Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Well, she definitely had two now. Of course, the second was in Cal’s possession on the Moon, but the first pin—the one she’d lost—she was clutching hard enough to burn a fish brand into her palm as indelible as those that Cal burned into the flanks of cattle.

  Kai, punning, had called the pin a linchpin, and had warned her about losing it, but now Lia was fretting the upsetting enigma of there being two linchpins—was that possible? was it likely?—and trying to find an answer to the puzzle.

  Back at the office, Shawanda told her that Miss Grace still had not arrived but that Suzi Bonner had called to invite her to dinner on Saturday evening.

  “Formal? Informal? What?”

  “I guess it’s more dress-down than dress-up, ma’am. Miss Suzi said you all was set to do some horseback riding before dinner.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  Lia went into her office and sat down at her desk. She put the fish pin on her blotter and stared at it. It was real. It glinted in the sunlight coming through the slatted blinds, and its imprint was there in her hand like a seraphic seal of approval. Why, then, did she feel so woozy and confused?

  The assembly center/dining hall in B dome is festooned with plants, giving it the fake serenity of a sauna in a forward battle zone. The incongruity of crimson-touched caladium leaves and mint-green ferns in a shell of rock and aluminum may account for some of Gordon Vear’s nervousness. On the other hand, a day after the ferry shuttle Daisy Duck’s landing on the lunacrete pad near the solar array, the President is going to address Von Braunville’s citizens, and Vear has an uneasy feeling about the likely gist of his remarks.

  Nearly everyone at the base is crowding into the dining hall; only essential communications personnel and the ‘dozer jockeys who must keep digging plagioclase feldspar for the O2 plant will be absent. Coming in with Dahlquist, Vear sees the “cowboy” Pickford sitting in a chair near the podium and beside him the Episcopalian sky pilot Joshua Marlin.

  Sighting the bishop calms the major. Marlin isn’t a Catholic, of course, but he’s closer to it than Easson, the Baptist physicist and chaplain, who is on his way home to Earth aboard the Checkers. And, when the crunch comes, Marlin is going to help them abreact history and set this topsy-turvy time to rights. How, Vear doesn’t yet know, but it will happen because of a ghostly dwarf; the determination of Erica Zola; Dahlquist and Vear’s bewildered complicity; and the aid of the newcomers sitting up front awaiting the entrance of the President. Primarily the bishop.

  “I want to sit in the back,” Vear tells Dahlquist.

  Dolly whispers, “Relax. This’ll be a pro forma glad-to-be-here speech that every politician makes on the campaign trail.”

  “He isn’t campaigning.”

  “Dream on. He’s always campaigning.”

  Vear elbows his roommate toward a chair in the rear, and the hall keeps filling. Ubiquitous murmuring. A palpable current of excitement in the refiltered air.

  And all this for a pro forma glad-to-be-here speech? No, sir. Not likely. The President has come to the Moon to wow them, and Vear remembers the fugue that he experienced on the interior crater ledge.

  He remembers, too, the docking maneuver in lunar orbit, when the t-ship Checkers and the shuttle Daisy Duck met to exchange cargoes and passengers. The hookup lasted forever. Why? Because you just couldn’t refuel the t-ship and push its many goodies through the docking ports into the shuttle in a mere fifteen minutes. And they hadn’t. It took nearly an hour, Vear recalls. And during those grueling sixty minutes, only the President and the Secret Service man Griegs declined to help with the work. Indeed, Nixon paddled past Vear into Daisy Duck’s air lock soon after instrument readings showed that it had a breathable mix of oxygen and nitrogen.

  As in his lunar hallucination, the major came to attention and saluted the President. But Nixon kept on floating. Eerily, the look on his face perfectly matched the one that he had worn nodding Ingham into Vear’s pie wedge during that hallucination. But Ingham existed nowhere except in the major’s fugue—Robinson and Griegs were the names of the men on this trip, a trip indisputably real—and, there in the cramped air lock of the t-ship, Vear knew that he was once again about to lose it.

  Speak to the man, he encouraged himself. You can’t allow the President of the United States to go by unacknowledged.

  And so he barked, “Good to see you again, sir. We trust you all had a good crossing.”

  Griegs, wedging himself into the lock next to the major, said, “Yeah, it was fine.”

  Nixon finned himself around and studied Vear for a minute. “What do you mean, ‘again’? We’ve never met, have we, Major?”

  “No, sir, I should’ve said ‘in person’. I’ve seen you on TV so often it just seemed like ‘again’.”

  The President’s expression hardened; his jowls quavered as if he were contemplating a reply. Instead, he favored, or chastised, Vear with a scowl of such crude intensity that the major could feel his own face crimsoning. Then Griegs shoved Vear out of the way, and the President and his bodyguard strapped themselves into seats in the shuttle.

  After which, not a little shaken, Vear oversaw the exchange of all the other passengers and the transfer of the cargo aboard the Checkers to Daisy Duck‘s underslung craw. Guinea pigs. Plants. Cowboy. And a Protestant Episcopal bishop.

  And surely, Vear thinks as the PA system begins to pipe in “Hail to the Chief”, Bishop Marlin is going to make a helluva lot more difference to us than Brezhnev bears, imported greenery, or that anxious-looking Pickford fellow.

  In fact, Pickford looks as nervous as Vear feels, and it’s hard not to sympathize with him. In the few words that the major and the guinea-pig keeper—Lord, what a job!—exchanged on the flight down, Pickford seemed an okay guy. When Daisy Duck swooped across the Mare Crisium mascon (an ancient meteorite whose deeply buried bulk accelerated the shuttle, shaking it with gravitational effects that Vear is still learning to conquer), Pickford truly enjoyed the extra speed. He shouted, “Ride ‘em, Major!” while everyone else, Marlin included, was as quiet as a Cistercian.

  Up front, people are beginning to stand. Vear sees the bishop, Pickford, Franciscus, Gubarev, Nemov, and many others rippling to their feet; soon everyone in the hall is upright. Commander Logan enters from the galley. The President emerges a step or two behind him with his Secret Service bodyguards, both of whom, today, are wearing their green berets and expensive civilian suits. Nixon raises his arms over his head, showing the V for victory sign and smiling tightly. Griegs and Robinson bookend the podium, each of them near a hanging fern basket.

  “Hail to the Chief” stops playing, everybody sits, Commander Logan introduces the President, and up he steps to speak. Vear leans forward, curious to know if Nixon’s words will in any way echo the words spoken to him during his lunar rapture.

  Nixon begins to talk. He says many of the things he said in his broadcasts from the Checkers. (Strangely, this speech is not being televised home—even though it is going out by radio to all base personnel not in the hall.) He has come to lift the dejected, to see Von Braunville firsthand, and to deliver a message of great importance to everyone working for NASA.

  “And what about the Russians?” Vear asks Dolly, whispering. Gubarev, Romanenko, Nemov, and Shikin are on the Moon courtesy of NASA, but they are Soviet scientists and military men.

  Dahlquist shrugs.

  Shortly, the President is comfortably into his speech, and Vear notes that after every big topic heading, Nixon is saying, “I am a Von Braunvillian.” A flourish lifted from John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin Berliner” address of the early 1960s. Nearly everyone on hand, sensing a refrain opportunity, joins Nixon in asserting, “I am a Von Braunvillian!” Applause accompanies these boasts, and now even the Russians are lending their voices to the chorus. Vear has to struggle to keep from joining it himself; eventually, though, he begins to wonder why he feels obliged to resist.

  The President pauses. All along, his gestures have had th
at spastic quality—almost a robotic mechanicalness—typical of his speech-making behavior. As he stands wordless before his fellow Von Braunvillians, his eyes go glassy and his jowls perceptibly inflate, as if something in the hall has annoyed him. Vear feels the hair on his nape rising and his palms turning cold.

  “My fellow Von Braunvillians,” the President says, “within the next six months the United States will launch a manned expedition to Mars. Four people here among you have been selected for this extraordinary mission. Their surnames—I list them alphabetically rather than by rank—are Berry, Franciscus, Hoffman, and Vear.”

  Stunned silence. Then the selected men’s colleagues, rising as one, burst into applause. Vear feels his skull ballooning like a bellows, and nothing about the moment seems real. He is suffering another hallucination. Or is he? Dolly’s hand on his shoulder has substance, doesn’t it? The hurrahing of his comrades is palpable, isn’t it?

  But do any of them care that he doesn’t want to go to Mars? Do any of them know that this unlikely scene parodies the President’s distressing revelation to him during his lunar fugue?

  Of course not. How could they? The din dies. Chairs scrape as everyone sits. “Usually, of course, we consult with our astronauts to see how they feel about a dangerous mission, but in this case we chose our fellas on the basis of service records, psychological profiles, and peer ratings. These guys came out on top. Make no mistake: We’d never send anybody unequal to the task, and Messieurs Berry, Franciscus, Hoffman, and Vear are more than equal to it. If they haven’t got the gumption to go, just let ‘em say so, without the least prejudice to their careers, and we’ll slap in some gung-ho alternates to take up the slack.”

  Romanenko, a Soviet cosmonaut and materials scientist, gets to his feet. “Mr. President, my countrymen and I applaud this great endeavor, too. We pledge our support. And if you must try to find these ‘gung-ho’ alternates, please overlook us not.”

  Approving murmurs. The cosmonaut nods to acknowledge them and then sits again.

  Nixon glares at Romanenko. At last, he says, “The only place you and your countrymen are going, Major, is home.”

  Warily, Romanenko rises again. “But why, Mr. President?”

  “We can maintain a token Soviet presence here at Von Braunville better with Brezhnev bears than with live commies. Six cavies for four cosmonauts. I for one see that as a pretty fair trade.”

  Stung, Romanenko lowers himself into his chair. Even Vear, in the midst of his personal shock, sits aghast at this unanticipated presidential rudeness, and no one in the entire hall speaks. Like Romanenko, like Vear, no one has any idea what to say or what good mere speech can possibly do. Playing superpower politics with men you have to work beside every day is impossible, and the major is embarrassed on the President’s behalf. So, it seems, is nearly every other American in the hall.

  Finally, Shikin, the youngest of the four Soviets, stands and says, “Mr. President, that is an insulting—”

  Nixon cocks his head and autocratically raises the palm of one hand. “Spare me. Communism is something a country—likewise Von Braunville—is infected with, not something it chooses. So let me make it perfectly clear that I’m taking action against a latent plague. You guys always say that what’s yours is yours and what’s ours is negotiable. Well, I’m not going to give you a single piece of this Mars mission. The Red Planet will never be the Red Planet in any sense that the Kremlin approves. And if that means the end of détente, good riddance.”

  Greatly daring, Shikin advances toward the podium. The agents flanking Nixon tense, and the young cosmonaut says, “Sir, I spit on your ideological bigotry.” He does, too. Directly on the lapel of the President’s pinstriped jacket.

  “Why, you filthy SOB!” the President snarls.

  Pandemonium ensues. Vear can scarcely believe that such chaos has descended on the isolate little world of Von Braunville. What luck that the President’s speech isn’t being televised home. No healthy impact on global opinion could derive from a brawl between the Leader of the Free World and a youthful cosmonaut.

  Even so, Nixon has decked Shikin with a badly telegraphed right cross. Shikin failed to duck it only because an irate ‘dozer pilot—a staunch Nixonian—shoved him into it from behind.

  Now, one of the President’s bodyguards is holding Shikin to the floor. The other is wielding the butt of his pistol, yanked from a shoulder holster, to knock the outraged Nemov to his knees.

  Gubarev and Romanenko are expostulating for calm, but the fever for fisticuffs has infected half the room, and finally the Soviets must fight to keep the surlies from knuckling them under, too.

  Bishop Marlin has also jumped into the fray—not to add himself to its combatants, but to limit the mayhem. He grabs the berserkly flailing Nixon from behind, imposing a full nelson, and walks him away from the two standing cosmonauts. The agent with the pistol goes after the bishop, who is hopping along behind the President as the latter’s rodeobronc antics demand. Cal Pickford slips forward to grab Robinson’s arm and pry the pistol loose.

  “Stop this nonsense!” Bishop Marlin cries. “Stop this nonsense immediately!” His powerful voice confounds some of the surlies, and when he shouts again, it quiets even the most implacable among them.

  Vear, who has been standing on his chair, watches Bishop Marlin twist Nixon back to the podium and release him with a disgusted push. Then the bishop bumps Nixon away from the mike, orders the bellicose ‘dozer jockey to help Shikin and Nemov up, and scolds everyone on the premises for their “puerile barbarism”.

  “This is what comes of beginning our meeting without a proper invocation,” he declares.

  Nixon, Vear notices, is standing at the bishop’s right elbow, more or less in control of himself again. His eyes, however, have a hooded look, and his jaw seems bluer and carved to a crisper jut than it did upon his entrance.

  “And so,” says Bishop Marlin, “we end with a benediction.” He blesses the abashed crowd. “Bury your animosities and go forth in peace.”

  The President shoots his cuffs with a robotic shoulder hunch, pivots, and leaves the hall by way of the galley. Commander Logan and the two Secret Service men follow him out.

  “Congratulations,” Dolly tells Vear.

  “For what?”

  “Being selected for the Mars mission. It’s a high honor.”

  “It’s a nightmare. A nightmare I’ve already had.”

  The plants festooning the hall sway in the perceptible wake of the late disturbance. Vear and Dolly, exiting ahead of thirty-five or forty others, bemusedly return to C dome.

  Cal was lying in the web of the low-g hammock that he had hung in the chaplain’s quarters, for Marlin had asked him to share this space and the two men were mulling the President’s behavior.

  “He lost it, didn’t he, sir?”

  “Some say he never had it. In truth, though, he’s been going rapidly downhill ever since the ‘80 election.”

  Cal tried to prop himself up in the hammock; Marlin’s reply was the first disparaging remark that he had heard this man utter about the President.

  “What do you mean, ‘rapidly’?”

  “The imperial presidency came to full flower in his first term, and he was definitely beyond clear-eyed self-assessment even before the victory in Vietnam. But only within the last two years has he surrendered his soul to the Evil for which he has been an unwitting—but not unwilling—instrument for so long.”

  “The Evil? What do you mean? I don’t get it.”

  Bishop Marlin was sitting at the former chaplain’s desk with a Bible and a prayer book open beside him. He printed several words on a sheet of paper and carried it to Cal, who, taking it, read the following message: HE’S POSSESSED BY DEMONS. MAYBE SATAN HIMSELF.

  Cal looked around. Obviously, the bishop feared that their pie wedge in B dome was bugged. Marlin printed several more words on his pad, tore off this sheet, and handed it to Cal, too. INSULTING SOVIETS, TAKING PUNCH AT ONE. THIS IS
OVER-THE-EDGE BEHAVIOR.

  Twisting, Cal managed to free his legs from the uncomfortable hammock. “I agree with you, sir, but—”

  Another sheet: NOT ONLY EVIDENCE. BERTHELOT TOLD ME SOMETHING THAT CLINCHES IT.

  “That clinches—” Cal wanted to say “possession”, but the bishop shook his head and handed him this block-printed message: PRESIDENT PLANS PREEMPTIVE NUCLEAR STRIKE AGAINST SOVIET UNION & SATELLITE-BASED LASER ATTACK.

  “When?” Cal blurted.

  WITHIN NEXT 2 WEEKS.

  “Why?”

  SUPPOSEDLY BECAUSE OF BAD SOVIET BEHAVIOR IN CENTRAL AMERICA, AFGHANISTAN, POLAND. EVEN HE BELIEVES THIS. BUT IN TRUTH BECAUSE HE’S IN THRALL TO DEMONS WHO WANT TO SEDUCE WHOLE SPECIES & BRING ABOUT ARMAGEDDON.

  Wait a minute, Cal thought. This guy is crazy. I’ve got good cause to think our fourth-term president the evilest bastard this side of Nazi Germany, but I don’t for a minute think that I’ve got to attribute his treacherous megalomania—a word that Lia has even applied to me—to demonic possession.

  They conversed in this same way—Cal talking guardedly aloud, Bishop Marlin scribbling on his notepad—for several more minutes, and Cal learned that Nixon had come to the Moon not just to lift morale, etc., but also to ensure his own safety when the preemptive nuclear strikes by SAC bombers and silo-inhabiting ICBMs, as well as an attack by experimental satellite lasers, put planet Earth in jeopardy of outright and total destruction. Still other signs of the President’s irreversible depravity were his complete abandonment of his family and his desire to get the four Soviet cosmonauts home to Russia in time for these annihilating fireworks.

  There was a knock on the chaplain’s door.

  The two men started. Have we already given ourselves away? Cal wondered. They began gathering up and crumpling into balls all the bishop’s incriminating notes.

  “Coming,” Marlin cried. “Just a minute.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Cal demanded.

  “Where? At the NASA facilities in Houston? You wouldn’t have come. Aboard the Clemency, the Checkers, or the Daisy Duck? That was impossible, too. The President was practically sitting in our laps.”