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

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 aproduct 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 world-views 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