"Dick, Philip K - The Penultimate Truth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH
by Philip K. Dick




Copyright 1964 by Philip K. Dick

Afterword copyright 1984 by Thomas M. Disch

Cover art by Barclay Shaw

A Bluejay Book, published by arrangement with the Author's Estate.

For information, contact Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the express written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information, contact Bluejay Books Inc., 130 West Forty-second Street, New York, New York 10036.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Bluejay printing, January 1984


For information about the Philip K. Dick Society, write to the Society at Box 611, Glen Ellen, California 95442.







THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH





1


A fog can drift in from outside and get you; it can invade. At the long high window of his library--an Ozymandiasian structure built from concrete chunks that had once in another age formed an entrance ramp to the Bayshore Freeway--Joseph Adams pondered, watched the fog, that of the Pacific. And because this was evening and the world was darkening, this fog scared him as much as that other fog, the one inside which did not invade but stretched and stirred and filled the empty portions of the body. Usually the latter fog is called loneliness.
"Fix me a drink," Colleen said plaintively from behind him.
"Your arm," he said, "it fell off? You can't squeeze the lemon?" He turned from the window with its view of dead trees, the Pacific beyond and its layer in the sky, darkness hanging and approaching, and for a moment actually considered fixing her the drink. And then he knew what he had to do, where he had to be:
At the marble-top desk which had been salvaged from a bombed-out house in the Russian Hill section of the former city of San Francisco he seated himself at the rhetorizor, touched its _on_-tab.
Groaning, Colleen disappeared to search for a leady to fix her the drink. Joseph Adams, at his desk and rhetorizor, heard her go and was glad. For some reason--but here he did not care to probe his own mind too deeply--he was lonelier with Colleen Hackett than without her, and anyhow late on Sunday night he fixed a dreadful drink; it was always too sweet, as if by mistake one of his leadies had dug up a bottle of Tokay and he had used it, not dry vermouth, in the martinis. Ironically, left to themselves, the leadies never made that error . . . was this an omen? Joe Adams wondered. Are they getting smarter than us?
At the keyboard of the rhetorizor he typed, carefully, the substantive he wanted. _Squirrel_. Then, after a good two minutes of sluggish, deep thought, the limiting adjective _smart_.
"Okay," he said, aloud, and sat back, touched the rerun tab.
The rhetorizor, as Colleen reentered the library with her tall gin drink, began to construct for him in the auddimension. "It is a wise old squirrel," it said tinnily (it possessed only a two-inch speaker), "and yet this little fellow's wisdom is not its own; nature has endowed it--"
"Aw god," Joe Adams said savagely, and slapped off the sleek, steel and plastic machine with all its many microcomponents; it became silent. He then noticed Colleen. "Sorry. But I'm tired. Why can't they, Brose or General Holt or Marshal Harenzany, _somebody_ in a position of responsibility, put Sunday night somewhere between Friday noon and--"
"Dear," Colleen said, and sighed. "I heard you type out only two semantic units. Give it more to ogpon."