Philip Dick - A Maze of Death

“He always was on the verge of a breakdown,” Glen Belsnor said. “With those goddam ‘trances’ he went into. He probably heard the voice of God telling him to kill Bert.”

“Did he say anything? Before you killed him?”

“‘I killed the Form Destroyer.’ That’s what he said. And then he pointed at Bert’s body and said, ‘See?’ Or something like that.” He shrugged weakly. “Well, Bert was very old. Very much decayed. The handiwork of the Form Destroyer was all over him, God knows. Tony seemed to recognize me. But he was completely insane anyhow. It was all crap he was saying, and then he went for the sword.”

They were both silent for a time.

“Four dead now,” Babble said. “Maybe more.”

“Why do you say ‘maybe more’?”

Babble said, “I’m thinking of those who left the settlement this morning. Maggie, the new man Russell, Seth and Mary Morley—”

“They’re probably all right.” But he did not believe his own words. “No,” he say savagely, “they’re probably all dead. Maybe all seven of them.”

“Try to calm down,” Babble said; he seemed a little afraid. “Is that gun of yours still loaded?”

“Yes.” Glen Belsnor picked it up, emptied it, handed the shells to Babble. “You can keep them. No matter what happens I’m not going to shoot anyone else. Not even to save one of the rest of us or all of the rest of us.” He made his way to a chair, seated himself, clumsily got out a cigarette and lit up.

“If there’s a court of inquiry,” Babble said, “I’ll be glad to testify that Tony Dunkelwelt was psychiatrically insane. But I can’t testify to his killing old Bert, or attacking you. I mean to say, I have only your verbal report for that.” He added quickly, “But of course I believe you.”

“There won’t be any inquiry.” He knew it was an absolute verity; there was no doubt in him on that score. “Except,” he said, “a posthumous one. Which won’t matter to us.”

“Are you keeping a log of some sort?” Babble asked.

“No.”

“You should.”

“Okay,” he snarled, “I will. But just leave me alone, goddam it!” He glared at Babble, panting with anger. “Lay off!”

“Sorry,” Babble said in a small voice, and shrank perceptibly away.

Glen Belsnor said, “You and I and Mrs. Rockingham may be the only ones alive.” He felt it intuitively, in a rush of comprehension.

“Perhaps we should round her up and stay with her. So that nothing happens to her.” Babble cringed his way to the door.

“Okay.” He nodded irritably. “You know what I’m going to do? You go stay with Mrs. Rockingham; I’m going to go over Russell’s possessions and his noser. Ever since you and Morley brought him around last night I’ve been wondering about him. He seems odd. Did you get that impression?”

“It’s just that he’s new here.”

“I didn’t feel that way about Ben Tallchief. Or the Morleys.” He got abruptly to his feet. “You know what occurred to me? Maybe he picked up the aborted signal from the satellite. I want to get a good look at his transmitter and receiver.” Back to what I know, he pondered. Where I don’t feel so alone.

Leaving Babble, he made his way toward the area in which all the nosers lay parked. He did not look back.

The signal from the satellite, he reasoned, short as it was, may have brought him here. He may have been already in the area, not on his way here but preparing a flyby. And yet he had transfer papers. The hell with it, he thought, and began taking apart the radio equipment of Russell’s noser.

Fifteen minutes later he knew the answer. Standard receiver and transmitter, exactly like the others in all their other nosers. Russell would not have been able to pick up the satellite’s signal because it was a flea-signal. Only the big receiver on Delmak-O could have monitored it. Russell had come in on the automatic pilot, like everybody else. And in the way that everybody else arrived.

So much for that, he said to himself.

Most of Russell’s possessions remained aboard the noser; he had only carried his personal articles from the noser to his living quarters. A big box of books. Everybody had books. Glen Belsnor idly tossed the books about, prowling deep in the carton. Textbook after textbook on economics; that figured. Microtapes of several of the great classics, including Tolkien, Milton, Virgil, Homer. All the epics, he realized. Plus War and Peace, as well as tapes of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. I always meant to read that, he said to himself.

Nothing about the books and tapes struck him as odd. Except …

No copy of Specktowsky’s Book.

Maybe Russell, like Maggie Walsh, had memorized it.

Maybe not.

There was one class of people who did not carry a copy of Specktowsky’s Book—did not carry it because they were not allowed to read it. The ostriches shut up in the planetwide aviary at Terra: those who lived in the sandpile because they had crumbled under the enormous psychological pressure suffered while emigrating. Since all the other planets of the Sol System were uninhabitable, emigration meant a trip to another star system … and the insidious beginning, for many, of the space illness of loneliness and uprootedness.

Maybe he recovered, Glen Belsnor reflected, and they let him loose. But they then would have made sure he owned a copy of Specktowsky’s Book; that would be the time when one really needed it.

He got away, he said to himself.

But why would he come here?

And then he thought, The Interplan West base, where General Treaton operates, is on Terra, tangent to the aviary. What a coincidence. The place, evidently, where all the nonliving organisms on Delmak-O had been constructed. As witness the inscription in the tiny replica of the Building.

In a sense it fits together, he decided. But in another sense it adds up to zero. Plain, flat zero.

These deaths, he said to himself, they’re making me insane, too. Like they did poor nutty Tony Dunkelwelt. But suppose: a psychological lab, operated by Interplan West, needing aviary patients as subjects. They recruit a batch—those bastards would, too—and one of them is Ned Russell. He’s still insane, but they can teach him; the insane can learn, too. They give him a job and send him out to do it—send him here.

And then a gross, vivid, terrifying thought came to him. Suppose we’re all ostriches from the aviary, he said to himself. Suppose we don’t know; Interplan West cut a memory conduit in our friggin’ brains. That would explain our inability to function as a group. That’s why we can’t really even talk clearly to one another. The insane can learn, but one thing they can’t do is to function collectively… except, perhaps, as a mob. But that is not really functioning in the sane sense; that is merely mass insanity.

So we are an experiment, then, he thought. I now know what we wanted to know. And it might explain why I have that tattoo stuck away on my right instep, that Persus 9.

But all this was a great deal to base on one slim datum: the fact that Russell did not possess a copy of Specktowsky’s Book.

Maybe it’s in his goddam living quarters, he thought all at once. Christ, of course; it’s there.

He departed from the assembly of nosers; ten minutes later he reached the common and found himself stepping up onto the porch. The porch where Susie Smart had died—opposite to the porch where Tony Dunkelwelt and old Bert had died.

We must bury them! he realized.—And shrank from it.

But first: I’ll look at Russell’s remaining stuff.

The door was locked.

With a prybar—taken from his rolypoly aggregate of worldly goods, his great black crowish conglomeration of junk and treasures—he forced open the door.