Michael Bishop - Philip K. Dick is Dead,Alas

Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

Battle of the Titans

Philip K. Dick died in February 1982 -- but not the 1982 of most history books.

In this 1982 America has won the Vietnam war, colonised the moon -- and re-

elected Richard Milhous Nixon FOUR times.

Dick is remembered for his early realist novels, whilst his bitingly satirical SF

circulates illegally in samizdat form.

But if Phil Dick is really dead, who is the bearded amnesiac who wanders into to

the Georgia office of an unsuccessful psychotherapist?

The ghost of Philip K.Dick?

Soon the seditious scribbler is making plans more bizarre than his own wildest

inventions: to remake reality -- and fix "King Richard" Nixon once and for all...

"A wonderfully inventive novel and a lovingly crafted homage, by one of the best of the

younger SF writers" -- Publishers Weekly

"Succeeds remarkably well. . . masterful" -- Locus

Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia. He is the author of many stories

and novels, including the Nebula Award-winning "The Quickening" and No Enemy But

Time and two hardcover collections, Blooded on Arachne and One Winter in Eden.

Grafton Books

A Division of the Collins Publishing Group

8 Grafton Street, London W1X SLA

A Grafton UK Paperback Original 1988

ISBN 0-586-20151-3

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow

Set in Plantin

be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,

without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it

shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated

without the publisher's prior consent in any

form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition being imposed

on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. All the events in this book and the vast

majority of its characters are fictional. Historical figures -- as, for

instance, Richard M. Nixon and Philip K. Dick -- are deliberately

presented in the wholly fictional context of an alternative reality.

Otherwise, any resemblance to real pe ple or incidents is purely o

coincidental.

This book is for the heirs, biological and literary, of Philip K. Dick

It is the essence of moral responsibility to determine beforehand the consequences

of our action or inaction.

-- Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams

Acknowledgments

This novel grew out of my respect and affection for the novels of the late Philip

K. Dick. The best, to my mind, remains The Man in the High Castle, but I also admire

Time Out of Joint, Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, A

Scanner Darkly, Valis, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. I think it important --

even if more or less redundant -- to note that the influence of these novels, and of many

other Dick titles, pervades this literary homage.

On the other hand, I do not mean Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas as a slavish

pastiche of Dick's work. Yes, I use many of Dick's favorite literary techniques (for

instance, multiple third-person point-of-view narration) and some of those

quintessentially Dickian science fictional "elements" (for instance, the reality breakdown)

to structure the novel, but I do not always deploy them as Dick would have. My failure to

do so may or may not be lamentable, but it is not an accident.

These books proved particularly helpful in the writing of my novel: Only

Apparently Real by Paul Williams, Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament by Gregg

Rickman, The Novels of Philip K. Dick by Kim Stanley Robinson, Real Peace and No

More Vietnams by Richard Nixon, People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck, MD, The

Demonologist by Gerard Brittle, Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler, and two titles

that satirically depict the political personality of Richard Nixon, Our Gang by Philip Roth

and The Public Burning by Robert Coover. I thank the authors.

Finally, I acknowledge the signal contribution of Geoffrey A. Landis, whom I met

in July 1985 while teaching a week of the Clarion SF & Fantasy Writing Workshop at

Michigan State University in East Lansing. Through a subsequent correspondence, Geoff

gave me pages of good material -- drawings, tables, personal speculations, etc. -- about

the likely evolution of the American space program if our country had achieved a military

victory in Vietnam in 1974. I have never been known as a writer of "hard" -- that is,

technologically and/or scientifically knowledgeable -- science fiction, and Geoff is

largely responsible for whatever accuracy and/or verisimilitude the Von Braunville

segments of my narrative may possess. On the other hand, no one should blame him for

my surrealistic lapses in these same passages. Once again, Geoff, my gratitude.

Michael Bishop

Pine Mountain, Georgia

January 14 to May 19, 1986

Prelude

The alien pink Moon peers into Philip K. Dick's apartment in Santa Ana,

California. The year is 1982 (although maybe not the 1982 of most history books), and

Dick himself has just suffered a debilitating stroke.

The Moon pins him to the floor in a circle of pink light. It projects -- weirdly -- an

arc of lunar surface onto his back. Craters, maria, and bays ripple across the jacket that he

was wearing when the stroke felled him. He is still wearing it as, subconsciously

conscious, he lies waiting for someone -- a friend, neighbor, the police -- to find him and

dispatch him to the hospital.

A hefty tomcat stalks into this ring of pink light, sits down beside the stricken

man. The cat meows once, nuzzles Dick's brow, grates his cheek with a tongue like wet

Velcro. After a while, the cat gingerly mounts its owner's jacket, pads across the shadowy

map of the Moon, and settles down in the clammy swale of the small of Dick's back for a

winter snooze.

February, thinks the quasi-conscious stroke victim, is a fucking horrible time to

die. . .

Soon, tiny machines in the fallen writer's blood begin to build a half-substantive,

half-astral simulacrum to warehouse his mind and memories.

Half-assed's more like it, thinks Dick, noting the buzz in his veins. This is weird.

This is all-fired fucking weird.

His second self is a sort of material ghost, which rises buck-naked and

shimmering from the mortal body of the stricken man. So swiftly, silently, and

imperceptibly is Philip K. Dick2 lifted out of Philip K. Dick1 that Harvey Wallbanger, the

cat, doesn't even stir. The other cats in the apartment are equally unaffected.

It feels to Dick2 as if someone has left a freezer door open somewhere, and he

looks upon his fallen self with astonished pity. "You poor bastard," he says. "Crazy shit

like this always happens to you. It's happened again."

A tangible ghost, Dick2 knows that intangible nanocomputers in the circulatory

system of Dick1 used that body as a template for his own miraculous form.

Goosebumps begin to prickle Dick2's resurrected flesh, and he begins trembling

with compassion as well as the cold. Dick1 has not arisen -- he will never arise again --

and Dick2, bereaved, loves him as fully as Dick1 loved each of his friends in life.

A life, Dick2 realizes, that is soon to end. A life that the evil policies of King

Richard twisted into a parody of the real thing in Dick1's middle age, and a life for which

Dick2 mourns as he stands shivering in the frigid lunar pinkness.

This is another secret ascension, reflects Dick2. My second fucking secret

ascension. I understand -- again -- that this world is irreal, and that above or beyond it

dwells some benign but hidden Entity who wants to remove our blinders. Although we're

occluded, this Entity wants us to see through our occlusion to the reality that eternally

appertains . . .

Time and space are illusions, Dick2 tells himself, walking to a closet to find

something with which to cover his nakedness. For at the moment it is warmth that Dick2

wants, not profound ontological insights. When he opens the closet door, he finds that his

half-astral body can indeed impinge upon the "solid" forms of this world. And why not?

If Dick1's world is actually irreal, then why shouldn't a ghost -- to some, the very essence

of irreality -- be able to function within it?

And I can function here, thinks Dick2, the pre-ghost of the yet living Philip K.

Dick. At least for a time. Until the Entity behind our occlusion withdraws its support. . .

The pre-ghost rifles the stuff in the closet like a prop lady going through the trunk

of a theater company. He just wants to get warm. To bundle himself in comfortable

clothes that don't make any kind of premeditated statement -- except, possibly, that he

isn't a proponent of empty style-consciousness.

At last he finds some worn trousers, a loose denim work shirt, and a silver jacket.

This last is a name-brand jobbie, with an affected little designer tag, but he -- Dick1 --

bought it on a whim because he needed a jacket and liked the sportiness of its cut, and he

-- Dick2 -- is delighted to snug into it as soon as he's pulled on the pants and shirt.

No underwear.

Why do I need underwear? wonders the Dickian pre-ghost. Isn't it clear that I

don't? Biology's behind me. Us half-astral beings are no longer slaves to secretions and

exudates . . .

Dick2 falls into an easy chair, tugs on some slouchy, low-cut tennis shoes, glances

again at Dick1.

You're doomed, he thinks. You were always doomed. You managed to get as far

as you did only because you were too fucking proud to succumb to the lie of consensus

reality. You wouldn't pull in your antennae. And look where it got you, Phil. Just look.

Dick2 rises, shuffles around the apartment, eventually sits down at the desk in the

room where Dick1's typewriter resides. He begins to type. Silently but maniacally, his

fingers tap-dance the keys. The type arms blur in their cage, a hundred hummingbirds

hammering at the mendaciousness of the night. Time is telescoped, reality turned upside

down.

Neighbors, barging in, find Dick1 sprawled unconscious on the living-room rug.

Harvey Wallbanger meows, and friends arrive to ferry the comatose writer to a nearby

medical facility. Every once in a while, someone enters the apartment to take away a cat

or a paperback novel or a toothbrush, but, through all of this, Dick2 continues to type.

February falls, March marches in, and the pre-ghost becomes a true ghost when a

new series of merciless strokes, triggering heart failure, abstracts Philip K. Dick1 from the

alternative irreality of the time stream in which he lived.

You poor fucking bastard, mourns the feverish consciousness at his typewriter,

fingers still furiously tapping. God-speed.

Bizarre images elbow the brain of Dick2. Writing on erasable parchment, invisible

bond, he takes himself to the Moon. A tunnel opens in the spot where the Moon should

be, and he goes through it to the Omicron Ceti binary, seventy parsecs distant, there to

meet the Entity sustaining this entire irreal Cosmos. They rap, God and the ghost at the

machine, and at the end of their colloquy Dick2 is sent spiraling back through the hoops

of his consciousness to an apartment in Santa Ana, California.

The ghost stops typing. He has been mind-wiped. Somewhere in King Richard's

Amerika -- apparently one of the mountain states -- he catches a disturbing glimpse of his

primary's burial, but he can no longer remember the identity of this person -- which is to

say, he can no longer recall his own identity.

If he could read, a skill that he has forgotten, he could put a name to himself by

pulling out X1's driver's license, or scanning his book plates, or trying to dig up some of

his canceled checks. Unfortunately, just back from his chat with the Deity, all he knows

about himself now is that he has fallen prey to an unforgiving kind of amnesia.

I need help, thinks X2. God knows, I need help.

Although the apartment holds him several more days, he works up his courage by

doing snuff and brewing hot black coffee. Finally, he ventures out of doors.

Mysteriously, greenbacks bulge in X1's wallet, and he -- X2 -- is able to extract them from

the billfold at will, a karmic gift of startling proportion. On the sidewalks, out in the wan

March sunlight, he, the ghost, acquires full substance. He suddenly possesses both a

shadow and a voice.

Impressed by this second shot at life, X2 hails a cab.

It comes squealing up. "Where to, buddy?" asks the driver. He is a real human

being, the erstwhile ghost observes. A dude with a brilliant bald spot. A dude whose

breath reeks of jalapeño peppers and bravura cheddar.

"The airport," X2 says. "Take me to the airport."

1

In order to clean their cage, Cal Pickford picked up two of the varmints known as

Brezhnev bears. Although they didn't stink (at least no worse than did most of the critters

in the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium), or gobble live mice, or scream like banshees, or

secrete venom or musk, or need a lot of arduous grooming, or go belly up if he once

forgot to feed them, or parrot his every thoughtless cuss word, Cal wrinkled his nose and

unceremoniously dropped the "bears" into a deep cardboard box full of cedar chips.

The fall didn't hurt them, but it was a less than delicate way to treat the creatures,

easily the pet shop's most profitable item since his arrival.

Cal knew why he disliked them, of course, but as he worked at the rear of the

shop in West Georgia Commons mall dumping out the pee-soaked carpeting of cedar

chips from his fifth glass cage of the morning and replacing it with a fresh layer of

newsprint and a clean floor of chips, he tried not to think about the popular, but

grotesque, beasties. Let the ugly-cute varmints scurry, and let the with-it young

professionals (UpMos) who regarded them as status symbols plop down their cash to buy

'em.

Today, Lia monopolized Cal's thoughts. She was in only the third week of her

private practice as a psychotherapist over in Warm Springs, but if clients didn't soon start

signing up with her for sessions, his pay as a pet-shop hand would fall far short of what

the Bonner-Pickfords needed to meet the payments on either Lia's new "preowned" car or

the rent on their apartment in Pine Mountain. Cal had a paid-for '68 Dodge Dart for his

commute to LaGrange, but Lia had mortgaged her success as a shrink to a '79 Mercury

Cougar. Together they were just scraping by.

That they both lived seventeen-plus miles from their jobs made no sense, but after

moving to Georgia from Colorado, where they had met at a Red Rocks folk-rock concert

in '76, Lia had insisted on living as near her surviving relatives -- her invalid mother,

Emily, and her brother, Jeff, and his family -- as possible. Because Jeff managed a horse

farm northwest of Pine Mountain, Pine Mountain had snared them, but Cal still wondered

how he -- a superannuated hippie cowboy -- had ever ended up in King Richard's Solid

South, land of cotton, cloggers, and Co' Cola.

Suddenly, Cal was aware of another presence at the back of the shop. He looked

up and saw a man of immense size walking between the aisles, scrutinizing everything

around him. Occasionally, this well-dressed man -- his three-piece suit was

conspicuously at odds with his middle linebacker's physique -- would pick an item off a

shelf (a currying comb or a container of flea powder), examine it briefly, and then set it

back down. He peered at the ceiling and into the corners of the shop, as well as at the

merchandise, and he carried himself with menacing authority.

"Anything I can do for you?" Cal asked, squatting beside a bag of cedar chips.

The man stopped and stared down at him. "Just looking."

"Well, go right ahead. We're glad to have browsers."

"I didn't say I was browsing," the big man replied, stepping closer to Cal's row of

glass cages. "I said I was looking."

"Looking's okay, too. Go ahead and look."

The interloper scrutinized Cal as if he were a currying comb or a box of flea

powder. "One thing I don't do is browse. Guess I'll never be your typical goddamn

'browser'."

A bruiser's more like it, Cal thought, decidedly uncomfortable with this line of

talk. Why was the guy still looking at him, for God's sake, and why would he come into

the Happy Puppy and put his hands all over everything if he weren't in the market for

some kind of animal or pet product?

"If there's anything I can help you with," Cal said, "let me know."

"You'll be the first to know, buddy," the man said, the line of his lips vaguely

resembling a smirk. But the smirk faded, and the man ambled slowly back toward the

front of the shop, picking up or squinting at various items as he walked. Eventually, he

swaggered past the cash computer into the main concourse of the mall.

Cal, shaken, tried to recall what he had been thinking about before the

interruption.

"Pickford!" Mr. Kemmings, the owner of this franchise of the Pet Emporium,

shouted. "Pickford, come up here, please!"

Cal was up to his elbows in cedar chips, fragrant red shavings sticking to his arms

like flower petals. He brushed them back down into the sack, shouted "Coming!" at his

employer, and then hurried to wash up at a sink in the shop's restroom. When he finally

got to the front, Mr. Kemmings, who was trying to sell a couple of ring doves to an old

woman in a tweed suit, told him to wait on a second customer.

This woman had just entered. Although she was decades younger than the Agatha

Christie character harkening to Mr. Kemmings, she hovered much closer to forty than did

Cal, who was still six years shy of that scary personal benchmark. Thirty-nine, Cal

estimated. Maybe as much as forty-one. She wore a black cape, sunglasses, and scarlet

riding britches tucked into tall leather boots.

Incognito, Cal thought. She's sauntering around incognito.

Mr. Kemmings said, "This lady says she'd like to buy a pet, Pickford. She wants

recommendations. Help her."

"Yes, sir." In Colorado, you said, "Yeah" or "All right" or "You bet." In Georgia,

you said, "Yes, sir" or "Yes, ma'am."

The woman in sunglasses was peering through her mirror lenses at a tank of

tropical fish.

"Do you like fish?" Cal asked her.

"Only when they're baked and served with lemon and a sprig of parsley.

Preferably on rice."

"You'd have to bake a whole school of these to make a meal," Cal said. "And

even one red snapper'd be cheaper."

The woman straightened. Her mirrors tracked him down. "I'm not terribly

concerned about costs."

"I wish we'd known that. We could've stocked a few animals from endangered

species." Immediately, Cal regretted the sarcasm. If Mr. Kemmings heard crap like that,

the old guy'd can him, and then what would he and Lia do?

Surprisingly, the woman was smiling. "That's pretty witty for a pet-store flunky,

Mr. Pickford."

"I'm sorry. Really. I shouldn't've said it."

"Why not? It's a free country."

Gal's mind gave him a troubling flash of the big guy who had preceded this

woman into the shop. "If you're rich, white, and Republican, maybe. Otherwise you'd

better hope whoever you're talking to isn't wired." Cal couldn't believe he'd said that. Out

of the frying pan. Into the inferno. Lia would have to buy him an asbestos mitten for his

tongue, his most inflammatory appendage.

A wry smile replaced the woman's warm one. "No, it's free even for people like

you, Mr. Pickford. In these United States, one out of three's a passing grade. You can flag

'em all and still prosper if you're not an avowed antipatriot."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'd like it better if you said, 'Yes, miss.' "

"Yes, miss."

"I'm assuming you're saying that freely -- with no sense of being yanked about."

"Yes, ma'am. I mean, Yes, miss."

"I came in here to buy a pet, a friend to keep me company when there's no one

else who'll do."

How often can that happen? Cal thought, for this woman, whether pushing forty

or glancing back over her shoulder at it, had a nice figure and a well-proportioned face.

Her sunglasses couldn't hide the pleasing symmetry of her features.

Aloud he said, "Are you a dog person or a cat person? Maybe that would help me

get a fix on you."

"I hope I'm not either, Mr. Pickford. You make both sobriquets sound like titles."

"Titles?"

"His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, Dog Person. All-Star Center Fielder

Murph Dailey, Cat Person. Can you imagine those words engraved on dinner

invitations?"

Suddenly, Cal was frightened. Who was he talking to? Was this person maybe --

in actual fact -- wired? What about the guy who'd come in ahead of her? Most of Mr. K's

customers had an easy-going, unpretentious, down-home manner about them. You didn't

see that many upper-crusters bopping around West Georgia Commons. Even if they had

money, or breeding, or both, they also had enough of one or both to act like everyday

Americans instead of the highfalutin characters in a play by Oscar Wilde. Cal was now

certain that his "rich, white, and Republican" remark had been a big mistake. This woman

was letting him know. She wanted him to sweat. And that was the only "fix" on her that

she intended him to arrive at.

Maybe she'd like to buy a snake, Cal thought. A rattler. Or possibly our boa

constrictor.

"I've heard a good deal about Brezhnev bears," she said. "You have some, don't

you? I believe I'd like to see them."

"Take her back there," Mr. Kemmings encouraged Cal. The boss had lost the

battle with his own customer, but apparently didn't want to steal Cal's potential sale.

"We've got a good stock of 'em right now, miss, but they're going like hot cakes. Pick one

or two out before the weekend crowd gets in here."

Hot cakes. Cal imagined drenching the naked backs of Brezhnev bears with Log

Cabin syrup.

Shaking this image from his head, he led his customer to the benches at the shop's

rear. Here were six aquariums, each housing -- on cedar chips, not in water -- two or

more of the popular pets. One of the aquariums still needed its chips dumped and

replaced, but Cal squared his back to it, shielding it from the woman's view, and she

began scrutinizing the "bears" in the other cages.

"My, they're odd little animals, aren't they?"

Cal said nothing.

"How long have you been selling them?"

"Me personally or Mr. Kemmings's shop? I've only been here since the middle of

January. About eight weeks."

"I meant the shop, of course."

"Well, the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium's had them ever since the first shipments

arrived from the Soviet Union. Maybe six months. That's because Nixon's secretary of

agriculture, Hiram Berthelot, hails from Woodbury, not that far from here, and I guess he

wanted local pet stores to be among the first in the country to offer the critters for sale."

"The efficacy of friends in high places."

"I guess so. Anyway, New Yorkers had to wait a month or two longer than Allan

tans to buy theirs."

Gracefully lifting the wings of her cape, the woman squatted before an aquarium.

She put the tip of one finger to the glass, an inch away from the tawny-maned head of

one of the animals. "They're not really bears, I know that. So what are they?"

"They're cavies, ma'am." Cal swallowed. "I mean, miss." He felt again that this

woman was toying with him. A person totally ignorant of Brezhnev bears was a person

who had been marooned on an uncharted island for the past half year.

"Cavies?"

"Guinea pigs. Most scientists don't like to call them that anymore, though. 'Guinea

pig' has some bad connotations."

"But they're naked. Except for their bushy little manes, that is. Guinea pigs have

hair. Some of them have quite a lot of hair. When I was a girl, a friend of mine owned

two Peruvian guinea pigs, and they looked like tangled balls of chocolate- or soot-

colored yarn. She had to clip them every month or so just to be able to tell their heads

from their heinies."

"These guinea pigs -- cavies -- were bred especially for laboratory research by

Soviet scientists, miss. That's why they're nicknamed Brezhnev bears. Sort of a tip of the

hat to détente and President Nixon's foreign-policy successes."

Cal hated himself for choosing his words with such craven care, but this lady --

and the strange guy who'd come in ahead of her -- had him spooked. If he blew his job at

the mall, Lia might finally stop trying to rescue him from his suicidal impulses. She

wanted their move to Georgia to be a fresh start, not a rehash of past problems.

The woman stood up, simultaneously releasing her cape. "But why are they

hairless?"

"To reduce the need for hands-on care. That's what makes them such good pets

for busy young people with jobs. Also, it pretty much cuts out the gamy odor that you get

with regular guinea pigs, and that's another plus. With all the cultural and technological

exchanges we've got going with the Soviets nowadays, it was almost inevitable that

Secretary Berthelot would arrange to import some of these bald commie cavies for

American laboratories."

"And the manes?"

"I think they're just for cuteness. The Kremlin has a strain that's completely

naked. Unfortunately, they give most people the willies. But Brezhnev bears, well, their

looks mostly make you giggle and feel protective and want to take a couple home for pets

or conversation pieces."

"Or status symbols?"

"That, too."

"Do you think, Mr. Pickford, I'm the sort of woman who requires status symbols

to bolster her ego?"

"No, miss. You asked to see them."

"I know I did. And I'm going to buy a pair. Not for status, though. For their

cuteness. For their company."

She selected two cavies, and Cal showed her some unoccupied aquariums so that

she could buy one of those, too -- along with a bag of guinea-pig pellets, a water bottle,

and a large sack of cedar chips. Her total bill came to $122.00, plus tax, and Mr.

Kemmings, beaming, let Cal ring it all up himself.

Maybe now I'll learn your name, Cal thought. He was ready to receive from their

customer a check or credit card. He wanted to know her name partly because he felt that

knowing it would make her less intimidating and partly because he had the odd suspicion

that he ought to know it already.

But rather than a check or a credit card, the woman handed over cash. A one-

hundred-dollar bill, a twenty, and a ten.

Feeling stymied, or possibly even subtly mocked, Cal gave her three dollars and

twelve cents in change. The two pennies (he noted, as he always did) bore in profile the

graven likeness of Richard Nixon, the only living president ever to secure this honor.

Moreover, King Richard's men had achieved this coup not after his retirement but during

the first year of his third term. Both pennies, in fact, were from that year, 1977, with the

word Liberty to the left of RN's visage and a D (for the Denver mint) stamped a quarter

inch beneath his ski-slope nose.

"Is there anything else I should know about their care?" the woman asked,

pocketing her change.

"Keep them warm. Sixty-five degrees, or about that, or they'll catch cold and cash

in their chips." (Pun half-assedly intended.)

"Can do. However, it's only about fifty outside today. How do I get them to my

car?"

Cal remembered that a nippy March headwind had fought his Dart all the way to

the mall this morning. The "bears" could stand a few minutes in such conditions, of

course, but if one of them were a trifle puny when it left the shop, even brief exposure to

the cold could be life-threatening. And because Mr. K. guaranteed the health of his

animals for a week after purchase, any Brezhnev bear that died during that time meant

lost profits.

But the boss had overheard. "Pickford'll help you, miss," he said, walking toward

them from the hamsters and gerbils. "Drive your car around back. Park it where you see

our name on one of the service doors. We'll load your purchases for you."

We'll? What's this "we'll" business? Mr. K. was fifty-eight, going on eighty-five,

with a damaged ticker and chronic shortness of breath. Cal didn't expect him to tote

heavy pet supplies to customers' automobiles, but he resented his use of the royal "we"

almost as much as he resented having a living man's kisser on legal coins of the realm.

Outside, after squeezing through the door with an aquarium in which two scared

Brezhnev bears were running amok, Cal encountered a big, cordovan-colored Cadillac.

He tried to hold a nonchalant look on his face as he eased the cage onto the leather-

upholstered seat and put everything else in the Fleetwood's trunk.

"You like my car?"

"I couldn't afford gas for it, much less the insurance."

"Why hasn't a smart fellow your age -- over thirty? -- found more challenging,

and better-paying work?" A significant gesture at the pet store. "Were you ever in trouble

with the authorities?"

Michael Bishop - Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

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