Franco walked toward the wub. The wub looked up slowly. It swallowed.
“A very foolish thing,” it said. “I am sorry that you want to do it. There was a parable that your Savior related—”
It stopped, staring at the gun.
“Can you look me in the eye and do it?” the wub said. “Can you do that?”
The Captain gazed down. “I can look you in the eye,” he said. “Back on the farm we had hogs, dirty razor-back hogs. I can do it.”
Staring down at the wub, into the gleaming, moist eyes, he pressed the trigger.
The taste was excellent.
They sat glumly around the table, some of them hardly eating at all. The only one who seemed to be enjoying himself was Captain Franco.
“More?” he said, looking around. “More? And some wine, perhaps.”
“Not me,” French said. “I think I’ll go back to the chart room.”
“Me, too.” Jones stood up, pushing his chair back. “I’ll see you later.”
The Captain watched them go. Some of the others excused themselves.
“What do you suppose the matter is?” the Captain said. He turned to Peterson. Peterson sat staring down at his plate, at the potatoes, the green peas, and at the thick slab of tender, warm meat.
He opened his mouth. No sound came.
The Captain put his hand on Peterson’s shoulder.
“It is only organic matter, now,” he said. “The life essence is gone.” He ate, spooning up the gravy with some bread. “I, myself, love to eat. It is one of the greatest things that a living creature can enjoy. Eating, resting, meditation, discussing things.”
Peterson nodded. Two more men got up and went out. The Captain drank some water and sighed.
“Well,” he said. “I must say that this was a very enjoyable meal. All the reports I had heard were quite true—the taste of wub. Very fine. But I was prevented from enjoying this pleasure in times past.”
He dabbed at his lips with his napkin and leaned back in his chair. Peterson stared dejectedly at the table.
The Captain watched him intently. He leaned over.
“Come, come,” he said. “Cheer up! Let’s discuss things.”
He smiled.
“As I was saying before I was interrupted, the role of Odysseus in the myths—”
Peterson jerked up, staring.
“To go on,” the Captain said. “Odysseus, as I understand him—”
Planet Stories, July 1952. Dick recalled: “My first published story, in the most lurid of all pulp magazines at the time, Planet Stories. As I carried four copies into the record store where I worked, a customer gazed at me and them, with dismay, and said: ‘Phil, you read that kind of stuff?’ I had to admit I not only read it, I wrote it.” On another occasion Dick commented: “The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now.”
35
The Eyes Have It
PHILIP K. DICK
It was quite by accident I discovered this incredible invasion of Earth by life-forms from another planet. As yet, I haven’t done anything about it; I can’t think of anything to do. I wrote to the Government, and they sent back a pamphlet on the repair and maintenance of frame houses. Anyhow, the whole thing is known; I’m not the first to discover it. Maybe it’s even under control.
I was sitting in my easy-chair, idly turning the pages of a paperbacked book someone had left on the bus, when I came across the reference that first put me on the trail. For a moment I didn’t respond. It took some time for the full import to sink in. After I’d comprehended, it seemed odd I hadn’t noticed it right away.
The reference was clearly to a nonhuman species of incredible properties, not indigenous to Earth. A species, I hasten to point out, customarily masquerading as ordinary human beings. Their disguise, however, became transparent in the face of the following observations by the author. It was at once obvious the author knew everything. Knew everything—and was taking it in his stride. The line (and I tremble remembering it even now) read:
. . . his eyes slowly roved about the room.
Vague chills assailed me. I tried to picture the eyes. Did they roll like dimes? The passage indicated not; they seemed to move through the air, not over the surface. Rather rapidly, apparently. No one in the story was surprised. That’s what tipped me off. No sign of amazement at such an outrageous thing. Later the matter was amplified.
. . . his eyes moved from person to person.
There it was in a nutshell. The eyes had clearly come apart from the rest of him and were on their own. My heart pounded and my breath choked in my windpipe. I had stumbled on an accidental mention of a totally unfamiliar race. Obviously non-Terrestrial. Yet, to the characters in the book, it was perfectly natural—which suggested they belonged to the same species.
And the author? A slow suspicion burned in my mind. The author was taking it rather too easily in his stride. Evidently, he felt this was quite a usual thing. He made absolutely no attempt to conceal this knowledge. The story continued:
. . . presently his eyes fastened on Julia.
Julia, being a lady, had at least the breeding to feel indignant. She is described as blushing and knitting her brows angrily. At this, I sighed with relief. They weren’t all non-Terrestrials. The narrative continues:
. . . slowly, calmly, his eyes examined every inch of her.
Great Scott! But here the girl turned and stomped off and the matter ended. I lay back in my chair gasping with horror. My wife and family regarded me in wonder.
“What’s wrong, dear?” my wife asked.
I couldn’t tell her. Knowledge like this was too much for the ordinary run-of-the-mill person. I had to keep it to myself. “Nothing,” I gasped. I leaped up, snatched the book, and hurried out of the room.
In the garage, I continued reading. There was more. Trembling, I read the next revealing passage:
. . . he put his arm around Julia. Presently she asked him if he would remove his arm. He immediately did so, with a smile.
It’s not said what was done with the arm after the fellow had removed it. Maybe it was left standing upright in the corner. Maybe it was thrown away. I don’t care. In any case, the full meaning was there, staring me right in the face.
Here was a race of creatures capable of removing portions of their anatomy at will. Eyes, arms—and maybe more. Without batting an eyelash. My knowledge of biology came in handy, at this point. Obviously they were simple beings, unicellular, some sort of primitive single-celled things. Beings no more developed than starfish. Starfish can do the same thing, you know.
I read on. And came to this incredible revelation, tossed off coolly by the author without the faintest tremor:
. . . outside the movie theater we split up. Part of us went inside, part over to the cafe for dinner.
Binary fission, obviously. Splitting in half and forming two entities. Probably each lower half went to the cafe, it being farther, and the upper halves to the movies. I read on, hands shaking. I had really stumbled onto something here. My mind reeled as I made out this passage:
. . . I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it. Poor Bibney has lost his head again.
Which was followed by:
. . . and Bob says he has utterly no guts.
Yet Bibney got around as well as the next person. The next person, however, was just as strange. He was soon described as:
. . . totally lacking in brains.
There was no doubt of the thing in the next passage. Julia, whom I had thought to be the one normal person, reveals herself as also being an alien life form, similar to the rest:
. . . quite deliberately, Julia had given her heart to the young man.
It didn’t relate what the final disposition of the organ was, but I didn’t really care. It was evident Julia had gone right on living in her usual manner, like all the others in the book. Without heart, arms, eyes, brains, viscera, dividing up in two when the occasion demanded. Without a qualm.
I sickened. The rascal now had her hand, as well as her heart. I shudder to think what he’s done with them, by this time.
. . . he took her arm.
Not content to wait, he had to start dismantling her on his own. Flushing crimson, I slammed the book shut and leaped to my feet. But not in time to escape one last reference to those carefree bits of anatomy whose travels had originally thrown me on the track:
. . . her eyes followed him all the way down the road and across the meadow.
I rushed from the garage and back inside the warm house, as if the accursed things were following me. My wife and children were playing Monopoly in the kitchen. I joined them and played with frantic fervor, brow feverish, teeth chattering.
I had had enough of the thing. I want to hear no more about it. Let them come on. Let them invade Earth. I don’t want to get mixed up in it.
I have absolutely no stomach for it.
Science Fiction Stories, #1, 1953.
Skin-Jobs
PAUL ATKINSON is a Lecturer in the School of Applied Media and Social Sciences at Monash University in Australia. His main area of research is the intersection between time and visual culture. He only has a theoretical interest in time travel, for the thought of traveling into the future, only to find that it is pretty much the same as today, horrifies him.
ROSS BARHAM spends his days as Head of Philosophy at Melbourne High School, and his nights as a Doctorial Candidate at the University of Melbourne. Somewhere in the cracks of space-time he also manifests as a new father, an Aikidoka, and a hobby farmer.
ERIC BECK is a freelance editor and writer who lives on a farm that is home to goats and sheep, none of whom are electric but whose doeeyed stares do, like the story of the wub, make him occasionally question his carnivorous eating practices.
ANDREW M. BUTLER remembers teaching film and cultural studies, but is convinced that that was his nephew’s memories. Books on Philip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, Cyberpunk, Postmodernism, and Film Studies have been published with his name on them, but it was the voices that told him what to write. He is currently writing about his version of science fiction of the 1970s. He always reaches for the light switch on the wrong side of the doorway.
JESSE W. BUTLER is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas, where he splits his brain between philosophical reflection on self-knowledge and trying to live a good life with his wife and two children. It isn’t always easy to do both, but he’s managed to avoid the need for holo-scanners so far. If anyone knows where to find a good cephalochromoscope, though, please let him know.
GERARD CASEY believes that work is the curse of the thinking class. He watches far too many noir movies and listens to ridiculous amounts of mainly classical music when not distracted by the demands of his day job teaching and writing about political philosophy at University College Dublin.
PHILIP KINDRED DICK was born in Chicago in 1928. His twin sister died six weeks after birth, and Dick later blamed their mother for the death. Dick’s parents divorced, and Dick grew up with his mother in Berkeley. He read his first science-fiction story in 1940. His first published story, “Beyond Lies the Wub,” appeared in 1953. He wrote fortyfour published novels and over 120 short stories. His novel The Man in the High Castle received the Hugo Award. Dick had a fanatical following among hard-core sci-fi addicts, but only achieved the wider fame which rescued him from poverty toward the end of his life. More major Hollywood movies have been made of Dick’s work than of any other writer except Stephen King, but Dick only lived to see the first of these, Blade Runner. His novel Ubik has been listed as one of the hundred best English-language novels published since the 1920s. In early 1974 Dick experienced powerful visions which influenced his later novels such as VALIS and The Divine Invasion, and which he explored in philosophical meditations, now published as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Dick was married five times. He died in 1982.
Built from cloned organs, DAN DINELLO resembles a Professor in the Film and Video Department of Columbia College Chicago where he was recently named its Distinguished Faculty Scholar. Though confused by his memory implants, he wrote the book Technophobia!, directed episodes of Strangers with Candy, and runs the website shockproductions.com.
DON FALLIS is Associate Professor of Information Resources and Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He has written several articles on lying and deception, including “What Is Lying?,” Journal of Philosophy (2009) and “The Most Terrific Liar You Ever Saw in Your Life” in The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy (forthcoming). Like PKD, he spent many years of his life in Orange County. And he can confirm that it’s easy to lose track of what is real and what is not, especially if you live near Disneyland or in one of the “off-world colonies” (aka “planned communities”) in South County.
RICHARD FEIST is Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, Saint Paul University. During a meeting with the Rector’s agents, where everyone wore a scramble suit, Dr. Feist was told to monitor the philosophy professors and to concentrate on the activities of Dr. Feist. To this day Skype makes Dr. Feist nervous; he remains unsure as to which video image he should speak. Despite his paranoia, Dr. Feist insists that he has published a number of books and articles on ethics and metaphysics. But he denies passing on his phobias to students.
MICHELLE GALLAGHER is an early modern scholar who laments the fact that science fiction is not recognized as a subfield of philosophy. She’s convinced that in some alternate universe Philip K. Dick is celebrated as the visionary founder of a school of neo-skepticism which dominates philosophical literature. In anticipation of the day when travel to that universe is possible, she has read every PKD story in print at least three times.
PATRICK GRACE is a lawyer in the Washington DC Metro area (who isn’t?), has done legal commentary on talk radio (ditto), and teaches Postmodern Jurisprudence with his co-author George Teschner. He is hard at work developing innovative strategies to corner a future market of new clientele—androids who have been charged with DUI.
RONALD S. GREEN’s true name may not be spoken. After creating and entering the amnesia labyrinth in which we all currently wander, his children at the University of Wisconsin amusingly awarded Him a PhD in Buddhist Studies. He encodes pink light transmissions at Coastal Carolina University, awaiting the student who will remember.
G.C. GODDU is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Richmond where he specializes in metaphysics and logic. In between dreaming up new ways to make time-travel stories consistent, he tries to determine if any of his students are replicants and to convince them that he is not an alien imposter.
BENJAMIN HUFF is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Randolph-Macon College. His research and teaching interests include virtue ethics, Chinese philosophy, philosophy of religion, and free will. He doesn’t remember ever going to Mars, but has spent a lot of nights camping in the deserts of Utah and Saudi Arabia, written patent applications for a space startup company, and applied for a pioneer spot in the Virgin Galactic/Google colonization plan (still waiting to hear back on that one!).
PAUL LIVINGSTON lives in the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, and teaches and writes on the nature of mind, language, and reality. He’s the author of three books: Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness (2004), Philosophy and the Vision of Language (2008), and the forthcoming Politics of Logic (2011). In their spare time, electric sheep dream of him.
HEATH MASSEY is an amazingly lifelike construct programmed to function as a teaching machine. As an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Beloit College, he offers a convincing illusion of enthusiasm and genuine wonder. His students only suspect that he is a mechanical artifice when he slips a gear and repeats the same phase of his cycle until a technician is called in to perform repairs. He is the author of The Origin of Time: Heidegger and Bergson and co-translator of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Institu
tion and Passivity. Recently he has been making the most of his time with his newborn son, Theo.
MATTHEW MCCALL is currently a graduate student in Philosophy at Ohio State University, where he enjoys laboring over the thoughts of Early Modern philosophers. He’s undecided on whether or not he is part of a blob. He would like it to be true, though, so that he can necessarily overcome and understand the strange behavior of his cat, Phil 2420 (whose namesake is, of course, one amazing science fiction writer).
LOUIS MELANÇON has lost several oxfords trying to pinpoint the exact moment the Principle of Sufficient Irritation occurs. To date he has only made a mess of the oven (the most convenient source of heat), confused the garbage man over the state of old footwear and slightly miffed his wife (not quite sufficient irritation). Louis is a US Army officer with combat arms and intelligence experiences ranging from the tactical to strategic levels. He holds master’s degrees from the Joint Military Intelligence College (now National Defense Intelligence College) as well as King’s College, London and has been awarded the Bronze Star Medal. He has been published in Military Review and contributed to Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?, Anime and Philosophy: Wide Eyed Wonder, and Dune and Philosophy: Weirding Way of the Mentat.
ETHAN MILLS is a sci-fi nerd who happens to be a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of New Mexico where he studies epistemology and Indian philosophy and teaches a variety of classes. He lives with his wife, Beth, and cat, Elsie. He previously contributed to Stephen Colbert and Philiosophy: I Am Philosophy (And So Can You!). The idea for his chapter in this volume was caused by showing Minority Report to his Philosophy 101 students. He wonders if his dissertation on skepticism in ancient India would be better if he were replaced by a skeptical android . . . unless of course he already is that android.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 36