"What was the matter with him? He never said anything, not a goddamn word."
"Christmas is a hell of a time to repossess something," O'Neill said. He reached shakily for his coat. "It's too bad. I wish they could have kept it."
Conners shrugged. "No tickie, no laundry."
"Why the hell can't we give them a deal? Maybe—" O'Neill struggled to get the word out. "Maybe sell the shelter wholesale, to people like that."
Conners glared at him angrily. "Wholesale? And then everybody wants it wholesale. It wouldn't be fair—and how long would we stay in business? How long would GEC last that way?"
"I guess not very long," O'Neill admitted moodily.
"Use your head." Conners laughed sharply. "What you need is a good stiff drink. Come on in the back closet—I've got a fifty of Haig and Haig in a drawer back there. A little something to warm you up, before you go home. That's what you need."
Mike Foster wandered aimlessly along the dark street, among the crowds of shoppers hurrying home. He saw nothing; people pushed against him but he was unaware of them. Lights, laughing people, the honking of car horns, the clang of signals. He was blank, his mind empty and dead. He walked automatically, without consciousness or feeling.
To his right a garish neon sign winked and glowed in the deepening night shadows. A huge sign, bright and colorful.
PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TO MEN
PUBLIC SHELTER ADMISSION 50¢
PAY FOR THE PRINTER
ASH, BLACK AND DESOLATE, stretched out on both sides of the road. Uneven heaps extended as far as the eye could see—the dim ruins of buildings, cities, a civilization—a corroded planet of debris, wind-whipped black particles of bone and steel and concrete mixed together in an aimless mortar.
Allen Fergesson yawned, lit a Lucky Strike, and settled back drowsily against the shiny leather seat of his '57 Buick. "Depressing damn sight," he commented. "The monotony—nothing but mutilated trash. It gets you down."
"Don't look at it," the girl beside him said indifferently.
The sleek, powerful car glided silently over the rubble that made up the road. His hand barely touching the power-driven wheel, Fergesson relaxed comfortably to the soothing music of a Brahms Piano Quintet filtering from the radio, a transmission of the Detroit settlement. Ash blew up against the windows—a thick coat of black had already formed, though he had gone no more than a few miles. But it didn't matter. In the basement of her apartment, Charlotte had a green-plastic garden hose, a zinc bucket and a DuPont sponge.
"And you have a refrigerator full of good Scotch," he added aloud. "As I recall—unless that fast crowd of yours has finished it off."
Charlotte stirred beside him. She had drifted into half-sleep, lulled by the purr of the motor and the heavy warmth of the air. "Scotch?" she murmured. "Well, I have a fifth of Lord Calvert." She sat up and shook back her cloud of blonde hair. "But it's a little puddinged."
In the back seat, their thin-faced passenger responded. They had picked him up along the way, a bony, gaunt man in coarse gray work-pants and shirt. "How puddinged?" he asked tautly.
"About as much as everything else," she said.
Charlotte wasn't listening. She was gazing vacantly through the ash-darkened window at the scene outside. To the right of the road, the jagged, yellowed remains of a town jutted up like broken teeth against the sooty midday sky. A bathtub here, a couple of upright telephone poles, bones and bleak fragments, lost amid miles of pocked debris. A forlorn, dismal sight. Somewhere in the moldy cave-like cellars a few mangy dogs huddled against the chill. The thick fog of ash kept real sunlight from reaching the surface.
"Look there," Fergesson said to the man in the back.
A mock-rabbit had bounded across the ribbon of road. He slowed the car to avoid it. Blind, deformed, the rabbit hurtled itself with sickening force against a broken concrete slab and bounced off, stunned. It crawled feebly a few paces, then one of the cellar dogs rose and crunched it.
"Ugh!" said Charlotte, revolted. She shuddered and reached to turn up the car heater. Slim legs tucked under her, she was an attractive little figure in her pink wool sweater and embroidered skirt. "I'll be glad when we get back to my settlement. It's not nice out here—"
Fergesson tapped the steel box on the seat between them. The firm metal felt good under his fingers. "They'll be glad to get hold of these," he said, "if things are as bad as you say."
"Oh, yes," Charlotte agreed. "Things are terrible. I don't know if this will help—he's just about useless." Her small smooth face wrinkled with concern. "I guess it's worth trying. But I can't see much hope."
"We'll fix up your settlement," Fergesson reassured her easily. The first item was to put the girl's mind to rest. Panic of this kind could get out of hand—had got out of hand, more than once. "But it'll take a while," he added, glancing at her. "You should have told us sooner."
"We thought it was just laziness. But he's really going, Allen." Fear flicked in her blue eyes. "We can't get anything good out of him anymore. He just sits there like a big lump, as if he's sick or dead."
"He's old," Fergesson said gently. "As I recall, your Biltong dates back a hundred and fifty years."
"But they're supposed to go on for centuries!"
"It's a terrible drain on them," the man in the back seat pointed out. He licked his dry lips, leaned forward tensely, his dirt-cracked hands clenched. "You're forgetting this isn't natural to them. On Proxima they worked together. Now they've broken up into separate units—and gravity is greater here."
Charlotte nodded, but she wasn't convinced. "Gosh!" she said plaintively. "It's just terrible—look at this!" She fumbled in her sweater pocket and brought out a small bright object the size of a dime. "Everything he prints is like this, now—or worse."
Fergesson took the watch and examined it, one eye on the road. The strap broke like a dried leaf between his fingers into small brittle fragments of dark fiber without tensile strength. The face of the watch looked all right—but the hands weren't moving.
"It doesn't run," Charlotte explained. She grabbed it back and opened it. "See?" She held it up in front of his face, her crimson lips tight with displeasure. "I stood in line half an hour for this, and it's just a blob!"
The works of the tiny Swiss watch were a fused, unformed mass of shiny steel. No separate wheels or jewels or springs, just a glitter of pudding.
"What did he have to go on?" the man in back asked. "An original?"
"A print—but a good print. One he did thirty-five years ago—my mother's, in fact. How do you think I felt when I saw it? I can't use it." Charlotte took the puddinged watch back and restored it to her sweater pocket. "I was so mad I—" She broke off and sat up straight. "Oh, we're here. See the red neon sign? That's the beginning of the settlement."
The sign read STANDARD STATIONS INC. Its colors were blue, red, and white—a spotlessly clean structure at the edge of the road. Spotless? Fergesson slowed the car as he came abreast of the station. All three of them peered out intently, stiffening for the shock they knew was coming.
"You see?" said Charlotte in a thin, clipped voice.
The gas station was crumbling away. The small white building was old—old and worn, a corroded, uncertain thing that sagged and buckled like an ancient relic. The bright red neon sign sputtered fitfully. The pumps were rusted and bent. The gas station was beginning to settle back into the ash, back into black, drifting particles, back to the dust from which it had come.
As Fergesson gazed at the sinking station, the chill of death touched him. In his settlement, there was no decay—yet. As fast as prints wore out, they were replaced by the Pittsburgh Biltong. New prints were made from the original objects preserved from the War. But here, the prints that made up the settlement were not being replaced.
It was useless to blame anyone. The Biltong were limited, like any race. They had done the best they could—and they were working in an alien environment.
Probably they were ind
igenous to the Centaurus system. They had appeared in the closing days of the War, attracted by the H-bomb flashes—and found the remnants of the human race creeping miserably through radioactive black ash, trying to salvage what they could of their destroyed culture.
After a period of analysis, the Biltong had separated into individual units, begun the process of duplicating surviving artifacts humans brought to them. That was their mode of survival—on their own planet, they had created an enclosing membrane of satisfactory environment in an otherwise hostile world.
At one of the gasoline pumps a man was trying to fill the tank of his '66 Ford. Cursing in futility, he tore the rotting hose away. Dull amber fluid poured on the ground and soaked into the grease-encrusted gravel. The pump itself spouted leaks in a dozen places. Abruptly, one of the pumps tottered and crashed in a heap.
Charlotte rolled down the car window. "The Shell station is in better shape, Ben!" she called. "At the other end of the settlement."
The heavyset man clumped over, red-faced and perspiring. "Damn!" he muttered. "I can't get a damn thing out of it. Give me a lift across town, and I'll fill me a bucket there."
Fergesson shakily pushed open the car door. "It's all like this here?"
"Worse." Ben Untermeyer settled back gratefully with their other passenger as the Buick purred ahead. "Look over there."
A grocery store had collapsed in a twisted heap of concrete and steel supports. The windows had fallen in. Stacks of goods lay strewn everywhere. People were picking their way around, gathering up armloads, trying to clear some of the debris aside. Their faces were grim and angry.
The street itself was in bad repair, full of cracks, deep pits and eroded shoulders. A broken water main oozed slimy water in a growing pool. The stores and cars on both sides were dirty and run-down. Everything had a senile look. A shoe-shine parlor was boarded up, its broken windows stuffed with rags, its sign peeling and shabby. A filthy cafe next door had only a couple of patrons, miserable men in rumpled business suits, trying to read their newspapers and drink the mud-like coffee from cups that cracked and dribbled ugly brown fluid as they lifted them from the worm-eaten counter.
"It can't last much longer," Untermeyer muttered, as he mopped his forehead. "Not at this rate. People are even scared to go into the theatre. Anyhow, the film breaks and half the time it's upside-down." He glanced curiously at the lean-jawed man sitting silently beside him. "My name's Untermeyer," he grunted.
They shook. "John Dawes," the gray-wrapped man answered. He volunteered no more information. Since Fergesson and Charlotte had picked him up along the road, he hadn't said fifty words.
Untermeyer got a rolled-up newspaper from his coat pocket and tossed it onto the front seat beside Fergesson. "This is what I found on the porch, this morning."
The newspaper was a jumble of meaningless words. A vague blur of broken type, watery ink that still hadn't dried, faint, streaked and uneven. Fergesson briefly scanned the text, but it was useless. Confused stories wandered off aimlessly, bold headlines proclaimed nonsense.
"Allen has some originals for us," Charlotte said. "In the box there."
"They won't help," Untermeyer answered gloomily. "He didn't stir all morning. I waited in line with a pop-up toaster I wanted a print of. No dice. I was driving back home when my car began to break down. I looked under the hood, but who knows anything about motors? That's not our business. I poked around and got it to run as far as the Standard station … the damn metal's so weak I put my thumb through it."
Fergesson pulled his Buick to a halt in front of the big white apartment building where Charlotte lived. It took him a moment to recognize it; there had been changes since he last saw it, a month before. A wooden scaffolding, clumsy and amateur, had been erected around it. A few workmen were poking uncertainly at the foundations; the whole building was sinking slowly to one side. Vast cracks yawned up and down the walls. Bits of plaster were strewn everywhere. The littered sidewalk in front of the building was roped off.
"There isn't anything we can do on our own," Untermeyer complained angrily. "All we can do is just sit and watch everything fall apart. If he doesn't come to life soon…"
"Everything he printed for us in the old days is beginning to wear out," Charlotte said, as she opened the car door and slid onto the pavement. "And everything he prints for us now is a pudding. So what are we going to do?" She shivered in the chill midday cold. "I guess we're going to wind up like the Chicago settlement."
The word froze all four of them. Chicago, the settlement that had collapsed! The Biltong printing there had grown old and died. Exhausted, he had settled into a silent, unmoving mound of inert matter. The buildings and streets around him, all the things he had printed, had gradually worn out and returned to black ash.
"He didn't spawn," Charlotte whispered fearfully. "He used himself up printing, and then he just—died."
After a time, Fergesson said huskily, "But the others noticed. They sent a replacement as soon as they could."
"It was too late!" Untermeyer grunted. "The settlement had already gone back. All that was left were maybe a couple of survivors wandering around with nothing on, freezing and starving, and the dogs devouring them. The damn dogs, flocking from everywhere, having a regular feast!"
They stood together on the corroded sidewalk, frightened and apprehensive. Even John Dawes' lean face had a look of bleak horror on it, a fear that cut to the bone. Fergesson thought yearningly of his own settlement, a dozen miles to the East. Thriving and virile—the Pittsburgh Biltong was in his prime, still young and rich with the creative powers of his race. Nothing like this!
The buildings in the Pittsburgh settlement were strong and spotless. The sidewalks were clean and firm underfoot. In the store windows, the television sets and mixers and toasters and autos and pianos and clothing and whiskey and frozen peaches were perfect prints of the originals—authentic, detailed reproductions that couldn't be told from the actual articles preserved in the vacuum-sealed subsurface shelters.
"If this settlement goes out," Fergesson said awkwardly, "maybe a few of you can come over with us."
"Can your Biltong print for more than a hundred people?" John Dawes asked softly.
"Right now he can," Fergesson answered. He proudly indicated his Buick. "You rode in it—you know how good it is. Almost as good as the original it was printed from. You'd have to have them side by side to tell the difference." He grinned and made an old joke. "Maybe I got away with the original."
"We don't have to decide now," Charlotte said curtly. "We still have some time, at least." She picked up the steel box from the seat of the Buick and moved toward the steps of the apartment building. "Come on up with us, Ben." She nodded toward Dawes. "You, too. Have a shot of whiskey. It's not too bad—tastes a little like anti-freeze, and the label isn't legible, but other than that it's not too puddinged."
A workman caught her as she put a foot on the bottom step. "You can't go up, miss."
Charlotte pulled away angrily, her face pale with dismay. "My apartment's up there! All my things—this is where I live!"
"The building isn't safe," the workman repeated. He wasn't a real workman. He was one of the citizens of the settlement, who had volunteered to guard the buildings that were deteriorating. "Look at the cracks, miss."
"They've been there for weeks." Impatiently, Charlotte waved Fergesson after her. "Come on." She stepped nimbly up onto the porch and reached to open the big glass-and-chrome front door.
The door fell from its hinges and burst. Glass shattered everywhere, a cloud of lethal shards flying in all directions. Charlotte screamed and stumbled back. The concrete crumbled under her heels; with a groan the whole porch settled down in a heap of white powder, a shapeless mound of billowing particles.
Fergesson and the workman caught hold of the struggling girl. In the swirling clouds of concrete dust, Untermeyer searched frantically for the steel box; his fingers closed over it and he dragged it to the sidewalk.
>
Fergesson and the workman fought back through the ruins of the porch, Charlotte gripped between them. She was trying to speak, but her face jerked hysterically.
"My things!" she managed to whisper.
Fergesson brushed her off unsteadily. "Where are you hurt? Are you all right?"
"I'm not hurt." Charlotte wiped a trickle of blood and white powder from her face. Her cheek was cut, and her blonde hair was a sodden mass. Her pink wool sweater was torn and ragged. Her clothes were totally ruined. "The box—have you got it?"
"It's fine," John Dawes said impassively. He hadn't moved an inch from his position by the car.
Charlotte hung on tight to Fergesson—against him, her body shuddered with fear and despair. "Look!" she whispered. "Look at my hands." She held up her white-stained hands. "It's beginning to turn black."
The thick powder streaking her hands and arms had begun to darken. Even as they watched, the powder became gray, then black as soot. The girl's shredded clothing withered and shriveled up. Like a shrunken husk, her clothing cracked and fell away from her body.
"Get in the car," Fergesson ordered. "There's a blanket in there—from my settlement."
Together, he and Untermeyer wrapped the trembling girl in the heavy wool blanket. Charlotte crouched against the seat, her eyes wide with terror, drops of bright blood sliding down her cheek onto the blue and yellow stripes of the blanket. Fergesson lit a cigarette and put it between her quivering lips.
"Thanks." She managed a grateful half-whimper. She took hold of the cigarette shakily. "Allen, what the hell are we going to do?"
Fergesson softly brushed the darkening powder from the girl's blonde hair. "We'll drive over and show him the originals I brought. Maybe he can do something. They're always stimulated by the sight of new things to print from. Maybe this'll arouse some life in him."
"He's not just asleep," Charlotte said in a stricken voice. "He's dead, Allen. I know it!"
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 4: The Minority Report Page 133