The Broken Bubble

by Philip Kindred Dick

  The Broken Bubble

  Philip Kindred Dick

  The Broken Bubble was written somewhere around 1956 under the longer title The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, and was rejected for publication in the 1950−s, as were all of Dick’s ‘straight’ (non-SF) novels at the time. It was published posthumously with a shortened title in 1988.

  Currently out of print in the United States

  The Broken Bubble

  by Philip K. Dick

  Publication Note

  The Broken Bubble was written somewhere around 1956 under the longer title The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, and was rejected for publication in the 1950−s, as were all of Dick’s ‘straight’ (non-SF) novels at the time. It was published posthumously with a shortened title in 1988.

  Currently out of print in the United States.

  (inner flap of the book)

  “The Broken Bubble will provide further evidence that Philip K. Dick is one of our genuine greats, the kind of writer who comes along once every three or four generations (if that often), someone who can write about a specific period of time and give us insights and truths that remain valid in all times.”

  —Pat Cadigan

  “Fifty or a hundred years from now, Dick may very well be recognized in retrospect as the greatest American novelist of the second halt of the twentieth century . . ..”

  —Norman Spinrad

  Philip K. Dick, the world-famous science fiction writer who died in 1982, was unable to obtain publication for the body of his fiction outside the genre. Since his death, however, a number of small presses have printed and sold out various of his unpublished works. Then Arbor House released his novel Mary and the Giant in 1987, and garnered such comments as “Philip K. Dick’s magic time machine ride into the 1950−s is just as amazing as his science fiction excursions into the future” (Ed Bryant); and “As enigmatic as a Beckett play, and at the same time as rooted in real life as a Steinbeck novel, Mary and the Giant is a weirdly compelling story” (Tim Powers); and “Boy, that guy was good!” (Suzy McKee Charnas).

  Now Arbor House is proud to present The Broken Bubble, new and complete, for the first time anywhere, by arrangement with the estate of Philip K. Dick. Excitement has been building as the unpublished works of this intriguing writer have continued to appear, with increasingly widespread review attention and a steadily growing cult audience. And this is just the book to satisfy his fans and hook new readers.

  The Broken Bubble is a novel of San Francisco in the 1950−s, about the unusual events that mix up and entwine the lives of four people at a turning point in American culture: the rise of rock-and-roll and the teenage life-style. Jim Briskin is a disc jockey on radio KOIF. He’s sill in love with his ex-wife Pat even though she’s about to marry someone else at the station-and she’s vaduating between them. But when he takes her to visit the desperate household of two of his teenage fans, she seduces the boy into abandoning his pregnant wife—who then claims Jim as her protector and support. And all around them the cultural upheaval of postwar American society is manifest, by teenage outcasts who have a remote-controlled Nazi automobile they use to bump into the rich kids’ cars; by Thisbe Holt, the dancer who performs for conventioneers by stuffing herself inside a clear plastic bubble; by blaring used-car ads and the conflict between generations. The solution to this human muddle is a literary triumph equaling in power Dick’s finest novels. Dick gives us a vision of redemption tempered with layered ironies and a lot of real humor. The Broken Bubble now takes its place beside the other major works of this fine writer.

  Philip K. Dick was considered by many to be the greatest living author of science fiction. His work won many awards, including the Hugo Award for best novel.

  (back cover of book jacket)

  “The Broken Bubble is at once terrifying, hilarious, and compassionate. Patricia Gray’s breakdown reads like fingernails on a chalkboard, and the convention of wild optometrists is about as nervously funny a scene as has ever been written. As for the adventure if the remote-controlled Horch— I can’t begin to explain; no writer but Phil Dick could have written it. It’s a novel of evident (astonishing, wild) talent and originality by a writer who has both of these articles to spare.”

  —James P. Baylock

  “His stories take place not in the depth, where monsters dwell, but on the surface, where they feed.”

  —Terry Bisson

  And in that universe “As far as I can tell, The Broken Bubble fell across the invisible membrane that separates our universe from one that is similar but not identical to ours. In that other universe, Jack Kerouac is still alive. And in that universe there was never a TV series called WKRP in Cincinnati, but there was a similar program called KOIF in San Francisco. That letter show was based on a novel by Jack Kerouac, called The Broken Bubble. And Jack Kerouac was not Jack Kerouac at all, but a brilliant novelist named Philip K. Dick, who started his career as a science fiction writer but switched to mainstream in the early 1960’s and went on to become world famous and appallingly wealthy.

  “If all of this seems the figment of a surrealist’s dream— well, that is entirely appropriate, isn’t it? Remember whom we’re talking about!

  “Any fan of Phil Dick’s work will place The Broken Bubble on the highest Shelf!”

  —Richard A. Lupoff

  The Broken Bubble

  1

  Luke trades big. Summer is here and Luke is mighty ready to make a deal with you, mighty ready, at three big lots, all of them busting with cars—cars—cars. What’d you think your old car’s worth? Maybe it’s worth more than you think on a brand-new Plymouth or Chevrolet four-door sedan or a Ford custom deluxe Ranch Wagon. Luke is trading big these days, buying big and selling big. Luke thinks big. Luke is big!

  Before Luke came, this wasn’t much of a town. Now it’s a really big car town. Now everybody drives a brand-new De-Soto with power windows, power seat. Come see Luke. Luke was born in Oklahoma before he moved out here to great old sunny California. Luke moved out here in 1946 after we beat the Japs. Listen to that sound truck that’s going up and down the streets. Listen to it go; it goes all the time. It pulls that big red signboard along, and all the time it’s playing the ‘Too Fat Polka’ and saying ‘Regardless of the make or condition of your old car . . .’ Hear that? It don’t matter what kind of old heap you got. Luke’ll give you two hundred dollars for it if you can drag walk tow push it into the lot.

  Luke wears a straw hat. He wears a double-breasted gray suit and he wears crepe-soled shoes. In his coat pocket he carries three fountain pens and two ballpoint pens. Inside his coat is an official Blue-Book Luke takes it out and tells you what your heap is worth. Look at that hot California sun pouring over Luke. Look at his big face sweat. Look at him grin. When Luke grins, he slips twenty bucks into your pocket. Luke gives away money.

  This is Automobile Row; this is the street of cars, Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco. Windows on all sides, all along and up and down, glass with words written in red-and-white poster paint; banners are pasted up high, and flags flutter, and over some lots are wads of colored aluminum strung on wire. And there are balloons and, in the evening, lights. At night the chains go up, the cars are locked, but lights come on, fine spotlights, fine big beams of color frying the bugs. And Luke has his clowns, his painted lady and gent clowns; they stand on top of the building and wave their arms. Luke has his microphones, and the salesmen call to people. Free quart of oil! Free dish! Free candy and cap gun for the kids. The steel guitar sings, and how Luke likes that. It sings like home.

  Bob Posin, holding his initialed briefcase, wondered if he had been recognized as a salesman, which in fact he was. He put cut his hand, saying, “I’m Bob Posin. From radio station
KOIF. Station manager.” He was now at Looney Luke’s Used Car Lot, trying to sell air time.

  “Yeah,” Sharpstein said, picking his teeth with a silver toothpick. He wore gray slacks and a lemon yellow shirt. Like all the West Coast used car dealers, his skin was baked red and dry, flaky, around his nose. “We were wondering when we’d hear from you.”

  They meandered among the cars.

  “Nice-looking cars you have here,” Posin said.

  “All clean,” Sharpstein said. “Every one a clean car.”

  “Are you Luke?”

  “Yeah, I’m Luke.”

  “You thinking of doing anything over the air?” That was the big question.

  Rubbing his cheekbone, Sharpstein said, “What sort of coverage your station got?”

  He gave an estimate twice the actual size; in these times he was willing to say anything. Television was getting the accounts, and nothing was left now but Regal Pale beer and L & M filter cigarettes. The independent AM stations were in a bad fix.

  “We’ve been having a few spots on TV,” Sharpstein said. “Works out pretty good, but they sure cost.”

  “And why pay for coverage of the whole Northern California area when your customers are right here in San Francisco?” He had a talking point there. Station KOIF with its thousand watts of operating power reached as many people in San Francisco as did the network AM and TV stations, and at a fraction of the cost.

  They strolled to the car lot office. At the desk Posin scratched figures on a pad of paper.

  “Sounds good to me,” Sharpstein said, his arms behind his head, his foot up on the desk. “Now tell me something. I have to admit I never got around to hearing your station. You got some kind of schedule I can see?”

  KOIF went on the air at five forty-five A.M. with news and weather and Sons of the Pioneers records.

  “Yup,” Sharpstein said.

  Then five hours of popular music. Then noon news. Then two hours of popular music from records and transcriptions. Then ‘Club 17,’ the kids’ rock-and-roll show, until five. Then an hour of Spanish-language light opera and talk and accordion music. Then dinner music from six until eight. Then—

  “In other words,” Sharpstein said, “the usual stuff.”

  “Balanced programming.” Music, news, sports, and religious. Plus spot plugs. That was what kept the station alive.

  “What about this?” Sharpstein said. “How about a plug every half hour between eight A.M. and eleven P.M.? Thirty oneminute spots a day, seven days a week.”

  Posin’s mouth fell open. Jesus Christ!

  “I’m serious,” Sharpstein said.

  Sweat fell from Posin’s arms into his nylon shirt. “Let’s see what that would run.” He wrote figures. What a bundle. Sweat stung his eyes.

  Sharpstein examined the figures. “Looks okay. It’ll be tentative, of course. We’ll try it a month and see what kind of response there is. We haven’t been satisfied with the Examiner ads.”

  “Nobody reads that,” Posin said hoarsely. Wait, he thought, until Ted Haynes, the owner of KOIF, was informed. “I’ll do your material myself. I’ll handle the material personally.”

  “You mean write it?”

  “Yes,” he said. Anything, everything.

  Sharpstein said, “We’ll supply the material. It comes from Kansas City, from the big boys. We’re part of a chain. You just put it on the air.”

  Radio station KOIF was located on narrow, steep Geary Street, in downtown San Francisco, on the top floor of the McLaughlen Building. The McLaughlen Building was a drafty, antiquated wooden office building, with a couch in the lobby. There was an elevator, an iron cage, but the station employees usually went up by the stairs.

  The door from the stairs opened onto a hallway. To the left was the front office of KOIF, with one desk, a mimeograph machine, typewriter, telephone, and two wooden chairs. To the right was the glass window of the control room. The wide-board floor, was unpainted. The ceilings, high above, were yellowed plaster, cobwebbed. Several offices were used as storerooms. Toward the back, away from the traffic noises, were the studios; the smaller of the two was the recording studio and the other, with more adequate soundproof doors and walls, was for broadcasting. In the broadcast studio was a grand piano. A corridor divided the station into two sections. The corridor cut off, from the main offices, a large room in which was an oak table on which were piles of folded and unfolded mail-outs, envelopes, cartons, like the workroom of a campaign headquarters. And, next to that, the room in which the transmitter controls were located, the board itself, a swinging mike, two Presto turntables upright record cabinets, a supply cabinet on the door of which was tacked a photograph of Eartha Kilt. And, of course, there was a bathroom, and a carpeted lounge for visitors. And a closet in which to hang coats or hats, and to store brooms.

  A door at the back of the studio corridor opened onto the roof. A catwalk led past chimneys and skylights, to a flight of shaky wooden stairs that connected with the fire escape. The roof door was unlocked. Occasionally station employees stepped out onto the catwalk for a smoke.

  The time was one-thirty in the afternoon, and KOIF was transmitting songs by the Crewcuts. Bob Posin had brought in the signed contract with Looney Luke Automotive Sales and had gone out again. At her desk in the front office, Patricia Gray typed bills from the accounts receivable file. In the control room Frank Hubble, one of the station announcers, leaned back in his chair and talked on the telephone. The music of the Crewcuts, from the PM speaker boxed in the upper corner of the wall, filled the office.

  The stairs door opened, and another announcer entered: a tall, thin, rather worried-looking man wearing a loose-fitting coat. Under his arm was a load of records.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Patricia stopped typing and said, “Have you been listening to the station?”

  “No.” Preoccupied, Jim Briskin searched for a place to put down his records. “Some Looney Luke material arrived. Hubble and Flannery have been giving it off and on. Some of it’s recorded and some isn’t.”

  A slow smile spread across his face. He had a long, horselike face, and the overgrown jaw that many announcers seem to have. His eyes were pale, mild; his hair was brownish gray and beginning to recede. “What’s that?”

  “The used car lot up on Van Ness.”

  His mind was on the afternoon programming. He was planning out ‘Club 17,’ his program, his three hours of tunes and talk for the kids. “How is it?” he said.

  “It’s just awful.” She put a page of material before him. Balancing his records against his hip, he read the typed pages. “Will you call Haynes and read this stuff to him? Bob called him and slurred over, he just talked about the income.”

  “Be quiet,” he said, reading.

  1A: The car you buy TODAY from Looney Luke will be a CLEAN cart And it will STAY CLEAN! Looney Luke GUARANTEES IT!

  2A (Echo): CLEAN! CLEAN! CLEAN!

  1A: A CLEAN car . . . CLEAN upholstering . . . a CLEAN DEAL from Looney Luke, the volume car dealer who OUTSELLS in big-volume sales ALL OTHER car dealers in the Bay Area.

  2A (Echo): SELLS! SELLS! SELLS!

  Instructions on the script called for the announcer to record the echo parts in advance; the counterpoint was his own voice, knocking against itself—

  “So?” he said. It seemed routine to him, the usual used car pitch.

  Pat said, “But that’s yours. For the dinner music stretch. Between the Romeo and Juliet Overture”—she looked at the evening programming—“and Till Eulenspiegel—”

  Picking up the phone, Jim dialed Ted Haynes’s home number. Presently Haynes’s measured voice was heard saying, “Who is calling?”

  “This is Jim Briskin,” he said.

  “On your phone or the station phone?”

  “Tell him about the laugh,” Pat said.

  “What?” he said, putting his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. And then he remembered the laugh.

  The laugh was Lo
oney Luke’s trademark. The sound truck carried it about town, and the loudspeakers in the illuminated towers of the car lot blasted it at the cars and pedestrians. It was a crazed laugh, a fun-house laugh; it went around and around, rising and falling, getting down into the belly in a slowed-down manner and then shooting up into the sinuses, all at once a sharp laugh, very shrill, a giggle. The laugh bubbled and simpered; something was wrong with it, something terrible and basic. The laugh became hysterical. Now it could not contain itself it burst frothily, fragmenting itself. Collapsing, the laugh sank down, winded, gasping, exhausted by the ordeal. And then, dragging in deep breaths, it started over. On and on it went, fifteen hours without letup, rolling out above the shiny Fords and Plymouths, over the Negro in knee boots who washed the cars, over the salesmen in their pastel suits, over the fiat lots, the, office buildings, the downtown business district of San Francisco, and ultimately over the residential sections, over the apartment houses with their single walls joining them in rows, over the new concrete houses near the Beach, over all the houses and all the stores, all the people in the town.

  “Mr. Haynes,” he said, “I have some Looney Luke material here for the dinner music program. This stuff isn’t going to go over, not with the kind of audience I have. The old ladies out by the Park don’t buy used cars. And they turn this stuff off as fast as they can get to the radio. And—”

  “I see your point,” Haynes said, “but it’s my understanding that Posin agreed to air Sharpstein’s material straight across the board each half hour. And anyhow, Jim, this is in the nature of an experiment.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But when we’re through, we won’t have any old ladies or any other sponsors. And by that time Luke will have dumped his ninety carloads of ‘55 Hudsons or whatever it is he’s pushing, and then what? You suppose he’s going to keep this stuff up after he breaks the back of the other lots? This is just to knock them off.”