Philip Dick - In Milton Lumky Territory

Later on he entered a town built on a hillside, on stilts, made entirely out of lumber; he saw no stone or metal, just the reddish wood dark in the early-morning gloom. Nothing stirred. But just past the town he came across more trucks shuddering away and wanting to get back on the road. Only a question of time before he encountered a band of them already in motion. And after that he would make no time at all; he would follow them up the grades and across the top and down the other side, the entire distance to Reno.

Now the road climbed wildly. The woods became forests of pine, lumber country. It was hard to believe that this narrow road was the main highway, US 40; what had happened to the broad four-lane flat pavement between Vallejo and Sacramento? This was like some alternate route, a county or state route used by skiers and fishermen, not by the interstate carriers. Few signs marked it. The ground on each side had been piled up so that the road seemed to cut constantly through masses of reddish dirt, throwing the dirt up car-high. Every now and then he saw construction equipment pulled off and covered by canvas.

Ahead of him the back end of a truck appeared around a curve; he slowed and men shifted down and gunned past it. The first one of them, he thought to himself. And he had not reached the summit.

The Sierras around him—he had to take the word of the Standard Stations roadmap that these were the Sierras—looked like a local recreation area, marred by trail-like side roads, stacks of logs, the twin ruts left by tractors and bulldozers. Every now and men a heap of rubbish, mostly picnic plates and beer cans, reminded him of me swarm of tourist cabins just out of sight beyond the pines. Every tiny dirt road led to them. And, as he reached me summit, he realized that he would be seeing one or more lakes.

The center of me Sierras, he thought. How demoralizing it was. Ahead of him me road rose only slightly; in fact, for me first time he could not tell if he were still climbing. Possibly it was a long, nearly level grade. A sloping field tumbled away to the right side, and he saw that a couple of cars had pulled off. The summit, he decided. Suddenly he discovered that he was stiff and cold and that he needed to go to the bathroom. So he coasted the car from the road, onto the wide dirt shoulder, shut off the motor, and parked.

The mountains were quiet. No wind. No voices. And, for him, the sense of expanse. Opening the car door he stepped unsteadily out. What time was it? Seven-thirty A.M. Here he was, up here by himself. And what a desolate place. A car shot by him along the road, its tires making a furious racket. Cramped throughout his muscles, he lurched about, his hands in his pockets, feeling lousy.

This is no place for me, he decided. A sort of everyone’s vacant lot with trees. He did not feel especially high up. But the air was cold, thin, and bad-smelling. It did not smell of pine needles or earth; it smelled bitter and it made his nose ache. Under his shoes the lumps of dried ground made him stumble. He stepped down the side of a pile of dirt, to a confined spot among shrubs, wee-weed, and then trudged jerkily back up to his car.

I suppose the motor won’t start, he thought to himself as he slammed the door. Up this high the automatic choke always misfunctions. Imagine having to stay here a whole week…but the motor started.

Waiting until a car had hurtled by, he regained the road and in a moment or so had passed on by the top of the next hill. All at once the sun, which had been hidden by the hills and trees, appeared and stabbed him in the eyes; the shattering pale light startled him and confused him and he involuntarily braked his car. From behind him a small pick-up truck shot by and around.

I forgot. Hitting the top at dawn means I have to drive into it the rest of the trip. He had never seen the early-morning sun so spread-out, so large.

Presently he did get a look at the lake; at a couple of them, in fact. They were set off to one side of the road a distance below him, flat, cheerily blue, embedded on what appeared to be a plateau. The trees grew thicker near the lake. He continually glanced out of the window at the lakes, but then a sheer drop in the road, like the side of a ball, made him turn around to keep his mind on his driving. Now that he had passed the peak he found himself descending much more suddenly than he had gone up; the grade dropped him so frighteningly that for a time he did not notice that he had crossed the state line and entered Nevada.

The hills became lesser, unimportant. Once he passed between masses of rock, a dry, barren area. This really is Nevada, he thought. No more vegetation. The water has stopped. Soon he would be out on the desert. And sure enough, he soon was.

What a disappointment. As it had been before when he had driven it. Not like mountains at all…more like a wooded obstacle to commerce that eventually—to everyone’s satisfaction—would be leveled and carted off in trucks in the form of dirt and lumber.

That afternoon, in Reno, he and Ed von Scharf sat upstairs together in the familiar office overlooking the noisy, bazaar-like main floor of the Consumers’ Buying Bureau. His former boss made it known that he was taking his coffee break, so no one tried to interrupt them. To start it off, Bruce told him about his marriage; he showed him a snapshot of Susan that had been taken in Reno the day of their marriage.

“Is she older than you?” von Scharf asked.

“Yes,” he said. “She’s thirty.”

“Are you pretty sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Positive,” he said. He described the R & J Mimeographing Service. He put in every detail. His former boss listened with deep attention.

“Is sidewalk traffic fairly heavy?”

“Yes,” he said. “We get a lot of people who work in office buildings, between eleven and one.”

His former boss said, “I don’t think you’re using your head. What do you actually have? A good location and a small amount to invest, and you have some sort of an outlet with the minimal fixtures and front. Why are you thinking in terms of typewriters?”

“Because it’s a typewriter place.”

“No it isn’t. What did you learn here? To buy whatever was to be had at a good price that we thought we could sell. You should be out searching for anything that you can get cheap that you think you can move, typewriters or vegetables; it doesn’t matter what. But by insisting on a certain item you destroy your position. You enter a seller’s market. The first you know, you’ll start bidding against someone for these Jap machines. Look, you know nothing about typewriters. Second, you have no real reason to suppose you can get yourself a buy. I’ll tell you what’s hot right now. Gasoline. There’s a terrible gas war out on the Coast. Retail gas, the regular, got down to 19¢ a gallon on the Coast this last month. The wholesalers are overstocked out there.”

“We can’t sell gas,” he said. He asked him if he had ever seen the Mithrias machines.

“No,” von Scharf said. “I never even heard of them. As far as I know, none of them have gotten out here.”

“Then we’d have a clear field.”

“How many could you buy for twenty-five hundred dollars? Suppose you have to pay one hundred dollars apiece? That’s only twenty-five of the buggers. That’s nonsense.”

Up to now he hadn’t calculated that. It made him feel cold.

“Not enough to bother with,” his former boss said. “You just don’t have enough capital.”

“I might be able to pick up a bunch of Mithrias cheaper than one hundred apiece,” he said doggedly.

“Maybe so. Well, what did you come here to find out from me?”

“I came because I thought maybe you’d know where I could pick up some of them.”