Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

As Jack stepped from the ship the boy disappeared from sight. On his own he had hurried down the ramp and plunged into the school. Doreen Anderton and Arnie Kott, Jack said to himself. The two people who mean the most to me, the friends with whom my contacts, my intimacy with life itself, is the strongest. And yet it’s right there that the boy has managed to infiltrate; he has unfastened me from my relationships where they are the strongest. What’s left? he asked himself. Once I have been isolated there, the rest—my son, my wife, my father, Mr. Yee—all follow almost automatically, without a fight. I can see what lies ahead for me if I continue to lose, step by step, to this completely psychotic boy. Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with—the endless ebb and flow of one’s own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way. It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.