Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online

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 yourhaving 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 anoddity 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 wind-up 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