Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Crazy, Vear thought. Sci-fi gobbledygook for the credulous. It could only work in a storybook.

  But he spoke into his helmet’s radio unit: “Von Braunville dematerializes, and we’re thrown back across the void like so many passive puppets?”

  “Dematerializes is the wrong word. And we’re not ‘thrown back across the void’, Gordon, because, in our abreacted reality, we’ll never’ve been here, anyway.”

  “Fuckin’ A!”

  “You don’t like the scenario, my foul-mouthed friend?”

  Actually, Vear thought, I don’t follow it. On the other hand, Dolly, I cursed because of that. And in the black, black shadow of the ferry shuttle, the major turned Dolly about and pointed toward B dome so that he could see an unsuited human figure rush from the main air lock and come leaping across the surface as if his life were the prize in a deadly lunar footrace.

  In truth, it was.

  “My God,” Dolly said. “It’s Romanenko.”

  The Soviet materials scientist was fighting the effects of both anoxia and decompression. Unrecompressed, he would find his bodily fluids percolating within five minutes. Running across a surface with a temperature of two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit was making him cold-foot it even faster than he might otherwise have run, and his joints had surely already begun to burn with neurological fire.

  Vear was fascinated and appalled. Both emotions grew in him as the cosmonaut sprinted straight at them, his head and hands bare and his eyes glittering like fractured rubies in the ruddy mask of his inhuman face. Kolya Romanenko’s every driven stride lifted him balletically high, but when he reached the edge of the lunacrete pad, his limbs were already flailing out of control and he fell headlong, sprawling like a puppet spasming with the gracelessness of a beheaded chicken.

  “Holy shit!” Dolly said. “What’d the crazy bastard think he was going to accomplish?”

  “A Nyby,” Vear murmured. “A Nyby.”

  “We’ve got to get him inside. Maybe—”

  “Maybe nothing. He’s dead. He was dead the moment he decided to bleed the oxygen out of that air lock and make his run.”

  “But it’s worth a shot, isn’t it? I mean, if we ta—”

  “If we take him back inside, we won’t make it to our rendezvous with Marlin and the others. There’ll be an uproar, a hubbub. We’d be prime candidates for a twelve-hour grilling.”

  Vear looked toward the polarized window on the hardened cap of A dome, Von Braunville’s headquarters facility. No one stirred there. Nor had the ‘dozer jockeys working at the oxygen plant seen Romanenko’s dash, and the two technicians among the weird blossoms of the solar array had retreated deeper into it. Sheer luck. Now, though, Vear hoped that the dead man had told none of his Soviet comrades his plan to emulate the last run of Roland Nyby. But that seemed unlikely. You rarely advertised a suicide attempt unless you hoped that someone would foil it, and Romanenko had succeeded. Conspicuously.

  “So what the hell do we do?” Dolly asked.

  “Hide him. Come on. You can help me.”

  They returned to the dead Soviet—Vear had never seen a sight like him before—and grasped his heavy arms. The whites of Kolya’s eyes were bloodshot, the capillaries in his nose had burst, and the blood and mucus oozing from his mouth and nostrils were “boiling”, turning into bubbles that broke as soon as they formed, splattering fluid on everything near him. Backtracking, Vear and Dolly pulled the decompressed cosmonaut up the beveled edge of the lunacrete pad and into Daisy Duck’s shadow.

  “Okay,” Vear said. “Let’s meet the others.” He pointed at a structure like a vitrafoamed telephone booth: the surface entrance to the slump-pit cavern. It was a hundred yards away.

  “Yeah,” Dolly said, audibly winded. “Great.”

  Robinson was jittery. He, a Vietnam veteran, an emeritus Green Beret, a Secret Service man, had decided to betray the President. No, not the President, actually—the man that so many malcontents and bleeding-heart liberals had dubbed, not wholly without reason, “King Richard”.

  Tyler Robinson still believed that he had fought in Indochina for a noble cause and that too many of the President’s noisiest critics were jealous airheads, but over the past several months the Boss had slid down the psychological curve from In Control to Off His Nut. Taking a punch at that cosmonaut Shikin—whom Logan had confined to quarters until the next t-ship arrived—was only the latest sign of his deteriorating grip on himself.

  Often, nowadays, Nixon would fly into towering rages, usually for petty or perplexing reasons: an aide’s failure to remember his daughters’ wedding anniversaries, someone’s offhand reference to the charm and wit of the late JFK, etc., etc. Tyler had seen him boot his press secretary in the coccyx, throw a handful of pens at a congressman who had tried to amend a favorite bill, and roundly curse a nine-year-old boy who had climbed up on the statue of John Wayne near the marble frieze of helicopters, B-52s, and tanks that the President was dedicating as a late addition to the Vietnam War Memorial. Of course, all three networks deleted this part of his “address” from their evening news programs, but it had offended almost everyone present—the kid had only been trying to see him better—and later, of course, the President, realizing that he had made himself look bad, spent an hour excoriating the Secret Service corps for “a fuckin’ goddamn lapse of security”.

  He’s unbalanced, Tyler told himself, driving a battery-powered corridor cart to the President’s suite to pick him up. Once upon a time, the federal legislature would’ve removed a fella like him in favor of the veep, but Nixon’s got that entire bunch of D.C. pols buffaloed. They’re scared to death of him. Me, too, truth to tell, but I’m finally in a position (maybe) to do something about him. Before he blows up the planet in a fit of presidential pique at Leonid, or Margaret, or another excited nine-year-old.

  Because, as Tyler had already told the bishop, King Richard’s little snits weren’t just the tantrums of a spoiled toddler. They were scarier than that. They had global implications. Moreover, the expressions that Nixon’s face acquired when he stormed were… well, inhuman. They suggested that the planet was his Nerf ball, a toy that he could squeeze, or rend, or bounce madly around with impunity.

  And when Bishop Marlin told you that the Boss was possessed, Tyler reflected, you knew from your familiarity with his pop-eyed rages that the old cleric wasn’t shittin’ you. No, sir. He was dead on the money, and if he and his crew can exorcize the demons that’ve infested the Boss, well, you, Tyler, you’ll’ve played an important role in… in saving the world.

  Griegs came out into the corridor, checking to make sure that no would-be assassins were around. He also checked the rear of the battery cart for lunar terrorists who may’ve tried to hop a ride without Tyler’s knowledge. Satisfied that no one had, Griegs came back around to talk to his partner.

  “Where’s Commander Logan? I thought he was going to escort us on this phase of our tour.”

  “He’s going to meet us there,” Tyler Robinson lied. “I’ve got the route right here.” He tapped his temple.

  “Okay, buddy-mine.” But Griegs spoke with some suspiciousness, before going to get the President, and when Nixon emerged, he was wearing—for the first time since their arrival—sports clothes: cleatless golfing shoes, pleated slacks, and a short-sleeved banlon shirt (pale blue). With no word to Tyler, he climbed into the rear seat of the cart. Griegs leapt in beside Nixon even as Tyler hit the juice, and their ivory enameled cart purred about the circular periphery of A dome to B, and around that of B to C, and around that of C to the entrance of the undergrounds connecting Von Braunville proper to its slump-pit facilities.

  The President, Tyler noticed, spoke not a word. Griegs kept his hand inside his jacket as if willing to risk ricocheting a bullet or ten off the lunacrete walls if anyone tried to impede their progress.

  “Sir,” said Tyler, partly to hide his nervousness, partly to show off what he had learned, “most lunar slump pits are formed by t
he draining of loose surface material into subsurface cavities. A bit incongruously, there are several goodsized slump pits on the floor of Censorinus. NASA engineers integrated four of these pits into the ‘architecture’ of Von Braunville, knowing that “basements” of this natural kind would be good storage areas, garages for lunar vehicles, and shelters from solar flares, meteorite showers, and possibly even deliberate bombardment by the Soviets or”—Tyler let an amused chuckle escape him—“hostile aliens. Remodeling these cavities wasn’t as expensive as trying to dig—”

  “Shut up, Robinson,” said the President.

  “Yes, sir.” But this peremptory command stung. He had wanted to explain that for the President’s tour the base commander had authorized the pressurization of a storage cavern ordinarily kept in vacuum. Therefore, the Boss wouldn’t have to don a space suit to get a good look at it—but, obviously, at this point, King Richard was merely going through the motions. Hadn’t he already regaled everyone with a speech, punched out a Russian, and inspected nearly every aboveground cranny of Von Braunville? Now, really, he didn’t want to do anything but zap the Soviets, lie low on the Moon, and, sooner or later, go home to Earth, preferably Key Biscayne.

  Faintly whining, Tyler’s cart took them through the motor pool and past a warehouse for comestibles, the quartermaser’s office, a storage bay for equipment parts, and seven or eight areas marked RESTRICTED ACCESS. Yellowish-green lights, reminiscent of those that Tyler’s CO in ‘Nam had powered off a gasoline generator in a bamboo-covered trench, cast a spooky murk and even spookier shadows over everything. And like popcorn or automatic rifle fire, Tyler’s ears kept popping.

  They purred down a ramp to another tight tunnel. Ahead of them in it walked a stocky figure. Griegs shifted on his seat, probably to grip the weapon in his shoulder holster, and Tyler, knowing that the pedestrian was Bishop Marlin, wondered if he would have to bump the old bird—gently—to prove to Griegs and the President that he was as unsympathetic to two-legged obstacles as they were. As they drew closer to him, the bishop, feigning deafness, deftly ignored their approach.

  “Haven’t you got a horn up there, Robinson?” Griegs asked.

  Tyler pretended to search the uncluttered instrument panel for a horn. “I don’t know.”

  “The middle of the steering wheel. Just like on an automobile, you hotdog.”

  “Oh, yeah. Here it is.”

  Exasperated, Griegs said, “Well, then, damn it, why don’t you use it?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Tyler hit the horn, which sounded like a duck quacking in an empty oil drum.

  Bishop Marlin flattened his body against the right-hand wall of the tunnel. His paunch, however, would make navigating between him and the opposite wall a risky, threading-the-needle business. The only two-way traffic down here, Tyler understood, was foot traffic, and the drivers of corridor carts had to take care not to impale or steamroll pedestrians. For that, and at least one other reason, he slowed.

  “Go on by him!” Griegs said.

  “I’m afraid I’ll hit him.”

  “Well, that’d be too damned bad for him, wouldn’t it?” Griegs was on the same side of the tunnel as Bishop Marlin, and, glancing back, Tyler saw that the President was eyeing the overweight cleric with mild annoyance. Otherwise, Nixon was unperturbed, his knees together and his clasped hands on his knees. Suspecting nothing, but smoldering with resentment at anyone who got too obtrusively in their way…

  Griegs recognized the bishop, too. When Tyler edged their cart past the bishop so that the bishop and the agent in the back were virtually face to face, Griegs said, “What the hell’re you doing down here, Your Right Reverendship?”

  With no warning, his right reverendship grabbed Griegs by the lapels, stepped aside, and, tugging with all his strength, banged the agent’s forehead into the wall. Griegs went limp. Witnessing this, the President instinctively leapt for freedom. Possibly, he hoped to run back into the labyrinth of bays in search of a hiding place.

  Oh, no, you don’t, thought Tyler. Despite the agility that the President had just shown, the agent hooked his trouser cuff with his forefinger and sent him sprawling. Tyler then hurled himself into the backseat to restore his boss to the cart and pinion him there. Bishop Marlin hurriedly assumed the wheel, accelerated, and drove them lickety-sputt-sputt-sputt toward the slump-pit cavern, where the others already awaited them.

  Griegs lay unconscious behind them, but the President, to Tyler Robinson’s dismay and astonishment, was struggling so ferociously that the agent kept expecting to hear a bone crack, either one of his own or one of the President’s. Worse, the man had the strength of legions and the tongue of fifty smut-peddling blasphemers. If Bishop Marlin didn’t get them to their destination soon, they might never reach it at all…

  Maybe I deserve this, Tyler thought, essaying a choke hold on his thrashing employer. After all, I’m a Quisling, aren’t I? A Benedict Arnold? A … well, a Judas?

  “Hang on!” the bishop cried. “For God’s sake, Tyler, don’t let go! We’re almost there!”

  25

  IN THIS slump-pit cavern, forty-nine coffins. Cal can’t keep from looking at them—even though, for the past three subjective hours, his exorcism team has been busting its butt trying to evict the spirit of evil from the truculent President.

  These forty-nine coffins, arranged about the frigid chamber in seven stacks seven coffins high, keep popping up in the corners of Cal’s eyes. He knows with a dreadful certainty that if this combat goes on much longer, Nixon will go free, but all of them racking their bodies and souls to effect his “cure” will end up inside those friggin’ boxes.

  Maybe even Kai, who has already died once. Indeed, Kai may soon find Horsy Stout’s glorified body—in which Philip K. Dick’s resurrected essence has hitchhiked to the Moon—sapped of volition and rendered useless as a means of transport. That’s how violent and dispiriting the struggle has so far been, and Kai is even yet blaming himself for Romanenko’s suicide.

  Over Bishop Marlin’s angry protest, the chamber also contains (in addition to the forty-nine coffins; the gurney on which Nixon lies; and a small table set with candles, an aspergillum, several crucifixes, a chalice for holy water, and the Sacrament), yes, an electric coffee urn.

  An hour ago, Kai insisted on sending Tyler to fetch the machine from the galley in B dome. And Tyler was able to accomplish his assignment only because a colorful timelessness—a muscadine-tinted stasis—prevails at Von Braunville. “Meanwhile”, the only persons immune to its effects are the seven exhausted exorcists beneath its translucent umbrella.

  At this exact subjective moment, the coffee urn gasps, gurgles, and whoops, filling the slump-pit cavern with unsettling echoes. Cal, his hands on the President, hears these noises as intimations of mortality, and he, like the bishop, wonders why the hell Kai, himself practically a spook, wants to subject them to the ghostly, godforsaken moans of a percolator.

  Haven’t we got enough to sweat? he thinks. At the moment, King Richard’s lying here as quiet as a basking snake, but ten minutes ago he was writhing, hissing, bucking, and twisting.

  Blaspheming everything beautiful and good, not excluding Bishop Marlin, Erica, Gordon, Dolly, Tyler, Kai, and (even if I qualify only on sufferance) me, Cal Pickford. And now, when we ought to be preparing for our next bout of wills and obscene cant, we’re gazing around zombie-eyed and listening to the high electric keening of that stupid coffee maker.

  “Philip,” the bishop says, “why in God’s name did you have to have that brought in here?”

  Kai sits Buddha-fashion next to the coffee urn; the urn itself rests on the cold floor beside the table with the candles, the holy water, and the wafer and wine. He is hugging himself and rocking imperceptibly from the waist; the aura surrounding the homunculus flickers bluely, like a gas flame on an old-fashioned stove, while the stack of coffins behind him glints and glooms in rhythm to the flickering.

  “I’m beginning to feel psychotic. I need a cup
of hot coffee to keep me from evaporating and floating off the way Easter did.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Right. Coffee with chicory. Maybe that’ll hold me here long enough to evict the devil from our friend.”

  “Nonsense,” murmurs the ecclesiastic.

  Cal, behind the President, presses down on his shoulders. The major and his roommate are each restraining a leg, and Tyler stands opposite Erica and the bishop at the middle of the gurney (they’ve removed its wheels, turning it into a rickety examination platform) with one hand on Nixon’s fabric belt. Tyler is ready to push down hard if the President resumes thrashing.

  Nixon’s pale blue shirt is indigo with sweat; sweat dots his face like beads of molten glass. He is staring upside down at Cal with an expression deceptively mild. Simultaneously, he emits a hellish body odor. Acrid. This smell commingles with the bitter fragrance of the coffee beans and chicory discoloring the water in the whoop-whoop-whooping urn.

  Says the President to Cal, in a growly voice unlike any he has ever heard him use, “You’re right to worry, Pickford. I am going to cram your scrawny ass into a coffin. You’d better believe I am, fuckbrain.”

  “How’re you going to do that?” Cal asks him.

  Bishop Marlin says, “Don’t talk to him. How many times do I have to tell you people that it’s dangerous to try to talk to the liars possessing this man.”

  The bishop looks done-in. Considering that he fasted for three days to purify himself for this encounter, no wonder. It’s plainly a miracle that he hasn’t already collapsed—an extension of God’s grace into the Stop-Time Crimson beneath which Kai has mysteriously endomed them. Even so, Cal fears that if the exorcism goes on much longer, Bishop Marlin may not survive.