Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  “How’d it go?” Bishop Marlin asked when Cal had returned to the crew deck. “Aside from the pellet spill, I mean.”

  He and the pilots, all dressed in T-shirts and flight pants, had been watching on monitors attached to a pegboard wall. Hudner and Levack were upside down to each other, watching TVs similarly oriented and fiddling with broken pieces of t-ship hardware.

  As for Bishop Marlin, he was blowing balls of water through a straw, four of which—lovely fragile spheres—wheeled about him in an accidental orrery a good deal more elegant than the one that had just attended Cal and the President.

  “He wants me to cut my braid,” Cal said. “The look on his face would’ve popped every one of your bubbles.”

  “I know,” Joshua Marlin said. “I know.”

  Major Levack cut Cal’s braid, and the remainder of their trip—another day and a half of relentless coasting—made Cal think of a voyage from life to death, across a Styx of ebony vacuum. Nixon had taken the role of Charon, arid everyone else aboard was a soul on the way to … well, what? Oblivion, probably. Even those rascally damn Brezhnev bears. Against all expectation, Cal found himself mourning the varmints as earnestly as he mourned his lost braid, and his dreams were all nightmares.

  Sometimes, though, Bishop Marlin would read from Revelation, and the words he read were these: ‘And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever …’ ”

  “The snake didn’t kill her,” Langland, the police captain, told Hiram Berthelot. “That’s an old wives’ tale, the notion that a boa constrictor will squeeze a human being to death.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was fright that did it, we think. It’s cold in the salon, and the snake, sensing the warmth of your wife’s presence, went to her instinctively. She was watching a movie, though, and didn’t notice until it was practically in her face.”

  “Which caused her heart to stop?”

  “Yes, Mr. Secretary. That’s what we think. The boa coiled up in her lap and stayed there even after her body had begun to cool. It didn’t constrict her, though. There are no signs of contusions, hematomata, or broken bones.”

  “Where did the goddamned snake come from?”

  Langland flipped his notepad out. “West Georgia Commons. The Happy Puppy Pet Emporium. The manager, Augustus Kemmings, sold it to an Americulturated Vietnamese by the name of Le Boi Loan, alias Lone Boy, a bookstore and Save-Our-Way clerk.”

  “Then he killed my wife.”

  “It’s highly likely that he established a set of circumstances that led to your wife’s death, yes, sir.”

  “He introduced the boa into the salon. That was premeditated, and it qualifies as murder.”

  “With something like this, Mr. Secretary, you’re not likely to get him on murder one. Manslaughter, maybe.”

  “Manslaughter be damned. This was premeditated. Pre-goddamn-meditated. And that’s murder.”

  “If a boa constrictor were a lethal weapon. But the DA’s gonna have a hard time making that argument stick, especially since these snakes don’t ordinarily crush and eat human beings. Besides, we’re fairly sure the autopsy will indicate heart attack, and a halfway decent defense attorney is gonna try like hell to suggest it may’ve been a response to the movie instead of the snake. We have no proof that the boa didn’t climb into her lap until after she’d died—only a reasonable conjecture.”

  “Is this sleazeball Lone Boy in custody?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “We sent a car out to his house. He wasn’t there. His wife didn’t know where he was, either. We’ve got an APB out, though, and his Datsun shouldn’t be that hard to find.”

  “I appreciate your calling me, Langland, but I don’t want news of this spilling to anyone. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir. And I’m sorry, Mr. Secretary. Really.”

  Berthelot made no reply. He went out to the street and climbed into the limousine that his bodyguard cum chauffeur, Jared Twitchell, was driving. The secretary sat beside him in the front. Briefly, they spoke. The street lamp coated the limousine with a waxy glow, and nearby elms shook their night-entangled canopies.

  “The Barrel of Fun?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Surely, the police would’ve checked there already.”

  “It’s a funny place. Game consoles. Booths to climb in. Lots of black-light posters and dimness.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s possible they missed him.”

  The Lincoln made the trip from midtown LaGrange to the suburban mall in less than eight minutes. Then the Secretary of Agriculture and his bodyguard strolled through its central concourse and up to the huge capsized “barrel” allowing them entrance to the video-game arcade. They went inside.

  Hundreds of outré noises assailed Berthelot. Computer blips. The chuckles of intragalactic weaponry. The whirr of electrified cormorant wings. The furnace roars of Technicolor dragons. The annihilating pileups of animated racing cars. With these noises came weird hues and a disorienting ambience of fractured lambency. Berthelot staggered through the arcade, and it seemed to him that he had entered another continuum.

  Maybe you have, he thought. Maybe the new continuum’s already here. If so, all the old laws have been abrogated. The only laws you need to obey are those that impinge on your conscience, Hiram, and those that don’t, well, they must be obsolete. He read the names of the games. Asteroids. Fragger. Centipede. Drac-Man. Phun Ky Cong. Defender. Bigg-Bugg. And others that escaped him, their designations scrolling around the canopies of the booths into which their players ducked and disappeared.

  The place was full of kids. And a few shadowy toughs who could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty-eight. They shot Hiram Berthelot and his bodyguard bleak, socket-eyed glances that turned their faces into either jokes or insults. Twitchell, undeterred, went patrolling through and past them as if they were substanceless spirits, wraiths in impalpable leather. After two circuits of the arcade’s token-dispensing kiosk, he found Le Boi Loan huddled in a booth purporting to be the cabin of a transdimensional voyager. He grabbed the Americulturated Vietnamese by the lapels of his jacket and shouted his boss’s name.

  Berthelot took over for Twitchell, who didn’t want him to. He leaned into the booth to study the foreign features of the man who had murdered his wife. Le Boi Loan cringed away. His face—his helpless cringing—infuriated Berthelot, who moved his hands from the lapels of the chickenshit’s jacket to his scrawny throat.

  This is the way I squeeze my foe, he thought. Squeeze my foe, squeeze my foe. So early in the evening.

  His fingers felt Adam’s apple, lymph nodes, and vertebrae, and tried to bring them all together into a lump no larger than his clasped hands. My Main Squeeze is just as effective as your Main Squeeze, he thought, all the while squeezing.

  Lone Boy began to kick. Twitchell, standing at Berthelot’s shoulder, muttered something about the inadvisability of wreaking vengeance on Grace’s murderer in so public a place. Already, the secretary was attracting attention.

  “Let me do it,” Twitchell said. “It’s what I’m paid for.”

  But Berthelot braced his feet and shrugged the bodyguard aside, bearing down even harder on the thrashing Loan. He, too, was aware that some of the game players in the Barrel of Fun were trying to determine the exact nature of this struggle, but he interposed his back—no inconsequential barrier—and did what he had to do. The horror of life without Grace Rinehart, film actress, patriot, and soulmate, sustained him in this effort, and when Le Boi Loan had finally ceased thrashing, he opened his fingers and saw that deep creases disfigured his victim’s neck.

  “It’s all right,” he consoled the dead man. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”

  “What?” Twitchell said. “What’re you telling him?”

  “Nothing,” Hiram Berthelot replied, backing out of the co
ckpit of the transdimensional voyager. “Only that he was a mean little bastard and I hope he rots in hell.”

  Matt Murdock, alias Daredevil, cannot believe it. His superpowers have left him, and his archenemy, Kingpin, has choked the very breath from his body.

  But why? What has he done to deserve this? Surely, putting a snake in the screening room at the salon—scaring the Kingpin’s mistress a little—doesn’t warrant so violent a response. Can’t the tight-assed guy take a joke?

  I’m dying, Murdock thinks, amazed: I was blind, and now I’m dying. Kingpin, lord of the criminal underworld, has defeated me in one-on-one combat.

  And in his last window of consciousness—the final panel of an adventure gone bad—Murdock glimpses the faces of a bereaved woman and two distraught little girls. The faces, he notes, are Oriental and hence bewilderingly foreign…

  Grif Langland, the police captain, could not believe what Hiram Berthelot had just told him. How could he? The Secret Service man assigned to the Secretary of Agriculture kept contradicting his boss, saying that it was he, Jared Twitchell, who had killed Le Boi Loan and not the insistent Berthelot. “Twitchell, will you shut up and let me confess?”

  “No, sir. I’m not going to let you take the rap for something I did. Besides, I’m authorized to do that sort of thing.”

  “Nobody’s authorized to commit murder, Twitchell. At any rate, no one should be.” He looked at Langland. “I took it upon myself to break the law, and now I’m turning my self in.”

  “Listen to Agent Twitchell,” Langland said, as uncomfortable as he could ever remember being. He didn’t want to arrest the most famous Georgian in national politics since Jimmy Carter. Everybody from Atlanta to Waycross would clamor for his scalp, and, with King Richard’s help, they just might get it.

  “I committed murder, Captain Langland.”

  “ ‘Justifiable homicide’, call it. You had your reasons.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Twitchell said. “I did.”

  “It wasn’t premeditated,” Berthelot said. “Pure impulse. I loved my wife. You’ll never know how much. But impulse killing’s still killing, and not even a member of the President’s cabinet is above the law. Arrest me. I demand to be arrested.”

  Think, Langland told himself. Think. “Sir,” he said, “there’s no reason at all for any of this to get out.”

  “Damn it! You think I want a cover-up? No Berthelot has ever ducked responsibility for his acts, and this administration doesn’t countenance cover-ups!”

  Langland was glad to hear Twitchell say, “Listen to me, sir. Taking the rap for this … this accident … wouldn’t be in the national interest.”

  “That’s horseshit,” Berthelot retorted.

  “President Nixon’s out of the country—off the goddamn planet, in fact—and letting this fuckin’ news out while he’s away would be … unpatriotic. You’d afflict the administration with a terrible scandal just when it least needs it.”

  “He’s right, Mr. Secretary,” Langland put in, grateful that a hulk like Twitchell could mount convincing reasons for … well, for covering up a murder by a cabinet member. In spite of himself, Berthelot appeared to be mulling the Secret Service man’s appeal to his patriotism. “You can’t drop this kind of bombshell while the President’s on an historic trip to the Moon.”

  The secretary slumped dejectedly into a coaster chair. He shut his eyes, rubbed his temples, and grimaced.

  “You should ask President Nixon’s advice,” Langland said.

  “Right,” said Twitchell. “But you’d distract the hell out of him if you asked him while he’s commuting to Von Braunville.”

  “I’ve killed a man!”

  Said Twitchell evenly, “I’ve killed lots of men.”

  “Just forget about this matter until the President comes home,” Langland said. “Then see him. Meanwhile, my department’ll take care of any embarrassing loose ends.”

  Berthelot groaned. Langland saw, they’d knocked the props out from under him. He was an honorable man, but he was also a patriot, and his patriotism required that he seek King Richard’s approval of his confession before going public with it.

  Thank God, thought Langland. Thank God for small mercies.

  23

  LIA SAT in her office waiting for Grace Rinehart to show. It was Wednesday, and, with Cal finally at Von Braunville, she began to anticipate—almost with pleasure—the itinerary that her least predictable client would seek to implement today. A luncheon at In Clover in LaGrange? A drive through Roosevelt State Park? Another visit to the LAC at Fort Benning?

  Bemused and impatient, Lia struck her intercom button.

  “Isn’t she here yet, Shawanda?”

  “No, ma’am,” replied Shawanda Bledsoe’s voice.

  “She’s forty minutes late. If she doesn’t get here soon, you and I might as well go home. Nobody else is scheduled.”

  “You want me to call out at her place?”

  “Why don’t you? I’d like to know what’s going on.”

  Lia fiddled with her notes. Then the intercom unit buzzed, and Shawanda said, “I got this man, Dr. Bonner. Said Miss Rinehart’s ‘unavailable to the telephone’.”

  “Is she going to make it today? Did he tell you that?”

  “The man he didn’t say. Said she’s going to be ‘out of pocket’—whatever the fool that mean—indefinitely.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “Told me your fee’s going to come, anyhow. That’s good.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.” But Lia craved a distraction from both mundane paperwork and Cal’s out-of-this-world mission as much as she did an income guarantee. With Grace Rinehart’s patronage and Cal’s job at Berthelot Acres, they were better off financially than they had been even in their best year in Colorado. Unfortunately, a theft, a murder, and a blackmail effort—all directly traceable to Miss Grace and her husband—continued to rankle, and Lia often felt that she was eating humble pie—hell, subservient stew— every time that she sessioned with the actress.

  Shawanda buzzed her. “Got you a call, ma’am. You want to pick up on line two for Missus Phoebe Flack?”

  Phoebe Flack? Her mother’s roommate at the Eleanor Roosevelt Nursing Home? What in the world did she want?

  “Hello,” Lia said.

  Phoebe Flack’s querulous voice said, “Doctor Lia, it’s me, your mama’s friend.” She gave her name and reminded Lia of all that she had done for Miss Emily during her stay in the home. Doubtfully, she wondered aloud if maybe the “busy doctor” could drop by for a few minutes to see her.

  “These are business hours, Phoebe. I’m working.” Or would be, thought Lia, if my queenly client would ever get here.

  “Whenever you can, then,” whined the woman.

  “But what’s this about, Phoebe?” Possibly, of course, the poor old gal was just lonely. But Lia didn’t want to think about this possibility because guilt—wholly appropriate guilt—would require her to take action to ease Phoebe’s loneliness.

  “I’ve got something for you. Didn’t think I should put it in the mail. It’s too valuable to mail.”

  What could Phoebe Flack have for her? Lia wondered. Especially if it were valuable. Probably a photograph, or a diary, or a stray family memento. Otherwise, her call made no sense. Despite having been roommates, Phoebe and her mama had never been close; they were “friends” only if that word meant “glorified acquaintances”.

  Instantly, Lia resolved to visit Phoebe. “I’ll be right over,” she said. Let Grace Rinehart, if ever she left off being “out of pocket”, sit in the waiting room cooling her heels.

  And so Lia hung up and walked from her office on Main Street to the nursing home. Phoebe Flack was parked in her wheelchair in the lobby, predatorily near the plate-glass doors. Lia kissed her on the cheek and pushed her down one of the Lysol-scented corridors to her own room, which she now shared with a woman whose skin seemed to have been made from lacquered tissue paper. The two women did not acknowle
dge each other, nor was Lia able to wrest a greeting from the Origami Dowager in the next bed.

  “What is it, Phoebe? What did you want me to come get?”

  “Just this, Doctor Lia.” Phoebe reached into the pocket of her robe and withdrew a circular tin that Lia did not recognize. Once in her own hands, however, the object disclosed itself as a yellow can of Dean Swift’s snuff. Lia got the top off, sniffed the brown grains, struggled to keep from sneezing.

  “Phshhuuuw,” she said. “Why are you giving me this, Phoebe?”

  “It was in the very back of your mama’s dresser drawer, Doctor Lia, and I figured you’d want it.”

  “It wasn’t my mother’s, Phoebe. Even if it had been, there’d hardly’ve been any need to give it to me.” Lia placed the tin on a bedside table. “Keep it, dispose of it, I honestly don’t care what you do with it.” Is this what the flaky Phoebe Flack had made her take off work to come see about?

  “And something else,” Phoebe said. She rotated her wrist and opened the cage of her fingers. Now Lia saw the gold intaglio profile of a fish on a beautiful lapel pin. The sight made her heart catch. A moment later, as if she had just completed a long run, it began to pound.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “A maid cleaning the chapel found it. She turned it in at the nurses’ station. They said whoever described this lost piece of jewelry could have it back. I claimed it, kept it. But when your mama died, I started feelin’ guilty. So it’s yours again, Doctor Lia. Can you forgive me for doin’ what I did?”

  Stunned, Lia said, “Certainly. Of course.”

  She walked dazedly back to her office in the April sun. Once, Cal had said, “Maybe you had two of them all along.” And she had replied, “Until this morning, I didn’t know I had even one.”