Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

by Philip K. Dick

He thrust her bodily into the flyship, squeezed in after her, turned to help Al Bliss close the door, and then they were up and into the rain-clouded nighttime sky. The great gleaming sky of Los Angeles, as bright as if it were high noon.

“Do you know what you are?” Kathy said. “You’re a very good person. Do you understand that?” He shrugged. Like most truths it was a matter of opinion. Perhaps he was. In this situation, anyhow. Not so in others. But Kathy didn’t know about that.

“I would never turn you in. I love you.” “You’ve known me perhaps five hours. Not even that.” “But I can always tell.” Her tone, her expression, both were firm. And deeply solemn. “You’re not even sure who I am!” Kathy said, “I’m never sure who anybody is.”

no rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic.

“Shall we go back to my room, then?” Kathy asked. “And screw like minks?”

Goddamn booze. Whatever you fear will happen to you, booze will make it happen. In my opinion booze is the great enemy of life.

I feel the weight of entropy on me now, he decided. I have discharged myself into a vacuum, and I will never get back what I have given out. It goes only one way. Yes, he thought, I’m sure that is one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.

General Buckman opened the third drawer of the large desk and placed a tape-reel in the small transport he kept there. Dowland aires for four voices . . .

Is that why I do what I do? To create order, structure, harmony? Rules. Yes, he thought; rules are goddamn important to me,

“Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away.

The sixes, eugenic experiments themselves, and secret ones,

They’re the sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems

“Alys, you know about me; you know who I am. Why doesn’t anybody else know?” “Because they’ve never been there.” “Where?”

Pictures on the walls. A face in one of the pictures jeered at him but he did not care; it could not leave the wall.