The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 5: The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Stories

by Philip K. Dick

As I held the Sibyl, a strange thing happened. I saw, amid the swirling gases, forms take shape.

  "You must not take them as real," the Sibyl said; I heard her voice, and yet although I understood her words I knew that the shapes were indeed real. I saw a giant ship, without sails or oars… I saw a city of thin, high buildings, crowded with vehicles unlike anything I had ever seen. And still I moved toward them and they toward me, until at last the shapes swirled behind me, cutting me off from the Sibyl. "I see this with the Gorgon's Eye," the Sibyl called after me. "It is the Eye which Medusas passed back and forth, the eye of the fates – you have fallen into -" And then her words were gone.

  I played in grass with a puppy, wondering about a broken Coca-Cola bottle which had been left in our backyard; I didn't know by whom.

  "Philip, you come in for dinner!" my grandmother called from the back porch. I saw that the sun was setting.

  "Okay!" I called back. But I continued to play. I had found a great spider web, and in it was a bee wrapped up in web, stung by the spider. I began to unwrap it, and it stung me.

  My next memory was reading the comic pages in the Berkeley Daily Gazette. I read about Brick Bradford and how he found a lost civilization from thousands of years ago.

  "Hey, Mom," I said to my mother. "Look at this; it's swell. Brick walks down this ledge, see, and at the bottom -" I kept staring at the olden-times helmets the people wore, and a strange feeling filled me; I didn't know why.

  "He certainly gets a lot out of the funnies," my grandmother said in a disgusted voice. "He should read something worthwhile. Those comics are garbage."

  The next I remember I was in school, sitting watching a girl dance. Her name was Jill and she was from the grade above ours, the sixth; she wore a belly dancer's costume and her veil covered the bottom part of her face. But I could see lovely kind eyes, eyes filled with wisdom. They reminded me of someone else's eyes I had once known, but who has a kid ever known? Later Mrs. Redman had us write a composition, and I wrote about Jill. I wrote about strange lands where Jill lived where she danced with nothing on above her waist. Later, Mrs. Redman talked to my mother on the phone and I was bawled out, but in obscure terms that had to do with a bra or something. I never understood it then; there was a lot I didn't understand. I seemed to have memories, and yet they had nothing to do with growing up in Berkeley at the Hillside Grammar School, or my family, or the house we lived in… they had to do with snakes. I know now why I dreamed of snakes: wise snakes, not evil snakes but those which whisper wisdom.

  Anyhow, my composition was considered very good by the principal of the school, Mr. Bill Gaines, after I wrote in that Jill wore something above her waist at all times, and later I decided to be a writer.

  One night I had an odd dream. I was maybe in junior high school, getting ready to go to Berkeley High next year. I dreamed that in the deep of night – and it was like a regular dream, it was really real – I saw this person from outer space behind glass in a satellite of some kind they'd come here in. And he couldn't talk; he just looked at me, with funny eyes.

  Two weeks or so later I had to fill out what I wanted to be when I grew up and I thought of my dream about the man from another universe, so I wrote: I AM GOING TO BE A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER.

  That made my family mad, but then, see, when they got mad I got stubborn, and anyhow my girlfriend, Ysabel Lomax, told me I'd never be any good at it and it didn't earn any money anyhow and science fiction was dumb and only people with pimples read it. So I decided for sure to write it, because people with pimples should have someone writing for them; it's unfair otherwise, just to write for people with clear complexions. America is built on fairness; that is what Mr. Gaines taught us at Hillside Grammar School, and since he was able to fix my wristwatch that time when no one else could, I tend to admire him.

  In high school I was a failure because I just sat writing and writing all day, and all my teachers screamed at me that I was a Communist because I didn't do what I was told.

  "Oh yeah?" I used to say. That got me sent up before the Dean of Boys. He told me off worse than my grandfather had, and warned me that if I didn't get better grades I'd be expelled.

  That night I had another one of those vivid dreams. This time a woman was driving me in her car, only it was like an old-time Roman style chariot, and she was singing.

  The next day when I had to go see Mr. Erlaud, the Dean of Boys, I wrote on his blackboard, in Latin:

  UBI PECUNIA REGNET

  When he came in he turned red in the face, since he teaches Latin and knows that means, "Where money rules."

  "This is what a left-wing complainer would write," he said to me. So I wrote something else as he sat looking over my papers; I wrote:

  UBI CUNNUS REGNET

  That seemed to perplex him. "Where – did you learn that particular Latin word?" he asked.

  "I don't know," I said. I wasn't sure, but it seemed to me that in my dreams they were talking to me in Latin. Maybe it was just my own brain doing reruns of my Latin 1-A beginners class, where I was really very good, surprisingly, because I didn't study.

  The next vivid dream like that came two nights before that freak or those freaks killed President Kennedy. I saw the whole thing happening in my dream, two nights before, but more than anything else, even more vivid, I saw my girlfriend Ysabel Lomax watching the conspirators doing their evil deed, and Ysabel had a third eye.

  My folks sent me to a psychologist later on, because after President Kennedy was assassinated I got really weird. I just sat and brooded and withdrew. It was a neat lady they sent me to, a Carol Heims. She was very pretty and she didn't say I was nuts; she said I should get away from my family, drop out of school – she said that the school system insulates you from reality and keeps you from learning techniques to handle actual situations – and for me to write science fiction.

  I did so. I worked at a TV sales shop sweeping up and uncrating and setting up the new TV sets. I kept thinking that each set was like a huge eye, though; it bothered me. I told Carol Heims my dreams that I had been having all my life, about the space people, and being in Latin, and that I thought I'd had a lot more I'd never remembered when I woke up.

  "Dreams aren't fully understood," Ms. Heims told me. I was sitting there wondering how she would look in a belly dancer costume, nude above the waist; I found that made the therapy hour go faster. "There's a new theory that it's part of your collective unconscious, reaching back perhaps thousands of years… and in dreams you get in touch with it. So, if that's true, dreams are valid and very valuable."

  I was busy imagining her hips moving suggestively from side to side, but I did listen to what she said; it was something about the wise kindness of her eyes. Always I thought of those wise snakes, for some reason.

  "I've been dreaming about books," I told her. "Open books, held up before me. Huge books, very valuable. Even holy, like the Bible."

  "That has to do with your career as a writer," Ms. Heims said.

  "These are old. Thousands of years old. And they're warning us about something. A dreadful murder, a lot of murders. And cops putting people into prison for their ideas, but doing it secretly – framing people. And I keep seeing this woman who looks like you but seated on a vast stone throne."

  Later on Ms. Heims was transferred to another part of the county and I couldn't see her any more. I felt really bad, and I buried myself in my writing. I sold a story to a magazine called Envigorating Science Fact, which told about superior races who had landed on Earth and were directing our affairs secretly. They never paid me.

  I am old now, and I risk telling this, because what do I have to lose? One day I got a request to write a small article for Love-Planet Adventure Yarns, and they gave me a plot they wanted written up, and a black-and-white photo of the cover. I kept staring at the photo; it showed a Roman or Greek – anyhow he wore a toga – and he had on his wrist a caduceus, which is the medical sign: two coiled snakes, only actually it was olive branches origi
nally.

  "How do you know that's called a 'caduceus'?" Ysabel asked me (we were living together now, and she was always telling me to make more money and to be like her family, which was well-to-do and classy).

  "I don't know," I said, and I felt funny. And then I began to see violently agitated colored phosphene activity in both my eyes, like those modern abstract graphics which Paul Klee and others draw – in vivid color, and flash-cut in duration: very fast. "What's the date?" I yelled at Ysabel, who was sitting drying her hair and reading the Harvard Lampoon.

  "The date? It's March 16," she said.

  "The year!" I yelled. "Pulchra puella, tempus -" And then I broke off, because she was staring at me. And, worse, I couldn't recall her name or who she was.

  "It is 1974," she answered.

  "The tyranny is in power, then, if it is only 1974," I said.

  "What?" she answered, astonished, staring at me.

  At once two beings appeared on each side of her, encapsulated in their inter-system vessels, two globes which hovered and maintained their atmosphere and temperature. "Don't say a further statement to her," one of them warned me. "We will erase her memory; she will think she fell asleep and had a dream."

  "I remember," I said, pressing my hands to my head. Anamnesis had taken place; I remember that I was from ancient times, and, before that, from the star Albemuth, as were these two Immortals. "Why are you back?" I said. "To -"

  "We shall work entirely through ordinary mortals," J'Annis said. He was the wiser of the two Immortals. "There is no Sibyl now to help, to give advice to the Republic. In dreams we are inspiring people here and there to wake up; they are beginning to understand that the Price of Release is being paid by us to free them from the Liar, who rules them."

  "They're not aware of you?" I said.

  "They suspect. They see holograms of us projected in the sky, which we employ to divert them; they imagine that we are floating about there."

  I knew that these Immortals were in the minds of men, not in the skies of Earth, that by diverting attention outward, they were free once more to help inward, as they had always helped: the inner World.

  "We will bring the springtime to this winter world," F'fr'am said, smiling. "We will raise the gates which imprison these people, who groan under a tyranny they dimly see. Did you see? Did you know of the comings-and-goings of the secret police, the quasi-military teams which destroyed all freedom of speech, all those who dissented?"

  Now, in my old age, I set forth this account for you, my Roman friends, here at Cumae, where the Sibyl lives. I passed either by chance or by design into the far future, into a world of tyranny, of winter, which you cannot imagine. And I saw the Immortals which assist us also assist those, two thousand years from now! Although those mortals in the future are – listen to me – blind. Their sight has been taken away by a thousand years of repression; they have been tormented and limited, the way we limit animals. But the Immortals are waking them up – will wake them up, I should say, in time to save them. And then the two thousand years of winter will end; they will open their eyes, because of dreams and secret inspirations; they will know – but I have told you all this, in my ancient, rambling fashion.

  Let me finish with this verse by our great poet Virgil, a good friend of the Sibyl, and you will know from it what lies ahead, for the Sibyl has said that although it will not apply to our time here in Rome, it will apply to those two thousand years from us, ahead in time, bringing them promise of relief:

  "Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;

  magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

  Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;

  Iam nova progenies, caelo demittitur alto.

  Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum

  desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,

  casta fave Lucina; tuus iam regnat Apollo."

  I will set this in the strange English language which I learned to speak during my time in the future, before the Immortals and the Sibyl drew me back here, my work there at that time done:

  "At last the Final Time announced by the Sibyl will arrive:

  The procession of ages turns to its origin.

  The Virgin returns and Saturn reigns as before;

  A new race from heaven on high descends.

  Goddess of Birth, smile on the new-born baby,

  In whose time the Iron Prison will fall to ruin

  And a golden race arises everywhere.

  Apollo, the rightful king, is restored!"

  Alas, you my dear Roman friends will not live to see this. But far along the corridors of time, in the United States (I use here words foreign to you) evil will fall, and this little prophecy of Virgil, which the Sibyl inspired in him, will come true. The Springtime is reborn!

  The Day Mr. Computer Fell out of its Tree

  He awoke, and sensed at once that something dreadful was wrong. Oh God, he thought as he realized that Mr. Bed had deposited him in a muddled heap against the wall. It's beginning again, he realized. And the Directorate West promised us infinite perfection. This is what we get, he realized, for believing in what mere humans say.

  As best he could he struggled out of his bedclothes, got shakily to his feet and made his way across the room to Mr. Closet.

  "I'd like a natty sharkskin gray double-breasted suit," he informed it, speaking crisply into the microphone on Mr. Closet's door. "A red shirt, blue socks, and -" But it was no use. Already the slot was vibrating as a huge pair of women's silk bloomers came sliding out.

  "You get what you see," Mr. Closet's metallic voice came to him, echoing hollowly.

  Glumly, Joe Contemptible put on the bloomers. At least it was better than nothing – like the day in Dreadful August when the vast polyencephalic computer in Queens had served up everyone in Greater America nothing but a handkerchief to wear.

  Going to the bathroom, Joe Contemptible washed his face – and found the liquid which he was splashing on himself to be warm root beer. Christ, he thought. Mr. Computer is even zanier this time than ever before. It's been reading old Phil Dick science fiction stories, he decided. That's what we get for providing Mr. Computer with every kind of archaic trash in the world to read and store in its memory banks.

  He finished combing his hair – without making use of the root beer – and then, having dried himself, entered the kitchen to see if Mr. Coffeepot was at least a sane fragment in a reality deteriorating all around him.

  No luck. Mr. Coffeepot obligingly presented him with a dixie cup of soap. Well, so much for that.

  The real problem, however, came when he tried to open Mr. Door. Mr. Door would not open; instead it complained tinnily: "The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

  "Meaning what?" Joe demanded, angry, now. This weird business was no longer fun. Not that it had ever been the times before – except, perhaps, when Mr. Computer had served him with roast pheasant for breakfast.

  "Meaning," Mr. Door said, "that you're wasting your time, fucker. You're not getting to the office today nohow."

  This proved to be true. The door would not open; despite his efforts the mechanism, controlled miles away from the polyencephalic master matrix, refused to budge.

  Breakfast, then? Joe Contemptible punched buttons on the control module of Mr. Food – and found himself staring at a plate of fertilizer.

  He thereupon picked up the phone and savagely attacked the numbers which would put him in touch with the local police.

  "Loony Tunes Incorporated," the face on the vidscreen said. "An animated cartoon version of your sexual practices produced in one week, including GLORIOUS SOUND EFFECTS!"

  Fuck it, Joe Contemptible said to himself and rang off.

  It had been a bad idea from the start, back in 1982, to operate every mechanism from a central source. Of course, the basic idea had sounded good: with the ozone layer burned off, too many people were behaving irrationally, and it had become necessary to solve the problem by some electronic means imm
une from the mind-slushing ultra violet radiation now flooding earth. Mr. Computer had, at the time, seemed to be the answer. But, sad to say, Mr. Computer had absorbed too much freaked-out input from its human builders and therefore, like them, Mr. Computer had its own psychotic episodes.

  There was of course an answer. It had hurriedly been slapped together – pasted into place, as it were, once the difficulty was discovered. The head of World Mental Health, a formidable old battleax named Joan Simpson, had been granted a form of immortality so as to be always available to treat Mr. Computer during its crazy periods. Ms. Simpson was stored at the center of the earth in a special lead-lined chamber, safe from the harmful radiation at the surface, in a quasi-suspended animation called Dismal Pak, in which Ms. Simpson (it was said) lay aslumber while being entertained by an endless procession of priceless 1940 radio soap operas, fed to her on a closed loop. Ms. Simpson, it was said, was the only truly sane person on – or rather in – earth; this, plus her superb skill, as well as infinite training in the art of healing psychotic constructs, was earth's sole hope for survival.

  Realizing this, Joe Contemptible felt a little better, but not a lot – for he had just picked up Mr. Newspaper where it lay on the floor beside the slot of his front door. The headline read:

  ADOLF HITLER CROWNED POPE. CROWDS CHEER IN RECORD NUMBERS.

  So much for Mr. Newspaper, Joe realized glumly, and tossed it into Mr. Garbage-slot. The mechanism churned, and then, instead of ingesting or cubing the newspaper, spat it back out again. Joe glanced briefly at the headline again, saw a photo of a human skeleton – complete with Nazi uniform and mustache, wearing the great crown of the pope – and seated himself on the couch in his living room to wait for the moment (sure to come soon) when Ms. Simpson was startled out of Dismal Pak to minister to Mr. Computer, and, in so doing, restore the world to sanity.

  Half to himself, Fred Doubledome said, "It's psychotic, all right. I asked it if it knew where it was and it said it was floating on a raft in the Mississippi. Now get a confirm for me; ask it who it is."