The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online

parked near the entrance of the hovel for days now. No one had the energy to come up to the surface and resume the clearing operations inaugurated earlier in the month. “It seems wrong, though,” he muttered. “We ought to be up here working in our gardens.”
    “And that’s some garden you’ve got,” Sam Regan said, with a grin. “What is that stuff you’ve got growing there? Got a name for it?”
    Norm Schein, hands in the pockets of his coveralls, walked over the sandy, loose soil with its sparse vegetation to his once carefully maintained vegetable garden; he paused to look up and down the rows, hopeful that more of the specially prepared seeds had sprouted. None had.
    “Swiss chard,” Tod said encouragingly. “Right? Mutated as it is, I can still recognize the leaves.”
    Breaking off a leaf Norm chewed it, then spat it out; the leaf was bitter and coated with sand.
    Now Helen Morris emerged from the hovel, shivering in the cold Martian sunlight. “We have a question,” she said to the three men. “I say that psychoanalysts back on Earth were charging fifty dollars an hour and Fran says it was for only forty-five minutes.” She explained, “We want to add an analyst to our layout and we want to get it right, because it’s an authentic item, made on Earth and shipped here, if you remember that Bulero ship that came by last week—”
    “We remember,” Norm Schein said sourly. The prices that the Bulero salesman had wanted. And all the time in their satellite Allen and Charlotte Faine talked up the different items so, whetting everyone’s appetite.
    “Ask the Faines,” Helen’s husband Tod said. “Radio them the next time the satellite passes over.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “In another hour. They have all the data on authentic items; in fact that particular datum should have been included with the item itself, right in the carton.” It perturbed him because it had of course been his skins—his and Helen’s together—that had gone to pay for the tiny figure of the human-type psychoanalyst, including the couch, desk, carpet, and bookcase of incredibly well-minned impressive books.
    “You went to the analyst when you were still on Earth,” Helen said to Norm Schein. “What was the charge?”
    “Well, I mostly went to group therapy,” Norm said. “At the Berkeley State Mental Hygiene Clinic, and they charged according to your ability to pay. And of course Perky Pat and her boyfriend go to a private analyst.” He walked down the length of the garden solemnly deeded to him, between the rows of jagged leaves, all of which were to some extent shredded and devoured by microscopic native pests. If he could find one healthy plant, one untouched—it would be enough to restore his spirits. Insecticides from Earth simply had not done the job, here; the native pests thrived. They had been waiting ten thousand years, biding their time, for someone to appear and make an attempt to raise crops.
    Tod said, “You better do some watering.”
    “Yeah,” Norm Schein agreed. He meandered gloomily in the direction of Chicken Pox Prospects’ hydro-pumping system; it was attached to their now partially sand-filled irrigation network which served all the gardens of their hovel. Before watering came sand-removal, he realized. If they didn’t get the big Class-A dredge started up soon they wouldn’t be able to water even if they wanted to. But he did not particularly want to.
    And yet he could not, like Sam Regan, simply turn his back on the scene up there, return below to fiddle with his layout, build or insert new items, make improvements…or, as Sam proposed, actually get out a quantity of the carefully hidden Can-D and begin the communication. We have responsibilities, he realized.
    To Helen he said, “Ask my wife to come up here.” She could direct him as he operated the dredge; Fran had a good eye.
    “I’ll get her,” Sam Regan agreed, starting back down below. “No one wants to come