Philip Dick - Now Wait for Last Year

With the assistance of two nurses he managed to get Molinari back into bed.

'Listen, Sweetscent,' Molinari whispered as he lay back against the pillow. 'I don't have to get that stuff through you; I can put pressure on Hazeltine and he'll deliver it right to me. Virgil Ackerman is a friend of mine; Virgil will see to it that Hazeltine complies. And don't try to tell me my job; you do yours and I'll do mine.' He shut his eyes and groaned. 'God, I know an artery near my heart just burst; I can feel the blood leaking out. Get Teagarden in here.' Again he groaned and then turned his face to the wall. 'What a day. But I'll get that Freneksy yet.' All at once he opened his eyes and said, 'I knew it was a stupid idea. But that's the kind of ideas I've been having lately, dumb ideas like that. And what else can I do but that? Can you think of something else?' He waited. 'No. Because there isn't anything else, that's why.' Again he shut his eyes. 'I feel terrible. I think I really am dying this time and you won't be able to save me.'

'I'll get Dr Teagarden,' Eric said, and started toward the door.

Molinari said, T know you're an addict, doctor.' He drew himself up slightly. 'I can almost invariably tell when someone is lying, and your wife wasn't. As soon as I saw you I spotted it; you don't know how much you've changed.'

After a pause Eric said, 'What are you going to do?'

'We'll see, doctor,' Molinari said, and again turned his face to the wall.

As soon as he had completed the task of delivering the supply of JJ-180 to Kathy he boarded an express ship for Detroit.

Forty-five minutes later he had reached the Detroit field and was on his way to Hazeltine Corporation by taxi. Gino Molinari, not the drug, had forced him to move this swiftly; he could not even wait until evening.

'Here we are, sir,' the autonomic circuit cab said respectfully. It slid open its door so that he could emerge. 'That gray one-story building with the hedge of rose-colored calyx with the whorl of green bracts at the base ... that is Hazeltine Corporation.' Looking out, Eric saw the building, the lawn and heather hedge. It wasn't a large structure as industrial installations went. So this was the point at which JJ-180 had entered the world.

'Wait,' he instructed the cab. 'Do you have a glass of water?'

'Certainly.' From the slot facing Eric a paper cup of water slid forward, teetered on the lip of the slot, and then halted.

Seated in the cab Eric swallowed the capsule of JJ-180 which he had brought with him. Purloined from Kathy's stock.

Several minutes passed.

'Why aren't you getting out, sir?' the cab inquired. 'Have I done something wrong?'

Eric waited. When he felt the drug begin to reach him he paid the cab, got out and walked slowly up the redwood-round path toward the Office of Hazeltine Corporation.

The building flashed as if caught by a whip of lightning. And, overhead, the blue sky twisted laterally. He saw, gazing up, the clear blue of day dawdle as if attempting to remain and then collapse; he shut his eyes because the dizziness was too great, the reference point of outside objects had become too tenuous, and he walked, step by step, feeling his way ahead, bent down, for some reason motivated to continue in motion, however slow.

It hurt. This, unlike the initial exposure, was a major readjustment of the reality structure impinging on him. His steps made no sound, he noticed; he had strayed onto the lawn, but he still kept his eyes shut. Hallucination, he thought, of another world. Is Hazeltine right? By a paradox perhaps I can answer that within the hallucination itself... if that is what it is. He did not think so; Hazeltine was wrong.

When a heather branch brushed his arm he let his eyes open. One of his feet had penetrated the soft black soil of a flower bed; he rested on a half-crushed tuberous begonia. Past the heather hedge the gray side of Hazeltine Corporation rose, exactly as before, and above it the sky was a washed-out blue with irregular clouds sweeping toward the north, the same sky, as nearly as he could tell. What had changed? He returned to the redwood-round path. Shall I go in? he asked himself. He looked back toward the street. The cab had gone. Detroit, the buildings and ramps of the city, seemed somehow elaborate. But he did not know this area.

When he reached the porch the door flew open automatically for him and he looked in on a neat office, with relaxing, leather-covered chairs, magazines, a deep-pile carpet whose design changed continuously... he saw, , through an open doorway, a business area: accounting machines and a computer of some ordinary kind, and at the same time he heard the buzz of activity beyond that, from the labs themselves.

As he started to sit down, a four-armed reeg walked into the office, its blue, chitinous face inexpressive, its embryonic wings pressed tightly to its sloping, bullet-shiny back. It whistled a greeting to him – he had not heard that about them – and passed on out through the doorway. Another reeg, manipulating its extensive network of double-jointed arms vigorously, made its appearance, traveled up to Eric Sweet-scent, halted, and produced a small square box.

Scudding across the side of the box, words in English took shape and departed; he woke to the fact that he had to pay attention to them. The reeg was communicating with him.

WELCOME TO HAZELTINE CORPORATION

He read the words but did not know what to do with them. This was a receptionist; he saw that the reeg was a female. How did he reply? The reeg waited, buzzing; its structure was so convoluted that it seemed unable to remain entirely still; its multilensed eyes shrank and grew as they were partially absorbed back into the skull, then pushed out like flattened corks. If he hadn't known better he would have said it was blind. And then he realized that these were its false eyes; the genuine ones, compound, were at its top-arm elbows.

He said, 'May I speak to one of your chemists?' And he thought, So we did lose the war. To these things. And now Terra is occupied. And its industries are run by these. But, he thought, human beings still exist, because this reeg was not dumbfounded to see me; it has accepted my presence as natural. So we can't be mere slaves, either.

REGARDING WHAT MATTER?

Hesitating, he said, 'A drug. Produced here in the past. Called either Frohedadrine or JJ-180; both names refer to the same product.'

JUST A MOMENT PLEASE

The female reeg scuttled through the inner doorway to the business office, then disappeared entirely. He stood waiting, thinking to himself that if this was an hallucination it certainly was not a voluntary one.

A larger reeg, a male, appeared; its joints seemed stiff and Eric realized that it was old. They had a short life span, measured in terms of months, not years. This one had almost come to the end of his.

Utilizing the translating box, the elderly male reeg said:

WHAT IS YOUR INQUIRY ABOUT JJ-180? PLEASE BE BRIEF

Eric bent, picked up a magazine that lay on a table nearby. It was not in English; the cover bore a picture of two reegs and the writing consisted of the crabbed, pictorial reegian script. Startled, he stared at it. The magazine was Life. Somehow it shocked him more than the actual sight of the enemy itself.

The elderly reeg rattled with impatience.

Eric said, 'I want to purchase an antidote to the addictive drug JJ-180. In order to break my addiction.'

YOU DID NOT NEED ME FOR THAT; THE RECEPTIONIST COULD HAVE TAKEN CARE OF YOU

Turning, the elderly reeg scrabbled haltingly off, eager to return to his work. Eric was left alone.

The receptionist returned with a small brown paper bag; she held it out to him, not with a jointed arm but with a mandible. Eric accepted it, opened it and looked inside. A bottle of pills. This was it; there was nothing more to be done.