Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

“What do you mean, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Mountains?” Jack said loudly. “You must be mistaken, Dad, there’s nothing there—it’s a total waste area. Anybody in real estate can tell you that.” His father’s faint voice came. “No, Jack, I believe it’s sound. I want to come out and have a look and discuss it with you. How’s Silvia and the boy?” “Fine,” Jack said. “But listen—don’t commit yourself, because it’s a known fact that any Mars real estate away from the part of the canal network that works—and remember that only about one-tenth of it works—comes close to being an outright fraud.” He could not understand how his father, with his years of business experience, especially in investments in unimproved land, could have gotten on to such a bum steer. It frightened him. Maybe his dad, in the years since he had seen him, had gotten old.

“O.K., Dad,” he said, “we’ll be expecting your wire.” He said good-bye and hung up. “Sorry to be on the phone so long,” he said to Mr. Yee. He reached for the slip. “An elderly person should not make the trip here,” Mr. Yee said in his placid, implacable voice. “He’s made up his mind to see how we’re doing,” Jack said. “And if you are not doing as well as he would wish, can he help you?” Mr. Yee smiled with contempt. “Are you supposed to have struck it rich? Tell him there are no diamonds. The UN got them.

Below him, Jack noted the Senator Taft Canal and aligned his flight with it; the canal would lead him to the McAuliff dairy ranch with its thousands of acres of withered grass, its once prize herd of Jerseys, now bent into something resembling their ancestors by the unjust environment. This was habitable Mars, this almost-fertile spiderweb of lines, radiating and crisscrossing but always barely adequate to support life, no more. The Senator Taft, directly below now, showed a sluggish and repellent green; it was water sluiced and filtered in its final stages, but here it showed the accretions of time, the underlying slime and sand and contaminants which made it anything but potable. God knew what alkalines the population had absorbed and built into its bones by now. However, they were alive.

The archaeological teams which had landed on Mars early in the ’70s had eagerly plotted the stages of retreat of the old civilization which human beings had now begun to replace. It had not at any time settled in the desert proper. Evidently, as with the Tigris and Euphrates civilization on Earth, it had clung to what it could irrigate. At its peak, the old Martian culture had occupied a fifth of the planet’s surface, leaving the rest as it had found it. Jack Bohlen’s house, for instance, near the junction of the William Butler Yeats Canal with the Herodotus; it stood almost at the edge of the network by which fertility had been attained for the past five thousand years. The Bohlens were latecomers, although no one had known, eleven years ago, that emigration would fall off so startlingly.

THE EX-PLUMBER, SUPREME Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Workers’ Local, Fourth Planet Branch, rose from his bed at ten in the morning and as was his custom strolled directly to the steam bath. “Hello, Gus.” “Hi there, Arnie.” Everybody called him by his first name, and that was good. Arnie Kott nodded to Bill and Eddy and Tom, and they all greeted him. The air, full of steam, condensed around his feet and drained off across the tiles, to be voided. That was a touch which pleased him: the baths had been constructed so as not to preserve the run-off. The water drained out onto the hot sand and disappeared forever. Who else could do that? He thought, Let’s see if those rich Jews up in New Israel have a steam bath that wastes water.

But the catch in the ad was simply that, once on Mars, the emigrant was guaranteed nothing, not even the certainty of being able to give up and go home; trips back were much more expensive, due to the inadequate field facilities. Certainly, he was guaranteed nothing in the way of employment. The fault lay with the big powers back Home, China and the U.S. and Russia and West Germany. Instead of properly backing the development of the planets, they had turned their attention to further exploration. Their time and brains and money were all committed to the sidereal projects, such as that frigging flight to Centaurus, which had already wasted billions of dollars and man-hours. Arnie Kott could not see the sidereal projects for beans. Who wanted to take a four-year trip to another solar system which maybe wasn’t even there?

On a number of levels they still worked together, even though on a strictly personal basis they had no common ground whatsoever. He found her aggressive, domineering, overly masculine, a tall and bony female with a long stride, wearing low-heeled shoes and a tweed coat and dark glasses, a huge leather purse slung from a strap over her shoulder . . . but she was shrewd and intelligent and a natural executive. As long as he did not have to see her outside of the business context, he could get along with her.

Their children born on Mars started out like this, novel and peculiar, in some respects enigmatic to their parents. Two of his own boys—his and Anne’s—now lived in a settlement camp at the outskirts of Lewistown. When he visited them he could not make them out; they looked toward him with bleak eyes, as if waiting for him to go away. As near as he could tell, the boys had no sense of humor. And yet they were sensitive; they could talk forever about animals and plants, the landscape itself. Both boys had pets, Martian critters that struck him as horrid: praying mantis types of bugs, as large as donkeys. The damn things were called boxers, because they were often seen propped up erect and squaring off at one another in a ritual battle which generally ended up with one killing and eating the other.

“What’s your destination?” Jack asked them. The young Bleekman named an oasis very far to the south. “You think you can make it?” Jack asked. He pointed to the old couple. “Can they?” “Yes, Mister,” the young Bleekman answered. “We can make it now, with the food and water yourself and the other Mister gave us.” I wonder if they can, Jack said to himself. Naturally they’d say it, even if they knew it wasn’t possible. Racial pride, I guess. “Mister,” the young Bleekman said, “we have a present for you because you stopped.” He held out something to Jack. Their possessions were so meager that he could not believe they had anything to spare. He held his hand out, however, and the young Bleekman put something small and cold into it, a dark, wrinkled, dried bit of substance that looked to Jack like a section of tree root. “It is a water witch,” the Bleekman said. “Mister, it will bring you water, the source of life, any time you need.” “It didn’t help you, did it?” Jack said. With a sly smile the young Bleekman said, “Mister, it helped; it brought you.”

The storage shed, where Steiner now sat, lay within sight of his small, private, illegal landing field. Upright on the field stood the rocket which had come in last night; Steiner’s technician—he himself had no manual ability of any sort—was busy preparing it for its return flight to Manila. The rocket was small, only twenty feet high, but it was Swiss-made and quite stable.

Taking hold of the hand truck, he began pushing the load of cartons through the doorway of the shed and out onto the rocky ground. “That looks like over a hundred pounds,” his technician said critically, as Steiner came up pushing the hand truck. “Very light cartons,” Steiner said. They contained a dried grass which, back in the Philippines, was processed in such a way that the end result very much resembled hashish. It was smoked in a mixture with ordinary Virginia burley tobacco, and got a terrific price in the United States. Steiner had never tried the stuff himself; to him, physical and moral health were one—he believed in his health foods, and neither smoked nor drank.

It was a young child, only three, suffering from one of the formidable physical defects associated with exposure to gamma rays during its intrauterine existence. He had seen it only once. There were many sobering anomalies at Camp B-G, and he had come to accept them, whatever they looked like. At first it had startled him, the Esterhazy child; it was so small and shriveled, with enormous eyes like a lemur’s. It had peculiar webbed fingers, as if it had been fashioned for an aquatic world. He had the feeling about it that it was astonishingly acute in its perceptions; it had studied him with deep intensity, seeming to reach some depth in him usually inaccessible, perhaps even to himself. . . . It had seemed to reach out somehow and probe his secrets and then it had withdrawn, accepting him on the basis of what it had picked up.

The boy was bent over, absorbed in some object which he held. A genuinely good-looking boy, with eyes that shone sometimes mockingly, sometimes with glee and excitement . . . and such terrific coordination. The way he sprinted about, on the tips of his toes, as if dancing to some unheard music, some tune from inside his own mind whose rhythms kept him enthralled. We are so pedestrian, compared to him, Steiner thought. Leaden. We creep along like snails, while he dances and leaps, as if gravity does not have the same influence on him as it does on us. Could he be made from some new and different kind of atom? “Hi, Manny,” Mr. Steiner said to his son. The boy did not raise his head or show any sign of awareness; he continued fooling with the object. I will write to the framers of the bill, Steiner thought, and tell them I have a child in the camp. And that I agree with them. His thoughts frightened him.

While Steiner stood there, tall, slender Dr. Glaub in his white coat, carrying his clipboard, approached. Steiner became suddenly aware of him and started. “There is a new theory about autism,” Dr. Glaub said. “From Bergholzlei, in Switzerland. I wished to discuss it with you, because it seems to offer us a new avenue with your son, here.” “I doubt it,” Steiner said. Dr. Glaub did not seem to hear him, he continued, “It assumes a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic individual, so that the environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot cope with it, in fact, he is unable to perceive it properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded-up television program, so that objects whizzed by so fast as to be invisible, and sound was a gobbledegook—you know? Just extremely high-pitched mishmash. Now, this new theory would place the autistic child in a closed chamber, where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slowed down—do you see? Both sound and video slowed, at last so slow that you and I would not be able to perceive motion or comprehend the sounds as human speech.”

Anyhow, if they’d destroyed them years ago we wouldn’t have such places as B-G, because in my mind there’s a direct link between the monsters born in the ’60s and all the freaks supposedly born due to radiation ever since; I mean, it’s all due to substandard genes, isn’t it? Now, I think that’s where the Nazis were right. They saw the need of weeding out the inferior genetic strains as long ago as 1930; they saw—” “My son,” Steiner began, and then stopped. He realized what he had said. The portly man stared at him. “My son is there,” Steiner at last went on, “means as much to me as your son does to you. I know that someday he will emerge into the world once more.” “Let me buy you a drink, Norbert,” the portly man said, “to show you how sorry I am; I mean, about the way I talked.” Steiner said, “If they close B-G it will be a calamity too great for us to bear, we who have children in there. I can’t face it.” “I see what you mean,” the portly man said. “I understand your feeling.” “You are superior to me if you understand how I feel,” Steiner said, “because I can make no sense out of it.” He set down his empty beer glass and stepped off the stool. “I don’t want another drink,” he said. “Excuse me; I have to leave.” He picked up his heavy suitcases.

“That damn stupid Steiner,” Arnie said. “That cabbage head.” “Eat your food, Arnie.” She began to unfold her napkin. “The soup looks good.” “I can’t eat,” he said. “I don’t want this slop.” He pushed his soup bowl away. “You’re still just like a big baby,” Anne said. “Still having your tantrums.” Her voice was soft and compassionate. “Hell,” he said, “sometimes I feel like I’ve got the weight of the entire planet on me, and you call me a baby!” He glared at her in baffled outrage. “I didn’t know that Norbert Steiner was involved in the black market,” Anne said. “Naturally you wouldn’t, you and your lady-committees. What do you know about the world around you?

“Listen, Anne, you have to knuckle down to what you call masculine domination and let my people edit what you write. Honest to God, it does more harm than good—I hate to say this to your face but it’s the truth. You’re a worse friend than you would be an enemy, the way you go about things. You’re a dabbler! Like most women. You’re—irresponsible.” He wheezed with wrath. Her face showed no reaction; what he said had no effect on her. “Can you bring any pressure to bear to help keep B-G open?” she asked. “Maybe we can make a deal. I want to see it kept open.” “A cause,” Arnie said ferociously. “Yes.” “You want my blunt answer?” She nodded, facing him coolly. “I’ve been sorry ever since those Jews opened that camp.” Anne said, “Bless you, honest blunt Arnie Kott, mankind’s friend.”

“I sure appreciate your going in my place, Doc. You psychiatrists really take a load off a man’s back; I’m not joking when I say I been losing sleep over this.” He gazed with grateful awe at the man before him, skilled in the social graces, capable of treading the narrow, hazardous path of complex interpersonal relations which had defeated so many union members over the years. “Don’t worry any further about it,” Dr. Glaub said. For after all, he thought, what’s a little schizophrenia? That is, you know, what you’re suffering from. I’ll take the social pressure from you, and you can continue in your chronic maladaptive state, at least for another few months. Until the next overpowering social demand is made on your limited capabilities. . . . As Goodmember Purdy left the office, Dr. Glaub reflected that this certainly was a practical form of psychotherapy which had evolved here on Mars.

Mr. Yee said, “Mrs. Bohlen asked our switchboard girl to inform you that a neighbor of yours, a Mr. Steiner, has taken his own life. Mrs. Bohlen is caring for the Steiner children, she wants you to know. She also asked if it was possible for you to come home tonight, but I told her that although we regretted it we could not spare you. You must stay available on call until the end of the week, Jack.” Steiner dead, Jack said to himself. The poor ineffectual sap. Well, maybe he’s better off. “Thank you, Mr. Yee,” he said into the microphone. As the ’copter lifted from the sparse grass of the pasture, Jack thought, This is going to affect all of us, and deeply. It was a strong and acute feeling, an intuition. I don’t believe I ever exchanged more than a dozen words with Steiner at any one time, and yet—there is something enormous about the dead. Death itself has such authority. A transformation as awesome as life itself, and so much harder for us to understand.

From a magazine rack he took a copy of Motor World, and heard, with his trained ears, a switch click. The school had noted his presence. It noted which magazine he selected, how long he sat reading, and what he next took. It measured him. A door opened, and a middle-aged woman wearing a tweed suit, smiling at him, said, “You must be Mr. Yee’s repairman.” “Yes,” he said, standing. “So glad to see you.” She beckoned him to follow her. “There’s been so much fuss about this one Teacher, but it is at the output stage.” Striding down a corridor, she held a door open for him as he caught up. “The Angry Janitor,” she said, pointing. He recognized it from his son’s description. “It broke down suddenly,” the woman was saying in his ear. “See? Right in the middle of its cycle—it had gone down the street and shouted and then it was just about to wave its fist.” “Doesn’t the master circuit know—” “I am the master circuit,” the middle-aged woman said, smiling at him cheerfully, her steel-rimmed glasses bright with the sparkle in her eyes. “Of course,” he said, chagrined.

The Whitlock was an elderly, white-haired gentleman, with a regional accent, perhaps that of Kansas. . . . He was kindly, and he let others express themselves; he was a permissive variety of teaching machine, with none of the gruffness and authoritarian manner of the Angry Janitor; he was, in fact, as near as Jack could tell, a combination of Socrates and Dwight D. Eisenhower. “Sheep are funny,” the Whitlock said. “Now, you look at how they behave when you throw some grub over the fence to them, such as corn stalks. Why, they’ll spot that from a mile away.” The Whitlock chuckled. “They’re smart when it comes to what concerns them. And maybe that helps us see what true smartness is; it isn’t having read a lot of books, or knowing long words . . . it’s being able to spot what’s to our advantage. It’s got to be useful to be real smartness.”

The boy liked most of his Teachers and came home raving about them; he got along fine with even the most severe of them, and by now it was obvious that he had no problems—he was not autistic, and he would never see the inside of Camp B-G. But this had not made Jack feel better. Nothing, Silvia had pointed out, would make him feel better. Only the two possibilities lay open, the Public School and Camp B-G, and Jack distrusted both. And why was that? He did not know. 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.

Once, a couple of years ago, he had told his wife his theory. Silvia had listened with a reasonable amount of attention and then she had said, “But you don’t see the point, Jack. Try to understand. There are things so much worse than neurosis.” Her voice had been low and firm, and he had listened. “We’re just beginning to find them out. You know what they are. You’ve gone through them.” And he had nodded, because he did know what she meant. He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural, And, he had to admit, it was horrible. It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity.

And now it was almost impossible for him to raise his head; he was falling asleep where he sat, there in Notting’s living room, and yet his eyes weren’t closing—he found when he tried that he couldn’t close them. His attention had become riveted on the match folder. Close cover before striking, he read. Can you draw this horse? First art lesson free, no obligation. Turn over for free enrollment blank. Unblinking, he stared on and on, while Lou Notting and Fred Clarke argued about abstract ideas such as the curtailment of liberties, the democratic process . . . he heard all the words perfectly clearly, and he did not mind listening. But he felt no desire to argue, even though he knew they both were wrong. He let them argue on; it was easier. It simply happened. And he let it happen. “Jack’s not with us tonight,” Clarke was saying. With a start, Jack Bohlen realized they had turned their attention on him; he had to do or say something, now. “Sure I am,” he said, and it cost him terrific effort; it was like rising up out of the sea. “Go on, I’m listening.”

It read much like all the co-op notices, and yet—why not? A lot of young people were going. And what was left for him on Earth? He had given up his co-op apartment, but he was still a member; he still had his share of stock and his number. Later on, when he had signed up and was in the process of being given his physical and his shots, the sequence had blurred in his mind; he remembered the decision to go to Mars as coming first, and then the giving up of his job and apartment. It seemed more rational that way, and he told that story to his friends. But it simply wasn’t true. What was true? For almost two months he had wandered about, confused and despairing, not certain of anything except that on November 14, his group, two hundred co-op members, would leave for Mars, and then everything would be changed; the confusion would lift and he would see clearly, as he had once at some vague period in the past. He knew that: once, he had been able to establish the order of things in space and time; now, for reasons unknown to him, both space and time had shifted so that he could not find his bearings in either one.

“Come in, Mr. Bohlen.” The personnel manager, a fine-looking man with curly gray hair—perhaps a fashion wig—welcomed him into his office. “This won’t take but a moment.” He eyed Jack keenly. “Mr. Bohlen, why aren’t you cashing your paychecks?” There was silence. “Aren’t I?” Jack said. His heart thudded ponderously, making his body shake. He felt unsteady and tired. I thought I was, he said to himself. “You could stand a new suit,” the personnel manager said, “and you need a haircut. Of course, it’s your business.” Putting his hand to his scalp, Jack felt about, puzzled; did he need a haircut? Hadn’t he just had one last week? Or maybe it was longer ago than that. He said, “Thanks.” He nodded. “O.K., I will. What you just said.” And then the hallucination, if it was that, happened. He saw the personnel manager in a new light. The man was dead.

A door opened for the master circuit, and she was gone; he was alone with Kindly Dad and he was not glad of it. “Hi, Kindly Dad,” he said without enthusiasm. Setting down his tool case he began unscrewing the back plate of the Teacher. Kindly Dad said in a warm, sympathetic voice, “What’s your name, young fellow?” “My name,” Jack said, as he unfastened the plate and laid it down beside him, “is Jack Bohlen, and I’m a kindly dad, too, just like you, Kindly Dad. My boy is ten years old, Kindly Dad. So don’t call me young fellow, O.K.?” Again he was trembling hard, and sweating. “Ohh,” Kindly Dad said. “I see!” “What do you see?” Jack said, and discovered that he was almost shouting. “Look,” he said. “Go through your goddamn cycle, O.K.? If it makes it easier for you, go ahead and pretend I’m a little boy.” I just want to get this done and get out of here, he said to himself, with as little trouble as possible. He could feel the swelling, complicated emotions inside him. Three hours! he thought dismally.

“Do you know what schizophrenia is, Kindly Dad?” “I believe I’ve got a pretty good idea, Jackie,” Kindly Dad said, “Well, Kindly Dad, it’s the most mysterious malady in all medicine, that’s what it is. And it shows up in one out of every six people, which is a lot of people.” “Yes, that certainly is,” Kindly Dad said. “At one time,” Jack said, as he watched the machinery moving, “I had what they call situational polymorphous schizophrenia simplex. And, Kindly Dad, it was rough.” “I just bet it was,” Kindly Dad said.

“Schizophrenia,” Jack said, “is one of the most pressing problems human civilization has ever faced. Frankly, Kindly Dad, I emigrated to Mars because of my schizophrenic episode when I was twenty-two and worked for Corona Corporation. I was cracking up. I had to move out of a complex urban environment and into a simpler one, a primitive frontier environment with more freedom. The pressure was too great for me; it was emigrate or go mad. That co-op building; can you imagine a thing going down level after level and up like a skyscraper, with enough people living there for them to have their own supermarket? I went mad standing in line at the bookstore. Everybody else, Kindly Dad, every single person in that bookstore and in that supermarket—all of them lived in the same building I did. It was a society, Kindly Dad, that one building. And today it’s small by comparison with some that have been built. What do you say to that?” “My, my,” Kindly Dad said, shaking his head.

Ask that Whitlock Teacher if intelligence doesn’t have to be practical to be true intelligence. I heard it say so, it has to be a tool for adaptation. Right, Kindly Dad?” “Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be.” “What you ought to be teaching,” Jack said, “is, how do we—” “Yes, Little Jackie,” Kindly Dad interrupted him, “it has to be.” And as it said this, a gear-tooth slipped in the glare of Jack’s trouble-light, and a phase of the cycle repeated itself. “You’re stuck,” Jack said. “Kindly Dad, you’ve got a worn gear-tooth.” “Yes, Little Jackie,” Kindly Dad said, “it has to be.” “You’re right,” Jack said. “It does have to be. Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life. Right, Kindly Dad?” “Yes, Little Jackie,” Kindly Dad said, “it has to be.” Shutting off the teaching machine at its power supply, Jack began to disassemble its main-shaft, preparatory to removing the worn gear.

ARNIE KOTT OWNED THE only harpsichord on Mars. However, it was out of tune, and he could find no one to service it. No matter which way you cut it, there were no harpsichord tuners on Mars. For a month now he had been training his tame Bleekman to tackle this task; Bleekmen had a fine ear for music, and his particular one seemed to understand what Arnie wanted. Heliogabalus had been provided with a translation into the Bleeky dialect of a manual on keyboard instrument maintenance, and Arnie expected results any day now. But meanwhile the harpsichord was virtually unplayable.

“Nothing ever gets fixed around here,” Arnie grumbled. All Mars, he decided, was a sort of Humpty Dumpty; the original state had been one of perfection, and they and their property had all fallen from that state into rusty bits and useless debris. He felt sometimes as if he presided over an enormous junkyard. And then, once more, he thought about the Yee Company repair ’copter which he had run into in the desert, and the zwepp piloting it. Independent bastards, Arnie said to himself. Ought to be taken down a peg or two. But they knew their worth. Vital to the economy of the planet; it was written on their faces. We bow to no man, et cetera. Arnie paced about the big front room of the Lewistown house which he maintained in addition to his apartment at Union Hall, hands in his pockets, scowling. Imagine: that guy talked back to me just like that, Arnie reflected. He must be a hell of a good repairman to be so confident. And Arnie also thought, I’m going to get that guy if it’s the last thing I do. Nobody talks to me like that and gets away with it.

Seating himself at his out-of-tune harpsichord, Arnie opened a book of Scarlatti sonatas and began to bang away at one of his favorites, a cross-hand one on which he had been practicing for months. It was strong, rhythmic, vigorous music, and he pounded the keys with delight, ignoring the distorted sound itself. Heliogabalus moved further off to study his manual; the sound hurt his ears. “I’ve got a long-playing record of this,” he said to Heliogabalus as he played. “So goddamn old and valuable that I don’t dare play it.” “What is a long-playing record?” the Bleekman asked. “You wouldn’t understand if I told you. Glenn Gould playing. It’s forty years old; my family passed it down to me. It was my mother’s. That guy could really hammer these cross-hand sonatas out.” His own playing discouraged him, and he gave up. I could never be any good, he decided, even if this instrument were in peak condition like it was before I had it shipped here from Home.

“You fellows were stupid to give up your native religion,” Arnie said. “You showed how weak you are. I wouldn’t have. Tell me how to find Dirty Knobby and I’ll ask it myself. I know goddamn well that your religion teaches that you can foretell the future, and what’s so peculiar about that? We’ve got extra-sensory individuals back Home, and some of them have precognition, can read the future. Of course we have to lock them up with the other nuts, because that’s a symptom of schizophrenia, if you happen to know what that means.” “Yes, Mister,” Heliogabalus said. “I know schizophrenia; it is the savage within the man.” “Sure, it’s the reversion to primitive ways of thought, but so what, if you can read the future? In those mental health camps back Home there must be hundreds of precogs—” And then a thought struck Arnie Kott. Maybe there’re a couple here on Mars, at Camp B-G. The hell with Dirty Knobby rock, then, Arnie thought. I’ll drop by B-G one day before they close it and get me a precog nut; I’ll bail him out of the camp and put him on the payroll, right here in Lewistown.

“You ever been psychoanalyzed, Helio?” Arnie said to him, feeling cheerful, now. “No, Mister. Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness.” “How zat, Helio?” “Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what, Mister.” “I don’t get you, Helio.” “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.” “Kee-rist,” Arnie said, with derision, “you half-educated freak—I’ll bet if human civilization disappeared from Mars you’d be right back there among those savages in ten seconds flat, worshipping idols and all the rest of it. Why do you pretend you want to be like us? Why are you reading that manual?” Heliogabalus said, “Human civilization will never leave Mars, Mister; that is why I study this book.”

His trade had been with certain housewives living out in remote tracts, very lonely women whose husbands stayed in the city five days a week, coming home only on weekends. Otto, who was good-looking, slender, with long, combed-back black hair (in his account of himself, anyhow), had made time with one woman after another; and an outraged husband, on finding out, had, instead of shooting Otto to death, gone instead to the Union Hiring Hall and lodged a formal charge: repairs without compensation at scale. Well, it certainly was not scale; he admitted that.

And where was Norb Steiner right now? No doubt ensconced in some bar or restaurant or some woman’s cheery living room, prattling his line, handing over tins of smoked salmon and getting in return— “Screw them all,” Otto mumbled, getting up to pace back and forth. “If that’s what they want, let ’em have it. Bunch of animals.” Those Israeli girls . . . that’s where Steiner was, with a kibbutzful of them, those hot, black-eyed, heavy-lipped, big-breasted, sexy ones who got tanned working out in the fields in shorts and cotton shirts clinging to them, no bras, just those big solid breasts—you could actually see their nipples, because the damp fabric stuck to them.

“That was Glaub on the phone,” Arnie Kott said. “The psychiatrist. You ever heard of him?” “No,” Jack said. “What do you do, live your life entirely with your head stuck in the back of machines?” Jack looked up, met the man’s gaze. “I’ve got a wife and son. That’s my life. What I’m doing right now is a means of keeping my family going.” He spoke calmly. Arnie did not seem to take offense; he even smiled. “Something to drink?” Arnie asked. “Coffee, if you have it.” “I’ve got authentic Home coffee,” Arnie said. “Black?” “Black.” “Yeah, you look like a black coffee man. You think you can fix that machine right here and now, or are you going to have to take it with you?” “I can fix it here.” Arnie beamed. “That’s swell! I really depend on that machine.” “Where’s the coffee?”

“Busy, isn’t he?” the girl said. “Oh, yeah,” Arnie agreed, “these repair guys are bugs on getting the job done right, I mean these outside guys, not our own—ours are a bunch of slobs that sit around playing with themselves at our expense. I’m through with them, Dor. I mean, this guy Bohlen is a whiz; he’s going to have the encoder working any minute now, aren’t you, Jack?” “Yeah,” Jack said. The girl said, “Don’t you say hello, Jack?” Halting his work he turned his attention on her; he faced her levelly. Her expression was cool and intelligent, with a faintly mocking quality which was peculiarly rewarding and annoying. “Hello,” Jack said.

Arnie said, “Doc Glaub is going to scare up a schizophrenic for me; I need one, I need its professional services.” He laughed, eyes twinkling, finding his own utterance outstandingly funny. “Do you?” Jack said. “I’m a schizophrenic.” Arnie stopped laughing. “No kidding. I never would have guessed; what I mean is, you look all right.” Finishing up the task of putting the encoder back together, Jack said, “I am all right. I’m cured.” Doreen said, “No one is ever cured of schizophrenia.” Her tone was dispassionate; she was simply stating a fact. “They can be,” Jack said, “if it’s what is called situational schizophrenia.” Arnie eyed him with great interest, even suspicion. “You’re pulling my leg. You’re just trying to worm your way into my confidence.” Jack shrugged, feeling himself flush. He turned his attention back, completely, to his work.

I see your point, Arnie, Dr. Glaub said to himself, practicing away as he piloted his ’copter closer and closer to Lewistown. Yes, there is a good deal to be said for that world-view. He had handled so many types of social situations for his patients, appearing in public for them, representing those timid, shut-in schizoid personalities who shrank from interpersonal exposure, that this would undoubtedly be a snap. And—if the schizophrenic process in Arnie were beginning to bring up its heavy artillery—Arnie might need to lean on him for his very survival. Hot dog, Dr. Glaub said to himself, and increased the velocity of the ’copter to its maximum.

Hell, I’ll spring him and bring him here. And, Jack, you get on this and engineer a machine to make contact with him—you see the picture?” After a moment Bohlen said, “I don’t know what to say.” He laughed briefly. “Sure you know what to say—hell, it ought to be easy for you, you’re a schizophrenic yourself, like you said.” Glaub, interested, said to Bohlen, “Is that the case?” He had already noted, automatically, the repairman’s skeletal tension as he sat sipping his drink, and the rigid musculature, not to mention the asthenic build. “But you appear to have made enormous strides toward recovery.” Raising his head, Bohlen met his glance, saying, “I’m totally recovered. For many years, now.” His face was affect-laden. No one makes a total recovery, Glaub thought. But he did not say it; instead he said, “Perhaps Arnie is right. You could empathize with the autistic, whereas that is our basic problem; the autistic can’t take our roles, see the world as we do, and we can’t take his role either. So a gulf separates us.” “Bridge that gulf, Jack!” Arnie cried. He whacked Bohlen on the back. “That’s your job; I’m putting you on the payroll.” Envy filled Dr. Glaub.

“What was it you saw,” the girl said, “when you looked at Dr. Glaub, there at the table?” Jack said, “Nothing.” “You’d rather not say about that, either.” “That’s right.” “Do you think if you tell me things will get worse?” “It’s not things; it’s me.” “Maybe it is the things,” Doreen said. “Maybe there is something in your vision, however distorted and garbled it’s become. I don’t know. I used to try like hell to comprehend what it was Clay—my brother—saw and heard. He couldn’t say. I know that his world was absolutely different from the rest of ours in the family. He killed himself, like Steiner did.” She had paused at a newsstand, to look over the item, on page one, about Norbert Steiner. “The existential psychiatrists often say to let them go ahead and take their lives; it’s the only way, for some of them . . . the vision becomes too awful to bear.” Jack said nothing. “Is it awful?” Doreen asked. “No. Just—disconcerting.” He struggled to explain. “There’s no way you can work it in with what you’re supposed to see and know; it makes it impossible to go on, in the accustomed way.”

Under his arm Grandfather Leo had a white carton tied with string: he hadn’t let the rocketship officials take it and put it with the luggage. When they had left the terminal building and were in his dad’s ’copter, Grandfather Leo opened the package. It was full of Jewish bread and pickles and thin-sliced corned beef wrapped in protective plastic, three pounds of corned beef in all. “My gosh,” Jack exclaimed in delight. “All the way from New York. You can’t get that out here in the colonies, Dad.” “I know that, Jack,” Grandfather Leo said. “A Jewish fella told me where to get it, and I like it so much I knew you’d like it, you and I have the same tastes.” He chuckled, pleased to see how happy he had made them. “I’m gonna make you a sandwich when we get to the house. First thing we get there.” The ’copter rose now above the rocketship terminal and passed on over the dark desert.

“Back Home,” Leo said, “when you were a young fellow, you always played around a lot. But I know you’re settled down, now.” “I am,” Jack said. “And I think you’re imagining things.” “You do seem withdrawn, Jack,” his father said. “I hope that old trouble of yours, you know what I mean, isn’t bothering you. I’m talking about—” “I know what you’re talking about.” Relentlessly, Leo went on, “When I was a boy there was no mental illness like there is now. It’s a sign of the times; too many people, too much overcrowding. I remember when you first got sick, and a long time before that, say from when you were seventeen on, you were cold toward other people, uninterested in them. Moody, too. Seems to me you’re like that, now.” Jack glared at his father. This was the trouble with having one’s folks visit; they could never resist the temptation to resume their old roles as the All-wise, the All-knowing. To Leo, Jack was not a grown man with a wife and child; he was simply his son Jack.

He wondered how his father would act if he knew about Doreen. Probably Leo would be grief-stricken; he came from a strait-laced generation—born in 1924, a long, long time ago. It was a different world, then. Amazing, how his father had adapted to this world, now; a miracle. Leo, born in the boom period following World War One, and now standing here on the edge of the Martian desert . . . but he still would not understand about Doreen, about how vital it was for him to maintain an intimate contact of this sort, at any cost; or rather, almost any cost. “What’s her name?” Leo said. “W-what?” Jack stammered. “I got a little of that telepathic sense,” Leo said in a toneless voice. “Don’t I?” After a pause, Jack said, “Evidently.” “Does Silvia know?” “No.” “I could tell because you didn’t look me in the eye.” “Balls,” Jack said fiercely.

Lately, since he had started working for Arnie Kott, her husband had changed. No doubt it was the eerie job which he had been given; the mute, autistic Steiner boy upset her, and she had been sorry from the first to see him appear. Life was complicated enough already. The boy flitted in and out of the house, always running on his toes, his eyes always darting as if he saw objects not present, heard sounds beyond the normal range. If only time could be turned back and Norbert Steiner could be somehow restored to life! If only . . . In her drugged mind she saw, in a flash, that ineffectual little man setting out in the morning with his suitcases of wares, salesman off on his rounds, yogurt and blackstrap molasses. Is he still alive somewhere? Perhaps Manfred saw him, lost as the boy was—according to Jack—in disfigured time. What a surprise is in store for them when they make contact with the boy and find they have rekindled that sad little specter . . . but more likely their theory is right, and it is the next, he sees the next. They will have what they want.

Presently, Jack said, “It looks like the co-op apartment house I lived in years ago when I had my breakdown.” “Exactly. The co-op movement will be in with the UN on this. These F.D.R. Mountains were once fertile, as everybody knows; there was plenty of water here. The UN hydraulic engineers believe they can bring enormous quantities of water up to the surface from the table below. The water table is closer to the surface in these mountains than anywhere else on Mars; this is the original water source for the canal network, the UN engineers believe.” “The co-op,” Jack said in a strange voice, “here on Mars.” “They’ll be fine modern structures,” Leo said. “It’s quite an ambitious project. The UN will be transporting people here free, providing their passage right to their new homes, and the cost of buying each unit will be small. It will take quite a big slice of these mountains, as you might guess, and as I heard it, they expect it to be ten to fifteen years before the project is completed.” Jack said nothing. “Mass emigration,” Leo said. “This will ensure it.” “I guess so,” Jack said.

“Look, Jack,” Leo said. He was intently examining the boy’s drawing. “What he’s written over the entrance of the building.” In twisted, wavering letters Manfred had written: AM-WEB “Must be the name of the building,” Leo said. “It is,” Jack said, recognizing the word; it was a contraction of a co-op slogan, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder.” “All men become brothers,” he said under his breath. “It’s on co-op stationery.” He remembered it well. Now, taking his crayons once more, Manfred resumed his work. As the two men watched, the boy began to draw something at the top of the picture. Dark birds, Jack saw. Enormous, dusky, vulture-like birds. At a broken window of the building, Manfred drew a round face with eyes, nose, a turned-down, despairing mouth. Someone within the building, gazing out silently and hopelessly, as if trapped within. “Well,” Leo said. “Interesting.” His expression was one of grim outrage. “Now, why would he want to draw that? I don’t think that’s a very wholesome or positive attitude; why can’t he draw it like it’s going to be, new and immaculate, with children playing and pets and contented people?” Jack said, “Maybe he draws what he sees.” “Well, if he sees that, he’s ill,” Leo said. “There are so many bright, wonderful things he could see instead; why would he want to see that?” “Perhaps he has no choice,” Jack said. Gubbish, he thought. I wonder; could gubbish mean time? The force that to the boy means decay, deterioration, destruction, and, at las...