The Potter of Firsk and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  In the corridor he met Sam Schmitz. “Carr’s at the buttons. He’s checking you out on the adjusted code…”

  A door labelled DANGER, KEEP OUT slid aside for them and they entered the central depot, a long hall filled with sound, activity, dust and, most notably, a thousand odd odors, whiffs of spicy reeks, balms and fetors from the thousand off-planet commodities coming in on the near belt.

  The luminous ceiling gave off a cold white glare which searched out every shadow. There was no glamour or concealment in this light—every item on the belts minutely described itself to the eyes of the checkers. The walls were painted in ceiling-to-floor blocks of various colors, the better to designate the bays, where various shipments, temporarily stacked, awaited re-routing.

  A narrow glass-fenced platform cut the depot in two. Back and forth from platform to the belts jumped the clerks in blue and white smocks, checking the merchandise in-coming on the near side, out-going on the far—crates, sacks, boxes, bales, bags, racks and cases.

  Machinery, metal parts in ingots and machined shapes, consignments of Earth fruit and vegetables going out to the colonies, the homesteads, the mines. Other consignments of off-world exotics incoming to entice and stimulate the sophisticates of Paris, London, Benares, Sahara City. Tanks of water, oaken casks of whiskey, green bottles of wine.

  Prefabricated houses, flyers, automobiles, speed-boats for the lakes of the Tanagra Highlands. Beautiful woods, richly mottled and marked from the hardwood swamps of a jungle planet. Ores, rocks, minerals, crystals, glasses, sands—all riding the belts, either approaching or leaving the twin curtains of dark brown-gold, shot with flickering streaks of light, at the far end of the hall.

  At the curtain end of the out-belt a big blond man sat in an elevated box, viciously chewing gum. Allixter and Schmitz ducked across the in-belt, stepped over the clerks’ platform, rode the out-belt to the operator’s box.

  Carr hauled back a lever and the belt eased to a stop. “All ready to go?”

  “Yep, all set,” said Schmitz cheerfully. He hopped up into the box while Allixter stood glumly eyeing the curtain. “Howza wife, Carr?” asked Schmitz. “Heard she took a dose of dermatitis from something you carried home on your clothes.”

  “She’s okay,” said Carr. “It was that kapok stuff from Deneb Kaitos. Now let’s see—I’ve got to set up this phony code. Hey, Scotty,” he called down to Allixter, “made your will yet? This is like stepping out of an airplane holding your nose and hoping you’ll hit water.”

  Allixter made a nonchalant gesture. “Everyday stuff, Carr, my boy. Set those dials—I want to be back sometime tonight.”

  Carr shook his head in rueful admiration. “They pay you a thousand franks for it—brother, it’s yours. I’ve seen some of the stuff that’s come out of the tubes when the settings were a little out of phase. Plywood panels come through looking like cheese-cloth handkerchiefs—a turbine agitator makes about a gallon of funny-looking rust.”

  Allixter’s mouth tightened over his teeth and he cracked his knuckles.

  “There she is,” said Carr. A bulb on the panel flared red, flickered, wavered through smoky orange, glared white. “She’s through.”

  Schmitz leaned down over the box. “Okay, Allixter, all yours.”

  Allixter pulled the hood over his head, sealed it, inflated the suit. Carr chuckled into Schmitz’ ear, “Scotty’s gloomy for sure over this one.”

  Schmitz grinned. “He’s afraid he’s walking into some hijacker’s warehouse.”

  Carr turned him a blankly curious side-look. “Is he?”

  Schmitz spat. “Hell no. He’s going to Rhetus, to set adjustments on the coder. That’s how I figure it.” He spat again. “Of course, I might be wrong.”

  Allixter lifted up his hood, yelled to Schmitz, “You better get me down the Linguaid.”

  Schmitz asked with a grin, “Can’t you talk English? That’s all you’ll hear on Rhetus.”

  “The Chief says take the Linguaid. So roll her out.”

  A buzzer sounded on Carr’s panel. Carr grunted. “Get him his analyzer. I can’t tie up the belt all day. Old Hannegan’s hollerin’ to get his grapes off to Centauri.”

  Schmitz snapped a few words into a mesh and moments later a runner from the shop appeared, rolling the Linguaid ahead of him, a black case slung between two wheels.

  “Be careful of that job,” said Schmitz. “It’s expensive and it’s the only decent outfit we got left since Olson burnt out the Semantalyzer. Don’t leave it on Rhetus.”

  “You worry a confounded lot about that Linguaid,” muttered Allixter, “and not a cent for old Scotty Allixter.”

  He sealed the hood over his head and, trundling the Linguaid ahead of him, stepped through the curtain.

  Allixter stood on a bone-white platform, bare to the heavens. He felt a stir of morose triumph. “I’m still alive. I’m not a cheese-cloth handkerchief, not a gallon of rust. I guess the Chief figured okay—got to give the old cuss credit. But…”

  Allixter stared around the landscape, a gray and black plain. At precise intervals massive concrete rotundas rose from the ground, most of which had been shattered as if by internal explosions.

  “This isn’t Rhetus—nowhere near Rhetus. And those aren’t men and they aren’t Rhets…” He turned an anxious look to the tube installation—it was of a type strange to his eyes—a cylinder of dark gold-brown fog. It seemed to be swirling slowly around a vortex.

  Where in creation was he? He looked at the sky—a hazy violet spangled by a myriad distant suns, random gouts of colored fire. Was it day or was it night? He searched the horizon with anxious eyes, sweating inside his air-film. Perspectives were strange, the lighting was strange, the shadows were strange. Everywhere he looked, everything was strange with the un-human wildness of the remote worlds.

  “I’m in a fix,” thought Allixter. “I’m lost.”

  It was a dreary landscape, a dingy plain studded with tremendous gray wrecks. Where the shattered walls had fallen machinery could be seen—wheels, shafts, banks of complex gear and circuits, squat housings and cases. All were broken, silent, corroded.

  Allixter turned his attention back to the cylinder of brown-gold fog. This was the in-curtain but where was the installation to send him back? Usually the two went together. The creatures who stood along the outer edge of the white platform approached, apparently with indecision and puzzlement. Allixter made no move for his JAR. He thought that if it were possible to cross-breed a seal and a man and plant a palmetto thatch of red-green quills on the scalp of the issue—here would be the result.

  As they approached, watching him from big dull-surfaced eyes, they made sounds of communication—squeaks, windy whistling tones, hisses—forming these sounds by trapping a pocket of air under their arm-pits, squeezing it past a flap of skin.

  Allixter said, “How do you do, my friends. I’m the representative of Tube Maintenance and it looks to me as if I’ve crossed over into an entirely different mesh, a million light-years gone from Earth if not farther. I fear that I’m entirely divorced from my own set of stations and Old Nick himself couldn’t tell me how to find my way home.”

  The natives ceased their noise as he spoke, then commenced once more. Allixter chewed his lips, laughed in tart amusement. He rocked the Linguaid back and forth affectionately, murmured, “And Sam Schmitz wanted to send me out half-naked!”

  He dropped a pair of legs to steady the Linguaid, swung the shutter away from the screen. “Come on over, Joe,” he said, motioning to a creature who stood slightly in the lead. “Let’s get to understand each other.”

  He set the controls for Cycle A. The screen glowed white. Geometric figures appeared—a circle, a square, a triangle, a line and a point.

  Joe looked intently, and the others crowded around his back. Allixter pointed to the circle and said, “Circle,” to the square—“Square,” likewise for the other shapes. Then, motioning to Joe, he pressed the record key and pointed to the circle.
>
  Joe was silent.

  Allixter released the key, went through the priming routine again. Again he set the banks to record, pointed to the circle. Joe squeezed a skirl of a sound from under his armpit. Allixter pointed to the other figures and Joe made other sounds.

  Encouraged, Allixter proceeded to Step Two—Enumeration. The screen depicted symbols representing the agglomerative numerals—a series of lines, one dot in the first line, two dots in the second line, three in the third, four in the fourth, in such fashion up to twenty. Joe, alive to his task, made sounds for the numbers. Then the screen displayed a random multitude of dots and Joe created another sound.

  Now Allixter tried colors. Joe stared at the screen impassively. Red—no response. Green—no response. Violet—no response. Allixter shrugged. “We’ll never get together here. You see by infra-red or ultra-violet.”

  The cycle passed on to more complicated situations. A dot moved swiftly across the screen, followed by a dot moving slowly. The sequence was repeated and Allixter pointed to the first dot. Joe created a sound. Allixter indicated the slow dot and Joe made another sound.

  From the bottom of the screen a line rose nearly to the top. Another line lifted about an inch. Joe made sounds which Allixter hoped were “tall” and “short” or “high” and “low”.

  A circle swelled almost past the outer verge of the screen and beside it appeared a minute dot. Joe’s sounds for “large” and “small” entered the memory banks.

  Presently the comparative situations were exhausted and the screen depicted noun objects—mountains, an ocean, a tree, a house, a factory, fire, water, a man, a woman. Then came more complicated objects—a turbine in a plastic housing to convey the idea of machinery—a conventionalized drawing of a dynamo with an exterior circuit first coiled around a bar, from which a magnetic field radiated, then continuing to a point where the circuit was broken and lightning-like flashes jumped the gap. Allixter pointed to these flashes and the Linguaid recorded Joe’s sound for electricity.

  Two hundred basic nouns were so recorded. Then the cycle turned to inter-person relationships. The machine had been designed for use by men—the stock situations depicted men. Allixter hoped confusion would not arise.

  First a man was shown attacking another man, striking him with a club. The victim fell with a crushed skull. Allixter pointed; the analyzer filed the words for dead and corpse. Then the murderer turned a savage face out of the screen, rushed forward with club upraised to strike. Joe jumped back, squeaking. Allixter, grinning, ran the sequence again, and the analyzer noted the word for enemy or assailant, or possibly attack.

  An hour passed—a score of situations were pictured and analyzed. It seemed to Allixter as time went by that the natives showed signs of nervousness. They cast restive glances in all directions, gestured with agitated flutters of their hand-members.

  Allixter searched the landscape but no menace was evident in the perimeter of his vision. However, by a kind of sympathy, he found his own nerves growing taut, found it difficult to concentrate on the Linguaid.

  Cycle A was completed—all the words and situations of the basic vocabulary had been recorded, although more useful and near-essential abstractions, such as interrogatives and pronouns, were still absent from the file.

  Allixter switched the machine from Cycle A to Converse. He spoke into the mike, careful to use only words of the basic vocabulary. “Desire return through machine. Lead to out-machine.”

  The Linguaid absorbed the words, found their counterparts in the recorded squeaks, hissings, trumpetings and voiced them from the speaker.

  Joe listened with attention—then he looked blankly at Allixter. His shoulders quivered. Air creaked and sputtered past the skin at his armpits.

  The Linguaid searched the files, voiced the words: “Call to machine…Desire…Machine man…Broken machine…Man come through machine…Bad…”

  There had obviously been more words spoken. The Linguaid translated only the sounds it could match against its recorded patterns.

  Allixter said, “Use words given machine.”

  Joe stared with great dull eyes. His tall thatch of red and green plumes drooped dejectedly. He made a further effort. “Man call for distant machine builder. Man come. Desire friend to build machine.”

  Allixter looked in frustration around the drab horizon, looked up into the spangled violet sky where there would never be night or day. He considered running Cycle B on the Linguaid—a process which would tax the patience of both himself and Joe but which might enable him to locate the installation to send him back to Earth.

  He tried once more. “Desire return through machine. Lead to out-machine.” He gestured to the brown-gold curtain. “See in-machine. Desire out-machine.”

  Something was wrong. The nervousness which Allixter had first noticed became marked. The natives crouched on the bone-white platform in smooth balls with their crests folded around them like partly-closed umbrellas. Allixter looked for Joe. Joe was at his feet, as huddled and compact as his mates.

  In sudden anxiety Allixter snapped the iris across the Linguaid screen, closed the lid down over the controls. A nearby building caught his eye. The machinery within was moving—grinding, pounding, snapping. Electricity or some other flow of energy arced across old contacts.

  Corroded shafts shuddered and twisted and strained. Wheels moaned and whined around dry bearings. Without warning the building exploded. Chunks of concrete and metal flew up in a crazy tangle, fell clattering in all directions. Smaller material scattered across the platform, and the natives trumpeted in terror.

  Some small fragments struck Allixter, bounded off his resilient air-film. It occurred to him that as yet he knew nothing of the atmosphere, that if the film had been punctured he might be poisoned.

  From his pouch he brought a spectrometer and let air in the vacuum chamber. He pressed the radiation button and read the dark lines on the ground glass off against a standard scale. Fluorine, chlorine, bromine, hydrogen fluoride, carbon dioxide, water vapor, argon, xenon, krypton—not a salubrious environment for the likes of him, he thought. He gazed speculatively at the structures. If he could get a few analyses of those metals he’d revolutionize the anti-corrosive industry—make a million franks overnight.

  He looked back to the exploded building, now in utter ruin. It suddenly glowed white hot and the heat did not seem to dissipate but increased. The wreckage melted into a pool of seething slag. The ground in the immediate vicinity steamed, scorched, slumped into the widening pool of lava.

  Allixter thought—That’s hard energy and if it’s dangerously radioactive it’s time for me to blow.

  He pushed the Linguaid ahead of him to the edge of the platform, prepared to jump down to the surface of the gray-black ground about two feet below. Behind him the natives still huddled, balls of seal-soft flesh, neatly covered by their thatch.

  Joe stirred, looked up, saw Allixter. He scampered forward on flexible short legs, making urgent sounds. Allixter turned the switch on the Linguaid.

  “Danger, danger, bad, deep, death,” said the Linguaid, the intonations calm and matter-of-fact.

  Allixter jerked back from the edge. Joe stopped alongside, tossed a fragment of rock to the ground. It cast up a puff of feathery dust, settled quickly out of sight. Allixter blinked.

  There but for the grace of God went Scotty Allixter, he thought. It was an ocean of ashes out there—soft fluff. With new eyes he gazed across the flat gray plain, where the blasted buildings rose like islands. He shrugged. It was beyond his understanding. He knew of many Earthmen who had lost their minds trying to comprehend the paradoxes and peculiarities of the outer stations.

  A sudden intuition struck him. He swept his eyes around the circumference of the bone-white platform. It was like a raft on the gray sea, with the slow-whirling cylinder at the center. How then had the natives made their way here? Could it possibly be that they too had arrived through the cylinder from an out-world?

  Joe
’s soft fingers fumbled at his arm. He squeaked, pumping his shoulders loosely, expertly, and the Linguaid translated, “Off. Come. Lead toward large machine.”

  Allixter said hopefully, “Desire out-machine. Desire return. Lead to out-machine.”

  Joe squeezed out further sounds. “Come—follow. Friend to large machine corpse. Large machine wreck friend. Large machine desire friend. Come—follow. Build large machine.”

  Allixter thought that whatever it was, it could be no worse than standing on this platform.

  Joe fumbled with a grating, pulled it aside, descended a steep flight of steps. Trundling the Linguaid ahead of him Allixter followed.

  The corridor became dark. Allixter flicked on his head-lamp. Ahead he saw a pair of gold-brown curtains, the ‘in’ distinguished from the ‘out’ by a subtle difference in their golden flicker.

  Joe stepped through the out-curtain, disappeared. As Allixter hesitated, he bobbed through the in-curtain, beckoned with a certain querulous insistence, once more popped back through the out-curtain.

  Allixter sighed. Pushing the Linguaid ahead of him, he stepped through.

  III

  Allixter stood in a wide corridor tiled with vitreous white squares. Ahead of him Joe slid through a tall vaguely Romanesque archway. He followed and came out on a pavilion open to the sky. The floor was the same vitreous tile, squares six feet on a side. It was innocent of furnishings or fittings. Around the edge of the floor pipe-stem columns supported a disproportionately heavy pediment and Allixter paused in trepidation, half-expecting the whole construction to buckle and fall crashing at his feet.