Radio Free Albemuth Page 6

  “Well, he’s not here now,” Nicholas said. “He’s in Washington DC, three thousand miles away.”

  “But how grotesque,” Rachel said. “To be living in the town where the tyrant was born. Like him, it’s an ugly little house, a dreadful color. I didn’t get out of the car; I didn’t want to go near it, even though it seemed to be open, and people were walking around inside it. Like it was a little museum, probably with exhibits of his schoolbooks and the bed he slept in, like one of those California historical sites you see near the highway.”

  Nicholas turned to gaze at his wife enigmatically.

  “And nobody mentioned this to you?” I said.

  “I don’t think they like to talk about it much,” Rachel said, “the people around here. I think they’d rather keep it secret. Fremont probably paid for it to be made into a historical site himself; I didn’t see any official state marker.”

  “I’d like to go there,” I said.

  “Fremont,” Nicholas ruminated. “The greatest liar in the history of the world. He probably wasn’t actually born there; he probably had a PR firm pick it out as the kind of place he ought to have been born in. I’d like to see it. Drive by there now, Rachel; let’s take a look at it.”

  She made a left turn; presently we were moving along very narrow tree-lined streets, some of which weren’t paved. This was Oldtown; I had been driven through it before.

  “It’s on Santa Fe,” Rachel said. “I remember noticing that and thinking I’d like to ride Fremont out of town on a rail” She pulled up to the curb and parked. “There it is, over there to the right.” She pointed. We could see only dim outlines of houses. Somewhere a TV set played a Spanish program. A dog barked. The air, as usual, was warm. There were no special lights put up around the house where, allegedly, Ferris F. Fremont had been born. Nicholas and I got out of the car and walked over, while Rachel remained in the car, holding the sleeping baby.

  “Well, there’s not much to see, and we can’t get inside tonight,” I said to Nicholas.

  “I want to determine if it’s a place I foresaw in my vision,” Nicholas said.

  “You’re going to have to do that tomorrow.”

  Together he and I walked slowly along the sidewalk; grass grew in the cracks, and once Nicholas stubbed his toe and swore. We arrived at last at the corner, where we halted.

  Bending down, Nicholas examined a word incised in the cement of the sidewalk, a very old word put there some time ago, when the sidewalk had been wet. It was professionally printed.

  “Look!” Nicholas said.

  I bent down and read the word.

  ARAMCHEK

  “That was the original name of this street,” Nicholas said, “evidently. Before they changed it. So that’s where Fremont got the name of that conspiratorial group: from his childhood. From finding it written on the sidewalk. He probably doesn’t even remember now. He must have played here.”

  The idea of Ferris Fremont playing here as a little boy—the idea of Ferris Fremont as a little boy at all, anywhere—was too bizarre to be believed. He had rolled his tricycle by these very houses, skipped over the very cracks we had tripped on in the night; his mother had probably warned him about cars passing along this street. The little boy playing here and inventing fantasies in his head about people passing, about the mysterious word ARAMCHEK inscribed in the cement under his feet, conjecturing over the weeks and months as to what it meant, discerning in a child’s mind secret and occult purposes in it that were to blossom later on in adulthood. Into full-blown, florid, paranoid delusions about a vast conspiratorial organization with no fixed beliefs and no actual membership but somehow a titanic enemy of society, to be hunted out and destroyed wherever found. I wondered how much of this had come into his head while he was still a child. Maybe he had imagined the entire thing then. As an adult he had merely voiced it.

  “Could be the contractor’s name,” I said, “rather than the original street name. They inscribe that too, sometimes, when they’re done with a job.”

  “Maybe it means an inspector had gone by here and completed his job of checking all the arams,” Nicholas said. “What’s an aram? Or it could mean the spot where you check for arams. You stick a metal pole down through a little hole in the pavement and take a reading, like a water-meter reading.” He laughed.

  “It is mysterious,” I said. “It doesn’t sound like a street name. Probably, if it was, it was named after somebody.”

  “An early Slavic settler to Orange County. Originally from the Urals. Raised cattle and wheat. Maybe owned a big land-grant ranch, deeded to him from the Mexicans. I wonder what his brand would be. An aram and then a check mark.”

  “We’re doing what Ferris did,” I said.

  “But along more reasonable lines. We’re not nuts. How much can you get from a single word?”

  “Maybe Ferris Fremont knows more than we do. Maybe he put investigators into it, after he grew up and had money; maybe that was a childhood dream fulfilled: to research the mysterious word ARAMCHEK and find out what it really meant and why they had thought to stick it into the sidewalk forever and ever.”

  “Too bad Ferris didn’t ask someone what the word meant.”

  I said. “He probably did. And he’s still asking. That’s the problem; he still wants to know. He wasn’t satisfied with any of the answers he got—like, ‘It’s the old street name. It’s a contractor.’ That wasn’t enough. It portended more.”

  “It doesn’t portend anything to me,” Nicholas said. “It’s just a weird word stuck in the cement sidewalk that’s been here God knows how many years. Let’s go.” He and I returned to the car and presently Rachel was driving us all back to the apartment.

  9SEVERAL years after Ferris F. Fremont had been elected President of the United States, I moved from the Bay Area to Southern California to be with my friend Nicholas Brady. I had been doing well in my writing career; in 1963 I had won the Hugo award for best science fiction novel of the year for my novel The Man in the High Castle. That book had to do with an imaginary alternate Earth in which Germany and Japan had won World War II and had divided the United States between them, with a buffer zone in the middle. I had written several other well received novels and was beginning to get solid critical comment, especially on my really insane novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which had to do with long hallucinogenic trips by the characters under the influence of psychedelic drugs. It was my first work dealing with drugs, and it soon earned me the reputation of being involved with drugs myself. This notoriety paid off well in sales but came back later on to haunt me.

  My real trouble concerning drugs came when Harlan Ellison in his anthology Dangerous Visions said in an introduction to a story of mine that it was ‘written under the influence of LSD,’ which of course was not correct. After that I had a really dreadful reputation as a doper, thanks to Marian’s desire for publicity. Later on I was able to add a paragraph to the afterword of the story stating that Harlan had not told the truth, but the harm was done. The police began to become interested in me and in the people who visited me. This became particularly true when the tyrant became President in the spring of 1969 and the darkness of oppression closed over the United States.

  In his inaugural statement, Ferris Fremont discussed the Vietnam War, in which the United States had been actively involved for a number of years, and declared it to be a two-front war: one front six thousand miles away and the other front here at home. He meant, he explained later, the internal war against Aramchek and all that it espoused. This was really one war fought in two areas of the world; and the more important battlefield, Fremont declared, consisted of the one here, for it was here that the survival of the United States would be decided. The gooks could not really invade us, he explained, and take us over; but Aramchek could. Aramchek had grown more and more during the last two administrations. Now that a Republican had been returned to office, Aramchek would be dealt with, after which the Vietnam War could finally be won.
It could never be won, Fremont explained, so long as Aramchek operated at home, sapping the vitality and will of the American people, destroying their determination to fight. The antiwar sentiment in the United States, according to Fremont, derived from Aramchek and its efforts.

  As soon as he had been sworn in as President, Ferris Fremont declared open war on the surface manifestations of Aramchek and fanned out from there in all directions.

  The defensive operation at home was titled Mission Checkup, this term having obvious medical connotations. It had to do with the basic moral health of America, Fremont explained when he directed the intelligence community to get under way. The basic premise was that antiwar sentiment sprang from a vast and secret subversive organization. President Fremont proposed to heal America of its sickness; he would destroy the ‘tree of evil,’ as he termed Aramchek, by ‘rooting out its seed,’ a metaphor that didn’t even mix, let alone wash. The ‘seeds of the tree of evil’ were the antiwar dissidents, of whom I was one. Already in trouble with the authorities for my alleged drug involvement, I was doubly in hot water due to my antiwar stand, both in my published writings and in discussions and speeches. The drug element made me vulnerable; it was a terrible liability for someone who wanted to oppose the war. All the authorities needed to do was nail me on a drug charge and they would forever destroy my effectiveness as a political person. I knew they knew that, too. It did not make for restful nights.

  However, I was not the only worried person in America. Because of his old left-wing days in Berkeley, Nicholas was beginning to wonder how safe he was now that Ferris F. Fremont had come to power and had launched Mission Checkup. After all, Nicholas occupied a high position at Progressive Records, a firm doing very / well; it was the typical goal of Mission Checkup to discern people like Nicholas—‘sleepers.’ Fremont deemed them—and expose them to the harsh light of day. For this purpose the government began to hire and employ what they called ‘Friends of the American People,’ agents out of uniform who went around and checked up on anyone suspected of being a threat to security, either for what he had once done, such as Nicholas, or what he was doing now, such as me, or for what he might do in the future, as was possible with all of us. Thus no one was entirely ruled out. The FAPers wore white armbands with a star-in-a-circle on it, and pretty soon they were seen everywhere in the United States, diligently investigating the moral state of hundreds of thousands of citizens.

  In the flatlands of the Midwest the government had begun to build large detention facilities, for the restriction and housing of those brought in by the FAPers and other para-police agencies. These facilities would not be used, President Fremont explained in a televised speech, “unless and until necessary,” meaning unless and until resistance to the war got significantly stronger. The message was clear to anyone contemplating opposition to the Vietnam War; he might find himself living in Nebraska and hoeing a collective turnip field. This therefore acted as a deterrent and since the camps did not see actual use they were not subject to juridical review. As threat they were sufficient.

  Personally, I had one nasty run-in with a FAP undercover agent, one without an armband. He wrote me on letterhead paper, pretending to represent a small student FM station near Irvine; he wanted, he said, to interview me because the Irvine students were interested in my work. I wrote him and agreed, but after he showed up it was evident, before he had asked three questions, that he was a plainclothes FAPer. After asking me if I had secretly written any porno novels, he suddenly began to shout wild accusatory questions at me. Did I take drugs? Was I the father of any illegitimate black science fiction writers? Was I God as well as the head of the Communist Party? And, of course, was Aramchek financing me? It was an upsetting experience; I had to physically evict him—I could hear him standing outside still shouting at me even after I shut and locked the door. After that I was very careful as to whom I let interview me.

  More damaging to me than the FAPer posing as an interviewer from a student radio station was the break-in of my house in late 1971, in which my files were forcibly blown open with plastic military explosives and thoroughly burglarized. I returned home to find water and rubble all over the floor, the file in ruins, and most of my business papers and all of my canceled checks gone. The entire house had been ransacked; windows in the back had been broken in, and door locks smashed. The police performed only a perfunctory investigation, telling me slyly that they believed I had done it myself.

  “Why?” I asked the police inspector in charge.

  “Oh,” he said, grinning, “to throw suspicion off yourself, probably.”

  No one was ever arrested, although the police admitted at one point that they knew who had done it and where my stolen possessions now were. What they did say, though, of a positive nature, was that although I would not get my things back, on the other hand I would not be arrested. Evidently they had found nothing sufficient to incriminate me. That experience greatly colored my life. It made me aware how far the abuses of power and the destruction of our constitutional liberties had gone under President Fremont. I told as many people as I could / about the break-in and burglary of my house, but I discovered very quickly that most people did not want to know, even antiwar liberals. They showed either fear or apathy, and several hinted, as the police had, that most likely I had done it myself, in order to ‘throw off suspicion’; of what they did not say.

  Of my friends who were genuinely sympathetic, Nicholas remained foremost. However, he thought my house had been hit and my papers stolen because of him. He imagined that he was the real target.

  “They wanted to find out if you were going to write about me,” he said. “You’re the one who could publicize them, by putting them in a science fiction novel. Millions of people would read it. The secret would be out.”

  “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 cancelled 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 cov
er 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—”