Abruptly, obliterating his tranquil state, a sharp, highly-articulated rumination by the slime mold reached him. “As long as it is confession-of-feeling-and-deeds time I suggest that your wife lay on the table the full account of her brief affair with Bunny Hentman.” It corrected itself, “I retract the expression, ‘lay on the table,’ as unbelievably unfortunate. However my basic point remains: so anxious was she that you obtain employment with high financial return—”
“Let me say it,” Mary said.
“Please do,” the slime mold agreed. “And I will speak up again only if you are remiss as regards completeness of account.”
Mary said, “I had a very short affair with Bunny Hentman, Chuck. Just prior to my leaving Terra. That’s all there is.”
“There is more,” the slime mold contradicted.
“Details?” she said hotly. “Do I have to tell exactly when and where we—”
“Not that. Another aspect of your relationship with Hentman.”
“All right.” Resignedly Mary nodded. “During those four days,” she said to Chuck, “I told Bunny that as I saw it, using all my experience with marital break-ups, I foresaw—based on my knowledge of your personality—that you’d try to kill me. If you failed in your suicide attempt.” She was silent, then. “I don’t know why I told him. Maybe I was scared. Evidently I had to tell someone and I was with him quite a bit, then.”
So it had not been Joan. He felt a little better about the whole thing, knowing this. And he could hardly blame Mary for what she had done. It was a wonder she hadn’t gone to the police; evidently she was telling the truth when she said she loved him. This shed new light on her; she had forfeited a chance to injure him, and at a time of great crisis.
“Maybe we’ll have more children while we’re here on this moon,” Mary said. “Like the slime molds… we arrived and we’ll increase in numbers until we become legion. The majority.” She laughed in an odd, soft way, and, in the darkness, relaxed against him, as she had not done in ages.
In the sky the Alphane ships continued to appear and both he and Mary remained silent, planning out schemes by which to obtain the children. It would be difficult, he realized soberly, perhaps even more tricky than anything they had done so far. But possibly the remains of the Hentman organization could assist them. Or some of the slime mold’s countless business contacts among Terrans and non-Terrans. Both were distinct possibilities. And Hentman’s agent who had infiltrated the CIA, his former boss Jack Elwood… but Elwood was now in jail. Anyhow if unhappily enough their efforts failed, as Mary said they would be having more children; this did not make up for the ones lost, but it would be a good omen, one that could not be overlooked.
“Do you love me, too?” Mary asked, her lips close to his ear.
“Yes,” he said truthfully. And then he said, “Ouch.” Because without warning she had bitten him, nearly severing the lobe of his ear.
That, too, seemed to him an omen.
But of what he could not quite yet tell.
ALSO BY PHILIP K. DICK
DR. BLOODMONEY
Dr. Bloodmoney is a post-nuclear holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of Dick’s most memorable characters: Hoppy Harrington, a deformed mutant with telekinetic powers; Walt Dangerfield, a selfless disc jockey stranded in a satellite circling the globe; Dr. Bluthgeld, the megalomaniac physicist largely responsible for the decimated state of the world; and Stuart McConchie and Bonny Keller, two unremarkable people bent on the survival of goodness in a world devastated by evil.
Science Fiction/0-375-71929-6
GALACTIC POT-HEALER
The Glimmung wants Joe Fernwright, who is a pot-healer (a repairer of ceramics). But what could such a powerful entity want with a humble pot-healer? Or with the dozens of other creatures it has lured to Plowman’s Planet? And if the Glimmung is a god, are its ends positive or malign? Combining quixotic adventure, spine-chilling horror, and deliriously paranoid theology, Galactic Pot-Healer is a uniquely Dickian voyage to alternate worlds of the imagination.
Science Fiction/0-679-75297-8
NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR
Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in war. His wife is addicted to a drug that whips its users back and forth across time, and his newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth, but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of policy—and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make him better or to keep him poised just this side of death.
Science Fiction/0-679-74220-4
RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH
It is the late 1960s, and a paranoid incompetent has schemed his way into the White House and convulsed America in a war against imaginary internal enemies. A science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick is trying to keep from becoming one of that war’s casualties. And his best friend, a record executive named Nicholas Brady, is receiving transmissions from an extraterrestrial entity that may also be God—one that apparently wants him to overthrow the President.
Science Fiction/0-679-78137-4
THE SIMULACRA
In The Simulacra, the whole government is a fraud and the President is an android. Ian Duncan is desperately in love with the first lady, Nicole Thibideaux, whom he has never met. Richard Kongrosian refuses to see anyone because he is convinced that his body odor is lethal. And the fascistic Bertold Goltz is trying to overturn the government. In classic fashion, Philip K. Dick shows there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.
Science Fiction/0-375-71926-1
TIME OUT OF JOINT
The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world’s long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise. And once he pursues his suspicions, he starts to see how he is the center of a universe gone terribly awry.
Science Fiction/0-375-71927-X
ALSO AVAILABLE:
Confessions of a Crap Artist, 0-679-74114-3
The Divine Invasion, 0-679-73445-7
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 0-679-74066-X
The Game-Players of Titan, 0-679-74065-1
The Man in the High Castle, 0-679-74067-8
Martian Time-Slip, 0-679-76167-5
A Maze of Death, 0-679-75298-6
A Scanner Darkly, 0-679-73665-4
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 0-679-74787-7
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 0-679-73666-2
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, 0-679-73444-9
Ubik, 0-679-73664-6
Valis, 0-679-73446-5
We Can Build You, 0-679-75296-X
The World Jones Made, 0-679-74219-0
VINTAGE BOOKS
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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2002
Copyright © 1964 by Ace Books, Inc.,
copyright renewed 1992 by Laura Coelho,
Christopher Dick, and Isa Hackett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatin Data
Dick, Philip K.
Clans of the Alphane moon / Philip K. Dick.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49451-1
1. Psychiatric hospital patients—Fiction.
2. Psychiatric hospitals—Fiction. 3. Mentally ill—Fiction.
4. Satellites—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.I3 C5 2002
813′.54—dc21
2001056757
/> www.vintagebooks.com
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Copyright
Clans of the Alphane Moon Page 22