Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

Perhaps, he had once conjectured, it was because there really was such a condition as autism. It was a childhood form of schizophrenia, which a lot of people had; schizophrenia was a major illness which touched sooner or later almost every family. It meant, simply, a person who could not live out the drives implanted in him by his society. The reality which the schizophrenic fell away from—or never incorporated in the first place—was the reality of interpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given values; it was not biological life, or any form of inherited life, but life which was learned. It had to be picked up bit by bit from those around one, parents and teachers, authority figures in general . . . from everyone a person came in contact with during his formative years.

True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values.

And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point—to embalm them.

Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but it’s friendly. And we do have this problem, we schizophrenics; we do pick up other people’s unconscious hostility.”

“It’s the worst thing about our condition, this awareness of the buried, repressed sadism and aggression in others around us, even strangers. I wish to hell we didn’t have it; we even pick it up from people in restaurants—” He thought of Glaub. “In buses, in a theater. Crowds.”

A coagulated self, fixed and immense, which effaces everything else and occupies the entire field. Then the most minute change is examined with the greatest attention. That is Manfred’s state now; has been, from the beginning. The ultimate stage of the schizophrenic process.

“It is a massive problem for the schizophrenic to relate to the school,” Glaub said. “The schizophrenic, such as yourself, very often deals with people through their unconscious. The teaching machines, of course, have no shadow personalities; what they are is all on the surface. Since the schizophrenic is accustomed constantly to ignore the surface and look beneath—he draws a blank. He is simply unable to understand them.”

“It’s people like you with your harsh driving demands that create schizophrenics.”

He tried to smile at her. But his face had become stiff; it would not yield. “Thanks,” he said, wanting her to know how much it meant to him.