The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories (2 page)

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Authors: Philip K. Dick

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BOOK: The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories
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I’d said that in
PHILIP K. DICK: ELECTRIC SHEPHERD
(edited by Bruce Gillespie, Norstrilia Press, 1975), and I still agree with it.
It is good now to see that Phil is finally getting some of the attention he deserved, both critically and at the popular level. My main regret is that it comes so late. He was often broke when I knew him, past the struggling author age but still struggling to make ends meet. I was heartened that for his last year or so he finally enjoyed financial security and even a measure of affluence. The last time I saw him he actually seemed happy and looked a bit relaxed. This was back when
Bladerunner
was being filmed, and we spent dinner and a long evening just talking, joking, reminiscing.
Much has been made of his later mysticism. I can’t speak with firsthand knowledge of everything he might have believed, partly because it seemed to keep changing and partly because it was often difficult to know when he was kidding and when he was serious. My main impression from a number of conversations, though, was that he played at theology the way other people might play at chess problems, that he liked asking the classic science fiction writer’s question—”What if?”—of anything he came across in the way of religious and philosophical notions. It was obviously a dimension of his work, and I’ve often wondered where another ten years would have taken his thinking. Impossible to guess now, really.
I recall that, like James Blish, he was fascinated by the problem of evil, and its juxtaposition with the sometime sweetness of life. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my quoting from the last letter I received from him (dated 10 April 1981):

 

Two items were presented to me for my inspection within a period of fifteen minutes: first, a copy of WIND IN THE WILLOWS, which I had never read… A moment after I looked it over someone showed me a two-page photograph in the current Time of the attempted assassination of the President. There the wounded, there the Secret Service man with the Uzi machine gun, there all of them on the assassin. My brain had to try to correlate WIND IN THE WILLOWS and that photograph. It could not. It never will be able to. I brought the Grahame book home and sat reading it while they tried to get the Columbia to lift off, in vain, as you know. This morning when I woke up I could not think at all; not even weird thoughts, such as assail one upon rising—no thoughts, just a blank. As if my own computers had, in my brain, ceased speaking to one another, like at the Cape. It is hard to believe that the scene of the attempted assassination and WIND IN THE WILLOWS are part of the same universe. Surely one of them is not real. Mr. Toad sculling a little boat down the stream, and the man with the Uzi… It is futile to try to make the universe add up. But I guess we must go on anyhow.

 

I felt at the time I received it that that tension, that moral bafflement, was a capsule version of a feeling which informed much of his writing. It is not a thing that was ever actually resolved for him; he seemed too sophisticated to trust any pat answer. He’d said a lot of things in a lot of places over the years, but the statement I most remember, which most fits the man I used to talk with, is one I quoted in my foreword to Greg Rickman’s first interview volume,
PHILIP K. DICK: IN HIS OWN WORDS
(Fragments West/Valentine Press, 1984). It was from a 1970 letter Phil had written to
SF Commentary:

 

I know only one thing about my novels. In them, again and again, this minor man asserts himself in all his hasty, sweaty strength. In the ruins of Earth’s cities he is busily constructing a little factory that turns out cigars or imitation artifacts that say, “Welcome to Miami, the pleasure center of the world.” In A. Lincoln, Simulacrum he operates a little business that produces corny electronic organs—and, later on, human-like robots which ultimately become more of an irritation than a threat. Everything is on a small scale. Collapse is enormous; the positive little figure outlined against the universal rubble is, like Tagomi, Runciter, Molinari, gnat-sized in scope, finite in what he can do… and yet in some sense great. I really do not know why. I simply believe in him and I love him. He will prevail. There is nothing else. At least nothing else that matters. That we should be concerned about. Because if he is there, like a tiny father-figure, everything is all right.
Some reviewers have found “bitterness” in my writing. I am surprised, because my mood is one of trust. Perhaps they are bothered by the fact that what I trust is so very small. They want something vaster. I have news for them: there is nothing vaster. Nothing more, I should say. But really, how much do we have to have? Isn’t Mr. Tagomi enough? I know it counts. I am satisfied.

 

I suppose I’ve recalled it twice now because I like to think of that small element of trust, of idealism, in Phil’s writings. Perhaps I’m imposing a construction, though, in doing this. He was a complex person, and I’ve a feeling he left a lot of different people with a lot of different impressions. This in mind, the best I can render of the man I knew and liked—mostly at long distance—is obviously only a crude sketch, but it’s the best I have to show. And since much of this piece is self-plagiarism, I feel no guilt in closing with something else I’ve said before:

 

The subjective response… when a Philip Dick book has been finished and put aside is that, upon reflection, it does not seem so much that one holds the memory of a story; rather, it is the after effects of a poem rich in metaphor that seem to remain.
This I value, partly because it does defy a full mapping, but mainly because that which is left of a Phil Dick story when the details have been forgotten is a thing which comes to me at odd times and offers me a feeling or a thought; therefore, a thing which leaves me richer for having known it.

 

It is gratifying to know that he is being acclaimed and remembered with fetidness in many places. I believe it will last. I wish it had come a lot sooner.
Roger Zelazny
October, 1986
Stability
Robert Benton slowly spread his wings, flapped them several times and sailed majestically off the roof and into the darkness.
He was swallowed up by the night at once. Beneath him, hundreds of tiny dots of light betokened other roofs, from which other persons flew. A violet hue swam close to him, then vanished into the black. But Benton was in a different sort of mood, and the idea of night races did not appeal to him. The violet hue came close again and waved invitingly. Benton declined, swept upward into the higher air.
After a while he leveled off and allowed himself to coast on air currents that came up from the city beneath, the City of Lightness. A wonderful, exhilarating feeling swept through him. He pounded his huge, white wings together, flung himself in frantic joy into the small clouds that drifted past, dived at the invisible floor of the immense black bowl in which he flew, and at last descended toward the lights of the city, his leisure time approaching an end.
Somewhere far down a light more bright than the others winked at him: the Control Office. Aiming his body like an arrow, his white wings folded about him, he headed toward it. Down he went, straight and perfect. Barely a hundred feet from the light he threw his wings out, caught the firm air about him, and came gently to rest on a level roof.
Benton began to walk until a guide light came to life and he found his way to the entrance door by its beam. The door slid back at the pressure of his fingertips and he stepped past it. At once he began to descend, shooting downward at increasing speed. The small elevator suddenly stopped and he strode out into the Controller’s Main Office.
“Hello,” the Controller said, “take off your wings and sit down.”
Benton did so, folding them neatly and hanging them from one of a row of small hooks along the wall. He selected the best chair in sight and headed toward it.
“Ah,” the Controller smiled, “you value comfort.”
“Well,” Benton answered, “I don’t want it to go to waste.”
The Controller looked past his visitor and through the transparent plastic walls. Beyond were the largest single rooms in the City of Lightness. They extended as far as his eyes could see, and farther. Each was—
“What did you want to see me about?” Benton interrupted. The Controller coughed and rattled some metal paper-sheets.
“As you know,” he began, “Stability is the watchword. Civilization has been climbing for centuries, especially since the twenty-fifth century. It is a law of nature, however, that civilization must either go forward or fall backward; it cannot stand still.”
“I know that,” Benton said, puzzled. “I also know the multiplication table. Are you going to recite that, too?”
The Controller ignored him.
“We have, however, broken that law. One hundred years ago—”
One hundred years ago! It hardly seemed as far back as that when Eric Freidenburg of the States of Free Germany stood up in the International Council Chamber and announced to the assembled delegates that mankind had at last reached its peak. Further progress forward was impossible. In the last few years, only
two
major inventions has been filed. After that, they had all watched the big graphs and charts, seen the lines going down and down, according to their squares, until they dipped into nothing. The great well of human ingenuity had run dry, and then Eric had stood up and said the thing everyone knew, but was afraid to say. Naturally, since it had been made known in a formal fashion, the Council would have to begin work on the problem.
There were three ideas of solution. One of them seemed more humane than the other two. This solution was eventually adopted. It was—Stabilization!
There was great trouble at first when the people learned about it, and mass riots took place in many leading cities. The stock market crashed, and the economy of many countries went out of control. Food prices rose, and there was mass starvation. War broke out… for the first time in three hundred years! But Stabilization had begun. Dissenters were destroyed, radicals were carted off. It was hard and cruel but seemed to be the only answer. At last the world settled down to a rigid state, a controlled state in which there could be no change, either backward or forward.
Each year every inhabitant took a difficult, week-long examination to test whether or not he was backsliding. All youths were given fifteen years of intensive education. Those who could not keep up with the others simply disappeared. Inventions were inspected by Control Offices to make certain that they could not upset Stability. If it seemed that they might—
“And that is why we cannot allow your invention to be put into use,” the Controller explained to Benton. “I am sorry.”
He watched Benton, saw him start, the blood drain from his face, his hands tremble.
“Come now,” he said kindly, “don’t take it so hard; there are other things to do. After all, you are not in danger of the Cart!”
But Benton only stared. At last he said,
“But you don’t understand: I have no invention. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No invention!” the Controller exclaimed. “But I was here the day you entered it yourself! I saw you sign the statement of ownership! You handed
me
the model!”
He stared at Benton. Then he pressed a stud on his desk and said into a small circle of light, “Send me up the information on number 34500-D, please.”
A moment passed, and then a tube appeared in the circle of light. The Controller lifted the cylindrical object out and passed it to Benton.
“You’ll find your signed statement there,” he said, “and it has your fingerprints in the print squares. Only you could have made them.”
Numbly, Benton opened the tube and took out the papers inside. He studied them a few moments, and then slowly put them back and handed the tube to the Controller.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s my writing, and those are certainly my prints. But I don’t understand, I never invented a thing in my life, and I’ve never been here before! What is this invention?”
“What is it!” the Controller echoed, amazed. “Don’t you know?”
Benton shook his head. “No, I do not,” he said slowly.
“Well, if you want to find out about it, you’ll have to go down to the Offices. All I can tell you is that the plans you sent us have been denied rights by the Control Board. I’m only a spokesman. You’ll have to take it up with them.”
Benton got up and walked to the door. As with the other, this one sprang open to his touch and he went on through into the Control Offices. As the door closed behind him the Controller called angrily, “I don’t know what you’re up to, but you know the penalty for upsetting Stability!”
“I’m afraid Stability is already upset,” Benton answered and went on.
The Offices were gigantic. He stared down from the catwalk on which he stood, for below him a thousand men and women worked at whizzing, efficient machines. Into the machines they were feeding reams of cards. Many of the people worked at desks, typing out sheets of information, filling charts, putting cards away, decoding messages. On the walls stupendous graphs were constantly being changed. The very air was alive with the vitalness of the work being conducted, the hum of the machines, the tap-tap of the typewriters, and the mumble of voices all merged together in a quiet, contented sound. And this vast machine, which cost countless dollars a day to keep running so smoothly, had a word: Stability!
Here, the thing that kept their world together lived. This room, these hard working people, the ruthless man who sorted cards into the pile marked “for extermination” were all functioning together like a great symphony orchestra. One person off key, one person out of time, and the entire structure would tremble. But no one faltered. No one stopped and failed at his task. Benton walked down a flight of steps to the desk of the information clerk.

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