“I guess so.”
“Good. Keep me posted. Call me here any night after eleven.”
The interview was over. Lone Boy toted the aquarium and its two naked denizens out to Miss Grace’s car (one gorgeous piece of upscale machinery), and then sat as close to the passenger door as he could as she drove him home. I’m a spy, he thought. A domestic espionage agent. My reward will be a forever exemption from reindoctrination. If this crazy Cal Pickford’s in contempt of the law, he deserves whatever he gets. And if it weren’t me spying, it’d be somebody else …
“I think Philip K. Dick’s stuff sucks,” he said, just to make conversation in the smoothly purring Caddy.
“Some of the published novels are okay. Back in ‘59 I was even in a movie based on one of them. My second major role. The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt.”
“I’ve never seen it,” Lone Boy confessed. “Not even on TV.”
“And you won’t, either. It was a flop. Not Phil Dick’s fault, though—the screenwriter’s and the casting director’s. As soon as I could afford to, I bought up all the prints. I think Dick was always grateful to me for that. Too bad he went off the deep end during the ’60s and started writing hateful, spaced-out crap.”
“I had to read Puttering About in a Small Land— you know, for my Americulturation. Did you like that one?”
“Never read it. Of course, I didn’t devise the curriculum for the centers. I had professionals do that. My film career was going pretty well back then, and I was too busy to see to all the specifics. I’m much more involved nowadays.”
She let him off, in the dark, in front of his apartment, in a section of town given over to dilapidated housing for former mill workers. Loan duck-walked up the shattered sidewalk carrying the Brezhnev bears in their aquarium. Triny and Tracy, to his chagrin, were still awake, waiting for him. For the next hour, they played with the Brezhnev bears while Lone Boy explained to his wife that he wouldn’t have to report for reindoctrination because Miss Grace had decided that they were teetering on the brink of affluence.
“That’s ridiculous,” Tuyet said.
Lone Boy knew that it was ridiculous, but that was his story. He could think of no other credible lie to disguise the fact that he would soon be spying on a man who, apparently, was trying to do the same thing that he was—make a living and build a better life. Later, lying fretfully beside the exhausted Tuyet, Lone Boy tried his damnedest to forget that another name for “domestic espionage agents” was No-Knocks.
9
AUGUSTUS “GUS” KEMMINGS had had a strange night. Much trouble sleeping. Luckily, he lived alone and couldn’t disturb anyone with his insomniac wanderings around the house. His wife had died the year after he began to manage the Happy Puppy Pet Emporium, and now the little brick house that the two of them had shared seemed as big as a half-empty museum.
It is a kind of museum, Gus reflected, standing in his robe and slippers in the living room. On the wall beside him, as in nearly every other room in the house, hung a framed sample of one of the argyle socks that the workers in his mill in Pine Mountain had made on his special hosiery looms. Also, piles of folded argyle socks lay in every chest of drawers on the premises.
Mrs. K. had never minded. In fact, it was Vera who’d insisted on turning the house in LaGrange into a modest monument to Gus’s previous occupation. All her life, she had been the victim of poor circulation. Gus would never forget their honeymoon and the first time she’d put her bare feet on him. What a shock. After that, she’d begun wearing his socks to bed.
“Vera,” Gus said aloud. Maybe I’d’ve been able to sleep if you’d been lying beside me running those furry argyles up and down my legs. Maybe.
Right after The Sinatra Hour, Gus had gone to bed. Then he had lain awake worrying about Cal Pickford, Cal’s grief over the death of that writer Philip Craddock, and the angry way Cal had refused to accept a couple of Brezhnev bears.
It was a spontaneous offer, Gus ruminated. A well-intentioned offer. But, boy-howdy, did that kid light into you. Grief must’ve been eating him up. Well, you know what he felt like, don’t you, Augustus? It wasn’t that long ago that you went through those same emotions. You’ve been through ‘em several times.
His son, Keith, had died in 1965 in the jungle near Pleiku with three hundred other kids from his airborne division. Seven years later, despite countless warnings, Kirsten had traveled to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City to protest Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. She never came home. In fact, she simply disappeared. No forwarding address. No farewell phone call. No messages from friends, foes, or law-enforcement officers. And, disturbingly, no body. At least, in the aftermath of that Ia Drang Valley business, he and Vera had been able to bury their hero son.
Kirsten, by contrast, was dismissed by those in authority as a “runaway”, a twenty-two-year-old runaway. Might as well call a twelve-year-old a toddler, Gus had griped, but when nothing came of his and Vera’s inquiries and subsequent bitter grumblings but a visit from a pair of No-Knocks advising them to cool it—“You’re endangering the war effort”—the red, white, and blue Kemmingses had cooled it, accepting on faith the No-Knocks’ argument that Kirsten had gone underground to escape prosecution and imprisonment; hence she was a “runaway”. Besides, to keep bellyaching publicly about her disappearance would have tempted the FBI to reclassify her as a “fugitive from justice” and to bruit this news around as a counterweight to the Kemmingses’ unpatriotic gripes.
Not quite ten years later, Kirsten still hadn’t come home from wherever she’d disappeared to. Keith lay beside Vera in the little graveyard in Pine Mountain, and the Kemmingses’ small brick house near the Callaway Educational Association complex in LaGrange was a private memorial to the making of socks and a haphazard menagerie of different animals from the pet shop: tropical fish, ring doves, hamsters, green snakes, and so on. The framed socks kept Augustus from forgetting who he had been; the host of animals kept him from surrendering to loneliness.
Absentmindedly, Gus tapped some fish food into one of the tanks and watched his darlings fin their way upward for the goodies. He looked at his wrist watch: 6:57. Dawn was past. It had been light for almost an hour. He ditched the box of fish food, turned on the TV, and sat down to catch the news on The Today Show.
Ah, NBC. Charlton Heston hosting and King Richard’s son-in-law David Eisenhower anchoring the news.
“Our top story this morning,” Eisenhower says, his narrow face looking sallow and aggrieved, “is the apparent suicide of another of our mission specialists in the oxygen-production facilities at Von Braunville, the American moon-base nestling in the Censorinus crater of the Lunar Highlands. To commemorate this great country’s bicentennial, the first spadeful of dirt at Von Braunville was turned on July Fourth, 1976. Since that time, nearly three hundred different Americans and dozens of persons from both our NATO allies and our Soviet mission collaborators have occupied this base for periods ranging from two weeks to a year. Only about fifty highly trained astronauts, scientists, technicians, and civilian observers live and work at Von Braunville at a time. Suicide, we stress, is not epidemic among them.
“However, five persons have killed themselves since the O2 plant at Von Braunville came on line early in ‘77, a rate of almost one a year. NASA officials and key members of the administration agree that five suicides is disproportionate, given the intense training and the positive motivation of those assigned to the base and the small number of people living there at any one time. Cold statistics show that slightly more than 1.4 percent of moonbase personnel have killed themselves while on duty there.
“A few others—the number is classified for security reasons—have committed suicide after returning from moonbase assignment. Most physicians and psychotherapists agree that these postdeparture suicides, however, are nonsignificant in the figuring of any space-related depression or malaise. Most troubling to those responsible for the efficiency and morale of our space-going pioneers
are the suicides of active residents of the Censorinus base.”
Young Eisenhower turns to the man sitting to his right in the NBC newsroom. “This is James L. Bodine, official NASA spokesman for Moon-related programs.”
A close-up of Bodine, smiling sedately. “Good morning, David.”
EISENHOWER: “Good morning, Jim. Could you tell us, please, the identity of the latest moonbase suicide?”
BODINE: “We’re now in the process of notifying that person’s family. So I don’t want to disclose that information yet. I’m sure you understand our need for discretion.”
EISENHOWER: “Of course. How, then, did this latest tragedy occur and what does NASA plan to do to minimize the chances for a sixth suicide at Von Braunville?”
BODINE: “Please recollect that dying on the Moon is easy; it’s staying alive up there that’s hard. As in all our previous cases, David, the would-be suicide left a dormitory dome without enough protection against the lunar near-vacuum. That was deliberate, we believe. It was also fatal. As for what NASA plans to do—”
EISENHOWER: “How do you know that the victim wasn’t—forgive me, Jim—murdered?”
BODINE: “We don’t send murderers to the Moon.”
EISENHOWER: “Ideally, NASA doesn’t send suicides either, but this is apparently the fifth in not quite six years. Why couldn’t this one, or one of the four others, be a murder?”
BODINE (somewhat testily): “Because it simply isn’t.”
Gus squints at Bodine’s off-center mouth and flinty eyes. “How do you know? What makes you so sure?” He remembers Kirsten. He remembers the disappearances of those long-haired hippie singers in the early 1970s, not to mention the ambiguous fates of Jane Fonda, the brothers Berrigan, and the editors of the New York Times, the Chicago Daily News, and the Washington Post. Cronkite is reported to be in exile somewhere in the Caribbean, and Tad Kennedy has been ruined by Chappaquidick—was it a setup?—and strong drink.
BODINE (continuing): “Our people at Von Braunville confirm that the suicide was a suicide. They’re very upset. They found this person lying next to a moondozer about thirty yards from the airlock of the dormitory dome. The deceased had walked that far before dying of asphyxiation.”
EISENHOWER: “Oxygen, oxygen, everywhere, but not a molecule to breathe?”
BODINE: “Yes, I suppose it is ironic.”
EISENHOWER: “But now you’ll take steps to counteract the mood swings and depressions of moonbase personnel?”
BODINE: “Most of our people don’t suffer these violent bouts of depression, David. We have athletic facilities, TV broadcasts, films, excellent food, a wonderful microfiche library, and almost anything else that anyone could want. We believe—”
EISENHOWER: “Opportunities for sex?”
BODINE (taken aback): “David, you know as well as I do that nine tenths of our moonbase personnel are male and that the women on hand there are monogamous wives and mothers. A question like that is pretty close to juvenile mischief making.”
EISENHOWER: “Then what do you believe is at the root of this spate of suicides, Jim?”
BODINE: “It isn’t a ‘spate’. We’ve been in space only a very short time, historically speaking, and on the Moon for only the past seven-eight years. We know more about rocket propellants and orbital velocities than we do about the human brain. It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise that the psychological stresses of living in near-weightlessness for long periods, on another world, still elude our full understanding.”
EISENHOWER: “Will we rotate our moonbase personnel more often to offset our ignorance?”
BODINE: “More frequent rotation of personnel is of course a possibility, but our latest suicide wasn’t actually a long-termer, and maybe we’ll simply try to monitor the psychological state of each astronaut, technician, and scientist more closely. We may also try beautifying Von Braunville with plants and allowing each worker at the station to have a personal pet of some kind. These strategies have proved helpful with prison populations, David, and although our people aren’t prisoners, of course, they do live under extremely tight and confining conditions.”
EISENHOWER: “That’s fascinating, Jim, and I wish we had time to pursue it further. However, it’s time for a commercial break—after which I’ll be back to tell you how Canadian law-enforcement officials”—full close-up on young Eisenhower—“believe that dogs as sniffers-out of illegal drugs in airports and prisons may have had their day. Our neighbors to the north think that gerbils—tiny, ratlike rodents that can be trained to detect one illicit odor each—may become an even more valuable weapon against runners, dealers, and users than Fido has been. Don’t go away.”
Gus smiles. He’s sorry about the new suicide at the moonbase, but the fact that NASA might rocket pets into space to comfort the guys up there, along with Eisenhower’s little teaser about gerbils, tickles him. But he’d better get something to eat and go on out to West Georgia Commons to see about his animals. Almost reluctantly, then, he clicks off The Today Show and shuffles into his bedroom to dress.
After eating a couple of sausage biscuits at Hardy’s, Augustus climbed back into his little Honda Civic. He still had some time to kill before the Pet Emporium opened at ten, and although he needed to go in at least an hour early, to check on his “critters”, to arrive now would be to make it a painfully long day. He decided to cruise for a while. Traffic was bad, people going to work and so forth, but Gus liked the bustle of downtown, particularly around the main square, with its fountains and its gallant-looking statue of Lafayette.
He circled the square twice, headed south past Charlie Joseph’s (makers of the best chili dog in the world), and eventually wound up cruising down Hines Street past the Chattahoochee Valley Art, Film, and Photography Salon.
Glancing to his right, he saw a good-looking woman—she had on heels, a tailored business suit, and a wide-brimmed hat like those sometimes worn by the models on the covers of Vera’s Vogues— exit onto the porch of the salon; she locked the glass doors behind her and came down the steps into the tiny walled courtyard. Here, only her hat visible, she pivoted and strode around the salon toward the parking lot.
Behind Gus, an impatient nine-to-fiver was leaning on the horn, trying to blast him through the traffic light before it changed again. At last, Gus got the Honda rolling, but his main thoughts were that he had just seen Grace Rinehart, the foremost patron of the Art, Film, and Photography Salon, and that the famous actress and the mysterious woman who had bought two Brezhnev bears from Cal yesterday morning were the Very Same Person.
Gus felt like a fool. He should have guessed. However, Grace Rinehart hadn’t wanted anyone to know her real identity. And so she had entered incognito and paid in cash.
What gives? Gus asked himself, already feeling an acid stomach coming on. Am I in trouble? Is Pickford in dutch? She was spying on us. She didn’t need to buy Brezhnev bears from me. Her husband’s the guy who first imported the critters from Mother Russia. Now he breeds them over by Woodbury. I get my own “bears” from Berthelot wholesalers. For Miss Rinehart to buy them from me is like a sheik flying over here to buy a can of oil at K-Mart. Except, of course, the lady had an ulterior motive. What, though?
Gus eventually got his Honda onto the four-lane out to the mall and cruised along it thinking about Miss Rinehart. She must have spent the night at the salon. Because of her many contributions to the facility and her leadership in having the building renovated, the salon committee had given her a suite of rooms on the second story. It was rumored that she spent more evenings in the building than she did at the Berthelot estate, for her husband was often in Washington. Anyway, Hiram and Miss Grace couldn’t, and didn’t, always cohabit nowadays, and some folks found their private lives grist for catty speculation.
For example, it was widely rumored that Miss Rinehart sometimes invited old Hollywood cronies out to LaGrange—leading men from the 1960s and early 1970s—and ushered them into the salon in the dead of
night for “reunions”. A Rinehart-and-Whoever Film Festival. In the upstairs screening room, she and her guest would watch one of her old films, and then one of his, and then maybe a film featuring both of them, and so on, alternating starring vehicles until they wearied of their celluloid ego orgy and retired to her hidden suite to costar in a more conventional festival of indulgence.
Gus found these rumors as titillating as anyone, but he didn’t trust them very far. Miss Rinehart was an asset to the community, a woman who had once helped turn the tide of negativism threatening to wash out the American effort in Vietnam. Moreover, her Liberty Americulturation Centers had made prosperous, productive citizens of thousands of talented Vietnamese, many of whom would eventually go back to their homeland—still as American citizens—to convince their old-style compatriots that the New Vietnam should apply for American statehood. As the fifty-first state, their country would cunningly formalize its special relationship with the United States: full partnership in tomorrow’s preeminent politicoeconomic system.
Manifest Destiny with a trans-Pacific dimension.
Well, Gus reflected, that Miss Rinehart is a mighty smart lady for figuring all that out, but her being smart only makes me that much more afraid of her.
Augustus Kemmings parked his car behind West Georgia Commons, unlocked the rear door of the pet shop, and went inside to reassure his babies of something he himself no longer believed, namely, that everything was going to be A-OK.
10
IN THE RECREATIONAL LOUNGE of one of the dome-capped caverns of Von Braunville at Censorinus, three of the moondozer operators at the O2 plant were watching a tape of the premier show of the 1981-1982 season of Star Trek, the fifteenth straight year that Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and the multinational and multispecies crew of the starship Enterprise had carried out their five-year mission “to boldly go where no man has ever gone before”—at least on network television.
Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas Page 12
