I thought so, Joe thought. Well, so it goes.
“What I am doing,” Glimmung said, “is this. I am attempting to learn how much strength I have. There is no abstract way of determining the limits of one’s force, one’s ability to exert effort; it can only be measured in a way such as this, a task which brings into view the actual, real limitation to my admittedly finite—but great—strength. Failure will tell me as much about myself as will success. Do you see that? No, none of you can. You are paralyzed. That’s why I brought you here. Self-knowledge; that is what I will achieve. And so will you: each about himself.”
“Suppose we fail?” Mali asked.
“The self-knowledge will be there anyhow,” Glimmung said; he sounded baffled, as if there was a gap between himself and the group of them. “You really do not understand, do you?” he said to them all. “You will, before it’s over. Those of you, anyhow, who want to go through with it.”
A fungiform lispingly asked, “At this late point do we still have the right to choose?”
“Any of you who wish to return to your own world are free to do so,” Glimmung said. “I will provide passage—first class—back. But those of you who do go back—you will find it once again as it was. And, as it was, you could not live such a life; each of you intended to destroy yourselves, and were in the process of so doing when I found you. Remember. That is what lies behind you. Don’t make it that which lies ahead of you.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“I’m leaving,” Harper Baldwin said.
Several others moved closer to him, signifying that they would leave, too.
“What about you?” Mali asked Joe.
Joe said, “What’s behind me is the police.” And death, he thought. The same as for you. . . for us all. “No,” he said. “I’m going to try. I’ll take the chance that he—we—fail. Maybe he’s right; maybe even failure is valuable. As he says, it tells us the limit of ourselves; it maps our boundaries.”
“If you’ll give me a tobacco cigarette,” Mali said, with a shiver of fear, “I’ll stay, too. But I’m dying for a cigarette.”
“That’s nothing worth dying for,” Joe said. “Let’s die for this. Even if we fall ten stories into the basement doing it.”
“And the rest of you are staying,” Glimmung said.
“That’s right,” a univalvular cephalopod squeaked.
Uneasily, Harper Baldwin said, “I’ll stay. I guess.”
Glimmung, with satisfaction, said, “Then let us begin.”
At the curb before the Olympia Hotel heavy-duty trucks had been parked. Each had a driver and each driver knew what to do.
A portly organism with a long, ropy tail approached Joe and Mali, a clipboard clutched energetically in its fuzzy paw. “You two are to go with me,” the organism declared, and then picked from the group eleven more individuals.
“That’s a werj,” Mali said to Joe. “Our driver. They can make excellent speed; their reflexes are so acute. We’ll be out on the promontory in the manner of a minute.”
“Matter of minutes,” Joe corrected absently as he seated himself on the bench in the rear segment of the truck.
Other life-forms squeezed in with Joe and Mali, and then the truck engine came noisily to life.
“What kind of turbine is that?” Joe said, annoyed by the noise it made.
A kindly looking bivalve beside him groaned, “It’s internal combustion. Bang bang bang all the way.”
“The frontier,” Joe said, and felt an aching joy, all at once. Yes, he thought, this is the frontier; we are back with Abraham Lincoln in a log cabin, and Daniel Boone, all of them. The oldtime pioneers.
One by one the trucks pulled away from the curb, their lights yellow in the night, like the orbs of luminous, foreign moths.
“Glimmung will be waiting for us,” Mali said. “When we get there.” She sounded tired. “He’s capable of reflex relocation, based on autonomic pulsations emanating from within his own neurological substructure. For all intents and purposes he can move from one locus to another without time-lapse.” She rubbed her eyes and sighed.
The helpful bivalve spoke up once more. “The creature beside you, Mr. Fernwright, is truthful.” It extended a pseudopodium to Mali. “Miss Yojez, I am Nurb K’ohl Daq from Sirius three. We have all been waiting anxiously for your party to arrive, because we understood that once you reached the Hotel Olympia all of us who have been waiting a long time can begin. As it seems to be so. But in addition I am glad to become known to you and have you know me, in that I for my part will search out and locate the coral encrusted objects which will then be brought out of Mare Nostrum and brought to you at your shop.”
“I am the engineer in charge of discreet artifacts and the transporting thereof on Mr. Nurb K’ohl Daq’s request to your shop,” a quasiarachnid, brightly black in its chitinous exoskeleton, said.
“You haven’t done any preliminary work?” Mali asked it. “While you waited?”
“Glimmung kept us in our rooms,” the bivalve explained. “We did two things. One. We read all pertinent documents relating to the history of Heldscalla. Two. We watched on a video monitor as robot sensors scanned the sunken cathedral time and again. On our screens we have seen Heldscalla countless times. But now we will be allowed to touch it.”
“I wish I could go to sleep,” Mali said. She rested her close-cropped head on Joe’s shoulder and slumped against him. “Wake me up when we get there.”
The quasiarachnid said to Joe and the bivalve, “This total Undertaking . . . it reminds me of an Earth saga, parts of which we were required to memorize during our educational years. It made a deep impression on me.”
“He means the Faust theme,” the bivalve told Joe. “Faustian man, striving upward, never satisfied. Glimmung is like Faust in certain respects, unlike him in others.”
Rustling its antennae in agitation the quasiarachnid said, “Glimmung resembles Faust in all respects. The Faust, at least, of Goethe, which is the version I adhere to.”
Eerie, Joe thought. A chitinous multilegged quasiarachnid and a large bivalve with pseudopodia arguing about Goethe’s Faust. A book which I’ve never read—and it originated on my planet, is the product of a human being.
“Part of the difficulty,” the quasiarachnid was saying, “lies in the translation; it was written in a language which has died out.”
“German,” Joe said. He knew that much, at least.
“I have,” the quasiarachnid muttered, “made a—“ It groped in a plastic utility pouch slung over its shoulder; four of its manual extremities busily sorted through the pouch. “Damn thing,” it muttered. “Everything sinks to the bottom. Here it is.” It brought out a much-folded sheet of paper, which it proceeded to unfold carefully. “I have made my own translation into modern-day Terran, formerly called ‘English.’ I will read you the crucial scene from the second part, the moment at last when Faust pauses in contemplation of what he has done, and is content. May, can—whatever the expression is. All right, Mr. Fernwright, sir?”
“Sure,” Joe said, as the truck rumbled along, over potholes and rocks, shaking and swaying the creatures within it. Mali, now, seemed to have totally fallen asleep. She had certainly been right about the driving skill of the werj; the truck rattled through the darkness at a great rate.
“’A swamp surrounds the mountains,’ “the quasiarachnid read from its carefully preserved sheet of paper.” ‘Poisoning everything already reclaimed. To drain the foul marsh—this must be done; this would be the highest conquest possible. I’ll open room for many millions: not in any sense safe, but daily freed, in which to live. Green the meadow, and fruitful; men and herds almost already on the most new earth, settled on the rim of which has been pushed up by bold peoples’ efforts. Within here a paradise land, that keeps outside the flood, and as it eats away, trying to enter and take over, a group will hurries to cut it off. Yes! This—‘”
The bivalve interrupted the quasiarachnid’s earnest recitation. “Your translation is not idiomatic. ‘Men and herds almost already on the most new earth.’ Grammatically it is correct, but no Terran talks like that.” The bivalve waved a pseudopodium toward Joe, seeking his support. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Fernwright?”
Joe thought, “Men and herds almost already on the most new earth.” The bivalve was right, of course; but–.
“I like it,” Joe said.
Highly pleased, the quasiarachnid yelped, “And see how much it resembles us and Glimmung, the Undertaking! ‘Within here a paradise land, that keeps outside the flood.’ The flood is a symbol for everything that eats away structures which living creatures have erected. The water which has covered Heldscalla; the flood won out many centuries ago, but now Glimmung is going to push it back. ‘A group will’ which hurries to cut it off—that is all of us. Perhaps Goethe was a precog; perhaps he foresaw the raising of Heldscalla.”