At the retail outlet of Trails of Hoffman Limited, Jack and Ruth McElhatten and their two children emerged from a flapple taxi; a robot-like organism carted their luggage, all seven overstuffed seedy—borrowed for the most part—suitcases, as they entered the modern, small building which for them was to be the last stopping-point on Terra.
Going up to the counter, Jack McElhatten searched about for a clerk to wait on them. Jeez, he thought; just when you decide to make the Big Move they decide to step out for a coffee break.
A smartly uniformed armed UN soldier, with an arm-band identifying him as a member of the crack UAR division, approached him. “What did you wish?”
Jack McElhatten said, “Hell, we came here to emigrate. I’ve got the poscreds.” He reached for his wallet. “Where are the forms to fill out, and then I know we got to take shots and—”
The UN soldier politely said, “Sir, have you watched your info media during the last forty-eight hours?”
“We’ve been packing.” Ruth McElhatten spoke up. “Why, what is it? Has something happened?”
And then, through an open rear door, Jack McElhatten saw it. The Telpor. And his heart bent with mingled dread and anticipation. What an admirably large move this was, this true migration; seeing the twin wall-like polar surfaces of the Telpor was to see— the frontier itself. In his mind he recalled the years of TV scenes of grasslands, of miles of green, lush—
“Sir,” the UN soldier said, “read this notice.” He pointed to a square white with words so dark, so unglamorous, that Jack McElhatten, even without reading them, felt the glow, the wonder of what for him was a long-held inner vision, depart.
“Oh good lord,” Ruth said, from beside him as she read the notice. “The UN—it’s closed down all the Telpor agencies. Emigration has been suspended.” She glanced in dismay at her husband. “Jack, it’s now illegal for us to emigrate, it says.”
The UN soldier said, “Later on, madam. Emigration will resume. When the situation is resolved.” He turned away, then, to halt a second couple, who, with four children, had entered the Trails of Hoffman office.
Through the still-open rear door, McElhatten saw, to his dumb disbelief, four work-garbed laborers; they were busily, sweatily, efficiently torch-cutting into sections the Telpor equipment.
He then forced himself to read the notice.
After he had read it the UN soldier tapped him—not unkindly— on the shoulder, pointed out a nearby TV set, which, turned on, was being watched by the second couple and their four children. “These are Newcolonizedland,” the UN soldier said. “You see?” His English was not too good, but he was attempting to explain; he wanted the McElhattens to understand why.
Approaching the TV set, Jack McElhatten saw gray, barracks-like structures with tiny, slotted windows like raptor eyes. And— high fences. He stared, uncomprehendingly . . . and yet, underneath, comprehending completely; he did not even have to listen to the aud track, to the UN announcer.
Ruth whispered, “My god. It’s a—concentration camp.”
A puff of smoke and the top floors of the gray cement building disappeared; dwarfed dark shapes scampered, and rapid-fire weapons clattered in the background of the announcer’s British-type voice; the calm, reasonable commentary explained what did not need to be explained.
At least not after this sight.
“Is that,” Ruth said to her husband, “how we would have lived over there?”
Presently he said, to her and their two children, “Come on. Let’s go home.” He signaled the robot-organism to pick their luggage up once more.
“But,” Ruth protested, “couldn’t the UN have helped us? They have all those welfare agencies—”
Jack McElhatten said, “The UN is protecting us now. And not with welfare agencies.” He indicated the work-garbed laborers busy dismantling the Telpor unit.
“But so late—”
“Not,” he said, “too late.” He signaled the robot-thing to carry their seven bulging suitcases back outside onto the sidewalk; avoiding the many passing people, the dense, always dense, sidewalk traffic, he searched for a flapple taxi to take himself and his family home again to their miserable cramped, hated conapt.
A man, distributing leaflets, approached him, held out a broadsheet; McElhatten reflexively accepted it. The Friends of a United People outfit, he saw. Glaring banner:
UN VERIFIES COLONY TYRANNY
He said, aloud, “They were right. The cranks. The lunatics, like that guy who wanted to make the eighteen-year trip by interstellar ship.” He carefully folded the broadsheet, put it into his pocket to read later; right now he felt too numbed. “I hope,” he said aloud, “that my boss will take me back.”
“They’re fighting,” Ruth said. “You could see on the TV screen; they showed UN soldiers and then others in funny uniforms I never saw before in all my—”
“You think,” Jack McElhatten asked his wife, “you could sit in the taxi with the kids while I find a bar and get one good stiff drink?”
She said, “Yes. I could.” Now a flapple taxi was swooping down, attracted; it headed for the curb, and the four of them and their mound of fat luggage enticing its tropism.
“Because,” Jack McElhatten said, “I can use for instance a bourbon and water. A double.” And then, he said to himself, I’m heading for UN recruiting headquarters and volunteer.
He did not know for what—not yet. But they would tell him.
His help was needed; he felt it in his blood. A war had to be won, and then, years from now but not eighteen as it had been for that nut written up in the ’papes, they could do it, could emigrate. But before that—the fighting. The winning of Whale’s Mouth all over again. Actually, for the first time.
But even before that: the two drinks.
As soon as the luggage was loaded he got with his family into the flapple taxi and gave it the name of the bar where he often stopped after work. Obligingly the taxi spouted up into the overcrowded, me-first, nose-to-nose density of supra-surface Terran unending traffic.
And as the taxi rose Jack McElhatten dreamed again of tall, windtouched grasses and froglike creatures and open plains meandered over by quaint animals that were not afraid because no one intended to hurt them. But his awareness of the reality remained and ran parallel to the dream; he saw both at once and he put his arm around his wife and hugged her and was silent.
The taxi, expertly maneuvering among all the other vehicles, directed itself toward the bar on the east side of town; it knew its way, too. It, also, knew its task.
AFTERWORD TO THE VINTAGE EDITION
by Paul Williams
LITERARY EXECUTOR
OF THE ESTATE OF PHILIP K. DICK,
1983–1992
This novel has an unusual history. Philip K. Dick wrote it during his very prolific mid-1960s period (he wrote ten novels in two years, 1963 and 1964). In a 1977 letter, Dick recalled: “Part Two of The Unteleported Man was written in 1964, a number of years after Part One was written—for Amazing-Fantastic, by the way, in response to a cover they had gotten and wanted to use. They needed a story to go with the cover, so they sent me a photo of the cover [painting] and I came up with forty thousand words, which was the maximum number they’d accept. Don Wollheim at Ace [Ace Books, Dick’s primary paperback publisher at the time] said he’d like an expansion to use as a novel, rather than a forty-thousand-word novelette; however, Part Two did not please him, so he published the forty-thousand-word Part One as one half of an Ace double.”
The records at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency show that the manuscript for “The Unteleported Man” (evidently the title was Dick’s) was received by the agency on August 26, 1964, and that the manuscript of the requested expansion material was received on May 5, 1965. The short novel was first published in the December 1964 issue of Fantastic (one of two science fiction magazines produced by the same editor and publisher) and then the same short novel (without the rejected expansion material) was published as a p
aperback book by Ace in 1966. It was published in their “double book” format, with another short novel by another author (the back cover of each book was actually the cover of the other book, so the two novels were printed upside down to each other in the same volume; Dick’s first published novel, Solar Lottery, in 1955, had been such a “double book” and he’d had other novels published by Ace in the same format over the years).
Ace reissued The Unteleported Man, again as half of a “double book,” in 1972. The novel was published under the same title, but with the previously unpublished expansion material added, by Berkley Books in 1983. This was because Dick, in 1979, had gotten his editor at Berkley to agree to publish the novel with the rejected 1965 expansion added on. The Ace edition was out of print, so Dick had the rights back, and he knew he had a copy of the rejected expansion material in the collection of his manuscripts that he’d given to the library at California State University, Fullerton. The cover of the 1983 paperback says, “now uncensored for the first time,” which is dramatic and somewhat misleading, since the previous editions contained every word of what had been published in Fantastic and originally submitted to and bought by Ace. Dick, of course, still unhappy that his expansion had been rejected in 1965, and eager to justify this new edition of the novel, had himself promoted this slightly misleading idea that the book would now be uncut for the first time.
When Dick obtained a copy of his 1965 expansion material from the Fullerton library, he found he had a problem. Four pages were missing from three different places in the manuscript, creating three gaps in the text that he now had to write new connective material to fill in. He also realized that this expansion wasn’t exactly a “part two” that could be placed immediately after the rest of the book with no explanation. In the course of dealing with these matters, he got the idea of “reframing” the book by writing new opening pages and perhaps various bits of new connective material.
So, probably in a single day or a few hours, he wrote a brand new Chapter One, and rewrote the original Chapter One extensively to make a new Chapter Two, and found himself giving the book a new title (Lies, Inc. ), and made a few other small changes here and there for consistency with the elements introduced in the new opening pages. He also made the big decision as to where in the existing novel to place the large chunk of 1965 expansion material. He inserted it almost three-fourths of the way through the original short novel, in the middle of the original Chapter Seven. But he didn’t write the connective material to fill in those annoying gaps. That, and possibly some other thoughts he had about new material he should write to make the new book flow together properly, kept him from calling the job done and sending the rewrite off to his editor (Mark Hurst) in New York.
So it came to pass that in July 1983, sixteen months after Philip K. Dick’s death in March 1982, Berkley Books published an edition of The Unteleported Man that was twice as long as the 1966 Ace edition but did not use the new title or the recently written pages and did have the anomaly of three gaps in the text of the second half of the novel.
This was not the end of the saga, however. Dick’s U.K. publisher, Gollancz, had a contract to publish a British edition of the expanded Unteleported Man, and before the end of 1983, I, as PKD’s literary executor, came across the revised and retitled 1979 typescript of the book and had it sent to Gollancz. There was still the matter of those missing manuscript pages, and so Gollancz, with the permission of Dick’s estate, hired science fiction writer John Sladek to write short connective material to fill in the gaps (only two gaps now, because Dick’s revisions deleted the last six pages of expansion material, which was the location of the third gap). So the book was published by Gollancz in 1984 with the 1965 expansion and Dick’s 1979 revisions and Sladek’s connective material, under the title Lies, Inc.
Then in 1985, while doing some research in the PKD papers at Cal State University’s Fullerton Library, I found the missing pages from the 1965 Unteleported Man expansion (they had found their way into a box containing manuscript material for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Those pages were then published in the eighth issue of The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter . . . and they are included in this (first American) edition of Lies, Inc.
So this is The Unteleported Man, take two, as the author intended it in 1979, but necessarily without any further revisions he may have thought about making but never got around to. For the curious, the 1965 expansion material begins several pages into Chapter Eight of the current edition with the words “Acrid smoke billowed about him,” and ends halfway through Chapter Fifteen just before the paragraph (added by Dick in 1979) that starts, “Acrid smoke billowed about him.” Because the 1965 material was inserted into the original novel at a different place in the 1983 Berkley edition (Berkley at the time had no way of knowing where, in 1979, Dick had intended for it to go), this present edition gives the novel a very different resolution than the 1983 edition does. So what you are holding is the first American edition of this novel as Philip K. Dick intended it in 1979 when he prepared this “Lies, Inc.” version of The Unteleported Man.
Paul Williams
Encinitas, California
April 2003
PHILIP K. DICK
LIES, INC.
Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.
NOVELS BY PHILIP K. DICK
Clans of the Alphane Moon
Confessions of a Crap Artist
The Cosmic Puppets
Counter-Clock World
The Crack in Space
Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny)
The Divine Invasion
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dr. Bloodmoney
Dr. Futurity
Eye in the Sky
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Galactic Pot-Healer
The Game-Players of Titan
Lies, Inc.
The Man in the High Castle
The Man Who Japed
Martian Time-Slip
A Maze of Death
Now Wait for Last Year
Our Friends from Frolix 8
The Penultimate Truth
Radio Free Albemuth
A Scanner Darkly
The Simulacra
Solar Lottery
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Time Out of Joint
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Ubik
VALIS
Vulcan’s Hammer
We Can Build You
The World Jones Made
The Zap Gun
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2004
Copyright © 1964 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.
Additional material copyright © 1983, 1984
by the Estate of Philip K. Dick
Afterword copyright © 2004 by Paul Williams
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.
Originally published in the United States as The Unteleported Man in a different form in Fantastic magazine in 1964.
Subsequently published under the same title with expanded material in 1983 by Berkley Books.
First published as Lies, Inc. with further additional material by Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, in 1984.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Di
ck, Philip K.
Lies, Inc. / Philip K. Dick.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: The unteleported man. 1964. Rev. ed. under title:
Lies, Inc., originally published: London: Gollancz, 1984.
1. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction. 2. Space colonies—
Fiction. 3. Spaceships—Fiction. I. Title: Lies
Incorporated. II. Dick, Philip K. Unteleported man. III. Title.
PS3554.I3L54 2004
813’.54—dc22 2003065789
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42661-1
v3.0
Lies, Inc. Page 21