Dangerous Visions Read online

  The clerk at the store seemed to have some vague recollection about not having seen Marshall, but he wasn't too sure. "You haven't been around for a couple of days or so, have you?" he asked Marshall.

  "More like a month," Marshall said.

  "You don't say," the clerk remarked, as he toted up the figures on Marshall's bill.

  "Been away," said Marshall.

  "Seeing your relatives?" the clerk asked.

  "Been to the moon," Marshall said.

  The clerk looked a little bored, and not at all interested, and not at all impressed. In fact, he didn't look as if he believed Marshall to begin with. But he was a polite man, so he commented. "Must be a nice trip," he commented, never thinking any more about it than that.

  Marshall went stomping out of the store and down to have his hair trimmed.

  "Pretty heavy growth, Mr. Kiss," the barber said.

  "Should be," Marshall answered. "There ain't no barbershops on the moon, you know."

  "Expect not," the barber said, and went ahead, busily clicking his shears and making believe he was clipping a hair here and a hair there, but never saying another word about the moon, never even having the common decency to ask what it was like on the moon.

  So Marshall fell asleep till the barber should be finished.

  The mayor came in for his daily shave. He was a young man with a heavy beard, and he glanced casually at Marshall. "Old-timer," he said to the barber.

  The barber nodded as he worked.

  "Looks tuckered out," the mayor said.

  "Should be," the barber told him. "He just got back from the moon." He snickered loud.

  "You don't say," the mayor said.

  "That's what he claims." The barber snickered again. "Just got back from the moon."

  "Well, no wonder he's tired, then." But the way the mayor laughed and the way the barber laughed, Marshall could tell that they were just making fun of him. For Marshall wasn't really sleeping, of course.

  It got Marshall mad, and he sprang up and threw the sheet off of him and stomped on down to the newspaper office.

  "My name is Marshall Kiss," Marshall said to the fresh cub at the desk, "and I've just come back from a trip to the moon!"

  "Thanks for the tip, Pop," the reporter said, smiling a little crookedly. "I'll look into it when I get the time." And, saying that, he planted his big feet plump on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head.

  Tears sprang up in Marshall's eyes. "I been to the moon twice," he shouted. "Once when I was nine years old, and it's been printed in your paper, too, at the time. Why, people came from twelve miles around just to look at me. I went up there in an old balloon and busted an eagle's heart when he tried to get up as high as I was." He looked at the reporter hard, and he could see that the reporter didn't believe him and wasn't going to try. "There's no pity left in the world any more," said Marshall, "and no joy." And with that, he walked out.

  The road home was mostly rocky and uphill, and it seemed to take Marshall a long time to walk a short distance. "Can't figure out how people changed so much," Marshall thought. "Grass is still green, and horses have tails, and hens lay eggs—" He was interrupted by a little boy who came running up from behind, pretending to gallop and hitting himself on the rump as if he were a horse.

  "Hello," the little boy said, "where are you going?"

  "Just up the hill a way, back to my farm," Marshall answered.

  "Where've you been?" the little boy asked.

  "Just to town," Marshall said.

  "Is that all?" the little boy asked, disappointed. "Ain't you never been nowhere else?"

  "I been to the moon," Marshall said, a little timidly.

  The boy's eyes opened and shone brightly.

  "Twice," Marshall added.

  The boy's eyes opened even wide. "How do you like that!" the little boy shouted, excited. "H-h-how do you like that?" He was so excited, he stammered.

  "Matter of fact," Marshall said, "I just come back from the moon."

  The little boy was silent for a second. "Say, mister," he asked finally, "do you mind if I bring my friend to see you?"

  "Not at all. I live right back there, in that house you see." Marshall turned off to get to his house.

  "I'll be right back," the little boy promised and ran away as fast as he could to get his friend.

  It must have been about a half hour later that the little boy and the little girl got to Marshall's house. They knocked on the door, but there wasn't any answer, so they just walked in. "It's all right," the little boy said, "he's very friendly."

  The kitchen was empty, so they looked in the parlor, and that was empty too.

  "Maybe he's gone back to the moon," the little girl whispered, awed.

  "Maybe he has," the little boy admitted, but just the same they looked in the bedroom.

  There was Marshall, lying on the bed, and at first they thought he was sleeping. But after a while, when he didn't move or breathe, the little boy and the little girl knew he was further away than that.

  "Guess you were right," the little boy said.

  He and the little girl just looked and looked with their eyes as wide as wide can be, at the man who had been to the moon twice.

  "I guess this makes three times now," the little girl said.

  And suddenly, without knowing why, they became frightened and ran off, leaving the door opened behind them. They ran silently, hand in hand, frightened, but happy too, as if something very wonderful had happened that they couldn't understand.

  After a while, though it was the first time it had ever happened on that farm, the horse wandered into the house and stuck his head through the bedroom door and looked.

  And then a chicken hopped in and hid under the bed.

  And a long time later, a lot of people came to look at the contented smile on Marshall's face.

  "That's him," the little boy said, pointing. "That's the man who's been to the moon twice."

  And somehow, with Marshall's smile, and the horse standing there swishing his tail, and the sudden cut-cutt of the chicken under the bed—somehow, nobody corrected the little boy.

  That was the day the Mars rocket went on a regular three-a-day schedule. Hardly anybody went to the moon at all, any more. There wasn't enough to see.

  Afterword:

  This particular story came out of a sudden, strongly personal understanding of certain aspects of my father's life—the enormous changes which took place in the history of his time: technological developments beyond dreaming when he was a boy.

  He had told me of sitting and listening to a phonograph which was carried on the back of a man who went from village to village in Poland, where my father was born. For a kopek the man wound the handle, the disc turned, the needle scratched, and if you put your ear close to the horn there was the miracle of a voice, a music, a recitation.

  Now, in 1928 or '29, my father stepped into an airplane which landed in a cornfield in the Catskill Mountains. For five dollars my father flew for five minutes.

  If this was my father's story, it was the story of his generation. Within what seems to me an incredibly short time, the mystery and the miracle were lost. There is small marvel to television, despite the fact that the extraordinary complexity of the sending and reception of a television signal is beyond the understanding and capability of the tens and hundred of millions of television watchers. The television set is successful because the marvel has been eliminated. Because the set is truly an idiot box; not so much in its content as in the manner in which the controls have been simplified, so that the viewing may be had by anyone with the sense to push a button and twist a dial. The dial itself, so devised that one has merely to twist it: not even to a specific number. But, ipso facto, if one wants to see the show on channel 8, all one has to do is keep twisting the dial until that show appears on the screen. Ergo, one has dialed to channel 8.

  And the marvel is gone.

  Because the sweep of modern history seems to me to h
ave a feeling of wonder; because it has a sense of fairy tale and unbelievability to me; because the miracle of the changes wrought from the time of my father's boyhood to my own seemed to me to have been lost, I wrote this story.

  It is simply a reminder that fantasy lies in the day-to-day of our lives as much as it lies in the wonder of the future. And it is a reminder that the best of our civilization goes far beyond the comprehension of the ordinary of our citizens. The wonder is that there is so much civilization when so few are civilized.

  In another mood I might have written a sharper story. But this time I thought simply that form should follow content. Hence, a fairy tale; old-fashioned and sentimental, written on an electric typewriter.

  Introduction to

  FAITH OF OUR FATHERS:

  There was no doubt about it. If the book was to approach new concepts and taboo subjects, stories that would be difficult to sell to mass market magazines or more particularly the insulated specialist magazines of the science fiction field, I had to get the writers who were not afraid to walk into the dark. Philip K. Dick has been lighting up his own landscape for years, casting illumination by the klieg lights of his imagination on a terra incognita of staggering dimensions. I asked for Phil Dick and got him. A story to be written about, and under the influence of (if possible), LSD. What follows, like his excellent offbeat novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, is the result of such a hallucinogenic journey.

  Dick has the uncomfortable habit of shaking up one's theories. For instance, mine own about the value of artificial stimuli to encourage the creative process. (It's a cop-out on my part, I suppose, because I am unable to write without music blasting away in the background. Matters not if it's Honegger or the Tijuana Brass or Archie Shepp or the New Vaudeville Band doing "Winchester Cathedral." I must have it.) When I was a tot younger, and was making the rounds of the various jazz clubs in New York, both as critic and reviewer and plain listener, I became tight with many musicians who swore they needed either weed or speed to get into the proper bag. Then, after fixing or getting high, they settled down to blow; what emerged was lunacy. I've known ballerinas who were grassheads because they couldn't get the "in the air" feeling without their nickel bag; psychiatrists who were able to support their own habits with self-signed narcotics prescriptions—habits they had built on the delusion that junk freed their minds for more penetrating analyses; artists who were on acid constantly, whose work under the "mind-expanding" influences were something you'd scour out with Comet if you found it at the bottom of your wading pool. My theory, developed over years of seeing people deluding themselves for the bounce they got, was that the creative process is at its most lively when it merges clean and unfogged from whatever wells exist within the minds of the creators. Philip K. Dick puts the lie to that theory.

  His experiments with LSD and other hallucinogens, plus stimulants of the amphetamine class, have borne such fruit as the story you are about to read, in every way a "dangerous" vision. The question now poses itself: how valid is the totality for the exception of rare successes like the work of Phil Dick? I don't presume to know. All I can venture is that proper administration of mind-expanding drugs might open whole new areas to the creative intellect. Areas that have been, till now, the country of the blind.

  For the record, Philip K. Dick attended the University of California, has kicked around in various jobs which included running a record shop (he is a Bach, Wagner and Buddy Greco buff), advertising copy writing and emceeing a classical music program on station KSMO in San Mateo, California. Among his books are Solar Lottery, Eye in the Sky, Time Out of Joint, The Simulacra, The Penultimate Truth, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year and the 1963 Hugo winner, The Man in the High Castle. Although portly, bearded and married, he is a confirmed girl-watcher.

  He is with us today in his capacity of shaker-upper of theories. And if he doesn't nibble away at your sense of "reality" just a little bit in "Faith of Our Fathers," check your pulse. You may be dead.

  FAITH OF OUR FATHERS

  by Philip K. Dick

  On the streets of Hanoi he found himself facing a legless peddler who rode a little wooden cart and called shrilly to every passer-by. Chien slowed, listened, but did not stop; business at the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts cropped into his mind and deflected his attention: it was as if he were alone, and none of those on bicyles and scooters and jet-powered motorcycles remained. And likewise it was as if the legless peddler did not exist.

  "Comrade," the peddler called however, and pursued him on his cart; a helium battery operated the drive and sent the cart scuttling expertly after Chien. "I possess a wide spectrum of time-tested herbal remedies complete with testimonials from thousands of loyal users; advise me of your malady and I can assist."

  Chien, pausing, said, "Yes, but I have no malady." Except, he thought, for the chronic one of those employed by the Central Committee, that of career opportunism testing constantly the gates of each official position. Including mine.

  "I can cure for example radiation sickness," the peddler chanted, still pursuing him. "Or expand, if necessary, the element of sexual prowess. I can reverse carcinomatous progressions, even the dreaded melanomae, what you would call black cancers." Lifting a tray of bottles, small aluminum cans and assorted powders in plastic jars, the peddler sang, "If a rival persists in trying to usurp your gainful bureaucratic position, I can purvey an ointment which, appearing as a dermal balm, is in actuality a desperately effective toxin. And my prices, comrade, are low. And as a special favor to one so distinguished in bearing as yourself I will accept the postwar inflationary paper dollars reputedly of international exchange but in reality damn near no better than bathroom tissue."

  "Go to hell," Chien said, and signaled a passing hovercar taxi; he was already three and one half minutes late for his first appointment of the day, and his various fat-assed superiors at the Ministry would be making quick mental notations—as would, to an even greater degree, his subordinates.

  The peddler said quietly, "But, comrade; you must buy from me."

  "Why?" Chien demanded. Indignation.

  "Because, comrade, I am a war veteran. I fought in the Colossal Final War of National Liberation with the People's Democratic United Front against the Imperialists; I lost my pedal extremities at the battle of San Francisco." His tone was triumphant, now, and sly. "It is the law. If you refuse to buy wares offered by a veteran you risk a fine and possible jail sentence—and in addition disgrace."

  Wearily, Chien nodded the hovercab on. "Admittedly," he said. "Okay, I must buy from you." He glanced summarily over the meager display of herbal remedies, seeking one at random. "That," he decided, pointing to a paper-wrapped parcel in the rear row.

  The peddler laughed. "That, comrade, is a spermatocide, bought by women who for political reasons cannot qualify for The Pill. It would be of shallow use to you, in fact none at all, since you are a gentleman."

  "The law," Chien said bitingly, "does not require me to purchase anything useful from you; only that I purchase something. I'll take that." He reached into his padded coat for his billfold, huge with the postwar inflationary bills in which, four times a week, he as a government servant was paid.

  "Tell me your problems," the peddler said.

  Chien stared at him. Appalled by the invasion of privacy—and done by someone outside the government.

  "All right, comrade," the peddler said, seeing his expression. "I will not probe; excuse me. But as a doctor—an herbal healer—it is fitting that I know as much as possible." He pondered, his gaunt features somber. "Do you watch television unusually much?" he asked abruptly.

  Taken by surprise, Chien said, "Every evening. Except on Friday when I go to my club to practice the esoteric imported art from the defeated West of steer-roping." It was his only indulgence; other than that he had totally devoted himself to Party activities.

  The peddler reached, selected a gray paper packet. "Sixty trade dollars," he stated.
"With a full guarantee; if it does not do as promised, return the unused portion for a full and cheery refund."

  "And what," Chien said cuttingly, "is it guaranteed to do?"

  "It will rest eyes fatigued by the countenance of meaningless official monologues," the peddler said. "A soothing preparation; take it as soon as you find yourself exposed to the usual dry and lengthy sermons which—"

  Chien paid the money, accepted the packet, and strode off. Balls, he said to himself. It's a racket, he decided, the ordinance setting up war vets as a privileged class. They prey off us—we, the younger ones—like raptors.