Philip Dick - GALACTIC POT HEALER

"He will emerge," the robot said.

"You can't be sure of that," Joe said; Mali, beside him, echoed his words. "Has this ever happened before?" Joe demanded. "Glimmung pulled under?" Instead of lifting Heldscalla up, he realized, Glimmung had been dragged down... to join the Black Glimmung and the Black Cathedral forever. Like my corpse; a lifeless thing floating about in the form of mere debris. Dwelling in a box.

"I can fire an HB cartridge into the water," the robot said. "But a warhead like that would kill him, too."

"No," Mali said emphatically.

"This did happen once before," Willis said, reflecting. "In Terran time—" It calculated. "Late in 1936. About the time of the summer Olympics, held in Berlin, that year."

Mali said, "And he made it back up?"

"Yes, Mrs. Lady," Willis answered. "And the Black One slid back down to the bottom again. Where it has remained until now. By coming here, Glimmung took a calculated risk; he knew it might disturb the Black One. That's why he said, ‘You've forced my hand.' You did. It's been forced; he's down there now."

Flashing his torch out onto the water, Joe saw something bobbing about. An object which reflected light. "Do you have a power boat?" he asked Willis.

"Yes, Mr. Sir," the robot said. "Do you want to go out there? What if they come boiling up?"

"I want to see what that is out there," Joe said. He already had a good idea.

Grudgingly, the robot went off in search of the boat.

A few minutes later the three of them put-putted their way out onto the dark and turbulent surface of Mare Nostrum.

"There it is," Joe said. "A few yards to the right." He held the object fixed with his torch as the boat approached it. Reaching out, he groped for the thing; his fingers closed over its handle and he lifted it back, into the boat.

A large bottle. And, in the bottle, a note.

"Another message from Glimmung," Joe said acidly as he unscrewed the lid of the bottle and dumped the note out; it fluttered onto the bottom of the boat and he retrieved carefully. Holding it in the light of the torch he read it.

Watch this place for hourly progress reports. Cordially, Glimmung. P.S. If I'm not up by morning, notify everybody that the Project has been scrubbed. Get back to your own planets as best you can. My best to you all. G.

"Why does he do this?" Joe asked the robot. "Why does he leave notes in bottles and reach people via radio programs and—"

"An idiosyncratic method of interpersonal communication," the robot answered as they put-putted back toward the staging center. "As long as I've known him he's dribbled out opaque, elliptical chunks of information in indirect ways. In your opinion, how ought he to communicate? By satellite?"

"He might as well," Joe said, and felt gloom descend over him in a morbid, taciturn cloud. He withdrew silently into himself; shivering with cold he awaited their arrival back at the staging area.

"He's going to die," Mali said quietly.

"Glimmung?" Joe asked.

She nodded. In the dim light her face seemed ghostly; across it vague shadows flitted, like ebbing tides.

"Did I ever tell you about The Game?" Joe said.

"I'm sorry; at this moment I—"

"It works this way. You take a book title, preferably one well known, and you feed it orally into a computer in Japan, which translates it into Japanese. Then you—"

"Is that what you're going back to?" Mali asked.

"Yes it is," he said.

"I should feel sorry for you," Mali said. "But I can't. You brought this on all of us—you've destroyed Glimmung, who meant to save you from your puerile pastimes. He meant to restore the dignity of work to you in a heroic enterprise, a joint enterprise involving hundreds of us, from a multitude of planets."

"But Mr. Sir had to go below," the robot said.

"Exactly," Mali said.

"The Book of the Kalends made me do it," Joe said.

"No it didn't," the robot said. "You had it in your mind to go below Mare Nostrum before the Kalend showed up and got you to read that passage in The Book."

"A man must do what aids his humanity," Joe said.

"What does that mean?" Mali demanded.

"A figure of speech," Joe said lamely. "What I mean is: like with the mountain climbers... it is there." And now, he thought, I have killed Glimmung, as The Book foretold. The Kalend was right. The Kalends are always right. Glimmung is dying as we sit here in this boat, put-putting back to the staging area. Without me, without my descent into Mare Nostrum, he would be alive and functioning. They are right. It's my fault—as Glimmung himself said, there at the end, before the Black Glimmung rose from the sea to do battle with him.

"How do you feel, Joe Fernwright?" Mali asked him. "Knowing what you did, knowing what you are responsible for?"

"Well," Joe said, "I suggest we keep watching the hourly progress reports." It sounded weak even to him; as he said it his voice faded away, ebbed at last into silence. The three of them continued on, no one speaking, until they reached the dock of the staging area and Willis was securing the boat.

"'The hourly progress reports,'" Mali said sardonically as they climbed up onto the wharf. The bright lights of the staging area blazed around them, giving Mali and Willis an unnatural cast, a kind of blanched-lead aspect, as if they were mimicking human life in a macabre, unnatural way. Or, he thought, as if I've killed them, too, and these are their corpses. But a robot, he decided, does not have a corpse. It's the lighting and the fact that I'm tired. He had never felt such exhaustion in his life; as he climbed he wheezed for air, his lungs aching. It was as if he had tried, by his own muscles, to lift Glimmung out of the sea and back onto dry land—and safety.

Which, he thought, Glimmung deserves.

"It's an interesting story," Joe said, to change the subject, "about how Glimmung first contacted me. I was sitting in my cubicle, with nothing to do, and the mail light lit up. I pressed the button, and down the pipe came—"

"Look," Mali interrupted quietly; her voice was low but deeply intense. She pointed out over the water, and Joe turned his torch in that direction. "It's frothing. From the struggle underneath. The Black Glimmung swallows Glimmung; the Black Cathedral swallows the cathedral; Amalita and Borel are forgotten, and so is Glimmung. Nothing survives; nothing comes back up out of the water." She turned her back and continued on into the staging area.

"Just a moment," the robot said. "I think a call is coming through for Mr. Sir. As before, an official call." The robot became silent and then it said, "Glimmung's personal secretary. She wants to talk to you once again." The door of the robot's chest swung open and, as before, on its tray appeared the audio telephone. "Please pick up the receiver," the robot instructed.

Once again Joe picked up the receiver. He felt weights, attached to his arms, drag him down; he had to struggle to hold the receiver up high enough so that he could hear.

"Mr. Fernwright?" The professional, adequate, female voice. "This is Hilda Reiss, again. Is Glimmung there with you?"

"Tell her," Mali said. "Tell her the truth."

Joe said, "He's at the bottom of Mare Nostrum."

"Is that so, Mr. Fernwright? Do I understand you correctly?"

"He went down into the Aquatic Sub-World," Joe said. "All of a sudden. None of us expected it."

"I don't think I'm understanding you properly," Miss Reiss said. "You seem to be saying—"

"He's fighting with everything he's got," Joe said. "I'm sure he'll emerge eventually. He says he'll be sending up hourly progress reports. So I don't think there's really too much to worry about."

"Mr. Fernwright," Miss Reiss said briskly, "Glimmung only sends out hourly progress reports when he's in distress."