Clans of the Alphane Moon

by Philip K. Dick

  “Sit down,” Elsie said, summoning a modicum of politeness; she put the teakettle on the stove, lit the burner. “Just clear off that bench,” she directed. “Push the stuff anywhere; on the floor if you want.”

  The four invaders reluctantly—with tangible aversion—pushed the mass of children’s soiled clothing onto the floor, seated themselves. Each had a vague, stunned expression and Ignatz wondered why.

  The woman, haltingly, said, “Couldn’t you—clean up your home here? I mean, how do you live in such—” She gestured, unable to continue.

  Ignatz felt apologetic. But after all… there were so many more important matters and so little time. Neither he nor Elsie could seem to find the opportunity to straighten things up; it was wrong, of course, to let the shack get like this, but—he shrugged. Sometime soon, perhaps. And the invaders could possibly help here, too; they might have a work-sim that could pitch in. The Manses had them, but they charged too much. Possibly the invaders would loan him a work-sim free.

  A rat, from its hole behind the icebox, scuttled across the floor. The woman invader, seeing the clumsy little weapon which it carried, shut her eyes and moaned.

  Ignatz, as he fixed the coffee, giggled. Well, no one had asked them to come here; if they didn’t like Gandhitown they could leave.

  From the bedroom several of the children appeared, gaped in silence at the four invaders. The invaders sat rigidly, saying nothing, waiting in pain for their coffee, ignoring the blank, staring eyes of the children.

  In the large council room at Adolfville the Heeb rep, Jacob Simion, spoke up suddenly. “They’ve landed. At Gandhitown. They’re with Ignatz Ledebur.”

  Furious, Howard Straw said, “While we sit here talking. Enough of this time-wasting gabble; let’s wipe them out. They have no business on our world—don’t you agree?” He poked Gabriel Baines.

  “I agree,” Baines said, and moved a trifle further away from the Mans delegate. “How did you know?” he asked Jacob Simion.

  The Heeb snickered. “Didn’t you see them here in the room? The asteral bodies? It was Ignatz who came here—you don’t remember that; he came and took Omar Diamond with him, but you’ve forgotten that because it never happened; the invaders made it unhappen by dividing the three into one and two.”

  Staring hopelessly at the floor the Dep said, “So already it’s too late; they’ve landed.”

  Howard Straw barked a sharp, cold laugh. “But only in Gandhitown. Who cares about that? It ought to be mopped up; personally I’d be glad if they pulverized it out of existence—it’s a cesspool and everybody living in it stinks.”

  Shrinking back as if struck, Jacob Simion murmured, “At least we Heebs, we’re not cruel.” He blinked back helpless tears; at that, Howard Straw grinned with relish and nudged Gabriel Baines.

  “Don’t you have spectacular weapons at Da Vinci Heights?” Gabriel Baines asked him. He had a deep intuition, then, that the Mans’ write-off of Gandhitown was indicative; the Manses probably intended to make no stand until their own settlement was endangered. They would not lend the inventiveness of their hyperactive minds for the general defense.

  Gabriel Baines’ long-time suspicions of Straw were now being justified.

  Frowning with worry Annette Golding said, “We can’t let Gandhitown go down the drain.”

  “‘Down the drain,’” Straw echoed. “Appropriate! Yes we certainly can. Listen; we have the weapons. They’ve never been put to use—they can wipe out any invading armada. We’ll trot them out—when we feel like it.” He glanced around the table at the other delegates, enjoying the power of his position, his mastery; they were all dependent on him.

  “I knew you’d behave like this as soon as a crisis arose,” Gabriel Baines said bitterly. God, how he hated the Manses. How unreliable morally they were, so egocentric and superior; they simply could not work for the common good. Thinking this he made himself a promise right on the spot. If his opportunity to get back at Straw ever came he would take it. Fully. In fact, he realized, if the opportunity came to pay back the whole bunch of them, the entire Mans settlement—it was a hope worth living for. The Manses held the advantage now, but it wouldn’t last.

  In fact, Gabriel Baines thought, it would almost be worth going to the invaders and making a pact with them on behalf of Adolfville; the invaders and ourselves against Da Vinci Heights.

  The more he thought of it the more the idea appealed to him.

  Annette Golding, eyeing him, said, “Do you have something to offer us, Gabe? You look as if you’ve thought of something valuable.” Like all Polys she had acute perceptions; she had correctly read the changing expressions on his face.

  Gabe chose to lie. Obviously he had to. “I think,” he said aloud, “we can sacrifice Gandhitown. We’re going to have to give it to them, let them colonize in that area, set up a base or whatever they want to do; we may not like it but—” He shrugged. What else could they do?

  Miserably, Jacob Simion stammered, “Y-you people don’t care about us just because we’re—not so cleanly as you all. I’m going back to Gandhitown and join my clan; if they’re going to perish I’ll perish with them.” He rose to his feet, pushing his chair over with a discordant crash. “Betrayers,” he added as he shambled, Heebwise, toward the door. The other delegates watched him go, displaying various shades of indifference; even Annette Golding, who generally cared about everything and everyone, did not seem perturbed.

  And yet—fleetingly—Gabriel Baines felt grief. Because for the whole lot of them, here went their potential fate; every now and then a full Pare or Poly or Skitz or even Mans drifted by insidious, imperceptible degrees into Heebhood. So it could still come about. Any time.

  And now, Baines realized, if that happens to any of us there will be no place to go. What became of a Heeb without Gandhitown? A good question; it frightened him.

  Aloud he said, “Wait.”

  At the door the shambling, unshaven, sloppy figure of Jacob Simion paused; in the sunken Heeb eyes a flicker of hope manifested itself.

  Gabriel Baines said, “Come back.” Addressing himself to the others, especially arrogant Howard Straw, he said, “We have to act in concert. Today it’s Gandhitown; tomorrow it’ll be Hamlet Hamlet or ourselves or the Skitzes—the invaders will nab us bit by bit. Until only Da Vinci Heights remains.” His antagonism toward Straw made his voice grate with envenomed harshness; in his own ears it was scarcely recognizable. “I vote formally that we employ all our resources in an effort to reconquer Gandhitown. We should make our stand there.” Right in the middle of the heaps of garbage, animal manure and rusting machinery, he said to himself, and winced.

  After a pause Annette said, “I—second the motion.”

  The vote was taken. Only Howard Straw voted against it. So the motion carried.

  “Straw,” Annette said briskly, “you’re instructed to produce these miracle weapons you’ve been bragging about. Since you Manses are so militant we’ll let you lead the attack to retake Gandhitown.” To Gabriel Baines she said, “And you Pares can organize it.” She seemed quite calm, now that it had all been decided.

  Softly, Ingred Hibbler said to Straw, “I might point out that if the war is fought near and in Gandhitown, damage will not occur to the other settlements. Had you thought of that?”

  “Imagine fighting in Gandhitown,” Straw muttered. “Wading around waist-deep in—” He broke off. To Jacob Simion and Omar Diamond he said, “We’ll need all the Skitz and Heeb saints, visionaries, miracle-workers and just plain Psis we can get; will your settlements produce them and let us employ them?”

  “I think so,” Diamond said. Simion nodded.

  “Between the miracle weapons from Da Vinci Heights and the talents of the Heeb and Skitz saints,” Annette said, “we should be able to offer more than token resistance.”

  Miss Hibbler said, “If we could get the full names of the invaders we could cast numerological charts of them, discover their weak points. Or if we had their e
xact birthdates—”

  “I think,” Annette interrupted, “that the weapons of the Manses, plus the organizing powers of the Pares, in conjunction with the Heeb and Skitz unnaturals, will be somewhat more useful.”

  “Thank you,” Jacob Simion said, “for not sacrificing Gandhitown.” He gazed in mute appreciation at Gabriel Baines.

  For the first time in months, perhaps even years, Baines felt his defenses melt; he enjoyed—briefly—a sense of relaxation, of near-euphoria. Someone liked him. And even if it was only a Heeb it meant a lot.

  It reminded him of his childhood. Before he had found the Pare solution.

  SEVEN

  Walking along the muddy, rubbish-heaped central street of Gandhitown, Dr. Mary Rittersdorf said, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. Clinically it’s mad. These people must all be hebephrenics. Terribly, terribly deteriorated.” Inside her something cried at her to get out, to leave this place and never return. To get back to Terra and her profession as marriage counselor and forget she had ever seen this.

  And the idea of attempting psychotherapy with these people—

  She shuddered. Even drug-therapy and electroshock would be of little use, here. This was the tail-end of mental illness, the point of no return.

  Beside her the young CIA agent, Dan Mageboom, said, “Your diagnosis, then, is hebephrenia? I can report that back officially?” Taking her by the arm he assisted her over the remains of some major animal carcass; in the mid-day sun the ribs stuck up like tines of a great curved fork.

  Mary said, “Yes, it’s obvious. Did you see the pieces of dead rat lying strewn around the door of that shack? I’m sick; I’m actually sick to my stomach. No one lives that way now. Not even in India and China. It’s like going back four thousand years; that’s the way Sinanthropus and Neanderthal must have lived. Only without the rusted machinery.”

  “At the ship,” Mageboom said, “we can have a drink.”

  “No drink is going to help me,” Mary said. “You know what this awful place reminds me of? The horrible shoddy old conapt my husband moved into when we separated.”

  Beside her Mageboom started, blinked.

  “You knew I was married,” Mary said. “I told you.” She wondered why her remark had surprised him, so; on the trip she had freely discussed her marital problems with him, finding him a good listener.

  “I can’t believe your comparison is accurate,” Mageboom said. “The conditions here are symptoms of a group psychosis; your husband never lived like that— he had no mental disorder.” He glared at her.

  Mary halting, said, “How do you know? You never met him. Chuck was—still is—sick. What I said is so; he has a latent streak of hebephrenia in him… he always shrank from socio-sexual responsibility; I told you about all my attempts to get him to seek employment that guaranteed a reasonable return.” But of course Mageboom himself was an employee of the CIA; she could hardly expect to obtain sympathy from him on that issue. Better, perhaps, to drop the whole topic. Things were depressing enough without having to rehash her life with Chuck.

  On both sides of her Heebs—that was what they called themselves, a corruption of the obviously accurate diagnostic category hebephrenic—gazed with vacuous silliness, grinning without comprehension, even without real curiosity. A white goat wandered by ahead of her; she and Dan Mageboom stopped warily, neither of them familiar with goats. It passed on.

  At least, she thought, these people are harmless. Hebephrenics, at all their stages of deterioration, lacked the capacity to act out aggression; there were other far more ominous derangement-syndromes to be on the lookout for. It was inevitable that, very shortly, they would begin to turn up. She was thinking in particular of the manic-depressives, who, in their manic phase, could be highly destructive.

  But there was an even more sinister category which she was steeling herself against. The destructiveness of the manics would be limited to impulse; at the worst it would have a tantrum-like aspect, temporary orgies of breaking and hitting which ultimately would subside. However, with the acute paranoid a systemized and permanent hostility could be anticipated; it would not abate in time but on the contrary would become more elaborate. The paranoid possessed an analytical, calculating quality; he had a good reason for his actions, and each move fitted in as part of the scheme. His hostility might be less conspicuously violent… but in the long run its durability posed deeper implications as far as therapy went. Because with these people, the advanced paranoids, cure or even temporary insight was virtually impossible. Like the hebephrenic, the paranoid had found a stable and permanent maladaptation.

  And, unlike the manic-depressive and the hebephrenic, or the simple catatonic schizophrenic, the paranoid seemed rational. The formal pattern of logical reasoning appeared undisturbed. Underneath, however, the paranoid suffered from the greatest mental disfigurement possible for a human being. He was incapable of empathy, unable to imagine himself in another person’s role. Hence for him others did not actually exist—except as objects in motion that did or did not affect his well-being. For decades it had been fashionable to say that paranoids were incapable of loving. This was not so. The paranoid experienced love fully, both as something given to him by others and as a feeling on his part toward them. But there was a slight catch to this.

  The paranoid experienced it as a variety of hate.

  To Dan Mageboom she said, “According to my theory the several sub-types of mental illness should be functioning on this world as classes somewhat like those of ancient India. These people here, the hebephrenics, would be equivalent to the untouchables. The manics would be the warrior class, without fear; one of the highest.”

  “Samurai,” Mageboom said. “As in Japan.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “The paranoids—actually paranoiac schizophrenics—would function as the statesman class; they’d be in charge of developing political ideology and social programs—they’d have the overall world view. The simple schizophrenics…” She pondered. “They’d correspond to the poet class, although some of them would be religious visionaries—as would be some of the Heebs. The Heebs, however, would be inclined to produce ascetic saints, whereas the schizophrenics would produce dogmatists. Those with polymorphic schizophrenia simplex would be the creative members of the society, producing the new ideas.” She tried to remember what other categories might exist. “There could be some with over-valent ideas, psychotic disorders that were advanced forms of milder obsessive-compulsive neurosis, the so-called diencephalic disturbances. Those people would be the clerks and office holders of the society, the ritualistic functionaries, with no original ideas. Their conservatism would balance the radical quality of the polymorphic schizophrenics and give the society stability.”

  Mageboom said, “So one would think the whole affair would work.” He gestured. “How would it differ from our own society on Terra?”

  For a time she considered the question; it was a good one.

  “No answer?” Mageboom said.

  “I have an answer. Leadership in this society here would naturally fall to the paranoids, they’d be superior individuals in terms of initiative, intelligence and just plain innate ability. Of course they’d have trouble keeping the manics from staging a coup… there’d always be tension between the two classes. But you see, with paranoids establishing the ideology, the dominant emotional theme would be hate. Actually hate going in two directions; the leadership would hate everyone outside its enclave and also would take for granted that everyone hated it in return. Therefore their entire so-called foreign policy would be to establish mechanisms by which this supposed hatred directed at them could be fought. And this would involve the entire society in an illusory struggle, a battle against foes that didn’t exist for a victory over nothing.”

  “Why is that so bad?”

  “Because,” she said, “no matter how it came out, the results would be the same. Total isolation for these people. That would be the ultimate effect of their entire gr
oup activity: to progressively cut themselves off from all other living entities.”

  “Is that so bad? To be self-sufficient—”

  “No,” Mary said. “It wouldn’t be self-sufficiency; it would be something entirely different, something you and I really can’t imagine. Remember the old experiments made with people in absolute isolation? Back in the mid-twentieth century, when they anticipated space travel, the possibility of a man being entirely alone for days, weeks on end, with fewer and fewer stimuli… remember the results they obtained when they placed a man in a chamber from which no stimuli at all reached him?”

  “Of course,” Mageboom said. “It’s what now is called the buggies. The result of stimulus-deprivation is acute hallucinosis.”

  She nodded. “Auditory, visual, tactile and olfactory hallucinosis, replacing the missing stimuli. And, in intensity, hallucinosis can exceed the force of reality; in its vividness, its impact, the effect aroused by it… for example, states of terror. Drug-induced hallucinations can bring on states of terror which no experience with the real world can produce.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they have an absolute quality. They’re generated within the sense-receptor system and constitute a feedback emanating not from a distant point but from within a person’s own nervous system. He can’t obtain detachment from it. And he knows it. There’s no retreat possible.”

  Mageboom said, “And how’s that going to act here? You don’t seem able to say.”

  “I can say, but it’s not simple. First, I don’t know yet how far this society is advanced along the lines of isolating itself and the individuals who make it up. We’ll know soon by their attitude toward us. The Heebs we’re seeing here—” She indicated the hovels on both sides of the muddy road. “Their attitude is no index. However, when we run into our first paranoids or manics—let’s say this: undoubtedly some measure of hallucination, of psychological projection, exists as a component of their world view. In other words, we have to assume they’re already partly hallucinating. But they still retain some sense of objective reality as such. Our presence here will accelerate the hallucinating tendency; we have to face that and be prepared. And the hallucination will take the form of seeing us as elements of dire menace; we, our ship, will literally be viewed—I don’t mean interpreted, I mean actually perceived—as threatening. What they undoubtedly will see in us is an invading spearhead that intends to overthrow their society, make it a satellite of our own.”