparent mask, flippers, his torch; he located weights to fix his belt…feverishly he worked. And, as he crept into the skintight suit, he realized that it didn’t matter. He was too late.

And, he thought, even if I find him I have no way of grappling him; I have no hoist by which to bring him up. And who can heal him? Not me. Not anyone.

He gave up. He began stripping the suit and weighted belt from him. His half-paralyzed fingers plucked at the zipper—the job of desuiting lay almost beyond his capacity.

A disaster of a trade, he thought. Glimmung now on the ocean bottom; the Black Glimmung, the false Glimmung, in charge of the sky. Everything has been reversed, and a dangerous situation has become a catastrophe.

But at least, he thought, it didn’t try to get me. It flapped on past … in search of greater prey.

He gazed out across the water; he shone his torch on the spot where Glimmung and his antithesis had sunk. What appeared to be bits of hide and broken clumps of feathers shone pale and sticky in the light of the torch. And a deep stain eddying out in greater and greater circles like oil. Blood, he thought. The thing is hurt, all right. Unless that’s Glimmung’s blood.

Stiffly, his arms shaking, he managed to creep down into the moored power boat. Presently he had put-putted out to the spot; the blood slick glistened on all sides of his boat as he shut off the power to the engine and merely drifted. The flotsam told him nothing. Even so, he remained there, listening to the sound of waves flopping blindly against a dark coastline somewhere behind him. Experimentally, he reached his hand down into the water and brought it out. The slime, in torch light, looked black. But it was blood. Fresh blood and lots of it. Blood from something which had been permanently maimed. Beyond hope of recovery.

It—whoever lost this blood—will die in a matter of days, he decided. Or possibly hours.

From the depths of the ocean a bottle floated up. At once he spotted it with his torch, snapped the power on to the engine, and put-putted toward it; reaching, he lifted the bottle into the boat.

A note. He uncorked the bottle, shook the note out into his waiting hand. By torch light he read it.

In disbelief he reread the words. Is it a gag? he wondered. Fake bravado at a time like this? And that was exactly what the pot had called Glimmung:
a fake
. And, by extension, the note itself a forgery, not really from Glimmung; like the words on the pot, this could be a product of the cathedral—not the Black counterpart but by the Heldscalla which Glimmung intended—or had intended—to raise. “I have routed the opposition,” he echoed in his mind as he reread the note once again. There is a credibility gap here, he decided. The enemy, as it thrashed its way out of the water and into the air, had seemed damaged but not mortally so. It was Glimmung, unable to ascend from the ocean floor, who seemed to Joe to be mortally damaged, despite this note.

A second bottle, smaller than the previous two, floated to the surface. He sequestered it, unscrewed the lid, and read the brief note within.

“But it’s too late,” Joe said aloud. They’re leaving right now. Glimmung, you waited too long. I am the only one left. I and the robots; in particular Willis. And we are not much.
Nothing at all compared with the gigantic and varied crew which you assembled for the task of raising Heldscalla. Your Project has come to an end.

And what was more this note could be a forgery, too. An attempt by the cathedral to hold onto everyone, to keep them from leaving the planet as Miss Reiss had ordered. However, the note had the authentic ring of Glimmung’s style. If the notes were forgeries, they were good ones.

Taking the last sheet of paper, Joe wrote an answer on the back of it in block letters.

He stuffed the note in one of the bottles, put in a weight from his belt, screwed tight the lid, and dropped the bottle over the side of the boat. It sank immediately. And, almost immediately, came bobbing back up. He fished it in and opened it.

Obediently, but without conviction, Joe put-putted back to the lit-up staging area. He located a vidphone—there were several—and when connected asked the autonomic phone system to connect him with the tower at the planet’s sole spaceport.

“When did the last major ship take off?” he asked the tower.

“Yesterday.”

“Then you have an intersystem ship on your pad right now?”

“Yes, we do.”

Good news, and yet, in a sense, ominous news, too. Joe said, “Glimmung wants it halted and the passengers dispersed so that they can come here.”

“You have authority to speak for Mr. Glimmung?”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Trove it.”

“He told me orally.”

“Prove it.”

“If you let the ship go,” Joe said, “then Heldscalla will never be raised. And Glimmung will destroy you.”

“Let’s see you verify that.”

“Let me talk to Miss Reiss,” Joe said.

“Who is Miss Reiss?”

“Aboard the ship. Glimmung’s private secretary.”

“I can’t take orders from her either. I’m autonomic.”

“Did a huge flapping thing, completely black, come your way?”

“No.”

“Well,” Joe said, “it’s heading there. It should show up any time. Everyone on board the ship will die because you won’t tell them to disperse.”

“Neurotic panic alarms cannot dissuade me,” the tower said, but it sounded uneasy, now. There was a pause; Joe sensed it straining to see and hear at the farthest reach of its sensory apparatus. “I—” the tower said haltingly. “I think I see it.”

“Disperse the ship’s passengers,” Joe said. “Before it’s too late.”

“But they’ll be sitting hens,” the tower said.

“Ducks,” Joe corrected.

“My point is clear though the metaphor be wrong,” the tower said. But now it sounded uncertain of itself. “Perhaps I could put you through to someone aboard the ship.”