Obviously, the Undertaking involves the locating of and the raising and repair of an underwater structure, probably—due to the number of engineers involved—of great magnitude. Almost certainly an entire city or even an entire civilization, very likely of some remote past age.

And then, once again, the text lapsed into a foreign script resembling dots and dashes, a sort of binary system of annotation.

Joe said to the girl beside him in the taxi, "The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla."

"Yes," Mali said shortly.

"But where's the precognition?" Joe demanded. "This is remarkably up to date—right up to this minute, give or take an hour—but that's all."

"You will find it," Mali said, "when you have looked a long time. It is buried. Among the different texts, which are all translations of one primary text, one line like a thread. The thread of the past entering the present, then entering the future. Somewhere in that book, Mr. Fernwright, the future of Heldscalla is written. The future of Glimmung. The future of us. We are all woven in by the yarn of the Kalends' time, their time-outside-of-time."

Joe said, "And you already knew about this book, before the spiddle sold it to you."

"I saw it before when Ralf and I were here. The SSA machine extrapolated we'd be joyous, and the Kalends' book, this book, said Ralf would—" She paused. "He killed himself. First he tried to kill me. But—he wasn't able to."

"And the Kalends' book said that."

"Yes. Exactly that. I remember it, Ralf and I reading in the text about ourselves and not believing. Still under the idea that the SSA mechanism was scientific data-analysis and this book was tale by old wife, a lot of old wives, seeing doom when we and the SSA machine saw happihood."

"Why did the SSA machine miss?"

"It missed because it didn't have one datum. Whitney's Syndrome. Psychotic reaction to amphetamines by Ralf. Paranoia and murderous hostility. He thought himself overweight; he took them as—" She hunted for the word.

"Appetite suppressants," Joe said. "Like alcohol." Good for some people, he thought; lethal for others. And Whitney's Syndrome didn't require overdoses; even a small amount triggered it off. If the latent illness was already there. Just as, for an alcoholic, the smallest drink meant defeat and bitter, utter, final destruction. "Too bad," he murmured.

The taxi pulled up to the curb. Its driver, a beaverlike creature with wicked, cutting teeth, said several words in a language which Joe did not understand; Mali, however, nodded and gave the beaverish individual a sum of metal money from her purse, and then she and Joe stepped from the taxi onto the sidewalk.

Joe, looking around him, said, "It's like going back a hundred and fifty years." Surface cars, carbon arc lighting... this could be Earth in the days of President Franklin Roosevelt, he thought to himself, both enticed and amused. He liked it. The pace, he realized; it's slower. And the density of population—relatively few organisms propelled themselves up and down the street, either on foot (or a reasonable substitute) or in cars.

"You can see why I got angry at you," Mali said, catching his reaction. "For your defaming Plowman's Planet, my home for six years. And now—" She gestured. "I'm back. And doing again what I did then: believing faith in a SSA mechanism."

"Let's go inside the hotel," Joe said, "and have a drink." Together, they passed through the revolving door, into the Olympia Hotel, with its wooden floors, carved hardwood decorations, polished brass doorknobs and railings, and thick red carpet. And its antique elevator, which Joe had already caught sight of. Nonautomatic, he discovered. The elevator required an attendant.

In his hotel room, with its dresser, splotched mirror, iron bed, and canvas windowshade elegance, Joe Fernwright sat on an overstuffed, faded chair and studied The Book.

Not long ago he had been preoccupied with The Game. And now—The Book. But this consisted of something quite different, and the more he read of The Book the more he realized it. Gradually, as he nosed among its pages, he began to assemble, in his mind, the totality of the English text; he had begun to put the separate bits in superimposition over one another.

"I'm going to take a bath," Mali said. She had already opened her suitcase and had laid most of her clothes out on the bed in her room. "Isn't it strange, Joe Fernwright?" she called. "That we have to keep two rooms. Like a century ago."

"Yes," he said.

She entered the room, wearing only her tight pants; bare from the waist up, he saw. Small-breasted but dense and tall, with fine muscle tone. The body of a dancer, he said to himself, or—a Cro-Magnon female, a hunter, an astute, supple person accustomed to long, lean, even fruitless marches. There was not a gram of useless flesh on her, as he had already discovered in the locked lounge of the ship. He had clutched it then; now he saw it. However, he thought morbidly, Kate had—actually still has—as good a figure. That made him depressed. He returned to reading The Book.

"Would you have wanted to go to sleep with me," Mali said, "if I were a cyclops?" She pointed to a spot above her nose. "One eye there. Polyphemus; the cyclops in The Odyssey. They put his one eye out with a burning stick, I think."

Joe said, "Listen to this." He read aloud from The Book. ‘The current, dominant species on the planet consists of what is called a Glimmung. This shadowy, enormous entity is not native to the planet; it migrated here several centuries ago, taking over from the weak species left over when the once-ruling master species, the so-called Fog-Things of antiquity, vanished.' " Joe waved her to come and look. "'Glimmung's power, however, is sharply curtailed by a mysterious book in which, it is alleged, everything which has been, is, and will be is recorded.' " He snapped the book shut. "It's talking about itself."

Coming over to his chair, Mali bent to read the text. "Let me see what else it says," she said.

"That's all. The English part ended there."

Taking The Book from him, Mali began to glance through it. She had begun to frown; her face was tense and stern. "Well here you are, Joe," she said at last. "As I told. You're in here by name."

He took The Book from her and read rapidly.

Joseph Fernwright learns that Glimmung considers the Kalends and their Book his antagonist, and is said to be plotting to undermine the Kalends once and for all. How he will do this, though, is not known. Here the rumors begin to differ.

"Let me turn the pages," Mali said; she examined the subsequent pages and then, her face darkening, paused. "In my language," she said. For a long, long time she studied the passage, and as she read and reread it, her expression became more intense, shadowed by her own intense urgency into starkness. "It says," she said at last, "that Glimmung's Undertaking is the raising of the cathedral Heldscalla to dry land once more. And that he will fail."

"Is there more?" Joe said. He had a feeling there was; her face showed it.

Mali said, "It says that most of those recruited to help Glimmung will be destroyed. When the Undertaking fails." She corrected herself. "Toojic. Damaged or made to unexist. Maimed; that's it. They will be permanently altered, beyond immediate repair."

"Do you think Glimmung knows about these passages?" Joe said. "That he'll fail and we'll be—"

"Of course he knows. It's there in the text, in that section you read. ‘Glimmung considers the Kalends and their book his antagonist and plots to undermine them.' And, ‘He's raising Heldscalla to undermine them.'

"It didn't say that," Joe said. "It reads, ‘How he will do this, though, is not known; here the rumors begin to differ.'"

"But obviously it's the raising of Heldscalla." She paced about the room in agitation, her hands clasped tightly together. "You said it yourself. ‘The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla.' All you have to do is put the two passages together. I told you it was all there, our future, Heldscalla's, Glimmung's. And ours is to unexist, to die." She halted, stared at him frantically. "That's the way the Fog-Things perished. They challenged the Book of the Kalends. As the spiddles can tell you; the spiddles are still chattering about it."