Dr. Bloodmoney

by Philip K. Dick

  The traffic had, almost halted. It appeared to be due to cars forcing their way in from a side street ahead, but he knew better; that was only the apparent cause—the genuine cause was his desire to cross. An opening between two cars lay directly ahead, and Doctor Bluthgeld led the group of people on foot across to the far side.

  Where do I want to go? he asked himself, ignoring the thanks of the people around him; they were all trying to tell him how much they owed him. Out into the country, away from the city? I am dangerous to the city, he realized. I should go fifty or sixty miles to the east, perhaps all the way to the Sierras, to some remote spot. West Marin; I could go back up there. Bonny is up there. I could stay with her and George. I think that would be far enough away, but if it is not I will continue on—I must absent myself from these people, who do not deserve to be punished any further. If necessary, I will continue on forever; I will never stop in one place.

  Of course, he realized, I can’t get to West Marin by car; none of these cars are moving or are ever going to move again. The congestion is too great. And the Richardson Bridge is certainly gone. I will have to walk; it will take days, but eventually I will make it there. I will go up to the Black Point Road, up toward Vallejo, and follow the route across the sloughs. The land is flat; I can cut directly across the fields if necessary.

  In any case it’s a penance for what I’ve done. This will be a voluntary pilgrimage, a way of healing the soul.

  He walked, and as he did so he concentrated on the damage about him; he viewed it with the idea of healing it, of restoring the city, if at all possible, to its pure state. When he came to a building that had collapsed he paused and said, Let this building be restored. When he saw injured people he said, Let these people be adjudged innocent and so forgiven. Each time, he made a motion with his hand which he had devised; it indicated his determination to see that things such as this did not reoccur. Perhaps they have learned a permanent lesson, he thought. They may leave me alone, now.

  But, it occurred to him, perhaps they would go in the opposite direction; they would, after they had dragged themselves from the ruins of their houses, develop an even greater determination to destroy him. This might in the long run increase, rather than dispel, their animosity.

  He felt frightened, thinking about their vengeance. Maybe I should go into hiding, he thought. Keep the name “Mr. Tree,” or use some other fictive name for purposes of concealment. Right now they are wary of me … but I’m afraid it will not last.

  And yet, even knowing that, he still continued to make his special sign to them as he walked along. He still bent his efforts to achieving a restoration for them. His own emotions contained no hostility; he was free of that. It was only they who harbored any hate.

  At the edge of the Bay, Doctor Bluthgeld emerged from the traffic to see the white, shattered, glass-like city of San Francisco lying everywhere on the far side of the water. Nothing stood. Overhead, smoke and yellow fire manifested themselves in a way that he could not believe. It was as if the city had become a stick of stove wood, incinerated without leaving a trace. And yet there were people coming out of it. He saw, on the water, bobbing chunks; the people had floated every kind of object out, and were clinging to them, trying to push across to Marin County.

  Doctor Bluthgeld stood there, unable to go on, his pilgrimage forgotten. First he had to cure them, and then if possible cure the city itself. He forgot his own needs. He concentrated on the city, using both hands, making new gestures which he had never hit on before; he tried everything, and after a long time he saw the smoke begin to clear. That gave him hope. But the people bobbing across, escaping, began to diminish in number; he saw fewer and fewer until the bay was empty of them, and only naked debris remained.

  So he concentrated then on saving the people themselves; he thought of the escape routes north, where the people should go and what they would need to find. Water, first of all, and then rations. He thought of the Army bringing in supplies, and the Red Cross; he thought of small towns in the country making their possessions available. Finally, what he willed began reluctantly to come to pass, and he remained where he was a long time, getting it to be. Things improved. The people found treatment for burns; he saw to that. He saw, too, to the healing of their great fear; that was important. He saw to the first glimmerings of their getting themselves established once more, in at least a rudimentary way.

  But curiously, at the same time that he devoted himself to improving their condition, he noticed to his surprise and shock that his own had deteriorated. He had lost everything in the service of the general welfare, because now his clothes were in rags, like sacks. His toes poked through his shoes. On his face a ragged beard hung down; a mustache had grown over his mouth, and his hair fell all the way over his ears and brushed his torn collar, and his teeth—even his teeth—were gone. He felt old and sick and empty, but nonetheless it was worth it. How long had he stood here, doing this job? The streams of cars had long since ceased. Only damaged, abandoned wrecks of autos lay along the freeway to his right. Had it been weeks? Possibly months. He felt hungry, and his legs trembled with the cold. So once more he began to walk.

  I gave them everything I had, he told himself, and thinking that he felt a little resentment, more than a trace of anger. What did I get back? I need a haircut and a meal and medical attention; I need a few things myself. Where can I get them? Now, he thought, I’m too tired to walk to Marin County; I’ll have to stay here, on this side of the Bay, for a while, until I can rest up and get my strength back. His resentment grew as he walked slowly along.

  But anyhow he had done his job. He saw, not far ahead, a first aid station with rows of dingy tents; he saw women with armbands and knew they were nurses. He saw men with metal helmets carrying guns. Law and order, he realized. Because of my efforts it’s being reestablished, here and there. They owe me a lot, but of course they don’t acknowledge it. I’ll let it pass, he decided.

  When he reached the first dingy tent, one of the men with guns stopped him. Another man, carrying a clipboard, approached. “Where are you from?” the man with the clipboard asked.

  “From Berkeley,” he answered.

  “Name.”

  “Mr. Jack Tree.”

  They wrote that down, then tore off a card and handed it to him. It had a number on it, and the two men explained that he should keep the number because without it he could not obtain food rations. Then he was told that if he tried—or had tried—to collect rations at another relief station he would be shot. The two men then walked off, leaving him standing there with his numbered card in his hand.

  Should I tell them that I did all this? he wondered. That I’m solely responsible, and eternally damned for my dreadful sin in bringing this about? No, he decided, because if I do they’ll take my card back; I won’t get any food ration. And he was terribly, terribly hungry.

  Now one of the nurses approached him and in a matter of fact voice said, “Any vomiting, dizziness, change of color of the stool?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Any superficial burns which have failed to heal?”

  He shook his head no.

  “Go over there,” the nurse said, pointing, “and get rid of your clothing. They’ll delouse you and shave your head, and you can get your shots there. We’re out of the typhoid serum so don’t ask for that.”

  To his bewilderment he saw a man with an electric razor powered by a gasoline generator shaving the heads of men and women both; the people waited patiently in line. A sanitary measure? he wondered.

  I thought I had fixed that, he thought. Or did I forget about disease. Evidently I did. He began to walk in that direction, bewildered by his failure to have taken everything into account. I must have left out a variety of vital things, he realized as he joined the line of people waiting to have their heads shaved.

  In the ruins of a cement basement of a house on Cedar Street in the Berkeley hills, Stuart McConchie spied something fat and gray that hopped
from one split block and behind the next. He picked up his broom handle—one end came to a cracked, elongated point—and wriggled forward.

  The man with him in the basement, a sallow, lean man named Ken, who was dying of radiation exposure, said, “You’re not going to eat that.”

  “Sure I am,” Stuart said, wriggling through the dust which had settled into the open, exposed basement until he lay against the split block of cement. The rat, aware of him, squeaked with fear. It had come up from the Berkeley sewer and now it wanted to get back. But he was between it and the sewer; or rather, he thought, between her and the sewer. It was no doubt a big female. The males were skinnier.

  The rat scurried in fright, and Stuart drove the sharp end of the stick into it. Again it squeaked, long and sufferingly. On the end of the stick it was still alive; it kept on squeaking. So he held it against the ground, held the stick down, and crushed its head with his foot.

  “At least,” the dying man with him said, “you can cook it.”

  “No,” Stuart said, and, seating himself, got out the pocket knife which he had found—it had been in the pants pocket of a dead school boy—and began skinning the rat. While the dying man watched with disapproval, Stuart ate the dead, raw rat.

  “I’m surprised you don’t eat me,” the man said, afterward.

  “It’s no worse than eating raw shrimp,” Stuart said. He felt much better now; it was his first food in days.

  “Why don’t you go looking for one of those relief stations that helicopter was talking about when it flew by yesterday?” the dying man said. “It said—or I understood it to say—that there’s a station over near the Hillside Grammar School. That’s only a few blocks from here; you could get that far.”

  “No,” Stuart said.

  “Why not?”

  The answer, although he did not want to say it, was simply that he was afraid to venture out of the basement onto the street. He did not know why, except that there were things moving in the settling ash which he could not identify; he believed they were Americans but possibly they were Chinese or Russians. Their voices sounded strange and echoey, even in daytime. And the helicopter, too; he was not certain about that. It could have been an enemy trick to induce people to come out and be shot. In any case he still heard gunfire from the flat part of the city; the dim sounds started before the sun rose and occurred intermittently until nightfall.

  “You can’t stay here forever,” Ken said. “It isn’t rational.” He lay wrapped up in the blankets which had belonged to one of the beds in the house; the bed had been hurled from the house as the house disintegrated, and Stuart and the dying man had found it in the backyard. Its neatly tucked in covers had been still on it, all in place including its two duck-feather pillows.

  What Stuart was thinking was that in five days he had collected thousands of dollars in money from the pockets of dead people he had found in the ruins of houses along Cedar Street—from their pockets and from the houses themselves. Other scavengers had been after food and different objects such as knives and guns, and it made him uneasy that he alone wanted money. He felt, now, that if he stirred forth, if he reached a relief station, he would discover the truth: the money was worthless. And if it was, he was a horse’s ass for collecting it, and when he showed up at the relief station carrying a pillowcase full of it, everyone would jeer at him and rightly so, because a horse’s ass deserved to be jeered at.

  And also, no one else seemed to be eating rats. Perhaps there was a superior food available of which he knew nothing; it sounded like him, down here eating something everyone else had discarded. Maybe there were cans of emergency rations being dropped from the air; maybe the cans came down early in the morning while he was still asleep and got all picked up before he had a chance to see them. He had had for several days now a deep and growing dread that he was missing out, that something free was being dispensed—perhaps in broad daylight—to everyone but him. Just my luck, he said to himself, and he felt glum and bitter, and the rat, which he had just eaten, no longer seemed a surfeit, as before.

  Hiding, these last few days, down in the ruined cement basement of the house on Cedar Street, Stuart had had a good deal of time to think about himself, and he had realized that it had always been hard for him to make out what other people were doing; it had only been by the greatest effort that he had managed to act as they acted, appear like them. It had nothing to do, either, with his being a Negro because he had the same problem with black people as with white. It was not a social difficulty in the usual sense; it went deeper than that. For instance, Ken, the dying man lying opposite him. Stuart could not understand him; he felt cut off from him. Maybe that was because Ken was dying and he was not. Maybe that set up a barrier; the world was clearly divided into two new camps now: people who were getting weaker with each passing moment, who were perishing, and people like himself, who were going to make it. There was no possibility of communication between them because their worlds were too different.

  And yet that was not it only, between himself and Ken; there was still more, the same old problem that the bomb attack had not created but merely brought to the surface. Now the gulf was wider; it was obvious that he did not actually comprehend the meaning of most activities conducted around him … he had been brooding, for instance, about the yearly trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles for his auto license renewal. As he lay in the basement it seemed to him more clearly each moment that the other people had gone to the Department of Motor Vehicles office over on Sacramento Street for a good reason, but he had gone because they had gone; he had, like a littler kid, merely tagged along. And now there was no one present to tag after; now he was alone. And therefore he could not think up any action to follow, he could not make any decision or follow any plan for the life of him.

  So he simply waited, and as he waited, wondered about the ’copter which flew overhead now and then and about the vague shapes in the street, and more than anything else if he was a horse’s ass or not.

  And then, all at once, he thought of something; he remembered what Hoppy Harrington had seen in his vision at Fred’s Fine Foods. Hoppy had seen him, Stuart McConchie, eating rats, but in the excitement and fear of all that had happened since, Stuart had forgotten. This now was what the phoce had seen; this was the vision—not the afterlife at all!

  God damn that little crippled freak, Stuart thought to himself as he lay picking his teeth with a piece of wire. He was a fraud; he put something over on us.

  Amazing how gullible people are, he said to himself. We believed him, maybe because he’s so peculiarly built anyhow … it seemed more credible with him being like he is—or was. He’s probably dead now, buried down in the service department. Well, that’s one good thing this war has done: wiped out all the freaks. But then, he realized, it’s also brewed up a whole new batch of them; there’ll be freaks strutting around for the next million years. It’ll be Bluthgeld’s paradise; in fact he’s probably quite happy right now—because this was really bomb testing.

  Ken stirred and murmured, “Could you be induced to crawl across the street? There’s that corpse there and it might have cigarettes on it.”

  Cigarettes, hell, Stuart thought. It probably has a walletful of money. He followed the dying man’s gaze and saw, sure enough, the corpse of a woman lying among the rubble on the far side. His pulse raced, because he could see a bulging handbag still clutched.

  In a weary voice Ken said, “Leave the money, Stuart. It’s an obsession with you, a symbol of God knows what.” As Stuart crawled out from the basement Ken raised his voice to call, “A symbol of the opulent society.” He coughed, retched. “And that’s gone now,” he managed to add.

  Up yours, Stuart thought as he crawled on across the street to the purse lying there. Sure enough, when he opened it he found a wad of bills, ones and fives and even a twenty. There was also a U-No candy bar in the purse, and he got that, too. But as he crawled back to the basement it occurred to him that the candy bar migh
t be radioactive, so he tossed it away.

  “The cigarettes?” Ken asked, when he returned.

  “None.” Stuart opened the pillow case, which was buried up to its throat in the dry ash which had filled the basement; he stuffed the bills in with the others and tied the pillow case shut again.

  “How about a game of chess?” Ken propped himself up weakly, opened the wooden box of chessmen which he and Stuart had found in the wreckage of the house. Already, he had managed to teach Stuart the rudiments of the game; before the war Stuart had never played.

  “Naw,” Stuart said. He was watching, far off in the gray sky, the moving shape of some plane or rocket ship, a cylinder. God, he thought, could it be a bomb? Dismally, he watched it sink lower and lower; he did not even lie down, did not seek to hide as he had done that first time, in the initial few minutes on which so much—their being alive now—had depended. “What’s that?” he asked.

  The dying man scrutinized it. “It’s a balloon.”

  Not believing him, Stuart said, “It’s the Chinese!”

  “It really is a balloon, a little one. What they used to call a blimp, I think. I haven’t seen one since I was a boy.”

  “Could the Chinese float across the Pacific in balloons?” Stuart said, imagining thousands of such small gray cigar-shaped balloons, each with a platoon of Mongolian-type Chinese peasant soldiers, armed with Czech automatic rifles, clutching handholds, clinging to every fold. “It’s just what you’d expect them to think up from the beginning; they reduce the world to their level, back a couple centuries. Instead of catching up with us—” He broke off, because now he saw that the balloon had on its side a sign in English:

  HAMILTON AIR FORCE BASE

  The dying man said slowly, “It’s one of ours.”