19

   Looking down, John Isidore saw his own hands; they gripped the twin handles of the empathy box. As he stood gaping at them, the lights in the living room of his apartment plunged out. He could see, in the kitchen, Pris hurrying to catch the table lamp there.
   “Listen, J.R.,” Irmgard whispered harshly in his ear; she had grabbed him by the shoulder, her nails digging into him with frantic intensity. She seemed unaware of what she did, now; in the dim nocturnal light from outdoors Irmgard’s face had become distorted, astigmatic. It had turned into—a craven dish, with cowering, tiny, lidless eyes. “You have to go,” she whispered, “to the door, when he knocks, if he does knock; you have to show him your identification and tell him this is your apartment and no one else is here. And you ask to see a warrant.”
   Pris, standing on the other side of him, her body arched, whispered, “Don’t let him in, J.R. Say anything; do anything that will stop him. Do you know what a bounty hunter would do let loose in here? Do you understand what he would do to us? “
   Moving away from the two android females Isidore groped his way to the door; with his fingers he located the knob, halted there, listening. He could sense the hall outside, is he always had sensed it: vacant and reverberating and lifeless.
   “Hear anything?” Roy Baty said, bending close. Isidore smelled the rank, cringing body; he inhaled fear from it, fear pouring out, forming a mist. “Step out and take a look.”
   Opening the door, Isidore looked up and down the indistinct hall. The air out here had a clear quality, despite the weight of dust. He still held the spider which Mercer had given him. Was it actually the spider which Pris had snipped apart with Irmgard Baty’s cuticle scissors? Probably not. He would never know. But anyhow it was alive; it crept about within his closed hand, not biting him: as with most small spiders its mandibles could not puncture human skin.
   He reached the end of the hall, descended the stairs, and stepped outside, onto what had once been a terraced path, garden-enclosed. The garden had perished during the war and the path had ruptured in a thousand places. But he knew its surface; under his feet the familiar path felt good, and he followed it, passed along the greater side of the building, coming at last to the only verdant spot in the vicinity—a yard-square patch of dust-saturated, drooping weeds. There he deposited the spider. He experienced its wavering progress as it departed his hand. Well, that was that; he straightened up.
   A flashlight beam focused on the weeds; in its glare their half-dead stalks appeared stark, menacing. Now he could see the spider; it rested on a serrated leaf. So it had gotten away all right.
   “What did you do?” the man holding the flashlight asked.
   “I put down a spider,” he said, wondering why the man didn’t see; in the beam of yellow light the spider bloated up larger than life. “So it could get away.”
   “Why don’t you take it up to your apartment? You ought to keep it in a jar. According to the January Sidney’s most spiders are up ten percent in retail price. You could have gotten a hundred and some odd dollars for it.”
   Isidore said, “If I took it back up there she’d cut it apart again. Bit by bit, to see what it did.”
   “Androids do that,” the man said. Reaching into his overcoat he brought out something which he flapped open and extended toward Isidore.
   In the irregular light the bounty hunter seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office. Methodical but informal. Not demi-god in shape; not at all as Isidore had anticipated him.
   “I’m an investigator for the San Francisco Police Department. Deckard, Rick Deckard.” The man flapped his ID shut again, stuck it back in his overcoat pocket. “They’re up there now? The three?”
   “Well, the thing is,” Isidore said, “I’m looking after them. Two are women. They’re the last ones of the group; the rest are dead. I brought Pris’s TV set up from her apartment and put it in mine, so they could watch Buster Friendly. Buster proved beyond a doubt that Mercer doesn’t exist.” Isidore felt excitement, knowing something of this importance—news that the bounty hunter evidently hadn’t heard.
   “Let’s go up there,” Deckard said. Suddenly he held a laser tube pointed at Isidore; then, indecisively, he put it away. “You’re a special, aren’t you,” he said. “A chickenhead.”
   “But I have a job. I drive a truck for—” Horrified, he discovered he had forgotten the name. “—a pet hospital,” he said. “The Van Ness Pet Hospital,” he said. “Owned b-b-by Hannibal Sloat.”
   Deckard said, “Will you take me up there and show me which apartment they’re in? There’re over a thousand separate apartments; you can save me a lot of time.” His voice dipped with fatigue.
   “If you kill them you won’t be able to fuse with Mercer again,” Isidore said.
   “You won’t take me up there? Show me which floor? Just tell me the floor. I’ll figure out which apartment on the floor it is.”
   “No,” Isidore said.
   “Under state and federal law,” Deckard began. He ceased, then. Giving up the interrogation. “Good night,” he said, and walked away, up the path and into the building, his flashlight bleeding a yellowed, diffuse path before him.

   Inside the conapt building, Rick Deckard shut off his flashlight; guided by the ineffectual, recessed bulbs spaced ahead of him he made his way along the hall, thinking, The chickenhead knows they’re androids; he knew it already, before I told him. But he doesn’t understand. On the other hand, who does? Do I? Did I? And one of them will be a duplicate of Rachael, he reflected. Maybe the special has been living with her. I wonder how he liked it, he asked himself. Maybe that was the one who he believed would cut up his spider. I could go back and get that spider, he reflected. I’ve never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. Maybe it’ll happen someday to me like it did him.
   He had brought listening gear from his car; he set it up, now, a revolving detek-snout with blip screen. In the silence of the hall the screen indicated nothing. Not on this floor, he said to himself. He clicked over to vertical. On that axis the snout absorbed a faint signal. Upstairs. He gathered up the gear and his briefcase and climbed the stairs to the next floor.
   A figure in the shadows waited.
   “If you move I’ll retire you,” Rick said. The male one, waiting for him. In his clenched fingers the laser tube felt hard but he could not lift it and aim it. He had been caught first, caught too soon.
   “I’m not an android,” the figure said. “My name is Mercer.” It stepped into a zone of light. “I inhabit this building because of Mr. Isidore. The special who had the spider; you talked briefly to him outside.”
   “Am I outside Mercerism, now?” Rick said. “As the chickenhead said? Because of what I’m going to do in the next few minutes?”
   Mercer said, “Mr. Isidore spoke for himself, not for me. What you are doing has to be done. I said that already.” Raising his arm he pointed at the stairs behind Rick. “I came to tell you that one of them is behind you and below, not in the apartment. It will be the hard one of the three and you must retire it first.” The rustling, ancient voice gained abrupt fervor. “Quick, Mr. Deckard. On the steps.”
   His laser tube thrust out, Rick spun and sank onto his haunches facing the flight of stairs. Up it glided a woman, toward him, and he knew her; he recognized her and lowered his laser tube. “Rachael” he said, perplexed. Had she followed him in her own hovercar, tracked him here? And why? “Go back to Seattle,” he said. “Leave me alone; Mercer told me I’ve got to do it.” And then he saw that it was not quite Rachael.
   “For what we’ve meant to each other,” the android said as it approached him, its arms reaching as if to clutch at him. The clothes, he thought, are wrong. But the eyes, the same eyes. And there are more like this; there can be a legion of her, each with its own name, but all Rachael Rosen—Rachael, the prototype, used by the manufacturer to protect the others. He fired at her as, imploringly, she dashed toward him. The android burst and parts of it flew; he covered his face and then looked again, looked and saw the laser tube which it had carried roll away, back onto the stairs; the metal tube bounced downward, step by step, the sound echoing and diminishing and slowing. The hard one of the three, Mercer had said. He peered about, searching for Mercer. The old man had gone. They can follow me with Rachael Rosens until I die, he thought, or until the type becomes obsolete, whichever comes first. And now the other two, he thought. One of them is not in the apartment, Mercer had said. Mercer protected me, he realized. Manifested himself and offered aid. She—it—would have gotten me, he said to himself, except for the fact that Mercer warned me. I can do the rest, now, he realized. This was the impossible one; she knew I couldn’t do this. But it’s over. In an instant. I did what I couldn’t do. The Batys I can track by standard procedure; they will be hard but they won’t be like this.
   He stood alone in the empty hall; Mercer had left him because he had done what he came for, Rachael—or rather Pris Stratton—had been dismembered and that left nothing now, only himself. But elsewhere in the building; the Batys waited and knew. Perceived what he had done, here. Probably, at this point, they were afraid. This had been their response to his presence in the building. Their attempt. Without Mercer it would have worked. For them, winter had come.
   This has to be done quickly, what I’m after now, he realized; he hurried down the hall and all at once his detection gear registered the presence of cephalic activity. He had found their apartment. No more need of the gear; he discarded it and rapped on the apartment door.
   From within, a man’s voice sounded. “Who is it?”
   “This is Mr. Isidore,” Rick said. “Let me in because I’m looking after you and t-t-two of you are women.”
   “We’re not opening the door,” a woman’s voice came.
   “I want to watch Buster Friendly on Pris’s TV set,” Rick said. “Now that he’s proved Mercer doesn’t exist it’s very important to watch him. I drive a truck for the Van Ness Pet Hospital, which is owned by Mr. Hannibal S-s-sloat.” He made himself stammer. “S-s-so would you open the d-d-door? It’s my apartment.” He waited, and the door opened. Within the apartment he saw darkness and indistinct shapes, two of them.
   The smaller shape, the woman, said, “You have to administer tests.”
   “It’s too late,” Rick said. The taller figure tried to push the door shut and turn on some variety of electronic equipment. “No,” Rick said, “I have to come in.” He let Roy Baty fire once; he held his own fire until the laser beam had passed by him as he twisted out of the way. “You’ve lost your legal basis,” Rick said, “by firing on me. You should have forced me to give you the Voigt-Kampff test. But now it doesn’t matter.” Once more Roy Baty sent a laser beam cutting at him, missed, dropped the tube, and ran somewhere deeper inside the apartment, to another room, perhaps, the electronic hardware abandoned.
   “Why didn’t Pris get you?” Mrs. Baty said.
   “There is no Pris,” he said. “Only Rachael Rosen, over and over again.” He saw the laser tube in her dimly outlined hand; Roy Baty had slipped it to her, had meant to decoy him into the apartment, far in, so that Irmgard Baty could get him from behind, in the back. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Baty,” Rick said, and shot her.
   Roy Baty, in the other room, let out a cry of anguish.
   “Okay, you loved her,” Rick said. “And I loved Rachael. And the special loved the other Rachael.” He shot Roy Baty; the big man’s corpse lashed about, toppled like an overstacked collection of separate, brittle entities; it smashed into the kitchen table and carried dishes and flatware down with it. Reflex circuits in the corpse made it twitch and flutter, but it had died; Rick ignored it, not seeing it and not seeing that of Irmgard Baty by the front door. I got the last one, Rick realized. Six today; almost a record. And now it’s over and I can go home, back to Iran and the goat. And we’ll have enough money, for once.
   He sat down on the couch and presently as he sat there in the silence of the apartment, among the nonstirring objects, the special Mr. Isidore appeared at the door.
   “Better not look,” Rick said.
   “I saw her on the stairs. Pris.” The special was crying.
   “Don’t take it so hard,” Rick said. He got dizzily to his feet, laboring. “Where’s your phone?”
   The special said nothing, did nothing except stand. So Rick hunted for the phone himself, found it, and dialed Harry Bryant’s office.

20

   “Good,” Harrv Bryant said, after he had been told. “Well, go get some rest. We’ll send a patrol car to pick up the three bodies.”
   Rick Deckard hung up. “Androids are stupid,” he said savagely to the special. “Roy Baty couldn’t tell me from you; it thought you were at the door. The police will clean up in here; why don’t you stay in another apartment until they’re finished? You don’t want to be in here with what’s left.”
   “I’m leaving this b-b-building,” Isidore said. “I’m going to l-l-live deeper in town where there’s m-m-more people.”
   “I think there’s a vacant apartment in my building,” Rick said.
   Isidore stammered, “I don’t w-w-want to live near you.”
   “Go outside or upstairs,” Rick said. “Don’t stay in here.”
   The special floundered, not knowing what to do; a variety of mute expressions crossed his face and then, turning, he shuffled out of the apartment, leaving Rick alone.
   What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scoure, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows.
   As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow now it’s time to go home. Maybe, after I’ve been there awhile with Iran I’ll forget.

   When he got back to his own apartment building, Iran met him on the roof. She looked at him in a deranged, peculiar way; in all his years with her he had never seen her like this.
   Putting his arm around her he said, “Anyhow it’s over. And I’ve been thinking; maybe Harry Bryant can assign me to a—”
   “Rick,” she said, “I have to tell you something. I’m sorry. The goat is dead.”
   For some reason it did not surprise him; it only made him feel worse, a quantitative addition to the weight shrinking him from every side. “I think there’s a guarantee in the contract,” he said. “If it gets sick within ninety days the dealer—”
   “It didn’t get sick. Someone”—Iran cleared her throat and went on huskily—”someone came here, got the goat out of its cage, and dragged it to the edge of the roof.”
   “And pushed it off?” he said.
   “Yes.” She nodded.
   “Did you see who did it?”
   “I saw her very clearly,” Iran said. “Barbour was still up here fooling around; he came down to get me and we called the police, but by then the animal was dead and she had left. A small young-looking girl with dark hair and large black eyes, very thin. Wearing a long fish-scale coat. She had a mail-pouch purse. And she made no effort to keep us from seeing her. As if she didn’t care.”
   “No, she didn’t care,” he said. “Rachael wouldn’t give a damn if you saw her; she probably wanted you to, so I’d know who had done it.” He kissed her. “You’ve been waiting up here all this time?”
   “Only for half an hour. That’s when it happened; half an hour ago.” Iran, gently, kissed him back. It’s so awful. So needless.”
   He turned toward his parked car, opened the door, and got in behind the wheel. “Not needless,” he said. “She had what seemed to her a reason.” An android reason, he thought.
   “Where are you going? Won’t you come downstairs and be with me? There was the most shocking news on TV; Buster Friendly claims that Mercer is a fake. What do you think about that, Rick? Do you think it could be true?”
   “Everything is true,” he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought.” He snapped on the car motor.
   “Will you be all right?”
   “I’ll be all right,” he said, and thought, And I’m going to die. Both those are true, too. He closed the car door, flicked a signal with his hand to Iran, and then swept up into the night sky.
   Once, he thought, I would have seen the stars. Years ago. But now it’s only the dust; no one has seen a star in years, at least not from Earth. Maybe I’ll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

21

   In the early morning light the land below him extended seemingly forever, gray and refuse-littered. Pebbles the size of houses had rolled to a stop next to one another and he thought, It’s like a shipping room when all the merchandise has left. Only fragments of crates remain, the containers which signify nothing in themselves. Once, he thought, crops grew here and animals grazed. What a remarkable thought, that anything could have cropped grass here.
   What a strange place he thought for all of that to die.
   He brought the hovercar down, coasted above the surface for a time. What would Dave Holden say about me now? he asked himself. In one sense I’m now the greatest bounty hunter who ever lived; no one ever retired six Nexus-6 types in one twenty-four-hour span and no one probably ever will again. I ought to call him, he said to himself.
   A cluttered hillside swooped up at him; he lifted the hovercar as the world came close. Fatigue, he thought; I shouldn’t be driving still. He clicked off the ignition, glided for an interval, and then set the hovercar down. It tumbled and bounced across the hillside, scattering rocks; headed upward, it came at last to a grinding, skittering stop.
   Picking up the receiver of the car’s phone he dialed the operator at San Francisco. “Give me Mount Zion Hospital” he told her.
   Presently he had another operator on the vidscreen. “Mount Zion Hospital.”
   “You have a patient named Dave Holden,” he said. “Would it be possible to talk to him? Is he well enough?”
   “Just a moment and I’ll check on that, sir.” The screen temporarily blanked out. Time passed. Rick took a pinch of Dr. Johnson Snuff and shivered; without the car’s heater the temperature had begun to plunge. “Dr. Costa says that Mr. Holden is not receiving calls,” the operator told him, reappearing.
   “This is police business,” he said; he held his flat pack of ID up to the screen.
   “Just a moment.” Again the operator vanished. Again Rick inhaled a pinch of Dr. Johnson Snuff; the menthol in it tasted foul, so early in the morning. He rolled down the car window and tossed the little yellow tin out into the rubble. “No, sir,” the operator said, once more on his screen. “Dr. Costa does not feel Mr. Holden’s condition will permit him to take any calls, no matter how urgent, for at least—”
   “Okay,” Rick said. He hung up.
   The air, too, had a foul quality; he rolled up the window again. Dave is really out, he reflected. I wonder why they didn’t get me. Because I moved too fast, he decided. All in one day; they couldn’t have expected it. Harry Bryant was right.
   The car had become too cold, now, so he opened the door and stepped out. A noxious, unexpected wind filtered through his clothes and he began to walk, rubbing his hands together.
   It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don’t think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.
   He walked on, up the hillside, and with each step the weight on him grew. Too tired, he thought, to climb. Stopping, he wiped stinging sweat from his eyes, salt tears produced by his skin, his whole aching body. Then, angry at himself, he spat—spat with wrath and contempt, for himself, with utter hate, onto the barren ground. Thereupon he resumed his trudge up the slope, the lonely and unfamiliar terrain, remote from everything; nothing lived here except himself.
   The heat. It had become hot, now; evidently time had passed. And he felt hunger. He had not eaten for god knew how long. The hunger and heat combined, a poisonous taste resembling defeat; yes, he thought, that’s what it is: I’ve been defeated in some obscure way. By having killed the androids? By Rachael’s murder of my goat? He did not know, but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certainly fatal cliffside fall—falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else’s degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked—the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.
   At that moment the first rock—and it was not rubber or soft foam plastic—struck him in the inguinal region. And the pain, the first knowledge of absolute isolation and suffering, touched him throughout in its undisguised actual form.
   He halted. And then, goaded on—the goad invisible but real, not to be challenged—he resumed his climb. Rolling upward, he thought, like the stones; I am doing what stones do, without volition. Without it meaning anything.
   “Mercer,” he said, panting; he stopped, stood still. In front of him he distinguished a shadowy figure, motionless. “Wilbur Mercer! Is that you?” My god, he realized; it’s my shadow. I have to get out of here, down off this hill!
   He scrambled back down. Once, he fell; clouds of dust obscured everything, and he ran from the dust—he hurried faster, sliding and tumbling on the loose pebbles. Ahead he saw his parked car. I’m back down, he said to himself. I’m off the hill. He plucked open the car door, squeezed inside. Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I’ve undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn’t new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone.
   Trembling, he got a fresh new tin of snuff from the glove compartment of the car; pulling off the protective band of tape he took a massive pinch, rested, sitting half in the car and half out, his feet on the arid, dusty soil. This was the last place to go to, he realized. I shouldn’t have flown here. And now he found himself too tired to fly back out.
   If I could just talk to Dave, he thought, I’d be all right; I could get away from here, go home and go to bed. I still have my electric sheep and I still have my job. There’ll be more andys to retire; my career isn’t over; I haven’t retired the last andy in existence. Maybe that’s what it is, he thought. I’m afraid there aren’t any more.
   He looked at his watch. Nine-thirty.
   Picking up the vidphone receiver he dialed the Hall of Justice on Lombard. “Let me speak to Inspector Bryant,” he said to the police switchboard operator Miss Wild.
   “Inspector Bryant is not in his office, Mr. Deckard; he’s out in his car, but I don’t get any answer. He must have temporarily left his car.”
   “Did he say where he intended to go?”
   “Something about the androids you retired last night.”
   “Let me talk to my secretary,” he said.
   A moment later the orange, triangular face of Ann Marsten appeared on the screen. “Oh, Mr. Deckard—Inspector Bryant has been trying to get hold of you. I think he’s turning your name over to Chief Cutter for a citation. Because you retired those six—”
   “I know what I did,” he said.
   “That’s never happened before. Oh, and Mr. Deckard; your wife phoned. She wants to know if you’re all right. Are you all right?”
   He said nothing.
   “Anyhow,” Miss Marsten said, “maybe you should call her and tell her. She left word she’ll be home, waiting to hear from you.”
   “Did you hear about my goat?” he said.
   “No, I didn’t even know you had a goat.”
   Rick said, “They took my goat.”
   “Who did, Mr. Deckard? Animal thieves? We just got a report on a huge new gang of them, probably teenagers, operating in—”
   “Life thieves,” he said.
   “I don’t understand you, Mr. Deckard.” Miss Marsten peered at him intently. “Mr. Deckard, you look awful. So tired. And god, your cheek is bleeding.”
   Putting his band up he felt the blood. From a rock, probably. More than one, evidently, had struck him.
   “You look,” Miss Marsten said, “like Wilbur Mercer.”
   “I am,” he said. “I’m Wilbur Mercer; I’ve permanently fused with him. And I can’t unfuse. I’m sitting here waiting to unfuse. Somewhere near the Oregon border.”
   “Shall we send someone out? A department car to pick you up?”
   “No,” he said. “I’m no longer with the department.”
   “Obviously you did too much yesterday, Mr. Deckard,” she said chidingly. “What you need now is bed rest. Mr. Deckard, you’re our best bounty hunter, the best we’ve ever had. I’ll tell Inspector Bryant when he comes in; you go on home and go to bed. Call your wife right away, Mr. Deckard, because she’s terribly, terribly worried. I could tell. You’re both in dreadful shape.”
   “It’s because of my goat,” he said. “Not the androids; Rachael was wrong—I didn’t have any trouble retiring them. And the special was wrong, too, about my not being able to fuse with Mercer again. The only one who was right is Mercer.”
   “You better get back here to the Bay Area, Mr. Deckard. Where there’re people. There isn’t anything living up there near Oregon; isn’t that right? Aren’t you alone?”
   “It’s strange,” Rick said. “I had the absolute, utter, completely real illusion that I had become Mercer and people were lobbing rocks at me. But not the way you experience it when you hold the handles of an empathy box. When you use an empathy box you feel you’re with Mercer. The difference is I wasn’t with anyone; I was alone.”
   “They’re saying now that Mercer is a fake.”
   “Mercer isn’t a fake,” he said. “Unless reality is a fake.” This hill, he thought. This dust and these many stones, each one different from all the others. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I can’t stop being Mercer. Once you start it’s too late to back off.” Will I have to climb the hill again? he wondered. Forever, as Mercer does … trapped by eternity. “Goodby,” he said, and started to ring off.
   “You’ll call your wife? You promise?”
   “Yes.” He nodded. “Thanks, Ann.” He hung up. Bed rest, he thought. The last time I hit bed was with Rachael. A violation of a statute. Copulation with an android; absolutely against the law, here and on the colony worlds as well. She must be back in Seattle now. With the other Rosens, real and humanoid. I wish I could do to you what you did to me, he wished. But it can’t be done to an and—roid because they don’t care. If I had killed you last night my goat would be alive now. There’s where I made the wrong decision. Yes, he thought; it can all be traced back to that and to my going to bed with you. Anyhow you were correct about one thing; it did change me. But not in the way you predicted.
   A much worse way, he decided.
   And yet I don’t really care. Not any longer. Not, he thought, after what happened to me up there, toward the top of the hill. I wonder what would have come next, if I had gone on climbing and reached the top. Because that’s where Mercer appears to die. That’s where Mercer’s triumph manifests itself, there at the end of the great sidereal cycle.
   But if I’m Mercer, he thought, I can never die, not in ten thousand years. Mercer is immortal.
   Once more he picked up the phone receiver, to call his wife.
   And froze.

22

   He set the receiver back down and did not take his eyes from the spot that had moved outside the car. The bulge in the ground, among the stones. An animal, he said to himself. And his heart lugged under the excessive load, the shock of recognition. I know what it is, he realized; I’ve never seen one before but I know it from the old nature films they show on Government TV.
   They’re extinct! he said to himself; swiftly he dragged out his much-creased Sidney’s, turned the pages with twitching fingers.
   TOAD (Bufonidae), all varieties ………… E.
   Extinct for years now. The critter most precious to Wilbur Mercer, along with the donkey. But toads most of all.
   I need a box. He squirmed around, saw nothing in the back seat of the hovercar; he leaped out, hurried to the trunk compartment, unlocked and opened it. There rested a car board container, inside it a spare fuel pump for his car. He dumped the fuel pump out, found some furry hempish twine, and walked slowly toward the toad. Not taking his eyes from it.
   The toad, he saw, blended in totally with the texture and shade of the ever-present dust. It had, perhaps, evolved, meeting the new climate as it had met all climates before. Had it not moved he would never have spotted it; yet he had been sitting no more than two yards from it. What happens when you find—if you find—an animal believed extinct? he asked himself, trying to remember. It happened so seldom. Something about a star of honor from the U.N. and a stipend. A reward running into millions of dollars. And of all possibilities—to find the critter most sacred to Mercer. Jesus, he thought; it can’t be. Maybe it’s due to brain damage on my part: exposure to radioactivity. I’m a special, he thought. Something has happened to me. Like the chickenhead Isidore and his spider; what happened to him is happening to me. Did Mercer arrange it? But I’m Mercer. I arranged it; I found the toad. Found it because I see through Mercer’s eyes.
   He squatted on his haunches, close beside the toad. It had shoved aside the grit to make a partial hole for itself, displaced the dust with its rump. So that only the top of its flat skull and its eyes projected above ground. Meanwhile, its metabolism slowed almost to a halt, it had drifted off into a trance. The eyes held no spark, no awareness of him, and in horror he thought, It’s dead, of thirst maybe. But it had moved.
   Setting the cardboard box down, he carefully began brushing the loose soil away from the toad. It did not seem to object, but of course it was not aware of his existence.
   When he lifted the toad out he felt its peculiar coolness; in his hands its body seemed dry and wrinkled—almost flabby—and as cold as if it had taken up residence in a grotto miles under the earth away from the sun. Now the toad squirmed; with its weak hind feet it tried to pry itself from his grip, wanting, instinctively, to go flopping off. A big one, he thought; full-grown and wise. Capable, in its own fashion, of surviving even that which we’re not really managing to survive. I wonder where it finds the water for its eggs.
   So this is what Mercer sees, he thought as he painstakingly tied the cardboard box shut—tied it again and again. Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer’s eyes I probably will never stop.
   And no android, he thought, will cut the legs from this. As they did from the chickenhead’s spider.
   He placed the carefully tied box on the car seat and got in behind the wheel. It’s like being a kid again, he Now all the weight had left him, the monumental oppressive fatigue. Wait until Iran hears about this; he the vidphone receiver, started to dial. Then paused. it as a surprise, he concluded. It’ll only take thirty minutes to fly back there.
   Eagerly he switched the motor on, and, shortly, had zipped up into the sky, in the direction of San Francisco, seven hundred miles to the south.

   At the Penfield mood organ, Iran Deckard sat with her right index finger touching the numbered dial. But she did not dial; she felt too listless and ill to want anything: a burden which closed off the future and any possibilities which it might once have contained. If Rick were here, she thought, he’d get me to dial 3 and that way I’d find myself wanting to dial something important, ebullient joy or if not that then possibly an 888, the desire to watch TV no matter what’s on it. I wonder what is on it, she thought. And then she wondered again where Rick had gone. He may be coming back and on the other hand he may not be, she said to herself, and felt her bones within her shrink with age.
   A knock sounded at the apartment door.
   Putting down the Penfield manual she jumped up, thinking, I don’t need to dial, now; I already have it—if it is Rick. She ran to the door, opened the door wide.
   “Hi,” he said. There he stood, a cut on his cheek, his clothes wrinkled and gray, even his hair saturated with dust. His hands, his face—dust clung to every part of him, except his eyes. Round with awe his eyes shone, like those of a little boy; he looks, she thought, as if he has been playing and now it’s time to give up and come home. To rest and wash and tell about the miracles of the day.
   “It’s nice to see you,” she said.
   “I have something.” He held a cardboard box with both hands; when he entered the apartment he did not set it down. As if, she thought, it contained something too fragile and too valuable to let go of; he wanted to keep it perpetually in his hands.
   She said, “I’ll fix you a cup of coffee.” At the stove she pressed the coffee button and in a moment had put the imposing mug by his place at the kitchen table. Still holding the box he seated himself, and on his face the round-eyed wonder remained. In all the years she had known him she had not encountered this expression before. Something had happened since she had seen him last; since, last night, he had gone off in his car. Now he had come back and this box had arrived with him: he held, in the box, everything that had happened to him.
   “I’m going to sleep,” he announced. “All day. I phoned in and got Harry Bryant; he said take the day off and rest. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.” Carefully he set the box down on the table and picked up his coffee mug; dutifully, because she wanted him to, he drank his coffee.
   Seating herself across from him she said, “What do you have in the box, Rick?
   “A toad.”
   “Can I see it?” She watched as he untied the box and removed the lid. “Oh,” she said, seeing the toad; for some reason it frightened her. “Will it bite?” she asked.
   “Pick it up. It won’t bite; toads don’t have teeth.” Rick lifted the toad out and extended it toward her. Stemming her aversion she accepted it. “I thought toads were extinct,” she said as she turned it over, curious about its legs; they seemed almost useless. “Can toads jump like frogs? I mean, will it jump out of my hands suddenly?”
   “The legs of toads are weak,” Rick said. “That’s the main difference between a toad and a frog, that and water. A frog remains near water but a toad can live in the desert. I found this in the desert, up near the Oregon border. Where everything had died.” He reached to take it back from her. But she had discovered something; still holding it upside down she poked at its abdomen and then, with her nail, located the tiny control panel. She flipped the panel open.

   “Oh.” His face fell by degrees. “Yeah, so I see; you’re right.” Crestfallen, he gazed mutely at the false animal; he took it back from her, fiddled with the legs as if baffled—he did not seem quite to understand. He then carefully replaced it in its box. “I wonder how it got out there in the desolate part of California like that. Somebody must have put it there. No way to tell what for.”
   “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you—about it being electrical.” She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.
   “No,” Rick said. “I’m glad to know. Or rather—” He became silent. “I’d prefer to know.”
   “Do you want to use the mood organ? To feel better? You always have gotten a lot out of it, more than I ever have.”
   “I’ll be okay.” He shook his head, as if trying to clear it, still bewildered. “The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.”
   Iran said, “You look as if you’ve walked a hundred miles.”
   “It’s been a long day.” He nodded.
   “Go get into bed and sleep.”
   He stared at her, then, as if perplexed. “It is over, isn’t it?” Trustingly he seemed to be waiting for her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious attitude toward his own words; they didn’t become real, not until she agreed.
   “It’s over,” she said.
   “God, what a marathon assignment,” Rick said. “Once I began on it there wasn’t any way for me to stop; it kept carrying me along, until finally I got to the Batys, and then suddenly I didn’t have anything to do. And that—” He hesitated, evidently amazed at what he had begun to say. “That part was worse,” he said. “After I finished. I couldn’t stop because there would be nothing left after I stopped. You were right this morning when you said I’m nothing but a crude cop with crude cop hands.”
   “I don’t feel that any more,” she said. “I’m just damn glad to have you come back home where you ought to be.” She kissed him and that seemed to please him; his face lit up, almost as much as before—before she had shown him that the toad was electric.
   “Do you think I did wrong?” he asked. “What I did today?
   “No.”
   “Mercer said it was wrong but I should do it anyhow. Really weird. Sometimes it’s better to do something wrong than right.”
   “It’s the curse on us,” Iran said. “That Mercer talks about.”
   “The dust?” he asked.
   “The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn’t reverse time and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes, to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it’s they who’re doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us, actually. Did one of them cut your check, where it’s been bleeding?”
   “Yes,” he said wanly.
   “Will you go to bed now? If I set the mood organ to a 670 setting?”
   “What does that bring about?” he asked.
   “Long deserved peace,” Iran said.
   He got to his feet, stood painfully, his face drowsy and confused, as if alegion of battles had ebbed and advanced there, over many years. And then, by degrees, he progressed along the route to the bedroom. “Okay,” he said. “Long deserved peace.” he stretched out on the bed, dust sifting from his clothes and hair onto the white sheets.
   No need to turn on the mood organ, Iran realized as she pressed the button which made the windows of the bedroom opaque. The gray light of day disappeared.
   On the bed Rick, after a moment, slept.
   She stayed there for a time, keeping him in sight to be sure he wouldn’t wake up, wouldn’t spring to a sitting position in fear as he sometimes did at night. And then, presently, she returned to the kitchen, reseated herself at the kitchen table.
   Next to her the electric toad flopped and rustled in its box; she wondered what it “ate,” and what repairs on it would run. Artificial flies, she decided.
   Opening the phone book she looked in the yellow paces under animal accessories, electric; she dialed and when the saleswoman answered, said, “I’d like to order one pound of artificial flies that really fly around and buzz, please.”
   “Is it for an electric turtle, ma’am?”
   “A toad,” she said.
   “Then I suggest our mixed assortment of artificial crawling and flying bugs of all types including—”
   “The flies will do,” Iran said. “Will you deliver? I don’t want to leave my apartment; my husband’s asleep and I want to be sure he’s all right.”
   The clerk said, “For a toad I’d suggest also a perpetually renewing puddle, unless it’s a horned toad, in which case there’s a kit containing sand, multicolored pebbles, and bits of organic debris. And if you’re going to be putting it through its feed cycle regularly I suggest you let our service department make a periodic tongue adjustment. In a toad that’s vital.”
   “Fine,” Iran said. “I want it to work perfectly. My husband is devoted to it.” She gave her address and hung up.
   And, feeling better, fixed herself at last a cup of black, hot coffee.

The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories

Philip Kindred Dick


The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick

Preface by Philip K. Dick
Foreword by Steven Owen Godersky
Introduction by Roger Zelazny
Stability
Roog
The Little Movement
Beyond Lies the Wub
The Gun
The Skull
The Defenders
Mr. Spaceship
Piper in the Woods
The Infinites
The Preserving Machine
Expendable
The Variable Man
I
II
III
IV
The Indefatigable Frog
The Crystal Crypt
The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
The Builder
Meddler
Paycheck
The Great C
Out in the Garden
The King of the Elves
Colony
Prize Ship
Nanny
Notes

The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
and Other Classic Stories
by Philip K. Dick

   In Memory of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982)

Preface by Philip K. Dick

   I will define science fiction, first, by saying what sf is not. It cannot be defined as “a story (or novel or play) set in the future,” since there exists such a thing as space adventure, which is set in the future but is not sf: it is just that: adventures, fights and wars in the future in space involving super-advanced technology. Why, then, is it not science fiction? It would seem to be, and Doris Lessing (e.g.) supposes that it is. However, space adventure lacks the distinct new idea that is the essential ingredient. Also, there can be science fiction set in the present: the alternate world story or novel. So if we separate sf from the future and also from ultra-advanced technology, what then do we have that can be called sf?
   We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: it is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society; that is, our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate world story or novel. It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which it is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this one way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society—or in any known society present or past. There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation; that is, the dislocation must be a conceptual one, not merely a trivial or bizarre one—this is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition. He knows that it is not his actual world that he is reading about.
   Now, to separate science fiction from fantasy. This is impossible to do, and a moment’s thought will show why. Take psionics; take mutants such as we find in Ted Sturgeon’s wonderful MORE THAN HUMAN. If the reader believes that such mutants could exist, then he will view Sturgeon’s novel as science fiction. If, however, he believes that such mutants are, like wizards and dragons, not possible, nor will ever be possible, then he is reading a fantasy novel. Fantasy involves that which general opinion regards as impossible; science fiction involves that which general opinion regards as possible under the right circumstances. This is in essence a judgment-call, since what is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and of the reader.
   Now to define good science fiction. The conceptual dislocation—the new idea, in other words—must be truly new (or a new variation on an old one) and it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his mind and wake it up to the possibility of something he had not up to then thought of. Thus “good science fiction” is a value term, not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is such a thing, objectively, as good science fiction.
   I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that that mind, like the author’s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create—and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.
   (in a letter) May 14,1981

Foreword by Steven Owen Godersky

   There is a current coin-of-phrase that touts Philip K. Dick as the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Well, that and a trajectory to Lagrange-5 are hyperbolic. The returns simply are not all in. The best is a tale that has yet to be written.
   There are some things, though, that might make us feel a little more secure about Phil Dick’s contribution to this planet, not that his reputation needs any particular help today. The scope, the integrity and the intellectual magnificence of Phil’s work are internationally revered. He is regarded by many as the most “serious” of the modern science fiction authors, and the interest in his works has continued to mount since his untimely death in 1982. His reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of scholarly criticism. If we take a measured look at his accomplishments there are three powerful themes that permeate almost every novel and story.
   The first and most prominent theme today, can be seen in Phil’s watershed work on the question of what divides humanity from all the intricacies of its creations. This is part of the central preoccupation of all consequential writers. But Phil rephrased the question What does it mean to be human? to What is it like not to be human? He posed the problem intellectually, after his fashion, but then he made us feel his answers. In the best and really highest tradition of Mary Shelley he struck on empathy as the difference; in his own word, caritas. I do not have to be a futurist to predict that both his search and his discovery will become ever more important to us as we rush along the strange road that science calls progress.
   Phil’s second theme is one of perspective; what I have come to think of as the care and feeding of scale-model gods. Though the arena of his ideas was so very large, what he trusted was, he once wrote, “very small.” In a literary era of superstars and superheroes Phil reminds us that our aspirations and abilities are not so different from, and not less important than, those of the great and powerful.
   Think of Tung Chien in Faith of Our Fathers, and Ragel Gumm in Time Out of Joint. Their prosaic drudgery proves central to the fate of their worlds. Recall Herb Ellis in Prominent Author, an ordinary guy rewrites the Old Testament for inch-tall goatherds. Reflect on the significance of Herb Sousa’s gumballs in Holy Quarrel; on the moral influence of wub-fur, in NotBy Its Cover, and the battle with the sentient pinball machine in Return Match. Small is written large. Large is written small. Shop clerks and storekeepers are just as likely as warlords and messiahs to be at Dick’s ontological foci. Old Mrs. Berthelsen, in Captive Market, possesses the ultimate secret of time and space, and uses it to sell vegetables out of a wagon.
   When reading Dick you don’t much see mile-long spaceships flaming into the sun. What you do see is one broken-down robot in a ditch. Or, more frightening, one butterfly trapped in a time warp. In Phil Dick’s stories, we see that everything, human or otherwise, is connected, everyone is important; what causes pain to one causes pain to all. As John Brunner points out, it certainly caused pain to Phil himself.
   Phil Dick’s third major theme is his fascination with war and his fear and hatred of it. One hardly sees critical mention of it, yet it is as integral to his body of work as oxygen is to water.
   Perhaps Dick, who began his writing career in Berkeley, California, absorbed the sensibilities of a town that had a carefully nurtured liberal commitment. Perhaps Joe McCarthy and the Korean War sensitized a beginning writer’s imagination. We know little of his juvenile years during the Second World War. But we can identify, early and consistently, a mistrust of the military mentality, a fear of what he had seen of the total war machine on either side. He had a great disinclination to accept the slogans of the period that supported the ends over the means. Victory at all cost for Democracy, for Freedom, for the Flag are hollow aphorisms when the price of victory is totalitarian submission to a heartless military bureaucracy: Phil feared this particular future for all of us.
   From Phil’s earliest stories, The Defenders, The Variable Man, A Surface Raid and To Serve the Master, to his later fiction, such as Faith of Our Fathers, and The Exit Door Leads In, the winners and the losers show their humanity largely in their rejection of warfare and aggression. For Dick, the only acceptable struggle was against the evil he recognized as “the forces of dissolution.” Phil Dick was anti-military long before it became fashionable in the Sixties. He continued, through his whole career, to value humanity and its foibles, no matter how small and vulnerable, over the organized terror of the modern state, no matter how expedient.
   So here it is; a look into an eclectic and vigorous mind. This indispensable collection of Phil Dick’s less than novel-length fiction may disturb you. It may frighten you, because some of Phil’s people live very close to home. But these stories will not leave you unchanged. A strange wind may blow through your door late at night, and the shadows of familiar objects may quiver in the light. Is some Palmer Eldritch figure hurrying now to approach our world? Even if you’re not a pre-cog, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Introduction by Roger Zelazny

   When I was approached to write this introduction I declined. It had nothing to do with my attitude toward Phil Dick’s work. It was, rather, because I felt that I had already said everything I had to say on the subject. It was then pointed out to me that I had said these things in a variety of different places. Even if I had nothing to add, a judicious rehashing in a place such as this might do a service for readers who, in all likelihood, hadn’t seen or heard it all before.
   So I thought about it. I also looked at some of the things I had written earlier. What might be worth repeating, what worth adding, after this time? I had only met Phil on a few occasions, in California and in France; and it had almost been by accident that we had once fallen into collaborating on a book. During our collaboration we had exchanged letters and spoken often on the telephone. I liked him and I was very impressed by his work. His sense of humor generally came through in our phone conversations. I remember once when he mentioned some royalty statements he’d just received. He’d said, “I’ve gotten so-and-so many hundred in France, so-and-so many hundred in Germany, so-and-so many hundred in Spain… Gee! this sounds like the catalog aria from Don Giovanni!” It was always a more immediate form of verbal wit than the cosmic ironies he played with in his fiction.
   I’d said something about his humor before. I’d also remarked on the games he played with consensus reality. I’d even generalized a bit about his characters. But why paraphrase when after all these years I’ve finally found a legitimate reason for quoting myself?


   These characters are often victims, prisoners, manipulated men and women. It is generally doubtful whether they will leave the world with less evil in it than they found there. But you never know. They try. They are usually at bat in the last half of the ninth inning with the tying run on base, two men out, two strikes and three balls riding, with the game being called on account of rain at any second. But then, what is rain? Or a ballpark?
   The worlds through which Phil Dick’s characters move are subject to cancellation or revision without notice. Reality is approximately as dependable as a politician’s promise. Whether it is a drug, a time-warp, a machine or an alien entity responsible for the bewildering shifting of situations about his people, the result is the same: Reality, of the capital “R” variety, has become as relative a thing as the dryness of our respective Martinis. Yet the struggle goes on, the fight continues. Against what? Ultimately, Powers, Principalities, Thrones, and Dominations, often contained in hosts who are themselves victims, prisoners, manipulated men and women.
   All of which sounds like grimly serious fare. Wrong. Strike the “grimly,” add a comma and the following: but one of the marks of Phil Dick’s mastery lies in the tone of his work. He is possessed of a sense of humor for which I am unable to locate an appropriate adjective. Wry, grotesque, slapstick, satirical, ironic… None of them quite fits to the point of generality, though all may be found without looking too far. His characters take pratfalls at the most serious moments; pathetic irony may invade the most comic scene. It is a rare and estimable quality to direct such a show successfully.


   I’d said that in PHILIP K. DICK: ELECTRIC SHEPHERD (edited by Bruce Gillespie, Norstrilia Press, 1975), and I still agree with it.
   It is good now to see that Phil is finally getting some of the attention he deserved, both critically and at the popular level. My main regret is that it comes so late. He was often broke when I knew him, past the struggling author age but still struggling to make ends meet. I was heartened that for his last year or so he finally enjoyed financial security and even a measure of affluence. The last time I saw him he actually seemed happy and looked a bit relaxed. This was back when Bladerunner was being filmed, and we spent dinner and a long evening just talking, joking, reminiscing.
   Much has been made of his later mysticism. I can’t speak with firsthand knowledge of everything he might have believed, partly because it seemed to keep changing and partly because it was often difficult to know when he was kidding and when he was serious. My main impression from a number of conversations, though, was that he played at theology the way other people might play at chess problems, that he liked asking the classic science fiction writer’s question—”What if?”—of anything he came across in the way of religious and philosophical notions. It was obviously a dimension of his work, and I’ve often wondered where another ten years would have taken his thinking. Impossible to guess now, really.
   I recall that, like James Blish, he was fascinated by the problem of evil, and its juxtaposition with the sometime sweetness of life. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my quoting from the last letter I received from him (dated 10 April 1981):


   Two items were presented to me for my inspection within a period of fifteen minutes: first, a copy of WIND IN THE WILLOWS, which I had never read… A moment after I looked it over someone showed me a two-page photograph in the current Time of the attempted assassination of the President. There the wounded, there the Secret Service man with the Uzi machine gun, there all of them on the assassin. My brain had to try to correlate WIND IN THE WILLOWS and that photograph. It could not. It never will be able to. I brought the Grahame book home and sat reading it while they tried to get the Columbia to lift off, in vain, as you know. This morning when I woke up I could not think at all; not even weird thoughts, such as assail one upon rising—no thoughts, just a blank. As if my own computers had, in my brain, ceased speaking to one another, like at the Cape. It is hard to believe that the scene of the attempted assassination and WIND IN THE WILLOWS are part of the same universe. Surely one of them is not real. Mr. Toad sculling a little boat down the stream, and the man with the Uzi… It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.


   I felt at the time I received it that that tension, that moral bafflement, was a capsule version of a feeling which informed much of his writing. It is not a thing that was ever actually resolved for him; he seemed too sophisticated to trust any pat answer. He’d said a lot of things in a lot of places over the years, but the statement I most remember, which most fits the man I used to talk with, is one I quoted in my foreword to Greg Rickman’s first interview volume, PHILIP K. DICK: IN HIS OWN WORDS (Fragments West/Valentine Press, 1984). It was from a 1970 letter Phil had written to SF Commentary:


   I know only one thing about my novels. In them, again and again, this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength. In the ruins of Earth’s cities he is busily constructing a little factory that turns out cigars or imitation artifacts that say, “Welcome to Miami, the pleasure center of the world.” In A. Lincoln, Simulacrum he operates a little business that produces corny electronic organs—and, later on, human-like robots which ultimately become more of an irritation than a threat. Everything is on a small scale. Collapse is enormous; the positive little figure outlined against the universal rubble is, like Tagomi, Runciter, Molinari, gnat-sized in scope, finite in what he can do… and yet in some sense great. I really do not know why. I simply believe in him and I love him. He will prevail. There is nothing else. At least nothing else that matters. That we should be concerned about. Because if he is there, like a tiny father-figure, everything is all right.
   Some reviewers have found “bitterness” in my writing. I am surprised, because my mood is one of trust. Perhaps they are bothered by the fact that what I trust is so very small. They want something vaster. I have news for them: there is nothing vaster. Nothing more, I should say. But really, how much do we have to have? Isn’t Mr. Tagomi enough? I know it counts. I am satisfied.


   I suppose I’ve recalled it twice now because I like to think of that small element of trust, of idealism, in Phil’s writings. Perhaps I’m imposing a construction, though, in doing this. He was a complex person, and I’ve a feeling he left a lot of different people with a lot of different impressions. This in mind, the best I can render of the man I knew and liked—mostly at long distance—is obviously only a crude sketch, but it’s the best I have to show. And since much of this piece is self-plagiarism, I feel no guilt in closing with something else I’ve said before:


   The subjective response… when a Philip Dick book has been finished and put aside is that, upon reflection, it does not seem so much that one holds the memory of a story; rather, it is the after effects of a poem rich in metaphor that seem to remain.
   This I value, partly because it does defy a full mapping, but mainly because that which is left of a Phil Dick story when the details have been forgotten is a thing which comes to me at odd times and offers me a feeling or a thought; therefore, a thing which leaves me richer for having known it.


   It is gratifying to know that he is being acclaimed and remembered with fetidness in many places. I believe it will last. I wish it had come a lot sooner.
   Roger Zelazny
   October, 1986

Stability

   Robert Benton slowly spread his wings, flapped them several times and sailed majestically off the roof and into the darkness.
   He was swallowed up by the night at once. Beneath him, hundreds of tiny dots of light betokened other roofs, from which other persons flew. A violet hue swam close to him, then vanished into the black. But Benton was in a different sort of mood, and the idea of night races did not appeal to him. The violet hue came close again and waved invitingly. Benton declined, swept upward into the higher air.
   After a while he leveled off and allowed himself to coast on air currents that came up from the city beneath, the City of Lightness. A wonderful, exhilarating feeling swept through him. He pounded his huge, white wings together, flung himself in frantic joy into the small clouds that drifted past, dived at the invisible floor of the immense black bowl in which he flew, and at last descended toward the lights of the city, his leisure time approaching an end.
   Somewhere far down a light more bright than the others winked at him: the Control Office. Aiming his body like an arrow, his white wings folded about him, he headed toward it. Down he went, straight and perfect. Barely a hundred feet from the light he threw his wings out, caught the firm air about him, and came gently to rest on a level roof.
   Benton began to walk until a guide light came to life and he found his way to the entrance door by its beam. The door slid back at the pressure of his fingertips and he stepped past it. At once he began to descend, shooting downward at increasing speed. The small elevator suddenly stopped and he strode out into the Controller’s Main Office.
   “Hello,” the Controller said, “take off your wings and sit down.”
   Benton did so, folding them neatly and hanging them from one of a row of small hooks along the wall. He selected the best chair in sight and headed toward it.
   “Ah,” the Controller smiled, “you value comfort.”
   “Well,” Benton answered, “I don’t want it to go to waste.”
   The Controller looked past his visitor and through the transparent plastic walls. Beyond were the largest single rooms in the City of Lightness. They extended as far as his eyes could see, and farther. Each was—
   “What did you want to see me about?” Benton interrupted. The Controller coughed and rattled some metal paper-sheets.
   “As you know,” he began, “Stability is the watchword. Civilization has been climbing for centuries, especially since the twenty-fifth century. It is a law of nature, however, that civilization must either go forward or fall backward; it cannot stand still.”
   “I know that,” Benton said, puzzled. “I also know the multiplication table. Are you going to recite that, too?”
   The Controller ignored him.
   “We have, however, broken that law. One hundred years ago—”
   One hundred years ago! It hardly seemed as far back as that when Eric Freidenburg of the States of Free Germany stood up in the International Council Chamber and announced to the assembled delegates that mankind had at last reached its peak. Further progress forward was impossible. In the last few years, only two major inventions has been filed. After that, they had all watched the big graphs and charts, seen the lines going down and down, according to their squares, until they dipped into nothing. The great well of human ingenuity had run dry, and then Eric had stood up and said the thing everyone knew, but was afraid to say. Naturally, since it had been made known in a formal fashion, the Council would have to begin work on the problem.
   There were three ideas of solution. One of them seemed more humane than the other two. This solution was eventually adopted. It was—Stabilization!
   There was great trouble at first when the people learned about it, and mass riots took place in many leading cities. The stock market crashed, and the economy of many countries went out of control. Food prices rose, and there was mass starvation. War broke out… for the first time in three hundred years! But Stabilization had begun. Dissenters were destroyed, radicals were carted off. It was hard and cruel but seemed to be the only answer. At last the world settled down to a rigid state, a controlled state in which there could be no change, either backward or forward.
   Each year every inhabitant took a difficult, week-long examination to test whether or not he was backsliding. All youths were given fifteen years of intensive education. Those who could not keep up with the others simply disappeared. Inventions were inspected by Control Offices to make certain that they could not upset Stability. If it seemed that they might—
   “And that is why we cannot allow your invention to be put into use,” the Controller explained to Benton. “I am sorry.”
   He watched Benton, saw him start, the blood drain from his face, his hands tremble.
   “Come now,” he said kindly, “don’t take it so hard; there are other things to do. After all, you are not in danger of the Cart!”
   But Benton only stared. At last he said,
   “But you don’t understand: I have no invention. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
   “No invention!” the Controller exclaimed. “But I was here the day you entered it yourself! I saw you sign the statement of ownership! You handed me the model!”
   He stared at Benton. Then he pressed a stud on his desk and said into a small circle of light, “Send me up the information on number 34500-D, please.”
   A moment passed, and then a tube appeared in the circle of light. The Controller lifted the cylindrical object out and passed it to Benton.
   “You’ll find your signed statement there,” he said, “and it has your fingerprints in the print squares. Only you could have made them.”
   Numbly, Benton opened the tube and took out the papers inside. He studied them a few moments, and then slowly put them back and handed the tube to the Controller.
   “Yes,” he said, “that’s my writing, and those are certainly my prints. But I don’t understand, I never invented a thing in my life, and I’ve never been here before! What is this invention?”
   “What is it!” the Controller echoed, amazed. “Don’t you know?”
   Benton shook his head. “No, I do not,” he said slowly.
   “Well, if you want to find out about it, you’ll have to go down to the Offices. All I can tell you is that the plans you sent us have been denied rights by the Control Board. I’m only a spokesman. You’ll have to take it up with them.”
   Benton got up and walked to the door. As with the other, this one sprang open to his touch and he went on through into the Control Offices. As the door closed behind him the Controller called angrily, “I don’t know what you’re up to, but you know the penalty for upsetting Stability!”
   “I’m afraid Stability is already upset,” Benton answered and went on.
   The Offices were gigantic. He stared down from the catwalk on which he stood, for below him a thousand men and women worked at whizzing, efficient machines. Into the machines they were feeding reams of cards. Many of the people worked at desks, typing out sheets of information, filling charts, putting cards away, decoding messages. On the walls stupendous graphs were constantly being changed. The very air was alive with the vitalness of the work being conducted, the hum of the machines, the tap-tap of the typewriters, and the mumble of voices all merged together in a quiet, contented sound. And this vast machine, which cost countless dollars a day to keep running so smoothly, had a word: Stability!
   Here, the thing that kept their world together lived. This room, these hard working people, the ruthless man who sorted cards into the pile marked “for extermination” were all functioning together like a great symphony orchestra. One person off key, one person out of time, and the entire structure would tremble. But no one faltered. No one stopped and failed at his task. Benton walked down a flight of steps to the desk of the information clerk.
   “Give me the entire information on an invention entered by Robert Benton, 34500-D,” he said. The clerk nodded and left the desk. In a few minutes he returned with a metal box.
   “This contains the plans and a small working model of the invention,” he stated. He put the box on the desk and opened it. Benton stared at the contents. A small piece of intricate machinery sat squatly in the center. Underneath was a thick pile of metal sheets with diagrams on them. “Can I take this?” Benton asked.
   “If you are the owner,” the clerk replied. Benton showed his identification card, the clerk studied it and compared it with the data on the invention. At last he nodded his approval, and Benton closed the box, picked it up and quickly left the building via a side exit.
   The side exit let him out on one of the larger underground streets, which was a riot of lights and passing vehicles. He located his direction, and began to search for a communications car to take him home. One came along and he boarded it. After he had been traveling for a few minutes he began to carefully lift the lid of the box and peer inside at the strange model. “What have you got there, sir?” the robot driver asked.
   “I wish I knew,” Benton said ruefully. Two winged flyers swooped by and waved at him, danced in the air for a second and then vanished. “Oh, fowl,” Benton murmured, “I forgot my wings.” Well, it was too late to go back and get them, the car was just then beginning to slow down in front of his house. After paying the driver he went inside and locked the door, something seldom done. The best place to observe the contents was in his “consideration” room, where he spent his leisure time while not flying. There, among his books and magazines he could observe the invention at ease.
   The set of diagrams was a complete puzzle to him, and the model itself even more so. He stared at it from all angles, from underneath, from above. He tried to interpret the technical symbols of the diagrams, but all to no avail.
   There was but one road now open to him. He sought out the “on” switch and clicked it.
   For almost a minute nothing happened. Then the room about him began to waver and give way. For a moment it shook like a quantity of jelly. It hung steady for an instant, and then vanished.
   He was falling through space like an endless tunnel, and he found himself twisting about frantically, grasping into the blackness for something to take hold of. He fell for an interminable time, helplessly, frightened. Then he had landed, completely unhurt. Although it had seemed so, the fall could not have been very long. His metallic clothes were not even ruffled. He picked himself up and looked about.
   The place where he had arrived was strange to him. It was a field… such as he had supposed no longer to exist. Waving acres of grain waved in abundance everywhere. Yet, he was certain that in no place on earth did natural grain still grow. Yes, he was positive. He shielded his eyes and gazed at the sun, but it looked the same as it always had. He began to walk.
   After an hour the wheat fields ended, but with their end came a wide forest. He knew from his studies that there were no forests left on earth. They had perished years before. Where was he, then?
   He began to walk again, this time more quickly. Then he started to run. Before him a small hill rose and he raced to the top of it. Looking down the other side he stared in bewilderment. There was nothing there but a great emptiness. The ground was completely level and barren, there were no trees or any sign of life as far as his eyes could see, only the extensive bleached out land of death.
   He started down the other side of the hill toward the plain. It was hot and dry under his feet, but he went forward anyway. He walked on, the ground began to hurt his feet—unaccustomed to long walking—and he grew tired. But he was determined to continue. Some small whisper within his mind compelled him to maintain his pace without slowing down.
   “Don’t pick it up,” a voice said.
   “I will,” he grated, half to himself, and stooped down.
   Voice! From where! He turned quickly, but there was nothing to be seen. Yet the voice had come to him and it had seemed—for a moment—as if it were perfectly natural for voices to come from the air. He examined the thing he was about to pick up. It was a glass globe about as big around as his fist.
   “You will destroy your valuable Stability,” the voice said.
   “Nothing can destroy Stability,” he answered automatically. The glass globe was cool and nice against his palm. There was something inside, but heat from the glowing orb above him made it dance before his eyes, and he could not tell exactly what it was.
   “You are allowing your mind to be controlled by evil things,” the voice said to him. “Put the globe down and leave.”
   “Evil things?” he asked, surprised. It was hot, and he was beginning to feel thirsty. He started to thrust the globe inside his tunic.
   “Don’t,” the voice ordered, “that is what it wants you to do.”
   The globe was nice against his chest. It nestled there, cooling him off from the fierce heat of the sun. What was it the voice was saying?
   “You were called here by it through time,” the voice explained. “You obey it now without question. I am its guardian, and ever since this time-world was created I have guarded it. Go away, and leave it as you found it.”
   Definitely, it was too warm on the plain. He wanted to leave; the globe was now urging him to, reminding him of the heat from above, the dryness in his mouth, the tingling in his head. He started off, and as he clutched the globe to him he heard the wail of despair and fury from the phantom voice.
   That was almost all he remembered. He did recall that he made his way back across the plain to the fields of grain, through them, stumbling and staggering, and at last to the spot where he had first appeared. The glass globe inside his coat urged him to pick up the small time machine from where he had left it. It whispered to him what dial to change, which button to press, which knob to set. Then he was falling again, falling back up the corridor of time, back, back to the graying mist from whence he had fallen, back to his own world.
   Suddenly the globe urged him to stop. The journey through time was not yet complete: there was still something that he had to do.
   “You say your name is Benton? What can I do for you?” the Controller asked. “You have never been here before, have you?”
   He stared at the Controller. What did he mean? Why, he had just left the office! Or had he? What day was it? Where had he been? He rubbed his head dizzily and sat down in the big chair. The Controller watched him anxiously.
   “Are you all right?” he asked. “Can I help you?”
   “I’m all right,” Benton said. There was something in his hands.
   “I want to register this invention to be approved by the Stability Council,” he said, and handed the time machine to the Controller.
   “Do you have the diagrams of its construction?” the Controller asked.
   Benton dug deeply into his pocket and brought out the diagrams. He tossed them on the Controller’s desk and laid the model beside them.
   “The Council will have no trouble determining what it is,” Benton said. His head ached, and he wanted to leave. He got to his feet.
   “I am going,” he said, and went out the side door through which he had entered. The Controller stared after him.

   “Obviously,” the First Member of the Control Council said, “he had been using the thing. You say the first time he came he acted as if he had been there before, but on the second visit he had no memory of having entered an invention, or even having been there before?”
   “Right,” the Controller said. “I thought it was suspicious at the time of the first visit, but I did not realize until he came the second time what the meaning was. Undoubtedly, he used it.”
   “The Central Graph records that an unstabilizing element is about to come up,” the Second Member remarked. “I would wager that Mr. Benton is it.”
   “A time machine!” the First Member said. “Such a thing can be dangerous. Did he have anything with him when he came the—ah—first time?”
   “I saw nothing, except that he walked as if he were carrying something under his coat,” the Controller replied.
   “Then we must act at once. He will have been able to set up a chain of circumstance by this time that our Stabilizers will have trouble in breaking. Perhaps we should visit Mr. Benton.”
   Benton sat in his living room and stared. His eyes were set in a kind of glassy rigidness and he had not moved for some time. The globe had been talking to him, telling him of its plans, its hopes. Now it stopped suddenly.
   “They are coming,” the globe said. It was resting on the couch beside him, and its faint whisper curled to his brain like a wisp of smoke. It had not actually spoken, of course, for its language was mental. But Benton heard.
   “What shall I do?” he asked.
   “Do nothing,” the globe said. “They will go away.” The buzzer sounded and Benton remained where he was. The buzzer sounded again, and Benton stirred restlessly. After a while the men went down the walk again and appeared to have departed.
   “Now what?” Benton asked. The globe did not answer for a moment.
   “I feel that the time is almost here,” it said at last. “I have made no mistakes so far, and the difficult part is past. The hardest was having you come through time. It took me years—the Watcher was clever. You almost didn’t answer, and it was not until I thought of the method of putting the machine in your hands that success was certain. Soon you shall release us from this globe. After such an eternity—”
   There was a scraping and a murmur from the rear of the house, and Benton started up.
   “They are coming in the back door!” he said. The globe rustled angrily. The Controller and the Council Members came slowly and warily into the room. They spotted Benton and stopped.
   “We didn’t think that you were at home,” the First Member said. Benton turned to him.
   “Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry that I didn’t answer the bell; I had fallen asleep. What can I do for you?”
   Carefully, his hand reached out toward the globe, and it seemed almost as if the globe rolled under the protection of his palm.
   “What have you there?” the Controller demanded suddenly. Benton stared at him, and the globe whispered in his mind.
   “Nothing but a paperweight,” he smiled. “Won’t you sit down?” The men took their seats, and the First Member began to speak. “You came to see us twice, the first time to register an invention, the second time because we had summoned you to appear, as we could not allow the invention to be issued.”
   “Well?” Benton demanded. “Is there something the matter with that?”
   “Oh, no,” the Member said, “but what was for us your first visit was for you your second. Several things prove this, but I will not go into them just now. The thing that is important is that you still have the machine. This is a difficult problem. Where is the machine? It should be in your possession. Although we cannot force you to give it to us, we will obtain it eventually in one way or another.”
   “That is true,” Benton said. But where was the machine? He had just left it at the Controller’s Office. Yet he had already picked it up and taken it into time, whereupon he had returned to the present and had returned it to the Controller’s Office!
   “It has ceased to exist, a non-entity in a time-spiral,” the globe whispered to him, catching his thoughts. “The time-spiral reached its conclusion when you deposited the machine at the Office of Control. Now these men must leave so that we can do what must be done.”
   Benton rose to his feet, placing the globe behind him. “I’m afraid that I don’t have the time machine,” he said. “I don’t even know where it is, but you may search for it if you like.”
   “By breaking the laws, you have made yourself eligible for the Cart,” the Controller observed. “But we feel that you have done what you did without meaning to. We do not want to punish anyone without reason, we only desire to maintain Stability. Once that is upset, nothing matters.”
   “You may search, but you won’t find it,” Benton said. The Members and the Controller began to look. They overturned chairs, searched under the carpets, behind pictures, in the walls, and they found nothing.
   “You see, I was telling the truth,” Benton smiled, as they returned to the living room.
   “You could have hidden it outside someplace,” the Member shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, however.”
   The Controller stepped forward.
   “Stability is like a gyroscope,” he said. “It is difficult to turn from its course, but once started it can hardly be stopped. We do not feel that you yourself have the strength to turn that gyroscope, but there may be others who can. That remains to be seen. We are going to leave now, and you will be allowed to end your own life, or wait here for the Cart. We are giving you the choice. You will be watched, of course, and I trust that you will make no attempt to flee. If so, then it will mean your immediate destruction. Stability must be maintained, at any cost.”
   Benton watched them, and then laid the globe on the table. The Members looked at it with interest.
   “A paperweight,” Benton said. “Interesting, don’t you think?” The Members lost interest. They began to prepare to leave. But the Controller examined the globe, holding it up to the light.
   “A model of a city, eh?” he said. “Such fine detail.” Benton watched him.
   “Why, it seems amazing that a person could ever carve so well,” the Controller continued. “What city is it? It looks like an ancient one such as Tyre or Babylon, or perhaps one far in the future. You know, it reminds me of an old legend.”
   He looked at Benton intently as he went on.
   “The legend says that once there was a very evil city, it was so evil that God made it small and shut it up in a glass, and left a watcher of some sort to see that no one came along and released the city by smashing the glass. It is supposed to have been lying for eternity, waiting to escape.
   “And this is perhaps the model of it.” the Controller continued.
   “Come on!” the First Member called at the door. “We must be going; there are lots of things left to do tonight.”
   The Controller turned quickly to the Members. “Wait!” he said. “Don’t leave.”
   He crossed the room to them, still holding the globe in his hand. “This would be a very poor time to leave,” he said, and Benton saw that while his face had lost most of its color, the mouth was set in firm lines. The Controller suddenly turned again to Benton.
   “Trip through time; city in a glass globe! Does that mean anything?” The two Council Members looked puzzled and blank. “An ignorant man crosses time and returns with a strange glass,” the Controller said. “Odd thing to bring out of time, don’t you think?” Suddenly the First Member’s face blanched white. “Good God in Heaven!” he whispered. “The accursed city! That globe?” He stared at the round ball in disbelief. The Controller looked at Benton with an amused glance.
   “Odd, how stupid we may be for a time, isn’t it?” he said. “But eventually we wake up. Don’t touch it!”
   Benton slowly stepped back, his hands shaking.
   “Well?” he demanded. The globe was angry at being in the Controller’s hand. It began to buzz, and vibrations crept down the Controller’s arm. He felt them, and took a firmer grip on the globe.
   “I think it wants me to break it,” he said, “it wants me to smash it on the floor so that it can get out.” He watched the tiny spires and building tops in the murky mistiness of the globe, so tiny that he could cover them all with his fingers.
   Benton dived. He came straight and sure, the way he had flown so many times in the air. Now every minute that he had hurtled about the warm blackness of the atmosphere of the City of Lightness came back to help him. The Controller, who had always been too busy with his work, always too piled up ahead to enjoy the airsports that the City was so proud of, went down at once. The globe bounced out of his hands and rolled across the room. Benton untangled himself and leaped up. As he raced after the small shiny sphere, he caught a glimpse of the frightened, bewildered faces of the Members, of the Controller attempting to get to his feet, face contorted with pain and horror.
   The globe was calling to him, whispering to him. Benton stepped swiftly toward it, and felt a rising whisper of victory and then a scream of joy as his foot crushed the glass that imprisoned it.
   The globe broke with a loud popping sound. For a time it lay there, then a mist began to rise from it. Benton returned to the couch and sat down. The mist began to fill the room. It grew and grew, it seemed almost like a living thing, so strangely did it shift and turn.
   Benton began to drift into sleep. The mist crowded about him, curling over his legs, up to his chest, and finally milled about his face. He sat there, slumped over on the couch, his eyes closed, letting the strange, aged fragrance envelop him.
   Then he heard the voices. Tiny and far away at first, the whisper of the globe multiplied countless times. A concert of whispering voices rose from the broken globe in a swelling crescendo of exultation. Joy of victory! He saw the tiny miniature city within the globe waver and fade, then change in size and shape. He could hear it now as well as see it. The steady throbbing of the machinery like a gigantic drum. The shaking and quivering of squat metal beings.
   These beings were tended. He saw the slaves, sweating, stooped, pale men, twisting in their efforts to keep the roaring furnaces of steel and power happy. It seemed to swell before his eyes until the entire room was full of it, and the sweating workmen brushed against him and around him. He was deafened by the raging power, the grinding wheels and gears and valves. Something was pushing against him, compelling him to move forward, forward to the City, and the mist gleefully echoed the new, victorious sounds of the freed ones.
   When the sun came up he was already awake. The rising bell rang, but Benton had left his sleeping-cube some time before. As he fell in with the marching ranks of his companions, he thought he recognized familiar faces for an instant—men he had known someplace before. But at once the memory passed. As they marched toward the waiting machines, chanting the tuneless sounds their ancestors had chanted for centuries, and the weight of his bonus if the Machines saw fit—
   For had he not been tending his machine faithfully?