Dr. Futurity (1960) by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online

And here, as in his office, Stenog had a harpsichord; on this one stood a stack of sheet music, some of it very old looking.
    After dinner, Stenog rose and said, "Let's take a run down to the Fountain." He nodded to Parsons. "I want you to understand our point of view."
    Together, in Stenog's car, they drove through the night darkness. The air, fresh and cold, blew around Parsons; the younger man kept the windows down, clearly from habit. He seemed withdrawn into himself, and Parsons did not try to talk to him.
    As they were being processed through the check-stations once more, Stenog abruptly burst out, "Do you consider this society morbid?"
    "There are strains of it," Parsons said. "Visible to an outsider. The emphasis on death--"
    "On life, you mean."
    "When I first got here, the first person who saw me tried to run me down and kill me. Thinking I wanted to be killed." And Icara, he thought.
    "That person probably saw you roaming around alone at night, on foot, on the public highway."
    "Yes," Parsons said.
    "That's one of the favorite ways for certain types of dashing individuals with a flair for the spectacular. They go out on the highway, outside the city, and it's the custom that the cars that see them run over them. It's time-honored, established. Didn't persons in your society go out at night, onto bridges, and throw themselves off?"
    Parsons said, "But they were a trivial few, a mentally disturbed minority."
    "Yet the custom, even so, was established within society! It was understood. If you decided to kill yourself, that was the proper way." Now, working himself up emotionally, Stenog said, "Actually, you know nothing about this society--you just came here. Look at this."
    They had come out in a huge chamber. Parsons halted, impressed by the maze of corridors that stretched off in all directions. Even at night, work continued; the corridors were active and alight.
    One wall of the chamber looked onto the edge of a cube. Going in that direction, Parsons discovered with a shock that he was seeing only a slice of the cube; virtually all of it lay buried in the ground, and he could only infer dimly what its full size might be.
    The cube was alive.
    The ceaseless undercurrent drummed up from the floor itself; he felt it moving through his body. An illusion, created by the countless technicians hurrying back and forth? Self-regulated freight elevators brought up empty containers, loaded themselves with new material and descended again. Armed guards prowled back and forth, keeping an eye on things; he saw them watching even Stenog. But the sense of life was not an illusion; he felt the emanation from the cube, the churning. A controlled, measured metabolism, but with a peculiar overtone of restlessness. Not a tranquil life, but with the tidal ebb and flow of the sea. Disturbing to him, and also to the other people; he caught, on their faces, the same fatigue and tension that he had seen with Stenog.
    And he felt coldness rising from the cube.
    Odd, he thought. Alive and cold . . . not like our life, not warm . In fact, he could see the breaths of the individuals in the corridors, his own, Stenog's, the white fog blown out by each of them. The pneuma.
    "What is in it?" he asked Stenog.
    Stenog said, "We are."
    At first, he did not understand; he assumed the man meant it metaphorically. Then, by degrees, he began to see.
    "Zygotes," Stenog said. "Arrested and frozen in cold-pack by the hundred billion. Our total seed. Our horde. The race is in there. Those of us now walking around--" He made a motion of dismissal. "A minute fraction of what's contained in there, the future generations to come."
    So, Parsons thought, their minds aren't fixed on the present; it's the future that's real to them. Those to come, in a sense, are more real than those who are walking around now .
    "How is it regulated?" he asked Stenog.
    "We keep a constant population. Roughly, two and three-quarter billion. Each death automatically starts a new