“You hear that, Mr. Fernwright?” Cavorting Cary Karns whooped. “You’re in a packing crate in Mr. Dwight L.—what was the rest of your name, sir?”
“Glimmung.”
“Mr. Dwight L. Glimmung’s basement of 301 Pleasant Hill Road. So all your troubles are over, Mr. Fernwright. Simply get out of the packing crate and you’ll be just fine!”
“I don’t want him to bust the crate, though,” Dwight L. Glimmung said. “Maybe I better go down there into that basement and pry a few boards loose and let him out.”
“Mr. Fernwright,” Karns said, “just for the edification of our radio audience, how did you happen to get into an empty packing crate in the basement of Mr. Dwight L. Glimmung of 301 Pleasant Hill Road? I’m sure our audience would like to know.”
“I don’t know,” Joe said.
“Well, perhaps then Mr. Glimmung—Mr. Glimmung? He seems to have rung off. Evidently he’s on his way down into the basement to let you out, Mr. Fernwright. What a lucky thing for you it was, sir, that Mr. Glimmung happened to be listening to this show! Otherwise you probably would be in that crate until doomsday. And now let’s turn to another listener; hello?” The phone clicked in Joe’s ear. The circuit had been broken.
Sounds. From around him. A creaking noise and something wide bent back; light flooded into the box wherein Joe Fernwright sat with his cigarette lighter, his phone, and his transistor radio.
“I got you out of the police barracks the best way I could,” a male voice—the same that Joe had heard on the radio—said.
“A strange way,” Joe said.
“To you strange. Strange to me have been a number of things you’ve done since the time I first became aware of you.,,
Joe said, “Like giving away my coins.”
“No, I understood that. What strikes me as odd is your having sat for all those months in your work cubicle, waiting.” A second slat slid away; more light flooded in at Joe and he blinked. He tried to see Glimmung, but he still could not. “Why didn’t you go to a nearby museum and break a number of their pots anonymously . . . and you would have got their business. And the pots would be healed as new. Nothing would have been lost and you would have been active and productive over these days.” The last slat fell away, and Joe Fernwright saw, up in the full light, the creature from Sirius five, the life-form which the encyclopedia had described as being senile and penniless.
He saw a great hoop of water spinning on a horizonal axis, and, within it, on a vertical axis, a transversal hoop of fire. Hanging over and behind the two elemental hoops a curtain draped and floated, a billowing fabric which he saw, with amazement, was Paisley.
And—one more aspect: an image embedded at the nucleus of the revolving hoops of fire and water. The pleasant, pretty face of a brown-haired teen-age girl. It hung suspended, and it smiled at him . . . an ordinary face, easily forgotten but always encountered. It was, he thought, a composite mask, as if drawn on a blank sidewalk with colored chalk. A temporary and not very impressive visage, through which Glimmung apparently meant to encounter him. But the hoop of water, he thought. The basis of the universe. As was the hoop of fire. And they revolved on and on, at a perfectly regulated speed. A superb and eternal self-perpetuating mechanism, he thought, except for the flimsy Paisley shawl and the immature female face. He felt bewildered. Did what he see add up to strength? Certainly it gave no aura of senility, and yet he had the impression that, despite the jejune face, it was very old. As to its financial status, he could make no estimate at this time. That would have to come later, if at all.
“I bought this house seven years ago,” Glimmung—or at least a voice—said. “When there was a buyers’ market.”
Joe, looking for the source of the voice, distinguished an oddity which twitched his blood and made him cold, as if ice and fire had mixed together in him, a pale analog of Glimmung.
The voice. It came from an ancient wind-up Victrola, on which a record played at a peculiar high speed. Glimmung’s voice was on the record.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Joe said. “Seven years ago was a good time to buy. You do your recruiting from here?”
“I work here,” Glimmung’s voice—from the ancient windup Victrola—answered. “I work many other places as well . . . in many star systems. Now let me tell you where you stand, Joe Fernwright. To the police you simply turned and walked out of the building, and for some reason they seemed unable, at the time, to stop you. But an APB has been sent out regarding you, so you can’t go back to your rooming house or your work cubicle.”
“Without being caught by the police,” Joe said.
“Do you want that?”
“Maybe it has to be,” Joe said stoically.
“Nonsense. Your police are feral and malicious. I want you to see Heldscalla, as it was before it sank. Youuuuuuuuu,” and the phonograph ran down. Joe, via the handcrank, wound it up again, feeling a mixture of feelings, each of which he would probably, if asked, be unable to describe. “You will find a viewing instrument on the table to your right,” Glimmung said, the record now playing at its proper speed. “A depth-perception mechanism originating here on your own planet.”
Joe searched—and found an antique stereoscope viewer, circa 1900, with a set of black-and-white cards to be put into it. “Couldn’t you do better than this?” he demanded. “A film sequence, or stereo video tape. Why, this thing was invented before the automobile.” It came to him, then. “You are broke,” he said. “Smith was right.”
“That’s a calumny,” Glimmung said. “I am merely parsimonious. It is an inherited characteristic of my order. As a product of your socialistic society you are used to great waste. I, however, am still on the free enterprise plan. ‘A penny saved—‘
“Oh Christ,” Joe groaned.
“If you want me to quit,” Glimmung said, “merely lift the mica-disk playback head-and-needle assembly from the record.”
“What happens when the record comes to an end?” Joe said.
“It will never do so.”
“Then it’s not a real record.”
“It’s a real record. The grooves form a loop.”
“What do you really look like?” Joe said.
Glimmung said, “What do you really look like?”
Nettled, Joe said, gesticulating, “It depends on whether you accept Kant’s division of phenomena from the Ding an sich, the thing in itself which like Leibnitz’s windowless monad—“
He halted, because the phonograph had run down again; the record had ceased to turn. As he rewound it, Joe thought, He probably didn’t hear anything I said. And probably on purpose.
“I missed your philosophical discourse,” the phonograph declared, when he had finished rewinding it.
“What I’m saying,” Joe said, “is that a phenomenon perceived is done so in the structural percept-system of the perceiver. Much of what you see in perceiving me—“ He pointed to himself for emphasis. “—is a projection from your own mind. To another percept-system I would appear quite different. To the police, for instance. There’re as many worldviews as there are sentient creatures.”
“Hmm,” Glimmung said.
“You understand the distinction I’m making,” Joe said.
“Mr. Fernwright, what do you really want? The time has come for you to choose, to act. To participate—or not participate—in a great historical moment. At this moment, Mr. Fernwright, I am in a thousand places, committing or helping to commit an enormous variety of engineers and artisans . . . you are one craftsman out of many. I can’t wait for you any longer.”
“Am I vital to the project?” Joe asked.
“A pot-healer is vital, yes. You or someone else.”
Joe said, “When do I get my thirty-five thousand crumbles? In advance?”
“You will get them whennnnnn,” Glimmung began to say, but again the old Victrola became unwound; the record slowed to a halt.
Cagey bastard, Joe said to himself grimly as he rewound the phonograph.
“When,” Glimmung said, “and if, only if, the cathedral is raised once more as it was centuries ago.”
That’s what I thought, Joe thought.
“Will you go to Plowman’s Planet?” Glimmung asked.
For a time Joe considered. In his mind he considered his room, the cubicle in which he worked, the loss of his coins, the police—he thought about it all and tried to make it add up. What ties me here? he asked himself. The known, he decided. The fact that I am used to it. You can get used to anything, and even learn to like it. Pavlov’s theory of learned reflex is correct; I am held by habit. And nothing more.
“Could I have just a few crumbles in advance?” he asked Glimmung. “I want to buy a cashmere sports jacket and a new pair of wash-and-wear shoes.”