Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Prologue
Part One: Phil
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Part Two: Nicholas
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Part Three: Phil
28
29
30
Read More from Philip K. Dick
About the Author
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First Mariner Books edition 2020
Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Philip K. Dick
Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhbooks.com
Cover design by Christopher Moisan
Cover photograph: Shutterstock
Author photograph © Frank Ronan
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dick, Philip K, author.
Title: Radio Free Albemuth / Philip K Dick.
Description: First Mariner Books edition. | Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | “Mariner Books.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2020023424 (print) | LCCN 2020023425 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358449034 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358448891 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3554.I3 R3 2020 (print) | LCC PS3554.I3 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023424
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023425
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Prologue
In 1932 in April a small boy and his mother and father waited on an Oakland, California, pier for the San Francisco ferry. The boy, who was almost four years old, noticed a blind beggar, huge and old with white hair and beard, standing with a tin cup. The little boy asked his father for a nickel, which the boy took over to the beggar and gave him. The beggar, in a surprisingly hearty voice, thanked him and gave him back a piece of paper, which the boy took to his father to see what it was.
“It tells about God,” his father said.
The little boy did not know that the beggar was not actually a beggar but a supernatural entity visiting Earth to check up on people. Years later the little boy grew up and became a man. In the year 1974 that man found himself in terrible difficulties, facing disgrace, imprisonment, and possible death. There was no way for him to extricate himself. At that point the supernatural entity returned to Earth, loaned the man a part of his spirit, and saved him from his difficulties. The man never guessed why the supernatural entity came to rescue him. He had long ago forgotten the great bearded blind beggar and the nickel he had given him.
I speak now of these matters.
Part One
Phil
1
My friend Nicholas Brady, who in his own mind helped save the world, was born in Chicago in 1928 but then moved right to California. Most of his life was spent in the Bay Area, especially in Berkeley. He remembered the metal hitching posts in the shape of horses’ heads in front of the old houses in the hilly part of the city, and the electric Red Trains that met the ferries, and, most of all, the fog. Later, by the forties, the fog had ceased to lie over Berkeley in the night.
Originally Berkeley, at the time of the Red Trains and the streetcars, was quiet and underpopulated except for the University, with its illustrious frat houses and fine football team. As a child Nicholas Brady took in a few football games with his father, but he never understood them. He could not even get the team song right. But he did like the Berkeley campus with the trees and quiet groves and Strawberry Creek; most of all he liked the sewer pipe through which the creek ran. The sewer pipe was the best thing on the campus. In summer, when the creek was low, he crawled up and down it. One time some people called him over and asked if he was a college student. He was eleven years old then.
I asked him once why he chose to live his life out in Berkeley, which by the forties had become overcrowded, noisy, and afflicted by angry students who fought it out at the Co-op market as if the stacks of canned food were barricades.
“Shit, Phil,” Nicholas Brady said. “Berkeley is my home.” People who gravitated to Berkeley believed that, even if they had only been there a week. They claimed no other place existed. This became particularly true when the coffeehouses opened up on Telegraph Avenue and the free speech movement started. One time Nicholas was standing in line at the Co-op on Grove and saw Mario Savio in line ahead of him. Savio was smiling and waving at admirers. Nicholas was on campus the day the PHUQUE sign was held up in the cafeteria, and the cops busted the guys holding it. However, he was in the bookstore, browsing, and missed the whole thing.
Although he lived in Berkeley for ever and ever, Nicholas attended the University for only two months, which made him different from everyone else. The others attended the University in perpetuity. Berkeley had an entire population of professional students who never graduated and who had no other goal in life. Nicholas’s nemesis vis-à-vis the University was ROTC, which in his time was still going strong. As a child Nicholas had gone to a progressive or Communist-front nursery school. His mother, who had many friends in the Communist Party in Berkeley in the thirties, sent him there. Later he became a Quaker, and he and his mother sat around in Friends Meeting the way Quakers do, waiting for the Holy Spirit to move them to speak. Nicholas subsequently forgot all that, at least until he enrolled at Cal and found himself given an officer’s uniform and an M-l rifle. Thereupon his unconscious fought back, burdened by old memories; he damaged the gun and could not go through the manual of arms; he came to drill out of uniform; he got failing grades; he was informed that failing grades in ROTC meant automatic expulsion from Cal, to which Nicholas said, “What’s right is right.”
However, instead of letting them expel him, he quit. He was nineteen years old and his academic career was ruined. It had been his plan to become a paleontologist. The other big university in the Bay Area, which was Stanford, cost far too much for him. His
