Galactic Pot-Healer Read Free Page A

something real and big. I know it.
    He carefully moved his chair around so that he faced the red warning light of the mail tube. And prepared to wait. Until it comes, he said to himself. Unless I physically starve to death first. I will not voluntarily die, now, he thought harshly. I want to stay alive. And wait. And wait.
    He waited.

2
    Nothing more came down the mail tube that day and Joe Fernwright trudged “home.”
    “Home” consisted of a room on a subsurface level of a huge apartment building. Once, the Jiffi-view Company of Greater Cleveland came by every six months and created a 3-D projection, animated, of a view of Carmel, California. This “view” filled his room’s “window,” or ersatz window. However, of late, due to his bad financial situation, Joe had given up trying to imagine that he lived on a great hill with a view of the sea and of towering redwoods; he had become content—or rather resigned—to face blank, inert, black glass. And in addition, if that wasn’t enough, he had let his psycho-lease lapse: the encephalic gadget installed in a closet of his room which, while he was “home,” compelled his brain to believe that his ersatz view of Carmel was authentic.
    The delusion was gone from his brain and the illusion was gone from his window. Now, “home” from work, he sat in a state of depression, reflecting, as always, on the futile aspects of his life.
    Once, the Cleveland Historical Artifacts Museum had sent him regular work. His hot-needle device had melded many fragments, had re-created into a single homogeneous unit one ceramic item after another as his father had before him. But that was over, now; all the ceramic objects owned by the museum had been healed.
    Here, in his lonely room, Joe Fernwright contemplated the lack of ornamentation. Time after time, wealthy owners of precious and broken pots had come to him, and he had done what they wanted; he had healed their pots, and they had gone away. Nothing remained after them; no pots to grace his room in place of the window. Once, seated like this, he had pondered the heat-needle which he made use of. If I press this little device against my breast, he had ruminated, and turn it on, and put it near my heart, it would put an end to me in less than a second. It is, in some ways, a powerful tool. The failure which is my life, he had thought again and again, would cease. Why not?
    But there was the strange note which he had received in the mail. How had the person—or persons—heard of him? To get clients he ran a perpetual small ad in
Ceramics Monthly
…and via this ad the thin trickle of work, throughout the years, had come. Had come and now, really, had gone. But
this
. The strange note!
    He picked up the receiver of his phone, dialed, and in a few seconds faced his ex-wife, Kate. Blond and hard lined, she glared at him.
    “Hi,” he said, in a friendly sort of fashion.
    “Where’s last month’s alimony check?” Kate said.
    Joe said, “I’m onto something. I’ll be able to pay all my back alimony if this—”
    “This what?” Kate interrupted. “Some new nuthead idea dredged out of the depths of what you call your brain?”
    “A note,” he said. “I want to read it to you to see if you can infer anything more from it than I can.” His ex-wife,although he hated her for it—and for a lot more—had a quick mind. Even now, a year after their divorce, he still relied on her powerful intellect. It was odd, he had once thought, that you could hate a person and never want to see them again, and yet at the same time seek them out and ask their advice. Irrational. Or, he thought, is it a sort of super-rationality? To rise above hate…
    Wasn’t it the hate which was irrational? After all, Kate had never done anything to him—nothing except make him excessively aware, intently aware, always aware, of his inability to bring in money. She had taught him to loathe himself, and then, having done that, she had left him.
    And he