Vintage PKD (6 page)

“Very—impressive,” Norm conceded.

Now the Oaklanders were studying Perky Pat. “Poured thermoplastic,” one of them said. “Artificial hair. Nice clothes, though; all stitched by hand, you can see that. Interesting; what we heard was correct. Perky Pat isn’t a grown-up, she’s just a teenager.”

Now the male companion to Connie appeared; he was set down in the bedroom beside Connie.

“Wait a minute,” Norm said. “You’re putting Paul or whatever his name is, in her bedroom with her? Doesn’t he have his own apartment?”

Wynn said, “They’re married.”

“Married!”
Norman and Fran stared at him, dumbfounded.

“Why sure,” Wynn said. “So naturally they live together. Your dolls, they’re not, are they?”

“N-no,” Fran said. “Leonard is Perky Pat’s boyfriend . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Norm,” she said, clutching his arm, “I don’t believe him; I think he’s just saying they’re married to get the advantage. Because if they both start out from the same room—”

Norm said aloud, “You fellows, look here. It’s not fair, calling them married.”

Wynn said, “We’re not ‘calling’ them married; they are married. Their names are Connie and Paul Lathrope, of 24 Arden Place, Piedmont. They’ve been married for a year, most players will tell you.” He sounded calm.

Maybe, Norm thought, it’s true. He was truly shaken.

“Look at them together,” Frank said, kneeling down to examine the Oaklanders’ layout. “In the same bedroom, in the same house. Why, Norm; do you see? There’s just the one bed. A big double bed.” Wild-eyed, she appealed to him. “How can Perky Pat and Leonard play against them?” Her voice shook. “It’s not morally
right
.”

“This is another type of layout entirely,” Norm said to Walter Wynn. “This, that you have. Utterly different from what we’re used to, as you can see.” He pointed to his own layout. “I insist that in this game Connie and Paul
not
live together and
not
be considered married.”

“But they are,” Foster spoke up. “It’s a fact. Look—their clothes are in the same closet.” He showed them the closet. “And in the same bureau drawers.” He showed them that, too. “And look in the bathroom. Two toothbrushes. His and hers, in the same rack. So you can see we’re not making it up.”

There was silence.

Then Fran said in a choked voice, “And if they’re married—you mean they’ve been—intimate?”

Wynn raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Sure, since they’re married. Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Perky Pat and Leonard have never—” Fran began, and then ceased.

“Naturally not,” Wynn agreed. “Because they’re only going together. We understand that.”

Fran said, “We just can’t play. We can’t.” She caught hold of her husband’s arm. “Let’s go back to Pinole pit—please, Norman.”

“Wait,” Wynn said, at once. “If you don’t play, you’re conceding; you have to give up Perky Pat.”

The three Oaklanders all nodded. And, Norm saw, many of the Berkeley flukers were nodding, too, including Ben Fennimore.

“They’re right,” Norm said heavily to his wife. “We’d have to give her up. We better play, dear.”

“Yes,” Fran said, in a dead, flat voice. “We’ll play.” She bent down and listlessly spun the needle of the spinner. It stopped at six.

Smiling, Walter Wynn knelt down and spun. He obtained a four.

The game had begun.

Crouching behind the strewn, decayed contents of a care parcel that had been dropped long ago, Timothy Schein saw coming across the surface of ash his mother and father, pushing the wheelbarrow ahead of them. They looked tired and worn.

“Hi,” Timothy yelled, leaping out at them in joy at seeing them again; he had missed them very much.

“Hi, son,” his father murmured, nodding. He let go of the handles of the wheelbarrow, then halted and wiped his face with his handkerchief.

Now Fred Chamberlain raced up, panting. “Hi, Mr. Schein, hi; Mrs. Schein. Hey, did you win? Did you beat the Oakland flukers? I bet you did, didn’t you?” He looked from one of them to the other and then back.

In a low voice Fran said, “Yes, Freddy. We won.”

Norm said, “Look in the wheelbarrow.”

The two boys looked. And, there among Perky Pat’s furnishings, lay another doll. Larger, fuller-figured, much older than Pat . . . they stared at her and she stared up sightlessly at the gray sky overhead. So this is Connie Companion doll, Timothy said to himself. Gee.

“We were lucky,” Norm said. Now several people had emerged from the pit and were gathering around them, listening. Jean and Sam Regan, Tod Morrison and his wife Helen, and now their Mayor, Hooker Glebe himself, waddling up excited and nervous, his face flushed, gasping for breath from the labor—unusual for him—of ascending the ramp.

Fran said, “We got a cancellation-of-debts card, just when we were most behind. We owed fifty thousand, and it made us even with the Oakland flukers. And then, after that, we got an advance-ten-squares card, and that put us right on the jackpot square, at least in our layout. We had a very bitter squabble, because the Oaklanders showed us that on their layout it was a tax lien slapped on real-estate-holdings square, but we had spun an odd number so that put us back on our own board.” She sighed. “I’m glad to be back. It was hard, Hooker; it was a tough game.”

Hooker Glebe wheezed, “Let’s all get a look at the Connie Companion doll, folks.” To Fran and Norm he said, “Can I lift her up and show them?”

“Sure,” Norm said, nodding.

Hooker picked up Connie Companion doll. “She sure is realistic,” he said, scrutinizing her. “Clothes aren’t as nice as ours generally are; they look machine-made.”

“They are,” Norm agreed. “But she’s carved, not poured.”

“Yes, so I see.” Hooker turned the doll about, inspecting her from all angles. “A nice job. She’s—um, more filled out than Perky Pat. What’s this outfit she has on? Tweed suit of some sort.”

“A business suit,” Fran said. “We won that with her; they had agreed on that in advance.”

“You see, she has a job,” Norm explained. “She’s a psychology consultant for a business firm doing marketing research. In consumer preferences. A high-paying position . . . she earns twenty thousand a year, I believe Wynn said.”

“Golly,” Hooker said. “And Pat’s just going to college; she’s still in school.” He looked troubled. “Well, I guess they were bound to be ahead of us in some ways. What matters is that you won.” His jovial smile returned. “Perky Pat came out ahead.” He held the Connie Companion doll up high, where everyone could see her. “Look what Norm and Fran came back with, folks!”

Norm said, “Be careful with her, Hooker.” His voice was firm.

“Eh?” Hooker said, pausing. “Why, Norm?”

“Because,” Norm said, “she’s going to have a baby.”

There was a sudden chill silence. The ash around them stirred faintly; that was the only sound.

“How do you know?”

“They told us. The Oaklanders told us. And we won that, too— after a bitter argument that Fennimore had to settle.” Reaching into the wheelbarrow he brought out a little leather pouch; from it he carefully took a carved pink newborn baby. “We won this too because Fennimore agreed that from a technical standpoint it’s literally part of Connie Companion doll at this point.”

Hooker stared a long, long time.

“She’s married,” Fran explained. “To Paul. They’re not just going together. She’s three months pregnant, Mr. Wynn said. He didn’t tell us until after we won; he didn’t want to, then, but they felt they had to. I think they were right; it wouldn’t have done not to say.”

Norm said, “And in addition there’s actually an embryo outfit—”

“Yes,” Fran said. “You have to open Connie up, of course, to see—”

“No,” Jean Regan said. “Please, no.”

Hooker said, “No, Mrs. Schein, don’t.” He backed away.

Fran said, “It shocked us of course at first, but—”

“You see,” Norm put in, “it’s logical; you have to follow the logic. Why, eventually Perky Pat—”

“No,” Hooker said violently. He bent down, picked up a rock from the ash at his feet. “No,” he said, and raised his arm. “You stop, you two. Don’t say any more.”

Now the Regans, too, had picked up rocks. No one spoke.

Fran said, at last, “Norm, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“You’re right,” Tod Morrison told them. His wife nodded in grim agreement.

“You two go back to Oakland,” Hooker told Norman and Fran Schein. “You don’t live here anymore. You’re different than you were. You—changed.”

“Yes,” Sam Regan said slowly, half to himself. “I was right; there was something to fear.” To Norm Schein he said, “How difficult a trip is it to Oakland?”

“We just went to Berkeley,” Norm said. “To the Berkeley Fluke-pit.” He seemed baffled and stunned by what was happening. “My God,” he said, “we can’t turn around and push this wheelbarrow back all the way to Berkeley again—we’re worn out, we need rest!”

Sam Regan said, “What if somebody else pushed?” He walked up to the Scheins, then, and stood with them. “I’ll push the darn thing. You lead the way, Schein.” He looked toward his own wife, but Jean did not stir. And she did not put down her handful of rocks.

Timothy Schein plucked at his father’s arm. “Can I come this time, Dad? Please let me come.”

“Okay,” Norm said, half to himself. Now he drew himself together. “So we’re not wanted here.” He turned to Fran. “Let’s go. Sam’s going to push the wheelbarrow; I think we can make it back there before nightfall. If not, we can sleep out in the open; Timothy’ll help protect us against the do-cats.”

Fran said, “I guess we have no choice.” Her face was pale.

“And take this,” Hooker said. He held out the tiny carved baby. Fran Schein accepted it and put it tenderly back in its leather pouch. Norm laid Connie Companion back down in the wheelbarrow, where she had been. They were ready to start back.

“It’ll happen up here eventually,” Norm said, to the group of people, to the Pinole flukers. “Oakland is just more advanced; that’s all.”

“Go on,” Hooker Glebe said. “Get started.”

Nodding, Norm started to pick up the handles of the wheelbarrow, but Sam Regan moved him aside and took them himself. “Let’s go,” he said.

The three adults, with Timothy Schein going ahead of them with his knife ready—in case a do-cat attacked—started into motion, in the direction of Oakland and the south. No one spoke. There was nothing to say.

“It’s a shame this had to happen,” Norm said at last, when they had gone almost a mile and there was no further sign of the Pinole flukers behind them.

“Maybe not,” Sam Regan said. “Maybe it’s for the good.” He did not seem downcast. And after all, he had lost his wife; he had given up more than anyone else, and yet—he had survived.

“Glad you feel that way,” Norm said somberly.

They continued on, each with his own thoughts.

After a while, Timothy said to his father, “All these big flukepits to the south . . . there’s lots more things to do there, isn’t there? I mean, you don’t just sit around playing that game.” He certainly hoped not.

His father said, “That’s true, I guess.”

Overhead, a care ship whistled at great velocity and then was gone again almost at once; Timothy watched it go but he was not really interested in it, because there was so much more to look forward to, on the ground and below the ground, ahead of them to the south.

His father murmured, “Those Oaklanders; their game, their particular doll, it taught them something. Connie had to grow and it forced them all to grow along with her. Our flukers never learned about that, not from Perky Pat. I wonder if they ever will. She’d have to grow up the way Connie did. Connie must have been like Perky Pat, once. A long time ago.”

Not interested in what his father was saying—who really cared about dolls and games with dolls?—Timothy scampered ahead, peering to see what lay before them, the opportunities and possibilities, for him and for his mother and dad, for Mr. Regan also.

“I can’t wait,” he yelled back at his father, and Norm Schein managed a faint, fatigued smile in answer.

Chapter One

from THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH

His head unnaturally aching, Barney Mayerson woke to find himself in an unfamiliar bedroom in an unfamiliar conapt building. Beside him, the covers up to her bare, smooth shoulders, an unfamiliar girl slept on, breathing lightly through her mouth, her hair a tumble of cottonlike white.

I’ll bet I’m late for work, he said to himself, slid from the bed, and tottered to a standing position with eyes shut, keeping himself from being sick. For all he knew he was several hours’ drive from his office; perhaps he was not even in the United States. However he
was
on Earth; the gravity that made him sway was familiar and normal.

And there in the next room by the sofa a familiar suitcase, that of his psychiatrist Dr. Smile.

Barefoot, he padded into the living room, and seated himself by the suitcase; he opened it, clicked switches, and turned on Dr. Smile. Meters began to register and the mechanism hummed. “Where am I?” Barney asked it. “And how far am I from New York?” That was the main point. He saw now a clock on the wall of the apt’s kitchen; the time was 7:30 A.M. Not late at all.

The mechanism which was the portable extension of Dr. Smile, connected by micro-relay to the computer itself in the basement level of Barney’s own conapt building in New York, the Renown 33, tinnily declared, “Ah, Mr. Bayerson.”

“Mayerson,” Barney corrected, smoothing his hair with fingers that shook. “What do you remember about last night?” Now he saw, with intense physical aversion, half-empty bottles of bourbon and sparkling water, lemons, bitters, and ice cube trays on the sideboard in the kitchen. “Who is this girl?”

Dr. Smile said, “This girl in the bed is Miss Rondinella Fugate. Roni, as she asked you to call her.”

It sounded vaguely familiar, and oddly, in some manner, tied up with his job. “Listen,” he said to the suitcase, but then in the bedroom the girl began to stir; at once he shut off Dr. Smile and stood up, feeling humble and awkward in only his underpants.

“Are you up?” the girl asked sleepily. She thrashed about, and sat facing him; quite pretty, he decided, with lovely, large eyes. “What time is it and did you put on the coffee pot?”

He tramped into the kitchen and punched the stove into life; it began to heat water for coffee. Meanwhile he heard the shutting of a door; she had gone into the bathroom. Water ran. Roni was taking a shower.

Again in the living room he switched Dr. Smile back on. “What’s she got to do with P. P. Layouts?” he asked.

“Miss Fugate is your new assistant; she arrived yesterday from People’s China where she worked for P. P. Layouts as their Pre-Fash consultant for that region. However, Miss Fugate, although talented, is highly inexperienced, and Mr. Bulero decided that a short period as your assistant, I would say ‘under you,’ but that might be misconstrued, considering—”

“Great,” Barney said. He entered the bedroom, found his clothes—they had been deposited, no doubt by him, in a heap on the floor—and began with care to dress; he still felt terrible, and it remained an effort not to give up and be violently sick. “That’s right,” he said to Dr. Smile as he came back to the living room buttoning his shirt. “I remember the memo from Friday about Miss Fugate. She’s erratic in her talent. Picked wrong on that U.S. Civil War Picture Window item . . . if you can imagine it, she thought it’d be a smash hit in People’s China.” He laughed.

The bathroom door opened a crack; he caught a glimpse of Roni, pink and rubbery and clean, drying herself. “Did you call me, dear?”

“No,” he said. “I was talking to my doctor.”

“Everyone makes errors,” Dr. Smile said, a trifle vacuously.

Barney said, “How’d she and I happen to—” He gestured toward the bedroom. “After so short a time.”

“Chemistry,” Dr. Smile said.

“Come on.”

“Well, you’re both precogs. You previewed that you’d eventually hit it off, become erotically involved. So you both decided—after a few drinks—that why should you wait? ‘Life is short, art is—’ ” The suitcase ceased speaking, because Roni Fugate had appeared from the bathroom, naked, to pad past it and Barney back once more into the bedroom. She had a narrow, erect body, a truly superb carriage, Barney noted, and small, up-jutting breasts with nipples no larger than matched pink peas. Or rather matched pink pearls, he corrected himself.

Roni Fugate said, “I meant to ask you last night—why are you consulting a psychiatrist? And my lord, you carry it around everywhere with you; not once did you set it down—and you had it turned on right up until—” She raised an eyebrow and glanced at him searchingly.

“At least I did turn it off then,” Barney pointed out.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” Rising on her toes she all at once stretched, reached above her head, then, to his amazement, began to do a brisk series of exercises, hopping and leaping, her breasts bobbing.

“I certainly do,” he murmured, taken aback.

“I’d weigh a ton,” Roni Fugate panted, “if I didn’t do these UN Weapons Wing exercises every morning. Go pour the coffee, will you, dear?”

Barney said, “Are you really my new assistant at P. P. Layouts?”

“Yes, of course; you mean you don’t remember? But I guess you’re like a lot of really topnotch precogs: you see the future so well that you have only a hazy recollection of the past. Exactly what do you recall about last night?” She paused in her exercises, gasping for breath.

“Oh,” he said vaguely, “I guess everything.”

“Listen. The only reason why you’d be carrying a psychiatrist around with you is that you must have gotten your draft notice. Right?”

After a pause he nodded.
That
he remembered. The familiar elongated blue-green envelope had arrived one week ago; next Wednesday he would be taking his mental at the UN military hospital in the Bronx.

“Has it helped? Has he—” She gestured at the suitcase. “—Made you sick enough?”

Turning to the portable extension of Dr. Smile, Barney said, “Have you?”

The suitcase answered, “Unfortunately you’re still quite viable, Mr. Mayerson; you can handle ten Freuds of stress. Sorry. But we still have several days; we’ve just begun.”

Going into the bedroom, Roni Fugate picked up her underwear, and began to step into it. “Just think,” she said reflectively. “If you’re drafted, Mr. Mayerson, and you’re sent to the colonies . . . maybe I’ll find myself with your job.” She smiled, showing superb, even teeth.

It was a gloomy possibility and his precog ability did not assist him: the outcome hung nicely, at perfect balance on the scales of cause-and-effect to be.

“You can’t handle my job,” he said. “You couldn’t even handle it in People’s China and that’s a relatively simple situation in terms of factoring out pre-elements.” But someday she could; without difficulty he foresaw that. She was young and overflowing with innate talent: all she required to equal him—and he was the best in the trade—was a few years’ experience. Now he became fully awake as awareness of his situation filtered back to him. He stood a good chance of being drafted, and even if he was not, Roni Fugate might well snatch his fine, desirable job from him, a job up to which he had worked by slow stages over a thirteen-year period.

A peculiar solution to the grimness of the situation, this going to bed with her; he wondered how he had arrived at it.

Bending over the suitcase, he said in a low voice to Dr. Smile, “I wish you’d tell me why the hell with everything so dire I decided to—”

“I can answer that,” Roni Fugate called from the bedroom; she had now put on a somewhat tight pale green sweater and was buttoning it before the mirror of her vanity table. “You informed me last night, after your fifth bourbon and water. You said—” She paused, eyes sparkling. “It’s inelegant. What you said was this. ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ Only the verb you used, I regret to say, wasn’t ‘join.’ ”

“Hmm,” Barney said, and went into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. Anyhow, he was not far from New York; obviously if Miss Fugate was a fellow employee at P. P. Layouts he was within commute distance of his job. They could ride in together. Charming. He wondered if their employer Leo Bulero would approve of this if he knew. Was there an official company policy about employees sleeping together? There was about almost everything else . . . although how a man who spent all his time at the resort beaches of Antarctica or in German E Therapy clinics could find time to devise dogma on every topic eluded him.

Someday, he said to himself, I’ll live like Leo Bulero; instead of being stuck in New York City in 180 degree heat—

Beneath him now a throbbing began; the floor shook. The building’s cooling system had come on. Day had begun.

Outside the kitchen window the hot, hostile sun took shape beyond the other conapt buildings visible to him; he shut his eyes against it. Going to be another scorcher, all right, probably up to the twenty Wagner mark. He did not need to be a precog to foresee this.

In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning homeopape’s weather-syndrome readings of the previous day.

The key glacier, Ol’ Skintop, had retreated 4.62 Grables during the last twenty-four-hour period. And the temperature, at noon in New York, had exceeded the previous day’s by 1.46 Wagners. In addition the humidity, as the oceans evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on, and toward what? Hnatt pushed the ’pape away, and picked up the mail which had been delivered before dawn . . . it had been some time since mailmen had crept out in daylight hours.

The first bill which caught his eye was the apt’s cooling prorated swindle; he owed Conapt 492 exactly ten and a half skins for the last month—a rise of three-fourths of a skin over April. Someday, he said to himself, it’ll be so hot that
nothing
will keep this place from melting; he recalled the day his l-p record collection had fused together in a lump, back around ’04, due to a momentary failure of the building’s cooling network. Now he owned iron oxide tapes; they did not melt. And at the same moment every parakeet and Venusian ming bird in the building had dropped dead. And his neighbor’s turtle had been boiled dry. Of course this had been during the day and everyone—at least the men—had been at work. The wives, however, had huddled at the lowest subsurface level, thinking (he remembered Emily telling him this) that the fatal moment had at last arrived. And not a century from now but
now
. The Caltech predictions had been wrong . . . only of course they hadn’t been; it had just been a broken power-lead from the N.Y. utility people. Robot workmen had quickly shown up and repaired it.

In the living room his wife sat in her blue smock, painstakingly painting an unfired ceramic piece with glaze; her tongue protruded and her eyes glowed . . . the brush moved expertly and he could see already that this was going to be a good one. The sight of Emily at work recalled to him the task that lay before him, today: one which he did not relish.

He said, peevishly, “Maybe we ought to wait before we approach him.”

Without looking up, Emily said, “We’ll never have a better display to present to him than we have now.”

“What if he says no?”

“We’ll go on. What did you expect, that we’d give up just because my onetime husband can’t foresee—or won’t foresee— how successful these new pieces will eventually be in terms of the market?”

Richard Hnatt said, “You know him; I don’t. He’s not vengeful, is he? He wouldn’t carry a grudge?” And anyhow what sort of grudge could Emily’s former husband be carrying? No one had done him any harm; if anything it had gone the other way, or so he understood from what Emily had related.

It was strange, hearing about Barney Mayerson all the time and never having met him, never having direct contact with the man. Now that would end, because he had an appointment to see Mayerson at nine this morning in the man’s office at P. P. Layouts. Mayerson of course would hold the whip hand; he could take one brief glance at the display of ceramics and decline ad hoc. No, he would say, P. P. Layouts is not interested in a min of this. Believe my precog ability, my Pre-Fash marketing talent and skill. And—out would go Richard Hnatt, the collection of pots under his arm, with absolutely no other place to go.

Looking out the window he saw with aversion that already it had become too hot for human endurance; the footer runnels were abruptly empty as everyone ducked for cover. The time was eight-thirty and he now had to leave; rising, he went to the hall closet to get his pith helmet and his mandatory cooling-unit; by law one had to be strapped to every commuter’s back until nightfall.

“Goodbye,” he said to his wife, pausing at the front door.

“Goodbye and lots of luck.” She had become even more involved in her elaborate glazing and he realized all at once that this showed how vast her tension was; she could not afford to pause even a moment. He opened the door and stepped out into the hall, feeling the cool wind of the portable unit as it chugged from behind him. “Oh,” Emily said, as he began to shut the door; now she raised her head, brushing her long brown hair back from her eyes. “Vid me as soon as you’re out of Barney’s office, as soon as you know one way or another.”

“Okay,” he said, and shut the door behind him.

Downramp, at the building’s bank, he unlocked their safety deposit box and carried it to a privacy room; there he lifted out the display case containing the spread of ceramic ware which he was to show Mayerson.

Shortly, he was aboard a thermosealed interbuilding commute car, on his way to downtown New York City and P. P. Layouts, the great pale synthetic-cement building from which Perky Pat and all the units of her miniature world originated. The doll, he reflected, which had conquered man as man at the same time had conquered the planets of the Sol system. Perky Pat, the obsession of the colonists. What a commentary on colonial life . . . what more did one need to know about those unfortunates who, under the selective service laws of the UN, had been kicked off Earth, required to begin new, alien lives on Mars or Venus or Ganymede or wherever else the UN bureaucrats happened to imagine they could be deposited . . . and after a fashion survive.