Glimmung said, “This is a ‘larger matter.’”
“Why?”
“Because there are no small matters. Just as there is no small life. The life of an insect, a spider; his life is as large as yours, and yours is as large as mine. Life is life. You wish to live as much as I do; you have spent seven months of hell, waiting day after day for what you needed . . . the way a spider waits. Think about the spider, Joe Fernwright. He makes his web. Then he makes a little silk cave at the end of the web to sit in. He holds strands that lead to every part of the web, so that he will know when something to eat, something he must have to live, arrives. He waits. A day goes by. Two days. A week. He waits on; there is nothing he can do but wait. The little fisherman of the night . . . and perhaps something comes, and he lives, or nothing comes, and he waits and he thinks, ‘It won’t come in time. It is too late.’ And he is right; he dies still waiting.”
“But for me,” Joe said, “something came in time.”
“I came,” Glimmung said.
Joe said, “Did you pick me because of—“ He hesitated. “Out of pity?”
“Never,” Glimmung said. “The Raising will take great skill, many skills, many knowings and crafts, vast numbers of arts. Do you still have that potsherd with you?”
Joe got the small divine fragment from his coat pocket; he put it down on the lunch counter, beside the empty bowl of soup.
“Thousands of them,” Glimmung said. “You have, I should guess, a hundred more years of life. It can’t be done in a hundred years; you will step among them, the beautiful little pieces, until the day you die. And you will get your wish; you will be, until the end. And, having been, you will always exist.” Glimmung looked at the Omega wristwatch that circled his humanoid wrist. “They will be announcing your flight in two minutes.”
After he had been strapped to his couch, and the pressure helmet had been screwed over his head, he managed to twist around so that he could hopefully see his flight companion, the person beside him.
Mali Yojez, the tag read. He squinted and saw that it was a girl, non-Terran but humanoid.
And then the first thrust rockets ignited and the ship began to rise.
He had never been off Earth before, and he realized this starkly as the weight on him grew. This—is—not—like—going—f rom—New York—to Tokyo, he said to himself gaspingly. With incalculable effort he managed to turn his head so that he could once again see the non-Terran girl. She had become blue. Maybe it’s natural to her race, Joe thought. Maybe I’ve turned blue, too. Maybe I’m dying, he said to himself, and then the booster rockets came on . . . and Joe Fernwright passed out.
When he awoke he heard only the sound of the Mahler “Fourth” and a low murmur of voices. I’m the last to come out of it, he said to himself gloomily. The pert, dark-haired stewardess busily unscrewed his pressure helmet and shut off his separate supply of oxygen.
“Feeling better, Mr. Fernwright?” the stewardess inquired as she delicately recombed his hair. “Miss Yojez has been reading the biographical material you gave us before flighttime, and she is very interested in meeting you. There; now your hair looks just ever so fine. Don’t you think so, Miss Yojez?”
“How do you do, Mr. Fernwright?” Miss Yojez asked him in a heavily accented voice. “I have been glad to know you very. In the lengthitude of our trip I am surprised not to talk to you, because I think we in common much have.”
“May I see Miss Yojez’s biographical material?” Joe asked the stewardess; it was handed to him and he scanned it rapidly. Favorite animal: a squimp. Favorite color: rej. Favorite game: Monopoly. Favorite music: koto, classical and Kimio Eto. Born in the Prox system, which made her a pioneer, of sorts.
“I think,” Miss Yojez said, “we are in the same undertaking, several of us with the inclusion of I and me.”
“You and me,” Joe said.
“You’re natural Earth?”
“I’ve never been off Earth in my life,” Joe said.
“Then this is your first space flight.”
“Yes,” he said. He eyed her covertly and found her attractive; her short-clipped bronze hair formed an effective contrast to her light gray skin. In addition, she had one of the smallest waists he had ever seen, and in the permo-form spray-foam blouse and pants this as well as the rest of her stood cleanly revealed. “You’re a marine biologist,” he said, reading more of her biographical material.
“Indeed. I am to determine the depth of coral investation of—“ She paused, brought forth a small dictionary and looked up a word. “Submerged artifacts.”
He felt curiosity toward one point; he asked, “How did Glimmung manifest himself to you?”
“’Manifest,’ “ Miss Yojez echoed; she searched through her small dictionary.
“Materializing,” the stewardess said brightly. “There is a circuit of the ship linking us with a translation computer back on Earth. At each couch is an earphone and microphone. Here are yours, Mr. Fernwright, and here are yours, Miss Yojez.”
“My Terran linguistic skills are returning,” Miss Yojez said, rejecting the earphone. To Joe she said, “What did you—“
“How did Glimmung appear to you?” Joe asked. “Physically what did he look like? Big? Short? Portly?”
Miss Yojez said, “Glimmung initially manifests himself in an aquatic framework, inasmuch as he, proper, often rests at the bottom of the oceans of his planet, in the—“ She culled her mind. “The vicinity of the sunken cathedral.”
That explained the oceanic transformation at the police station. “But subsequently how did he appear?” he asked. “The same?”
“The second time he came to I,” Miss Yojez said, “he manifested himself as a laundry of basket.”
Can she mean that? Joe wondered. A basket of laundry? He thought, then, of The Game; the old preoccupation abruptly stirred into life inside him. “Miss Yojez,” he said, “perhaps we could make use of the computer translator . . . they can be very interesting. Let me tell you about an incident that occurred in automated translating of a Soviet article on engineering years ago. The term—“
“Please,” Miss Yojez said, “I can’t follow you and additionally we have things other to discuss. We must ask everyone and find out how many has been employed by Mr. Glimmung.” She fitted the earphone to the side of her head, lifted the microphone and pressed all the buttons on the translation console beside her. “Would everyone who is going to Plowman’s Planet to work in Mr. Glimmung’s undertaking raise their hands, please?”
“So anyway,” Joe said, “this article on engineering, when the computer translated it into English, had one strange term in it that appeared over and over. ‘Water sheep.’ What the hell does that mean? they all asked. I dunno, they all said. Well, what finally they—“
Miss Yojez broke in, “Of the forty-five of us aboard this ship thirty are in Glimmung’s pay.” She laughed. “Perhaps now is the time for us to establish a union and work collectively.”
A stern-looking gray-haired man at the front end of the section said, “That’s not a half bad idea, actually.”
“But he’s already paying so much,” a timid little fellow on the left side pointed out.
“Is it in writing?” the gray-haired man said. “He’s made oral promises to us and then he’s threatened us, or at least so I gather. Anyhow he threatened me. He came on like the day of judgment; it really took the wind out of my sails, and if you knew me you’d know it’s rare when anyone can do that to Harper Baldwin.”
“So anyhow,” Joe said, “they finally managed to trace it back to the original paper, in Russian, and you know what it was? It was ‘hydraulic ram.’ And it came out in English as ‘water sheep.’ Now, on the basis of this, I and a number of distinguished colleagues—“
“Oral promises,” a sharp-faced middle-aged woman toward the rear of the section said, “are not enough. Before we do any work for him we should have written contracts. Basically, when you get down to it, he’s gotten us on this ship by intimidation.”
“Then think what a threat he’ll be when we get to Plowman’s Planet,” Miss Yojez pointed out.
All the passengers were silent for a moment.
“We just call it The Game,” Joe said.
“In addition,” the gray-haired man said, “we must remember that we’re only a small part of the work force that Glimmung’s been recruiting all over the galaxy. I mean, we can act collective to hell and gone, and what does it matter? We’re just a drop in the bucket, we here. Or eventually we’ll be, when he gets the others onto his damn planet, which could be any time.”