Martian Time Slip

VIP免费

2024-12-23 1 0 696.66KB 104 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

PHILIP K. DICK

MARTIAN TIME-SLIP

To Mark and Jodie

From the depths of phenobarbital slumber, Silvia Bohlen heard something that called. Sharp, it broke the

layers into which she had sunk, damaging her perfect state of nonself.

"Mom," her son called again, from outdoors.

Sitting up, she took a swallow of water from the glass by the bed; she put her bare feet on the floor and rose

with difficulty. Time by the clock: nine-thirty. She found her robe, walked to the window.

I must not take any more of that, she thought. Better to succumb to the schizophrenic process, join the rest of

the world. She raised the window shade; the sunlight, with its familiar reddish, dusty tinge, filled her sight and

made it impossible to see. She put up her hand, calling, "What is it, David?"

"Mom, the ditch rider's here!"

Then this must be Wednesday. She nodded, turned and walked unsteadily from the bedroom to the kitchen,

where she managed to put on the good, solid, Earth-made coffeepot.

What must I do? she asked herself. All's ready for him. David will see, anyhow. She turned on the water at

the sink and splashed her face. The water, unpleasant and tainted, made her cough. We should drain the tank, she

thought. Scour it, adjust the chlorine flow and see how many of the filters are plugged; perhaps all. Couldn't the

ditch rider do that? No, not the UN's business.

"Do you need me?" she asked, opening the back door. The air swirled at her, cold and choked with the fine

sand; she averted her head and listened for David's answer. He was trained to say no.

"I guess not," the boy grumbled.

Later, as she sat in her robe at the kitchen table drinking coffee, her plate of toast and applesauce before her,

she looked out on the sight of the ditch rider arriving in his little flat-bottom boat which put-putted up the canal

in its official way, never hurrying and yet always arriving on schedule. This was 1994, the second week in

August. They had waited eleven days, and now they would receive their share of water from the great ditch

which passed by their line of houses a mile to the Martian north.

The ditch rider had moored his boat at the sluice gate and was hopping up onto dry land, encumbered with

his ringed binder--in which he kept his records--and his tools for switching the gate. He wore a gray uniform

spattered with mud, high boots almost brown from the dried silt. German? But he was not; when the man turned

his head she saw that his face was flat and Slavic and that in the center of the visor of his cap was a red star. It

was the Russians' turn, this time; she had lost track.

And she evidently was not the only one who had lost track of the sequence of rotation by the managing UN

authorities. For now she saw that the family from the next house, the Steiners, had appeared on their front porch

and were preparing to approach the ditch rider: all six of them, father and heavy-set mother and the four blonde,

round, noisy Steiner girls.

It was the Steiners' water which the rider was now turning off.

"Bitte, mein Herr," Norbert Steiner began, but then he, too, saw the red star, and became silent.

To herself, Silvia smiled. Too bad, she thought.

Opening the back door, David hurried into the house. "Mom, you know what? The Steiners' tank sprang a

leak last night, and around half their water drained out! So they don't have enough water stored up for their

garden, and it'll die, Mr. Steiner says."

She nodded as she ate her last bit of toast. She lit a cigarette.

"Isn't that terrible, Mom?" David said.

Silvia said, "And the Steiners want him to leave their water on just a little longer."

"We can't let their garden die. Remember all the trouble we had with our beets? And Mr. Steiner gave us that

chemical from Home that killed the beetles, and we were going to give them some of our beets but we never did;

we forgot."

That was true. She recalled with a guilty start; we did promise them . . . and they've never said anything, even

though they must remember. And David is always over there playing.

"Please go out and talk to the rider," David begged.

She said, "I guess we could give them some of our water later on in the month; we could run a hose over to

their garden. But I don't believe them about the leak--they always want more than their share."

"I know," David said, hanging his head.

"They don't deserve more, David. No one does."

"They just don't know how to keep their property going right," David said. "Mr. Steiner, he doesn't know

anything about tools."

"Then that's their responsibility." She felt irritable, and it occurred to her that she was not fully awake; she

needed a Dexamyl, or her eyes would never be open, not until it was nightfall once more and time for another

phenobarbital. Going to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, she got down the bottle of small green heart-

shaped pills, opened it, and counted; she had only twenty-three left, and soon she would have to board the big

tractor-bus and cross the desert to town, to visit the pharmacy for a refill.

From above her head came a noisy, echoing gurgle. The tank on the roof, their huge tin water storage tank,

had begun to fill. The ditch rider had finished switching the sluice gate; the pleas of the Steiners had been in

vain.

Feeling more and more guilty, she filled a glass with water in order to take her morning pill. If only Jack

were home more, she said to herself; it's so empty around here. It's a form of barbarism, this pettiness we're

reduced to. What's the point of all this bickering and tension, this terrible concern over each drop of water, that

dominates our lives? There should be something more. . . . We were promised so much, in the beginning.

Loudly, from a nearby house, the racket of a radio blared up suddenly; dance music, and then an announcer

giving a commercial for some sort of farm machinery.

". . . Depth and angle of the furrow," the voice declared, echoing in the cold bright morning air, "pre-set and

selfadjusting so that even the most unskilled owner can--almost the first time--"

Dance music returned; the people had turned to a different station.

The squabble of children rose up. Is it going to be like this all day? she asked herself, wondering if she could

face it. And Jack, away until the weekend at his job--it was almost like not being married, like not having a man.

Did I emigrate from Earth for this? She clapped her hands to her ears, trying to shut out the noise of radios and

children.

I ought to be back in bed; that's where I belong, she thought as she at last resumed dressing for the day which

lay ahead of her.

In his employer's office in downtown Bunchewood Park, Jack Bohlen talked on the radio-telephone to his

father in New York City. The contact, made through a system of satellites over millions of miles of space, was

none too good, as always; but Leo Bohlen was paying for the call.

"What do you mean, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mountains?" Jack said loudly. "You must be mistaken, Dad,

there's nothing there--it's a total waste area. Anybody in real estate can tell you that."

His father's faint voice came. "No, Jack, I believe it's sound. I want to come out and have a look and discuss

it with you. How's Silvia and the boy?"

"Fine," Jack said. "But listen--don't commit yourself, because it's a known fact that any Mars real estate away

from the part of the canal network that works--and remember that only about one-tenth of it works--comes close

to being an outright fraud." He could not understand how his father, with his years of business experience,

especially in investments in unimproved land, could have gotten on to such a bum steer. It frightened him.

Maybe his dad, in the years since he had seen him, had gotten old. Letters told very little; his dad dictated them

to one of his company stenographers.

Or perhaps time flowed differently on Earth than on Mars; he had read an article in a psychology journal

suggesting that. His father would arrive a tottering, white-haired old relic. Was there any way to get out of the

visit? David would be glad to see his grandfather, and Silvia liked him, too. In Jack Bohlen's ear the faint, distant

voice related news of New York City, none of any interest. It was unreal to Jack. A decade ago he had made a

terrific effort to detach himself from his community on Earth, and he had succeeded; he did not want to hear

about it.

And yet the link with his father remained, and it would be shored up in a little while by his father's first trip

off Earth; he had always wanted to visit another planet before it was too late--before his death, in other words.

Leo was determined. But despite improvements in the big interplan ships, travel was hazardous. That did not

bother him. Nothing would deter him; he had already made reservations, in fact.

"Gosh, Dad," Jack said, "it sure is wonderful that you feel able to make such an arduous trip. I hope you're up

to it." He felt resigned.

Across from him his employer, Mr. Yee, regarded him and held up a slip of yellow paper on which was

written a service call. Skinny, elongated Mr. Yee in his bow tie and singlebreasted suit . . . the Chinese style of

dress rigorously rooted here on alien soil, as authentic as if Mr. Yee did business in downtown Canton.

Mr. Yee pointed to the slip and then solemnly acted out its meaning: he shivered, poured from left hand to

right, then mopped his forehead and tugged at his collar. Then he inspected the wrist watch on his bony wrist. A

refrigeration unit on some dairy farm had broken down, Jack Bohlen understood, and it was urgent; the milk

would be ruined as the day's heat increased.

"O.K., Dad," he said, "we'll be expecting your wire." He said good-bye and hung up. "Sorry to be on the

phone so long," he said to Mr. Yee. He reached for the slip.

"An elderly person should not make the trip here," Mr. Yee said in his placid, implacable voice.

"He's made up his mind to see how we're doing," Jack said.

"And if you are not doing as well as he would wish, can he help you?" Mr. Yee smiled with contempt. "Are

you supposed to have struck it rich? Tell him there are no diamonds. The UN got them. As to the call which I

gave you: that refrigeration unit, according to the file, was worked on by us two months ago for the same

complaint. It is in the power source or conduit. At unpredictable times the motor slows until the safety switch

cuts it off to keep it from burning out."

"I'll see what else they have drawing power from their generator," Jack said.

It was hard, working for Mr. Yee, he thought as he went upstairs to the roof where the company's copters

were parked. Everything was conducted on a rational basis. Mr. Yee looked and acted like something put

together to calcu late. Six years ago, at the age of twenty- two, he had calculated that he could operate a more

profitable business on Mars than on Earth. There was a crying need on Mars for service maintenance on all sorts

of machinery, on anything with moving parts, since the cost of shipping new units from Earth was so great. An

old toaster, thoughtlessly scrapped on Earth, would have to be kept working on Mars. Mr. Yee had liked the idea

of salvaging. He did not approve of waste, having been reared in the frugal, puritanical atmosphere of People's

China. And being an electrical engineer in Honan Province, he possessed training. So in a very calm and

methodical way he had come to a decision which for most people meant a catastrophic emotional wrenching; he

had made arrangements to emigrate from Earth, exactly as he would have gone about visiting a dentist for a set

of stainless steel dentures. He knew to the last UN dollar how far he could cut his overhead, once he had set up

shop on Mars. It was a lowmargin operation, but extremely professional. In the six years since 1988 he had

expanded until now his repairmen held priority in cases of emergency--and what, in a colony which still had

difficulty growing its own radishes and cooling its own tiny yield of milk, was not an emergency?

Shutting the 'copter door, Jack Bohlen started up the engine, and soon was rising above the buildings of

Bunchewood Park, into the hazy dull sky of midmorning, on his first service call of the day.

Far to his right, an enormous ship, completing its trip from Earth, was settling down onto the circle of basalt

which was the receiving field for living cargoes. Other cargoes had to be delivered a hundred miles to the east.

This was a firstclass carrier, and shortly it would be visited by remoteoperated devices which would fleece the

passengers of every virus and bacteria, insect and weed-seed adhering to them; they would emerge as naked as

the day they were born, pass through chemical baths, sputter resentfully through eight hours of tests--and then at

last be set free to see about their personal survival, the survival of the colony having been assured. Some might

even be sent back to Earth; those whose condition implied genetic defects revealed by the stress of the trip. Jack

thought of his dad patiently enduring the immigration processing. Has to be done, my boy, his dad would say.

Necessary. The old man, smoking his cigar and meditating . . . a philosopher whose total formal education

consisted of seven years in the New York public school system, and during its most feral period. Strange, he

thought, how character shows itself. The old man was in touch with some level of knowledge which told him

how to behave, not in the social sense, but in a deeper, more permanent way. He'll adjust to this world here, Jack

decided. In his short visit he'll come to terms better than Silvia and I. About as David has . . .

They would get along well, his father and his boy. Both shrewd and practical, and yet both haphazardly

romantic, as witness his father's impulse to buy land somewhere in the F. D. R. Mountains. It was a last gasp of

hope springing eternal in the old man; here was land selling for next to nothing, with no takers, the authentic

frontier which the habitable parts of Mars were patently not. Below him, Jack noted the Senator Taft Canal and

aligned his flight with it; the canal would lead him to the McAuliff dairy ranch with its thousands of acres of

withered grass, its once prize herd of Jerseys, now bent into something resembling their ancestors by the unjust

environment. This was habitable Mars, this almost-fertile spiderweb of lines, radiating and crosscrossing but

always barely adequate to support life, no more. The Senator Taft, directly below now, showed a sluggish and

repellent green; it was water sluiced and filtered in its final stages, but here it showed the accretions of time, the

underlying slime and sand and contaminants which made it anything but potable. God knew what alkalines the

population had absorbed and built into its bones by now. However, they were alive. The water had not killed

them, yellow-brown and full of sediment as it was. While over to the west--the reaches, which were waiting for

human science to rare back and pass its miracle.

The archaeological teams which had landed on Mars early in the '70s had eagerly plotted the stages of retreat

of the old civilization which human beings had now begun to replace. It had not at any time settled in the desert

proper. Evidently, as with the Tigris and Euphrates civilization on Earth, it had clung to what it could irrigate. At

its peak, the old Martian culture had occupied a fifth of the planet's surface, leaving the rest as it had found it.

Jack Bohlen's house, for instance, near the junction of the William Butler Yeats Canal with the Herodotus; it

stood almost at the edge of the network by which fertility had been attained for the past five thousand years. The

Bohlens were latecomers, although no one had known, eleven years ago, that emigration would fall off so

startlingly.

The radio in the 'copter made static noises, and then a tinny version of Mr. Yee's voice said, "Jack, I have a

service call for you to add. The UN Authority says that the Public School is malfunctioning and their own man is

unavailable."

Picking up the microphone, Jack said into it, "I'm sorry, Mr. Yee--as I thought I'd told you, I'm not trained to

touch those school units. You'd better have Bob or Pete handle that." As I know I told you, he said to himself.

In his logical way, Mr. Yee said, "This repair is vital, and therefore we can't turn it down, Jack. We have

never turned down any repair job. Your attitude is not positive. I will have to insist that you tackle the job. As

soon as it is possible I will have another repairman out to the school to join you. Thank you, Jack." Mr. Yee rang

off.

Thank you, too, Jack Bohlen said acidly to himself.

Below him now he saw the beginnings of a second settlement; this was Lewistown, the main habitation of the

plumbers' union colony which had been one of the first to be organized on the planet, and which had its own

union members as its repairmen; it did not patronize Mr. Yee. If his job became too unpleasant, Jack Bohlen

could always pack up and migrate to Lewistown, join the union, and go to work at perhaps an even better salary.

But recent political events in the plumbers' union colony had not been to his liking. Arnie Kott, president of the

Water Workers' Local, had been elected only after much peculiar campaigning and some more-than-average

balloting irregularities. His regime did not strike Jack as the sort he wanted to live under; from what he had seen

of it, the old man's rule had all the elements of early Renaissance tyranny, with a bit of nepotism thrown in. And

yet the colony appeared to be prospering economically. It had an advanced public works program, and its fiscal

policies had brought into existence an enormous cash reserve. The colony was not only efficient and prosperous,

it was also able to provide decent jobs for all its inhabitants. With the exception of the Israeli settlement to the

north, the union colony was the most viable on the planet. And the Israeli settlement had the advantage of

possessing die-hard Zionist shock units, encamped on the desert proper, engaged in reclamation projects of all

sorts, from growing oranges to refining chemical fertilizers. Alone, New Israel had reclaimed a third of all the

desert land now under cultivation. It was, in fact, the only settlement on Mars which exported its produce back to

Earth in any quantity.

The water workers' union capital city of Lewistown passed by, and then the monument to Alger Hiss, the first

UN martyr; then open desert followed. Jack sat back and lit a cigarette. Under Mr. Yee's prodding scrutiny, he

had left without remembering to bring his thermos of coffee, and he now felt its lack. He felt sleepy. They won't

get me to work on the Public School, he said to himself, but with more anger than conviction. I'll quit. But he

knew he wouldn't quit. He would go to the school, tinker with it for an hour or so, giving the impression of being

busy repairing, and then Bob or Pete would show up and do the job; the firm's reputation would be preserved,

and they could go back to the office. Everyone would be satisfied, including Mr. Yee.

Several times he had visited the Public School with his son. That was different. David was at the top of his

class, attending the most advanced teaching machines along the route. He stayed late, making the most of the

tutorial system of which the UN was so proud. Looking at his watch, Jack saw that it was ten o'clock. At this

moment, as he recalled from his visits and from his son's accounts, David was with the Aristotle, learning the

rudiments of science, philosophy, logic, grammar, poetics, and an archaic physics. Of all the teaching machines,

David seemed to derive the most from the Aristotle, which was a relief; many of the children preferred the more

dashing teachers at the School: Sir Francis Drake (English history, fundamentals of masculine civility) or

Abraham Lincoln (United States history, basics of modern warfare and the contemporary state) or such grim

personages as Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill. He himself had been born too soon to take advantage of the

tutorial school system, he had gone to classes as a boy where he sat with sixty other children, and later, in high

school, he had found himself listening and watching an instructor speaking over closedcircuit TV along with a

class of a thousand. If, however, he had been allowed into the new school, he could readily have located his own

favorite: on a visit with David, on the first parent-teacher day in fact, he had seen the Thomas Edison Teaching

Machine, and that was enough for him. It took David almost an hour to drag his father away.

Below the 'copter, the desert land gave way to sparse, prairie-like grassland. A barbed-wire fence marked the

beginning of the McAuliff ranch, and with it the area administered by the State of Texas. McAuliff's father had

been a Texas oil millionaire, and had financed his own ships for the emigration to Mars; he had beaten even the

plumbers' union people. Jack put out his cigarette and began to lower the 'copter, searching against the glare of

the sun for the buildings of the ranch.

A small herd of cows panicked and galloped off at the noise of the 'copter; he watched them scatter, hoping

that McAuliff, who was a short, dour-faced Irishman with an obsessive attitude toward life, hadn't noticed.

McAuliff, for good reasons, had a hypochondriacal view of his cows; he suspected that all manner of Martian

things were out to get them, to make them lean, sick, and fitful in their milk production.

Turning on his radio transmitter, Jack said into the microphone, "This is a Yee Company repairship. Jack

Bohlen asking permission to land on the McAuliff strip, in answer to your call."

He waited, and then there came the answer from the huge ranch. "O.K., Bohlen, all clear. No use asking what

took you so long." McAuliff's resigned, grumpy voice.

"Be there any minute now," Jack said, with a grimace.

Presently he made out the buildings ahead, white against the sand.

"We've got fifteen thousand gallons of milk here." McAuliff's voice came from the radio speaker. "And it's

all going to spoil unless you get this damned refrigeration unit going soon."

"On the double," Jack said. He put his thumbs in his ears and leered a grotesque, repudiating face at the radio

speaker.

The ex-plumber, Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Workers' Local, Fourth Planet Branch, rose

from his bed at ten in the morning and as was his custom strolled directly to the steam bath.

"Hello, Gus."

"Hi there, Arnie."

Everybody called him by his first name, and that was good. Arnie Kott nodded to Bill and Eddy and Tom,

and they all greeted him. The air, full of steam, condensed around his feet and drained off across the tiles, to be

voided. That was a touch which pleased him: the baths had been constructed so as not to preserve the run-off.

The water drained out onto the hot sand and disappeared forever. Who else could do that? He thought, Let's see

if those rich Jews up in New Israel have a steam bath that wastes water.

Placing himself under a shower, Arnie Kott said to the fellows around him, "I heard some rumor I want

checked on soon as possible. You know that combine from California, those Portugees that originally held title

on the F.D.R. Mountain Range, and they tried to extract iron ore there, but it was too low grade, and the cost was

way out of line? I heard they sold their holdings."

"Yeah, I heard that too." All the boys nodded. "I wonder how much they lost. Must have taken a terrible

beating."

Arnie said, "No, I heard they found a buyer that was willing to put up more than they paid; they made a

profit, after all these yars. So it paid them to hold out. I wonder who's nuts enough to want that land. I got some

mineral rights there, you know. I want you to check into who bought that land and what kind of operation they

represent. I want to know what they're doing over there."

"Good to know those things." Again everyone nodded, and one man--Fred, it looked like--detached himself

from his shower and padded off to dress. "I'll check into that, Arnie," Fred said over his shoulder. "I'll get to it

right away."

Addressing himself to the remaining men, Arnie soaped himself all over and said, "You know I got to protect

my mineral rights; I can't have some smoozer coming in here from Earth and making those mountains into like

for instance a national park for picnickers. I tell you what I heard. I know that a bunch of Communist officials

from Russia and Hungary, big boys, was over here around a week ago, no doubt looking around. You think

because that collective of theirs failed last year they gave up? No. They got the brains of bugs, and like bugs they

always come back. Those Reds are aching to establish a successful collective on Mars; it's practically a wet

dream of theirs back Home. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that those Portugees from California sold to

Communists, and pretty soon we're seeing the name changed from the F.D.R. Mountains, which is right and

proper, to something like the Joe Stalin Mountains."

The men all laughed appreciatively.

"Now, I got a lot of business ahead of me today to conduct," Arnie Kott said, washing the soapsuds from him

with furious streams of hot water. "So I can't devote myself to this matter any further; I'm relying on you to dig

into it. For example, I have been traveling east where we got that melon experiment in progress, and it seems like

we're about to be entirely successful in inducing the New England type of melon into growing here in this

environment. I know you all have been wondering about that, because everybody likes a good slice of cantaloupe

in the morning for his breakfast, if it's at all possible."

"That's true, Arnie," the boys agreed.

"But," Arnie said, "I got more on my mind than melons. We had one of those UN boys visiting us the other

day protesting our regulations concerning the niggers. Or maybe I shouldn't say that; maybe I should talk like the

UN boys and say 'indigenous population remnants,' or just Bleekmen. What he had reference to was our

licensing the mines owned by our settlement to use Bleekmen at below scale, I mean, below the minimum wage-

-because even those fairies at the UN don't seriously propose we pay scale to Bleekmen figgers. However, we

have this problem that .we can't pay any minimum wage to the Bleekmen niggers because their work is so

inconsistent that we'd go broke, and we have to use them in mining operations because they're the only ones who

can breathe down there, and we can't get oxygen equipment in quantity transported over here at any price less

than outrageous. Somebody's making a lot of money back Home on those oxygen tanks and compressors and all

that. It's a racket, and we're not going to get gouged, I can tell you."

Everybody nodded somberly.

"Now, we can't allow the UN bureaucrats to dictate to us how we'll run our settlement," Arnie said. "We set

up operations here before the UN was anything here but a flag planted in the sand; we had houses built before

they had a pot to piss in anywhere on Mars, including all that disputed area in the south between the U.S. and

France."

"Right, Arnie," the boys all agreed.

"However," Arnie said, "there's the problem that those UN fruits control the waterways, and we got to have

water; we need them for conveyance into and out of the settlement and for source of power and to drink and like

now, like we're here bathing. I mean, those buggers can cut off our water any time; they've got us by the short

hairs."

He finished his shower and padded across the warm, wet tiles to get a towel from the atttendant. Thinking

about the UN made his stomach rumble, and his onetime duodenal ulcer began to burn way down in his left side,

almost at the groin. Better get some breakfast, he realized.

When he had been dressed by the attendant, in his gray flannel trousers and T-shirt, soft leather boots, and

nautical cap, he left the steam bath and crossed the corridor of the Union Hall to his dining room, where Helio,

his Bleekman cook, had his breakfast waiting. Shortly, he sat before a stack of hotcakes and bacon, coffee and a

glass of orange juice, and the previous week's New York Times, the Sunday edition.

"Good morning, Mr. Kott." In answer to his buttonpressing, a secretary from the pooi had appeared, a girl he

had never seen before. Not too good-looking, he decided after a brief glance; he returned to reading the

newspaper. And calling him Mr. Kott, too. He sipped his orange juice and read about a ship that had perished in

space with all three hundred aboard killed. It was a Japanese merchantman carrying bicycles. That made him

laugh. Bicycles in space, and all gone, now; too bad, because on a planet with little mass like Mars, where there

was virtually no power source-- except the sluggish canal system--and where even kerosene cost a fortune,

bicycles were of great economic value. A man could pedal free of cost for hundreds of miles, right over the sand,

too. The only people who used kerosene-powered turbine conveyances were vital functionaries, such as the

repair and maintenance men, and of course important officials such as himself. There were public transports, of

course, such as the tractor-buses which connected one settlement with the next and the outlying residential areas

with the world at large . . . but they ran irregularly, being dependent on shipments from Earth for their fuel. And

personally speaking the buses gave him a case of claustrophobia, they moved so slow.

Reading the New York Times made him feel for a little while as if he were back Home again, in South

Pasadena; his family had subscribed to the West Coast edition of the Times, and as a boy he remembered

bringing it in from the mailbox, in from the street lined with apricot trees, the warm, smoggy little street of neat

one-story houses and parked cars and lawns tended from one weekend to the next without fail. It was the lawn,

with all its equipment and medicines, that he missed most--the wheelbarrow of fertilizer, the new grass seed, the

snippers, the poultry-netting fence in the early spring. . . and always the sprinklers at work throughout the long

summer, whenever the law allowed. Water shortage there, too. Once his Uncle Paul had been arrested for

washing his car on a water-ration day.

Reading further in the paper he came upon an article about a reception at the White House for a Mrs. Lizner

who, as an official of the Birth Control Agency, had performed eight thousand therapeutic abortions and had

thereby set an example for American womanhood. Kind of like a nurse, Arnie Kott decided. Noble occupation

for females. He turned the page.

There, in big type, was a quarter-page ad which he himself had helped compose, a glowing come-on to get

people to emigrate. Arnie sat back in his chair, folded the paper, felt deep pride as he studied the ad; it looked

good, he decided. It would surely attract people, if they had any guts at all and a sincere desire for adventure, as

the ad said.

The ad listed all the skills in demand on Mars, and it was a long list, excluding only canary raiser and

proctologist, if that. It pointed out how hard it was now for a person with only a master's degree to get a job on

Earth, and how on Mars there were good-paying jobs for people with only B.A.'s.

That ought to get them, Arnie thought. He himself had emigrated due to his having only a B.A. Every door

had been shut to him, and then he had come to Mars as nothing but a union plumber, and within a few short

years, look at him. On Earth, a plumber with only a B.A. would be raking up dead locusts in Africa as part of a

U.S. foreign aid work gang. In fact, his brother Phil was doing that right now; he had graduated from the

University of California and had never had a chance to practice his profession, that of milk tester. In his class,

over a hundred milk testers had been graduated, and for what? There were no opportunities on Earth. You have

to come to Mars, Arnie said to himself. We can use you here. Look at the pokey cows on those dairy ranches

outside of town. They could use some testing.

But the catch in the ad was simply that, once on Mars, the emigrant was guaranteed nothing, not even the

certainty of being able to give up and go home; trips back were much more expensive, due to the inadequate

field facilities. Certainly, he was guaranteed nothing in the way of employment. The fault lay with the big

powers back Home, China and the U.S. and Russia and West Germany. Instead of properly backing the

development of the planets, they had turned their attention to further exploration. Their time and brains and

money were all committed to the sidereal projects, such as that frigging flight to Centaurus, which had already

wasted billions of dollars and man-hours. Arnie Kott could not see the sidereal projects for beans. Who wanted

to take a fouryear trip to another solar system which maybe wasn't even there?

And yet at the same time Arnie feared a change in the attitude of the great terrestrial powers. Suppose one

morning they woke up and took a new look at the colonies on Mars and Venus? Suppose they eyed the

ramshackle developments there and decided something should be done about them? In other words, what

became of Arnie Kott when the Great Powers came to their senses? It was a thought to ponder.

However, the Great Powers showed no symptoms of rationality. Their obsessive competitiveness still

governed them; right this moment they were locking horns, two light years away, to Arnie's relief.

Reading further in the paper, he came across a brief article having to do with a women's organization in

Berne, Switzerland, which had met to declare once more its anxiety about colonization.

COLONIAL SAFETY COMMITTEE ALARMED OVER CONDITIONS OF MARS LANDING

FIELDS

The ladies, in a petition presented to the Colonial Department of the UN, had expressed once more their

conviction that the fields on Mars at which ships from Earth landed were too remote from habitation and from

the water system. Passengers in some cases had been required to trek over a hundred miles of wasteland, and

these included women and children and old people. The Colonial Safety Committee wanted the UN to pass a

regulation compelling ships to land at fields within twenty-five miles of a major (named) canal.

Do-gooders, Arnie Kott thought as he read the article. Probably not one of them has ever been off Earth; they

just know what somebody wrote home in a letter, some aunt retiring to Mars on a pension, living on free UN

land and naturally griping. And of course they also depended on their member in residence on Mars, a certain

Mrs. Anne Esterhazy; she circulated a mimeographed newsletter to other public-spirited ladies throughout the

settlements. Arnie received and read her newsletter, The Auditor Speaks Back, a title at which he gagged. He

gagged, too, at the one- and two-line squibs inserted between longer articles:

Pray for potable purification!! Contact colony charismatic councilors and witness for water filtration we can

be proud of!

He could hardly make out the meaning of some of the Auditor Speaks Back articles, they were phrased in

such special jargon. But evidently the newsletter had attracted an audience of devoted women who grimly took

each item to heart and acted out the deeds asked of them. Right now they were undoubtedly complaining, along

with the Colonial Safety Committee back on Earth, about the hazardous distances separating most of the landing

fields on Mars from water sources and human habitation. They were doing their part in one of the many great

fights, and in this particular case, Arnie Kott had managed to gain control of his nausea. For of the twenty or so

landing fields on Mars, only one lay within twenty-five miles of a major canal, and that was Samuel Gompers

Field, which served his own settlement. If by some chance the pressure of the Colonial Safety Committee was

effective, then all incoming passenger ships from Earth would have to land at Arnie Kott's field, with the revenue

received going to his settlement.

It was far from accidental that Mrs. Esterhazy and her newsletter and organization on Earth were advocating

a cause which would be of economic value to Arnie. Anne Esterhazy was Arnie's ex-wife. They were still good

friends, and still owned jointly a number of economic ventures which they had founded or bought into during

their marriage. On a number of levels they still worked together, even though on a strictly personal basis they

had no common ground whatsoever. He found her aggressive, domineering, overly masculine, a tall and bony

female with a long stride, wearing low-heeled shoes and a tweed coat and dark glasses, a huge leather purse

slung from a strap over her shoulder. . . but she was shrewd and intelligent and a natural executive. As long as he

did not have to see her outside of the business context, he could get along with her.

The fact that Anne Esterhazy had once been his wife and that they still had financial ties was not well known.

When he wanted to get in touch with her he did not dictate a letter to one of the settlement's stenographers;

instead he used a little encoding dictation machine which he kept in his desk, sending the reel of tape over to her

by special messenger. The messenger dropped off the tape at an art object shop which Anne owned over in the

Israeli settlement, and her answer, if any, was deposited the same way at the office of a cement and gravel works

on the Bernard Baruch Canal which belonged to Arnie's brother-in-law, Ed Rockingham, his sister's husband.

A year ago, when Ed Rockingham had built a house for himself and Patricia and their three children, he had

acquired the unacquirable: his own canal. He had had it built, in open violation of the law, for his private use,

and it drew water from the great common network. Even Arnie had been outraged. But there had been no

prosecution, and today the canal, modestly named after Rockingham's eldest child, carried water eighty miles out

into the desert, so that Pat Rockingham could live in a lovely spot and have a lawn, a swimming pooi, and a fully

irrigated flower garden. She grew especially large camellia bushes, which were the only ones that had survived

the transplanting to Mars. All during the day, sprinklers revolved and sprayed her bushes, keeping them from

drying up and dying.

Twelve huge camellia bushes seemed to Arnie Kott an ostentation. He did not get along well with his sister

or Ed Rockingham. What had they come to Mars for? he asked himself. To live, at incredible expense and effort,

as much as possible as they had back Home on Earth. To him it was absurd. Why not remain on Earth? Mars, for

Arnie, was a new place, and it meant a new life, lived with a new style. He and the other settlers, both big and

small, had made in their time on Mars countless minute adjustments in a process of adaptation through so many

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

PHILIPK.DICKMARTIANTIME-SLIP2Copyright1964byPhilipK.DickCopyrightrenewed1992byLauraCoelho,ChristopherDick,andIsaHackett3ToMarkandJodie41Fromthedepthsofphenobarbitalslumber,SilviaBohlenheardsomethingthatcalled.Sharp,itbrokethelayersintowhichshehadsunk,damagingherperfectstateofnonself."Mom,"hersoncall...

展开>> 收起<<

Martian Time Slip.pdf

共104页,预览21页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Martian Time Slip

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: