Philip K. Dick - We Can Build You

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WE CAN BUILD YOU

by Philip K. Dick

Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and

simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Originally published by DAW Books, Inc., New York, in 1972.

ISBN O-679-75296-X

To Robert and Ginny Heinlein,

whose kindness to us meant more

than ordinary words can answer.

Our sales technique was perfected in the early 1970s. First we put an ad in a local

newspaper, in the classified.

Spinet piano, also electronic organ, repossessed,

in perfect condition, SACRIFICE. Cash or good credit

risk wanted in this area, to take over payments rather

than transport back to Oregon. Contact Frauenzimmer

Piano Company, Mr. Rock, Credit Manager, Ontario, Ore.

For years we've run this ad in newspapers in one town after another, all up and down the

western states and as far inland as Colorado. The whole approach developed on a scientific,

systematic basis; we use maps, and sweep along so that no town goes untouched. We own four turbine-

powered trucks, out on the road constantly, one man to a truck.

Anyhow, we place the ad, say in the San Rafael Independent-Journal, and soon letters start

arriving at our office in Ontario, Oregon, where my partner Maury Rock takes care of all that. He

sorts the letters and compiles lists, and then when he has enough contacts in a particular area,

say around San Rafael, he night-wires the truck. Suppose it's Fred down there in Mann County. When

Fred gets the wire he brings out his own map and lists the calls in proper sequence. And then he

finds a pay phone and telephones the first prospect.

Meanwhile, Maury has airmailed an answer to each person who's written in response to the

ad.

Dear Mr. So-and-so:

We were gratified to receive your response to our notice

in the San Rafael Independent-Journal. The man who is handling

this matter has been away from the office for a few days now,

so we've decided to forward to him your name and address with

the request that he contact you and provide you with all the

details.

The letter drones on, but for several years now it has done a good job for the company.

However, of late, sales of the electronic organs have fallen off. For instance, in the Vallejo

area we sold forty spinets not so long ago, and not one single organ.

Now, this enormous balance in favor of the spinet over the electronic organ, in terms of

sales, led to an exchange between I and my partner, Maury Rock; it was heated, too.

I got to Ontario, Oregon, late, having been down south around Santa Monica discussing

matters with certain dogooders there who had invited law-enforcement officials in to scan our

enterprise and method of operating . . . a gratuitous action which led to nothing, of course,

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since we're operating strictly legally.

Ontario isn't my hometown, or anybody else's. I hail from Wichita Falls, Kansas, and when

I was high school age I moved to Denver and then to Boise, Idaho. In some respects Ontario is a

suburb of Boise; it's near the Idaho border-- you go across a long metal bridge--and it's a flat

land, there, where they farm. The forests of eastern Oregon don't begin that far inland. The

biggest industry is the Ore-Ida potato patty factory, especially its electronics division, and

then there're a whole lot of Japanese farmers who were shuffled back that way during World War Two

and who grow onions or something. The air is dry, real estate is cheap, people do their big

shopping in Boise; the latter is a big town which I don't like because you can't get decent

Chinese food there. It's near the old Oregon Trail, and the railroad goes through it on its way to

Cheyenne.

Our office is located in a brick building in downtown Ontario across from a hardware

store. We've got root iris growing around our building. The colors of the iris look good when you

come driving up the desert routes from California and Nevada.

So anyhow I parked my dusty Chevrolet Magic Fire turbine convertible and crossed the

sidewalk to our building and our sign:

MASA ASSOCIATES

MASA stands for MULTIPLEX ACOUSTICAL SYSTEM OF AMERICA, a made-up electronics-type name

which we developed due to our electronic organ factory, which, due to my family ties, I'm deeply

involved with. It was Maury who came up with Frauenzimmer Piano Company, since as a name it fitted

our trucking operation better. Frauenzimmer is Maury's original old-country name, Rock being made-

up, too. My real name is as I give it: Louis Rosen, which is German for roses. One day I asked

Maury what Frauenzimmer meant, and he said it means womankind. I asked where he specifically got

the name Rock.

"I closed my eyes and touched a volume of the encyclopedia, and it said ROCK TO SUBUD."

"You made a mistake," I told him. "You should have called yourself Maury Subud."

The downstairs door of our building dates back to 1965 and ought to be replaced, but we

just don't have the funds. I pushed the door open, it's massive and heavy but swings nicely, and

walked to the elevator, one of those old automatic affairs. A minute later I was upstairs stepping

out in our offices. The fellows were talking and drinking loudly.

"Time has passed us by," Maury said at once to me. "Our electronic organ is obsolete."

"You're wrong," I said. "The trend is actually _toward_ the electronic organ because

that's the way America is going in its space exploration: electronic. In ten years we won't sell

one spinet a day; the spinet will be a relic of the past."

"Louis," Maury said, "please look what our competitors have done. Electronics may be

marching forward, but without us. Look at the Hammerstein Mood Organ. Look at the Waldteufel

Euphoria. And tell me why anyone would be content like you merely to bang out music."

Maury is a tall fellow, with the emotional excitability of the hyperthyroid. His hands

tend to shake and he digests his food too fast; they're giving him pills, and if those don't work

he has to take radioactive iodine someday. If he stood up straight he'd be six three. He's got, or

did have once, black hair, very long but thinning, and large eyes, and he always had a sort of

disconcerted look, as if things are going all wrong on every side.

"No good musical instrument becomes obsolete," I said. But Maury had a point. What had

undone us was the extensive brain-mapping of the mid 1960s and the depth-electrode techniques of

Penfield and Jacobson and Olds, especially their discoveries about the mid-brain. The hypothalamus

is where the emotions lie, and in developing and marketing our electronic organ we had not taken

the hypothalamus into account. The Rosen factory never got in on the transmission of selective-

frequency short range shock, which stimulates very specific cells of the mid-brain, and we

certainly failed from the start to see how easy--and important--it would be to turn the circuit

switches into a keyboard of eighty-eight black and whites.

Like most people, I've dabbled at the keys of a Hammerstein Mood Organ, and I enjoy it.

But there's nothing creative about it. True, you can hit on new configurations of brain

stimulation, and hence produce entirely new emotions in your head which would never otherwise show

up there. You might--theoretically--even hit on the combination that will put you in the state of

nirvana. Both the Hammerstein and Waldteufel corporations have a big prize for that. But that's

not music. That's escape. Who wants it?

"I want it," Maury had said back as early as December of 1978. And he had gone out and

hired a cashiered electronics engineer of the Federal Space Agency, hoping he could rig up for us

a new version of the hypothalamus-stimulation organ.

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But Bob Bundy, for all his electronics genius, had no experience with organs. He had

designed simulacra circuits for the Government. Simulacra are the synthetic humans which I always

thought of as robots; they're used for Lunar exploration, sent up from time to time from the Cape.

Bundy's reasons for leaving the Cape are obscure. He drinks, but that doesn't dim his

powers. He wenches. But so do we all. Probably he was dropped because he's a bad security risk;

not a Communist--Bundy could never have doped out even the existence of political ideas--but a bad

risk in that he appears to have a touch of hebephrenia. In other words, he tends to wander off

without notice. His clothes are dirty, his hair uncombed, his chin unshaved, and he won't look you

in the eye. He grins inanely. He's what the Federal Bureau of Mental Health psychiatrists call

_dilapidated_. If someone asks him a question he can't figure out how to answer it; he has speech

blockage. But with his hands--he's damn fine. He can do his job, and well. So the McHeston Act

doesn't apply to him.

However, in the many months Bundy had worked for us, I had seen nothing invented. Maury in

particular kept busy with him, since I'm out on the road.

"The only reason you stick up for that electric keyboard Hawaiian guitar," Maury said to

me, "is because your dad and brother make the things. That's why you can't face the truth."

I answered, "You're using an ad hominem agreement."

"Talmud scholarism," Maury retorted. Obviously, he--all of them, in fact--were well-

loaded; they had been sopping up the Ancient Age bourbon while I was out on the road driving the

long hard haul.

"You want to break up the partnership?" I said. And I was willing to, at that moment,

because of Maury's drunken slur at my father and brother and the entire Rosen Electronic Organ

Factory at Boise with its seventeen full-time employees.

"I say the news from Vallejo and environs spells the death of our principal product,"

Maury said. "Even with its sixhundred-thousand possible tone combinations, some never heard by

human ears. You're a bug like the rest of your family for those outer-space voodoo noises your

electronic dungheap makes. And you have the nerve to call it a musical instrument. None of you

Rosens have an ear. I wouldn't have a Rosen electronic sixteen-hundred-dollar organ in my home if

you gave it to me at cost; I'd rather have a set of vibes."

"All right," I yelled, "you're a purist. And it isn't sixhundred-thousand; it's seven-

hundred-thousand."

"Those souped-up circuits bloop out one noise and one only," Maury said, "however much

it's modified--it's just basically a whistle."

"One can compose on it," I pointed out.

"Compose? It's more like creating remedies for diseases that don't exist, using that

thing. I say either burn down the part of your family's factory that makes those things or damn

it, Louis, convert. Convert to something new and useful that mankind can lean on during its

painful ascent upward. Do you hear?" He swayed back and forth, jabbing his long finger at me.

"We're in the sky, now. To the stars. Man's no longer hidebound. Do you hear?"

"I hear," I said. "But I recall that you and Bob Bundy were supposed to be the ones who

were hatching up the new and useful solution to our problems. And that was months ago and

nothing's come of it."

"We've got something," Maury said. "And when you see it you'll agree it's oriented toward

the future in no uncertain terms."

"Show it to me."

"Okay, we'll take a drive over to the factory. Your dad and your brother Chester should be

in on it; it's only fair, since it'll be them who produce it."

Standing with his drink, Bundy grinned at me in his sneaky, indirect fashion. All this

inter-personal communication probably made him nervous.

"You guys are going to bring ruin down on us," I told him. "I've got a feeling."

"We face ruin anyhow," Maury said, "if we stick with your Rosen WOLFGANG MONTE VERDI

electronic organ, or whatever the decal is this month your brother Chester's pasting on it."

I had no answer. Gloomily, I fixed myself a drink.

The Mark VII Saloon Model Jaguar is an ancient huge white car, a collector's item, with

fog lights, a grill like the Rolls, and naturally hand-rubbed walnut, leather seats, and many

interior lights. Maury kept his priceless old 1954 Mark VII in mint condition and tuned perfectly,

but we were able to go no faster than ninety miles an hour on the freeway which connects Ontario

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with Boise.

The languid pace made me restless. "Listen Maury," I said, "I wish you would begin

explaining. Bring the future to me right now, like you can in words."

Behind the wheel, Maury smoked away at his Corina Sport cigar, leaned back and said,

"What's on the mind of America, these days?"

"Sexuality," I said.

"No."

"Dominating the inner planets of the solar system before Russia can, then."

"No."

"Okay, you tell me."

"The Civil War of 1861."

"Aw chrissakes," I said.

"It's the truth, buddy. This nation is obsessed with the War Between the States. I'll tell

you why. It was the only and first national epic in which we Americans participated; that's why."

He blew Corina Sport cigar smoke at me. "It matured we Americans."

"It's' not on my mind," I said.

"I could stop at a busy intersection of any big downtown city in the U.S. and collar ten

citizens, and six of those ten, if asked what was on their mind, would say, 'The U.S. Civil War of

1861.' And I've been working on the implications-- the practical side--ever since I figured that

out, around six months ago. It has grave meaning for MASA ASSOCIATES, if we want it to, I mean; if

we're alert. You know they had that Centennial a decade or so back; recall?"

"Yes," I said. "In 1961."

"And it was a flop. A few souls got out and refought a few battles, but it was nothing.

Look in the back seat."

I switched on the interior lights of the car and twisting around I saw on the back seat a

long newspaper-wrapped carton, shaped like a display window dummy, one of those manikins. From the

lack of bulge up around the chest I concluded it wasn't a female one.

"So?" I said.

"That's what I've been working on."

"While I've been setting up areas for the trucks!"

"Right," Maury said. "And this, in time, will be so far long remembered over any sales of

spinets or electronic organs that it'll make your head swim."

He nodded emphatically. "Now when we get to Boise-- listen. I don't want your dad and

Chester to give us a hard time. That's why it's necessary to inform you right now. That back there

is worth a billion bucks to us or anyone else who happens to find it. I've got a notion to pull

off the road and demonstrate it to you, maybe at some lunch counter. Or a gas station, even; any

place that's light." Maury seemed very tense and his hands were shaking more than usual.

"Are you sure," I said, "that isn't a Louis Rosen dummy, and you're going to knock me off

and have it take my place?"

Maury glanced at me oddly. "Why do you say that? No, that's not it, but by chance you're

close, buddy. I can see that our brains still fuse, like they did in the old days, in the early

'seventies when we were new and green and without backing except maybe your dad and that warning-

to-all-ofus younger brother of yours. I wonder, why didn't Chester become a large-animal vet like

he started out to be? It would have been safer for the rest of us; we would have been spared. But

instead a spinet factory in Boise, Idaho. Madness!" He shook his head.

"Your family never even did that," I said. "Never built anything or created anything. Just

middlemen, schlock hustlers in the garment industry. I mean, what did they do to set us up in

business, like Chester and my dad did? What is that dummy in the back seat? I want to know, and

I'm not stopping at any gas station or lunch counter; I've got the distinct intuition that you

really do intend to do me in or some such thing. So let's keep driving."

"I can't describe it in words."

"Sure you can. You're an A-one snow-job artist."

"Okay. I'll tell you why that Civil War Centennial failed. Because all the original

participants who were willing to fight and lay down their lives and die for the Union, or for the

Confederacy, are dead. Nobody lives to be a hundred, or if they do they're good for nothing--they

can't fight, they can't handle a rifle. Right?"

I said, "You mean you have a mummy back there, or one of what in the horror movies they

call the 'undead'?"

"I'll tell you exactly what I have. Wrapped up in those newspapers in the back seat I have

Edwin M. Stanton."

"Who's that?"

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"He was Lincoln's Secretary of War."

"Aw!"

"No, it's the truth."

"When did he die?"

"A long time ago."

"That's what I thought."

"Listen," Maury said, "I have an electronic simulacrum back in the back seat, there. I

built it, or rather we had Bundy build it. It cost me six thousand dollars but it was worth it.

Let's stop at that roadside cafe and gas station up along the road, there, and I'll unwrap it and

demonstrate it to you; that's the only way."

I felt myflesh crawl. "You will indeed."

"Do you think this is just some bagatelle, buddy?"

"No. I think you're absolutely serious."

"I am," Maury said. He began to slow the car and flash the directional signal. "I'm

stopping where it says Tommy's Italian Fine Dinners and Lucky Lager Beer."

"And then what? What's a demonstration?"

"We'll unwrap it and have it walk in with us and order a chicken and ham pizza; that's

what I mean by a demonstration."

Maury parked the Jaguar and came around to crawl into the back. He began tearing the

newspaper from the humanshaped bundle, and sure enough, there presently emerged an elderly-looking

gentleman with eyes shut and white beard, wearing archaically-styled clothing, his hands folded

over his chest.

"You'll see how convincing this simulacrum is," Maury said, "when it orders its own

pizza." He began to tinker with switches which were available at the back of the thing.

All at once the face assumed a grumpy, taciturn expression and it said in a growl, "My

friend, remove your fingers from my body, if you will." It pried Maury's hands loose from it, and

Maury grinned at me.

"See?" Maury said. The thing had sat up slowly and was in the process of methodically

brushing itself off; it had a stern, vengeful look, now, as if it believed we had done it some

harm, possibly sapped it and knocked it out, and it was just recovering. I could see that the

counter man in Tommy's Italian Fine Dinners would be fooled, all right; I could see that Maury had

made his point already. If I hadn't seen it spring to life I would believe myself it was just a

sour elderly gentleman in old-style clothes and a split white beard, brushing itself off with an

attitude of outrage.

"I see," I said.

Maury held open the back door of the Jaguar, and the Edwin M. Stanton electronic

simulacrum slid over and rose to a standing position in a dignified fashion.

"Does it have any money?" I asked.

"Sure," Maury said. "Don't ask trifling questions; this is the most serious matter you've

ever had facing you." As the three of us started across the gravel to the restaurant, Maury went

on, "Our entire economic future and that of America's involved in this. Ten years from now you and

I could be wealthy, due to this thing, here."

The three of us had a pizza at the restaurant, and the crust was burned at the edges. The

Edwin M. Stanton made a noisy scene, shaking its fist at the proprietor, and then after finally

paying our bill, we left.

By now we were an hour behind schedule, and I was beginning to wonder if we were going to

get to the Rosen factory after all. So I asked Maury to step on it, as we got back into the

Jaguar.

"This car'll crack two hundred," Maury said, starting up, "with that new dry rocket fuel

they have out."

"Don't take unnecessary chances," the Edwin M. Stanton told him in a sullen voice as the

car roared out onto the road. "Unless the possible gains heavily outweigh the odds."

"Same to you," Maury told it.

The Rosen Spinet Piano & Electronic Organ Factory at Boise, Idaho, doesn't attract much

notice, since the structure itself, technically called the plant, is a flat, one-story building

that looks like a single-layer cake, with a parking lot behind it, a sign over the office made of

letters cut from heavy plastic, very modern, with recessed red lights behind. The only windows are

in the office.

At this late hour the factory was dark and shut, with no one there. We drove on up into

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the residential section, then.

"What do you think of this neighborhood?" Maury asked the Edwin M. Stanton.

Seated upright in the back of the Jaguar the thing grunted, "Rather unsavory and

unworthy."

"Lisfen," I said, "my family lives down here near the industrial part of Boise so as to be

in easy walking distance from the factory." It made me angry to hear a mere fake criticizing

genuine humans, especially a fine person like my dad. And as to my brother--few radiation-mutants

ever made the grade in the spinet and electronic organ industry outside of Chester Rosen. _Special

birth_ persons, as they are called. There is so much discrimination and prejudice in so many

fields . . . most professions of high social status are closed to them.

It was always disappointing to the Rosen family that Chester's eyes are set beneath his

nose, and his mouth is up where his eyes ought to be. But blame H-bomb testing in the 'fifties and

'sixties for him--and all the others similar to him in the world today. I can remember, as a kid,

reading the many medical books on birth defects--the topic has naturally interested many people

for a couple of decades, now--and there are some that make Chester nothing at all. One that always

threw me into a week-long depression is where the embryo disintegrates in the womb and is born in

pieces, a jaw, an arm, handful of teeth, separate fingers. Like one of those plastic kits out of

which boys build a model airplane. Only, the pieces of the embryo don't add up to anything;

there's no glue in this world to stick it together.

And there're embryos with hair growing all over them, like a slipper made from yak fur.

And one that dries up so that the skin cracks; it looks like it's been maturing outdoors on the

back step in the sun. So lay off Chester.

The Jaguar had halted at the curb before the family house, and there we were. I could see

lights on inside the house, in the living room; my mother, father and brother were watching TV.

"Let's send the Edwin M. Stanton up the stairs alone," Maury said. "Have it knock on the

door, and we'll sit here in the car and watch."

"My dad'll recognize it as a phony," I said, "a mile away. In fact he'll probably kick it

back down the steps, and you'll be out the six hundred it cost you." Or whatever it was Maury had

paid for it, and no doubt charged against MASA's assets.

"I'll take the chance," Maury said, holding the back door of the car open so that the

contraption could get out. To it he said, "Go up there to where it says 1429 and ring the bell.

And when the man comes to the door, you say, 'Now he belongs to the ages.' And then just stand."

"What does that mean?" I said. "What kind of opening remark is that supposed to be?"

"It's Stanton's famous remark that got him into history," Maury said. "When Lincoln died."

"'Now he belongs to the ages,' "the Stanton practiced as it crossed the sidewalk and

started up the steps.

"I'll explain to you in due course how the Edwin M. Stanton was constructed," Maury said

to me. "How we collected the entire body of data extant pertaining to Stanton and had it

transcribed down at UCLA into instruction punch-tape to be fed to the ruling monad that serves the

simulacrum as a brain."

"You know what you're doing?" I said, disgusted. "You're wrecking MASA, all this kidding

around, this harebrained stuff--I never should have gotten mixed up with you."

"Quiet," Maury said, as the Stanton rang the doorbell.

The front door opened and there stood my father in his trousers, slippers, and the new

bathrobe I had given him at Christmas. He was quite an imposing figure, and the Edwin M. Stanton,

which had started on its little speech, halted and shifted gears.

"Sir," it finally said, "I have the privilege of knowing your boy Louis."

"Oh yes," my father said. "He's down in Santa Monica right now."

The Edwin M. Stanton did not seem to know what Santa Monica was, and it stood there at a

loss. Beside me in the Jaguar, Maury swore with exasperation, but it struck me funny, the

simulacrum standing there like some new, no-good salesman, unable to think up anything at all to

say and so standing mute.

But it was impressive, the two old gentlemen standing there facing each other, the Stanton

with its split white beard, its old-style garments, my father looking not much newer. The meeting

of the patriarchs, I thought. Like in the synagogue.

My father at last said to it, "Won't you step inside?" He held the door open, and the

thing passed on inside and out of sight; the door shut, leaving the porch lit up and empty.

"How about that," I said to Maury.

We followed after it. The door being unlocked, we went on inside.

There in the living room sat the Stanton, in the middle of the sofa, its hands on its

knees, discoursing with my dad, while Chester and my mother went on watching the TV.

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"Dad," I said, "you're wasting your time talking to that thing. You know what it is? A

machine Maury threw together in his basement for six bucks."

Both my father and the Edwin M. Stanton paused and glanced at me.

"This nice old man?" my father said, and he got an angry, righteous expression; his brows

knitted and he said loudly, "Remember, Louis, that man is a frail reed, the most feeble thing in

nature, but goddamn it, mein Sohn, a thinking reed. The entire universe doesn't have to arm itself

against him; a drop of water can kill him." Pointing his finger at me excitedly, my dad roared on,

"But if the entire universe were to crush him, you know what? You know what I say? Man would still

be more noble!" He pounded on the arm of his chair for emphasis. "You know why, mein Kind? Because

he knows that he dies and I'll tell you something else; he's got the advantage over the god-damn

universe because it doesn't know a thing of what's going on. And," my dad concluded, calming down

a little, "all our dignity consists in just that. I mean, man's little and can't fill time and

space, but he sure can make use of the brain God gave him. Like what you call this 'thing,' here.

This is no thing. This is _ein Mensch_, a man. Say, I have to tell you a joke." He launched, then,

into a joke half in Yiddish, half in English.

When it was over we all smiled, although it seemed to me that the Edwin M. Stanton's was

somewhat formal, even forced.

Trying to think back to what I had read about Stanton, I recalled that he was considered a

pretty harsh guy, both during the Civil War and the Reconstruction afterward, especially when he

tangled with Andrew Johnson and tried to get him impeached. He probably did not appreciate my

dad's humanitarian-type joke because he got the same stuff from Lincoln all day long during his

job. But there was no way to stop my dad anyhow; his own father had been a Spinoza scholar, well

known, and although my dad never went beyond the seventh grade himself he had read all sorts of

books and documents and corresponded with literary persons throughout the world.

"I'm sorry, Jerome," Maury said to my dad, when there was a pause, "but I'm telling you

the truth." Crossing to the Edwin M. Stanton, he reached down and fiddled with it behind the ear.

"Glop," the Stanton said, and then became rigid, as lifeless as a window-store dummy; the

light in its eyes expired, its arms paused and stiffened. It was graphic, and I glanced to see how

my dad was taking it. Even Chester and my mom looked up from the TV a moment. It really made one

pause and consider. If there hadn't been philosophy in the air already that night, this would have

started it; we all became solemn. My dad even got up and walked over to inspect the thing

firsthand.

"Oy gewalt." He shook his head.

"I could turn it back on," Maury offered.

"_Nein, das geht mir nicht_." My dad returned to his easy chair, made himself comfortable,

and then asked in a resigned, sober voice, "Well, how did the sales at Vallejo go, boys?" As we

got ready to answer he brought out an Anthony & Cleopatra cigar, unwrapped it and lit up. It's a

fine-quality Havana-filler cigar, with a green outer wrapper, and the odor filled the living room

immediately. "Sell lots of organs and AMADEUS GLUCK spinets?" He chuckled.

"Jerome," Maury said, "the spinets sold like lemmings, but not one organ moved."

My father frowned.

"We've been involved in a high-level confab on this topic," Maury said, "with certain

facts emerging. The Rosen electronic organ--"

"Wait," my dad said. "Not so fast, Maurice. On this side of the Iron Curtain the Rosen

organ has no peer." He produced from the coffee table one of those masonite boards on which we

have mounted resistors, solar batteries, transistors, wiring and the like, for display. "This

demonstrates the workings of the Rosen true electronic organ," he began. "This is the rapid delay

circuit, and--"

"Jerome, I know how the organ works. Allow me to make my point."

"Go ahead." My dad put aside the masonite board, but before Maury could speak, he went on,

"But if you expect us to abandon the mainstay of our livelihood simply because salesmanship--and I

say this knowingly, not without direct experience of my own--when and because salesmanship has

deteriorated, and there isn't the will to sell--"

Maury broke in, "Jerome, listen. I'm suggesting expansion."

My dad cocked an eyebrow.

"Now, you Rosens can go on making all the electronic organs you want," Maury said, "but I

know they're going to diminish in sales volume all the time, unique and terrific as they are. What

we need is something which is really new; because after all, Hammerstein makes those mood organs

and they've gone over good, they've got that market sewed up airtight, so there's no use our

trying that. So here it is, my idea."

Reaching up, my father turned on his hearing aid.

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"Thank you, Jerome," Maury said. "This Edwin M. Stanton electronic simulacrum. It's as

good as if Stanton had been alive here tonight discussing topics with us. What a sales idea that

is, for educational purposes, like in the schools. But that's nothing; I had that in mind at

first, but here's the authentic deal. Listen. We propose to President Mendoza in our nation's

Capitol that we abolish war and substitute for it a ten-year-spaced-apart centennial of the U.S.

Civil War, and what we do is, the Rosen factory supplies all the participants, simulacra--that's

the plural, it's a Latin type word--of _everybody_. Lincoln, Stanton, Jeff Davis, Robert E. Lee,

Longstreet, and around three million simple ones as soldiers we keep in stock all the time. And we

have the battles fought with the participants really killed, these made-to-order simulacra blown

to bits, instead of just a grade-B movie type business like a bunch of college kids doing

Shakespeare. Do you get my point? You see the scope of this?"

We were all silent. Yes, I thought, there is scope to it.

"We could be as big as General Dynamics in five years," Maury added.

My father eyed him, smoking his A & C. "I don't know, Maurice. I don't know." He shook his

head.

"Why not? Tell me, Jerome, what's wrong with it?"

"The times have carried you away, perhaps," my father said in a slow voice tinged with

weariness. He sighed. "Or am I getting old?"

"Yeah, you're getting old!" Maury said, very upset and flushed.

"Maybe so, Maurice." My father was silent for a little while and then he drew himself up

and said, "No, your idea is too--ambitious, Maurice. We are not that great. We must take care not

to reach too high for maybe we will topple, _nicht wahr?_"

"Don't give me that German foreign language," Maury grumbled. "If you won't approve this.

. . I'm too far into it already, I'm sorry but I'm going ahead. I've had a lot of good ideas in

the past which we've used and this is the best so far. It is the times, Jerome. We have to

_move_."

Sadly, to himself, my father resumed smoking his cigar.

Still hoping my father would be won over, Maury left the Stanton--on consignment, so fo

speak--and we drove back to Ontario. By then it was nearly midnight, and since we both were

depressed by my father's weariness and lack of enthusiasm Maury invited me to stay overnight at

his house. I was glad to accept; I felt the need of company.

When we arrived we found his daughter Pris, who I had assumed was still back at Kasanin

Clinic at Kansas City in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Mental Health. Pris, as I knew from

what Maury had told me, had been a ward of the Federal Government since her third year in high

school; tests administered routinely in the public schools had picked up her "dynamism of

difficulty," as the psychiatrists are calling it now--in the popular vernacular, her schizophrenic

condition.

"She'll cheer you up," Maury said, when I hung back. "That's what you and I both need.

She's grown a lot since you saw her last; she's no child anymore. Come on." He dragged me into the

house by one arm.

She was seated on the floor in the living room wearing pink pedal pushers. Her hair was

cut short and in the years since I had seen her she had lost weight. Spread around her lay colored

tile; she was in the process of cracking the tile into irregular pits with a huge pair of long-

handled cutting pliers.

"Come look at the bathroom," she said, hopping up. I followed warily after her.

On the bathroom walls she had sketched all sorts of sea monsters and fish, even a mermaid;

she had already partially tiled them with every color imaginable. The mermaid had red tiles for

tits, one bright tile in the center of each breast.

The panorama both repelled and interested me.

"Why not have little light bulbs for nipples?" I said. "When someone comes in to use the

can and turns on the light the nipples light up and guide him on his way."

No doubt she had gotten into this tiling orgy due to years of occupational therapy at

Kansas City; the mental health people were keen on anything creative. The Government has literally

tens of thousands of patients in their several clinics throughout the country, all busy weaving or

painting or dancing or making jewelry or binding books or sewing costumes for plays. And all the

patients are there involuntarily, committed by law. Like Pris, many of them had been picked up

during puberty, which is the time psychosis tends to strike.

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Undoubtedly Pris was much better now, or they would not have released her into the outer

world. But she still did not look normal or natural to me. As we walked back to the living room

together I took a close look at her; I saw a little hard, heart-shaped face, with a widow's crown,

black hair, and due to her odd make-up, eyes outlined in black, a Harlequin effect, and almost

purple lipstick; the whole color scheme made her appear unreal and doll-like, lost somewhere back

behind the mask which she had created out of her face. And the skinniness of her body put the

capper on the effect: she looked to me like a dance of death creation animated in some weird way,

probably not through the usual assimilation of solid and liquid foods . . . perhaps she chewed

only walnut shells. But anyhow, from one standpoint she looked good, although unusual to say the

least. For my money, however, she looked less normal than the Stanton.

"Sweet Apple," Maury said to her, "we left the Edwin M. Stanton over at Louis' dad's

house."

Glancing up, she said, "Is it off?" Her eyes burned with a wild, intense flame, which both

startled and impressed me.

"Pris," I said, "the mental health people broke the mold when they produced you. What an

eerie yet fine-looking chick you turned out to be, now that you've grown up and gotten out of

there."

"Thanks," she said, with no feeling at all; her tone had, in former times, been totally

flat, no matter what the situation, including big crises. And that was the way with her still.

"Get the bed ready," I said to Maury, "so I can turn in." Together, he and I unfolded the

guest bed in the spare room; we tossed sheets and blankets on it, and a pillow. His daughter made

no move to help; she remained in the living room snipping tile.

"How long's she been working on that bathroom mural?" I asked.

"Since she got back from K.C. Which has been quite a while, now. For the first couple of

weeks she had to report back to the mental health people in this area. She's not actually out;

she's on probation and receiving out-patient therapy. In fact you could say she's on loan to the

outside world."

"Is she better or worse?"

"A lot better. I never told you how bad she got, there in high school before they picked

it up on their test. We didn't know what was wrong. Frankly, I thank god for the McHeston Act; if

they hadn't picked it up, if she had gone on getting sicker, she'd be either a total schizophrenic

paranoid or a dilapidated hebephrenic, by now. Permanently institutionalized for sure."

I said, "She looks so strange."

"What do you think of the tiling?"

"It won't increase the value of the house."

Maury bristled. "Sure it will."

Appearing at the door of the spare room, Pris said, "I asked, _is it off?_" She glowered

at us as if she had guessed we were discussing her.

"Yes," Maury said, "unless Jerome turned it back on to discourse about Spinoza with it."

"What's it know?" I asked. "Has it got a lot of spare random useless type facts in it?

Because if not my dad won't be interested long."

Pris said, "It has the same facts that the original Edwin M. Stanton had. We researched

his life to the nth degree."

I got the two of them out of my bedroom, then took off my clothes and went to bed.

Presently I heard Maury say goodnight to his daughter and go off to his own bedroom. And then I

heard nothing--except, as I had expected, the snap-snap of tile being cut.

For an hour I lay in bed trying to sleep, falling off and then being brought back by the

noise. At last I got up, turned on the light, put my clothes back on, smoothed my hair in place,

rubbed my eyes, and came out of the spare room. She sat exactly as I had seen her first that

evening, yogi-style, now with an enormous heap of broken tile around her.

"I can't sleep with that racket," I told her.

"Too bad." She did not even glance up.

"I'm a guest."

"Go elsewhere."

"I know what using that pliers symbolizes," I told her. "Emasculating thousands upon

thousands of males, one after another. Is that why you left Kasanin Clinic? To sit here all night

doing this?"

"No. I'm getting a job."

"Doing what? The labor market's glutted."

"I have no fears. There's no one like me in the world. I've already received an offer from

a company that handles emigration processing. There's an enormous amount of statistical work

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involved."

"So it's someone like you," I said, "who'll decide which of us can leave Earth."

"I turned it down. I don't intend to be just another bureaucrat. Have you ever heard of

Sam K. Barrows?"

"Naw," I said. But the name did sound familiar.

"There was an article on him in _Look_. When he was twenty he always rose at five a.m.,

had a bowl of stewed prunes, ran two miles around the streets of Seattle, then returned to his

room to shave and take a cold shower. And then he went off and studied his law books."

"Then he's a lawyer."

"Not anymore," Pris said. "Look over in the bookcase. The copy of _Look_ is there."

"Why should I care?" I said, but I went to get the magazine.

Sure enough, there on the cover in color was a man labeled:

SAM K. BARROWS, AMERICA'S MOST ENTERPRISING

NEW YOUNG MULTI-MILLIONAIRE

It was dated June 18, 1981, so it was fairly recent. And sure enough, there came Sam,

jogging up one of the waterfront streets of downtown Seattle, in khaki shorts and gray sweatshirt,

at what appeared to be sunup, puffing happily, a man with head shining due to being smooth-shaven,

his eyes like the dots stuck in a snowman's face: expressionless, tiny. No emotion there; only the

lower half of the face seemed to be grinning.

"If you saw him on TV--" Pris said.

"Yeah," I said, "I saw him on TV." I remembered now, because at the time--a year ago--the

man had struck me unfavorably. His monotonous way of speaking. . . he had leaned close to the

reporter and mumbled at him very rapidly. "Why do you want to work for him?" I asked.

"Sam Barrows," Pris said, "is the greatest living land speculator in existence. Think

about that."

"That's probably because we're running out of land," I said. "All the realtors are going

broke because there's nothing to sell. Just people and no place to put them." And then I

remembered.

Barrows had solved the real estate speculation problem. In a serks of far-reaching legal

actions, he had managed to get the United States Government to permit private speculation in land

on the other planets. Sam Barrows had singlehandedly opened the way for subdividers on Luna, Mars

and Venus. His name would go down in history forever.

"So that's the man you want to work for," I said. "The man who polluted the untouched

other worlds." His salesmen sold from offices all over the United States his glowinglydescribed

Lunar lots.

"'Polluted untouched other worlds,' "Pris mimicked. "A slogan of those conservationists."

"But true," I said. "Listen, how are you going to make use of your land, once you've

bought it? How do you live on it? No water, no air, no heat, no--"

"That will be provided," Pris said.

"How?"

"That's what makes Barrows the great man he is," Pris said. "His vision. Barrows

Enterprises is working day and night--"

"A racket," I broke in.

There was silence, then. A strained silence.

"Have you ever actually spoken to Barrows?" I asked. "It's one thing to have a hero;

you're a young girl and it's natural for you to worship a guy who's on the cover of magazines and

on TV and he's rich and single-handedly he opened up the Moon to loan sharks and land speculators.

But you were talking about getting a job."

Pris said, "I applied for a job at one of his companies. And I told them I wanted to see

him personally."

"They laughed."

"No, they sent me into his office. He sat there and listened to me for a whole minute.

Then, of course, he had to take care of other business; they sent me on to the personnel manager's

office."

"What did you say to him in your minute?"

"I looked at him. He looked at me. You've never seen him in real life. He's incredibly

handsome."

"On television," I said, "he's a lizard."

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