“What secret?” I asked.
“The fact that I represent an extraterrestrial authority greater than any human power, whose time is destined to come.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I think they were interested in me, since it was my house they hit and my papers they read or stole.”
“They wanted to see if we formed an organization.”
“They wanted to see who I know,” I said. “And what organizations I belong to and give money to; that’s why they took all my canceled checks, every last one of them, years, decades of them. That hardly suggests anything about you and your dreams.”
“Are you writing about me?” Nicholas asked.
“No,” I said.
“Just make sure you don’t give my actual name. I have to protect myself.”
“Christ,” I said angrily, “nobody can protect themselves these days, with Mission Checkup going on and all those pimple-faced little FAPers creeping around peering through their Coke-bottle-bottom glasses. We’re all going to wind up in the Nebraska camps and you fucking well know it, Nick. How can you expect to be spared? Look what happened to me—they took years of my notes for future books; they effectively wiped me out. Just the intimidation alone . . . hell, every time I write a few pages I know I can come home from the store and find it all gone again, like I did that day. Nothing is safe, nothing and no one.”
“You think there’ve been other burglaries like yours?” Nicholas asked.
“Yes.”
“I haven’t read about them in the papers.”
I gazed at him for a long time.
“I guess they wouldn’t be reported,” he mumbled lamely.
“Not really, no,” I said. “Mine wasn’t. It was just listed under all the thefts for the week in the county. ‘Six hundred dollars’ worth of stereo reported stolen by Philip K. Dick of Placentia, on the night of November eighteenth, 1971.’ No mention of papers stolen or canceled checks stolen or files blown open. As if it were an ordinary burglary by junkies for something they could sell. No mention of the wall beside the files burned black by the heat of the blast. No mention of the big heap of water-soaked towels and rugs piled in the bathroom, which they used to cover the file when they detonated the C-three; it creates such heat that if—”
“You certainly know a lot about it,” Nicholas said.
“I’ve asked,” I said shortly.
Nicholas said, “I wonder if my four hundred pages of notes are safe. Maybe I should put them in a safe deposit box in a bank somewhere.”
“Subversive dreams,” I said.
“They’re not dreams.”
“The dream-control police. Sniffing out subversive dreams.”
“Are you sure it was the police who hit your house?” Nicholas said. “It could have been a private group, sore at you because, say—well, say because of the pro-drug stand in your books.”
“There never has been and never will be any ‘pro-drug stand’ in my books,” I said angrily. “I write about drugs and drug use, but that doesn’t mean I’m pro-drug; other people write about crime and about criminals, but that doesn’t make them pro-crime.”
“Your books are hard to understand. They may have been misinterpreted, especially after Harlan Ellison wrote what he wrote about you. Your books are so—well, they’re nuts.”
“I guess so,” I said.
Nicholas said, “Really, Phil, you write the strangest books of anybody in the U.S., really psychotic books, books about crazy people and people on drugs, freaks and misfits of every description; in fact, of the kind never before described. You can’t blame the government for being curious about the kind of person who would write such books, can you? I mean, your main character is always outside the system, a loser who finally somehow—”
“Et tu, Nicholas,” I said, with real outrage.
“Sorry, Phil, but—well, why can’t you write about normal people, the way other authors do? Normal people with normal interests who do normal things. Instead, when your books open, there is this misfit holding down some miserable low job, and he takes drugs and his girlfriend is in a mental institution but he still loves her—”
“Okay!” I interrupted. “I know it was the authorities who broke into my house because the house behind me was evacuated. And the black family that lives there has ten children, so someone is always there, constantly. The night of the burglary I noticed the house behind me was completely empty, and it stayed empty an entire week. And the broken windows and doors of my house were all in the rear, adjoining it. No private burglars would evacuate a whole house. It was the authorities.”
“They’ll get you again, Phil,” Nicholas said. “Probably they wanted to see what your next book is about. What is your next book about, anyhow?”
“Not you,” I said. “I can tell you that.”
“Did they find the MS?”
“The MS of my new book,” I told him, “was in my attorney’s safe. I transferred it there a month before the hit on my house.”
“What’s the book about?”
After a pause I said, “A police state in America modeled on the Soviet Gulag prison system. A police slave-labor state here. It’s called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.”
“Why’d you put the manuscript in your lawyer’s safe?”
I said, reluctantly, “Well, I—shit, Nick. To tell you the truth, I had a dream.”
Silence for a time.
10
Nicholas had been right to be apprehensive about the FAP interest in him. Not long thereafter, as he sat at his desk in his office at Progressive Records, listening to a tape of a new singer, two FAPers paid him a surprise visit. The two government agents had fat red necks and both wore modern single-breasted polyester suits and stylish ties. They were middle-aged and heavyset; they carried briefcases, which they placed on the desk between them and Nicholas. Nicholas was reminded of the two FBI agents who had visited him years ago in Berkeley, but this
