Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online

move mountains to those who can only—”
    Joan broke in, “I have a very meager power, but look.” Turning, she raised the lapel of her shirt. “See my button? Bona fide member of Psi-men, Incorporated, of America.” She explained, “What I can do is, I can make time flow backward. In a limited area, say twelve by nine, about the size of your living room. Up to a period of five minutes.” She smiled, and once again he marveled at her teeth; they transformed her face, made it beautiful; as long as she smiled she was delightful to behold, and it seemed to Chuck that this told something about her. The quality of beauty arose from within; inside, she was lovely, and he realized that over the years, as she aged, it would gradually work its way outward, influence the surface. By the time she was thirty or thirty-five she would be radiant. Right now she was still a child.
    “Is that a useful talent?” he asked.
    “It has a limited use.” Perching on the arm of his archaic Danish-style sofa she stuck her fingers in thepockets of her tight pants and explained, “I work for the Ross Police Department; they rush me to bad traffic accidents and—you’ll laugh, but it really works—I turn time back to before the accident, or if I’m too late, if more than five minutes has gone by, sometimes instead I can bring back a person who’s just died. See?”
    “I see,” he said.
    “It doesn’t pay much. And worse than that, I have to be on call twenty-four hours of the day. They notify me at my conapt and I go by high-speed jet hopper to the spot. See?” She turned her head, pointed to her right ear; he saw a small stubby cylinder embedded in her ear and realized that it was a police receiver. “I’m always tuned in. That means I can’t be more than a few seconds run from transportation, of course; I can go to restaurants and theaters and other people’s houses, but—”
    “Well,” he said, “maybe you can save my life sometime.” He thought, If I had jumped you could have forced me back into existence again. What a great service.…
    “I’ve saved many lives.” Joan held out her hand. “May I have a cigarette, too?”
    He gave her one, lit it, feeling—as usual—guilty of his lapse.
    “What do
you
do?” Joan asked.
    With reluctance—not because it was classified but because it held so low a status in the ladder of public esteem—he described his job with the CIA. Joan Trieste listened intently.
    “Then you help keep our government from falling,” she said, with a smile of delight. “How wonderful!”
    Charmed, he said, “Thanks.”
    “But you do! Just think—right this moment hundreds of simulacra all over the Communist world are sayingyour words, halting people at street corners and in jungles…” Her eyes shone. “And all I do is help the Ross Police Department.”
    “There’s a law,” Chuck said, “which I call Rittersdorf’s Third Law of Diminished Returns, which states that proportional to how long you hold a job you imagine that it has progressively less and less importance in the scheme of things.” He smiled back at her; the glow in her eyes, the sparkle of white teeth, made smiling easy. He was beginning to forget his burdening, despairing mood of a short while ago.
    Joan roamed about the conapt. “Are you going to move a lot of personal things in? Or are you going to live just like this? I’ll help decorate it for you, and Lord Running Clam will, too, to the extent he can. And down the hall there’s a molten metal life form from Jupiter called Edgar; he’s hibernating these days, but when he comes back to life he’ll want to pitch in. And in the apt to your left there’s a wiz-bird from Mars; you know, with the multicolored headdress… it has no hands but it can move objects by psychokinesis; it’ll want to help, except that for today it’s hatching; it’s on an egg.”
    “God,” Chuck said. “What a polygenetic building.” He was a little stunned to hear all