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 Blame.
“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.
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 modernlooking 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.