The Man in the High Castle

by Philip K. Dick

Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself—they were the hope of the world. Place difference did not have the significance for them.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

Scrape up a fully restored 1929 Ford including fabric top (black). Grand slam to keep patronage forever. Crated original mint trimotor airmail plane discovered in barn in Alabama, etc. Produce mummified head of Mr. B. Bill, including flowing white hair; sensational American artifact. Make my reputation in top connoisseur circles throughout Pacific, not excluding Home Islands. To inspire himself, he lit up a marijuana cigarette, excellent Land-O-Smiles brand.

However, it had been one of the Japanese trade missions which had cut off Omuro’s head for his profiteering. And nowadays such a violation of the harsh, rigid, but just Japanese civil law was unheard of. It was a credit to the incorruptibility of the Jap occupation officials, especially those who had come in after the War Cabinet had fallen.

‘What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?’”

From the bible.

Mr. Tagomi began, “I inquired of the oracle, ‘Will the meeting between myself and Mr. Childan be profitable?’ and obtained to my dismay the ominous hexagram The Preponderance of the Great. The ridgepole is sagging. Too much weight in the middle; all unbalanced. Clearly away from the Tao.” The tape recorder whirred.

“You, sir, are of American ancestry. Although you have gone to the trouble of darkening your skin color.” He scrutinized Mr. Ramsey. “A tan achieved by a sun lamp,” Mr. Ramsey murmured. “For merely acquiring vitamin D.” But his expression of humiliation gave him away. “I assure you that I retain authentic roots with—” Mr. Ramsey stumbled over the words. “I have not cut off all ties with—native ethnic patterns.”

First of all, coded material was infrequent, and dealt usually with matters of security, not with trade deals. And the cipher was the metaphor type, utilizing poetic allusion, which had been adopted to baffle the Reich monitors—who could crack any literal code, no matter how elaborate.

He lugged his heavy cases to the curb, hailed a pedecab, and told the chink to take him to the Nippon Times Building. The chink, gaunt-faced, hunched over and perspiring, gasped a place-conscious acknowledgment and began loading Mr. Childan’s bags aboard. Then, having assisted Mr. Childan himself into the carpet-lined seat, the chink clicked on the meter, mounted his own seat and pedaled off along Montgomery Street, among the cars and buses.

And then, too, he might see a slave. German or South ships docked at the port of San Francisco all the time, and blacks occasionally were allowed off for short intervals. Always in groups of fewer than three. And they could not be out after nightfall; even under Pacific law, they had to obey the curfew.

Weren’t the old-timers like that? But, she thought, now the frontier isn’t here; it’s the other planets. She thought: He and I could sign up for one of those colonizing rocket ships. But the Germans would disbar him because of his skin and me because of my dark hair.

Your abstract art represented a period of spiritual decadence, of spiritual chaos, due to the disintegration of society, the old plutocracy.

it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate—confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

What they do not comprehend is man’s helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn’t it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small . . . and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

“All afternoon assorted officials examined the alternatives,” Mr. Tagomi said. “This is most authentic of dying old U.S. culture, a rare retained artifact carrying flavor of bygone halcyon day.” Mr. Baynes opened the box. In it lay a Mickey Mouse wristwatch on a pad of black velvet. Was Mr. Tagomi playing a joke on him? He raised his eyes, saw Mr. Tagomi’s tense, concerned face. No, it was not a joke. “Thank you very much,” Baynes said. “This is indeed incredible.”

Like postwar boodle paper money, it was fine until questioned. Nobody was hurt—until the day of reckoning. And then everyone, equally, would be ruined. But meanwhile, nobody talked about it, even the men who earned their living turning out the forgeries; they shut their own minds to what they made, kept their attention on the mere technical problems.

somebody told me Frink’s a kike. Changed his nose and name. All I have to do is notify the German consul here. Routine business.

Well, listen. One has historicity in it.” He grinned at her. “Pick them up. Go ahead. One’s worth, oh, maybe forty or fifty thousand dollars on the collectors’ market.” The girl gingerly picked up the two lighters and examined them. “Don’t you feel it?” he kidded her. “The historicity?” She said, “What is ‘historicity’?”

“You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.”

Wyndam-Matson giggled. “That’s my point! I’d have to prove it to you with some sort of document. A paper of authenticity. And so it’s all a fake, a mass delusion. The paper proves its worth, not the object itself!”

Following after her, still carrying the book, Joe went on, “And the U.S. comes in. After it licks the Japs. And after the war, the U.S. and Britain divide the world. Exactly like Germany and Japan did in reality.”

Only the white races endowed with creativity, he reflected. And yet I, blood member of same, must bump head to floor for these two. Think how it would have been had we won! Would have crushed them out of existence. No Japan today, and the U.S.A. gleaming great sole power in entire wide world. He thought: I must read that Grasshopper book. Patriotic duty, from the sound of it.

And there was another notion circulating and growing in the back of Robert Childan’s mind. With these, there’s no problem of authenticity. And that problem may someday wreck the historic American artifacts industry. Not today or tomorrow—but after that, who knows.

“Yet,” Paul said, “I have for several days now inspected it, and for no logical reason I feel a certain emotional fondness. Why is that? I may ask. I do not even now project into this blob, as in psychological German tests, my own psyche. I still see no shapes or forms. But it somehow partakes of Tao. You see?” He motioned Childan over. “It is balanced. The forces within this piece are stabilized.

We experience the tranquillity associated not with art but with holy things. I recall a shrine in Hiroshima wherein a shinbone of some medieval saint could be examined.

This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained. By this meditation, conducted by myself at great length since you were last here, I have come to identify the value which this has in opposition to historicity. I am deeply moved, as you may see.”

mass-produced. Either in base metal or plastic. From a mold. In any quantity desired.” After a time Childan said, “What about wu? Will that remain in the pieces?” Paul said nothing.

You and I—we have no awareness of the vast number of uneducated. They can obtain from mold-produced identical objects a joy which would be denied to us. We must suppose that we have the only one of a kind, or at least something rare, possessed by a very few. And, of course, something truly authentic. Not a model or replica.”

trade the gun in on more historicity sanctioned item. This gun, for me, has too much subjective history . . . all of the wrong kind. But that ends with me; no one else can experience it from the gun. Within my psyche only.

What if I had bought one of those odd, indistinct items? Kept it, re-examined, contemplated . . . would I have subsequently, through it, found my way back? I doubt it. Those are for him, not me.

But what does it matter? Even if Doctor Goebbels is deposed and Operation Dandelion is canceled? They will still exist, the blackshirts, the Partei, the schemes if not in the Orient then somewhere else. On Mars and Venus.

Evidently we go on, as we always have. From day to day. At this moment we work against Operation Dandelion. Later on, at another moment, we work to defeat the police. But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step. He thought, We can only hope. And try.