Philip Dick - THE WORLD JONES MADE

"On Venus," Cussick asked, "are there supplies? Some kind of installations?"

"Mountains of supplies. Miles of installations. All we have to do is get the eight of them there."

Cussick got to his feet. "I'll notify Rafferty."

Pearson also rose. "My car's outside; I'll drive you to the field. Better yet, I'll come along."

Within half an hour they were setting down in San Francisco. Rafferty was asleep; Cussick roused him and delivered the message. Ordinance was notified. The transport Van was activated and the eight Venusians collected into it: seven adults and one baby still in its incubator. Frightened, bewildered, the mutants sat huddled together; timid persons, peering up, blinking rapidly, conversing in low, uncertain whispers.

"Good luck," Rafferty told them.

Pearson and Cussick rode along with the Van to Ordinance. They supervised the loading of the ships, four mutants in each. The complex safety seals were melted in place and the ships uprighted. As Cussick and Pearson and Rafferty watched from the shadows at the edge of the field, the ships were simultaneously launched. In all, the whole thing took an hour and a half: Jones still had thirty minutes to wait.

"Feel like a drink?" Cussick asked Pearson and Rafferty.

The three of them got thoroughly drunk. In their grim stupor, time and space ceased to have meaning. The world blurred in a chaotic swirl of drifting phantoms, indistinct sounds, shifting colors and shafts of light. Sometime during the process, an event momentarily caught Cussick's attention.

Four gray-uniformed men stood around them, examining their identification papers with brisk efficiency. Muddled, with a violent effort of will, he focused on them.

"What do you want?" he demanded. But they weren't interested in him; it was Pearson they were grabbing hold of and carting off. Suddenly horrified, Cussick struggled furiously; in a frenzy he waded in and fought to save Pearson. One of the gray-uniformed figures shoved him down, and another stepped on his face.

Then they were gone. Cussick lay on the floor beside the inert shape of Rafferty, among overturned stools and broken glass. Gradually, reluctantly, the frigid gray of sanity crept back into his mind. Pearson had been arrested.

Outside the bar boomed a growing cacophony of sounds: the roar of motors, shrieks, shouts, marching feet, exploding shells.

The remaining half hour had passed. Jones was in office. The day of the Crisis Government, the new world order, had begun.

IN THE cramped, low-ceilinged shop cabin, a small figure sat hunched over a workbench; soldering gun gripped in both hands, he moodily pondered a tangled mass of electronic parts and wiring. Except for the hum of the gun's coil's the cabin was silent. Nothing stirred. The metal walls of the cabin were cold, smooth, impersonal. Storage compartments, stenciled with code numbers, covered every flat surface. No space had been wasted; the cabin was a square block of efficiency.

The transistors, relays, and heaps of wiring spread out on the bench formed the steering mechanism of a signal rocket. The signal rocket itself, six feet long and four inches in diameter, stood propped up in the corner, a thin metal skin minus its insides. Pasted on the wall behind the bench dangled greasy, crumpled schematics. Blue-white light flooded down from a flexible snake-lamp. Repair tools of every kind sparkled metallically.

"I can't do it," Louis said aloud, for his own benefit. Suddenly he began feverishly tearing wires loose and resoldering them in alternate combinations. For ten minutes, solder steamed and sizzled and activated the mechanism of the rocket. Tubes lit up; electricity moved through the circuit.

Nothing happened. In a flurry of activity, he again jerked leads loose, switched them at random, and resoldered them.

Blowing and spitting on the cooling metal, poking at the smoking terminals, he watched anxiously as tie circuit carried power one final time.

Still nothing.

He set the time switch for ninety seconds, the interval Dieter had computed. Tik-tok went the mechanism. Tik-tok, tik-tok, tik-tok, tik-tok until he couldn't stand it; cutting down the interval to five seconds he waited in a controlled hysteria until the relays snapped shut, and the clicking ceased.

His wristwatch told him it was still a second off. In ninety seconds it would be eighteen seconds off. Or worse; maybe it would never trip. Maybe the signal rocket would shoot past the other ship, out into the darkness, without ever releasing its magnetic pick-up grapple. The hell with it. He didn't know enough about electronics.

"I'm no good," he said, speaking in general, meaning himself and not merely what he had done. Meaning himself and his whole life. In the small shop cabin his voice squeaked back at him, a thin and brittle sound... but a sound, nevertheless. Any sound was welcome.

"You -- ," he said to the tangled remains on the bench, expressing himself from the bottom of his soul. There was nobody around to hear, so he thought of a few more terms and uttered them aloud. It sounded odd to hear his little voice bleating out obscenities. He was surprised, almost shocked. Rage vanished, and shame took its place.

"Irma could fix it," he said unhappily. And then he was overcome with fright. Pure, sheer, fright. Very quietly he closed his eyes and screamed. Like a man with something terrible caught in his throat, he sat stiffly at the workbench, fingers curled like talons, skin cold and clammy, tongue extended, shoulders hunched, mouth locked open, shrieking out the fear inside him.

And it wouldn't help, because they wouldn't hear him back on Earth anyhow. I'm out here, he was yelling. I'm trillions of miles out here, alone. There's nothing around me; I'm falling by myself, and nobody knows or gives a damn. Help me! Take me back! I want to go home!

And all the time he realized it was infantile stupidity, because, in fact, he was not alone: Dieter and Vivian and the baby, Laura, were along with him, plus a titanic metal ship as long as four city blocks, weighing thousands of tons, crammed with a billion dollars worth of turbines, safety devices, supplies. So it was all nonsense.

Trembling, he reached out and touched the wall. By God, it seemed real enough. What more could he ask? Could it get any more real? What would it look like if it were more real? His thoughts went around and around, without a flywheel, spinning crazily, faster and faster.

He crossed to the door, yanked it absolutely shut, bolted it, peered through the crack, and was satisfied. He was locked in; even if he went completely berserk, it would be all right: nobody would see him, nobody would know, there was no harm he could do. He could wreck the whole shop cabin, and it wouldn't make any difference. Not like running amuck outside, where he could get at the delicate automatic pilot.

The metal walls of the shop cabin had a bright, metallic quality. They looked like metal foil, thin as paper, even thinner. A fragile metal hide between him and the emptiness. He could feel it out there; putting his hand against the wall, suffering incredibly but forcing himself, he stood actually touching the outside emptiness.

He could hear it. He could sense it, practically smell it. A cold musty smell, like moldy paper. A deserted trash heap blowing around at night; wind so faint that it was invisible, stirring so slightly that no motion was felt, only the sense of presence. It was always there, outside the ship. It never ceased.

Resentment took the place of fear. Why hadn't they fixed up communication between the two ships? And why hadn't they fixed up some sort of sound? There was no sound; the turbines were off—except for occasional shattering split seconds when side jets came on momentarily to correct the course. How did he know the ship was moving? He listened, but he heard nothing; he sniffed, he peered, he reached out his hand, but there wasn't anything there. Only the metal foil wall, seemingly thinner than paper, so fragile that he could tear it to shreds.