The Man in the High Castle

by Philip K. Dick

  “Not have bowl rat’s-nest soup? Or maybe goat brains fried in olive oil?” A couple of the truck drivers, turning on their stools, grinned along with the gag, too. And in addition they took pleasure in noticing how attractive she was. Even lacking the fry cook’s kidding, she would have found the truck drivers scrutinizing her. The months of active judo had given her unusual muscle tone; she knew how well she held herself and what it did for her figure.

  It all has to do with the shoulder muscles, she thought as she met their gaze. Dancers do it, too. It has nothing to do with size. Send your wives around to the gym and we’ll teach them. And you’ll be so much more content in life.

  “Stay away from her,” the fry cook warned the truck drivers with a wink. “She’ll throw you on your can.”

  She said to the younger of the truck drivers, “Where are you in from?”

  “Missouri,” both men said.

  “Are you from the United States?” she asked.

  “I am,” the older man said. “Philadelphia. Got three kids there. The oldest is eleven.”

  “Listen,” Juliana said. “Is it—easy to get a good job back there?”

  The younger truck driver said, “Sure. If you have the right color skin.” He himself had a dark brooding face with curly black hair. His expression had become set and bitter.

  “He’s a wop,” the older man said.

  “Well,” Juliana said, “didn’t Italy win the war?” She smiled at the young truck driver but he did not smile back. Instead, his somber eyes glowed even more intensely, and suddenly he turned away.

  I’m sorry, she thought. But she said nothing. I can’t save you or anybody else from being dark. She thought of Frank. I wonder if he’s dead yet. Said the wrong thing; spoke out of line. No, she thought. Somehow he likes Japs. Maybe he identifies with them because they’re ugly. She had always told Frank that he was ugly. Large pores. Big nose. Her own skin was finely knit, unusually so. Did he fall dead without me? A fink is a finch, a form of bird. And they say birds die.

  “Are you going back on the road tonight?” she asked the young Italian truck driver.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “If you’re not happy in the U.S. why don’t you cross over permanently?” she said. “I’ve been living in the Rockies for a long time and it isn’t so bad. I lived on the Coast, in San Francisco. They have the skin thing there, too.”

  Glancing briefly at her as he sat hunched at the counter, the young Italian said, “Lady, it’s bad enough to have to spend one day or one night in a town like this. Live here? Christ—if I could get any other kind of job, and not have to be on the road eating my meals in places like this—” Noticing that the fry cook was red, he ceased speaking and began to drink his coffee.

  The older truck driver said to him, “Joe, you’re a snob.”

  “You could live in Denver,” Juliana said. “It’s nicer up there.” I know you East Americans, she thought. You like the big time. Dreaming your big schemes. This is just the sticks to you, the Rockies. Nothing has happened here since before the war. Retired old people, farmers, the stupid, slow, poor . . . and all the smart boys have flocked east to New York, crossed the border legally or illegally. Because, she thought, that’s where the money is, the big industrial money. The expansion. German investment has done a lot . . . it didn’t take long for them to build the U.S. back up.

  The fry cook said in a hoarse angry voice, “Buddy, I’m not a Jew-lover, but I seen some of those Jew refugees fleeing your U.S. in ’49, and you can have your U.S. If there’s a lot of building back there and a lot of loose easy money it’s because they stole it from those Jews when they kicked them out of New York, that goddam Nazi Nuremberg Law. I lived in Boston when I was a kid, and I got no special use for Jews, but I never thought I’d see that Nazi racial law get passed in the U.S., even if we did lose the war. I’m surprised you aren’t in the U.S. Armed Forces, getting ready to invade some little South American republic as a front for the Germans, so they can push the Japanese back a little bit more—”

  Both truck drivers were on their feet, their faces stark. The older man picked up a ketchup bottle from the counter and held it upright by the neck. The fry cook without turning his back to the two men reached behind him until his fingers touched one of his meat forks. He brought the fork out and held it.

  Juliana said, “Denver is getting one of those heat-resistant runways so that Lufthansa rockets can land there.”

  None of the three men moved or spoke. The other customers sat silently.

  Finally the fry cook said, “One flew over around sundown.”

  “It wasn’t going to Denver,” Juliana said. “It was going west, to the Coast.”

  By degrees, the two truck drivers reseated themselves. The older man mumbled, “I always forget; they’re a little yellow out here.”

  The fry cook said, “No Japs killed Jews, in the war or after. No Japs built ovens.”

  “Too bad they didn’t,” the older truck driver said. But, picking up his coffee cup, he resumed eating.

  Yellow, Juliana thought. Yes, I suppose it’s true. We love the Japs out here.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked, speaking to the young truck driver, Joe. “Overnight.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I just got out of the truck to come in here. I don’t like this whole state. Maybe I’ll sleep in the truck.”

  “The Honey Bee Motel isn’t too bad,” the fry cook said.

  “Okay,” the young truck driver said. “Maybe I’ll stay there. If they don’t mind me being Italian.” He had a definite accent, although he tried to hide it.

  Watching him, Juliana thought, It’s idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped. I’m the same way; I couldn’t stay on the West Coast and eventually I won’t be able to stand it here. Weren’t the old-timers like that? But, she thought, now the frontier isn’t here; it’s the other planets.

  She thought: He and I could sign up for one of those colonizing rocket ships. But the Germans would disbar him because of his skin and me because of my dark hair. Those pale skinny Nordic SS fairies in those training castles in Bavaria. This guy—Joe whatever—hasn’t even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. Yes, that’s how they are. They’re not idealists like Joe and me; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that maiming those German psychiatrists do as a poor substitute for psychotherapy.

  Their trouble, she decided, is with sex; they did something foul with it back in the ’thirties, and it has gotten worse. Hitler started it with his—what was she? His sister? Aunt? Niece? And his family was inbred already; his mother and father were cousins. They’re all committing incest, going back to the original sin of lusting for their own mothers. That’s why they, those elite SS fairies, have that angelic simper, that blond babylike innocence; they’re saving themselves for Mama. Or for each other.

  And who is Mama for them? she wondered. The leader, Herr Bormann, who is supposed to be dying? Or—the Sick One.

  Old Adolf, supposed to be in a sanitarium somewhere, living out his life of senile paresis. Syphilis of the brain, dating back to his poor days as a bum in Vienna . . . long black coat, dirty underwear, flophouses.

  Obviously, it was God’s sardonic vengeance, right out of some silent movie. That awful man struck down by an internal filth, the historic plague for man’s wickedness.

  And the horrible part was that the present-day German Empire was a product of that brain. First a political party, then a nation, then half the world. And the Nazis themselves had diagnosed it, identified it; that quack herbal medicine man who had treated Hitler, that Dr. Morell who had dosed Hitler with a patent medicine called Dr. Koester’s Antigas Pills—he had originally been a specialist in venereal disease. The entire world knew it, and yet the Leader’s gabble was still
sacred, still Holy Writ. The views had infected a civilization by now, and, like evil spores, the blind blond Nazi queens were swishing out from Earth to the other planets, spreading the contamination.

  What you get for incest: madness, blindness, death.

  Brrr. She shook herself.

  “Charley,” she called to the fry cook. “You about ready with my order?” She felt absolutely alone; getting to her feet she walked to the counter and seated herself by the register.

  No one noticed her except the young Italian truck driver; his dark eyes were fixed on her. Joe, his name was. Joe what? she wondered.

  Closer to him, now, she saw that he was not as young as she had thought. Hard to tell; the intensity all around him disturbed her judgment. Continually he drew his hand through his hair, combing it back with crooked, rigid fingers. There’s something special about this man, she thought. He breathes—death. It upset her, and yet attracted her. Now the older truck driver inclined his head and whispered to him. Then they both scrutinized her, this time with a look that was not the ordinary male interest.

  “Miss,” the older one said. Both men were quite tense, now. “Do you know what this is?” He held up a flat white box, not too large.

  “Yes,” Juliana said. “Nylon stockings. Synthetic fiber made only by the great cartel in New York, I. G. Farben. Very rare and expensive.”

  “You got to hand it to the Germans; monopoly’s not a bad idea.” The older truck driver passed the box to his companion, who pushed it with his elbow along the counter toward her.

  “You have a car?” the young Italian asked her, sipping his coffee.

  From the kitchen, Charley appeared; he had her plate.

  “You could drive me to this place.” The wild, strong eyes still studied her, and she became increasingly nervous, and yet increasingly transfixed. “This motel, or wherever I’m supposed to stay tonight. Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a car. An old Studebaker.”

  The fry cook glanced from her to the young truck driver, and then set her plate before her at the counter.

  The loudspeaker at the end of the aisle said, “Achtung, meine Damen und Herren.” In his seat, Mr. Baynes started, opened his eyes. Through the window to his right he could see, far below, the brown and green of land, and then blue. The Pacific. The rocket, he realized, had begun its long slow descent.

  In German first, then Japanese, and at last English, the loudspeaker explained that no one was to smoke or to untie himself from his padded seat. The descent, it explained, would take eight minutes.

  The retro-jets started then, so suddenly and loudly, shaking the ship so violently, that a number of passengers gasped. Mr. Baynes smiled, and in the aisle seat across from him, another passenger, a younger man with close-cropped blond hair, also smiled.

  “Sie furchten dass—” the young man began, but Mr. Baynes said at once, in English:

  “I’m sorry; I don’t speak German.” The young German gazed at him questioningly, and so he said the same thing in German.

  “No German?” the young German said, amazed, in accented English.

  “I am Swedish,” Baynes said.

  “You embarked at Tempelhof.”

  “Yes, I was in Germany on business. My business carries me to a number of countries.”

  Clearly, the young German could not believe that anyone in the modern world, anyone who had international business dealings and rode—could afford to ride—on the latest Lufthansa rocket, could or would not speak German. To Baynes he said, “What line are you in, mein Herr?”

  “Plastics. Polyesters. Resins. Ersatz—industrial uses. Do you see? No consumers’ commodities.”

  “Sweden has a plastics industry?” Disbelief.

  “Yes, a very good one. If you will give me your name I will have a firm brochure mailed to you.” Mr. Baynes brought out his pen and pad.

  “Never mind. It would be wasted on me. I am an artist, not a commercial man. No offense. Possibly you have seen my work while on the Continent. Alex Lotze.” He waited.

  “Afraid I do not care for modern art,” Mr. Baynes said. “I like the old prewar cubists and abstractionists. I like a picture to mean something, not merely to represent the ideal.” He turned away.

  “But that’s the task of art,” Lotze said. “To advance the spirituality of man, over the sensual. Your abstract art represented a period of spiritual decadence, of spiritual chaos, due to the disintegration of society, the old plutocracy. The Jewish and capitalist millionaires, the international set that supported the decadent art. Those times are over; art has to go on—it can’t stay still.”

  Baynes nodded, gazing out the window.

  “Have you been to the Pacific before?” Lotze asked.

  “Several times.”

  “Not I. There is an exhibition in San Francisco of my work, arranged by Dr. Goebbels’ office, with the Japanese authorities. A cultural exchange to promote understanding and goodwill. We must ease tensions between the East and West, don’t you think? We must have more communication, and art can do that.”

  Baynes nodded. Below, beyond the ring of fire from the rocket, the city of San Francisco and the Bay could now be seen.

  “Where does one eat in San Francisco?” Lotze was saying. “I have reservations at the Palace Hotel, but my understanding is that one can find good food in the international section, such as the Chinatown.”

  “True,” Baynes said.

  “Are prices high in San Francisco? I am out of pocket for this trip. The Ministry is very frugal.” Lotze laughed.

  “Depends on the exchange rate you can manage. I presume you’re carrying Reichsbank drafts. I suggest you go to the Bank of Tokyo on Samson Street and exchange there.”

  “Danke sehr,” Lotze said. “I would have done it at the hotel.”

  The rocket had almost reached the ground. Now Baynes could see the airfield itself, hangars, parking lots, the autobahn from the city, the houses . . . very lovely view, he thought. Mountains and water, and a few bits of fog drifting in at the Golden Gate.

  “What is that enormous structure below?” Lotze asked. “It is half-finished, open at one side. A spaceport? The Nipponese have no spacecraft, I thought.”

  With a smile, Baynes said, “That’s Golden Poppy Stadium. The baseball park.”

  Lotze laughed. “Yes, they love baseball. Incredible. They have begun work on that great structure for a pastime, an idle timewasting sport—”

  Interrupting, Baynes said, “It is finished. That’s its permanent shape. Open on one side. A new architectural design. They are very proud of it.”

  “It looks,” Lotze said, gazing down, “as if it was designed by a Jew.”

  Baynes regarded the man for a time. He felt, strongly for a moment, the unbalanced quality, the psychotic streak, in the German mind. Did Lotze actually mean what he said? Was it a truly spontaneous remark?

  “I hope we will see one another later on in San Francisco,” Lotze said as the rocket touched the ground. “I will be at loose ends without a countryman to talk to.”

  “I’m not a countryman of yours,” Baynes said.

  “Oh, yes; that’s so. But racially, you’re quite close. For all intents and purposes the same.” Lotze began to stir around in his seat, getting ready to unfasten the elaborate belts.

  Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses . . . what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth . . . ?

  But, he thought, what does it mean, insane?
A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?

  He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, intuit it. But—they are purposely cruel . . . is that it? No. God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.

  Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they—these madmen—respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.

  And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. It is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate—confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

  What they do not comprehend is man’s helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn’t it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small . . . and you will escape the jealousy of the great.