“You mean people lived there?” the twins protested simultaneously. Disbelief and horror showed on their faces. “It’s—awful.”
The road divided. Ed slowed the car down and waited for his wife to direct him. “Is it far?” he demanded hoarsely. “This place gives me the creeps. You can’t tell what’s hanging around in those cellars. We gassed them back in ‘09, but it’s probably worn off by now.”
“To the right,” Barbara said. “Beyond that hill, there.”
Ed shifted into low-low and edged the car past a ditch, onto a side road. “You really think this old woman has the power?” he asked helplessly. “I hear so damn much stuff— I never know what’s true and what’s hogwash. There’s always supposed to be some old hag that can raise the dead and read the future and cure the sick. People’ve been reporting that stuff for five thousand years.”
“And for five thousand years such things have been happening.” His wife’s voice was placid, confident. “They’re always there to help us. All we have to do is go to them. I saw her heal Mary Fulsome’s son; remember, he had that withered leg and couldn’t walk. The medics wanted to destroy him.”
“According to Mary Fulsome,” Ed muttered harshly.
The car nosed its way between dead branches of ancient trees. The ruins fell behind; abruptly the road plunged into a gloomy thicket of vines and shrubs that shut out the sunlight. Ed blinked, then snapped on the dim headlights. They flickered on as the car ground its way up a rutted hill, around a narrow curve … and then the road ceased.
They had reached their destination. Four rusty cars blocked the road; others were parked on the shoulders and among the twisted trees. Beyond the cars stood a group of silent people, men and their families, in the drab uniforms of commune workers. Ed pulled on the brake and fumbled for the ignition key; he was astounded at the variety of communes represented. All the nearby communes, and distant ones he had never encountered. Some of the waiting people had come hundreds of miles.
“There’s always people waiting,” Barbara said. She kicked open the bent door and carefully slid out, the baby in her arms. “People come here for all kinds of help, whenever they’re in need.”
Beyond the crowd was a crude wooden building, shabby and dilapidated, a patched-together shelter of the war years. A gradual line of waiting persons was being conducted up the rickety steps and into the buildings; for the first time Ed caught sight of those whom he had come to consult.
“Is that the old woman?” he demanded, as a thin, withered shape appeared briefly at the top of the steps, glanced over the waiting people, and selected one. She conferred with a plump man, and then a muscular giant joined the discussion.
“My God,” Ed said, “is there an organization of them?”
“Different ones do different things,” Barbara answered. Clutching the baby tight, she edged her way forward into the waiting mass of people. “We want to see the healer— we’ll have to stand with that group over to the right, waiting by that tree.”
Porter sat in the kitchen of the shelter, smoking and drinking coffee, his feet up on the windowsill, vaguely watching the snuffing line of people moving through the front door and into the various rooms.
“A lot of them, today,” he said to Jack. “What we need is a flat cover-charge.”
Jack grunted angrily and shook back his mane of blond hair. “Why aren’t you out helping instead of sitting here guzzling coffee?”
“Nobody wants to peep into the future.” Porter belched noisily; he was plump and flabby, blue-eyed, with thin damp hair. “When somebody wants to know if they’re going to strike it rich or marry a beautiful woman I’ll be there in my booth to advise them.”
“Fortune-telling,” Jack muttered. He stood restlessly by the window, great arms folded, face stern with worry. “That’s what we’re down to.”
“I can’t help that they ask me. One old geezer asked me when he was going to die; when I told him thirty-one days he turned red as a beet and started screaming at me. One thing, I’m honest. I tell them the truth, not what they want to hear.” Porter grinned. “I’m not a quack.”
“How long has it been since somebody asked you something important?”
“You mean something of abstract significance?” Porter lazily searched his mind. “Last week a fellow asked me if there’d ever be interplanetary ships again. I told him not that I could see.”
“Did you also tell him you can’t see worth a damn? A half year at the most?”
Porter’s toad-like face bloomed contentedly. “He didn’t ask me that.”
The thin, withered old woman entered the kitchen briefly. “Lord,” Thelma gasped, sinking down in a chair and pouring herself coffee. “I’m exhausted. And there must be fifty of them out there waiting to get healed.” She examined her shaking hands. “Two bone cancers in one day about finishes me. I think the baby will survive, but the other’s too far gone even for me. The baby will have to come back.” Her voice trailed off wearily. “Back again next week.”
“It’ll be slower tomorrow,” Porter predicted. “Ash storm down from Canada will keep most of them at their communes. Of course, after that—” He broke off and eyed Jack curiously. “What are you upset about? Everybody’s growling around, today.”
“I just came from Butterford,” Jack answered moodily. “I’m going back later and try again.”
Thelma shuddered. Porter looked away uneasily; he disliked hearing about conversations with a man whose bones were piled in the basement of the shelter. An almost superstitious fear drifted through the plump body of the precog. It was one thing to preview the future; seeing ahead was a positive, progressive talent. But returning to the past, to men already dead, to cities now turned to ash and rubble, places erased from the maps, participating in events long since forgotten—it was a sickly, neurotic rehashing of what had already been. Picking and stirring among the bones—literally bones—of the past.
“What did he say?” Thelma asked.
“The same as always,” Jack answered.
“How many times is this?”
Jack’s lips twisted. “Eleven times. And he knows it—I told him.”
Thelma moved from the kitchen, out into the hall. “Back to work.” She lingered at the door. “Eleven times and always the same. I’ve been making computations. How old are you, Jack?”
“How old do I look?”
“About thirty. You were born in 1946. This is 2017. That makes you seventy-one years old. I’d say I’m talking to an entity about a third of the way along. Where’s your current entity?”
“You should be able to figure that. Back in ‘76.”
“Doing what?”
Jack didn’t answer. He knew perfectly well what his entity of this date, 2017, was doing back in the past. The old man of seventy-one years was lying in a medical hospital at one of the military centers, receiving treatment for a gradually worsening nephritis. He shot a quick glance at Porter to see if the precog was going to volunteer information previewed from the future. There was no expression on Porter’s languid features, but that proved nothing. He’d have to get Stephen to probe into Porter if he really wanted to be sure.
Like the common workers who filed in daily to learn if they were going to strike it rich and marry happily, he wanted vitally to know the date of his own death. He had to know—it went beyond mere wanting.
He faced Porter squarely. “Let’s have it. What do you see about me in the next six months?”
Porter yawned. “Am I supposed to orate the whole works? It’ll take hours.”
Jack relaxed, weak with relief. Then he would survive another six months, at least. In that he could bring to a successful completion his discussions with General Ernest Butterford, chief of staff of the armed forces of the United States. He pushed past Thelma and out of the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Back to see Butterford again. I’m going to make one more try.”
“You always s
ay that,” Thelma complained peevishly.
“And I always am,” Jack said. Until I’m dead, he thought bitterly, resentfully. Until the half conscious old man lying in the hospital bed at Baltimore, Maryland, passes away or is destroyed to make room for some wounded private carted by boxcar from the front lines, charged by Soviet napalm, crippled by nerve gas, insane from metallic ash-particles. When the ancient corpse was thrown out—and it wouldn’t be long—there would be no more discussion with General Butterford.
First, he descended the stairs to the supply lockers in the basement of the shelter. Doris lay asleep on her bed in the corner, dark hair like cobwebs over her coffee-colored features, one bare arm raised, a heap of clothing strewn on the chair beside the bed. She awoke sleepily, stirred, and half sat up.
“What time is it?”
Jack glanced at his wristwatch. “One-thirty in the afternoon.” He began opening one of the intricate locks that sealed in their supplies. Presently he slid a metal case down a rail and onto the cement floor. He swung an overhead light around and clicked it on.
The girl watched with interest “What are you doing?” She tossed her covers back and got to her feet, stretched, and padded barefoot over to him. “I could have brought it out for you without all that work.”
From the lead-lined case Jack removed the carefully stacked heap of bones and remnants of personal possessions: wallet, identification papers, photographs, fountain pen, bits of tattered uniform, a gold wedding ring, some silver coins.
“He died under difficulties,” Jack murmured. He examined the data-tape, made sure it was complete, and then slammed shut the case. “I told him I would bring this. Of course, he won’t remember.”
“Each time erases the last?” Doris wandered over to get her clothes. “It’s really the same time again and again, isnt it?”
“The same interval,” Jack admitted, “but there’s no repetition of material.”
Doris eyed him slyly as she struggled into her jeans. “Some repetition … it always comes out the same, no matter what you do. Butterford goes ahead and presents his recommendations to the President.”
Jack didn’t hear her. He had already moved back, taken his series of steps along the time-path. The basement, Doris’ half-dressed figure, wavered and receded, as if seen through the bottom of a glass gradually filled with opaque liquid. Darkness, mixed with shifting textures of density, wavered around him as he walked sternly forward, the metal case gripped. Backward, actually. He was retreating along the direction in which the flow itself moved. Changing places with an earlier John Tremaine, the pimple-faced boy of sixteen who had trudged dutifully to high school, in the year 1962 A. D. in the city of Chicago, Illinois. This was a switch he had made many times. His younger entity should be resigned, by now … but he hoped idly that Doris would be finished dressing when the boy emerged.
The darkness that was no-time dwindled, and he blinked in a sudden torrent of yellow sunlight. Still gripping his metal case he made the final step backward and found himself in the center of a vast murmuring room. People drifted on all sides; several gaped at him, paralyzed with astonishment. For a moment he couldn’t place the spatial location—and then memory came, a swift bitter flood of nostalgia.
He was back in the high school library where he had spent much time. The familiar place of books and bright-faced youths, gaily-dressed girls giggling and studying and flirting … young people totally oblivious of the approaching war. The mass death that would leave nothing of this city but dead, drifting ash.
He hurried from the library, conscious of the circle of bewilderment he had left behind. It was awkward to make a switch in which the passive entity was near other people; the abrupt transformation of a sixteen-year-old high school boy into the stern, towering figure of a thirty-year-old man was difficult to assimilate, even in a society theoretically aware of Psionic powers.
Theoretically—because at this date public consciousness was minimal. Awe and disbelief were the primary emotions; the surge of hopefulness hadn’t begun. Psi-powers seemed miraculous only; the realization that these powers were at the disposal of the public wouldn’t set in for a number of years.
He emerged on the busy Chicago street and hailed a taxi. The roar of buses, autos, the metallic swirl of buildings and people and signs, dazed him. Activity on all sides: the ordinary harmless routines of the common citizen, remote from the lethal planning at top levels. The people on all sides of him were about to be traded for the chimera of international prestige … human life for metaphysical phantoms. He gave the cabdriver the address of Butterford’s hotel suite and settled back to prepare himself for the familiar encounter.
The first steps were routine. He gave his identification to the battery of armed guards, was checked, searched, and processed into the suite. For fifteen minutes he sat in a luxurious anteroom smoking and restlessly waiting-as always. There were no alterations he could make here: the changes, if they were to materialize, came later.
“Do you know who I am?” he began bluntly, when the tiny, suspicious head of General Butterford was stuck from an inner office. He advanced grimly, case gripped. “This is the twelfth visit; there had better be results this time.”
Butterford’s deep-set little eyes danced hostilely behind his thick glasses. “You’re one of those supermen,” he squeaked. “Those Psionics.” He blocked the door with his wizened, uniformed body. “Well? What do you want? My time’s valuable.”
Jack seated himself facing the general’s desk and corps of aides. “You have the analysis of my talent and history in your hands. You know what I can do.”
Butterford glanced hostilely at the report. “You move into time. So?” His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, twelfth time?” He grabbed up a heap of memoranda. “I’ve never seen you before. State what you have to say and then get out; I’m busy.”
“I have a present for you,” Jack said grimly. He carried the metal case to the desk, unsnapped it, and exposed the contents. “They belong to you—go ahead, take them out and run your hands over them.”
Butterford gazed with revulsion at the bones. “What is this, some sort of anti-war exhibit? Are you Psis mixed up with those Jehovah’s Witnesses?” His voice rose shrilly, resentfully. “Is this something you expect to pressure me with?”
“These are your goddamn bones!” Jack shouted in the man’s face. He overturned the case; the contents spilled out on the desk and floor. “Touch them! You’re going to die in this war, like everybody else. You’re going to suffer and die hideously—they’re going to get you with bacterial poisons one year and six days from this date. You’ll live long enough to see the total destruction of organized society and then you’ll go the way of everybody else!”
It would have been easier if Butterford were a coward. He sat gazing down at the tattered remains, the coins and pictures and rusting possessions, his face white, body stiff as metal. “I don’t know whether to believe you,” he said finally. “I never really believed any of this Psi-stuff.”
“That’s totally untrue,” Jack answered hotly. “There isn’t a government on the planet ignorant of us. You and the Soviet Union have been trying to organize us since ‘58, when we made ourselves known.”
The discussion was on ground that Butterford understood. His eyes blazed furiously. “That’s the whole point! If you Psis cooperated there wouldn’t be those bones.” He jabbed wildly at the pale heap on the desk. “You come here and blame me for the war. Blame yourselves—you won’t put your shoulders to the wheel. How can we hope to come out of this war unless everybody does his part?” He leaned meaningfully toward Jack. “You came from the future, you say. Tell me what you Psis are going to do in the war. Tell me the part you’re going to play.”
“No part.”
Butterford settled back triumphantly. “You’re going to stand idly by?”
“Absolutely.”
“And you came here to blame me?”
“If we help,” Jack said carefully
, “we help at policy level, not as hired servants. Otherwise, we will stand on the sidelines, waiting. We’re available, but if winning the war depends on us, we want to say how that war will be won. Or whether there’ll be a war at all.” He slammed the metal case shut. “Otherwise, we might become apprehensive, as the scientists did in the middle fifties. We might begin to lose our enthusiasm … and also become bad security risks.”
In Jack’s mind a voice spoke, thin and bitter. A telepathic member of the Guild, a Psi of the present, monitoring the discussion from the New York office. “Very well-spoken. But you’ve lost. You lack the ability to maneuver him … all you’ve done is defend our position. You haven’t even brought up the possibility of changing his.”
It was true. Desperately, Jack said: “I didn’t come back here to state the Guild’s position—you know our position! I came to lay the facts out in front of you. I came here from 2017. The war is over. Only a remnant survives. These are the facts, events that have taken place. You’re going to recommend to the President that the United States call Russia’s bluff on Java.” His words came out individually, icily. “It’s not a bluff. It means total war. Your recommendation is in error.”
Butterford bristled. “You want us to back down? Let them take over the free world?”
Twelve times: impasse. He had accomplished nothing. “You’d go into the war knowing you can’t win?”
“We’ll fight,” Butterford said. “Better an honorable war than a dishonorable peace.”
“No war is honorable. War means death, barbarism, and mass destruction.”
“What does peace mean?”
“Peace means the growth of the Guild. In fifty years our presence will shift the ideology of both blocs. We’re above the war; we straddle both worlds. There’re Psis here and in Russia; we’re part of no country. The scientists could have been that, once. But they chose to cooperate with national governments. Now it’s up to us.”
The Book of Philip K Dick (1973) Page 11
