The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page A

from his father’s Psionic faculty; maybe Kongrosian blames himself, not the fallout. Ask him when you get there.”
    “Ask him!” Nat echoed, appalled.
    “Certainly. Why not?”
    “It’s a hell of an idea,” Nat said. And, as frequently in the past in his relations with Molly, it seemed to him that she was an exceptionally harsh and aggressive, almost masculine woman; there was a bluntness in her which did not much appeal to him. And on top of that Molly was far too intellectually oriented; she lacked her father’s personal, emotional touch.
    “Why did you want to come on this trip?” he asked her. Certainly not to hear Kongrosian play; that was obvious. Perhaps it had to do with the son, the special child; Molly would be attracted to that. He felt revulsion, but he did not show it; he managed to smile back at her.
    “I enjoy Kongrosian,” Molly said placidly. “It would be very gratifying to meet him personally and listen to him play.”
    Nat said, “But I’ve heard you say there’s no market right now for Psionic versions of Brahms and Schumann.”
    “Aren’t you able, Nat, to separate your
personal
life from company business? My own individual tastes run to Kongrosian’s style, but that doesn’t mean I think he’ll sell. You know, Nat, we’ve done rather well with all subtypes of folk music for the last few years. I’d tend to say that performers like Kongrosian, however popular they may be at the White House, are anachronisms and we must be highly alert that we don’t step backward into economic ruin with them.” She smiled at him, looking lazily for his reaction. “I’ll tell you another reason I wanted to come. You and I can spend a good deal of time together, tormenting each other. Just you and me, on a trip. . . . we can stay at a motel in Jenner. Did you think of that?”
    Nat took a deep, unsteady breath.
    Her smile increased. It was as if she were actually laughing at him, he thought. Molly could handle him, make him do what she wanted; they both knew that and it amused her.
    “Do you want to marry me?” Molly asked him. “Are your intentions honorable in the old, twentieth century sense?”
    Nat said, “Are yours?”
    She shrugged. “Maybe I like monsters. I like
you,
Nat, you and your worm-like F-a2 recording machine that you nourish and pamper, like a wife or a pet or both.”
    “I’d do the same for you,” Nat said. All at once he felt Jim Planck watching him and he concentrated on watching the earth below them. It obviously embarrassed Jim, this exchange. Planck was an engineer, a man who worked with his body—a mere
Be,
as Molly had called him, but a good man. Talk of this sort was tough on Jim.
    And, Nat thought, on me. The only one of us who really enjoys it is Molly. And she really does, it’s not an affectation.
    It was a sobering thought.
    The autobahn fatigued Chic Strikerock, with its centrally-controlled cars and wheels spinning up invisible runnels in massed procession. In his own individual car he felt as if he were participating in a black-magic ritual—as if he, and the other commuters, had put their lives into the hands of a force better left undiscussed. Actually it was a simple homeostatic beam which justified its position by making ceaseless references to all other vehicles and the guide-walls of the road itself, but he was not amused. He sat in his car reading the morning
New York
Times.
He kept his attention on the newspaper instead of the grinding, never-stopping environment which surrounded him, meditating on an article dealing with a further discovery of unicellular fossils on Ganymede.
    Old-time civilization, Chic said to himself. The next layer down, just on the verge of being uncovered by the auto-shovels operating in the airless, near-weightless void of mid-space, of the big-planet moons.
    We’re being robbed, he decided. The next layer down will be comic books, contraceptives, empty Coke bottles. But they—the authorities—won’t tell us. Who