The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories tcsopkd-4

by Philip Kindred Dick

  “Depends where they get you.” Going into the kitchen, Sharp found two beers in the refrigerator. As he poured, he said: “They shouldn’t waste grain making this stuff… but as long as they do, it’s a shame not to drink it.”

  Giller accepted his beer greedily. “Must be nice to be a big wheel and have luxuries like this.” His small, dark eyes roved speculatively around the kitchen. “Your own stove, and your own refrigerator.” Smacking his lips, he added: “And beer. I haven’t had a beer since last August.”

  “You’ll live,” Sharp said, without compassion. “Is this a business call? If so, get to the point; I’ve got plenty of work to do.”

  Giller said: “I just wanted to say hello to a fellow Petaluman.”

  Wincing, Sharp answered: “It sounds like some sort of synthetic fuel.”

  Giller wasn’t amused. “Are you ashamed to have come from the very section that was once—”

  “I know. The egg-laying capital of the universe. Sometimes I wonder—how many chicken feathers do you suppose were drifting around, the day the first H-bomb hit our town?”

  “Billions,” Giller said morosely. “And some of them were mine. My chickens, I mean. Your family had a farm, didn’t they?”

  “No,” Sharp said, refusing to be identified with Giller. “My family operated a drug store facing on Highway 101. A block from the park, near the sporting goods shop.” And, he added under his breath: You can go to hell. Because I’m not going to change my mind. You can camp on my doorstep the rest of your life and it still won’t do any good. Petaluma isn’t that important. And anyhow, the chickens are dead.

  “How’s the Sac rebuild coming?” Giller inquired.

  “Fine.”

  “Plenty of those walnuts again?”

  “Walnuts coming out of people’s ears.”

  “Mice getting in the shell heaps?”

  “Thousands of them,” Sharp sipped his beer; it was good quality, probably as good as pre-war. He wouldn’t know, because in 1961, the year the war broke out, he had been only six years old. But the beer tasted the way he remembered the old days: opulent and carefree and satisfying.

  “We figure,” Giller said hoarsely, an avid gleam in his face, “that the Petaluma-Sonoma area can be built up again for about seven billion Westbloc. That’s nothing compared to what you’ve been doling out.”

  “And the Petaluma-Sonoma area is nothing compared with the areas we’ve been rebuilding,” Sharp said. “You think we need eggs and wine? What we need is machinery. It’s Chicago and Pittsburgh and Los Angeles and St. Louis and—”

  “You’ve forgotten,” Giller droned on, “that you’re a Petaluman. You’re turning your back on your origin—and on your duty.”

  “Duty! You suppose the Government hired me to be a lobbyist for one trivial farm area?” Sharp flushed with outrage. “As far as I’m concerned—”

  “We’re your people,” Giller said inflexibly. “And your people come first.”

  When he had got rid of the man, Sharp stood for a time in the night darkness, gazing down the road after Giller’s receding car. Well, he said to himself, there goes the way of the world—me first and to hell with everybody else.

  Sighing, he turned and made his way up the path toward the front porch of his house. Lights gleamed friendlily in the window. Shivering, he put his hand out and groped for the railing.

  And then, as he clumsily mounted the stairs, the terrible thing happened.

  With a rush, the lights of the window winked out. The porch railing dissolved under his fingers. In his ears a shrill screaming whine rose up and deafened him. He was falling. Struggling frantically, he tried to get hold of something, but there was only empty darkness around him, no substance, no reality, only the depth beneath him and the din of his own terrified shrieks.

  “Help!” he shouted, and the sound beat futilely back at him. “I’m falling!”

  And then, gasping, he was outstretched on the damp lawn, clutching handfuls of grass and dirt. Two feet from the porch—he had missed the first step in the darkness and had slipped and fallen. An ordinary event: the window lights had been blocked by the concrete railing. The whole thing had happened in a split second and he had fallen only the length of his own body. There was blood on his forehead; he had cut himself as he struck.

  Silly. A childish, infuriating event.

  Shakily, he climbed to his feet and mounted the steps. Inside the house, he stood leaning against the wall, shuddering and panting. Gradually the fear faded out and rationality returned.

  Why was he so afraid of falling?

  Something had to be done. This was worse than ever before, even worse than the time he had stumbled coming out of the elevator at the office—and had instantly been reduced to screaming terror in front of a lobbyful of people.

  What would happen to him if he really fell? If, for example, he were to step off one of the overhead ramps connecting the major Los Angeles office buildings? The fall would be stopped by safety screens; no physical harm was ever done, though people fell all the time. But for him—the psychological shock might be fatal. Would befatal; to his mind, at least.

  He made a mental note: no more going out on the ramps. Under no circumstances. He had been avoiding them for years, but from now on, ramps were in the same class as air travel. Since 1982 he hadn’t left the surface of the planet. And, in the last few years, he seldom visited offices more than ten flights up.

  But if he stopped using the ramps, how was he going to get into his own research files? The file room was accessibly only by ramp: the narrow metallic path leading up from the office area.

  Perspiring, terrified, he sank down on the couch and sat huddled over, wondering how he was going to keep his job, do his work.

  And how he was going to stay alive.

  Humphrys waited, but his patient seemed to have finished.

  “Does it make you feel any better,” Humphrys asked, “to know that fear of falling is a common phobia?”

  “No,” Sharp answered.

  “I guess there’s no reason why it should. You say it’s shown up before? When was the first time?”

  “When I was eight. The war had been going on two years. I was on the surface, examining my vegetable garden.” Sharp smiled weakly. “Even when I was a kid, I grew things. The San Francisco network picked up exhaust trails of a Soviet missile and all the warning towers went off like Roman candles. I was almost on top of the shelter. I raced to it, lifted the lid and started down the stairs. At the bottom were my mother and father. They yelled for me to hurry. I started to run down the stairs.”

  “And fell?” Humphrys asked expectantly.

  “I didn’t fall; I suddenly got afraid. I couldn’t go any farther; I just stood there. And they were yelling up at me. They wanted to get the bottom plate screwed in place. And they couldn’t until I was down.”

  With a touch of aversion, Humphrys acknowledged: “I remember those old two-stage shelters. I wonder how many people got shut between the lid and the bottom plate.” He eyed his patient. “As a child, had you heard of that happening? People being trapped on the stairs, not able to get back up, not able to get down …”

  “I wasn’t scared of being trapped! I was scared of falling—afraid I’d pitch head-forward off the steps.” Sharp licked his dry lips. “Well, so I turned around—” His body shuddered. “I went back up and outside.”

  “During the attack?”

  “They shot down the missile. But I spent the alert tending my vegetables. Afterward, my family beat me nearly unconscious.”

  Humphrys’ mind formed the words: origin of guilt.

  “The next time,” Sharp continued, “was when I was fourteen. The war had been over a few months. We started back to see what was left of our town. Nothing was left, only a crater of radioactive slag several hundred feet deep. Work teams were creeping down into the crater. I stood on the edge watching them. The fear came.” He put out his cigarette and sat waiting until the analyst foun
d him another. “I left the area after that. Every night I dreamed about that crater, that big dead mouth. I hitched a ride on a military truck and rode to San Francisco.”

  “When was the next time?” asked Humphrys.

  Irritably, Sharp said: “Then it happened all the time, every time I was up high, every time I had to walk up or down a flight of steps—any situation where I was high and might fall. But to be afraid to walk up the steps of my own house—” He broke off temporarily. “I can’t walk up three steps,” he said wretchedly. “Three concrete steps.”

  “Any particular bad episodes, outside of those you’ve mentioned?”

  “I was in love with a pretty brown-haired girl who lived on the top floor of the Atcheson Apartments. Probably she still lives there; I wouldn’t know. I got five or six floors up and then—I told her good night and came back down.” Ironically, he said: “She must have thought I was crazy.”

  “Others?” Humphrys asked, mentally noting the appearance of the sexual element.

  “One time I couldn’t accept a job because it involved travel by air. It had to do with inspecting agricultural projects.”

  Humphrys said: “In the old days, analysts looked for the origin of a phobia. Now we ask: what does it do? Usually it gets the individual out of situations he unconsciously dislikes.”

  A slow, disgusted flush appeared on Sharp’s face. “Can’t you do better than that?”

  Disconcerted, Humphrys murmured: “I don’t say I agree with the theory or that it’s necessarily true in your case. I’ll say this much though: it’s not falling you’re afraid of. It’s something that falling reminds you of. With luck we ought to be able to dig up the prototype experience—what they used to call the original traumatic incident.” Getting to his feet, he began to drag over a stemmed tower of electronic mirrors. “My lamp,” he explained. “It’ll melt the barriers.”

  Sharp regarded the lamp with apprehension. “Look,” he muttered nervously, “I don’t want my mind reconstructed. I may be a neurotic, but I take pride in my personality.”

  “This won’t affect your personality.” Bending down, Humphrys plugged in the lamp. “It will bring up material not accessible to your rational center. I’m going to trace your life—track back to the incident at which you were done great harm—and find out what you’re really afraid of.”

  Black shapes drifted around him. Sharp screamed and struggled wildly, trying to pry loose the fingers closing over his arms and legs. Something smashed against his face. Coughing, he slumped forward, dribbling blood and saliva and bits of broken teeth. For an instant, blinding light flashed; he was being scrutinized.

  “Is he dead?” a voice demanded.

  “Not yet.” A foot poked experimentally into Sharp’s side. Dimly, in his half-consciousness, he could hear ribs cracking. “Almost, though.”

  “Can you hear me, Sharp?” a voice rasped, close to his ear.

  He didn’t respond. He lay trying not to die, trying not to associate himself with the cracked and broken thing that had been his body.

  “You probably imagine,” the voice said, familiar, intimate, “that I’m going to say you’ve got one last chance. But you don’t, Sharp. Your chance is gone. I’m telling you what we’re going to do with you.”

  Gasping, he tried not to hear. And, futilely, he tried not to feel what they were systematically doing to him.

  “All right,” the familiar voice said finally, when it had been done. “Now throw him out.”

  What remained of Paul Sharp was lugged to a circular hatch. The nebulous outline of darkness rose up around him and then—hideously—he was pitched into it. Down he fell, but this time he didn’t scream.

  No physical apparatus remained with which to scream.

  Snapping the lamp off, Humphrys bent over and methodically roused the slumped figure.

  “Sharp!” he ordered loudly. “Wake up! Come out of it!”

  The man groaned, blinked his eyes, stirred. Over his face settled a glaze of pure, unmitigated torment.

  “God,” he whispered, eyes blank, body limp with suffering. “They—”

  “You’re back here,” Humphrys said, shaken by what had been dredged up. “There’s nothing to worry about; you’re absolutely safe. It’s over with—happened years ago.”

  “Over,” Sharp murmured pathetically.

  “You’re back in the present. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Sharp muttered. “But—what was it? They pushed me out—through and into something. And I went on down.” He trembled violently. “I fell.”

  “You fell through a hatch,” Humphrys told him calmly. “You were beaten up and badly injured—fatally, they assumed. But you did survive. You are alive. You got out of it.”

  “Why did they do it?” Sharp asked brokenly. His face, sagging and gray, twitched with despair. “Help me, Humphrys …”

  “Consciously, you don’t remember when it happened?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember where?”

  “No.” Sharp’s face jerked spasmodically. “They tried to kill me—they did kill me!” Struggling upright, he protested: “Nothing like that happened to me. I’d remember if it had. It’s a false memory—my mind’s been tampered with!”

  “It’s been repressed,” Humphrys said firmly, “deeply buried because of the pain and shock. A form of amnesia—it’s been filtering indirectly up in the form of your phobia. But now that you recall it consciously—”

  “Do I have to go back?” Sharp’s voice rose hysterically. “Do I have to get under that damn lamp again?”

  “It’s got to come out on a conscious level,” Humphrys told him, “but not all at once. You’ve had your limit for today.”

  Sagging with relief, Sharp settled back in the chair. “Thanks,” he said weakly. Touching his face, his body, he whispered: “I’ve been carrying that in my mind all these years. Corroding, eating away—”

  “There should be some diminution of the phobia,” the analyst told him, “as you grapple with the incident itself. We’ve made progress; we now have some idea of the real fear. It involves bodily injury at the hands of professional criminals. Ex-soldiers in the early post-war years… gangs of bandits, I remember.”

  A measure of confidence returned to Sharp. “It isn’t hard to understand a falling fear, under the circumstances. Considering what happened to me … Shakily, he started to his feet. And screamed shrilly.

  “What is it?” Humphrys demanded, hastily coming over and grabbing hold of his arm. Sharp leaped violently away, staggered, and collapsed inertly in the chair. “What happened?”

  Face working, Sharp managed: “I can’t get up.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t stand up.” Imploringly, he gazed up at the analyst, stricken and terrified. “I’m—afraid I’ll fall. Doctor, now I can’t even get to my feet.”

  For an interval neither man spoke. Finally, his eyes on the floor, Sharp whispered: “The reason I came to you, Humphrys, is because your office is on the ground floor. That’s a laugh, isn’t it? I couldn’t go any higher.”

  “We’re going to have to turn the lamp back on you,” Humphrys said.

  “I realize it. I’m scared.” Gripping the arms of the chair, he continued: “Go ahead. What else can we do? I can’t leave here. Humphrys, this thing is going to kill me.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Humphrys got the lamp into position. “We’ll get you out of this. Try to relax; try to think of nothing in particular.” Clicking the mechanism on, he said softly: “This time I don’t want the traumatic incident itself. I want the envelope of experience that surrounds it. I want the broader segment of which it’s a part.”

  Paul Sharp walked quietly through the snow. His breath, in front of him, billowed outward and formed a sparkling cloud of white. To his left lay the jagged ruins of what had been buildings. The ruins, covered with snow, seemed almost lovely. For a moment he paused, entranced.

  “Interesting,” a member of his resear
ch team observed, coming up. “Could be anything—absolutely anything—under there.”

  “It’s beautiful, in a way,” Sharp commented.

  “See that spire?” The young man pointed with one heavily gloved finger; he still wore his lead-shielded suit. He and his group had been poking around the still-contaminated crater. Their boring bars were lined up in an orderly row. “That was a church,” he informed Sharp. “A nice one, by the looks of it. And over there—” he indicated an indiscriminate jumble of ruin—“that was the main civic center.”

  “The city wasn’t directly hit, was it?” Sharp asked.

  “It was bracketed. Come on down and see what we’ve run into. The crater to our right—“

  “No, thanks,” Sharp said, pulling back with intense aversion. “I’ll let you do the crawling around.”

  The youthful expert glanced curiously at Sharp, then forgot the matter. “Unless we run into something unexpected, we should be able to start reclamation within a week. The first step, of course, is to clear off the slag-layer. It’s fairly well cracked—a lot of plant growth has perforated it, and natural decay has reduced a great deal of it to semi-organic ash.”

  “Fine,” Sharp said, with satisfaction. “I’ll be glad to see something here again, after all these years.”

  The expert asked: “What was it like before the war? I never saw that; I was born after the destruction began.”

  “Well,” Sharp said, surveying the fields of snow, “this was a thriving agricultural center. They grew grapefruit here. Arizona grapefruit. The Roosevelt Dam was along this way.”

  “Yes,” the expert said, nodding. “We located the remnants of it.”

  “Cotton was grown here. So was lettuce, alfalfa, grapes, olives, apricots—the thing I remember most, the time I came through Phoenix with my family, was the eucalyptus trees.”

  “We won’t have all that back,” the expert said regretfully. “What the heck—eucalyptus? I never heard of that.”