“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.”
“Hmm,” Joe said.
“Do you understand me?” Miss Reiss snapped.
“Yes.” Joe nodded.
“Did he go under voluntarily or was he dragged under?”
“A little bit of both,” Joe said. “There was a confrontation.” He gesticulated, finding it difficult to bring forth the right words. “Between the two of them. But Glimmung decidedly seemed to have the upper hand. Or should I say pseudopodium?”
“Let me talk to her,” Mali said; she seized the phone, tugged it from his hand, and spoke into it. “This is Miss Yojez.” An interval of silence. “Yes, Miss Reiss; I know that. Yes, I know that, too. Well, as Mr. Fernwright says, he may emerge victorious. We must have faith, as the Bible says.” Again a prolonged period of listening. Then she glanced up at Joe, held her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, said, “She wants us to try to get a message down to Glimmung.”
“What message?” Joe said.
Into the phone Mali said, “What message?”
“No message,” Joe said to Willis, “is going to be of any help to him. There isn’t anything we can do.” He felt utterly impotent, more so than at any other time of his life. The sense of the proximity of death, which had haunted him during his depressed periods, dilated in him, and in undismayed fury; he felt it numb his guts, his heart, his nervous system. Awareness of guilt clung to him like a satin, ornate cloak. Shame so pure that it had virtually an archetypal quality to it, as if he were reexperiencing the primordial shame of Adam, the first sense of conspicuousness before the sight of God. He felt hatred for himself, for the fecklessness of his conduct; he had brought his benefactor into jeopardy—and the entire planet as well. I’m a Jonah, he said to himself. The Kalends are right; I have come here to blight this planet with my presence. And Glimmung must have known . . . yet, he brought me here anyhow. Perhaps because I needed this; for my sake. Christ, he thought. And this is now the end. Look how I’ve paid him back: with death.
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.”