The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford and Other Classic Stories (68 page)

“Oh,” the clerk squeaked indignantly, “Allied Domestic’s models are
never
destroyed. Banged up a little now and then, perhaps, but you show me one of our models that’s been put out of commission.” With dignity, he retrieved his order pad and smoothed down his coat. “No, sir,” he said emphatically, “our models survive. Why, I saw a seven-year-old Allied running around, an old Model 3-S. Dented a bit, perhaps, but plenty of fire left. I’d like to see one of those cheap Protecto-Corp. models try to tangle with
that
.”

Controlling himself with an effort, Tom asked: “But why? What’s it all for? What’s the purpose in this—competition between them?”

The clerk hesitated. Uncertainly, he began again with his order pad. “Yes sir,” he said. “Competition; you put your finger right on it. Successful competition, to be exact. Allied Domestic doesn’t meet competition—it
demolishes
it.”

It took a second for Tom Fields to react. Then understanding came. “I see,” he said. “In other words, every year these things are obsolete. No good, not large enough. Not powerful enough. And if they’re not replaced, if I don’t get a new one, a more advanced model—”

“Your present Nanny was, ah, the loser?” The clerk smiled knowingly. “Your present model was, perhaps, slightly anachronistic? It failed to meet present-day standards of competition? It, ah, failed to come out at the end of the day?”

“It never came home,” Tom said thickly.

“Yes, it was demolished … I fully understand. Very common. You see, sir, you don’t have a choice. It’s nobody’s fault, sir. Don’t blame us; don’t blame Allied Domestic.”

“But,” Tom said harshly, “when one is destroyed, that means you sell another one. That means a sale for you. Money in the cash register.”

“True. But we all have to meet contemporary standards of excellence. We can’t let ourselves fall behind … as you saw, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, you saw the unfortunate consequences of falling behind.”

“Yes,” Tom agreed, in an almost inaudible voice. “They told me not to have her repaired. They said I should replace her.”

The clerk’s confident, smugly-beaming face seemed to expand. Like a miniature sun, it glowed happily, exaltedly. “But now you’re all set up, sir. With this model you’re right up there in the front. Your worries are over, Mr…” He halted expectantly. “Your name, sir? To whom shall I make out this purchase order?”

Bobby and Jean watched with fascination as the delivery men lugged the enormous crate into the living room. Grunting and sweating, they set it down and straightened gratefully up.

“All right,” Tom said crisply. “Thanks.”

“Not at all, mister.” The delivery men stalked out, noisily closing the door after them.

“Daddy, what is it?” Jean whispered. The two children came cautiously around the crate, wide-eyed and awed.

“You’ll see in a minute.”

“Tom, it’s past their bedtime,” Mary protested. “Can’t they look at it tomorrow?”

“I want them to look at it
now
.” Tom disappeared downstairs into the basement and returned with a screwdriver. Kneeling on the floor beside the crate he began rapidly unscrewing the bolts that held it together. “They can go to bed a little late, for once.”

He removed the boards, one by one, working expertly and calmly. At last the final board was gone, propped up against the wall with the others. He unclipped the book of instructions and the 90-day warranty and handed them to Mary. “Hold onto these.”

“It’s a Nanny!” Bobby cried.

“It’s a huge, huge Nanny!”

In the crate the great black shape lay quietly, like an enormous metal tortoise, encased in a coating of grease. Carefully checked, oiled, and fully guaranteed. Tom nodded. “That’s right. It’s a Nanny, a new Nanny. To take the place of the old one.”

“For
us?”

“Yes.” Tom sat down in a nearby chair and lit a cigarette. “Tomorrow morning we’ll turn her on and warm her up. See how she runs.”

The children’s eyes were like saucers. Neither of them could breathe or speak.

“But this time,” Mary said, “you must stay away from the park. Don’t take her near the park. You hear?”

“No,” Tom contradicted. “They can go in the park.”

Mary glanced uncertainly at him. “But that orange thing might—”

Tom smiled grimly. “It’s fine with me if they go into the park.” He leaned toward Bobby and Jean. “You kids go into the park any time you want. And don’t be afraid of anything. Of anything or anyone. Remember that.”

He kicked the end of the massive crate with his toe.

“There isn’t anything in the world you have to be afraid of. Not anymore.”

Bobby and Jean nodded, still gazing fixedly into the crate.

“All right, Daddy,” Jean breathed.

“Boy, look at her!” Bobby whispered. “Just look at her! I can hardly wait till tomorrow!”

Mrs. Andrew Casworthy greeted her husband on the front steps of their attractive three-story house, wringing her hands anxiously.

“What’s the matter?” Casworthy grunted, taking off his hat. With his pocket handkerchief he wiped sweat from his florid face. “Lord, it was hot today. What’s wrong? What is it?”

“Andrew, I’m afraid—”

“What the hell happened?”

“Phyllis came home from the park today without her Nanny. She was bent and scratched yesterday when Phyllis brought her home, and Phyllis is so upset I can’t make out—”

“She came home alone. By herself. All alone.”

Slow rage suffused the man’s heavy features. “What happened?”

“Something in the park, like yesterday. Something attacked her Nanny. Destroyed her! I can’t get the story exactly straight, but something black, something huge and black … it must have been another Nanny.”

Casworthy’s jaw slowly jutted out. His thickset face turned ugly dark red, a deep unwholesome flush that rose ominously and settled in place. Abruptly, he turned on his heel.

“Where are you going?” his wife fluttered nervously.

The paunchy, red-faced man stalked rapidly down the walk toward his sleek surface cruiser, already reaching for the door handle.

“I’m going to shop for another Nanny,” he muttered. “The best damn Nanny I can get. Even if I have to go to a hundred stores. I want the best—and the biggest.”

“But, dear,” his wife began, hurrying apprehensively after him, “can we really afford it?” Wringing her hands together anxiously, she raced on: “I mean, wouldn’t it be better to wait? Until you’ve had time to think it over, perhaps. Maybe later on, when you’re a little more—calm.”

But Andrew Casworthy wasn’t listening. Already the surface cruiser boiled with quick, eager life, ready to leap forward. “Nobody’s going to get ahead of me,” he said grimly, his heavy lips twitching. “I’ll show them, all of them. Even if I have to get a new size designed. Even if I have to get one of those manufacturers to turn out a new model for me!”

And, oddly, he knew one of them would.

All notes in italics are by Philip K. Dick. The year when the note was written appears in parentheses following the note. Most of these notes were written as story notes for the collections THE BEST OF PHILIP K. DICK (published 1977) and THE GOLDEN MAN (published 1980). A few were written at the request of editors publishing or reprinting a PKD story in a book or magazine. The first entry below is from an introduction written for the collection THE PRESERVING MACHINE.

When there is a date following the name of a story, it is the date the manuscript of that story was first received by Dick’s agent, per the records of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. Absence of a date means no record is available. (Dick began working with the agency in mid-1952.) The name of a magazine followed by a month and year indicates the first published appearance of a story. An alternate name following a story indicates Dick’s original name for the story, as shown in the agency records.

These five volumes include all of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction, with the exception of short novels later published as or included in novels, childhood writings, and unpublished writings for which manuscripts have not been found. The stories are arranged as closely as possible in chronological order of composition; research for this chronology was done by Gregg Rickman and Paul Williams.

The difference between a short story and a novel comes to this: a short story may deal with murder; a novel deals with the murderer, and his actions stem from a psyche which, if the writer knows his craft, he has previously presented. The difference, therefore, between a novel and a short story is not length; for example, William Styron’s
The Long March
is now published as a “short novel” whereas originally in
Discovery
it was published as a “long story.” This means that if you read it in
Discovery
you are reading a story, but if you pick up the paperback version you are reading a novel. So much for that.

There is one restriction in a novel not found in short stories: the requirement that the protagonist be liked enough or familiar enough to the reader so that, whatever the protago
nist does, the readers would also do, under the same circumstances… or, in the case of escapist fiction, would like to do. In a story it is not necessary to create such a reader identification character because (one) there is not enough room for such background mate
rial in a short story and (two) since the emphasis is on the deed, not the doer, it really does not matter—within reasonable limits, of course—
who
in a story commits the murder. In a story, you learn about the characters from what they do; in a novel it is the other way around: you have your characters and then they do something idiosyncratic, emanating from their unique natures. So it can be said that events in a novel are unique—not found in other writings; but the same events occur over and over again in stories, until, at last, a sort of code language is built up between the reader and the author. I am not sure that this is bad by any means.

What an sf story really requires is the
initial premise
which cuts it off entirely from our present world. This break must be made in the reading of, and the writing of,
all
good fiction… a made-up world must be presented. But there is much more pressure on an sf writer, for the break is far greater than in, say,
Paul’s Case
or
Big Blonde—
two varieties of mainstream fiction which will always be with us.

It is in sf stories that sf action occurs; it is in sf novels that worlds occur. The stories in this collection are a series of events. Crisis is the key to story-writing, a sort of brinkmanship in which the author mires his characters in happenings so sticky as to seem impossible of solution. And then he gets them out… usually. He can get them out; that’s what matters. But in a novel the actions are so deeply rooted in the personality of the main character that to extricate him the author would have to go back and rewrite his character. This need not happen in a story, especially a short one (such long, long stories as Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
are, like the Styron piece, really short novels). The implication of all this makes clear why some sf writers can write stories but not novels, or novels but not stories. It is because
anything
can happen in a story; the author merely tailors his character to the event. So, in terms of actions and events, the story is far less restrictive to the author than is a novel. As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do—not what he would like them to do. This is on one hand the strength of the novel and on the other, its weakness.
(1968)

STABILITY written 1947 or earlier [previously unpublished].

ROOG written 11/51.
Fantasy & Science Fiction,
Feb 1953. [First sale.]

The first thing you do when you sell your first story is phone up your best friend and tell him. Whereupon he hangs up on you, which puzzles you until you realize that he is trying to sell stories, too, and hasn ‘t managed to do it. That sobers you, that reaction. But then when your wife comes home you tell her, and she doesn ‘t hang up on you; she is very pleased and
excited. At the time I sold
Roog
to Anthony Boucher at
Fantasy and Science Fiction
I was managing a record store part time and writing part time. If anyone asked me what I did I always said “I’m a writer.” This was in Berkeley, in 1951. Everybody was a writer. No one had ever sold anything. In fact most of the people I knew believed it to be crass and undignified to submit a story to a magazine; you wrote it, read it aloud to your friends, and finally it was forgotten. That was Berkeley in those days.

Another problem for me in getting everyone to be awed was that my story was not a literary story in a little magazine, but an sf story. Sf was not read by people in Berkeley in those days (except for a small group of fans who were very strange; they looked like animated vegetables). “But what about your
serious
writing?” people said to me. I was under the impression that
Roog
was quite a serious story. It tells of fear; it tells of loyalty; it tells of obscure menace and a good creature who cannot convey knowledge of that menace to those he loves. What could be more serious a theme than this? What people really meant by “serious” was “important.” Sf was, by definition, not important. I cringed over the weeks following my sale of
Roog
as I realized the serious Codes of Behavior I had broken by selling my story, and an sf story at that.