And he still called up and asked for her advice.
He read her the note.
"Obviously it's illegal," Kate said. "But you know your business affairs don't interest me. You'll have to work it out by yourself or with whoever you're currently sleeping with, probably some eighteen-year-old girl who doesn't know any better, who doesn't have any basis for comparison as an older woman would have."
"What do you mean ‘illegal'?" he asked. "What kind of pot is illegal?"
"Pornographic pots. The kind the Chinese made during the war."
"Oh Christ," he said; he hadn't thought of that. Who but Kate would remember those! She had been lewdly fascinated by the one or two of them which had passed through his hands.
"Call the police," Kate said.
"I—"
"Anything else on your mind?" Kate said. "Now that you've interrupted my dinner and the dinner of everyone who's over here tonight?"
"Could I come over?" he said; loneliness crept through him and edged his question with the fear which Kate had always detected: the fear that she would retract into her implacable chesspiece fort, the fort of her own mind and body out of which she ventured to inflict a wound, or two, and then disappear back in, leaving an expressionless mask to greet him. And, by means of that mask, she used his own failings to injure him.
"No," Kate said.
"Why not?"
"Because you have nothing to offer anyone in the way of talk or discussion or ideas. As you've said many times, your talent is in your hands. Or did you intend to come over and break one of my cups, my Royal Albert cups with the blue glaze, and then heal it? As a sort of magical incantation designed to throw everyone into fits of laughter."
Joe said, "I can contribute verbally."
"Give me an example."
"What?" he said, staring at her face on the screen of the phone.
"Say something profound."
"You mean right now?"
Kate nodded.
"Beethoven's music is firmly rooted in reality. That's what makes him unique. On the other hand, genius as he was, Mozart—"
"Shove it," Kate said and hung up; the screen went blank. I shouldn't have asked if I could come over, Joe realized with acute misery. It gave her that opening, that foot-in-thepsychic-door that she uses, that she preys on. Christ, he thought. Why did I ask? He got up and wandered drearily about his room; his motion became more and more aimless until at last he stopped and simply stood. I have to think about what really matters, he told himself. Not that she hung up or said anything nasty, but whether or not that note I got in the mail today means anything. Pornographic pots, he said to himself. She's probably right. And it's illegal to heal a pornographic pot, so there goes that.
I should have realized it as soon as I read the note, he said to himself. But that's the difference between Kate and me. She would know right away. I probably wouldn't have known until I had finished healing it and then taken a good firm look at it. I'm just not bright, he said to himself. Compared to her. Compared to the world.
"The arithmetical total ejaculated in a leaky flow," he thought fiercely. My best. At least I'm good at The Game. So what? he asked himself. So what?
Mr. Job, he thought, help me. The time has come. Tonight. Going rapidly into the tiny bathroom attached to his room he grabbed up the lid of the water closet of the toilet. Nobody, he had often thought, looks into a toilet. There hung the asbestos sack of quarters.
And, in addition, a small plastic container floated. He had never seen it before in his life.
Lifting it from the water he saw, with disbelief, that it contained a rolled up piece of paper. A note, floating in the water closet of his toilet, like a bottle launched at sea. Oh, this can't really be, he thought, and felt like laughing. I mean Christ; it just can't. But he did not laugh, because he felt fear. Fear that bordered on dread. It's another communication, he said to himself. Like the one in the mail tube today. But nobody communicates this way; it isn't human!
He unscrewed the lid of the small plastic container and groped the enclosed piece of paper out. Yes, it had writing on it; he was right. He read the writing and then he read it again.
I WILL PAY YOU THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND CRUMBLES
What in god's name is a crumble? he asked himself, and the dread sharpened into panic; he felt undernourished, strangulated heat rise to the back of his neck, a weak response somatically: his body, as well as his mind, was trying to adjust to this; it could not be done on a mental level alone, not this.
Returning to the main room he picked up the receiver of the phone and dialed the twenty-four-hour-a-day dictionary service.
"What's a crumble?" he asked, when the robot monitor answered.
"A crumbling substance," the computer fed to the monitor. "In other words fine debris. A small crumb or particle. Introduced into English 1577."
"Other languages?" Joe asked.
"Middle English kremelen. Old English gecrymian. Middle High Gothic—"
"What about non-Terran languages?"
"On Betelgeuse seven in the Urdian tongue it means a small opening of a temporary nature: a wedge which—"
"That's not it," Joe said.
"On Rigel two it means a small life-form which scuttles—"
"Not that either," Joe said.
"On Sirius five, in the Plabkian tongue ‘crumble' is a monetary unit."
"That's it," Joe said. "Now tell me how much in Earth money thirty-five thousand crumbles represents."
The dictionary robot said, "I am sorry, sir, but you will have to consult the banking service for that answer. Please look in your phone book for the number." It clicked off; the screen died away.
He looked up the number and dialed the banking service. "We are closed for the night," the banking-service robot monitor informed him.
"All over the world?" Joe said in amazement.
"Everywhere."
"How long do I have to wait?"
"Four hours."
"My life, my entire future—" But he was talking into a dead phone. The banking-service system had abolished the contact.
What I'll do, he decided, is lie down and sleep for four hours. It was now seven o'clock; he could set the alarm for eleven.
A pressing of the proper button brought the bed sliding out from the wall, virtually to fill the room; it had been his living room and now it was his bedroom. Four hours, he said to himself as he set the mechanism of the bed's clock. He lay down, made himself comfortable—as much so as the inadequate bed permitted—and groped for the toggle switch that induced immediately and powerfully the most profound sleep state possible.
A buzzer sounded.
The damn dream circuit, he said to himself. Even early like this do I have to use it? He leaped up, opened the cabinet beside the bed and got out the instructions. Yes, mandatory dreaming was required at any time he used the bed... unless, of course, he threw the sex lever. I'll do that, he said to himself. I'll tell it I'm having knowledge in the Biblical sense of a female person.
Once more he lay down and activated the sleep switch.
"You weigh one hundred and forty pounds," the bed said. "And there is exactly that weight extended over me. Therefore you are not engaged in copulation." The mechanism voided his throwing of the sleep toggle switch, and at the same time the bed began to warm up; the heating coils in it blatantly glowed beneath him.
He could not argue with an angry bed. So he turned on the sleep-dream interaction and shut his eyes, resignedly.
Sleep came at once; it always did: the mechanism was perfect. And, at once, the dream—which everyone anywhere in the world who was now asleep was also dreaming—clicked on.