Philip Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

“Drink your coffee, why don’t you?” Hnatt suggested. “How about some bear’s claw to go with it?” The darkness had left his face; he, like Emily, was now tranquil, uninvolved.

Barney said, “I don’t understand it. Palmer Eldritch said to come here.” Or had he? Something like that; he was certain of it. “This was supposed to work out, I thought,” he said, helplessly.

Hnatt and Emily glanced at each other.

“Eldritch is in a hospital somewhere—” Emily began.

“Something’s gone wrong,” Barney said. “Eldritch must have lost control. I better find him; he can explain it to me.” And he felt panic, mercury-swift, fluid, pervasive panic; it filled him to his fingertips. “Goodbye,” he managed to say, and started toward the door, groping for escape.

From behind him Richard Hnatt said, “Wait.”

Barney turned. At the breakfast table Emily sat with a fixed, faint smile on her face, sipping her coffee, and across from her Hnatt sat facing Barney. Hnatt had one artificial hand, with which he held his fork, and when he lifted a bite of egg to his mouth Barney saw huge, jutting stainless steel teeth. And Hnatt was gray, hollowed out, with dead eyes, and much larger than before; he seemed to fill the room with his presence. But it was still Hnatt. I don ’ t get it , Barney said, and stood at the door, not leaving the apt and not returning; he did as Hnatt suggested: he waited. Isn ’ t this something like Palmer Eldritch? he asked himself. In pics… he has an artificial limb and steel teeth and Jensen eyes, but this was not Eldritch.

“It’s only fair to tell you,” Hnatt said matter-of-factly, “that Emily is a lot fonder of you than what she says suggests. I know because she’s told me. Many times.” He glanced at Emily, then. “You’re a duty type. You feel it’s the moral thing to do at this point, to suppress your emotions toward Barney; it’s what you’ve been doing all along anyhow. But forget your duty. You can’t build a marriage on it; there has to be spontaneity there. Even if you feel it’s wrong to—” He made a gesture. “Well, let’s say deny me… still, you should face your feelings honestly and not cover them with a self-sacrificing façade. That’s what you did with Barney here; you let him kick you out because you thought it was your duty not to interfere with his career.” He added, “You’re still behaving that way and it’s still a mistake. Be true to yourself.” And, all at once, he grinned at Barney, grinned—and one dead eye flicked off, as if in a mechanical wink.

It was Palmer Eldritch now. Completely.

Emily, however, did not appear to notice; her smile had faded and she looked confused, upset, and increasingly furious. “You make me so damn angry,” she said to her husband. “I said how I feel and I’m not a hypocrite. And I don’t like to be accused of being one.”

Across from her the seated man said, “You have only one life. If you want to live it with Barney instead of me—”

“I don’t.” She glared at him.

“I’m going,” Barney said; he opened the hall door. It was hopeless.

“Wait.” Palmer Eldritch rose, and sauntered after him. “I’ll walk downstairs with you.”

Together the two of them trudged down the hall toward the steps.

“Don’t give up,” Eldritch said. “Remember: this is only the initial time you’ve made use of Chew-Z; you’ll have other times later. You can keep chipping away until eventually you get it.”

Barney said, “What the hell is Chew-Z?”

From close beside him a girl’s voice was repeating, “Barney Mayerson. Come on.” He was being shaken; he blinked, squinted. Kneeling, her hand on his shoulder, was Anne Hawthorne. “What was it like? I stopped by and I couldn’t find anyone around; then I ran across all of you here in a circle, completely passed out. What if I had been a UN official?”

“You woke me,” he said to Anne, realizing what she had done; he felt massive, resentful disappointment. However, the translation for the time being was over and that was that. But he experienced the craving within him, the yearning. To do it again, and as soon as possible. Everything else was unimportant, even the girl beside him and his inert very quiet fellow-hovelists slumped here and there.

“It was that good?” Anne said perceptively. She touched her coat. “He visited our hovel, too; I bought. That man with the strange teeth and eyes, that gray, big man.”

“Eldritch. Or a simulacrum of him.” His joints ached, as if he had been sitting doubled up for hours, and yet, examining his watch, he saw that only a few seconds, a minute at the most, had passed. “Eldritch is everywhere,” he said to Anne. “Give me your Chew-Z,” he said to her.

“No.”

He shrugged, concealing his disappointment, the acute, physical impact of deprivation. Well, Palmer Eldritch would be returning; he surely knew the effects of his product. Possibly even later today.

“Tell me about it,” Anne said.

Barney said, “It’s an illusory world in which Eldritch holds the key positions as god; he gives you a chance to do what you can’t really ever do—reconstruct the past as it ought to have been. But even for him it’s hard. Takes time.” He was silent, then; he sat rubbing his aching forehead.

“You mean he can’t—and you can’t—just wave your arms and get what you want? As you can in a dream?”

“It’s absolutely not like a dream.” It was worse, he realized. More like being in hell, he thought. Yes, that’s the way hell must be: recurrent and unyielding. But Eldritch thought in time, with sufficient patience and effort, it could be changed .

“If you go back—” Anne began.

“‘If.” He stared at her. “I’ve got to go back. I wasn’t able to accomplish anything this time.” Hundreds of times, he thought. It might take that. “Listen. For God’s sake give me that Chew-Z bindle you’ve got there. I know I can convince her. I’ve got Eldritch himself on my side, plugging away. Right now she’s mad, and I took her by surprise—” He became silent; he stared at Anne Hawthorne. There’s something wrong, he thought. Because—

Anne had one artificial arm and hand; the plastic and metal fingers were only inches from him and he could discern them clearly. And when he looked up into her face he saw the hollowness, the emptiness as vast as the intersystem space out of which Eldritch had emerged. The dead eyes, filled with space beyond the known, visited worlds.

“You can have more later,” Anne said calmly. “One session a day is enough.” She smiled. “Otherwise you’d run out of skins; you wouldn’t be able to afford any more, and then what the hell would you do?”

Her smile glinted, the shiny opulence of stainless steel.

The other hovelists, on all sides of him, groaned into wakefulness, recovering by slow, anguished stages; they sat up, mumbled, and tried to orient themselves. Anne had gone somewhere. By himself he managed to get to his feet. Coffee, he thought. I’ll bet she’s fixing coffee.

“Wow,” Norm Schein said.

“Where’d you go?” Tod Morris demanded, thick-tongued; blearily he too stood, then assisted his wife Helen. “I was back in my teens, in high school, when I was on my first complete date—first, you get me, successful one, you follow?” He glanced nervously at Helen, then.

Mary Regan said, “It’s much better than Can-D. Infinitely. Oh, if I could tell you what I was doing—” She giggled self-consciously. “I just can’t, though.” Her face shone hot and red.

Going off to his own compartment Barney Mayerson locked the door, and got out the tube of toxin that Allen Faine had given him; he held it in his hand, thinking, Now is the time . But—are we back? Did I see nothing more than a residual view of Eldritch, superimposed on Anne? Or perhaps it had been genuine insight, perception of the actual, of their unqualified situation; not just his but all of theirs together.