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TITLES BY PHILIP K.DICK AVAILABLE IN PANTHER SCIENCE FICTION
BLADE RUNNER (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN
SAID
NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH
THE ZAP GUN
A SCANNER DARKLY
GALACTIC POT HEALER
OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8
CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON
A HANDFUL OF DARKNESS
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER
A MAZE OF DEATH
LIES, INC. WE CAN BUILD YOU
Philip K. Dick
THE MOST CONSISTENTLY BRILLIANT SF WRITER IN THE WORLD'
JOHN BRUNNER, author of STAND ON ZANZIBAR
Philip K. Dick was born 'in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in
California. He attended college for a year at Berkeley. Apart from writing, his
main interest was music: at one time he ran a record shop and also a classical
music programme for a local radio station. He won the Hugo Award for his classic
novel of alternative history, The Man in the High Castle (1962). He was married
five times and had three children. He died in March 1982.
'Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no
greater praise' Michael Moorcock
'One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Philip K.
Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac'
Sunday Times
'No other writer of his generation had such a powerful intellectual presence. He
has stamped himself not only on our memories but in our imaginations' Brian
Aldiss
The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world' John Brunner
By the same author
Novels
Solar Lottery Eye in the Sky Vulcan's Hammer The Man Who Japed The Cosmic
Puppets The World Jones Made Time Out of Joint Dr Futurity
The Man in the High Castle The Game Players of Titan Clans of the Alphane Moon
Flow My Tears, the
Policeman Said The Penultimate Truth The Simulacra Martian Time-Slip Dr
Bloodmoney or How
We Got Along After the
Bomb
The Unteleported Man The Zap Gun Now Wait for Last Year Counter-Clock World
Blade Runner (also
published as Do
Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?) Ubik
Our Friends from Prolix 8 Galactic Pot-Healer
The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch A Scanner Darkly Valis
The Divine Invasion The Transmigration of
Timothy Archer Confessions of a Crap Artist The Ganymede Takeover
(with Ray Nelson) Deus Irae (with Roger
Zelazny) A Maze of Death Lies, Inc. The Man Whose Teeth
Were All Exactly Alike In Milton Lumky Territory Puttering About in a Small
Land
We Can Build You Humpty Dumpty in
Oakland
Short Stories
A Handful of Darkness The Variable Man The Preserving Machine The Book of Philip
K. Dick The Golden Man
PHILIP K. DICK
Radio Free Albemuth
GRAFTON BOOKS
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
LONDON GLASGOW TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND
Grafton Books
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA
A Grafton UK Paperback Original 1987 Copyright (c)The Estate of Philip K. Dick
1985 ISBN 0-586-06936-4
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow
Set in Times
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may 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-soid, 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.
The publisher would like to thank Tim Powers for providing Philip K. Dick's
final corrected manuscript of this novel, which Dick had given Powers for his
private collection.
Prologue
In 1932 in April a small boy and his mother and father waited on an Oakland,
California, pier for the San Francisco ferry. The boy, who was almost four years
old, noticed a blind beggar, huge and old with white hair and beard, standing
with a tin cup. The little boy asked his father for a nickel, which the boy took
over to the beggar and gave him. The beggar, in a surprisingly hearty voice,
thanked him and gave him back a piece of paper, which the boy took to his father
to see what it was.
'It tells about God,' his father said.
The little boy did not know that the beggar was not actually a beggar but a
supernatural entity visiting Earth to check up on people. Years later the little
boy grew up and became a man. In the year 1974 that man found himself in
terrible difficulties, facing disgrace, imprisonment, and possible death. There
was no way for him to extricate himself. At that point the supernatural entity
returned to Earth, loaned the man a part of his spirit, and saved him from his
difficulties. The man never guessed why the supernatural entity came to rescue
him. He had long ago forgotten the great bearded blind beggar and the nickel he
had given him.
I speak now of these matters.
PART ONE
Phil
My friend Nicholas Brady, who in his own mind helped
save the world, was born in Chicago in 1928 but then
moved right to California. Most of his life was spent in
the Bay Area, especially in Berkeley. He remembered
the metal hitching posts in the shape of horses' heads in
front of the old houses in the hilly part of the city, and
the electric Red Trains that met the ferries, and, most of
all, the fog. Later, by the forties, the fog had ceased to
lie over Berkeley in the night.
Originally Berkeley, at the time of the Red Trains and
the streetcars, was quiet and underpopulated except for
the University, with its illustrious frat houses and fine
football team. As a child Nicholas Brady took in a few
football games with his father, but he never understood
them. He could not even get the team song right. But he
did like the Berkeley campus with the trees and the quiet
groves and Strawberry Creek; most of all he liked the
sewer pipe through which the creek ran. The sewer pipe
I was the best thing on the campus. In summer, when the
creek was low, he crawled up and down it. One time
some people called him over and asked if he was a college
student. He was eleven years old then.
I asked him once why he chose to live his life out in Berkeley, which by the
forties had become overcrowded, noisy, and afflicted by angry students who
fought it out at the Co-op market as if the stacks of canned food were
barricades.
'Shit, Phil,' Nicholas Brady said. 'Berkeley is my home.' People who gravitated
to Berkeley believed that, even if they had only been there a week. They claimed
no other place existed. This became particularly true when the coffeehouses
opened up on Telegraph Avenue and the free speech movement started. One time
Nicholas was standing in line at the Co-op on Grove and saw Mario Savio in line
ahead of him. Savio was smiling and waving at admirers. Nicholas was on campus
the day the PHUQUE sign was held up in the cafeteria, and the cops busted the
guys holding it. However, he was in the bookstore, browsing, and missed the
whole thing.
Although he lived in Berkeley for ever and ever, Nicholas attended the
University for only two months, which made him different from everyone else. The
others attended the University in perpetuity. Berkeley had an entire population
of professional students who never graduated and who had no other goal in life.
Nicholas's nemesis vis-a-vis the University was ROTC, which in his time was
still going strong. As a child Nicholas had gone to a progressive or Communist-
front nursery school. His mother, who had many friends in the Communist Party in
Berkeley in the thirties, sent him there. Later he became a Quaker, and he and
his mother sat around in Friends Meeting the way Quakers do, waiting for the
Holy Spirit to move them to speak. Nicholas subsequently forgot all that, at
least until he enrolled at Cal and found himself given an officer's uniform and
an M-l rifle. Thereupon his unconscious fought back, burdened by old memories;
he damaged the gun and could not go through the manual of arms; he came to drill
out of uniform; he got failing grades; he was informed that failing grades in
ROTC meant automatic expulsion from Cal, to which --Nicholas said, 'What's right
is right.'
However, instead of letting them expel him, he quit.
He was nineteen years old and his academic career was
ruined. It had been his plan to become a paleontologist.
The other big university in the Bay Area, which was Stanford, cost far too much
for him. His mother held the minor post of clerk for the US Department of
Forestry,
in a building on campus; she had no money. Nicholas
faced going to work. He really hated the University and
thought of not returning his uniform. He thought of
showing up at drill with a broom and insisting it was his
M-l rifle. He never thought of firing the M-l rifle at his
superior officers, though; the firing pin was missing.
Nicholas, in those days, was still in touch with reality.
The matter of returning his officer's uniform was solved when the University
authorities opened his gym locker and took the uniform out of it, including both
shirts. Nicholas had been formally severed from the military world; moral
objections, more thoughts of brave demonstrations, vanished from his head, and
in the fashion of students attending Cal he began roaming the streets of
Berkeley, his hands stuck in the back pockets of his Levi's, gloom on his face,
uncertainty in his heart, no money in his wallet, no definite future in his
head. He still lived with his mother, who was tired of the 1 arrangement. He had
no skills, no plans, only inchoate anger. As he walked along he sang a left-wing
marching song from the International Brigade of the Loyalist Army of Spain, a
Communist brigade made up mostly of Germans. The song went:
Vor Madrid im Schiitzengraben, In der Stunde der Gefahr,
Mil den eisernen Brigaden, Sein Herz voll Hass geladen, Stand Hans, der
Kommissar.
The line- he liked best was 'Sein Herz voll Hass
geladen,' which meant 'His heart full of hate.' Nicholas
sang that over and over again as he strode along Berkeley
Way, down to Shattuck, and then up Dwight Way back
to Telegraph. Nobody noticed him because what he was
doing was not unusual in Berkeley at that time. One
often saw as many as ten students striding along in jeans
singing left-wing songs and pushing people out of the
way. '
At the corner of Telegraph and Channing the woman behind the counter at
University Music waved at him, because Nicholas often hung around there browsing
through the records. So he went inside.
'You don't have your uniform on,' the woman said.
'I've dropped out of the fascist university,' Nicholas said, which certainly was
true.
Pat excused herself to wait on a real customer, so he took an album of the
Firebird Suite into a listening booth and put on the side where the giant egg
cracks open. It fitted his mood, although he was not certain what came out of
the egg. The picture on the album cover just showed the egg, and someone with a
spear evidently going to break the egg.
Later on, Pat opened the door of the listening booth, and they talked about his
situation.
'Maybe Herb would hire you here,' Pat said. 'You're in the store all the time,
you know the stock, and you know a lot about classical music.'
'I know where every record in the store is,' Nicholas said, excited at the idea.
'You'd have to wear a suit and tie.'
'I have a suit and tie,' Nicholas said.
Going to work for University Music at nineteen was probably the greatest move of
his life, because it froze him into a mold that never broke, an egg that never
opened - or at least did not open for twenty-five more years, an awfully long
time for someone who had really never done anything but play in the parks of
Berkeley, go to the Berkeley public schools, and spend Saturday afternoons at
the kiddies' matinee at the Oaks Theater on Solano Avenue, where they showed a
newsreel, a selected short subject, and two cartoons before the regular subject,
all for eleven cents.
Working for University Music on Telegraph Avenue made him part of the Berkeley
scene for decades to come and shut off all possibilities of growth or knowledge
of any other life, any larger world. Nicholas had grown up in Berkeley and he
remained in Berkeley, learning how to sell records and later how to buy records,
how to interest customers in new artists, how to refuse taking back defective
records, how to change the toilet paper roll in the bathroom behind the number
three listening booth - it became his whole world: Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra
and Ella Mae Morse, Oklahoma, and later South Pacific, and 'Open the Door,
Richard' and 'If I'd Known You Were Coming I'd Have Baked a Cake.' He was behind
the counter when Columbia brought out LP records. He was opening cartons from
the distributors when Mario Lanza appeared, and he was checking inventory and
back orders when Mario Lanza died. He personally sold five thousand copies of
Jan Peerce's 'Bluebird of Happiness,' hating each copy. He was there when
Capitol Records went into the classical music line and when their classical
music line folded. He was always glad he had gone into the retail record
business, because he loved classical music and loved being around records all
the time, selling them to customers he personally knew and buying them at
discount for his own collection; but he also hated the fact that he had gone
into the record business because he realized the first day he was told to sweep
the floor that he would be a semi-janitor, semi-clerk the rest of his life - he
had the sarrie mixed attitude toward it he had had toward the university and
toward his father. Also, he had the same mixed attitude toward Herb Jackman, his
boss, who was married to Pat, an Irish girl. Pat was very pretty and a lot
younger than Herb, and Nicholas had a heavy crush on her for years and years, up
until the time they all became older and did a lot of drinking together at
Hambone Kelley's, a cabaret in El Cerrito that featured Lu Walters and his
Dixieland jazz band.
I met Nicholas for the first time in 1951, after Lu Watters's band had become
Turk Murphy's band and signed up with Columbia Records. Nicholas often came into
the bookstore where I worked during his lunch hour, to browse among the used
copies of Proust and Joyce and Kafka, the used textbooks the students at the
university sold us after their courses - and their interest in literature -
ended. Cut off from the university, Nicholas Brady bought the used textbooks
from the poly sci and literature classes that he could never attend; he had
quite a knowledge of English lit, and it wasn't very long before we got to
talking, became friends, and finally became roommates in an upstairs apartment
in a brown shingle house on Bancroft Way, near his store and mine.
I had just sold my first science fiction story, to Tony Boucher at a magazine
called Fantasy and Science Fiction, for $75, and was considering quitting my job
as book clerk and becoming a full time writer, something I subsequently did.
Science fiction writing became my career.
The first of Nicholas Brady's paranormal experiences occurred at the house on
Francisco Street where he lived for years; he and his wife, Rachel, bought the
house for $3,750 when they first got married in 1953. The house was very old -
one of the original Berkeley farmhouses -on a lot only thirty feet wide, with no
garage, on a mud sill, the only heat being from the oven in the kitchen. His
monthly payments were $27.50, which is why he stayed there so long.
I used to ask Nicholas why he never painted or repaired the house; the roof
leaked and in wintertime during the heavy rains he and Rachel put out empty
coffee cans to catch the water dripping everywhere. The house was an ugly
peeling yellow.
'It would defeat the purpose of having such an inexpensive house,' Nicholas
explained. He still spent most of his money on records. Rachel took courses at
the University, in the political science department. I rarely found her home
when I dropped by. Nicholas told me one time that his wife had a crush on a
fellow student, who headed the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party just
off campus. She resembled the other Berkeley girls I used to see: jeans,
glasses, long dark hair, assertive loud voice, continually discussing politics.
This, of course, was during the McCarthy period. Berkeley was becoming extremely
political.
Nicholas had Wednesdays and Sundays off from work.
On Wednesday he was home alone. On Sunday both he and Rachel were home.
One Wednesday - this is not the paranormal experience - when Nicholas was home
listening to Beethoven's Eighth Symphony on his Magnavox phonograph, two FBI
agents dropped by.
'Is Mrs Brady home?' they asked.They wore business suits and carried bulging
briefcases. Nicholas thought they were insurance salesmen.
'What do you want from her?' he demanded with hostility. He imagined they were
trying to sell her something.
The two agents exchanged glances and then presented Nicholas with their
identification. Nicholas was filled with rage and terror. He started telling the
two FBI agents, in a stammering voice, a joke he had read in Talk of the Town'
in The New Yorker about two FBI agents who were checking up on a man, and, while
interviewing a neighbor, the neighbor had said that the man listened to
symphonies, and the agents asked suspiciously what language the symphonies were
in.
The two agents standing on Nicholas's front porch; on hearing his garbled
version of the story, did not find it funny.
That wasn't our office,' one of them said.
'Why don't you talk to meT Nicholas demanded, protecting his wife.
Again the two FBI agents exchanged glances, nodded, and entered the house.
Nicholas, in a state of terror, sat facing them, trying to quell his shaking.
'As you know,' the agent with the greater double chin explained, 'it is our job
to protect the liberties of American citizens from totalitarian intrusion. We
never investigate legitimate political parties such as the Democratic or
Republican parties, which are bona fide political parties under American law.'
He then began to talk about the Socialist Workers Party, which, he explained to
Nicholas, was not a legitimate political party but a Communist organization
devoted to violent revolution at the expense of American liberties.
Nicholas knew all that. He kept silent, however.
'And your wife,' the other agent said, 'could be of use to us, since she belongs
to the student corps of the SWP, in reporting who attends their meetings and
what is said there.' Both agents looked expectantly at Nicholas.
Til have to discuss this with Rachel,' Nicholas said. 'When she comes home.'
'Are you engaged in political activity, Mr Brady?' the agent with the greater
double chin asked him. He had a notebook before him and a fountain pen. The two
agents had propped one of their briefcases between Nicholas and them; he saw a
square object bulging within it and knew he was being taped.
'No,' Nicholas said, truthfully. All he did was listen to exotic rare foreign
vocal records, especially those of Tiana Lemnitz, Erna Berger, and Gerhard
Husch.
'Would you like to be?' the lesser agent asked.
'Um,' Nicholas said.
'You're familiar with the International People's Party,' the greater agent said.
'Had you ever considered attending meetings of it? They hold them about a block
from here, on the other side of San Pablo Avenue.'
'We could use someone in there at the local group meeting,' the lesser agent
said. 'Are you interested?'
'We can finance you,' his colleague added.
Nicholas blinked, gulped, and then gave the first speech of his life. The agents
were not pleased, but they listened.
Later on that day, after the agents had left, Rachel arrived home, loaded down
with textbooks and looking cross.
'Guess who was here today looking for you,' Nicholas said. He told her who.
'Bastards!' Rachel cried out. 'Bastards!'
It was two nights later that Nicholas had his mystical experience.
He and Rachel lay in bed, asleep. Nicholas was on the left, nearer the door of
their bedroom. Still disturbed by the recent visit of the FBI agents, he slept
lightly, tossing a lot, having vague dreams of an unpleasant nature. Toward
dawn, just when the first false white light was beginning to fill the room, he
lay back on a nerve, awoke from the pain, and opened his eyes.
A figure stood silently beside the bed, gazing down at him. The figure and
Nicholas regarded each other; Nicholas grunted in amazement and sat up. At once
Rachel awoke and began to scream
'Ich bin's!' Nicholas told her reassuringly (he had taken German in high
school). What he meant to tell her was that the figure was himself, 'Ich bin's'
being the German idiom for that. However, in his excitement he did not realize
he was speaking a foreign language, albeit one Mrs Altecca had taught him in the
twelfth grade. Rachel could not understand him. Nicholas began to pat her, but
he kept on repeating himself in German. Rachel was confused and frightened. She
kept on screaming. Meanwhile, the figure disappeared.
Later on, when she was fully awake, Rachel was uncertain whether or not she had
seen the figure or just reacted to his start of surprise. It had all been so
sudden.
'It was myself,' Nicholas said, 'standing beside the bed gazing down at me. I
recognized myself.'
'What was it doing there?' Rachel said.
'Guarding me,' Nicholas said. He knew it. He could tell from having seen the
expression on the figure's face. So there was nothing to be afraid of. He had
the impression that the figure, himself, had come back from the future, perhaps
from a point vastly far ahead, to make certain that he, his prior self, was
doing okay at a critical time in his life. The impression was distinct and
strong and he could not rid himself of it.
Going into the living room, he got his German dictionary and checked the idiom
that he had used. Sure enough, it was correct. It meant, literally, 'I am it.'
He and Rachel sat together in the living room, drinking instant coffee, in their
pajamas.
'I wish I was sure if I saw it,' Rachel kept repeating. 'Something sure scared
me. Did you hear me scream? I didn't know I could scream like that. I don't
think I ever screamed like that before in my life. I wonder if the neighbors
heard. I hope they don't call the police. I'll bet I woke them up. What time is
it? It's getting light; it must be dawn.'
'I never had anything like that happen before in my life,' Nicholas said. 'Boy,
was I surprised, opening my eyes like I did and seeing it - me - standing there.
What a shock. I wonder if anybody else ever had that happen to them. Boy.'
'We're so near the neighbors,' Rachel said. 'I hope I didn't wake them.'
The next day Nicholas came around to my place to tell me about his mystical
experience and get my opinion. He was not exactly candid about it, however;
initially he told it to me not as a personal experience but as a science fiction
idea for a story. That was so if it sounded nutty the onus wouldn't be on him.
'I thought,' he said, 'as a science fiction writer you could explain it. Was it
time travel? Is there such a thing as time travel? Or maybe an alternate
universe.'
I told him it was himself from an alternate universe. The proof was that he
recognized himself. Had it been a future self he would not have recognized it,
since it would have been altered from the features he saw in the mirror. No one
could ever recognize his own future self. I had written about that in a story,
once. In the story the man's future self came back to warn him just as he, the
protagonist, was about to do something foolish. The protaganist, not recognizing
his future self, had killed it. I had yet to market the story, but my hopes were
good. My agent, Scott Meredith, had sold everything else I had written.
'Can you use the idea?' Nicholas asked.
'No,' I told him. 'It's too ordinary.'
'Ordinary!' He looked upset. 'It didn't seem ordinary to me that night. I think
it had a message for me, and it was beaming the message at me telepathically,
but I woke up and that ended the transmission.'
I explained to him that if you encountered your self from an alternate universe
- or from the future, for that matter - you would hardly need to employ
telepathy. That wasn't logical, since there would be no linguistic barrier.
Telepathy was used when contact between members of different races, such as from
other star systems, took place.
'Oh,'Nicholas said, nodding.
'It was benign?' I asked.
'Sure it was; it was me. I'm benign. You know, Phil, in some ways my whole life
is a waste. What am I doing at my age, working as a clerk in a record shop? Look
what you're doing - you're a full-time writer. Why the hell
can't I do something like that? Something meaningful. I'm a clerk! The lowest of
the low!' And Rachel is going to be a full professor some day, when she's
through school. I should never have dropped out; I should have gotten my BA.'
I said, 'You sacrificed your academic career for a noble cause, your opposition
to war.'
'I broke my gun. There was no cause; I was just inept the day we had to take
apart our gun and put it back together. I lost the trigger down inside the
works. That's all.'
I explained to him how his subconscious was wiser than his conscious mind, and
how he ought to take credit for its vision, its sense of higher values. After
all, it was part of him.
'I'm not sure I believe that,' Nicholas said. 'I'm not sure what I believe any
more. Not since those two FBI agents came by and rousted me. They wanted me to
spy-on my wife! I think that's what they were really after. They get people to
spy on each other, like in 1984, and destroy the whole society. What does my
life add up to, Phil, in comparison to yours, say? In comparison to anyone's?
I'm going to Alaska. I was over the other day talking to the man at Southern
Pacific; they have connections to Alaska through a yacht that goes up there
three times a year. I could go on that. I think that's what my self from the
future or an alternate universe was there to tell me, the other night, that my
life doesn't add up to anything and I better do something drastic. I probably
was about to find out what I was supposed to do, only I wrecked it all by waking
up and opening my eyes. Actually it was Rachel who scared it off by screaming;
that's when it left. If it wasn't for her I'd know how to organize my future,
whereas as it stands I know nothing,
I'm doing nothing, I have no hopes or prospects except checking in the goddamn
Victor shipment that's up there at the shop waiting for me, forty big cartons -
the whole fall line they pushed on us, that even Herb went for. Because of the
ten percent discount.' He lapsed into gloomy silence.
'What did the FBI agents look like?' I asked, never having seen one. Everybody
in Berkeley was scared of just such a visit as Nicholas had received, myself
included. It was the times.
They have fat red necks and double chins. And little eyes, like two coals stuck
into dough. And they watch you all the time. They never take their eyes off you.
They had faint but detectable southern accents. They said they'd be back to talk
to both of us. They'll probably be by to talk to you too. About your writing.
Are your stories left-wing?'
I asked, 'Haven't you read them?'
'I don't read science fiction,' Nicholas said. 'I just read serious writers like
Proust and Joyce and Kafka. When science fiction has something serious to say,
I'll read it.' He began, then, to talk up the virtues of Finnegans Wake, in
particular the final part, which he compared to the final part of Ulysses. It
was his belief that no one but himself had either read it or understood it.
'Science fiction is the literature of the future,' I told him, when he paused.
'In a few decades they'll be visiting the moon.'
'Oh, no,' Nicholas said vigorously. 'They'll never visit the moon. You're living
in a fantasy world.'
'Is that what your future self told you?' I said. 'Or your self from another
universe, whatever it was?'
24
It seemed to me that it was Nicholas who was living in a fantasy world, working
in the record store as a clerk, meanwhile always lost in great literature of a
sort divorced from his own reality. He had read so much James Joyce that Dublin
was more real to him than Berkeley. And yet even to me Berkeley was not quite
real but lost, as Nicholas was, in fantasy; all of Berkeley dreamed a political
dream separate from the rest of America, a dream soon to be crushed, as reaction
flowed deeper and deeper and spread out wider. A person like Nicholas Brady
could never go to Alaska; he was a product of Berkeley and could only survive in
the radical student milieu of Berkeley. What did he know of the rest of the
United States? I had driven across the country; I had visited Kansas and Utah
and Kentucky, and I knew the isolation of the Berkeley radicals. They might
affect America a little with their views, but in the long run it would be solid
conservative America, the Midwest, which would win out. And when Berkeley fell,
Nicholas Brady would fall with it.
Of course this was a long time ago, before President Kennedy was assassinated,
before President Ferris Fremont and the New American Way. Before the darkness
closed over us completely.
Being politically oriented, Nicholas had already noted the budding career of the
junior senator from California, Ferris F. Fremont, who had issued forth in 1952
from Orange County, far to the south of us, .an area so reactionary that to us
in Berkeley it seemed a phantom land, made of the mists of dire nightmare, where
apparitions spawned that were as terrible as they were real -more real than if
they had been composed of solid reality. Orange County, which no one in Berkeley
had ever actually seen, was the fantasy at the other end of the world,
Berkeley's opposite; if Berkeley lay in the thrall of illusion, of detachment
from reality, it was Orange County which had pushed it there. Within one
universe the two could never coexist.
It was as if Ferris Fremont stood amid the deserts of Orange County and
imagined, at the north end of the state, the unreal thralldom of Berkeley and
shuddered and said to himself something on the order of That must go. If the two
men, Nicholas Brady in the north and Ferris Fremont in the south, could have
looked across the six-hundred-mile distance between them and confronted each
other, both would have been appalled as he read in the Berkeley Daily Gazette
about the rise to political power of the publisher from Oceanside who had gotten
his chance in the Senate by defaming his Democratic rival, Margaret Burger
Greyson, as a homosexual.
As a matter of record, Margaret Burger Greyson was a routine senator, but the
defamatory charges had formed the basis of Fremont's victory, not her voting
record. Fremont had used his newspaper in Oceanside to blast Mrs Greyson, and,
financed by unknown sources, he had plastered the southern part of the state
with billboards darkly alluding to Mrs Greyson's sex life.
CALIFORNIA NEEDS A STRAIGHT CANDIDATE!
DON'T YOU THINK THERE'S SOMETHING QUEER ABOUT GREYSON?
That kind of thing. It was based on a supposedly actual incident in Mrs
Greyson's life, but no one really knew.
Mrs Greyson fought back but never sued. After her defeat she vanished into
obscurity, or maybe, as Republicans joked, into the gay bars of San Diego. Mrs
Greyson, needless to say, had been a liberal. In the McCarthy days there wasn't
that much difference in the public's view between communism and homosexuality,
so Fremont had little difficulty winning, once his smear campaign began.
At that time Fremont was a callow lout, fat-cheeked and sullen, with beetle
brows and pasted-down black hair that looked greased into place; he wore a
pinstripe suit and loud tie and two-tone shoes, and it was said that he had hair
on his knuckles. He was frequently photographed at the target range, guns being
his hobby. He liked to wear a Stetson hat. Mrs Greyson's only rejoinder to him
that ever received any favor was a bitter remark, made after the returns had
come in, that Fremont certainly was no straight shooter, straight or not.
Anyhow, Mrs Greyson's political career was ended, Ferris F. Fremont's begun. He
flew at once to Washington, DC, in search of a house for himself, his wife,
Candy, and their two bulbous sons, Amos and Don.
Now, you should have seen the effects in Berkeley of all this shit. Berkeley did
not take it well. The radical student milieu resented a campaign's being won on
such a basis, and they resented Fremont's showing up in Washington even more.
They did not so much care for Mrs Greyson as they resented the winner; for one
thing, as Republicans pointed out, there were many gays in Berkeley, and there
certainly were many pinkos: Berkeley was the pinko capital of the world.
The pinko capital of the world was not surprised when Senator Fremont was named
to a committee investigating un-American activities. It wasn't surprised when
the senator nailed several prominent liberals as Communist Party members. But it
was surprised when Senator Fremont made the Aramchek accusation.
Nobody in Berkeley, including the Communist Party members living and working
there, had ever heard of Aramchek. It mystified them. What was Aramchek? Senator
Fremont claimed in his speech that a Communist Party member, an agent of the
Politburo, had under pressure given him a document in which the CP-USA discussed
the nature of Aramchek, and that from this document it was evident that the CP-
USA, the Communist Party of America, was itself merely a front, one among many,
cannon fodder as it were, to mask the real enemy, the real agency of treason,
Aramchek. There was no membership roll in Aramchek; it did not function in any
normal way. Its members espoused no particular philosophy, either publicly or
privately. Yet it was Aramchek that was stealthily taking over these United
States. You'd have thought someone in the pinko capital would have heard of it.
At that time I knew a girl who belonged to the Communist Party. She had always
seemed strange, even before she joined, and after she joined she was
insufferable. She wore bloomers and informed me that the sex act was an
exploitation of women, and one time, in anger at my choice of friends, she
dropped her cigarette in my cup of coffee at Larry Blake's restaurant on
Telegraph Avenue. My friends were Trotskyists. I had introduced her to two of
them in public, without telling her their political affiliations. You never did
that in Berkeley. Liz came by my table the next day at Larry Blake's, not
speaking; I think it got her in trouble with the Party. Anyhow one time
kiddingly I asked her if she also belonged to Aramchek as well as to the Party.
'What a crock,' she said. 'What a fascist lie. There is no Aramchek. I would
know.'
'If it existed,' I asked, 'would you join it?'
'It would depend on what it does.'
'It overthrows America,' I said.
'Don't you think monopoly capitalism with its suppression of the working class
and its financing of imperialist wars through puppet regimes should be
overthrown?' Liz said.
'You'd join it,' I said.
But even Liz couldn't join Aramchek if it didn't exist. I never saw her after
she dropped her cigarette in my coffee at Larry Blake's; the Party had told her
not to talk to me again, and she did what it said. Still, I don't believe she
ever managed to rise high in the Communist Party; she was a typical low-echelon
type, devoted to following orders but never really getting them right. Ever
since, I've wondered what happened to her. I doubt if she ever wondered what
happened to me; after the Party pronounced the ban on me I ceased to exist, as
far as she was concerned.
One night I had dinner with Nicholas and Rachel where the topic of Aramchek came
up. The Socialist Workers Party had passed a resolution denouncing both Senator
Fremont and Aramchek: one the arm of US imperialism, the other the arm of
militant Moscow.
That's covering both bases,' Nicholas commented. 'You SWP are certainly
opportunists.'
Rachel smiled the superior sneering smile of a Berkeley poly sci girl.
'Are you still seeing that guy?' Nicholas said, meaning the SWP organizer that
his wife had a crush on.
'Are you still in love with your boss's wife?' Rachel demanded.
'Well,' Nicholas muttered, fooling with his coffee cup.
'I think Fremont has a great concept there,' I said. 'Denouncing an organization
that doesn't even exist -one Fremont made up and says it's taking over America.
Obviously no one can destroy it. No one's safe from it. No one knows where it'll
turn up next.'
'In Berkeley,' Nicholas said.
'In Kansas City,' I said. 'In the heartland. In Salt Lake City - anywhere.
Fremont can form anti-Aramchek cadres, youth groups on the right dedicated to
fighting it wherever it manifests itself, armed uniformed bands of kids ever
vigilant. It'll get Fremont into the White House.' I was kidding. But, as we all
know, I turned out to be right. After the death of John Kennedy, and his
brother's death, and the death of virtually every other major political figure
in the United States, it took only a few years.
The purpose of killing the leading political figures in the United States by
violent assassination, allegedly by screwed-up loners, was to get Ferris F.
Fremont elected. It was the only way. He could not effectively compete. Despite
his aggressive campaigns, he bordered on the worthless. Some time ago one of his
aides must have pointed that out to him. 'If you're going to get into the White
House, Ferris,' the aide must have said, 'you've got to kill everyone else
first.' Taking him literally, Ferris Fremont did so, starting in 1963 and
working his way forward during the administration of Lyndon Johnson.
By the time Lyndon Johnson had retired, the field was clear. The man who could
not compete did not have to.
There is no point in dwelling on the ethics of Ferris Fremont. Time has already
rendered its verdict, the verdict of the world - except for the Soviet Union,
which still holds him in great respect. That Fremont was in fact closely tied to
Soviet intrigue in the United States, backed in fact by Soviet interests and his
strategy framed by Soviet planners, is in dispute but is nonetheless a fact. The
Soviets backed him, the right-wingers backed him, and finally just about
everyone, in the absence of any other candidate, backed him. When he took
office, it was on the wave of a huge mandate. Who else could they vote for? When
摘要：

TITLESBYPHILIPK.DICKAVAILABLEINPANTHERSCIENCEFICTIONBLADERUNNER(DoAndroidsDreamofElectricSheep?)FLOWMYTEARS,THEPOLICEMANSAIDNOWWAITFORLASTYEARTHETHREESTIGMATAOFPALMERELDRITCHTHEZAPGUNASCANNERDARKLYGALACTICPOTHEALEROURFRIENDSFROMFROLIX8CLANSOFTHEALPHANEMOONAHANDFULOFDARKNESSTHETRANSMIGRATIONOFTIMOTHY...

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