Vintage PKD by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page B

disaster area. They are called ‘care parcels’ because they came from people who cared.”
    “I know that,” Fred said. “I didn’t ask that.”
    “Well, I told you anyhow,” Timothy said.
    The two boys continued skinning the rabbit.
    Jean Regan said to her husband, “Have you heard about the Connie Companion doll?” She glanced down the long rough-board table to make sure none of the other families was listening. “Sam,” she said, “I heard it from Helen Morrison; she heard it from Tod and he heard it from Bill Ferner, I think. So it’s probably true.”
    “What’s true?” Sam said.
    “That in the Oakland Fluke-pit they don’t have Perky Pat; they have Connie Companion . . . and it occurred to me that maybe some of this—you know, this sort of emptiness, this boredom we feel now and then—maybe if we saw the Connie Companion doll and how she lives, maybe we could add enough to our own layout to—” She paused, reflecting. “To make it more complete.”
    “I don’t care for the name,” Sam Regan said. “Connie Companion; it sounds cheap.” He spooned up some of the plain, utilitarian grain-mash which the careboys had been dropping, of late. And, as he ate a mouthful, he thought, I’ll bet Connie Companion doesn’t eat slop like this; I’ll bet she eats cheeseburgers with all the trimmings, at a high-type drive-in.
    “Could we make a trek down there?” Jean asked.
    “To Oakland Fluke-pit?” Sam stared at her. “It’s
fifteen miles
, all the way on the other side of the Berkeley Fluke-pit!”
    “But this is important,” Jean said stubbornly. “And Bill says that a fluker from Oakland came all the way up here, in search of electronic parts or something . . . so if he can do it, we can. We’ve got the dust suits they dropped us. I know we could do it.”
    Little Timothy Schein, sitting with his family, had overheard her; now he spoke up. “Mrs. Regan, Fred Chamberlain and I, we could trek down that far, if you pay us. What do you say?” He nudged Fred, who sat beside him. “Couldn’t we? For maybe five dollars.”
    Fred, his face serious, turned to Mrs. Regan and said, “We could get you a Connie Companion doll. For five dollars for
each
of us.”
    “Good grief,” Jean Regan said, outraged. And dropped the subject.
    But later, after dinner, she brought it up again when she and Sam were alone in their quarters.
    “Sam, I’ve got to see it,” she burst out. Sam, in a galvanized tub, was taking his weekly bath, so he had to listen to her. “Now that we know it exists we have to play against someone in the Oakland Fluke-pit; at least we can do that. Can’t we? Please.” She paced back and forth in the small room, her hands clasped tensely. “Connie Companion may have a Standard Station and an airport terminal with jet landing strip and color TV and a French restaurant where they serve escargot, like the one you and I went to when we were first married . . . I just have to see her layout.”
    “I don’t know,” Sam said hesitantly. “There’s something about Connie Companion doll that—makes me uneasy.”
    “What could it possibly be?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Jean said bitterly, “It’s because you know her layout is so much better than ours and she’s so much more than Perky Pat.”
    “Maybe that’s it,” Sam murmured.
    “If you don’t go, if you don’t try to make contact with them down at the Oakland Fluke-pit, someone else will—someone with more ambition will get ahead of you. Like Norman Schein. He’s not afraid the way you are.”
    Sam said nothing; he continued with his bath. But his hands shook.
    A careboy had recently dropped complicated pieces of machinery which were, evidently, a form of mechanical computer. For several weeks the computers—if that was what they were—had sat about the pit in their cartons, unused, but now Norman Schein was finding something to do with one. At the moment he was busy adapting some of its gears, the smallest ones,