The Valis Trilogy: The Complete Collection of Philip K. Dick's Award-Winning VALIS Series

by Philip K. Dick

In that simple sentence, “You’re the authority,” Stone had given Fat back his soul. The soul which Gloria, with her hideous malignant psychological death-game, had taken away. They—note the “they”—paid Dr. Stone to figure out what had destroyed the patient entering the ward. In each case a bullet had been fired at him, somewhere, at some time, in his life. The bullet entered him and the pain began to spread out. Insidiously, the pain filled him up until he split in half, right down the middle. The task of the staff, and even of the other patients, was to put the person back together but this could not be done so long as the bullet remained. All that lesser therapists did was note the person split into two pieces and begin the job of patching him back into a unity; but they failed to find and remove the bullet. The fatal bullet fired at the person was the basis of Freud’s original attack on the psychologically injured person; Freud had understood: he called it a trauma. Later on, everyone got tired of searching for the fatal bullet; it took too long. Too much had to be learned about the patient. Dr. Stone had a paranormal talent, like his paranormal Bach remedies which were a palpable hoax, a pretext to listen to the patient. Rum with a flower dipped in it—nothing more, but a sharp mind hearing what the patient said. Dr. Leon Stone turned out to be one of the most important people in Horselover Fat’s life. To get to Stone, Fat had had to nearly kill himself physically, matc...

I’ve always told people that for each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you’re lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second.