Nick said, ‘“I must be gone: there is a grave where daffodil and lily wave, and I would please the hapless faun, buried under the sleepy ground, with mirthful songs before the dawn. His shouting days with mirth were crowned; and still I dream he treads the lawn, walking ghostly in the dew, pierced by my glad singing through.”’
‘Thank you,’ Amos Ild said.
‘Why?’ Nick said.
‘For explaining.’ He began another picture. With his black crayon he drew the woman, underground and horizontal. ‘There’s the grave,’ he said, pointing. ‘That you have to go to. That’s where she is.’
‘Will she hear me?’ Nick asked. ‘Will she know I’m there?’
‘Yes,’ Amos Ild said. ‘If you sing. But you have to sing.’
The door opened and the black trooper said, ‘Come along, mister. To the infirmary.’
He lingered. ‘And should I put daffodils and lilies there?’ he asked Amos Ild.
‘Yes, and you have to remember to call her name.’
‘Charlotte,’ he said.
Amos Ild nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Come on,’ the trooper said, taking him by the shoulder and leading him out of the room. ‘There’s no point in talking to the kiddies.’
‘“Kiddies”?’ Nick asked. ‘Is that what you’re going to call them?’
‘Well, we’ve sort of started to. They’re like children.’
‘No,’ Nick said, ‘they are not like children.’ They are like saints and prophets, he thought. Soothsayers, old wisemen. But we will have to take care of them, they won’t be able to manage by themselves. They won’t even be able to wash themselves.
‘Did he say anything worth hearing?’ the trooper asked him.
Nick said, ‘He said she can hear me.’
They had reached the infirmary. ‘Go on in there,’ the trooper said, pointing. ‘Through that door.’
‘Thanks,’ Nick said. And joined the line of men and women already waiting.
‘What he said,’ the black trooper said, ‘wasn’t very much.’
‘It was enough,’ Nick said.
‘They’re pathetic, aren’t they?’ the trooper asked. ‘I always wished I was a New Man, but now—’ He grimaced.
‘Go away,’ Nick said. ‘I want to be able to think.’
The black-clad trooper strode off.
‘And your name, sir?’ the nurse said to him. She held her pen poised.
‘Nick Appleton,’ he said. ‘I’m the tire regroover.’ He added, ‘And I want to think. Maybe if I could just lie down—’
‘There are no beds left, sir,’ the nurse said. ‘But your arm’ – she touched it gingerly – ‘we can set that.’
‘Okay,’ he said. And, leaning against the nearby wall for support, waited. And, as he waited, thought.
Attorney Horace Denfeld briskly entered the outer office of Council Chairman Willis Gram. He had his briefcase with him, and the expression he wore, even unto the way he walked, showed a further development of his sense of negotiating from strength.
‘Tell Mr. Gram that I have further material pertaining to his alimony and property—’
At her desk, Miss Knight glanced up and said, ‘You’re too late, counselor.’
‘I beg your pardon? You mean he’s busy now? I’ll have to wait?’ Denfeld examined his diamond-surrounded wristwatch. ‘I can wait fifteen minutes at the longest. Please convey that news to him.’
‘He’s gone,’ Miss Knight said, folding her fingers beneath her sharp chin, a lazy, confident gesture not lost on Denfeld. ‘All his personal problems, you and Irma in particular – they’re all over with.’
‘You mean because of the invasion.’ Denfeld rubbed the side of his nose irritably. ‘Well, we’ll follow him with a writ issued by the court,’ he said, scowling and looking his most terrible look. ‘Wherever he’s gone.’
‘Willis Gram,’ Miss Knight said, ‘has gone where no writs can follow him.’
‘You mean he’s dead?’
‘He is outside our lives, now. Beyond the Earth we live on. He’s with an enemy, an old enemy, and with what may be a new friend. At least we can hope so.’
‘We’ll find him,’ Denfeld said.
‘Do you want to bet? Fifty pops?’
Denfeld hesitated. ‘I—’
Returning to her typing, Miss Knight said, between peck-pecks, ‘Good day, Mr. Denfeld.’
By her desk, Denfeld stood – something had caught his eye, and he now reached to pick it up: a small plastic statuette of a man in robes. He held it for a time – Miss Knight tried to ignore him but there he was – fingering the statuette, studying it closely, solemnly. On his face an expression of wonder had appeared, as if, with each passing moment, he saw something more in the plastic figure.
‘Who is this?’ he asked Miss Knight.
‘A statue of God,’ Miss Knight said, and paused in her busy typing to study him. ‘Everybody has one, it’s a fad. Haven’t you seen one of those before?’
‘Is that how God looks?’ Denfeld asked.
‘No, of course not; it’s only—’
‘But it is God,’ he said.
‘Well, yes.’ She watched him; she saw the wonder in his eyes, his consciousness narrowed down to this one artifact… and then she realized: Of course, Denfeld is a New Man. And I’m seeing the process; he is becoming a kiddy. Rising from her chair, she said, ‘Sit down, Mr. Denfeld.’ She led him over to a couch and got him seated… his briefcase forgotten, she realized. Forgotten now; forgotten forever. ‘Can I get anything for you?’ she asked; she was at a loss as to what to say. ‘Some Coke? Zing?’
Denfeld gazed up at her wide-eyed and hopeful. ‘Could I have this? To keep?’
‘Certainly,’ she said, and felt compassion for him. One of the least and last of the New Men to go, she thought. And where is his arrogance now? Where is everybody’s?
‘Can God fly?’ Denfeld asked. ‘Can He hold out His arms and fly?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Someday—’ He broke off. ‘I think every living thing will fly or anyhow trudge or run; some will go fast, like they do in this life, but most will fly or trudge. Up and up. Forever. Even slugs and snails; they’ll go very slow but they’ll make it sometime. All of them will make it eventually, no matter how slow they go. Leaving a lot behind; that has to be done. You think so?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A very great lot behind.’
‘Thank you,’ Denfeld said.
‘For what?’
‘For giving me God.’
‘Okay,’ she said. And stoically resumed her typing. While Horace Denfeld played endlessly with the plastic statuette. With the vastness of God.
ALSO BY PHILIP K. DICK
DR. BLOODMONEY
Dr. Bloodmoney is a post-nuclear-holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of Dick’s most memorable characters: Hoppy Harrington, a deformed mutant with telekinetic powers; Walt Dangerfield, a selfless disc jockey stranded in a satellite circling the globe; Dr. Bluthgeld, the megalomaniac physicist largely responsible for the decimated state of the world; and Stuart McConchie and Bonnie Keller, two unremarkable people bent on the survival of goodness in a world devastated by evil. Epic and alluring, this brilliant novel is a mesmerizing depiction of Dick’s undying hope in humanity.
Fiction/Science Fiction/0-375-71929-6
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
Television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show until one day, all proof of his existence is erased. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonymous with loss of life. As Taverner races to solve the riddle of his “disappearance” the author immerses us in a horribly plausible United States in which everyone informs on everyone else, a world in which even the omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock of the self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.
&nbs
p; Fiction/Science Fiction/0-679-74066-X
THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH
Not too long from now, when exiles from a blistering Earth huddle miserably in Martian colonies, the only things that make life bearable are the drugs. A new substance called Chew-Z is marketed under the slogan: “God promises eternal life. We can deliver it.” The question is: What kind of eternity? And who—or what—is the deliverer? In this wildly disorienting funhouse of a novel, Dick explores mysteries that were once the property of St. Paul and Aquinas. His wit, compassion, and knife-edged irony make this novel as moving as it is visionary.
Fiction/Science Fiction/0-679-73666-2
THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it, Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.
Fiction/Science Fiction/0-679-74067-8
MARTIAN TIME-SLIP
On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated “anomalous” children for deportation and destruction, other people—especially Supreme Good-member Arnie Kott of the Water Worker’s union—suspect that Manfred’s disorder may be a window into the future. But what sort of future? And what happens to those unfortunates whom Manfred ushers into it? In Martian Time-Slip Dick uses power politics, extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and time.
Fiction/Science Fiction/0-679-76167-5
UBIK
Glen Runciter is dead. Or is everybody else? Someone died in an explosion orchestrated by Runciter’s business competitors. And, indeed, it’s the kingly Runciter whose funeral is scheduled in Des Moines. But in the meantime, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering—and sometimes scatological—messages from their boss. And the world around them is warping in ways that suggest that their own time is running out. Or already has. This searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again.
Fiction/Science Fiction/0-679-73664-6
A SCANNER DARKLY
Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D—which Arctor takes in massive doses—gradually splits the user’s brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn’t realize he is narcing on himself. Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick’s industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling.
Fiction/Science Fiction/0-679-73665-4
ALSO AVAILABLE
Clans of the Alphane Moon, 0-375-71928-8
Confessions of a Crap Artist, 0-679-74114-3
Counter-Clock World, 0-375-71933-4
The Divine Invasion, 0-679-73445-7
Galactic Pot-Healer, 0-679-75297-8
The Game-Players of Titan, 0-679-74065-1
The Man Who Japed, 0-375-71935-0
A Maze of Death, 0-679-75298-6
Now Wait for Last Year, 0-679-74220-4
Radio Free Albemuth, 0-679-78137-4
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 0-679-74787-7
The Simulacra, 0-375-71926-1
Time Out of Joint, 0-375-71927-X
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, 0-679-73444-9
VALIS, 0-679-73446-5
We Can Build You, 0-679-75296-X
The World Jones Made, 0-679-74219-0
The Zap Gun, 0-375-71936-9
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2003
Copyright © 1970 by Philip K. Dick,
copyright renewal 1998 by Laura Coelho,
Christopher Dick, and Isolde Hackett
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.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49719-2
www.vintagebooks.com
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