Martian Time-Slip

by Philip Kindred Dick

  Jack said, “Kindly Dad.” And he thought acidly, I wonder if there’s an Aunt Mom in here somewhere. Aunt Mom’s delicious home-baked tall tales for little tots to imbibe. He felt nauseated.

  “You are familiar with that Teacher?”

  As a matter of fact he was not; David hadn’t mentioned it.

  From farther down the corridor he could hear the children still discussing life with the Whitlock; their voices reached him as he lay on his back, holding the soldering gun above his head and reaching into the works of the Angry Janitor to keep the tip in place.

  “Yes,” the Whitlock was saying in its never-ruffled, absolutely placid voice, “the raccoon is an amazing fellow, ol’ Jimmy Raccoon is. Many times I’ve seen him. And he’s quite a large fellow, by the way, with powerful, long arms which are really quite agile.”

  “I saw a raccoon once,” a child piped excitedly. “Mr. Whitlock, I saw one, and he was this close to me!”

  Jack thought, You saw a raccoon on Mars?

  The Whitlock chuckled. “No, Don, I’m afraid not. There aren’t any raccoons around here. You’d have to go all the way across over to old mother Earth to see one of those amazing fellows. But the point I’d like to make is this, boys and girls. You know how ol’ Jimmy Raccoon takes his food, and carries it oh so stealthily to the water, and washes it? And how we laughed at old’ Jimmy when the lump of sugar dissolved and he had nothing at all left to eat? Well, boys and girls, do you know that we’ve got Jimmy Raccoons right here in this very--“

  “I think I’m finished,” Jack said, withdrawing the gun. “Do you want to help me put this back together?”

  The master circuit said, “Are you in a rush?”

  “I don’t like that thing talking away in there,” Jack said. It made him tense and shaky, so much so that he could hardly do his work.

  A door rolled shut, down the corridor from them; the sound of the Whitlock’s voice ceased. “Is that better?” the master circuit asked.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. But his hands were still shaking. The master circuit noted that; he was aware of her precise scrutiny. He wondered what she made of it.

  The chamber in which Kindly Dad sat consisted of one end of a living room with fireplace, couch, coffee table, curtained picture window, and an easy chair in which Kindly Dad himself sat, a newspaper open on his lap. Several children sat attentively on the couch as Jack Bohlen and the master circuit entered; they were listening to the expostulations of the teaching machine and did not seem aware that anyone had come in. The master circuit dismissed the children, and then she started to leave, too.

  “I’m not sure what you want me to do,” Jack said.

  “Put it through its cycle. It seems to me that it repeats portions of the cycle or stays stuck; in any case, too much time is consumed. It should return to its starting stage in about three hours.” A door opened for the master circuit, and she was gone; he was alone with Kindly Dad and he was not glad of it.

  “Hi, Kindly Dad,” he said without enthusiasm. Setting down his tool case he began unscrewing the back plate of the Teacher.

  Kindly Dad said in a warm, sympathetic voice, “What’s your name, young fellow?”

  “My name,” Jack said, as he unfastened the plate and laid it down beside him, “is Jack Bohlen, and I’m a kindly dad, too, just like you, Kindly Dad. My boy is ten years old, Kindly Dad. So don’t call me young fellow, O.K.?” Again he was trembling hard, and sweating.

  “Ohh,” Kindly Dad said. “I see!”

  “What do you see?” Jack said, and discovered that he was almost shouting. “Look,” he said. “Go through your goddamn cycle, O.K.? If it makes it easier for you, go ahead and pretend I’m a little boy.” I just want to get this done and get out of here, he said to himself, with as little trouble as possible. He could feel the swelling, complicated emotions inside him. Three hours! he thought dismally.

  Kindly Dad said, “Little Jackie, it seems to me you’ve got a mighty heavy weight on your chest today. Am I right?”

  “Today and every day.” Jack clicked on his trouble-light and shone it up into the works of the Teacher. The mechanism seemed to be moving along its cycle properly so far.

  “Maybe I can help you,” Kindly Dad said. “Often it helps if an older, more experienced person can sort of listen in on your troubles, can sort of share them and make them lighter.”

  “O.K.,” Jack agreed, sitting back on his haunches. “I’ll play along; I’m stuck here for three hours anyhow. You want me to go all the way back to the beginning? To the episode back on Earth when I worked for Corona Corporation and had the occlusion?”

  “Start wherever you like,” Kindly Dad said graciously.

  “Do you know what schizophrenia is, Kindly Dad?”

  “I believe I’ve got a pretty good idea, Jackie,” Kindly Dad said.

  “Well, Kindly Dad, it’s the most mysterious malady in all medicine, that’s what it is. And it shows up in one out of every six people, which is a lot of people.”

  “Yes, that certainly is,” Kindly Dad said.

  “At one time,” Jack said, as he watched the machinery moving, “I had what they call situational polymorphous schizophrenia simplex. And, Kindly Dad, it was rough.”

  “I just bet it was,” Kindly Dad said.

  “Now, I know what you’re supposed to be for,” Jack said, “I know your purpose, Kindly Dad. We’re a long way from Home. Millions of miles away. Our connection with our civilization back Home is tenuous. And a lot of folks are mighty scared, Kindly Dad, because with each passing year that link gets weaker. So this Public School was set up to present a fixed milieu to the children born here, an Earthlike environment. For instance, this fireplace. We don’t have fireplaces here on Mars; we heat by small atomic furnaces. That picture window with all that glass--sandstorms would make it opaque. In fact there’s not one thing about you that’s derived from our actual world here. Do you know what a Bleekman is, Kindly Dad?”

  “Can’t say that I do, Little Jackie. What is a Bleekman?”

  “It’s one of the indigenous races of Mars. You do know you’re on Mars, don’t you?”

  Kindly Dad nodded.

  “Schizophrenia,” Jack said, “is one of the most pressing problems human civilization has ever faced. Frankly, Kindly Dad, I emigrated to Mars because of my schizophrenic episode when I was twenty-two and worked for Corona Corporation. I was cracking up. I had to move out of a complex urban environment and into a simpler one, a primitive frontier environment with more freedom. The pressure was too great for me; it was emigrate or go mad. That co-op building; can you imagine a thing going down level after level and up like a skyscraper, with enough people living there for them to have their own supermarket? I went mad standing in line at the bookstore. Everybody else, Kindly Dad, every single person in that bookstore and in that supermarket--all of them lived in the same building I did. It was a society, Kindly Dad, that one building. And today it’s small by comparison with some that have been built. What do you say to that?”

  “My, my,” Kindly Dad said, shaking his head.

  “Now here’s what I think,” Jack said. “I think this Public School and you teaching machines are going to rear another generation of schizophrenics, the descendants of people like me who are making a fine adaptation to this new planet. You’re going to split the psyches of these children because you’re teaching them to expect an environment which doesn’t exist for them. It doesn’t even exist back on Earth, now; it’s obsolete. Ask that Whitlock Teacher if intelligence doesn’t have to be practical to be true intelligence. I heard it say so, it has to be a tool for adaptation. Right, Kindly Dad?”

  “Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be.”

  “What you ought to be teaching,” Jack said, “is, how do we--“

  “Yes, Little Jackie,” Kindly Dad interrupted him, “it has to be.” And as it said this, a gear-tooth slipped in the glare of Jack’s trouble-light, and a phase of the cycle repeated itself.


  “You’re stuck,” Jack said. “Kindly Dad, you’ve got a worn gear-tooth.”

  “Yes, Little Jackie,” Kindly Dad said, “it has to be.”

  “You’re right,” Jack said. “It does have to be. Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life. Right, Kindly Dad?”

  “Yes, Little Jackie,” Kindly Dad said, “it has to be.”

  Shutting off the teaching machine at its power supply, Jack began to disassemble its main-shaft, preparatory to removing the worn gear.

  “So you found it,” the master circuit said, when Jack emerged a half-hour later, wiping his face with his sleeve.

  “Yes,” he said. He was exhausted. His wrist watch told him that it was only four o’clock; an hour more of work lay ahead of him.

  The master circuit accompanied him to the parking lot. “I am quite pleased with the promptness with which you attended to our needs,” she said. “I will telephone Mr. Yee and thank him.”

  He nodded and climbed into his ‘copter, too worn out even to say goodbye. Soon he was ascending; the duck egg which was the UN-operated Public School became small and far away below him. Its stifling presence vanished, and he could breathe again.

  Flipping on his transmitter he said, “Mr. Yee. This is Jack; I’m done at the school. What next?”

  After a pause Mr. Yee’s pragmatic voice answered. “Jack, Mr. Arnie Kott at Lewistown called us. He requested that we service an encoding dictation machine in which he places great trust. Since all others of our crew are tied up, I am sending you.”

  6

  Arnie Kott owned the only harpsichord on Mars. However, it was out of tune, and he could find no one to service it. No matter which way you cut it, there were no harpsichord tuners on Mars.

  For a month now he had been training his tame Bleekman to tackle this task; Bleekmen had a fine ear for music, and his particular one seemed to understand what Arnie wanted. Heliogabalus had been provided with a translation into the Bleeky dialect of a manual on keyboard instrument maintenance, and Arnie expected results any day now. But meanwhile the harpsichord was virtually unplayable.

  Back in Lewistown from his visit to Anne Esterhazy, Arnie Kott felt glum. The death of the black-market goodies man, Norbert Steiner, was a solid blow below the belt, and Arnie knew that he would have to make a move, probably a drastic and unprecedented one, to compensate for it. It was now three o’clock in the afternoon. What had he gotten out of his trip to New Israel? Only a piece of bad news. Anne, as usual, could not be talked into anything; she intended to go right on with her amateurish campaigns and causes, and if she were the laughingstock of Mars it did not matter to her.

  “Goddamn you, Heliogabalus,” Arnie said with fury, “you get that goddamn instrument playing right or I’m kicking you out of Lewistown. You can go back to eating beetles and roots in the desert with the rest of your kind.”

  Seated on the floor beside the harpsichord, the Bleekman winced, glanced up acutely at Arnie Kott, then lowered his eyes to the manual once more.

  “Nothing ever gets fixed around here,” Arnie grumbled.

  All Mars, he decided, was a sort of Humpty Dumpty; the original state had been one of perfection, and they and their property had all fallen from that state into rusty bits and useless debris. He felt sometimes as if he presided over an enormous junkyard. And then, once more, he thought about the Yee Company repair ‘copter which he had run into in the desert, and the zwepp piloting it. Independent bastards, Arnie said to himself. Ought to be taken down a peg or two. But they knew their worth. Vital to the economy of the planet; it was written on their faces. We bow to no man, et cetera. Arnie paced about the big front room of the Lewistown house which he maintained in addition to his apartment at Union Hall, hands in his pockets, scowling.

  Imagine: that guy talked back to me just like that, Arnie reflected. He must be a hell of a good repairman to be so confident.

  And Arnie also thought, I’m going to get that guy if it’s the last thing I do. Nobody talks to me like that and gets away with it.

  But of the two thoughts about the Yee Company uppity repairman, the former slowly began to dominate his mind, because he was a practical man and he knew that things had to be kept running. Codes of conduct had to come second. We’re not running a medieval society here, Arnie said to himself. If the guy’s really good he can say what he wants to me; all I care about is results.

  With that in mind, he telephoned the Yee Company at Bunchewood Park, and soon had Mr. Yee himself on the line.

  “Listen,” Arnie said, “I got a sick encoder over here, and if you fellows can get it working maybe I can use you on a permanent contract basis; you follow me?”

  There was no doubt of it; Mr. Yee followed him, all right. He saw the entire picture. “Our best man, sir. Right away. And I know we’ll give absolute satisfaction, any hour of the day or night.”

  “I want one particular man,” Arnie said, and he thereupon described the repairman he had met in the desert.

  “Young, dark-haired, slender,” Mr. Yee repeated. “Glasses, and with a nervous manner. That would be Mr. Jack Bohlen. Our finest.”

  “Let me tell you,” Arnie said, “that this Bohlen guy talked to me in a way I don’t let nobody talk to me, but after I thought it over I realized he was in the right, and when I see him I’m going to tell him that to his face.” However, in actuality Arnie Kott no longer could recall what the issue had been. “That guy Bohlen seems to have a good head on him,” he wound up. “Can he get over here today?”

  Without hesitation Mr. Yee promised service by five o’clock.

  “I appreciate that,” Arnie said. “And be sure and tell him that Arnie holds no grudges. Sure, I was taken aback at the time; but that’s all over. Tell him--“ He pondered. “Tell Bohlen he’s got absolutely nothing to worry about regarding me.” He rang off, then, and sat back with a feeling of grim, honest accomplishment.

  So the day after all wasn’t a total waste. And, too, he had gotten an interesting bit of information from Anne, while over at New Israel. He had brought up the topic of the rumored goings-on in the F.D.R. Mountains, and as usual Anne knew a few inside yarns emanating from Home, accounts no doubt garbled in the chain of oral tellings . . . yet the nugget of veracity was there. The UN back Home was in the process of staging one of its periodic coups. It was going to descend on the F.D.R. Mountains in another couple of weeks and lay claim to them as public domain land belonging to no one--which was palpably true. But why was it that the UN wanted a big hunk of worthless real estate? There, Anne’s tale got perplexing. One story noised about back at Geneva was that the UN intended to build an enormous supernational park, a sort of Garden of Eden, to lure emigrants out of Earth. Another had it that the UN engineers were going to make a vast final attack on the problem of beefing up the power sources on Mars; they were going to set up a huge hydrogen atomic energy power plant, unique in both size and scope. The water system would be revitalized. And, with adequate sources of power, heavy industry could at last move over to Mars, taking advantage of free land, light gravity, low taxation.

  And then another rumor had it that the UN was going to set up a military base in the F.D.R. Mountains to offset United States and Soviet plans along the same general lines.

  Whichever rumor was true, one fact stuck out: certain parcels of land in the F.D.R. range were going to be acutely valuable, pretty soon. The entire range was up for sale right now, in pieces varying from half an acre to a hundred thousand acres, and at a staggeringly low price. Once speculators got wind of the UN’s plans, this would change . . . no doubt the speculators were already beginning to act. To claim land on Mars they had to be on the spot; it could not be done from Home--that was the law. So one could expect the speculators to start coming over any time now, if Anne’s rumors were correct. It would be like the first year of colonization, when speculators were active everywhere.

  Seating himself at his out-of-tune harpsichord, Arnie opened
a book of Scarlatti sonatas and began to bang away at one of his favorites, a cross-hand one on which he had been practicing for months. It was strong, rhythmic, vigorous music, and he pounded the keys with delight, ignoring the distorted sound itself. Heliogabalus moved further off to study his manual; the sound hurt his ears.

  “I’ve got a long-playing record of this,” he said to Heliogabalus as he played. “So goddamn old and valuable that I don’t dare play it.”

  “What is a long-playing record?” the Bleekman asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand if I told you. Glenn Gould playing. It’s forty years old; my family passed it down to me. It was my mother’s. That guy could really hammer these crosshand sonatas out.” His own playing discouraged him, and he gave up. I could never be any good, he decided, even if this instrument were in peak condition like it was before I had it shipped here from Home.

  Seated on the bench but not playing, Arnie ruminated once more on the golden opportunities involved in the F.D.R. Mountains land. I could buy in any time, he thought, with Union funds. But where? It’s a big range; I can’t buy it all.

  Who knows that range? he asked himself. That Steiner probably did, because as I understand it his base of operations is--or rather was--someplace near there. And there are prospectors coming and going. And Bleekmen live there, too.

  “Helio,” he said, “do you know the F.D.R. range?”

  “Mister, I do know them,” the Bleekman said. “I shun them. They are cold and empty and have no life.”