God, I thought, I’ve been doing what it told me for years. Moving down to Southern California, going to work for Progressive Records—what am I going to do when they shoot it down? What’ll my life be built around? But then I thought, Maybe Valis will install another satellite in its place. He could do that; with his foresight he would know the Soviet intentions long in advance—from the start, in fact. You cannot take him by surprise.
Or maybe you can.
It is possible, I said to myself as I tailgated a big truck in the right-hand lane, that the satellite has done its job. Already transmitted everything in its banks. But I’m used to hearing its voice, that lovely AI voice, informing me, comforting me, helping me . . . look what it did for Johnny; look what it had done for me. To be deprived of that . . .
What else have I got to live for? I asked myself. What else did I ever have to live for? My relationship with Rachel isn’t all that much; I love my son, but I see him so rarely; my work is important but not that important. Something such as I have had, to hear that AI voice—it is worse to lose it than it was good ever to have had it. It hurts so much.
Pain of loss, I thought; the greatest pain in the world. My friend will one day soon cease talking with me. That day lies imminently ahead, as surely as the fact that right now the U.S.S.R. is preparing to launch an intercept satellite. The worldwide tyranny has spotted its enemy and now moves. The big blind engine is being cranked up.
When they blow that satellite out of the sky, I realized, they might as well blow me out of the sky as well. Being rescued from that shoe ad letter accomplishes nothing, now. All the help, all the knowledge and insight, all the coaching and guiding—down the rathole, for nothing: gone. And not just for me; for everybody who wanted a just society, who wanted to be free. For those who heard the AI voice and those who did not: our fate is the same. The one friend we had will one of these days be wiped away as if it never existed.
I felt the decay of the universe as I drove along the freeway: coldness and illness and final oblivion.
I suppose, I said to myself, I could rationalize it and say that because of Valis’s help I have met a nice new girl, attractive and smart . . . with a life expectancy measured in inches. We have been brought together just in time to go up in smoke. Plans, hopes, dreams—all reduced to smoke. Particles of a satellite which came here to be destroyed, the same as us: born to be blown up. The hell with it all, I thought wretchedly. Better not to have started this or tried. Better not to have even known help existed, to have imagined something happier for us in our lives.
When you attack a tyranny you must expect it to fight back. Why not? Why shouldn’t it? How could I, with some idea of its nature, expect anything else? An H-warhead for the ETI satellite; cancer for Sadassa Silvia; if the shoe ad trap had worked, prison for me—prison or death.
Meditating about this I did not comprehend—or maybe I comprehended well enough and didn’t care—that the truck ahead of me had slowed. Its brake lights came on; I didn’t notice. I kept on going in my little VW bug, right on into the tail assembly, the huge iron rear bumper, of the truck.
I heard nothing and felt nothing, no concussion or shock. All I saw was my windshield turn into a billion broken Coke bottle bottoms, a strange pattern like a giant spiderweb engulfing me. Fallen into the spiderweb, I remember thinking. To be eaten later. The spiderweb, but where is the spider? I thought. Gone away.
Liquid had spilled over my neck and chest. It was my own blood.
23
The din around me was terrible. Wheeled down a ramp, strapped flat; I tried to turn my head hut could not. Voices, movement; a face peered down at me, a woman’s face, and I heard a woman’s voice. She was flashing a light in my eyes and telling me to do something. I could not do it. Sorry, I thought.
“Are you in a health plan?” another voice asked insistently. “Do you have Blue Cross? Can you sign this form, if I hold it for you? Here’s a pencil. You may sign it with your left hand if you wish.”
The hell with you, I thought.
I could see two California Highway Patrolmen in their brown uniforms, standing off to one side with a clipboard, looking bored.
Wheelchairs, gurneys. Little young nurses in short skirts, and a crucifix on the wall.
Beside me a Highway Patrol officer bent down and said, “Don’t let your insurance company fix up your car. It’s leaking oil from the motor. The block is cracked.”
“Okay,” I managed to whisper. I felt nothing, thought nothing.
“I’m going to have to cite you, Mr. Brady,” the Highway Patrol officer said. “For following too close and driving at an unsafe speed. I have your license; we’re checking for warrants. You’re going right into surgery, so I’ll return your license to the personal property office of the hospital. It’ll be with your other things, your wallet and keys and money.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The officer departed. I lay there alone, thinking to myself, What the hell, what the hell. They should call somebody, I thought. Rachel. They ought to notify her; I should tell them. Remind them. What do they care? I thought, I wonder what hospital this is. I was driving—where? Just into Orange County. I never made it back to Placentia, back
