Vintage PKD by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online

can get a dollar for that!” Fred exclaimed, leaping up and down. “The hide alone—I bet we can get fifty cents just for the darn hide!”
    Together, they hurried toward the dead rabbit, wanting to get there before a red-tailed hawk or a day-owl swooped on it from the gray sky above.
    Bending, Norman Schein picked up his Perky Pat doll and said sullenly, “I’m quitting; I don’t want to play anymore.”
    Distressed, his wife protested, “But we’ve got Perky Pat all the way downtown in her new Ford hardtop convertible and parked and a dime in the meter and she’s shopped and now she’s in the analyst’s office reading
Fortune
—we’re way ahead of the Morrisons! Why do you want to quit, Norm?”
    “We just don’t agree,” Norman grumbled. “You say analysts charged twenty dollars an hour and I distinctly remember them charging only ten; nobody could charge twenty. So you’re penalizing our side, and for what? The Morrisons agree it was only ten. Don’t you?” he said to Mr. and Mrs. Morrison, who squatted on the far side of the layout which combined both couples’ Perky Pat sets.
    Helen Morrison said to her husband, “You went to the analyst more than I did; are you sure he charged only ten?”
    “Well, I went mostly to group therapy,” Tod said. “At the Berkeley State Mental Hygiene Clinic, and they charged according to your ability to pay. And Perky Pat is at a
private
psychoanalyst.”
    “We’ll have to ask someone else,” Helen said to Norman Schein. “I guess all we can do now this minute is suspend the game.” He found himself being glared at by her, too, now, because by his insistence on the one point he had put an end to their game for the whole afternoon.
    “Shall we leave it all set up?” Fran Schein said. “We might as well; maybe we can finish tonight after dinner.”
    Norman Schein gazed down at their combined layout, the swanky shops, the well-lit streets with the parked new-model cars, all of them shiny, the split-level house itself, where Perky Pat lived and where she entertained Leonard, her boyfriend. It was the
house
that he perpetually yearned for; the house was the real focus of the layout—of all the Perky Pat layouts, however much they might otherwise differ.
    Perky Pat’s wardrobe, for instance, there in the closet of the house, the big bedroom closet. Her capri pants, her white cotton short-shorts, her two-piece polka-dot swimsuit, her fuzzy sweaters . . . and there, in her bedroom, her hi-fi set, her collection of long-playing records . . .
    It had been this way, once, really been like this in the ol-days. Norm Schein could remember his own l-p record collection, and he had once had clothes almost as swanky as Perky Pat’s boyfriend Leonard, cashmere jackets and tweed suits and Italian sportshirts and shoes made in England. He hadn’t owned a Jaguar XKE sports car, like Leonard did, but he had owned a fine-looking old 1963 Mercedes-Benz, which he had used to drive to work.
    We lived then
, Norm Schein said to himself,
like Perky Pat and
Leonard do now
. This is how it actually was.
    To his wife he said, pointing to the clock radio which Perky Pat kept beside her bed, “Remember our G.E. clock radio? How it used to wake us up in the morning with classical music from that FM station, KSFR? The ‘Wolf-gangers,’ the program was called. From six A.M. to nine every morning.”
    “Yes,” Fran said, nodding soberly. “And you used to get up before me; I knew I should have gotten up and fixed bacon and hot coffee for you, but it was so much fun just indulging myself, not stirring for half an hour longer, until the kids woke up.”
    “Woke up, hell; they were awake before we were,” Norm said. “Don’t you remember? They were in the back watching ‘The Three Stooges’ on TV until eight. Then I got up and fixed hot cereal for them, and then I went on to my job at Ampex down at Redwood City.”
    “Oh yes,” Fran said. “The TV.” Their Perky Pat did not