The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

by Philip K. Dick

‘God,’ Eldritch said, ‘promises eternal life. I can do better; I can deliver it.’

It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.

maybe I’ll have an Emily layout. And spend time, in fantasy, back with you, back to the life I deliberately, moronically, turned my back on. The only really good period of my life, when I was genuinely happy. But of course I didn’t know it, because I had nothing to compare it to . . . as I have now.

‘You learn to get by from day to day,’ Sam Regan said sympathetically to him. ‘You never think in longer terms. Just until dinner or until time for bed; very finite intervals and tasks and pleasures. Escapes.’

Her use of Can-D all at once, a symptom of her inability to believe or to cope, her giving up.

I’ve got a great respect for traps, he reflected. In other words a situation in which none of the doors lead out. No matter how they happen to be marked.

The time, then, had come for him to poison himself so that an economic monopoly could be kept alive, a sprawling, interplan empire from which he now derived nothing. Amazing, he thought, how strong the self-destructive drive can be.

‘Now, Mr Mayerson, you can begin to chew away for the rest of your life.’

‘It’s not that you’re so inadequate,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I have high standards.’ I was taught to expect a lot from others, he said to himself. To expect they’d be as reputable and stable as I am, and not sloppily emotional all the time, not in control of themselves.

He thought, I cut her down, once, cut her off, lopped her, with thorough knowledge of what I was doing, and this is the result; I am seeing the bread as they say which was cast on the water drifting back to choke me, water-soaked bread that will lodge in my throat, never to be swallowed or disgorged, either one.

‘Tell me about it,’ Anne said. Barney said, ‘It’s an illusory world in which Eldritch holds the key positions as god; he gives you a chance to do what you can’t really ever do - reconstruct the past as it ought to have been.

‘Earth,’ Barney said, ‘I’ve had.’

Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox . . . and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become . . . maybe that’s the source of its knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding.

‘That thing,’ he said, speaking to them all, especially to Norm Schein and his wife, ‘has a name which you’d recognize if I told it to you. Although it would never call itself that. We’re the ones who’ve titled it. From experience, at a distance, over thousands of years. But sooner or later we were bound to be confronted by it. Without the distance. Or the years.’ Anne Hawthorne said, ‘You mean God.’

A hostess is giving a dinner party and she’s got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room - has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak - and it’s gone. And there’s the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing its face.’ ‘The cat got the steak,’ Barney said. ‘Did it? The guests are called in; they argue about it. The steak is gone, all five pounds of it; there sits the cat, looking well-fed and cheerful. “Weigh the cat,” someone says. They’ve had a few drinks; it looks like a good idea. So they go into the bathroom and weigh the cat on the scales. It reads exactly five pounds. They all perceive this reading and one guest says, “Okay, that’s it. There’s the steak.” They’re satisfied that they know what happened, now; they’ve got empirical proof. Then a qualm comes to one of them and he says, puzzled, “But where’s the cat?”

Barney said, ‘It meant that you were seeing into absolute reality. The essence beyond the mere appearance.’ In your terminology, he thought, what you saw is called - stigmata.

All three stigmata - the dead, artificial hand, the Jensen eyes, and the radically deranged jaw.’

It seems to be nothing more or less than the desire of, as Anne puts it, an out-of-dust created organism to perpetuate itself; we all have it, we all would like to see a goat or a lamb cut to pieces and incinerated instead of ourselves. Oblations have to be made. And we don’t care to be them. In fact our entire lives are dedicated to that one principle. And so is its.

It looked a little like a lean, famished old grandmother on all fours and he realized that this was probably the jackal-creature which he had been warned repeatedly about. In any case, whatever it was, it obviously hadn’t fed in days; it eyed him ravenously, while keeping its distance - and then, projected telepathically, its thoughts reached him. So he was right. This was it. ‘May I eat you?’ it asked. And panted, avidly slack-jawed.