Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick Page B

said, with rigorous patience, “There is only one book. In this world.”
    “By ‘world,’” Joe said, “you mean ‘planet,’ or in the larger sense—”
    “On Plowman’s Planet,” Mali said, “there is just this one book.”
    “Don’t the people get tired of reading it?”
    “It changes,” Mali said. She handed the spiddle a dime, which it accepted gratefully; a copy of the book was passed to her and she in turn passed it to Joe.
    Examining it, Joe said, “It has no title. And no author.”
    “It is written,” Mali said, as they walked on toward the spaceport buildings, “by a group of creatures or entities—I don’t the English know—that records everything that passes on Plowman’s Planet. Everything. Great and small.”
    “Then it’s a newspaper.”
    Mali halted; she turned to face him, her eyes burning with exasperation.
“It is recorded first,”
she said, as steadily as she could manage. “The Kalends spin the story; they enter it in the ever-changing book without a title, and it comes to about, finally.”
    “Precognitive,” Joe said.
    “That raises a question. Which is cause? Which is effect? The Kalends wove in their altering, evolving script that the Fog-Things would pass away. They did pass away. Did then the Kalends
make
them pass away? The spiddles think so.”She added, “But the spiddles are very superstitious. They naturally believe that.”
    Joe opened the book at random. The text was not in English; he did not recognize the language or even the letters of its alphabet. But then, as he leafed through it, he came to a short section in English, embedded in the mass of alien-looking entries.
    The girl Mali Yojez is an expert at removing coral deposits from submerged artifacts. Other individuals brought from various systems throughout the galaxy include geologists, structural engineers, hydraulic engineers, seismologists; one specializes in underwater robot operations and another, an archaeologist, is a master at locating buried, ancient cities. A peculiar many-armed bivalve lives in a tank of salt water and functions well in supervising the raising of sunken ships for salvage purposes. A gastropod, capable of
    At that point the text lapsed into another language; he shut the book, pondered. “Maybe I’m mentioned in here somewhere,” he said, as they reached the moving sidewalk leading to the concourse sections of the spaceport terminal building-complex.
    “Of course,” Mali said calmly. “If you long look enough you will find it. How will you make it—pardon. How will it make
you
feel?”
    “Eerie,” he said, still pondering.
    A surface car, acting as a taxi, transported them to their hotel. Joe Fernwright, on the short trip, continued to examine the untitled book; it preoccupied him, preempting the colorful shops which the taxi passed, and the several life-forms bustling about here and there—he was aware of the city street, its people, and buildings, but only dimly. Because he had already found another passage in English.
    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