Vintage PKD (4 page)

“Well, I went mostly to group therapy,” Tod said. “At the Berkeley State Mental Hygiene Clinic, and they charged according to your ability to pay. And Perky Pat is at a
private
psychoanalyst.”

“We’ll have to ask someone else,” Helen said to Norman Schein. “I guess all we can do now this minute is suspend the game.” He found himself being glared at by her, too, now, because by his insistence on the one point he had put an end to their game for the whole afternoon.

“Shall we leave it all set up?” Fran Schein said. “We might as well; maybe we can finish tonight after dinner.”

Norman Schein gazed down at their combined layout, the swanky shops, the well-lit streets with the parked new-model cars, all of them shiny, the split-level house itself, where Perky Pat lived and where she entertained Leonard, her boyfriend. It was the
house
that he perpetually yearned for; the house was the real focus of the layout—of all the Perky Pat layouts, however much they might otherwise differ.

Perky Pat’s wardrobe, for instance, there in the closet of the house, the big bedroom closet. Her capri pants, her white cotton short-shorts, her two-piece polka-dot swimsuit, her fuzzy sweaters . . . and there, in her bedroom, her hi-fi set, her collection of long-playing records . . .

It had been this way, once, really been like this in the ol-days. Norm Schein could remember his own l-p record collection, and he had once had clothes almost as swanky as Perky Pat’s boyfriend Leonard, cashmere jackets and tweed suits and Italian sportshirts and shoes made in England. He hadn’t owned a Jaguar XKE sports car, like Leonard did, but he had owned a fine-looking old 1963 Mercedes-Benz, which he had used to drive to work.

We lived then
, Norm Schein said to himself,
like Perky Pat and
Leonard do now
. This is how it actually was.

To his wife he said, pointing to the clock radio which Perky Pat kept beside her bed, “Remember our G.E. clock radio? How it used to wake us up in the morning with classical music from that FM station, KSFR? The ‘Wolf-gangers,’ the program was called. From six A.M. to nine every morning.”

“Yes,” Fran said, nodding soberly. “And you used to get up before me; I knew I should have gotten up and fixed bacon and hot coffee for you, but it was so much fun just indulging myself, not stirring for half an hour longer, until the kids woke up.”

“Woke up, hell; they were awake before we were,” Norm said. “Don’t you remember? They were in the back watching ‘The Three Stooges’ on TV until eight. Then I got up and fixed hot cereal for them, and then I went on to my job at Ampex down at Redwood City.”

“Oh yes,” Fran said. “The TV.” Their Perky Pat did not have a TV set; they had lost it to the Regans in a game a week ago, and Norm had not yet been able to fashion another one realistic-looking enough to substitute. So, in a game, they pretended now that “the TV repairman had come for it.” That was how they explained their Perky Pat not having something she really would have had.

Norm thought, Playing this game . . . it’s like being back there, back in the world before the war. That’s why we play it, I suppose. He felt shame, but only fleetingly; the shame, almost at once, was replaced by the desire to play a little longer.

“Let’s not quit,” he said sullenly. “I’ll agree the psychoanalyst would have charged Perky Pat twenty dollars. Okay?”

“Okay,” both the Morrisons said together, and they settled back down once more to resume the game.

Tod Morrison had picked up their Perky Pat; he held it, stroking its blond hair—theirs was blond, whereas the Scheins’ was a brunette—and fiddling with the snaps of its skirt.

“Whatever are you doing?” his wife inquired.

“Nice skirt she has,” Tod said. “You did a good job sewing it.”

Norm said, “Ever know a girl, back in the ol-days, that looked like Perky Pat?”

“No,” Tod Morrison said somberly. “Wish I had, though. I
saw
girls like Perky Pat, especially when I was living in Los Angeles during the Korean War. But I just could never manage to know them personally. And of course there were really terrific girl singers, like Peggy Lee and Julie London . . . they looked a lot like Perky Pat.”

“Play,” Fran said vigorously. And Norm, whose turn it was, picked up the spinner and spun.

“Eleven,” he said. “That gets my Leonard out of the sports car repair garage and on his way to the racetrack.” He moved the Leonard doll ahead.

Thoughtfully, Tod Morrison said, “You know, I was out the other day hauling in perishables which the careboys had dropped . . . Bill Ferner was there, and he told me something interesting. He met a fluker from a fluke-pit down where Oakland used to be. And at that fluke-pit you know what they play? Not Perky Pat. They never have heard of Perky Pat.”

“Well, what do they play, then?” Helen asked.

“They have another doll entirely.” Frowning, Tod continued, “Bill says the Oakland fluker called it a Connie Companion doll. Ever hear of that?”

“A ‘Connie Companion’ doll,” Fran said thoughtfully. “How strange. I wonder what she’s like. Does she have a boyfriend?”

“Oh sure,” Tod said. “His name is Paul. Connie and Paul. You know, we ought to hike down there to that Oakland Fluke-pit one of these days and see what Connie and Paul look like and how they live. Maybe we could learn a few things to add to our own layouts.”

Norm said, “Maybe we could play them.”

Puzzled, Fran said, “Could a Perky Pat play a Connie Companion? Is that possible? I wonder what would happen?”

There was no answer from any of the others. Because none of them knew.

As they skinned the rabbit, Fred said to Timothy, “Where did the name ‘fluker’ come from? It’s sure an ugly word; why do they use it?”

“A fluker is a person who lived through the hydrogen war,” Timothy explained. “You know, by a fluke. A fluke of fate? See? Because almost everyone was killed; there used to be thousands of people.”

“But what’s a ‘fluke’ then? When you say a ‘fluke of fate—’ ”

“A fluke is when fate has decided to spare you,” Timothy said, and that was all he had to say on the subject. That was all he knew.

Fred said thoughtfully, “But you and I, we’re not flukers because we weren’t alive when the war broke out. We were born after.”

“Right,” Timothy said.

“So anybody who calls me a fluker,” Fred said, “is going to get hit in the eye with my bull-roarer.”

“And ‘careboy,’ ” Timothy said, “that’s a made-up word, too. It’s from when stuff was dumped from jet planes and ships to people in a disaster area. They are called ‘care parcels’ because they came from people who cared.”

“I know that,” Fred said. “I didn’t ask that.”

“Well, I told you anyhow,” Timothy said.

The two boys continued skinning the rabbit.

Jean Regan said to her husband, “Have you heard about the Connie Companion doll?” She glanced down the long rough-board table to make sure none of the other families was listening. “Sam,” she said, “I heard it from Helen Morrison; she heard it from Tod and he heard it from Bill Ferner, I think. So it’s probably true.”

“What’s true?” Sam said.

“That in the Oakland Fluke-pit they don’t have Perky Pat; they have Connie Companion . . . and it occurred to me that maybe some of this—you know, this sort of emptiness, this boredom we feel now and then—maybe if we saw the Connie Companion doll and how she lives, maybe we could add enough to our own layout to—” She paused, reflecting. “To make it more complete.”

“I don’t care for the name,” Sam Regan said. “Connie Companion; it sounds cheap.” He spooned up some of the plain, utilitarian grain-mash which the careboys had been dropping, of late. And, as he ate a mouthful, he thought, I’ll bet Connie Companion doesn’t eat slop like this; I’ll bet she eats cheeseburgers with all the trimmings, at a high-type drive-in.

“Could we make a trek down there?” Jean asked.

“To Oakland Fluke-pit?” Sam stared at her. “It’s
fifteen miles
, all the way on the other side of the Berkeley Fluke-pit!”

“But this is important,” Jean said stubbornly. “And Bill says that a fluker from Oakland came all the way up here, in search of electronic parts or something . . . so if he can do it, we can. We’ve got the dust suits they dropped us. I know we could do it.”

Little Timothy Schein, sitting with his family, had overheard her; now he spoke up. “Mrs. Regan, Fred Chamberlain and I, we could trek down that far, if you pay us. What do you say?” He nudged Fred, who sat beside him. “Couldn’t we? For maybe five dollars.”

Fred, his face serious, turned to Mrs. Regan and said, “We could get you a Connie Companion doll. For five dollars for
each
of us.”

“Good grief,” Jean Regan said, outraged. And dropped the subject.

But later, after dinner, she brought it up again when she and Sam were alone in their quarters.

“Sam, I’ve got to see it,” she burst out. Sam, in a galvanized tub, was taking his weekly bath, so he had to listen to her. “Now that we know it exists we have to play against someone in the Oakland Fluke-pit; at least we can do that. Can’t we? Please.” She paced back and forth in the small room, her hands clasped tensely. “Connie Companion may have a Standard Station and an airport terminal with jet landing strip and color TV and a French restaurant where they serve escargot, like the one you and I went to when we were first married . . . I just have to see her layout.”

“I don’t know,” Sam said hesitantly. “There’s something about Connie Companion doll that—makes me uneasy.”

“What could it possibly be?”

“I don’t know.”

Jean said bitterly, “It’s because you know her layout is so much better than ours and she’s so much more than Perky Pat.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Sam murmured.

“If you don’t go, if you don’t try to make contact with them down at the Oakland Fluke-pit, someone else will—someone with more ambition will get ahead of you. Like Norman Schein. He’s not afraid the way you are.”

Sam said nothing; he continued with his bath. But his hands shook.

A careboy had recently dropped complicated pieces of machinery which were, evidently, a form of mechanical computer. For several weeks the computers—if that was what they were—had sat about the pit in their cartons, unused, but now Norman Schein was finding something to do with one. At the moment he was busy adapting some of its gears, the smallest ones, to form a garbage disposal unit for his Perky Pat’s kitchen.

Using the tiny special tools—designed and built by inhabitants of the fluke-pit—which were necessary in fashioning environmental items for Perky Pat, he was busy at his hobby bench. Thoroughly engrossed in what he was doing, he all at once realized that Fran was standing directly behind him, watching.

“I get nervous when I’m watched,” Norm said, holding a tiny gear with a pair of tweezers.

“Listen,” Fran said, “I’ve thought of something. Does this suggest anything to you?” She placed before him one of the transistor radios which had been dropped the day before.

“It suggests that garage-door opener already thought of,” Norm said irritably. He continued with his work, expertly fitting the miniature pieces together in the sink drain of Pat’s kitchen; such delicate work demanded maximum concentration.

Fran said, “It suggests that there must be radio
transmitters
on Earth somewhere, or the careboys wouldn’t have dropped these.”

“So?” Norm said, uninterested.

“Maybe our Mayor has one,” Fran said. “Maybe there’s one right here in our own pit, and we could use it to call the Oakland Fluke-pit. Representatives from there could meet us halfway . . . say at the Berkeley Fluke-pit. And we could play there. So we wouldn’t have that long fifteen-mile trip.”

Norman hesitated in his work; he set the tweezers down and said slowly, “I think possibly you’re right.” But if their Mayor Hooker Glebe had a radio transmitter, would he let them use it? And if he did—

“We can try,” Fran urged. “It wouldn’t hurt to try.”

“Okay,” Norm said, rising from his hobby bench.

The short, sly-faced man in Army uniform, the Mayor of the Pinole Fluke-pit, listened in silence as Norm Schein spoke. Then he smiled a wise, cunning smile. “Sure, I have a radio transmitter. Had it all the time. Fifty-watt output. But why would you want to get in touch with the Oakland Fluke-pit?”

Guardedly, Norm said, “That’s my business.”

Hooker Glebe said thoughtfully, “I’ll let you use it for fifteen dollars.”

It was a nasty shock, and Norm recoiled. Good Lord; all the money he and his wife had—they needed every bill of it for use in playing Perky Pat. Money was the tender in the game; there was no other criterion by which one could tell if he had won or lost. “That’s too much,” he said aloud.

“Well, say ten,” the Mayor said, shrugging.

In the end they settled for six dollars and a fifty-cent piece.

“I’ll make the radio contact for you,” Hooker Glebe said. “Because you don’t know how. It will take time.” He began turning a crank at the side of the generator of the transmitter. “I’ll notify you when I’ve made contact with them. But give me the money now.” He held out his hand for it, and, with great reluctance, Norm paid him.

It was not until late that evening that Hooker managed to establish contact with Oakland. Pleased with himself, beaming in self-satisfaction, he appeared at the Scheins’ quarters, during their dinner hour. “All set,” he announced. “Say, you know there are actually
nine
fluke-pits in Oakland? I didn’t know that. Which you want? I’ve got one with the radio code of Red Vanilla.” He chuckled. “They’re tough and suspicious down there; it was hard to get any of them to answer.”

Leaving his evening meal, Norman hurried to the Mayor’s quarters, Hooker puffing along after him.

The transmitter, sure enough, was on, and static wheezed from the speaker of its monitoring unit. Awkwardly, Norm seated himself at the microphone. “Do I just talk?” he asked Hooker Glebe.

“Just say, This is Pinole Fluke-pit calling. Repeat that a couple of times and then when they acknowledge, you say what you want to say.” The Mayor fiddled with controls of the transmitter, fussing in an important fashion.