Vintage PKD

by Philip K. Dick

  KIRK ( frantically): Spock, the Enterprise is about to blow up!

  SPOCK (calmly): Negative, Captain; it’s merely a faulty fuse.

  Spock is always right, even when he’s wrong. It’s the tone of voice, the supernatural reasonability; this is not a man like us; this is a god. God talks this way; every one of us senses it instinctively. That’s why they have Leonard Nimoy narrating pseudo-science TV programs. Nimoy can make anything sound plausible. They can be in search of a lost button or the elephants’ graveyard, and Nimoy will calm our doubts and fears. I would like him as a psychotherapist; I would rush in frantically, filled with my usual hysterical fears, and he would banish them.

  PHIL (hysterically): Leonard, the sky is falling!

  NIMOY (calmly): Negative, Phil; it’s merely a faulty fuse.

  And I’d feel okay and my blood pressure would drop and I could resume work on the novel I’m three years behind on vis-à-vis my deadline.

  In reading my stories, you should bear in mind that most were written when science fiction was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt towards science-fiction writers. It made our lives wretched. Even in Berkeley—or especially in Berkeley—people would say, “But are you writing anything serious?” We made no money; few publishers published science fiction (Ace Books was the only regular book publisher of it); and really cruel abuse was inflicted on us. To select science-fiction writing as a career was an act of self-destruction; in fact, most writers, let alone other people, could not even conceive of someone considering it. The only non-science-fiction writer who ever treated me with courtesy was Herbert Gold, whom I met at a literary party in San Francisco. He autographed a file card to me this way: “To a colleague, Philip K. Dick.” I kept the card until the ink faded and was gone, and I still feel grateful to him for his charity. (Yes, that was what it was, then, to treat a science-fiction writer with courtesy.) To get hold of a copy of my first published novel, Solar Lottery, I had to special-order it from the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco, which specialized in the outré. So in my head I have to collate the experience in 1977 of the mayor of Metz shaking hands with me at an official city function, and the ordeal of the fifties when Kleo and I lived on ninety dollars a month, when we could not even pay the fine on an overdue library book and when I wanted to read a magazine I had to go to the library because I could not afford to buy it, when we were literally living on dog food. But I think you should know this—specifically, in case you are, say, in your twenties and rather poor and perhaps becoming filled with despair, whether you are a science-fiction writer or not, whatever you want to make of your life. There can be a lot of fear, and often it is justified fear. People do starve in America. My financial ordeal did not end in the fifties; as late as the mid-seventies I still could not pay my rent, nor afford to take Christopher to the doctor, nor own a car, nor have a phone. In the month that Christopher and his mother left me I earned nine dollars, and that was just three years ago. Only the kindness of my agent, Scott Meredith, in loaning me money when I was broke got me through. In 1971 I actually had to beg friends for food. Now look; I don’t want sympathy; what I am trying to do is tell you that your crisis, your ordeal, assuming you have one, is not something that is going to be endless, and I want you to know that you will probably survive it through your courage and wits and sheer drive to live. I have seen uneducated street girls survive horrors that beggar description. I have seen the faces of men whose brains had been burned out by drugs, men who still could think enough to be able to realize what happened to them; I watched their clumsy attempts to weather that which cannot be weathered. As in Heine’s poem “Atlas,” this line: “I carry that which can’t be carried.” And the next line is, “And in my body my heart would like to break!” But this is not the sole constituent of life, and it is not the sole theme in fiction, mine or anyone else’s, except perhaps for the nihilist French existentialists. Kabir, the sixteenth-century Sufi poet, wrote, “If you have not lived through something, it is not true.” So live through it; I mean, go all the way to the end. Only then can it be understood, not along the way.

  If I had to come forth with an analysis of the anger that lies inside me, which expresses itself in so many sublimations, I would guess that probably what arouses my indignation is seeing the meaningless. That which is disorder, the force of entropy—there is no redemptive value of something that can’t be understood, as far as I am concerned. My writing, in toto, is an attempt on my part to take my life and everything I’ve seen and done, and fashion it into a work which makes sense. I’m not sure I’ve been successful. First, I cannot falsify what I have seen. I see disorder and sorrow, and so I have to write about it; but I’ve seen bravery and humor, and so I put that in, too. But what does it all add up to? What is the vast overview which is going to impart sense into the entirety?

  What helps for me—if help comes at all—is to find the mustard seed of the funny at the core of the horrible and futile. I’ve been researching ponderous and solemn theological matters for five years now, for my novel-in-progress, and much of the Wisdom of the World has passed from the printed page and into my brain, there to be processed and secreted in the form of more words: words in, words out, and a brain in the middle wearily trying to determine the meaning of it all. Anyhow, the other night I started on the article on Indian Philosophy in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an eight-volume learned reference set which I esteem. The time was four A.M.; I was exhausted—I have been working endlessly like this on this novel, doing this kind of research. And there, at the heart of this solemn article, was this:

  The Buddhist idealists used various arguments to show that perception does not yield knowledge of external objects distinct from the percipient . . . The external world supposedly consists of a number of different objects, but they can be known as different only because there are different sorts of experiences “of ” them. Yet if the experiences are thus distinguishable, there is no need to hold the superfluous hypothesis of external objects.

  In other words, by applying Ockham’s razor to the basic epistemological question of “What is reality?” the Buddhist idealists reach the conclusion that belief in an external world is a “superfluous hypothesis”—i.e., it violates the Principle of Parsimony— which is the principle underlying all Western science. Thus the external world is abolished, and we can go about more important business—whatever that might be.

  That night I went to bed laughing. I laughed for an hour. I am still laughing. Push philosophy and theology to their ultimate (and Buddhist idealism probably is the ultimate of both) and what do you wind up with? Nothing. Nothing exists (they also proved that the self doesn’t exist, either). As I said earlier, there is only one way out: seeing it all as ultimately funny. Kabir, whom I quoted, saw dancing and joy and love as ways out, too; and he wrote about the sound of “the anklets on the feet of an insect as it walks.” I would like to hear that sound; perhaps if I could, my anger and fear, and my high blood pressure, would go away.

  I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON

  After takeoff the ship routinely monitored the condition of the sixty people sleeping in its cryonic tanks. One malfunction showed, that of person nine. His EEG revealed brain activity.

  Shit, the ship said to itself.

  Complex homeostatic devices locked into circuit feed, and the ship contacted person nine.

  “You are slightly awake,” the ship said, utilizing the psychotronic route; there was no point in rousing person nine to full consciousness—after all, the flight would last a decade.

  Virtually unconscious, but unfortunately still able to think, person nine thought, Someone is addressing me. He said, “Where am I located? I don’t see anything.”

  “You’re in faulty cryonic suspension.”

  He said, “Then I shouldn’t be able to hear you.”

  “ ‘Faulty,’ I said. That’s the point; you can hear me. Do you know your name?”r />
  “Victor Kemmings. Bring me out of this.”

  “We are in flight.”

  “Then put me under.”

  “Just a moment.” The ship examined the cryonic mechanisms; it scanned and surveyed and then it said, “I will try.”

  Time passed. Victor Kemmings, unable to see anything, unaware of his body, found himself still conscious. “Lower my temperature,” he said. He could not hear his voice; perhaps he only imagined he spoke. Colors floated toward him and then rushed at him. He liked the colors; they reminded him of a child’s paint box, the semianimated kind, an artificial life form. He had used them in school, two hundred years ago.

  “I can’t put you under,” the voice of the ship sounded inside Kemmings’s head. “The malfunction is too elaborate; I can’t correct it and I can’t repair it. You will be conscious for ten years.”

  The semianimated colors rushed toward him, but now they possessed a sinister quality, supplied to them by his own fear. “Oh my God,” he said. Ten years! The colors darkened.

  As Victor Kemmings lay paralyzed, surrounded by dismal flickerings of light, the ship explained to him its strategy. This strategy did not represent a decision on its part; the ship had been programmed to seek this solution in case of a malfunction of this sort.

  “What I will do,” the voice of the ship came to him, “is feed you sensory stimulation. The peril to you is sensory deprivation. If you are conscious for ten years without sensory data, your mind will deteriorate. When we reach the LR4 System, you will be a vegetable.”

  “Well, what do you intend to feed me?” Kemmings said in panic. “What do you have in your information storage banks? All the video soap operas of the last century? Wake me up and I’ll walk around.”

  “There is no air in me,” the ship said. “Nothing for you to eat. No one to talk to, since everyone else is under.”

  Kemmings said, “I can talk to you. We can play chess.”

  “Not for ten years. Listen to me; I say, I have no food and no air. You must remain as you are . . . a bad compromise, but one forced on us. You are talking to me now. I have no particular information stored. Here is policy in these situations: I will feed you your own buried memories, emphasizing the pleasant ones. You possess two hundred and six years of memories and most of them have sunk down into your unconscious. This is a splendid source of sensory data for you to receive. Be of good cheer. This situation, which you are in, is not unique. It has never happened within my domain before, but I am programmed to deal with it. Relax and trust me. I will see that you are provided with a world.”

  “They should have warned me,” Kemmings said, “before I agreed to emigrate.”

  “Relax,” the ship said.

  He relaxed, but he was terribly frightened. Theoretically, he should have gone under, into the successful cryonic suspension, then awakened a moment later at his star of destination; or rather the planet, the colony planet, of that star. Everyone else aboard the ship lay in an unknowing state—he was the exception, as if bad karma had attacked him for obscure reasons. Worst of all, he had to depend totally on the goodwill of the ship. Suppose it elected to feed him monsters? The ship could terrorize him for ten years— ten objective years and undoubtedly more from a subjective standpoint. He was, in effect, totally in the ship’s power. Did interstellar ships enjoy such a situation? He knew little about interstellar ships; his field was microbiology. Let me think, he said to himself. My first wife, Martine; the lovely little French girl who wore jeans and a red shirt open at the waist and cooked delicious crepes.

  “I hear,” the ship said. “So be it.”

  The rushing colors resolved themselves into coherent, stable shapes. A building: a little old yellow wooden house that he had owned when he was nineteen years old, in Wyoming. “Wait,” he said in panic. “The foundation was bad; it was on a mud sill. And the roof leaked.” But he saw the kitchen, with the table that he had built himself. And he felt glad.

  “You will not know, after a little while,” the ship said, “that I am feeding you your own buried memories.”

  “I haven’t thought of that house in a century,” he said wonderingly; entranced, he made out his old electric drip coffeepot with the box of paper filters beside it. This is the house where Martine and I lived, he realized. “Martine!” he said aloud.

  “I’m on the phone,” Martine said from the living room.

  The ship said, “I will cut in only when there is an emergency. I will be monitoring you, however, to be sure you are in a satisfactory state. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Turn down the rear right burner on the stove,” Martine called. He could hear her and yet not see her. He made his way from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room. At the VF, Martine stood in rapt conversation with her brother; she wore shorts and she was barefoot. Through the front windows of the living room he could see the street; a commercial vehicle was trying to park, without success.

  It’s a warm day, he thought. I should turn on the air conditioner.

  He seated himself on the old sofa as Martine continued her VF conversation, and he found himself gazing at his most cherished possession, a framed poster on the wall above Martine: Gilbert Shelton’s “Fat Freddy Says” drawing in which Freddy Freak sits with his cat on his lap, and Fat Freddy is trying to say “Speed kills,” but he is so wired on speed—he holds in his hand every kind of amphetamine tablet, pill, spansule, and capsule that exists—that he can’t say it, and the cat is gritting his teeth and wincing in a mixture of dismay and disgust. The poster is signed by Gilbert Shelton himself; Kemmings’s best friend Ray Torrance gave it to him and Martine as a wedding present. It is worth thousands. It was signed by the artist back in the 1980s. Long before either Victor Kemmings or Martine lived.

  If we ever run out of money, Kemmings thought to himself, we could sell the poster. It was not a poster; it was the poster. Martine adored it. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers—from the golden age of a long-ago society. No wonder he loved Martine so; she herself loved back, loved the beauties of the world, and treasured and cherished them as she treasured and cherished him; it was a protective love that nourished but did not stifle. It had been her idea to frame the poster; he would have tacked it up on the wall, so stupid was he.

  “Hi,” Martine said, off the VF now. “What are you thinking?”

  “Just that you keep alive what you love,” he said.

  “I think that’s what you’re supposed to do,” Martine said. “Are you ready for dinner? Open some red wine, a cabernet.”

  “Will an ’07 do?” he said, standing up; he felt, then, like taking hold of his wife and hugging her.

  “Either an ’07 or a ’12.” She trotted past him, through the dining room and into the kitchen.

  Going down into the cellar, he began to search among the bottles, which, of course, lay flat. Musty air and dampness; he liked the smell of the cellar, but then he noticed the redwood planks lying half-buried in the dirt and he thought, I know I’ve got to get a concrete slab poured. He forgot about the wine and went over to the far corner, where the dirt was piled highest; bending down, he poked a board . . . he poked with a trowel and then he thought, Where did I get this trowel? I didn’t have it a minute ago. The board crumbled against the trowel. This whole house is collapsing, he realized. Christ sake. I better tell Martine.

  Going back upstairs, the wine forgotten, he started to say to her that the foundations of the house were dangerously decayed, but Martine was nowhere in sight. And nothing cooked on the stove— no pots, no pans. Amazed, he put his hands on the stove and found it cold. Wasn’t she just cooking? he asked himself.

  “Martine!” he said loudly.

  No response. Except for himself, the house was empty. Empty, he thought, and collapsing. Oh my God. He seated himself at the kitchen table and felt the chair give slightly under him; it did not give much, but he felt it; he felt the sagging.

  I’m afraid, he thought. Where did she go?


  He returned to the living room. Maybe she went next door to borrow some spices or butter or something, he reasoned. Nonetheless, panic now filled him.

  He looked at the poster. It was unframed. And the edges had been torn.

  I know she framed it, he thought; he ran across the room to it, to examine it closely. Faded . . . the artist’s signature had faded; he could scarcely make it out. She insisted on framing it and under glare-free, reflection-free glass. But it isn’t framed and it’s torn! The most precious thing we own!

  Suddenly he found himself crying. It amazed him, his tears. Martine is gone; the poster is deteriorated; the house is crumbling away; nothing is cooking on the stove. This is terrible, he thought. And I don’t understand it.

  The ship understood it. The ship had been carefully monitoring Victor Kemmings’s brain wave patterns, and the ship knew that something had gone wrong. The wave-forms showed agitation and pain. I must get him out of this feed-circuit or I will kill him, the ship decided. Where does the flaw lie? it asked itself. Worry dormant in the man; underlying anxieties. Perhaps if I intensify the signal. I will use the same source, but amp up the charge. What has happened is that massive subliminal insecurities have taken possession of him; the fault is not mine, but lies, instead, in his psychological makeup.

  I will try an earlier period in his life, the ship decided. Before the neurotic anxieties got laid down.

  In the backyard, Victor scrutinized a bee that had gotten itself trapped in a spider’s web. The spider wound up the bee with great care. That’s wrong, Victor thought. I’ll let the bee loose. Reaching up, he took hold of the encapsulated bee, drew it from the web, and, scrutinizing it carefully, began to unwrap it.

  The bee stung him; it felt like a little patch of flame.

  Why did it sting me? he wondered. I was letting it go.

  He went indoors to his mother and told her, but she did not listen; she was watching television. His finger hurt where the bee had stung it, but, more important, he did not understand why the bee would attack its rescuer. I won’t do that again, he said to himself.