The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick 4: The Minority Report

by Philip K. Dick

  Rogers stared about him. The walls were covered with murals painted directly on the rough wood. "So I see," he said. "You grind your own colors from clay and berries?"

  "Not quite," Williamson replied. "We have a big pigment industry. Tomorrow I'll show you our kiln where we fire our own things. Some of our best work is with fabrics and screen processes."

  "Interesting. A decentralized society, moving gradually back into primitive tribalism. A society that voluntarily rejects the advanced technocratic and cultural products of the Galaxy, and thus deliberately withdraws from contact with the rest of mankind."

  "From the uniform Relay-controlled society only," Williamson insisted.

  "Do you know why Relay maintains a uniform level for all worlds?" Rogers asked. "I'll tell you. There are two reasons. First, the body of knowledge which men have amassed doesn't permit duplication of experiment. There's no time.

  "When a discovery has been made it's absurd to repeat it on countless planets throughout the universe. Information gained on any of the thousand worlds is flashed to Relay Center and then out again to the whole Galaxy. Relay studies and selects experiences and coordinates them into a rational, functional system with contradictions. Relay orders the total experience of mankind into a coherent structure."

  "And the second reason?"

  "If uniform culture is maintained, controlled from a central source, there won't be war."

  "True," Williamson admitted.

  "We've abolished war. It's as simple as that. We have a homogeneous culture like that of ancient Rome—a common culture for all mankind which we maintain throughout the Galaxy. Each planet is as involved in it as any other. There are no backwaters of culture to breed envy and hatred."

  "Such as this."

  Rogers let out his breath slowly. "Yes—you've confronted us with a strange situation. We've searched for Williamson's World for three centuries. We've wanted it, dreamed of finding it. It has seemed like Prester John's Empire—a fabulous world, cut off from the rest of humanity. Maybe not real at all. Frank Williamson might have crashed."

  "But he didn't."

  "He didn't, and Williamson's World is alive with a culture of its own. Deliberately set apart, with its own way of life, its own standards. Now contact has been made, and our dream has come true. The people of the Galaxy will soon be informed that Williamson's World has been found. We can now restore the first colony outside the Solar System to its rightful place in the Galactic culture."

  Rogers reached into his coat, and brought out a metal packet. He unfastened the packet and laid a clean, crisp document on the table.

  "What's this?" Williamson asked.

  "The Articles of Incorporation. For you to sign, so that Williamson's World can become a part of the Galactic culture."

  Williamson and the rest of the people in the room fell silent. They gazed down at the document, none of them speaking.

  "Well?" Rogers said. He was tense. He pushed the document toward Williamson. "Here it is."

  Williamson shook his head. "Sorry." He pushed the document firmly back toward Rogers. "We've already taken a plebiscite. I hate to disappoint you, but we've already decided not to join. That's our final decision."

  The Class-One battleship assumed an orbit outside the gravity belt of Williamson's World.

  Commander Ferris contacted the Relay Center. "We're here. What next?"

  "Send down a wiring team. Report back to me as soon as it has made surface contact."

  Ten minutes later Corporal Pete Matson was dropped overboard in a pressurized gravity suit. He drifted slowly toward the blue and green globe beneath, turning and twisting as he neared the surface of the planet.

  Matson landed and bounced a couple of times. He got shakily to his feet. He seemed to be at the edge of a forest. In the shadow of the huge trees he removed his crash helmet. Holding his blast rifle tightly he made his way forward, cautiously advancing among the trees.

  His earphones clicked. "Any sign of activity?"

  "None, Commander," he signaled back.

  "There's what appears to be a village to your right. You may run into someone. Keep moving, and watch out. The rest of the team is dropping, now. Instructions will follow from your Relay web."

  "I'll watch out," Matson promised, cradling his blast rifle. He sighted it experimentally at a distant hill and squeezed the trigger. The hill disintegrated into dust, a rising column of waste particles.

  Matson climbed a long ridge and shielded his eyes to peer around him.

  He could see the village. It was small, like a country town on Terra. It looked interesting. For a moment he hesitated. Then he stepped quickly down from the ridge and headed toward the village, moving rapidly, his supple body alert.

  Above him, from the Class-One battleship, three more of the team were already falling, clutching their guns and tumbling gently toward the surface of the planet…

  Rogers folded up the Incorporation papers and returned them slowly to his coat. "You understand what you're doing?" he asked.

  The room was deathly silent. Williamson nodded. "Of course. We're refusing to join your Relay system."

  Rogers' fingers touched the trace web. The web warmed into life. "I'm sorry to hear that," he said.

  "Does it surprise you?"

  "Not exactly. Relay submitted our scout's report to the computers. There was always the possibility you'd refuse. I was given instructions in case of such an event."

  "What are your instructions?"

  Rogers examined his wristwatch. "To inform you that you have six hours to join us—or be blasted out of the universe." He got abruptly to his feet. "I'm sorry this had to happen. Williamson's World is one of our most precious legends. But nothing must destroy the unity of the Galaxy."

  Williamson had risen. His face was ash white, the color of death. They faced each other defiantly.

  "We'll fight," Williamson said quietly. His fingers knotted together violently, clenching and unclenching.

  "That's unimportant. You've received Relay coordinates on weapons development. You know what our war fleet has."

  The other people sat quietly at their places, staring rigidly down at their empty plates. No one moved.

  "Is it necessary?" Williamson said harshly.

  "Cultural variation must be avoided if the Galaxy is to have peace," Rogers replied firmly.

  "You'd destroy us to avoid war?"

  "We'd destroy anything to avoid war. We can't permit our society to degenerate into bickering provinces, forever quarreling and fighting—like your clans. We're stable because we lack the very concept of variation. Uniformity must be preserved and separation must be discouraged. The idea itself must remain unknown."

  Williamson was thoughtful. "Do you think you can keep the idea unknown? There are so many semantic correlatives, hints, verbal leads. Even if you blast us, it may arise somewhere else."

  "We'll take that chance." Rogers moved toward the door. "I'll return to my ship and wait there. I suggest you take another vote. Maybe knowing how far we're prepared to go will change the results."

  "I doubt it."

  Rogers' web whispered suddenly. "This is North at Relay."

  Rogers fingered the web in acknowledgment.

  "A Class-One Battleship is in your area. A team has already been landed. Keep your ship grounded until it can fall back. I've ordered the team to lay out its fission-mine terminals."

  Rogers said nothing. His fingers tightened around the web convulsively.

  "What's wrong?" Williamson asked.

  "Nothing." Rogers pushed the door open. "I'm in a hurry to return to my ship. Let's go."

  Commander Ferris contacted Rogers as soon as his ship had left Williamson's World.

  "North tells me you've already informed them," Ferris said.

  "That's right. He also contacted your team directly. Had it prepare to attack."

  "So I'm informed. How much time did you offer them?"

  "Six hours."

 
"Do you think they'll give in?"

  "I don't know," Rogers said. "I hope so. But I doubt it."

  Williamson's World turned slowly in the viewscreen with its green and blue forest, rivers and oceans. Terra might have looked that way, once. He could see the Class-One battleship, a great silvery globe moving slowly in its orbit around the planet.

  The legendary world had been found and contacted. Now it would be destroyed. He had tried to prevent it, but without success. He couldn't prevent the inevitable.

  If Williamson's World refused to join the Galactic culture its destruction became a necessity—grim, axiomatic. It was either Williamson's World or the Galaxy. To preserve the greater, the lesser had to be sacrificed.

  He made himself as comfortable as possible by the view-screen, and waited.

  At the end of six hours a line of black dots rose from the planet and headed slowly toward the Class-One battleship. He recognized them for what they were—old-fashioned jet-driven rocket ships. A formation of antiquated war vessels, rising up to give battle.

  The planet had not changed its mind. It was going to fight. It was willing to be destroyed, rather than give up its way of life.

  The black dots grew swiftly larger, became roaring blazing metal disks puffing awkwardly along. A pathetic sight. Rogers felt strangely moved, watching the jet-driven ships divide up for the contact. The Class-One battleship had secured its orbit, and was swinging in a lazy, efficient arc. Its banks of energy tubes were slowly rising, lining up to meet the attack.

  Suddenly the formation of the ancient rocketships dived. They rumbled over the Class-One, firing jerkily. The Class-One's tubes followed their path. They began to reform clumsily, gaining distance for a second try, and another run.

  A tongue of colorless energy flicked out. The attackers vanished.

  Commander Ferris contacted Rogers. "The poor tragic fools." His heavy face was gray. "Attacking us with those things."

  "Any damage?"

  "None whatever." Ferris wiped his forehead shakily. "No damage to me at all."

  "What next?" Rogers asked stonily.

  "I've declined the mine operation and passed it back to Relay. They'll have to do it. The impulse should already be—"

  Below them, the green and blue globe shuddered convulsively. Soundlessly, effortlessly, it flew apart. Fragments rose, bits of debris and the planet dissolved in a cloud of white flame, a blazing mass of incandescent fire. For an instant it remained a miniature sun, lighting up the void. Then it faded into ash.

  The screens of Rogers' ship hummed into life, as the debris struck. Particles rained against them, and were instantly disintegrated.

  "Well," Ferris said. "It's over. North will report the original scout mistaken. Williamson's World wasn't found. The legend will remain a legend."

  Rogers continued to watch until the last bits of debris had ceased flying, and only a vague, discolored shadow remained. The screens clicked off automatically. To his right, the Class-One battleship picked up speed and headed toward the Riga System.

  Williamson's World was gone. The Galactic Relay culture had been preserved. The idea, the concept of a separate culture with its own ways, its own customs, had been disposed of in the most effective possible way.

  "Good job," the Relay trace web whispered. North was pleased. "The fission mines were perfectly placed. Nothing remains."

  "No," Rogers agreed. "Nothing remains."

  Corporal Pete Matson pushed the front door open, grinning from ear to ear. "Hi, honey! Surprise!"

  "Pete!" Gloria Matson came running, throwing her arms around her husband. "What are you doing home? Pete—"

  "Special leave. Forty-eight hours." Pete tossed down his suitcase triumphantly. "Hi there, kid."

  His son greeted him shyly. "Hello."

  Pete squatted down and opened his suitcase. "How have things been going? How's school?"

  "He's had another cold," Gloria said. "He's almost over it. But what happened? Why did they—"

  "Military secret." Pete fumbled in his suitcase. "Here." He held something out to his son. "I brought you something. A souvenir."

  He handed his son a handmade wooden drinking cup. The boy took it shyly and turned it around, curious and puzzled. "What's a—a souvenir?"

  Matson struggled to express the difficult concept. "Well, it's something that reminds you of a different place. Something you don't have, where you are. You know." Matson tapped the cup. "That's to drink out of. It's sure not like our plastic cups, is it?"

  "No," the child said.

  "Look at this, Gloria." Pete shook out a great folded cloth from his suitcase, printed with multi-colored designs. "Picked this up cheap. You can make a shirt out of it. What do you say? Ever seen anything like it?"

  "No," Gloria said, awed. "I haven't." She took the cloth and fingered it reverently.

  Pete Matson beamed, as his wife and child stood clutching the souvenirs he had brought them, reminders of his excursion to distant places. Foreign lands.

  "Gee," his son whispered, turning the cup around and around. A strange light glowed in his eyes. Thanks a lot, Dad. For the—souvenir."

  The strange light grew.

  SURVEY TEAM

  HALLOWAY CAME UP through six miles of ash to see how the rocket looked in landing. He emerged from the lead-shielded bore and joined Young, crouching down with a small knot of surface troops.

  The surface of the planet was dark and silent. The air stung his nose. It smelled foul. Halloway shivered uneasily. "Where the hell are we?"

  A soldier pointed into the blackness. "The mountains are over there. See them? The Rockies, and this is Colorado."

  Colorado… The old name awakened vague emotion in Halloway. He fingered his blast rifle. "When will it get here?" he asked. Far off, against the horizon, he could see the Enemy's green and yellow signal flares. And an occasional flash of fission white.

  "Any time now. It's mechanically controlled all the way, piloted by robot. When it comes it really comes."

  An Enemy mine burst a few dozen miles away. For a brief instant the landscape was outlined in jagged lightning. Halloway and the troops dropped to the ground automatically. He caught the dead burned smell of the surface of Earth as it was now, thirty years after the war began.

  It was a lot different from the way he remembered it when he was a kid in California. He could remember the valley country, grape orchards and walnuts and lemons. Smudge pots under the orange trees. Green mountains and sky the color of a woman's eyes. And the fresh smell of the soil…

  That was all gone now. Nothing remained but gray ash pulverized with the white stones of buildings. Once a city had been in this spot. He could see the yawning cavities of cellars, filled now with slag, dried rivers of rust that had once been buildings. Rubble strewn everywhere, aimlessly…

  The mine flare faded out and the blackness settled back. They got cautiously to their feet. "Quite a sight," a soldier murmured.

  "It was a lot different before," Halloway said.

  "Was it? I was born undersurface."

  "In those days we grew our food right in the ground, on the surface. In the soil. Not in underground tanks. We—"

  Halloway broke off. A great rushing sound filled the air suddenly, cutting off his words. An immense shape roared past them in the blackness, struck someplace close, and shook the earth.

  "The rocket!" a soldier shouted. They all began running, Halloway lumbering awkwardly along.

  "Good news, I hope," Young said, close by him.

  "I hope, too," Halloway gasped. "Mars is our last chance. If this doesn't work we're finished. The report on Venus was negative; nothing there but lava and steam."

  Later they examined the rocket from Mars.

  "It'll do," Young murmured.

  "You're sure?" Director Davidson asked tensely. "Once we get there we can't come running back."

  "We're sure." Halloway tossed the spools across the desk to Davidson. "Examine them yourself. The air on Mars w
ill be thin, and dry. The gravity is much weaker than ours. But we'll be able to live there, which is more than you can say for this God-forsaken Earth."

  Davidson picked up the spools. The unblinking recessed lights gleamed down on the metal desk, the metal walls and floor of the office. Hidden machinery wheezed in the walls, maintaining the air and temperature. "I'll have to rely on you experts, of course. If some vital factor is not taken into account—"

  "Naturally, it's a gamble," Young said. "We can't be sure of all factors at this distance." He tapped the spools. "Mechanical samples and photos. Robots creeping around, doing the best they can. We're lucky to have anything to go on."

  "There's no radiation at least," Halloway said. "We can count on that. But Mars will be dry and dusty and cold. It's a long way out. "Weak sun. Deserts and wrinkled hills."

  "Mars is old," Young agreed.

  "It was cooled a long time ago. Look at it this way: We have eight planets, excluding Earth. Pluto to Jupiter is out. No chance of survival there. Mercury is nothing but liquid metal. Venus is still volcano and steam—pre-Cambrian. That's seven of the eight. Mars is the only possibility a priori."

  "In other words," Davidson said slowly, "Mars has to be okay because there's nothing else for us to try."

  "We could stay here. Live on here in the undersurface systems like gophers."

  "We could not last more than another year. You've seen the recent psych graphs."

  They had. The tension index was up. Men weren't made to live in metal tunnels, living on tank-grown food, working and sleeping and dying without seeing the sun.

  It was the children they were really thinking about. Kids that had never been up to the surface. Wan-faced pseudo mutants with eyes like blind fish. A generation born in the subterranean world. The tension index was up because men were seeing their children alter and meld in with a world of tunnels and slimy darkness and dripping luminous rocks.

  "Then it's agreed?" Young said.

  Davidson searched the faces of the two technicians. "Maybe we could reclaim the surface, revive Earth again, renew its soil. It hasn't really gone that far, has it?"