Philip Dick - The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 5 - The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Stories

Hoppy laughed. "That's right," he said excitedly.

"Has he done the reading?" Edie Keller asked. "Or was he too sick tonight to do it?"

"Oh yeah, the reading's in progress," Earl Colvig said, "but we're not listening; we're tired of sick old Walt – we're listening to Hoppy and watching what he does. He did funny things tonight, didn't you, Hoppy?"

"Show the little girl how you moved that coin from a distance," June Raub said. "I think she'd enjoy that."

"Yes, do that again," the pharmacist called from his seat. "That was good; we'd all like to see that again, I'm sure." In his eagerness to watch he rose to his feet, forgetting that people were behind him.

"My brother," Edie said quietly, "wants to hear the reading. That's what he came for."

"Be still," Bonny, her mother, said to her.

Brother, Hoppy thought. She doesn't have any brother. He laughed out loud at that, and several people in the audience smiled. "Your brother ?" he said, wheeling his phocomobile toward the child. "I can do the reading; I can be Philip and Mildred and everybody in the book; I can be Dangerfield. Sometimes I actually am. I was tonight, and that's why your brother thinks Dangerfield's in the room. What it is, it's me." He looked around at the people. "Isn't that right, folks? Isn't it actually me?"

"That's right, Hoppy," Orion Shroud agreed. Everyone nodded.

"You have no brother, Edie," Hoppy said to the little girl. "Why do you say your brother wants to hear the reading when you have no brother?" He laughed and laughed. "Can I see him? Talk to him? Let me hear him talk and – I'll do an imitation of him."

"That'll be quite an imitation," Cas Stone chuckled.

"Like to hear that," Earl Colvig said.

"I'll do it," Hoppy said, "as soon as he says something to me." He sat in the center of his 'mobile, waiting. "I'm waiting," he said.

"That's enough," Bonny Keller said. "Leave my child alone." Her cheeks were red with anger.

"Lean down," Edie said to Hoppy. "Toward me. And he'll speak to you." Her face, like her mother's, was grim.

Hoppy leaned toward her, cocking his head on one side, mockingly.

A voice, speaking from inside him, as if it were part of the interior world, said, "How did you fix that record changer? How did you really do that?"

Hoppy screamed.

Everyone was staring at him, white-faced; they were on their feet, now, all of them rigid.

"I heard Jim Fergesson," Hoppy said. "A man I worked for, once. A man who's dead."

The girl regarded him calmly. "Do you want to hear my brother say more? Say some more words to him, Bill; he wants you to say more."

And, in Hoppy's interior mind, the voice said, "It looked like you healed it. It looked like instead of replacing that broken spring -"

Hoppy wheeled his cart wildly, spun up the aisle to the far end of the room, wheeled again and sat panting, a long way from the Keller child; his heart pounded and he stared at her. She returned his stare silently.

"Did he scare you?" Now the child was openly smiling at him, but her smile was empty and cold. "He paid you back because you were picking on me. It made him angry. So he did that."

Coming up beside Hoppy, George Keller said, "What happened, Hop?"

"Nothing," he said shortly. "Maybe we better listen to the reading." Sending out his manual extensor, he turned up the volume of the radio.

You can have what you want, you and your brother, he thought. Dangerfield's reading or anything else. How long have you been in there? Only seven years? It seems more like forever. As if – you've always existed. It had been a terribly old, wizened, white thing that had spoken to him. Something hard and small, floating. Lips overgrown with downy hair that hung trailing, streamers of it, wispy and dry. I bet it was Fergesson, he said to himself; it felt like him. He's in there, inside that child. I wonder. Can he get out?

Edie Keller said to her brother, "What did you do to scare him like you did? He really was scared."

From within her the familiar voice said, "I was someone he used to know, a long time ago. Someone dead."

Amused, she said, "Are you going to do any more to him?"

"If I don't like him," Bill said, "I may do more to him, a lot of different things, maybe."

"How did you know about the dead person?"

"Oh," Bill said, "because – you know why. Because I'm dead, too." He chuckled, deep down inside her stomach; she felt him quiver.

"No you're not," she disagreed. "You're as alive as I am, so don't say that; it isn't right." It frightened her.

Bill said, "I was just pretending. I'm sorry. I wish I could have seen his face… how did it look?"

"Awful," Edie said. "It turned all inward, like a frog's."

"I wish I could come out," Bill said plaintively. "I wish I could be born like everybody else. Can't I be born later on?"

"Doctor Stockstill says you couldn't."

"Maybe I could make Doctor Stockstill let me out. I can do that if I want."

"No," she said. "You're lying; you can't do anything but sleep and talk to the dead and maybe do imitations like you did. That isn't much."

There was no response from within.

"If you did anything bad," she said, "I could swallow something that would kill you. So you better behave."

She felt more and more afraid of him; she was talking to herself, trying to bolster her confidence. Maybe it would be a good thing if you did die, she thought. Only then I'd have to carry you around still, and it – wouldn't be pleasant. I wouldn't like that.

She shuddered.

"Don't worry about me," Bill said suddenly. "I know a lot of things; I can take care of myself. I'll protect you, too. You better be glad about me because I can look at everyone who's dead, like the man I imitated. There're a whole lot of them, trillions and trillions of them and they're all different. When I'm asleep I hear them muttering. They're still around."

"Around where?" she asked.

"Underneath us," Bill said. "Down in the ground."

"Brrr," she said.

"It's true. And we're going to be there, too. And so is Mommy and Daddy and everyone else. You'll see."

"I don't want to see," she said. "Please don't say any more. I want to listen to the reading."

Andrew Gill glanced up from his task of rolling cigarettes to see Hoppy Harrington – whom he did not like – entering the factory with a man whom he did not know. At once Gill felt uneasy. He set down his tobacco paper and rose to his feet. Beside him at the long bench the other rollers, his employees, continued at their work.

He employed, in all, eight men, and this was in the tobacco division alone. The distillery, which produced brandy, employed another twelve. His was the largest commercial enterprise in West Marin and he sold his products all over Northern California; his cigarettes had even gotten back to the East Coast and were known there.

"Yes?" he said to Hoppy. He placed himself in front of the phoce's cart, halting him.

Hoppy stammered. "This m-man came up from Oakland to see you, Mr. Gill. He's an important businessman, he says. Isn't that right?" The phoce turned to the man beside him. "Isn't that what you told me, Stuart?"

Holding out his hand, the man said, "I represent the Hardy Homeostatic Vermin Trap Corporation of Berkeley, California. I'm here to acquaint you with an amazing proposition that could well mean tripling your profits within six months." His eyes flashed.

Gill repressed the impulse to laugh aloud. "I see," he said, nodding. "Very interesting, Mr. -" He glanced questioningly at the phoce.

"M-mr. Stuart McConchie," the phoce stammered. "I knew him before the war; I haven't seen him in all that time and now he's migrated up here, the same as I did."

"My employer, Mr. Hardy," Stuart McConchie said, "has empowered me to describe to you in detail the design of a fully-automated cigarette-making machine. We at Hardy Homeostatic are well aware of the fact that your cigarettes are rolled entirely in the old-fashioned way. By hand." He pointed toward the employees at the long bench. "Such a method is a century out of date, Mr. Gill. You've achieved superb quality in your special deluxe Gold Label cigarettes -"