Paycheck (2003)

by Philip K. Dick

  ‘There’s formula,’ Cynthia said, witheringly. ‘Similac and those. I’m going to change so we can go out.’ She turned and strode toward their bedroom.

  ‘You know,’ Ian said after her, ‘if there was any way you could get me classified as a pre-person, you’d send me there. To the Facility with the greatest facility.’ And, he thought, I’ll bet I wouldn’t be the only husband in California who went. There’d be plenty others. In the same bag as me, then as now.

  ‘Sounds like a plan,’ Cynthia’s voice came to him dimly; she had heard.

  ‘It’s not just a hatred for the helpless,’ Ian Best said. ‘More is involved. Hatred of what? Of everything that grows?’ You blight them, he thought, before they grow big enough to have muscle and the tactics and skill for fight - big like I am in relation to you, with my fully developed musculature and weight. So much easier when the other person - I should say pre-person - is floating and dreaming in the amniotic fluid and knows nothing about how to nor the need to hit back.

  Where did the motherly virtues go to? he asked himself. When mothers especially protected what was small and weak and defenseless?

  Our competitive society, he decided. The survival of the strong. Not the fit, he thought; just those who hold the power. And are not going to surrender it to the next generation: it is the powerful and evil old against the helpless and gentle new.

  ‘Dad,’ Walter said, ‘are we really going to Vancouver Island in Canada and raise real food and not have anything to be afraid of any more?’

  Half to himself, Ian said, ‘Soon as I have the money.’

  ‘I know what that means. It’s a “we’ll see” number you say. We aren’t going, are we?’ He watched his father’s face intently. ‘She won’t let us, like taking me out of school and like that; she always brings up that … right?’

  ‘It lies ahead for us someday,’ Ian said doggedlly. ‘Maybe not this month but someday, sometime. I promise.’

  ‘And there’s no abortion trucks there.’

  ‘No. None. Canadian law is different.’

  ‘Make it soon, Dad. Please.’

  His father fixed himself a second Scotch and milk and did not answer; his face was somber and unhappy, almost as if he was about to cry.

  *

  In the rear of the abortion truck three children and one adult huddled, jostled by the turning of the truck. They fell against the restraining wire that separated them, and Tim Gantro’s father felt keen despair at being cut off mechanically from his own boy. A nightmare during day, he thought. Caged like animals; his noble gesture had brought only more suffering to him.

  ‘Why’d you say you don’t know algebra?’ Tim asked, once. ‘I know you know even calculus and trig-something; you went to Stanford University.’

  ‘I want to show,’ he said, ‘that either they ought to kill all of us or none of us. But not divide along these bureaucratic arbitrary lines. “When does the soul enter the body?” What kind of rational question is that in this day and age? It’s Medieval.’ In fact, he thought, it’s a pretext - a pretext to prey on the helpless. And he was not helpless. The abortion truck had picked up a fully grown man, with all his knowledge, all his cunning. How are they going to handle me? he asked himself. Obviously I have what all men have; if they have souls, then so do I. If not, then I don’t, but on what real basis can they “put me to sleep”? I am not weak and small, not an ignorant child cowering defenselessly. I can argue the sophistries with the best of the county layers; with the DA himself, if necessary.

  If they snuff me, he thought, they will have to snuff everyone, including themselves. And that is not what this is all about. This is a con game by which the established, those who already hold all the key economic and political posts, keep the youngsters out of it - murder them if necessary. There is, he thought, in the land, a hatred by the old of the young, a hatred and a fear. So what will they do with me? I am in their age group, and I am caged up in the back of this abortion truck. I pose, he thought, a different kind of threat; I am one of them but on the other side, with stray dogs and cats and babies and infants. Let them figure it out; let a new St Thomas Aquinas arise who can unravel this.

  ‘All I know,’ he said aloud, ‘is dividing and multiplying and subtracting. I’m even hazy on my fractions.’

  ‘But you used to know that!’ Tim said.

  ‘Funny how you forget it after you leave school,’ Ed Gantro said. ‘You kids are probably better at it than I am.’

  ‘Dad, they’re going to snuff you,’ his son Tim said, wildly. ‘Nobody’ll adopt you. Not at your age. You’re too old.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ Ed Gantro said. ‘The binomial theorem. How does that go? I can’t get it all together: something about A and B.’ And as it leaked out of his head, as had his immortal soul … he chuckled to himself. I cannot pass the soul test, he thought. At least not talking like that. I am a dog in the gutter, an animal in a ditch.

  The whole mistake of the pro-abortion people from the start, he said to himself, was the arbitrary line they drew. An embryo is not entitled to American Constitutional rights and can be killed, legally, by a doctor. But a fetus was a ‘person’, with rights, at least for a while; and then the proabortion crowd decided that even a seven-month fetus was not ‘human’ and could be killed, legally, by a licensed doctor. And, one day, a newborn baby - it is a vegetable; it can’t focus its eyes, it understands nothing, nor talks … The pro-abortion lobby argued in court, and won, with their contention that a newborn baby was only a fetus expelled by accident or organic processes from the womb. But, even then, where was the line to be drawn finally? When the baby smiled its first smile? When it spoke its first word or reached for its initial time for a toy it enjoyed? The legal line was relentlessly pushed back and back. And now the most savage and arbitrary definition of all: when it could perform ‘higher math’.

  That made the ancient Greeks, of Plato’s time, nonhumans, since arithmetic was unknown to them, only geometry; and algebra was an Arab invention, much later in history. Arbitrary. It was not a theological arbitrariness either; it was a mere legal one. The Church had long since - from the start, in fact - maintained that even the zygote, and the embryo that followed, was as sacred a life form as any that walked the earth. They had seen what would come of arbitrary definitions of ‘Now the soul enters the body,’ or in modern terms, ‘Now it is a person entitled to the full protection of the law like everyone else.’ What was so sad was the sight now of the small child playing bravely in his yard day by day, trying to hope, trying to pretend a security he did not have.

  Well, he thought, we’ll see what they do with me; I am thirty-five years old, with a Master’s Degree from Stanford. Will they put me in a cage for thirty days, with a plastic food dish and a water source and a place - in plain sight - to relieve myself, and if no one adopts me will they consign me to automatic death along with the others?

  I am risking a lot, he thought. But they picked up my son today, and the risk began then, when they had him, not when I stepped forward and became a victim myself.

  He looked about at the three frightened boys and tried to think of something to tell them - not just his own son but all three.

  ‘ “Look,” ‘ he said, quoting. ‘ “I tell you a sacred secret. We shall not all sleep in death. We shall—” ‘ But then he could not remember the rest. Bummer, he thought dismally. ‘ “We shall wake up,” ‘ he said, doing the best he could. ‘ “In the twinkling of an eye.” ‘

  ‘Cut the noise,’ the driver of the truck, from beyond his wire mesh, growled. ‘I can’t concentrate on this fucking road.’ He added, ‘You know, I can squirt gas back there where you are, and you’ll pass out; it’s for obstreperous pre-persons we pick up. So you want to knock it off, or have me punch the gas button?’

  ‘We won’t say anything,’ Tim said quickly, with a look of mute terrified appeal at his father. Urging him silently to conform.

  His father said nothing. The glance of urgent pleading
was too much for him, and he capitulated. Anyhow, he reasoned, what happened in the truck was not crucial. It was when they reached the County Facility - where there would be, at the first sign of trouble, newspaper and TV reporters. So they rode in silence, each with his own fears, his own schemes. Ed Gantro brooded to himself, perfecting in his head what he would do - what he had to do. And not just for Tim but all the PP abortion candidates; he thought through the ramifications as the truck lurched and rattled on.

  As soon as the truck parked in the restricted lot of the County Facility and its rear doors had been swung open, Sam B. Carpenter, who ran the whole goddamn operation, walked over, stared, said, ‘You’ve got a grown man in there, Ferris. In fact, you comprehend what you’ve got? A protester, that’s what you’ve latched onto.’

  ‘But he insisted he doesn’t know any math higher than adding,’ Ferris said.

  To Ed Gantro, Carpenter said, ‘Hand me your wallet. I want your actual name. Social Security number, police region stability ident - come on, I want to know who you really are.’

  ‘He’s just a rural type,’ Ferris said, as he watched Gantro pass over his lumpy wallet.

  ‘And I want confirm prints offa his feet,’ Carpenter said. ‘The full set. Right away - priority A.’ He liked to talk that way.

  An hour later he had the reports back from the jungle of interlocking security-data computers from the fake-pastoral restricted area in Virginia. ‘This individual graduated from Stanford College with a degree in math. And then got a master’s in psychology, which he has, no doubt about it, been subjecting us to. We’ve got to get him out of here.’

  ‘I did have a soul,’ Gantro said, ‘but I lost it.’

  ‘How?’ Carpenter demanded, seeing nothing about that on Gantro’s official records.

  ‘An embolism. The portion of my cerebral cortex, where my soul was, got destroyed when I accidentally inhaled the vapors of insect spray. That’s why I’ve been living out in the country eating roots and grubs, with my boy here, Tim.’

  ‘We’ll run an EEG on you,’ Carpenter said.

  ‘What’s that?’ Gantro said. ‘One of those brain tests?’

  To Ferris, Capenter said. ‘The law says the soul enters at twelve years. And you bring this individual male adult well over thirty. We could be charged with murder. We’ve got to get rid of him. You drive him back to exactly where you found him and dump him off. If he won’t voluntarily exit from the truck, gas the shit out of him and then throw him out. That’s a national security order. Your job depends on it, also your status with the penal code of this state.’

  ‘I belong here,’ Ed Gantro said. ‘I’m a dummy.’

  ‘And his kid,’ Carpenter said. ‘He’s probably a mathematical mental mutant like you see on TV. They set you up; they’ve probably already alerted the media. Take them all back and gas them and dump them wherever you found them or, barring that, anyhow out of sight.’

  ‘You’re getting hysterical,’ Ferris said, with anger. ‘Run the EEG and the brain scan on Gantro, and probably we’ll have to release him, but these three juveniles—’

  ‘All genuises,’ Carpenter said. ‘All part of the setup, only you’re too stupid to know. Kick them out of the truck and off our premises, and deny - you get this? - deny you ever picked any of the four of them up. Stick to that story.’

  ‘Out of the vehicle,’ Ferris ordered, pressing the button that lifted the wire mesh gates.

  The three boys scrambled out. But Ed Gantro remained.

  ‘He’s not going to exit voluntarily,’ Carpenter said. ‘Okay, Gantro, we’ll physically expel you.’ He nodded to Ferris, and the two of them entered the back of the truck. A moment later they had deposited Ed Gantro on the pavement of the parking lot.

  ‘Now you’re just a plain citizen,’ Carpenter said, with relief. ‘You can claim all you want, but you have no proof.’

  ‘Dad,’ Tim said, ‘how are we going to get home?’ All three boys clustered around Ed Gantro.

  ‘You could call somebody from up there,’ the Fleischhacker boy said. ‘I bet if Walter Best’s dad has enough gas he’d come and get us. He takes a lot of long drives; he has a special coupon.’

  ‘Him and his wife, Mrs Best, quarrel a lot,’ Tim said. ‘So he likes to go driving at night alone; I mean, without her.’

  Ed Gantro said, ‘I’m staying here. I want to be locked up in a cage.’

  ‘But we can go,’ Tim protested. Urgently, he plucked at his dad’s sleeve. ‘That’s the whole point, isn’t it? They let us go when they saw you. We did it!’

  Ed Gantro said to Carpenter, ‘I insist on being locked up with the other pre-persons you have in there.’ He pointed at the gaily imposing, esthetic solid-green-painted Facility building.

  To Mr Sam B. Carpenter, Tim said, ‘Call Mr Best, out where we were, on the peninsula. It’s a 669 prefix number. Tell him to come and get us, and he will. I promise. Please.’

  The Fleischhacker boy added, ‘There’s only one Mr Best listed in the phone book with a 669 number. Please, mister.’

  Carpenter went indoors, to one of the Facility’s many official phones, looked up the number. Ian Best. He punched the number.

  ‘You have reached a semiworking, semiloafing number,’ a man’s voice, obviously that of someone half-drunk, responded. In the background Carpenter could hear the cutting tones of a furious woman, excoriating Ian Best.

  ‘Mr Best,’ Carpenter said, ‘several persons whom you know are stranded down at Fourth and A Streets in Verde Gabriel, an Ed Gantro and his son, Tim, a boy identified as Ronald or Donald Fleischhacker, and another unidentified minor boy. The Gantro boy suggested you would not object to driving down here to pick them up and take them home.’

  ‘Fourth and A Streets,’ Ian Best said. A pause. ‘Is that the pound?’

  ‘The County Facility,’ Carpenter said.

  ‘You son of a bitch,’ Best said. ‘Sure I’ll come get them; expect me in twenty minutes. You have Ed Gantro there as a pre-person? Do you know he graduated from Stanford University?’

  ‘We are aware of this,’ Carpenter said stonily. ‘But they are not being detained; they are merely - here. Not - I repeat not - in custody.’

  Ian Best, the drunken slur gone from his voice, said, ‘There’ll be reporters from all the media there before I get there.’ Click. He had hung up.

  Walking back outside, Carpenter said to the boy Tim, ‘Well, it seems you mickey-moused me into notifying a rabid anti-abortionist activist of your presence here. How neat, how really neat.’

  A few moments passed, and then a bright-red Mazda sped up to the entrance of the Facility. A tall man with a light beard got out, unwound camera and audio gear, walked leisurely over to Carpenter. ‘I understand you may have a Stanford MA in math here at the Facility,’ he said in a neutral, casual voice. ‘Could I interview him for a possible story?’

  Carpenter said, ‘We have booked no such person. You can inspect our records.’ But the reporter was already gazing at the three boys clustered around Ed Gantro.

  In a loud voice the reporter called, ‘Mr Gantro?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ed Gantro replied.

  Christ, Carpenter thought. We did lock him in one of our official vehicles and transport him here; it’ll hit all the papers. Already a blue van with the markings of a TV station had rolled onto the lot. And, behind it, two more cars.

  ABORTION FACILITY

  SNUFFS STANFORD GRAD

  That was how it read in Carpenter’s mind. Or

  COUNTY ABORTION FACILITY

  FOILED IN ILLEGAL ATTEMPT TO …

  And so forth. A spot on the 6:00 evening TV news. Gantro, and when he showed up, Ian Best who was probably an attorney, surrounded by tape recorders and mikes and video cameras.

  We have mortally fucked up, he thought. Mortally fucked up. They at Sacramento will cut our appropriation; we’ll be reduced to hunting down stray dogs and cats again, like before. Bummer.

  When Ian Best arrived in hi
s coal-burning Mercedes-Benz, he was still a little stoned. To Ed Gantro he said, ‘You mind if we take a scenic roundabout route back?’

  ‘By way of what?’ Ed Gantro said. He wearily wanted to leave now. The little flow of media people had interviewed him and gone. He had made his point, and now he felt drained, and he wanted to go home.

  Ian Best said, ‘By way of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.’

  With a smile, Ed Gantro said, ‘These kids should go right to bed. My kid and the other two. Hell, they haven’t even had any dinner.’

  ‘We’ll stop at a McDonald’s stand,’ Ian Best said. ‘And then we can take off for Canada, where the fish are, and lots of mountains that still have snow on them, even this time of year.’

  ‘Sure,’ Gantro said, grinning. ‘We can go there.’

  ‘You want to?’ Ian Best scrutinized him. ‘You really want to?’

  ‘I’ll settle a few things, and then, sure, you and I can take off together.’

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ Best breathed. ‘You mean it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do. Of course, I have to get my wife’s agreement. You can’t go to Canada unless your wife signs a document in writing where she won’t follow you. You become what’s called a “landed Immigrant”.’

  ‘Then I’ve got to get Cynthia’s written permission.’

  ‘She’ll give it to you. Just agree to send support money.’

  ‘You think she will? She’ll let me go?’

  ‘Of course,’ Gantro said.

  ‘You actually think our wives will let us go,’ Ian Best said as he and Gantro herded the children into the Mercedes-Benz. ‘I’ll bet you’re right; Cynthia’d love to get rid of me. You know what she calls me, right in front of Walter? “An aggressive coward”, and stuff like that. She has no respect for me.’