Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick Page A

creature knows itself,” Glimmung said. “You don’t know yourself; you don’t have any knowledge, none at all, of your most basic potentials. Do you understand what the Raising will mean for you? Everything that has been latent, has been potential, in you—all of it will become actualized. Everyone who conspires in the Raising, everyone involved, from a hundred planets tossed here and there in the galaxy—everyone will
be
. You have never been, Joe Fernwright. You merely exist. To be is to do. And we will do a great thing, Joe Fernwright.” Glimmung’s voice rang like steel.
    “Did you come here to talk me out of my doubts?” Joe asked. “Is that why you’re at the spaceport? To make sure I don’t change my mind and drop out at the last moment?” It couldn’t be that; he was not that important. Glimmung, stretched between fifteen worlds, would not be lowering himself to this, to an attempt to restore the confidence of one meager pot-healer from Cleveland; Glimmung had too much to do: there were larger matters.
    Glimmung said, “This is a ‘larger matter.’”
    “Why?”
    “Because there are no small matters. Just as there is no small life. The life of an insect, a spider; his life is as large as yours, and yours is as large as mine. Life is life. You wish to live as much as I do; you have spent seven months of hell, waiting day after day for what you needed … the way a spider waits. Think about the spider, Joe Fernwright. He makes his web. Then he makes a little silk cave at the end of the web to sit in. He holds strands that lead to every part of the web, so that he will know when something to eat, something he must have to live, arrives. He waits. A day goes by. Two days. A week. He waits on; there is nothing he can do but wait. The little fisherman of the night…and perhaps something comes, and he lives, or nothing comes, and he waits and he thinks, ‘It won’t come in time. It is too late.’ And he is right; he dies still waiting.”
    “But for me,” Joe said, “something came in time.”
    “I came,” Glimmung said.
    Joe said, “Did you pick me because of—” He hesitated. “Out of pity?”
    “Never,” Glimmung said. “The Raising will take great skill, many skills, many knowings and crafts, vast numbers of arts. Do you still have that potsherd with you?”
    Joe got the small divine fragment from his coat pocket; he put it down on the lunch counter, beside the empty bowl of soup.
    “Thousands of them,” Glimmung said. “You have, I should guess, a hundred more years of life. It can’t be done in a hundred years; you will step among them, the beautiful little pieces, until the day you die. And you will get your wish; you will
be
, until the end. And, having been, you will always exist.” Glimmung looked at the Omega wrist watch that circled his humanoid wrist. “They will be announcing your flight in two minutes.”
    After he had been strapped to his couch, and the pressurehelmet had been screwed over his head, he managed to twist around so that he could hopefully see his flight companion, the person beside him.
    Mali Yojez, the tag read. He squinted and saw that it was a girl, non-Terran but humanoid.
    And then the first thrust rockets ignited and the ship began to rise.
    He had never been off Earth before, and he realized this starkly as the weight on him grew. This—is—not—like—going—from—New York—to Tokyo, he said to himself gaspingly. With incalculable effort he managed to turn his head so that he could once again see the non-Terran girl. She had become blue. Maybe it’s natural to her race, Joe thought. Maybe I’ve turned blue, too. Maybe I’m dying, he said to himself, and then the booster rockets came on…and Joe Fernwright passed out.
    When he awoke he heard only the sound of the Mahler “Fourth” and a low murmur of voices. I’m the last to come out of it, he said to himself gloomily. The pert, dark-haired stewardess busily unscrewed his pressure