Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “Hiram, I don’t get it. I worked like a nigger to maneuver Cal Pickford into your employ.”

  “Our employ, Grace. He’s still in it.”

  “But you’re sending him to the Moon! You and Dick are sending the ranch foreman you’ve been searching for for three years to Von Braunville! Why?”

  Berthelot, dressed in silk pajamas and an embroidered bathrobe, lowers himself to the edge of their circular bed. Grace sits in a fortified position at its center. A striped bolster chair supports her back; from chair arm to chair arm, ramparts of fringed pillows make a semicircle in front of her. With the master remote in her left hand, she is obsessively changing channels, rewinding movie scenes, pausing the action here, speeding it there, turning every phosphor-dot window in the room into a pointillist turmoil of light and color.

  “I’ve told you, Grace—to tend to the ‘bears’.”

  “But I promised him he wouldn’t have to do that.”

  “He understands that it’s an honor. That he won’t have to do it again. It’s okay. Please stop worrying.”

  “Lia won’t like him being away for so long, and she’ll hate me even more than she does now. At our last session—I told her how you and I met—she kept taking pencils from her purse and snapping them in two. She must’ve broken a dozen. We were sitting in a booth in a restaurant in Manchester, and with every snap, another head would turn. I was disguised again, of course, but that stupid snapping made my position pretty goddamn insecure.”

  “You can buy a therapist, Grace, but not somebody else’s love or good opinion.”

  Caustically, Berthelot’s wife says, “Benjamin Franklin? Oscar Wilde? From whom do you steal your epigrams?”

  “I make them up myself. Banal though it may be, it’s true.”

  “Listen, Hi, it’ll be different when you’re president. She’ll be glad to see me coming then. So will everybody else.”

  “I’m not going to be president.”

  Grace stops pushing buttons on the master remote. The video screens windowing the ceiling and the magnolia-print wallpaper grow conspicuously less agitated. “Say that again.”

  “I’m not going to be president.”

  Grace sets the remote down and stares hard at her husband. “Of course you are. You’ve got Dick’s backing. You’ll turn aside all your Republican challengers, including General Willie, and in the November election you’ll swamp whichever mealymouthed nonentity the donkey-brain Democrats send out naked against you. Don’t ever tell me you’re not going to be president.”

  “But that’s what I’m telling you, baby.”

  “Who, then? Who?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe no one. Certainly not me.”

  Grace rises from her fortress of pillows like a cobra from a snake charmer’s basket. “Why the fuck not?”

  Berthelot reaches out and touches his wife’s hair. “Look, I could be president, baby. But I’d hold the job in name only. It’s becoming clearer all the time that President Nixon has no plans to give up power—only the visible trappings of his office. He’s settled on me as his titular successor only because he thinks I’m a wimp who’ll be easily manipulatable once I’ve been sworn in.”

  “But you’re not a wimp!”

  “I’m grateful for your testimony to the contrary.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “One of the President’s aides had lunch with me a week or so ago. He told me to beware of the endorsement. ‘It’s the kiss of death,’ he said.”

  “Which aide?”

  “I can’t tell you, baby. Of all the White House ass lickers, though, he’s the one with the cleanest tongue. He’s got a line to all the reliable scuttlebutt, and he talked to me straight.”

  “Ass lickers? They’re not ass lickers, they’re—”

  “Hush a minute and listen. This guy told me that the President has decided to endorse me to ensure my victory. The last person he wants to succeed him is Westmoreland. Willie’s got a mind of his own, and he’s been champing at the bit these past six years to shed the veepship and run for the Oval Office. I’m to deflect Willie’s ambitions. Then, once I’m in, dear old Dick’s gonna shove his fist up my butt and dance me around like a hand puppet.”

  “That’s pure poppycock, Hi. In the first place, if Dick’s so in love with power, why doesn’t he just run again? He’d take sixty percent of the vote. In the second place, you’d never let him get away with that kind of manipulation.”

  “Going for a fifth term might sully his reputation. FDR still catches hell in some quarters for making it to a fourth.”

  “But Roosevelt ran for a fourth in the middle of a world war. You don’t just bail out of a situation like that.”

  “Okay. And Nixon’s war? It’s over. Running again, in more or less settled times, may make him look greedy for the very thing that he is greedy for—self-aggrandizing power. Sure, he’d like to go down as the only fifth-term president in history, but not in a way that suggests that that was his only reason for running.”

  “But it wouldn’t be. I’m sure it wouldn’t be.”

  Berthelot says nothing. On a pool-table-sized screen directly overhead, his wife—fifteen years younger—drops a bra strap for a blond actor later killed in a terrorist bombing in London.

  “Anyway, Hiram, once sworn in, you could shake Dick—not that you’d have to, not at all—and do whatever you pleased, letting your conscience guide. You’d be the president, not him, and the Constitution would hold you up. What could he do?”

  “What we did to Pickford. Blackmail me.”

  “Dick wouldn’t do that. Besides, how could he blackmail you? You’re a straight arrow. The only true one I’ve ever met.”

  “My source told me that the President has become increasingly self-willed and ruthless since the O2 plant at Censorinus came on line. Privately, that is. On public occasions, he’s still pretty much the old “New Nixon”, but when alone with his intimates he’s more of an autocrat than he was when he was prosecuting the war.

  “I take the aide’s assessment of faith. I’ve been to plenty of cabinet meetings, and I’ve long had the feeling that the President approves of me. Still, I’m hardly an intimate. Is it so hard to believe that for hidden reasons of his own he’s cultivating a new ruthlessness, from which he may need to be saved?”

  “You’re saying he’s ill? You’re saying that this illness might lead him to try to blackmail you?”

  “I am Grace. Yes, I am.”

  “But blackmail you with what? How?”

  Berthelot turns his eyes away from the pale woman in her fort of pillows. On a screen near a low white enamel bureau, his wife—seven years younger—leads a band of crewcut volunteers along a tangled Cambodian trail. When any of its weary members stumbles or hangs back, she impatiently semaphores.

  “With you,” he says, returning his gaze to her. “My informant tells me that your beloved Dick—now a very sick man—would try to manipulate me by threatening to ruin your reputation. There are films, he says. Not Hollywood productions, mind you, but footage surreptitiously shot in and around the Art, Film, and Photography Salon. And the President would release these films to his friends in the media if I proved an intractable doer of my own will rather than his.”

  Grace stares at her husband, her eyes like burnt pennies in a fuse box. “What are you going to do?”

  Stretching one arm toward his wife, Berthelot leans across the bed. When she pushes his reaching fingers aside, he dog-walks over the mattress until he is just outside her fort of fringed pillows. Then he rises on his knees and tries to kiss her on the lips. She shows him the profile of her jaw. Glancingly, his mouth mumbles at the rigid line of bone she has presented him.

  “Gimme a li’l sugar. Jus’ a li’l sugar, baby.”

  “I asked you what you’re going to do.”

  “A li’l sugar’d make us both happy. But you’re not going to give it to me, are you?”

  “This isn’t the time.”


  “It’s the place, Grace. And with jus’ a li’l effort, baby, you could make it the time, too.”

  “Stop it, Hiram.” She turns her head, gives him a perfunctory kiss, and quickly draws back.

  “That wasn’t much. It was almost nothing. But it’s got my mojo runnin’, baby. It’s got my mojo justa jukin’ along at ninety plus.”

  “I hate it when you talk like you think a horny redneck would. I really hate it, Hiram.”

  Berthelot takes the woman’s face in his hands and bestows kiss after kiss upon it. Slow, delicate, tender kisses. “You love me, don’t you?” he asks her. “You really love me?”

  Grudgingly, Grace says that she does.

  “Would you stop loving me if I didn’t become president? Would you shed me and find some eager young stud to fill in for me?”

  Grace does not reply.

  “I wouldn’t be able to stand that,” Berthelot tells her. “You know my secret. You know you’ve got the only li’l ignition switch that could ever crank my mojo.”

  “Hiram—”

  “The ten years before I met you, I was as dead as a junked four cylinder. Nobody could rev me up. Then you, baby.”

  “All you’re talking’s lubrication. Crude, crass sex.”

  “All I’m talkin’s love,” Berthelot whispers. “You really think I could go the way I do with you—go ‘n’ keep a-goin’—if it wasn’t love that stoked me to it?”

  “If you truly love me, you’ll back away.”

  “Baby,” he rebukes her.

  “I mean it. I mean what I’m asking.”

  He stares at her for a moment, touches her hair, and then, more awkwardly than not, rolls to the edge of their bed, eleven billion light-years from her fastness of pillows.

  “What are you going to do if…” Grace runs down.

  “If the President tries to blackmail us?”

  In her fort of fringed bolsters, she imperceptibly nods.

  Standing up, the Secretary of Agriculture surveys the chamber. The empty mirrors and the teeming video screens. He loves this woman. Deeply loves her. Her every image—no matter the medium, the production, or the year—deserves the whole of his attention. So, of course, does she. Looking at her again, he puts his hands in his bathrobe pockets. He wants to reassure and hearten her, the vulnerable woman inside the famous one.

  “What am I going to do?” he asks rhetorically. “Baby mine, O my little baby, I’m going to cure the President.”

  “The Moon?” Lia cried. “What do you mean, the Moon?”

  “Just listen. Just be quiet a few minutes and listen to what I have to say…”

  22

  BERTHELOT arranged an exemption to the Travel Restrictions Act so that Lia could fly to Houston with Cal for his week of training and then to the Cape for the takeoff. To Lia’s surprise, NASA treated Cal and her like celebrities. It was as if she were a stand-in Grace Rinehart, a personal emissary of the famous wife of the powerful man who, according to the latest Capitol Hill gossip, was King Richard’s hand-picked heir and successor.

  A friendly, fortyish astronaut was Lia’s liaison officer. He took her to see portions of Cal’s weightlessness-training program; he showed her films of the beautifully choreographed construction of Kennedy Port and of the historic Bicentennial groundbreaking at Von Braunville. And, in his company, Lia toured a vehicle-assembly building and attended private briefings on rocket propellants, orbital mechanics, and lunar geography.

  Later, she was fitted for her own space suit and given a spin on a long-armed machine that put bone-flattening centrifugal pressure on her entire body. The “vomit comet” scared her only a bit more than did the bucking mechanical bull in a local dancehall that Cal made her ride on their single evening away from training. Cowboys, she decided, had a built-in awareness of the unsettling hazards of zero g, and she was glad that it was her pigtailed hubby (NASA had let him keep his Indian braid) going into space instead of her. On the other hand, she wasn’t all that happy that he was going.

  One night, at the suburban home where NASA had quartered her, Lia had a long talk with the wife of her astronaut liaison. The woman told Lia that not everyone who went up came back down. Since 1977, two Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles (reputedly unmanned) boosted from the main pad at Canaveral had suffered annihilating explosions before reaching Earth orbit. Further, the government had relocated the families of the killed crew members before they could spread word of these disasters to others in the Texas-based community of astronauts. You knew that they had died, though. Why else would the members of the same HLLV mission receive simultaneous transfers that scattered their families willy-nilly across the country before the men themselves had even returned to Houston?

  But the space program was more important than individual lives, the astronaut’s wife murmured. So no news got out, and NASA kept launching tin cans on huge, unpredictable Roman candles. Finally, the woman realized that she was upsetting her guest and hurried to add that two explosions in six years really wasn’t all that many. Besides, for two years, they had been flinging the shuttle aloft on an immense fly-back booster that obviated the need for expendable external tanks and colossal solid-fuel rockets. In fact, NASA’s safety record was a sterling one when you compared it to the number of auto accidents every year… prior, at least, to the passage of the Internal Travel Restrictions Act.

  In Florida, on the morning of the takeoff, Lia joined Cal in a battleship-gray antechamber near the booster flight line. She put her hands on the chest of his jumpsuit and fiddled with the tiny pull on one of its zippers. But why are they sending you? she wondered. Why you rather than some other equally or even better qualified cavy keeper?

  “Don’t worry, Lia. God’s not going to let anything happen to six innocent Brezhnev bears.”

  “Not to mention the President of the United States.”

  Cal put a finger to his lips. “Shhhh.”

  Berthelot had said that Nixon would be going to Censorinus on this same mission, up from the Cape on the HLLV shuttle Clemency and from Kennedy Port to lunar orbit aboard the newly commissioned transfer ship Checkers— but King Richard had attended none of Cal’s training sessions and Lia did not believe that he had traveled to Houston to prepare. This morning, however, David Eisenhower had announced on Today that his father-in-law really did intend to be the world’s first head of state to visit the Moon, and both Cal and Lia had a sense that something grand and furtive was happening just out of their view. Still, they had seen nothing to confirm their suspicions, and no one was talking.

  “The whole country’s just learned that the President is turning astronaut. Why do I have to be quiet?”

  “He may be near enough to hear you,” Cal said.

  “Impossible. My flesh isn’t crawling. Besides, you’re right—God’s more likely to preserve you guys for those two pregnant pigs’ sakes than for the bastard who had Viking knocked off.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “God may also approve of the fact you all’ve got an Episcopal bishop going along.”

  This was true, and it was one of the many odd aspects of a very odd mission. Bishop Joshua Marlin of the Georgia diocese of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Hiram Berthelot’s personal friend and confessor, had trained with Cal in Houston, subjecting himself to calisthenics, jogging, and the dizzying torments of the “octopus arm”—as he and Cal had dubbed that machine—in order to prepare for the flight. And, for a ruddy fifty-year-old man of substantial girth and dubious eyesight, Marlin had acquitted himself remarkably well. Lia, along with Cal, had had lunch with the bishop on three occasions, and she was comforted by the knowledge that he would be sitting in the crew chair next to her husband’s on the Clemency and later on the Checkers.

  Cal said, “Bishop Marlin has blessed this flight and everyone on it—Colonel Hudner, Major Levack, me, even that Secret Service guy who made only every third training session in Houston. Marlin jokes with us, too. Calls this the 4-P Expedition.”

  Lia w
aited for Cal to explain.

  “Pets, Plants, Priest, and President. Up we go to propitiate the demons of despair.”

  “And what else? You’re holding out on me.” For Lia knew that preflight anxiety did not fully account for Cal’s reticence.

  “I don’t know. Nothing I can talk about.”

  “This is happening because of Kai, isn’t it? Because he wants to obliterate this reality with a better one.” As soon as Lia had said these words, voicing for the first time what both of them had intuitively known since departing Georgia for NASA headquarters, a low-grade but persistent terror settled in her heart. She clutched Cal to her and held him. But the terror throbbed on and on.

  “It’s going to work,” he whispered.

  “So you say. But, afterward, will either of us have any idea what we’ve done? And if whatever it is you’re going to do doesn’t work, this may be the last time we’ll ever hold each other.”

  “Hush.”

  “Damn that haint! And his amnesia, and his stereographia, and all his troublemaking unpublished sci-fi!”

  “Shhhh!”

  Lia pulled back from Cal. “And you, too, so far as that goes, for being the ‘lens’ that focused him on Warm Springs!”

  “It would’ve happened even without me, Lia. Somehow or other, it would’ve happened without me.”

  His fatalism, his certainty, enraged her. She wanted to ball up her fist and strike his chest again and again—so that he could experience maybe a tenth of the terror-bred pain that was racking her even as she tried to bid him a respectable good-bye. But good-bye for how long? It was possible that Philip K. Dick, Bishop Marlin, Cal, and their undisclosed confederates at Von Braunville would so violently rend the fabric of this historical continuum that no one wrapped in it now would ever wear it again as anything other than a shroud.