Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page A

eat a dead rat? he asked himself. It must be a terrible world, the next reincarnation, to live like that. Not even to cook it but just to snatch it up and gobble it down. Maybe, he thought, even fur and all; fur and tail, everything. He shuddered.
    How can I watch history being made? he wondered angrily. When I have to think about things like dead rats—I want to fully meditate on this great spectacle unfolding before my very eyes, and instead—I have to have garbage like that put into my mind by that sadistic, that radiation-drug freak that Fergesson had to go and hire. Sheoot!
    He thought of Hoppy, then, no longer bound to his cart, no longer an armless, legless cripple, but somehow floating. Somehow master of them all, of—as Hoppy had said—the world. And that thought was even worse than the one about the rat.
    I’ll bet there’s plenty he saw, Stuart said to himself, that he isn’t going to say, that he’s deliberately keeping back. He just tells us enough to make us squirm and then he shuts up. If he can go into a trance and see the next reincarnation then he can see everything because what else is there? But I don’t believe in that Eastern stuff anyhow, he said to himself. I mean, that isn’t Christian.
    But he believed what Hoppy had said; he believed because he had seen with his own eyes. There really was a trance. That much was true.
    Hoppy had seen something . And it was a dreadful something; there was no doubt of that.
    What else does he see? Stuart wondered. I wish I could make the little bastard say. What else has that warped, wicked mind perceived about me and about the rest of us, all of us?
    I wish, he thought, I could look, too. Because it seemed to Stuart very important, and he ceased looking at the TV screen. He forgot about Walter and Lydia Dangerfield and history in the making; he thought only about Hoppy and the incident at the café. He wished he could stop thinking about it but he could not.
    He thought on and on.

IV
    The far-off popping noise made Mr. Austurias turn his head to see what was coming along the road. Standing on the hillside at the edge of the grove of live oaks, he shielded his eyes and saw on the road below the small phocomobile of Hoppy Harrington; in the center of his cart the phocomelus guided himself along, picking a way past the potholes. But the popping noise had not been made by the phocomobile, which ran from an electric battery.
    A truck, Mr. Austurias realized. One of Orio Stroud’s converted old wood-burners; he saw it now, and it moved at great speed, bearing down on Hoppy’s phocomobile. The phocomelus did not seem to hear the big vehicle behind him.
    The road belonged to Orio Stroud; he had purchased it from the county the year before, and it was up to him to maintain it and also to allow traffic to move along it other than his own trucks, He was not permitted to charge a toll. And yet, despite the agreement, the pod-burning truck clearly meant to sweep the phocomobile from its path; it headed straight without slowing.
    God, Mr. Austurias thought. He involuntarily raised his hand, as if warding off the truck. Now it was almost upon the cart, and still Hoppy paid no heed.
    “Hoppy!” Mr. Austurias yelled, and his voice echoed in the afternoon quiet of the woods, his voice and the poppopping of the truck’s engine.
    The phocomelus glanced up, did not see him, continued on with the truck now so close that—Mr. Austurias shut his eyes. When he opened them again he saw the phocomobile off onto the shoulder of the road; the truck roared on, and Hoppy was safe: he had gotten out of the way at the last moment.
    Grinning after the truck, Hoppy waved an extensor. It had not bothered him, not frightened him in the least, although he must have known that the truck intended to grind him flat. Hoppy turned, waved at Mr. Austurias, who he could not see but who he knew to be there.
    His hands trembled, the hands of the grade school teacher; he bent, picked up his empty