GALACTIC POT HEALER

"Yes," Joe said. "Without deliberation." He felt nothing in the way of emotions; he experienced only bodily discomfort, acute and still growing. It had preempted any feeling, any mental activity.

"However, we're going to impound your remaining coins. For the present at least. And you'll be on probation for a year, during which time you will report here, once a week, and give us an account, a full account, of your activities."

"Without a trial?" Joe said.

"Do you want to be tried?" the police official eyed him keenly.

"No," Joe said. He went on rubbing his head. The QCA material apparently hasn't been fed to their computers yet, he decided. But eventually it'll all be combined. They'll put it all together, my tipping the cop, my finding notes in the water closet of my toilet. I'm a nut, he said to himself. I've gone mad from inactivity; the last seven months have destroyed me. And now, when I made my move, when I took my coins to Mr. Job--_I couldn't do it_.

"Wait a minute," another cop said. "Here's something on him from QCA. It just rolled down the circuit from their computer bank central."

Turning, Joe ran toward the door of the police station. Toward the mass of people outside. As if to bury himself among them; to cease to be a finite part.

Two cops appeared ahead of him and they lunged toward him as he ran; they came closer u

Bobbing and undulating, a squid swept past him; it was, he thought, like the soul of the sea. The squid all at once ejected clouds of darkness, as if meant to efface everything. He saw no police officers, now; the darkness propagated itself until it filled up the panorama and then it became more intense, as if it were not opaque enough before. But I can breathe, Joe said. "Hey," he said aloud—and heard his own voice. I'm just not in the water, he realized, like they are. I can identify myself; I'm split off, a separate entity. But why?

What if I try to move? he wondered. He took one step, another, and then clunk; he rebounded off a wall-like surface. Another way, he said; he turned and took a step to his right. Clunk. In panic he thought, I'm in a box like a coffin! Did they kill me? he asked himself. When I tried to run for the door. He reached his arms out, into the darkness, groping... and something was placed in his right hand. Small, square. With two disklike knobs.

A transistor radio.

He turned it on.

"Hi there, folks!" a happy, ti

"Mr. Karns," a shrill female voice said, "there ought to be a stop sign placed at the intersection of Fulton Avenue and Clover, where all the little schoolchildren, and I see them every day—"

Something hard, some dense object, bumped Joe's left hand. He took hold of it. A phone.

Sitting down, he placed the phone and the transistor radio in front of him and then he got out his cigarette lighter and zipped the butane flame on. It illuminated a meager circle, but within the circle he could make out the phone and the transistor radio. A Zenith transistor radio, he noted. Evidently a good one, from the size of it.

"Okay, folks out there," Cavorting Cary Karns merrily prattled. "The number is 394-950-911111; that's where you'll reach me and through me the whole world of—"

Joe dialed. At last he had painstakingly dialed the whole number. He held the receiver to his ear, listened to a busy signal for a moment, and then heard, from both the receiver and the radio, the voice of Cavorting Cary Karns. "Yes sir, or is it ma'am?" Karns asked.

"Where am I?" Joe said into the phone.

"Hey there!" Karns said. "We've got somebody out there, some poor soul, who's lost. Your name is, sir?"

"Joseph Fernwright," Joe said.

"Well, Mr. Fernwright, it's a downright pleasure to talk to you. Your question is, Where are you? Does anybody know where Mr. Joseph Fernwright of Cleveland—you are in Cleveland, aren't you, Mr. Fernwright?--does anybody out there know where he is, at this moment? I think this is a valid question on Mr. Fernwright's part; I'd like to hold the lines open for anyone who can call in and give us some idea, at least a general idea, of the vicinity in which Mr. Fernwright is currently. So you other people, who don't know where Mr. Fernwright is, could you not call in until we've located Mr. Fernwright? Mr. Fernwright, it shouldn't be long; we've got a ten million audience and a fifty-thousand-watt transmitter going and—wait! A call." Ti

A male voice, from the radio and from Joe's phone, said, "My name is Dwight L. Glimmung of 301 Pleasant Hill Road, and I know where Mr. Fernwright is. He's in my basement. Slightly to the right and a little behind my furnace. He's in a wooden packing crate that came with an air-conditioning unit that I ordered from People's Sears, last year."

"You hear that, Mr. Fernwright?" Cavorting Cary Karns whooped. "You're in a packing crate in Mr. Dwight L.—what was the rest of your name, sir?"

"Glimmung."

"Mr. Dwight L. Glimmung's basement of 301 Pleasant Hill Road. So all your troubles are over, Mr. Fernwright. Simply get out of the packing crate and you'll be just fine!"

"I don't want him to bust the crate, though," Dwight L. Glimmung said. "Maybe I better go down there into that basement and pry a few boards loose and let him out."

"Mr. Fernwright," Karns said, "just for the edification of our radio audience, how did you happen to get into an empty packing crate in the basement of Mr. Dwight L. Glimmung of 301 Pleasant Hill Road? I'm sure our audience would like to know."

"I don't know," Joe said.

"Well, perhaps then Mr. Glimmung—Mr. Glimmung? He seems to have rung off. Evidently he's on his way down into the basement to let you out, Mr. Fernwright. What a lucky thing for you it was, sir, that Mr. Glimmung happened to be listening to this show! Otherwise you probably would be in that crate until doomsday. And now let's turn to another listener; hello?" The phone clicked in Joe's ear. The circuit had been broken.

Sounds. From around him. A creaking noise and something wide bent back; light flooded into the box wherein Joe Fernwright sat with his cigarette lighter, his phone, and his transistor radio.

"I got you out of the police barracks the best way I could," a male voice—the same that Joe had heard on the radio—said.

"A strange way," Joe said.

"To you strange. Strange to me have been a number of things you've done since the time I first became aware of you.,,