7

In orbit around Plowman's Planet, the ship began firing its retrorockets, cutting its velocity. They would be landing in half an hour.

Meanwhile, Joe Fernwright amused himself in a mordant way: by reading The Wall Street Journal; he had found over the years that this newspaper, out of all of them, contained the most chilling and the most recent oddities. Reading the Journal was like taking a little trip into the future—six months or so.

A new deep-depth rooming house in New Jersey, designed especially for geriatric persons, has built into it a novel circuit, designed to make the transfer of the room easy and without delay. When a roomer dies, electronic detectors in the wall register his lack of pulse, and send swift circuits into action. The deceased is grappled by standard waldoes, drawn into the wall of the room, where on the spot his remains are incinerated within an asbestos chamber, thus permitting the new tenant, also a geriatric case, to take possession by noon.

He ceased reading, tossed down the newspaper. We must be better off out here, he decided. If that's what they've got planned for us back on Earth.

"I've verified our reservations," Mali said matter-of-factly. "We all have rooms at the Olympia Hotel in the largest city on the planet; Diamond Head, it's called, because it's on a winding prominence that goes fifty milies out into Mare Nostrum."

"What's ‘Mare Nostrum'?" Joe asked.

"'Our Ocean.'"

He showed the item in the Journal to her and then, silently, to the rest of the passengers. They all read it and then they all looked at one another for sign of a reaction.

"We made the right choice," Harper Baldwin said. The others nodded. "That's good enough for me," Baldwin said. He shook his head and scowled, disgust and anger contorting his face. "And we built such a society," he rasped.

Strong-armed members of the ship's crew manually unscrewed the hatch; outside air eddied in, smelling odd and cold. It seemed to Joe that the ocean was close; he sensed it in the air. Shielding his eyes he gazed out against a weak sun; he distinguished the outline of a reasonably modernlooking city, and, past it, hills in a mixture of brown and gray. But the ocean is somethere nearby, he said to himself. Mali is right; this is a planet dominated by an ocean. And it is in the ocean that we will find everything that matters.

Smiling with mechanical courtesy, the stewardesses escorted them to the open hatch and the flight of stairs which led down to the damp surface of the field. Joe Fernwright took Mali by the arm and led her down; neither of them spoke for a time—Mali seemed absorbed in herself, taking no notice of the other people or the spaceport buildings. Bad memories, Joe reflected. Maybe what happened to her happened here.

And for me, he thought; look what this is for me. The first interplanetary or intersystem flight in my life. This ground under me is not Earth. A very strange and important thing is happening to me. He smelled the air. Another world and another atmosphere. It feels strange, he decided.

"Don't say," Mali said, "that you find this place ‘unearthly.' Please, for my sake."

"I don't get it," Joe said. "It is unearthly. It's completely different."

"Never mind," Mali said. "A little game Ralf and I had. A long time ago. Thingisms, we called them. Let's see if I can remember some of them. He thought all of them up. ‘The book business is hidebound.' That's one. ‘Plants are taking over the world sporadically.' Let's see. ‘The operator let me off the hook.' I always liked that; it made me think of a giant hook, in fact a whole giant phone. ‘In 1945 the discovery of atomic energy electrified the world.' Do you see?" She glanced at him. "You don't," she said. "Never mind."

"They're all true statements," Joe said. "As far as I can make out. What's the game part?"

‘The senate inquiry into modern use of side arms was muzzled.' How do you like that one? I saw that in a newspaper. I think Ralf found the others in newspapers or heard them over TV; I think all they were real." She added somberly, "Everything about Ralf was real. For the beginning. But then later, no."

A careful, brown, large creature resembling a rat approached Joe and Mali. It held what appeared to be an armload of books.

"Spiddles," Mali said, pointing to the careful ratlike creature, and to a second one which had accosted Harper Baldwin. "One of the native life-forms, here. Unlike Glimmung. You will find—let me see." She counted on her fingers. "Spiddles, wubs, werjes, klakes, trobes, and printers. Left over from the old days... all of them older species, when the Fog-Things of antiquity passed away. It wants you to buy a book."

The spiddle touched a tiny tape recorder mounted on its belt; the tape began to speak for the spiddle. "Fully documented history of a fascinating world," it said in English, and then evidently repeated this in a variety of other tongues; anyhow it had stopped speaking in English.

"Buy it," Mali said.

"Pardon?" Joe said.

"Buy its book."

"You know this book? What book is it?"

Mali said, with rigorous patience, "There is only one book. In this world."

"By ‘world,' "Joe said, "you mean ‘planet,' or in the larger sense—"

"On Plowman's Planet," Mali said, "there is just this one book."

"Don't the people get tired of reading it?"

"It changes," Mali said. She handed the spiddle a dime, which it accepted gratefully; a copy of the book was passed to her and she in turn passed it to Joe.

Examining it, Joe said, "It has no title. And no author."

"It is written," Mali said, as they walked on toward the spaceport buildings, "by a group of creatures or entities—I don't the English know—that records everything that passes on Plowman's Planet. Everything. Great and small."

"Then it's a newspaper."

Mali halted; she turned to face him, her eyes burning with exasperation. "_It is recorded first_," she said, as steadily as she could manage. "The Kalends spin the story; they enter it in the ever-changing book without a title, and it comes to about, finally."

"Precognitive," Joe said.

"That raises a question. Which is cause? Which is effect? The Kalends wove in their altering, evolving script that the Fog-Things would pass away. They did pass away. Did then the Kalends make them pass away? The spiddles think so." She added, "But the spiddles are very superstitious. They naturally believe that."

Joe opened the book at random. The text was not in English; he did not recognize the language or even the letters of its alphabet. But then, as he leafed through it, he came to a short section in English, embedded in the mass of alienlooking entries.

The girl Mali Yojez is an expert at removing coral deposits from submerged artifacts. Other individuals brought from various systems throughout the galaxy include geologists, structural engineers, hydraulic engineers, seismologists; one specializes in underwater robot operations and another, an archaeologist, is a master at locating buried, ancient cities. A peculiar many-armed bivalve lives in a tank of salt water and functions well in supervising the raising of sunken ships for salvage purposes. A gastropod, capable of

At that point the text lapsed into another language; he shut the book, pondered. "Maybe I'm mentioned in here somewhere," he said, as they reached the moving sidewalk leading to the concourse sections of the spaceport terminal building-complex.

"Of course," Mali said calmly. "If you long look enough you will find it. How will you make it—pardon. How will it make you feel?"

"Eerie," he said, still pondering.

A surface car, acting as a taxi, transported them to their hotel. Joe Fernwright, on the short trip, continued to examine the untitled book; it preoccupied him, preempting the colorful shops which the taxi passed, and the several lifeforms bustling about here and there—he was aware of the city street, its people, and buildings, but only dimly. Because he had already found another passage in English.