The Crack in Space

ONE
The young couple, black-haired, dark-skinned, probably Mexican or Puerto Rican, stood nervously at Herb Lackmore's counter and the boy, the husband, said in a low voice, 'Sir, we want to be put to sleep. We want to become bibs.'
Rising from his desk, Lackmore walked to the counter and although he did not like Cols -- there seemed to be more of them every month, coming into his Oakland branch office of the U.S. Department on Special Public Welfare -- he said in a pleasant tone of voice designed to reassure the two of them, 'Have you thought it over carefully, folks? It's a big step. You might be out for, say, a few hundred years. Have you shopped for any professional advice about this?'
The boy, glancing at his wife, swallowed and murmured, 'No, sir. We just decided between us. Neither of us can get a job and we're about to be evicted from our dorm. We don't even own a wheel, and what can you do without a wheel? You can't go anywhere. You can't even look for work.' He was not a bad-looking boy, Lackmore noticed. Possibly eighteen, he still wore the coat and trousers which were army-separation issue. The girl had long hair; she was quite small, with black, bright eyes and a delicately-formed almost doll-like face. She never ceased watching her husband.
'I'm going to have a baby,' the girl blurted.
'Aw, the heck with both of you,' Lackmore said in disgust, drawing his breath in sharply. 'You both get right out of here.'
Ducking their heads guiltily the boy and his wife turned and started from Lackmore's office, back outside onto the busy downtown early-morning Oakland, California street.
'Go see an abort-consultant!' Lackmore called after themirritably. He resented having to help them, but obviously someone had to; look at the spot they had gotten themselves into. Because no doubt they were living on a government military pension, and if the girl was pregnant the pension would automatically be withdrawn.
Plucking hesitantly at the sleeve of his wrinkled coat the Col boy said, 'Sir, how do we find an abort-consultant?'
The ignorance of the dark-skinned strata, despite the government's ceaseless educational campaigns. No wonder their women were often preg. 'Look in the phone book,' Lackmore said. 'Under abortionists, therapeutic. Then the subsection advisors. Got it?'
'Yes, sir. Thank you.' The boy nodded rapidly.
'Can you read?'
'Yes. I stayed in school until I was thirteen.' On the boy's face fierce pride showed; his black eyes gleamed.
Lackmore returned to reading his homeopape; he did not have any more time to offer gratis. No wonder they wanted to become bibs. Preserved, unchanged, in a government warehouse, year after year, until -- would the labor market ever improve? Lackmore personally doubted it, and he had been around a long time; he was ninety-five years old, a jerry. In his time he had put to sleep thousands of people, almost all of them, like this couple, young. And -- dark.
The door of the office shut. The young couple had gone again as quietly as they had come.
Sighing, Lackmore began to read once more the pape's article on the divorce trial of Lurton D. Sands, Jr, the most sensational event now taking place; as always, he read every word of it avidly.
This day began for Darius Pethel with vidphone calls from irate customers wanting to know why their Jiffi-scuttlers hadn't been fixed. Any time now, he told them soothingly, and hoped that Erickson was already at work in the service department of Pethel Jiffi-scuttler Sales & Service.
As soon as he was off the vidphone Pethel searched among the litter on his desk for the day's copy of U.S. Business Report; he of course kept abreast of all the economic developments on the planet. This alone set him above his employees; this, his wealth, and his advanced age.
'What's it say?' his salesman, Stu Hadley, asked, standing in the office doorway, robant magnetic broom in hand, pausing in his activity.
Silently, Pethel read the major headline.
EFFECTS ON THE NATION'S BUSINESS
COMMUNITY OF A NEGRO PRESIDENT
And there, in 3-D, animated, was a pic of James Briskin; the pic came to life, Candidate Briskin smiled in miniature, as Pethel pressed the tab beneath it. The Negro's mustache-obscured lips moved and above his head a balloon appeared, filled with the words he was saying.
My first task will be to find an equitable disposition of the tens of millions of sleeping.

'And dump every last bib back on the labor market,' Pethel murmured, releasing the word tab. 'If this guy gets in, the nation's ruined.' But it was inevitable. Sooner or later, there would be a Negro president; after all, since the Event of 1993 there had been more Cols than Caucs.
Gloomily, he turned to page two for the latest on the Lurton Sands scandal; maybe that would cheer him up, the political news being so bad. The famous org-trans surgeon had become involved in a sensational contested divorce suit with his equally famous wife Myra, the abort-consultant. All sorts of juicy details were beginning to filter out, charges on both sides. Dr Sands, according to the homeopapes, had a mistress; that was why Myra had stomped out, and rightly so. Not like the old days, Pethel thought, recalling his youth in the late decades of the twentieth century. Now it was 2080 and public -- and private -- morality had worsened.
Why would Dr Sands want a mistress anyhow, Pethel wondered, when there's that Golden Door Moments of Bliss satellite passing overhead every day? They say there're five thousand girls to choose from.
He, himself, had never visited Thisbe Olt's satellite; he did not approve of it, nor did very many jerries -- it was too radical a solution to the overpopulation problem, and seniors, by letter and telegram, had fought its passage in Congress back in '72. But the bill had gone through anyhow . . . probably, he reflected, because most Congressmen had the idea of taking a jet'ab up there themselves. And no doubt regularly did, now.
'If we whites stick together--' Hadley began.
'Listen,' Pethel said, 'that time has passed. If Briskin can dispose of the bibs, more power to him; personally, it keeps me awake at night, thinking of all those people, most of them just kids, lying in those gov warehouses year after year. Look at the talent going to waste. It's -- bureaucratic! Only a swollen socialist government would have dreamed up a solution like that.' He eyed his salesman harshly. 'If you hadn't gotten this job with me, even you might--'
Hadley interrupted quietly, 'But I'm white.'
Reading on further, Pethel saw that Thisbe Olt's satellite had grossed a billion U.S. dollars in 2079. Wow, he said to himself. That's big business. Before him was a pic of Thisbe; with cadmium-white hair and little high conical breasts she was a superb sight, an aesthetic as well as a sexual treat. The pic showed her serving male guests of her satellite a tequila sour -- an added fillip because tequila, being derived from the mescal plant, had long been illegal on Earth proper.
Pethel touched the word tab of Thisbe's pic and at once Thisbe's eyes sparkled, her head turned, her stable, dense breasts vibrated subtly, and in the balloon above her head the proper words formed.
Embarrassing personal urgency, Mr American businessman? Do as many doctors recommend: visit my Golden Door!

It was an ad, Pethel discovered. Not an informative article.
'Excuse me.' A customer had entered the store and Hadley moved in his direction.
Oh lord, Darius Pethel thought as he recognized the customer. Don't we have his 'scuttler fixed yet? He rose to his feet, knowing that he would be personally needed to appease the man; this was Dr Lurton Sands, and because of his recent domestic troubles he had become, of late, demanding and hot-tempered.
'Yes, Doctor,' Pethel said, walking toward him. 'What can I do for you today?' As if he didn't know. Trying to fight off Myra as well as keep his mistress, Cally Vale, Dr Sands had enough problems; he really needed the use of his Jiffi-scuttler. Unlike other customers it was not going to be possible to put this man off.
Plucking by reflex at his great handlebar mustache, presitial candidate Jim Briskin said tentatively, 'We're in a rut, Sal. I ought to fire you. You're trying to make me out the epitome of the Cols and yet you know I've spent twenty years playing up to the white power structure. Frankly, I think we'd have better luck trying to get the white vote, not the dark. I'm used to them; I can appeal to them.'
'You're wrong,' his campaign manager, Salisbury Heim, said. 'Your appeal -- listen and understand this, Jim -- is to the dark kid and his wife scared to death their only prospect is winding up bibs in some gov warehouse. "Bottled in bond," as they say. In you these people see...'
'But I feel guilty.'
'Why?' Sal Heim demanded.
'Because I'm a fake. I can't close the Dept of SPW warehouses; you know that. You got me to promise, and ever since I've been sweating my life away trying to conceive how it could be done. And there isn't any way.' He examined his wristwatch; one quarter-hour remained before he had to give his speech. 'Have you read the speech Phil Danville wrote for me?' He reached into his disorganized, lumpy coat-pouch.
'Danville!' Heim's face convulsed. 'I thought you got rid of him; give me that.' He grabbed the folded sheets and began going over them. 'Danville is a nut. Look.' He waved the first sheet in Jim Briskin's face. 'According to him, you're going to ban traffic from the U.S. to Thisbe's satellite. That's insane! If the Golden Door is closed, the birth rate will jump back up again where it was -- what then? How does Danville manage to counter that?'
After a pause Briskin said, 'The Golden Door is immoral.'
Spluttering, Heim said, 'Sure. And animals should wear pants.'
'There's just got to be a better solution than that satellite.'
Heim lapsed into silence as he read further into the speech. 'And he has you advocate this outmoded, thoroughly discredited planet-wetting technique of Bruno Mini.' He tossed the papers into Jim Briskin's lap. 'So what do you wind up with? You back a planetary colonization scheme tried twenty years ago and abandoned; you advocate closing the Golden Door satellite -- you'll be popular, Jim, after tonight. But popular with whom, though? Just answer me; who is this aimed at?' He waited.
There was silence.
'You know what I think?' Heim said presently. 'I think this is your elaborate way of giving up. Of saying to hell with the whole thing. It's how you shed responsibility; I saw you start to do the same thing at the convention in that crazy doomsday speech you gave, that morbid curiosity which still has everyone baffled. But fortunately you'd already been nominated. It was too late for the convention to repudiate you.'
Briskin said, 'I expressed my real convictions in that speech.'
'What, that civilization is now doomed because of this overpopulation biz? Some convictions for the first Col President to have.' Heim got to his feet and walked to the window; he stood looking out at downtown Philadelphia, at the jet-copters landing, the runnels of autocars and ramps of footers coming and going, into and out of every high-rise building in sight. 'I once in a while think,' Heim said in a low voice, 'that you feel it's doomed because it's nominated a Negro and may elect him; it's a way of putting yourself down.'
'No,' Briskin said, with calm; his long face remained unruffled.
'I'll tell you what to say in your speech for tonight,' Heim said, his back to Briskin. 'First, you once more describe your relationship with Frank Woodbine, because people go for space explorers; Woodbine is a hero, much more so than you or what's-his-name. You know; the man you're running against. The SRCD incumbent.'
'William Schwarz.'
Heim nodded exaggeratedly. 'Yes, you're right. Then after you gas about Woodbine -- and we show a few shots of you and him standing together on various planets -- then you make a joke about Dr Sands.'
'No,' Briskin said.
'Why not? Is Sands a sacred cow? You can't touch him?'
Jim Briskin said slowly, painstakingly, 'Because Sands is a great doctor and shouldn't be ridiculed in the media the way he is right now.'
'He saved your brother's life. By finding him a wet new liver just in the nick of time. Or he saved your mother just when . . .'
'Sands has preserved hundreds, thousands, of people. Including plenty of Cols. Whether they were able to pay or not.' Briskin was silent a moment and then he added, 'Also I met his wife Myra and I didn't like her. Years ago I went to her; I had made a girl preg and we wanted abort advice.'
'Good!' Heim said violently. 'We can use that. You made a girl pregnant -- that, when Nonovulid is free for the asking; that shows you're a provident type, Jim.' He tapped his forehead. 'You think ahead.'
'I now have five minutes,' Briskin said woodenly. He gathered up the pages of Phil Danville's speech and returned them to his inside coat pouch; he still wore a formal dark suit even in hot weather. That, and a flaming red wig, had been his trademark back in the days when he had telecast as a TV newsclown.
'Give that speech,' Heim said, 'and you're politically dead. And if you're . . .' He broke off. The door to the room had opened and his wife Patricia stood there.
'Sorry to bother you,' Pat said. 'But everyone out here can hear you yelling.' Heim caught a glimpse, then, of the big outside room full of teen-age Briskinettes, uniformed young volunteers who had come from all over the country to help elect the Republican Liberal candidate.
'Sorry,' Heim murmured.
Pat entered the room and shut the door after her. 'I think Jim's right, Sal.' Small, gracefully-built -- she had once been a dancer -- Pat lithely seated herself and lit a cigar. 'The more naive Jim appears, the better.' She blew gray smoke from between her luminous, pale lips. 'He still has a lingering reputation for being cynical. Whereas he should be another Wendell Wilkie.'
'Wilkie lost,' Heim pointed out.
'And Jim may lose,' Pat said; she tossed her head, brushing back her long hair from her eyes. 'But if he does, he can run again and win next time. The important thing is for him to appear sensitive and innocent, a sweet person who takes the world's suffering on his own shoulders because he's made that way. He can't help it; he has to suffer. You see?'
'Amateurs,' Heim said, and groaned.
The TV cameras stood inert, as the seconds passed, but they were ready to begin; the time for the speech lay just ahead as Jim Briskin sat at the small desk which he employed when addressing the people. Before him, near at hand, rested Phil Danville's speech. And he sat meditating as the TV technicians prepared for the recording.

Excerpted from

The Crack in Space
by Philip K. Dick
Buy this book at Barnes & Noble

Lies, Inc.

ONE

The SubInfo computers owned by Lies Incorporated had been caught in an unnatural act by a service mechanic. SubInfo computer Five had transmitted information which was not a lie.

It would have to be taken apart to see why. And to whom the correct information had gone.

Probably there would be no way to discern to whom the correct information had gone. But a carrier check maintained an automatic record of all subinformation transmitted by the bank of computers located here and there on Terra. The information had to do with a rat. According to the carrier check the rat lived with a colony of other rats in a garbage dump in Oakland, California.

What importance could information dealing with a rat have? Lewis Stine, the chief mechanic for Lies Incorporated, pondered this as he broke the flow of current to SubInfo computer Five and prepared to begin taking it apart. Of course he could ask the computer . . . but the computer, being programmed to lie, would of course lie-even to Lies Incorporated itself. That was an irony which Stine did not appreciate. This problem always surfaced when it came time to dismantle one of the computers.

Any other bank of computers, Stine thought, could be asked.

Just for a moment he restored power to SubInfo computer Five and punched buttons on the console of a terminal. Whom did you transmit to? he asked.

BEN APPLEBAUM, RACHMAEL

"Fine," Stine said. At least he knew that. Somebody on Terra with the name Rachmael ben Applebaum probably now knew more about rats than he cared to know, albeit on a subliminal basis.

You're probably thinking a lot about rats thesedays, Mr. ben Applebaum, Stine said to himself. And you are wondering why.

Again he cut the power to the computer. And began to go to work.



Standing before his bathroom mirror shaving, Rachmael ben Applebaum thought about the delicious taste of cheeseburger fragments-not a whole cheeseburger (you rarely found those) but the wonderful dried bits lying here and there among the coffee grounds, grapefruit rinds and egg shells.

I'll fly over to Bob's Big Boy, he decided, and order a cheeseburger for breakfast.

And then he thought, It's those damn dreams.

Actually it was one dream over and over again. And he always had it around three a.m.; several times he had awakened, gotten out of bed, bewildered and disturbed by the intensity of the dream, and noted the clock. The place he dreamed of; it was awful. And yet, for some reason, while he was actually there-actually dreaming-the place seemed great. And this was the part that bothered him the most: that he liked it so. It seemed familiar; it seemed to be a place he regarded as home.

However, so did a number of other people

People. They hadn't looked exactly like people, although they had talked like people.

"That's mine," Fred said, holding on to an armload of dog kibble.

"The hell you say," Rachmael said angrily. "I saw it first. Give it here or I'll pop you."

He and Fred fought over the armload of dog kibble, and Rachmael finally won. But he won in an odd way: by biting Fred on the shoulder. He hadn't hit him; he had bitten him.

Strange, Rachmael thought as he continued to shave.

I'm going to have to see a psychiatrist, he said to himself. Maybe it's memories of a former life. Millions of years ago before I . . . before I had evolved into a human being. Far lower on the evolutionary scale. Biting people, or rather biting animals. Yes, he thought; Fred was an animal of some kind. But we talked English.

In his dream he kept a secret hoard of valuables which the others in the settlement knew nothing about. He thought of them now, those precious artifacts which he cherished, which he had gone to such lengths-and effort-to acquire. Mostly food, of course; nothing was more important than food. And yet-you could sometimes find string. He had a lot of string: fine brown string; he had wound it up into a heap and, during the day, he slept in the midst of it. The pile of string comforted him; it lulled him and made his dreams peaceful. All but one; there at the settlement, asleep during the day in his pile of string, he had one dreadful dream which kept coming back.

It had to do with a huge fish opening its mouth wide . . . and vast ugly teeth strove to crunch him, crunch him with avid relish.

Jeez, Rachmael said. Maybe I'm not here shaving; maybe I'm just dreaming this. Maybe I'm asleep in my pile of string, and having a good dream, not the bad one; having the dream where I'm a

He thought, A man.

So then, by inference, he thought, I'm not a man when I'm at the settlement. That would explain why I bit, and why Fred bit. That son-of-a-bitch, he said to himself. He knows where a lot of dog kibble is and he won't tell any of the rest of us. I'll find it; I'll find his trove.

But then, he realized, while I'm out doing that, maybe Fred (or someone else) will find my trove and take away my string. My wonderful string which was so hard to drag back to my hiding place; it kept snagging and catching on things . . . I'll defend that string with my life, Rachmael said to himself. Any son-of-a-bitch who tries to steal it will wind up without his face.

He looked at his wristwatch. Got to hurry, he said to himself. It's late; I overslept again. And I can't get the dream out of my head. It was too vivid for a dream. It wasn't a dream; maybe it was involuntary telepathy of some kind. Or contact with an alternate universe. That's probably what it was: another Earth on which I was born as an animal rather than a human being.

Or a microwave transmission, using my brain as a transducer without an electronic interface. They have those, especially the police agencies.

He was very much afraid of the world-wide police agencies. Especially Lies, Incorporated, the worst police agency of them all. Even the Soviet police were afraid of them.

They're beaming psychotronic signals at me subliminally while I'm asleep, he thought. And then he realized how paranoid that was. Christ; no sane person would think that. And even if Lies, Incorporated did transmit microwave-boosted telepathic information to him in his sleep, would it have to do with rats?

With rats!

I'm a goddamn rat, he realized. When I go to sleep I abreact back millions of years to when I was once a rat, and I think rat thoughts and have rat ideas; I cherish what a rat cherishes. That explains my fighting with Fred for the dog kibble. It's simple: memories from the paleocortex, rather than the neocortex.

There's an anatomical explanation. Has to do with accretional layers of the brain; the brain has old layers which come to wakefulness during normal sleep.

That's the trouble with living in a police state, he said to himself; you think-you imagine-the police are behind everything. You get paranoid and think they're beaming information to you in your sleep, to subliminally control you. Actually the police wouldn't do that. The police are our friends.

Or was that idea beamed to me subliminally? he wondered suddenly. "The police are our friends." The hell they are!

He continued shaving, feeling glum about the whole thing. Maybe the dream will stop coming, he said to himself. Or

Pausing, he thought, Maybe the dream is trying to tell me something.

For a long time he stood without moving, the razor held away from his face. Tell me what? That I'm living in a garbage dump where there's dried scraps of food, rotting food, other rats?

He trembled.

And, as best he could, continued shaving.

TWO

"Syn-cof?" the receptionist asked sympathetically. "Or Martian fnikjuice tea, while you wait?"

Rachmael ben Applebaum, getting out a genuine Tampa, Florida Garcia y Vega cigarillo, said, "I'll just sit, thanks." He lit the cigar, waited. For Miss Freya Holm. He wondered what she looked like. If she was as pretty as the receptionist

A soft voice said, almost timidly, "Mr. ben Applebaum? I'm Miss Holm. If you'll come into my office-" She held the door open, and she was perfection; his Garcia y Vega cigarillo dwindled, neglected in the ashtray as he rose to his feet. She, no more than twenty, chitin-black long hair that hung freely down her shoulders, teeth white as the glossy bond of the expensive UN info mags . . . he stared at her, at the small girl in the gold-spray bodice and shorts and sandals, with the single camellia over her left ear, stared and thought, And this is my police protection.

"Sure." Numbly, he passed her, entered her small, contemporarily furnished office; in one glance he saw artifacts from the extinct cultures of six planets. "But Miss Holm," he said, then, candidly. "Maybe your employers didn't explain; there's pressure here. I've got one of the most powerful economic syndromes in the Sol system after me. Trails of Hoffman-"

"THL," Miss Holm said, seating herself at her desk and touching the on of her aud-recorder, "is the owner of Dr. Sepp von Einem's teleportation construct and hence monopolistically has made obsolete the hyper-see liners and freighters of Applebaum Enterprise." On her desk before her she had a folio, which she consulted. "You see, Mr. Rachmael ben Applebaum-" She glanced up. "I wish to keep you in data-reference distinct from your father, the late Maury Applebaum. So may I call you Rachmael?"

"Y-yes," he said, nettled by her coolness, her small, firm poise-and the folio which lay before her; long before he had consulted Listening Instructional Educational Services-or, as the pop mind called it in UN-egged-on derision, Lies Incorporated-the police agency had gathered, with its many monitors, the totality of information pertaining to him and to the collapse from abrupt technological obsolescence of the once formidable Applebaum Enterprise. And

"Your late father," Freya Holm said, "died evidently at his own instigation. Officially the UN police list it as Selbstmort . . . suicide. We however-" She paused, consulting the folio. "Hmmm."

Rachmael said, "I'm not satisfied, but I'm resigned." After all, he could not bring back his heavy, red-faced, near-sighted and highly over-taxed father. Selbstmort, in the official German of the UN, or not. "Miss Holm," he began, but she cut him off, gently.

"Rachmael, the Telpor electronic entity of Dr. Sepp von Einem, researched and paid for, developed in the several interplan labs of Trails of Hoffman, could do nothing else than bring chaos to the drayage industry. Theodoric Ferry, who is chairman of the board of THL, must have known this when he financed Dr. von Einem at his Schweinfort labs where the Telpor . . ."

Her voice faded.

Rachmael ben Applebaum sat with a circle of friends around a superior person, very wise and ancient. They called him Abba, which meant Daddy. When Abba spoke the entire settlement listened, and as best they could the individuals committed to memory what Abba told them. Because what that ancient person told them had an absolute quality to it; Abba had not originated in the settlement, but knew things which no one else knew, and he guided them all.

". . . breakthrough occurred," Abba said in his low, gentle voice. "And yet THL owned-outside of your father's-the largest single holding of the now-defunct Applebaum Enterprise. Therefore, my little ones, know this: Trails of Hoffman Limited deliberately ruined a corporation which it had major investments in . . . and this, I admit, has seemed strange to us."

The wise, elderly Abba faded out. Freya Holm glanced up alertly, tossed back her mass of black hair.

"And now they hound you for restitution; correct?"

Rachmael blinked; he managed to nod mutely.

Quietly, Miss Holm asked, "How long did it take a passenger liner of your father's corporation to reach Whale's Mouth with a load of, say, five hundred colonists, plus their personal effects?"

After a tormented pause he said, "We-never even tried. Years. Even at hyper-see."

The girl, across from him, still waited, wanting to hear him say it.

"With our flagship transport," he said, "eighteen years."

"And with Dr. von Einem's teleportation instrument-"

"Fifteen minutes," he said harshly. And Whale's Mouth, the number IX planet of the Fomalhaut system, was to date the sole planet discovered either by manned or unmanned observers which was truly habitable-truly a second Terra. Eighteen years . . . and even deep-sleep would not help, for such a prolonged period; aging, although slowed down, although consciousness was dimmed, still occurred. Alpha and Prox; that had been all right; that had been short enough. But Fomalhaut, at twenty-four light years

"We just couldn't compete," he said. "We simply could not carry colonists that far."

"Would you have tried, without von Einem's Telpor breakthrough?"

Rachmael said, "My father-"

"Was thinking about it." She nodded. "But then he died and it was too late and now you've had to sell virtually all your ships to meet note-payment due-dates. Now, from us, Rachmael. You wanted . . . ?"

"I still own," he said, "our fastest, newest, biggest ship, the Omphalos. She's never been sold, no matter how great the pressure THL has put on me, within and outside the UN courts." He hesitated, then said it. "I want to go to Whale's Mouth. By ship. Not by Dr. von Einem's Telpor. And by my own ship, by what we meant to be our-" He broke off. "I want to take her all the way to Fomalhaut, on an eighteen-year voyage-alone. And when I arrive at Whale's Mouth I'll prove-"

"Yes?" Freya said. "Prove what, Rachmael?"

As he sat there, formulating his answer, he saw again the tender, intelligent shape of Abba; but Abba did not look human. A fur of darkness and complexity covered Abba and as the wise one spoke his voice seemed shrill and eerie. Remnants of the dream, Rachmael realized; coming back at me in my waking state.

Abba said, "There lies a wonderful place. In it lies very fine food. In it lies . . . in it lies . . . lies."

The last word lingered in Rachmael's mind. Lies.

Across from him the girl waited for him to answer.

"Lies," he said. "Something about lies."

"Oh, the name they give us." Freya laughed.

A pun, he thought. The two words sound the same, spelled the same, but mean different things.

"That we could have done it," Rachmael said. "Had von Einem not come along with that teleportation thing, that-" He gestured and felt, within him, impotent fury. And still the word lingered in his mind, traced there by Abba, who was wise but who was not human.

Lies.

Freya said, "Telpor is one of the most vital discoveries in human history, Rachmael. Teleportation, from one star-system to another. Twenty-four light-years in fifteen minutes. When you reach Whale's Mouth by the Omphalos, I for instance will be-" She calculated. "Forty-three years old."

Excerpted from

Lies, Inc.
by Philip K. Dick
Buy this book at Barnes & Noble

Lies, Inc.

ONE

The SubInfo computers owned by Lies Incorporated had been caught in an unnatural act by a service mechanic. SubInfo computer Five had transmitted information which was not a lie.

It would have to be taken apart to see why. And to whom the correct information had gone.

Probably there would be no way to discern to whom the correct information had gone. But a carrier check maintained an automatic record of all subinformation transmitted by the bank of computers located here and there on Terra. The information had to do with a rat. According to the carrier check the rat lived with a colony of other rats in a garbage dump in Oakland, California.

What importance could information dealing with a rat have? Lewis Stine, the chief mechanic for Lies Incorporated, pondered this as he broke the flow of current to SubInfo computer Five and prepared to begin taking it apart. Of course he could ask the computer . . . but the computer, being programmed to lie, would of course lie-even to Lies Incorporated itself. That was an irony which Stine did not appreciate. This problem always surfaced when it came time to dismantle one of the computers.

Any other bank of computers, Stine thought, could be asked.

Just for a moment he restored power to SubInfo computer Five and punched buttons on the console of a terminal. Whom did you transmit to? he asked.

BEN APPLEBAUM, RACHMAEL

"Fine," Stine said. At least he knew that. Somebody on Terra with the name Rachmael ben Applebaum probably now knew more about rats than he cared to know, albeit on a subliminal basis.

You're probably thinking a lot about rats thesedays, Mr. ben Applebaum, Stine said to himself. And you are wondering why.

Again he cut the power to the computer. And began to go to work.



Standing before his bathroom mirror shaving, Rachmael ben Applebaum thought about the delicious taste of cheeseburger fragments-not a whole cheeseburger (you rarely found those) but the wonderful dried bits lying here and there among the coffee grounds, grapefruit rinds and egg shells.

I'll fly over to Bob's Big Boy, he decided, and order a cheeseburger for breakfast.

And then he thought, It's those damn dreams.

Actually it was one dream over and over again. And he always had it around three a.m.; several times he had awakened, gotten out of bed, bewildered and disturbed by the intensity of the dream, and noted the clock. The place he dreamed of; it was awful. And yet, for some reason, while he was actually there-actually dreaming-the place seemed great. And this was the part that bothered him the most: that he liked it so. It seemed familiar; it seemed to be a place he regarded as home.

However, so did a number of other people

People. They hadn't looked exactly like people, although they had talked like people.

"That's mine," Fred said, holding on to an armload of dog kibble.

"The hell you say," Rachmael said angrily. "I saw it first. Give it here or I'll pop you."

He and Fred fought over the armload of dog kibble, and Rachmael finally won. But he won in an odd way: by biting Fred on the shoulder. He hadn't hit him; he had bitten him.

Strange, Rachmael thought as he continued to shave.

I'm going to have to see a psychiatrist, he said to himself. Maybe it's memories of a former life. Millions of years ago before I . . . before I had evolved into a human being. Far lower on the evolutionary scale. Biting people, or rather biting animals. Yes, he thought; Fred was an animal of some kind. But we talked English.

In his dream he kept a secret hoard of valuables which the others in the settlement knew nothing about. He thought of them now, those precious artifacts which he cherished, which he had gone to such lengths-and effort-to acquire. Mostly food, of course; nothing was more important than food. And yet-you could sometimes find string. He had a lot of string: fine brown string; he had wound it up into a heap and, during the day, he slept in the midst of it. The pile of string comforted him; it lulled him and made his dreams peaceful. All but one; there at the settlement, asleep during the day in his pile of string, he had one dreadful dream which kept coming back.

It had to do with a huge fish opening its mouth wide . . . and vast ugly teeth strove to crunch him, crunch him with avid relish.

Jeez, Rachmael said. Maybe I'm not here shaving; maybe I'm just dreaming this. Maybe I'm asleep in my pile of string, and having a good dream, not the bad one; having the dream where I'm a

He thought, A man.

So then, by inference, he thought, I'm not a man when I'm at the settlement. That would explain why I bit, and why Fred bit. That son-of-a-bitch, he said to himself. He knows where a lot of dog kibble is and he won't tell any of the rest of us. I'll find it; I'll find his trove.

But then, he realized, while I'm out doing that, maybe Fred (or someone else) will find my trove and take away my string. My wonderful string which was so hard to drag back to my hiding place; it kept snagging and catching on things . . . I'll defend that string with my life, Rachmael said to himself. Any son-of-a-bitch who tries to steal it will wind up without his face.

He looked at his wristwatch. Got to hurry, he said to himself. It's late; I overslept again. And I can't get the dream out of my head. It was too vivid for a dream. It wasn't a dream; maybe it was involuntary telepathy of some kind. Or contact with an alternate universe. That's probably what it was: another Earth on which I was born as an animal rather than a human being.

Or a microwave transmission, using my brain as a transducer without an electronic interface. They have those, especially the police agencies.

He was very much afraid of the world-wide police agencies. Especially Lies, Incorporated, the worst police agency of them all. Even the Soviet police were afraid of them.

They're beaming psychotronic signals at me subliminally while I'm asleep, he thought. And then he realized how paranoid that was. Christ; no sane person would think that. And even if Lies, Incorporated did transmit microwave-boosted telepathic information to him in his sleep, would it have to do with rats?

With rats!

I'm a goddamn rat, he realized. When I go to sleep I abreact back millions of years to when I was once a rat, and I think rat thoughts and have rat ideas; I cherish what a rat cherishes. That explains my fighting with Fred for the dog kibble. It's simple: memories from the paleocortex, rather than the neocortex.

There's an anatomical explanation. Has to do with accretional layers of the brain; the brain has old layers which come to wakefulness during normal sleep.

That's the trouble with living in a police state, he said to himself; you think-you imagine-the police are behind everything. You get paranoid and think they're beaming information to you in your sleep, to subliminally control you. Actually the police wouldn't do that. The police are our friends.

Or was that idea beamed to me subliminally? he wondered suddenly. "The police are our friends." The hell they are!

He continued shaving, feeling glum about the whole thing. Maybe the dream will stop coming, he said to himself. Or

Pausing, he thought, Maybe the dream is trying to tell me something.

For a long time he stood without moving, the razor held away from his face. Tell me what? That I'm living in a garbage dump where there's dried scraps of food, rotting food, other rats?

He trembled.

And, as best he could, continued shaving.

TWO

"Syn-cof?" the receptionist asked sympathetically. "Or Martian fnikjuice tea, while you wait?"

Rachmael ben Applebaum, getting out a genuine Tampa, Florida Garcia y Vega cigarillo, said, "I'll just sit, thanks." He lit the cigar, waited. For Miss Freya Holm. He wondered what she looked like. If she was as pretty as the receptionist

A soft voice said, almost timidly, "Mr. ben Applebaum? I'm Miss Holm. If you'll come into my office-" She held the door open, and she was perfection; his Garcia y Vega cigarillo dwindled, neglected in the ashtray as he rose to his feet. She, no more than twenty, chitin-black long hair that hung freely down her shoulders, teeth white as the glossy bond of the expensive UN info mags . . . he stared at her, at the small girl in the gold-spray bodice and shorts and sandals, with the single camellia over her left ear, stared and thought, And this is my police protection.

"Sure." Numbly, he passed her, entered her small, contemporarily furnished office; in one glance he saw artifacts from the extinct cultures of six planets. "But Miss Holm," he said, then, candidly. "Maybe your employers didn't explain; there's pressure here. I've got one of the most powerful economic syndromes in the Sol system after me. Trails of Hoffman-"

"THL," Miss Holm said, seating herself at her desk and touching the on of her aud-recorder, "is the owner of Dr. Sepp von Einem's teleportation construct and hence monopolistically has made obsolete the hyper-see liners and freighters of Applebaum Enterprise." On her desk before her she had a folio, which she consulted. "You see, Mr. Rachmael ben Applebaum-" She glanced up. "I wish to keep you in data-reference distinct from your father, the late Maury Applebaum. So may I call you Rachmael?"

"Y-yes," he said, nettled by her coolness, her small, firm poise-and the folio which lay before her; long before he had consulted Listening Instructional Educational Services-or, as the pop mind called it in UN-egged-on derision, Lies Incorporated-the police agency had gathered, with its many monitors, the totality of information pertaining to him and to the collapse from abrupt technological obsolescence of the once formidable Applebaum Enterprise. And

"Your late father," Freya Holm said, "died evidently at his own instigation. Officially the UN police list it as Selbstmort . . . suicide. We however-" She paused, consulting the folio. "Hmmm."

Rachmael said, "I'm not satisfied, but I'm resigned." After all, he could not bring back his heavy, red-faced, near-sighted and highly over-taxed father. Selbstmort, in the official German of the UN, or not. "Miss Holm," he began, but she cut him off, gently.

"Rachmael, the Telpor electronic entity of Dr. Sepp von Einem, researched and paid for, developed in the several interplan labs of Trails of Hoffman, could do nothing else than bring chaos to the drayage industry. Theodoric Ferry, who is chairman of the board of THL, must have known this when he financed Dr. von Einem at his Schweinfort labs where the Telpor . . ."

Her voice faded.

Rachmael ben Applebaum sat with a circle of friends around a superior person, very wise and ancient. They called him Abba, which meant Daddy. When Abba spoke the entire settlement listened, and as best they could the individuals committed to memory what Abba told them. Because what that ancient person told them had an absolute quality to it; Abba had not originated in the settlement, but knew things which no one else knew, and he guided them all.

". . . breakthrough occurred," Abba said in his low, gentle voice. "And yet THL owned-outside of your father's-the largest single holding of the now-defunct Applebaum Enterprise. Therefore, my little ones, know this: Trails of Hoffman Limited deliberately ruined a corporation which it had major investments in . . . and this, I admit, has seemed strange to us."

The wise, elderly Abba faded out. Freya Holm glanced up alertly, tossed back her mass of black hair.

"And now they hound you for restitution; correct?"

Rachmael blinked; he managed to nod mutely.

Quietly, Miss Holm asked, "How long did it take a passenger liner of your father's corporation to reach Whale's Mouth with a load of, say, five hundred colonists, plus their personal effects?"

After a tormented pause he said, "We-never even tried. Years. Even at hyper-see."

The girl, across from him, still waited, wanting to hear him say it.

"With our flagship transport," he said, "eighteen years."

"And with Dr. von Einem's teleportation instrument-"

"Fifteen minutes," he said harshly. And Whale's Mouth, the number IX planet of the Fomalhaut system, was to date the sole planet discovered either by manned or unmanned observers which was truly habitable-truly a second Terra. Eighteen years . . . and even deep-sleep would not help, for such a prolonged period; aging, although slowed down, although consciousness was dimmed, still occurred. Alpha and Prox; that had been all right; that had been short enough. But Fomalhaut, at twenty-four light years

"We just couldn't compete," he said. "We simply could not carry colonists that far."

"Would you have tried, without von Einem's Telpor breakthrough?"

Rachmael said, "My father-"

"Was thinking about it." She nodded. "But then he died and it was too late and now you've had to sell virtually all your ships to meet note-payment due-dates. Now, from us, Rachmael. You wanted . . . ?"

"I still own," he said, "our fastest, newest, biggest ship, the Omphalos. She's never been sold, no matter how great the pressure THL has put on me, within and outside the UN courts." He hesitated, then said it. "I want to go to Whale's Mouth. By ship. Not by Dr. von Einem's Telpor. And by my own ship, by what we meant to be our-" He broke off. "I want to take her all the way to Fomalhaut, on an eighteen-year voyage-alone. And when I arrive at Whale's Mouth I'll prove-"

"Yes?" Freya said. "Prove what, Rachmael?"

As he sat there, formulating his answer, he saw again the tender, intelligent shape of Abba; but Abba did not look human. A fur of darkness and complexity covered Abba and as the wise one spoke his voice seemed shrill and eerie. Remnants of the dream, Rachmael realized; coming back at me in my waking state.

Abba said, "There lies a wonderful place. In it lies very fine food. In it lies . . . in it lies . . . lies."

The last word lingered in Rachmael's mind. Lies.

Across from him the girl waited for him to answer.

"Lies," he said. "Something about lies."

"Oh, the name they give us." Freya laughed.

A pun, he thought. The two words sound the same, spelled the same, but mean different things.

"That we could have done it," Rachmael said. "Had von Einem not come along with that teleportation thing, that-" He gestured and felt, within him, impotent fury. And still the word lingered in his mind, traced there by Abba, who was wise but who was not human.

Lies.

Freya said, "Telpor is one of the most vital discoveries in human history, Rachmael. Teleportation, from one star-system to another. Twenty-four light-years in fifteen minutes. When you reach Whale's Mouth by the Omphalos, I for instance will be-" She calculated. "Forty-three years old."

Excerpted from

Lies, Inc.
by Philip K. Dick
Buy this book at Barnes & Noble

A Scanner Darkly

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair. After he had taken a shower for eight hours, standing under hot water hour after hour suffering the pain of the bugs, he got out and dried himself, and he still had bugs in his hair; in fact, he had bugs all over him. A month later he had bugs in his lungs.

Having nothing else to do or think about, he began to work out theoretically the life cycle of the bugs, and, with the aid of the Britannica, try to determine specifically which bugs they were. They now filled his house. He read about many different kinds and finally noticed bugs outdoors, so he concluded they were aphids. After that decision came to his mind it never changed, no matter what other people told him ... like "Aphids don't bite people."

They said that to him because the endless biting of the bugs kept him in torment. At the 7-11 grocery store, part of a chain spread out over most of California, he bought spray cans of Raid and Black Flag and Yard Guard. First he sprayed the house, then himself. The Yard Guard seemed to work the best.

As to the theoretical side, he perceived three stages in the cycle of the bugs. First, they were carried to him to contaminate him by what he called Carrier-people, which were people who didn't understand their role in distributing the bugs. During that stage the bugs had no jaws or mandibles (he learned that word during his weeks of scholarly research, an unusually bookish occupation for a guy who worked at the Handy Brake and Tire place relining people's brake drums). The Carrier-people therefore felt nothing. He used to sit in the far corner of his livingroom watching different Carrier-people enter—most of them people he'd known for a while, but some new to him—covered with the aphids in this particular nonbiting stage. He'd sort of smile to himself, because he knew that the person was being used by the bugs and wasn't hip to it.

"What are you grinning about, Jerry?" they'd say.

He'd just smile.

In the next stage the bugs grew wings or something, but they really weren't precisely wings; anyhow, they were appendages of a functional sort permitting them to swarm, which was how they migrated and spread—especially to him. At that point the air was full of them; it made his living room, his whole house, cloudy. During this stage he tried not to inhale them.

Most of all he felt sorry for his dog, because he could see the bugs landing on and settling all over him, and probably getting into the dog's lungs, as they were in his own. Probably—at least so his empathic ability told him—the dog was suffering as much as he was. Should he give the dog away for the dog's own comfort? No, he decided: the dog was now, inadvertently, infected, and would carry the bugs with him everywhere.

Sometimes he stood in the shower with the dog, trying to wash the dog clean too. He had no more success with him than he did with himself. It hurt to feel the dog suffer; he never stopped trying to help him. In some respect this was the worst part, the suffering of the animal, who could not complain.

"What the fuck are you doing there all day in the shower with the goddamn dog?" his buddy Charles Freck asked one time, coming in during this.

Jerry said, "I got to get the aphids off him." He brought Max, the dog, out of the shower and began drying him. Charles Freck watched, mystified, as Jerry rubbed baby oil and talc into the dog's fur. All over the house, cans of insect spray, bottles of talc, and baby oil and skin conditioners were piled and tossed, most of them empty; he used many cans a day now.

"I don't see any aphids," Charles said. "What's an aphid?"

"It eventually kills you," Jerry said. "That's what an aphid is. They're in my hair and my skin and my lungs, and the goddamn pain is unbearable—I'm going to have to go to the hospital."

"How come I can't see them?"

Jerry put down the dog, which was wrapped in a towel, and knelt over the shag rug. "I'll show you one," he said. The rug was covered with aphids; they hopped up everywhere, up and down, some higher than others. He searched for an especially large one, because of the difficulty people had seeing them. "Bring me a bottle or jar," he said, "from under the sink. We'll cap it or put a lid on it and then I can take it with me when I go to the doctor and he can analyze it."

Charles Freck brought him an empty mayonnaise jar. Jerry went on searching, and at last came across an aphid leaping up at least four feet in the air. The aphid was over an inch long. He caught it, carried it to the jar, carefully dropped it in, and screwed on the lid. Then he held it up triumphantly. "See?" he said.

"Yeahhhhh," Charles Freck said, his eyes wide as he scrutinized the contents of the jar. "What a big one! Wow!"

"Help me find more for the doctor to see," Jerry said, again squatting down on the rug, the jar beside him.

"Sure," Charles Freck said, and did so.

Within half an hour they had three jars full of the bugs. Charles, although new at it, found some of the largest.

It was midday, in June of 1994. In California, in a tract area of cheap but durable plastic houses, long ago vacated by the straights. Jerry had at an earlier date sprayed metal paint over all the windows, though, to keep out the light; the illumination for the room came from a pole lamp into which he had screwed nothing but spot lamps, which shone day and night, so as to abolish time for him and his friends. He liked that; he liked to get rid of time. By doing that he could concentrate on important things without interruption. Like this: two men kneeling down on the shag rug, finding bug after bug and putting them into jar after jar.

"What do we get for these," Charles Freck said, later on in the day. "I mean, does the doctor pay a bounty or something? A prize? Any bread?"

"I get to help perfect a cure for them this way," Jerry said. The pain, constant as it was, had become unbearable; he had never gotten used to it, and he knew he never would. The urge, the longing, to take another shower was overwhelming him. "Hey, man," he gasped, straightening up, "you go on putting them in the jars while I take a leak and like that." He started toward the bathroom.

"Okay," Charles said, his long legs wobbling as he swung toward a jar, both hands cupped. An ex-veteran, he still had good muscular control, though; he made it to the jar. But then he said suddenly, "Jerry, hey—those bugs sort of scare me. I don't like it here by myself." He stood up.

"Chickenshit bastard," Jerry said, panting with pain as he halted momentarily at the bathroom.

"Couldn't you—"

"I got to take a leak!" He slammed the door and spun the knobs of the shower. Water poured down.

"I'm afraid out here." Charles Freck's voice came dimly, even though he was evidently yelling loud.

"Then go fuck yourself!" Jerry yelled back, and stepped into the shower. What fucking good are friends? he asked himself bitterly. No good, no good! No fucking good!

"Do these fuckers sting?" Charles yelled, right at the door.

"Yeah, they sting," Jerry said as he rubbed shampoo into his hair.

"That's what I thought." A pause. "Can I wash my hands and get them off and wait for you?"

Chickenshit, Jerry thought with bitter fury. He said nothing; he merely kept on washing. The bastard wasn't worth answering ... He paid no attention to Charles Freck, only to himself. To his own vital, demanding, terrible, urgent needs. Everything else would have to wait. There was no time, no time; these things could not be postponed. Everything else was secondary. Except the dog; he wondered about Max, the dog.

Charles Freck phoned up somebody who he hoped was holding, "Can you lay about ten deaths on me?"

"Christ, I'm entirely out—I'm looking to score myself. Let me know when you find some, I could use some."

"What's wrong with the supply?"

"Some busts, I guess."

Charles Freck hung up and then ran a fantasy number in his head as he slumped dismally back from the pay phone booth—you never used your home phone for a buy call—to his parked Chevy. In his fantasy number he was driving past the Thrifty Drugstore and they had a huge window display; bottles of slow death, cans of slow death, jars and bathtubs and vats and bowls of slow death, millions of caps and tabs and hits of slow death, slow death mixed with speed and junk and barbiturates and psychedelics, everything—and a giant sign: YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD HERE. Not to mention: LOW LOW PRICES, LOWEST IN TOWN.

But in actuality the Thrifty usually had a display of nothing: combs, bottles of mineral oil, spray cans of deodorant, always crap like that. But I bet the pharmacy in the back has slow death under lock and key in an unstepped-on, pure, unadulterated, uncut form, he thought as he drove from the parking lot onto Harbor Boulevard, into the afternoon traffic. About a fifty-pound bag.

He wondered when and how they unloaded the fifty-pound bag of Substance D at the Thrifty Pharmacy every morning, from wherever it came from—God knew, maybe from Switzerland or maybe from another planet where some wise race lived. They'd deliver probably real early, and with armed guards—the Man standing there with Laser rifles looking mean, the way the Man always did. Anybody rip off my slow death, he thought through the Man's head, I'll snuff them.

Probably Substance D is an ingredient in every legal medication that's worth anything, he thought. A little pinch here and there according to the secret exclusive formula at the issuing house in Germany or Switzerland that invented it. But in actuality he knew better; the authorities snuffed or sent up everybody selling or transporting or using, so in that case the Thrifty Drugstore—all the millions of Thrifty Drugstores—would get shot or bombed out of business or anyhow fined. More likely just fined. The Thrifty had pull. Anyhow, how do you shoot a chain of big drugstores? Or put them away?

They just got ordinary stuff, he thought as he cruised along. He felt lousy because he had only three hundred tabs of slow death left in his stash. Buried in his back yard under his camellia, the hybrid one with the cool big blossoms that didn't burn brown in the spring. I only got a week's supply, he thought. What then when I'm out? Shit.

Suppose everybody in California and parts of Oregon runs out the same day, he thought. Wow.

This was the all-time-winning horror-fantasy that he ran in his head, that every doper ran. The whole western part of the United States simultaneously running out and everybody crashing on the same day, probably about 6 A.M. Sunday morning, while the straights were getting dressed up to go fucking pray.

Scene: The First Episcopal Church of Pasadena, at 8:30 A.M. on Crash Sunday.

"Holy parishioners, let us call on God now at this time to request His intervention in the agonies of those who are thrashing about on their beds withdrawing."

"Yeah, yeah." The congregation agreeing with the priest.

"But before He intervenes with a fresh supply of—"

A black-and-white evidently had noticed something in Charles Freck's driving he hadn't noticed; it had taken off from its parking spot and was moving along behind him in traffic, so far without lights or siren, but ...

Maybe I'm weaving or something, he thought. Fucking goddamn fuzzmobile saw me fucking up. I wonder what.

COP: "All right, what's your name?"

"My name?" (CAN'T THINK OF NAME.)

"You don't know your own name?" Cop signals to other cop in prowl car. "This guy is really spaced."

"Don't shoot me here." Charles Freck in his horror-fantasy number induced by the sight of the black-and-white pacing him. "At least take me to the station house and shoot me there, out of sight."

To survive in this fascist police state, he thought, you gotta always be able to come up with a name, your name. At all times. That's the first sign they look for that you're wired, not being able to figure out who the hell you are.

What I'll do, he decided, is I'll pull off soon as I see a parking slot, pull off voluntarily before he flashes his light, or does anything, and then when he glides up beside me I'll say I got a loose wheel or something mechanical.

They always think that's great, he thought. When you give up like that and can't go on. Like throwing yourself on the ground the way an animal does, exposing your soft unprotected defenseless underbelly. I'll do that, he thought.

He did so, peeling off to the right and bumping the front wheels of his car against the curb. The cop car went on by.

Pulled off for nothing, he thought. Now it'll be hard to back out again, traffic's so heavy. He shut off his engine. Maybe I'll just sit here parked for a while, he decided, and alpha meditate or go into various different altered states of consciousness. Possibly by watching the chicks going along on foot. I wonder if they manufacture a bioscope for horny. Rather than alpha. Horny waves, first very short, then longer, larger, larger, finally right off the scale.

This is getting me nowhere, he realized. I should be out trying to locate someone holding. I've got to get my supply or pretty soon I'll be freaking, and then I won't be able to do anything. Even sit at the curb like I am. I not only won't know who I am, I won't even know where I am, or what's happening.

What is happening? he asked himself. What day is this? If I knew what day I'd know everything else; it'd seep back bit by bit.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip K. Dick

Excerpted from

A Scanner Darkly: A Graphic Novel
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Counter-Clock World

Place there is none; we go backward and forward, and there is no place.--St. Augustine

As he glided by the extremely small, out-of-the-way cemetery in his airborne prowl car, late at night, Officer Joseph Tinbane heard unfortunate and familiar sounds. A voice. At once he sent his prowl car up over the spiked iron poles of the badly maintained cemetery fence, descended on the far side, listened.

The voice said, muffled and faint, "My name is Mrs. Tilly M. Benton, and I want to get out. Can anybody hear me?"

Officer Tinbane flashed his light. The voice came from beneath the grass. As he had expected: Mrs. Tilly M. Benton was underground.

Snapping on the microphone of his car radio Tinbane said, "I'm at Forest Knolls Cemetery--I think it's called--and I have a 1206, here. Better send an ambulance out with a digging crew; from the sound of her voice it's urgent."

"Chang," the radio said in answer. "Our digging crew will be out before morning. Can you sink a temporary emergency shaft to give her adequate air? Until our crew gets there--say nine or ten a.m."

"I'll do the best I can," Tinbane said, and sighed. It meant for him an all-night vigil. And the dim, feeble voice from below begging in its senile way for him to hurry. Begging on and on. Unceasingly.

This part of his job he liked least. The cries of the dead; he hated that sound, and he had heard them, the cries, so much, and so many times. Men and women, mostly old but some not so old, sometimes children. And it always took the digging crew so long to get there.

Again pressing his mike button, Officer Tinbane said,"I'm fed up with this. I'd like to be reassigned. I'm serious; this is a formal request."

Distantly, from beneath the ground, the impotent, ancient female voice called, "Please, somebody; I want to get out. Can you hear me? I know somebody's up there; I can hear you talking."

Leaning his head out the open window of his prowl car, Officer Tinbane yelled, "We'll be getting you out any time now, lady. Just try to be patient."

"What year is this?" the elderly voice called back. "How much time has passed? Is it still 1974? I have to know; please tell me, sir."

Tinbane said, "It's 1998."

"Oh dear." Dismay. "Well, I suppose I must get used to it."

"I guess," Tinbane said, "you'll have to." He picked a cigaret butt from the car's ashtray, lit it and pondered. Then, once again, he pressed his mike button. "I'd like permission to contact a private vitarium."

"Permission denied," his radio said. "Too late at night."

"But," he said, "one might happen along anyhow. Several of the bigger ones keep their scout-ambulances heading back and forth all through the night." He had one vitarium in particular in mind, a small one, old-fashioned. Decent in its sales methods.

"So late at night it's unlikely--"

"This man can use the business." Tinbane picked up the vidphone receiver mounted on the car's dashboard. "I want to talk to a Mr. Sebastian Hermes," he told the operator. "You find him; I'll wait. First of all try his place of business, the Flask of Hermes Vitarium; he probably has an all-night relay to his residence." If the poor guy can currently afford it, Tinbane thought. "Call me back as soon as you've located him." He hung up, then, and sat smoking his cigaret.

The Flask of Hermes Vitarium consisted primarily of Sebastian Hermes himself, with the help of a meager assortment of five employees. No one got hired at the establishment and no one got fired. As far as Sebastian was concerned these people constituted his family. He had no other, being old, heavy set, and not very likable. They, another, earlier vitarium, had dug him up only ten years ago, and he still felt on him, in the dreary part of the night, the coldness of the grave. Perhaps it was that which made him sympathetic to the plight of the old-born.

The firm occupied a small, wooden, rented building which had survived World War Three and even portions of World War Four. However, he was, at this late hour, of course home in bed, asleep in the arms of Lotta, his wife. She had such attractive clinging arms, always bare, always young arms; Lotta was much younger than he: twenty-two years by the non-Hobart Phase method of reckoning, which she went by, not having died and been reborn, as he, so much older, had.

The vidphone beside his bed clanged; he reached, by reflex of his profession, to acknowledge it.

"A call from Officer Tinbane, Mr. Hermes," his answering girl said brightly.

"Yes," he said, listening in the dark, watching the dull little gray screen.

A controlled young man's face appeared, familiar to him. "Mr. Hermes, I have a live one at a hell of a third rate place called Forest Knolls; she's crying to be let out. Can you make it here right away, or should I begin to drill an air vent myself? I have the equipment in my car, of course."

Sebastian said, "I'll round up my crew and get there. Give me half an hour. Can she hold out that long?" He switched on a bedside light, groped for his pen and paper, trying to recall if he had ever heard of Forest Knolls. "The name."

"Mrs. Tilly M. Benton, she says."

"Okay," he said, and rang off.

Stirring beside him, Lotta said drowsily, "A job call?"

"Yes." He dialed the number of Bob Lindy, his engineer.

"Want me to fix you some hot sogum?" Lotta asked; she had already gotten out of bed and was stumbling, half-asleep, toward the kitchen.

"Fine," he said. "Thanks." The screen glowed, and thereon formed the glum and grumpy, thin and rubbery face of his company's sole technician. "Meet me at a place called Forest Knolls," Sebastian said. "As soon as you can. Will you have to go by the shop for gear, or--"

"I've got it all with me," Lindy grumbled, irritably. "In my own car. Chang." He nodded, broke the connection.

Padding back from the kitchen, Lotta said, "The sogum pipe is on. Can I come along?" She found her brush and began expertly combing her mane of heavy dark-brown hair; it hung almost to her waist, and its intense color matched that of her eyes. "I always like to see them brought up. It's such a miracle. I think it's the most marvelous sight I've ever watched; it seems to me it fulfills what St. Paul says in the Bible, about 'Grave, where is thy victory?'" She waited hopefully, then, finished with her hair, searched in the bureau drawers for her blue and white ski sweater which she always wore.

"We'll see," Sebastian said. "If I can't get all the crew we won't be handling this one at all; we'll have to leave it to the police, or wait for morning and hope we're first." He dialed Dr. Sign's number.

"Sign residence," a groggy middle-aged familiar female voice said. "Oh, Mr. Hermes. Another job so soon? Can't it wait until morning?"

"We'll lose it if we wait," Sebastian said. "I'm sorry to get him out of bed, but we need the business." He gave her the name of the cemetery and the name of the old-born individual.

"Here's your sogum," Lotta said, coming from the kitchen with a ceramic container and ornamented intake tube; she now had her big ski sweater on over her pajamas.

He had only one more call to make, this one to the company's pastor, Father Jeramy Faine. Placing the call, he sat precariously on the edge of the bed, dialing with one hand, using the other to hold in place the container of sogum. "You can come with me," he said to Lotta. "Having a woman along might make the old lady--I assume she's old--more comfortable."

The vidscreen lit; elderly, dwarfish Father Faine blinked owlishly, as if surprised in the act of a nocturnal debauchery. "Yes, Sebastian," he said, sounding, as always, fully awake; of Sebastian's five employees, Father Faine alone seemed perpetually prepared for a call. "Do you know which denomination this old-born is?"

"The cop didn't say," Sebastian said. As far as he himself was concerned it didn't much matter; the company's pastor sufficed for all religions, including Jewish and Udi. Although the Uditi, in particular, did not much share his view. Anyhow, Father Faine was what they got, like it or not.

"It's settled, then?" Lotta asked. "We're going?"

"Yes," he said. "We've got everyone we need." Bob Lindy to sink the air shaft, put digging tools to work; Dr. Sign to provide prompt--and vital--medical attention; Father Faine to perform the Sacrament of Miraculous Rebirth . . . and then tomorrow during business hours, Cheryl Vale to do the intricate paper work, and the company's salesman, R.C. Buckley, to take the order and set about finding a buyer.

That part--the selling end of the business--did not much appeal to him; he reflected on this as he dressed in the vast suit which he customarily wore for cold night calls. R.C., however, seemed to get a bang out of it; he had a philosophy which he called "placement location," a dignified term for managing to pawn off an old-born individual on somebody. It was R.C.'s line that he placed the old-borns only in "specially viable, selected environments of proven background," but in fact he sold wherever he could--as long as the price was sufficient to guarantee him his five percent commission.

Lotta, trailing after him as he got his greatcoat from the closet, said, "Did you ever read the part of First Corinthians in the N.E.B. translation? I know it's getting out of date, but I've always liked it."

"Better get finished dressing," he said gently.

"Okay." She nodded dutifully, trotted off to get workpants and the high soft-leather boots which she cherished so much. "I'm in the process of memorizing it, because after all I am your wife and it pertains so directly to the work we--I mean you--do. Listen. That's how it starts. I mean; I'm quoting. 'Listen. I will unfold a mystery; we shall not all die, but we shall be changed in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet call.'"

"A call," Sebastian said meditatively as he waited patiently for her to finish dressing, "that came one day in June of the year 1986." Much, he thought, to everyone's surprise--except of course for Alex Hobart himself, who had predicted it, and after whom the anti-time effect had been named.

"I'm ready," Lotta said proudly; she had on her boots, workpants, sweater, and, he knew, her pajamas under it all; he smiled, thinking of that: she had done it to save time, so as not to detain him.

Together, they left their conapt; they ascended by the building's express elevator to the roof-field and their parked aircar.

"Myself," he said to her as he wiped the midnight moisture from the windows of the car, "I prefer the old King James translation."

"I've never read that," she said, childish candor in her voice, as if meaning, But I'll read it; I promise.

Sebastian said, "As I recall, in that translation the passage goes, 'Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep; we shall be changed--' and so on. Something like that. But I remember the 'behold.' I like that better than 'listen.'" He started up the motor of the aircar, and they ascended.

"Maybe you're right," Lotta said, always agreeable, always willing to look up to him--he was, after all, so much older than she--as an authority. That perpetually pleased him. And it seemed to please her, too. Seated beside her, he patted her on the knee, feeling affection; she thereupon patted him, too, as always: their love for each other passed back and forth between them, without resistance, without difficulty; it was an effortless two-way flow.

Young, dedicated Officer Tinbane met them inside the dilapidated spiked-iron-pole fence of the cemetery. "Evening, sir," he said to Sebastian, and saluted; for Tinbane every act done while wearing his uniform was official, not to mention impersonal. "Your engineer got here a couple of minutes ago and he's sinking a temporary airshaft. It was lucky I passed by." The policeman greeted Lotta, seeing her now. "Good evening, Mrs. Hermes. Sorry it's so cold; you want to sit in the squad car? The heater's on."

"I'm fine," Lotta said; craning her neck, she strove to catch sight of Bob Lindy at work. "Is she still talking?" she asked Officer Tinbane.

"Chattering away," Tinbane said; he led her and Sebastian, by means of his flashlight, toward the zone of illumination where Bob Lindy already toiled. "First to me; now to your engineer."

On his hands and knees, Lindy studied the gauges of the tube-boring rig; he did not look up or greet them, although he evidently was aware of their presence. For Lindy, work came first; socializing ran a late last.

"She has relatives, she claims," Officer Tinbane said to Sebastian. "Here; I wrote down what she's been saying; their names and addresses. In Pasadena. But she's senile; she seems confused." He glanced around. "Is your doctor coming for sure? I think he'll be needed; Mrs. Benton said something about Bright's disease; that's evidently what she died of. So possibly he'll need to attach an artificial kidney."

Its landing lights on, an aircar set down. Dr. Sign stepped from it, wearing his plastic, heat-enclosed, modern, stylish suit. "So you think you've got a live one," he said to Officer Tinbane; he knelt over the grave of Mrs. Tilly Benton, cocked an ear, then called, "Mrs. Benton, can you hear me? Are you able to breathe?"

The faint, indistinct, wavering voice drifted up to them, as Lindy momentarily ceased his drilling. "It's so stuffy, and it's dark and I'm really very much afraid; I'd like to be released to go home as soon as I can. Are you going to rescue me?"

Cupping his hands to his mouth, Dr. Sign shouted back, "We're drilling now, Mrs. Benton; just hang on and don't worry; it'll only be another minute or so." To Lindy he said, "Didn't you bother to yell down to her?"

Lindy growled, "I have my work. Talking's up to you guys and Father Faine." He resumed the drilling. It was almost complete, Sebastian noted; he walked a short distance away, listening, sensing the cemetery and the dead beneath the headstones, the corruptible, as Paul had called them, who, one day, like Mrs. Benton, would put on incorruption. And this mortal, he thought, must put on immortality. And then the saying that is written, he thought, will come to pass. Death is swallowed up in victory. Grave, where is thy victory? Oh death, where is thy sting? And so forth. He roamed on, using his flashlight to avoid tripping over headstones; he moved very slowly, and always hearing--but not exactly; not literally, with his ears, but rather inside him--the dim stirrings underground. Others, he thought, who one day soon will be old-born; their flesh and particles are migrating back already, finding their way to their onetime places; he sensed the eternal process, the unending complex activity of the graveyard, and it gave him a thrill of enthusiasm, and of great excitement. Nothing was more profoundly optimistic, more powerful in its momentum of good, than this re-forming of bodies which had, as Paul put it, corrupted away, and now, with the Hobart Phase at work, reversed the corruption.

Copyright 2002 by Philip K. Dick
Excerpted from

Counter-Clock World
by Philip K. Dick
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