Electric Dreams Read online

  The car was out. He’d never get through. They’d be waiting for him. It was ten miles on foot. Ten long miles over rough ground, gulleys and open fields and hills of uncut forest. He’d have to go alone.

  Loyce opened the door. For a brief second he looked back at his wife and son. Then he slammed the door behind him and raced down the porch steps.

  A moment later he was on his way, hurrying swiftly through the darkness toward the edge of town.

  The early morning sunlight was blinding. Loyce halted, gasping for breath, swaying back and forth. Sweat ran down in his eyes. His clothing was torn, shredded by the brush and thorns through which he had crawled. Ten miles—on his hands and knees. Crawling, creeping through the night. His shoes were mud-caked. He was scratched and limping, utterly exhausted.

  But ahead of him lay Oak Grove.

  He took a deep breath and started down the hill. Twice he stumbled and fell, picking himself up and trudging on. His ears rang. Everything receded and wavered. But he was there. He had got out, away from Pikeville.

  A farmer in a field gaped at him. From a house a young woman watched in wonder. Loyce reached the road and turned onto it. Ahead of him was a gasoline station and a drive-in. A couple of trucks, some chickens pecking in the dirt, a dog tied with a string.

  The white-clad attendant watched suspiciously as he dragged himself up to the station. ‘Thank God.’ He caught hold of the wall. ‘I didn’t think I was going to make it. They followed me most of the way. I could hear them buzzing. Buzzing and flitting around behind me.’

  ‘What happened?’ the attendant demanded. ‘You in a wreck? A hold-up?’

  Loyce shook his head wearily. ‘They have the whole town. The City Hall and the police station. They hung a man from the lamppost. That was the first thing I saw. They’ve got all the roads blocked. I saw them hovering over the cars coming in. About four this morning I got beyond them. I knew it right away. I could feel them leave. And then the sun came up.’

  The attendant licked his lip nervously. ‘You’re out of your head. I better get a doctor.’

  ‘Get me into Oak Grove,’ Loyce gasped. He sank down on the gravel. ‘We’ve got to get started—cleaning them out. Got to get started right away.’

  They kept a tape recorder going all the time he talked. When he had finished the Commissioner snapped off the recorder and got to his feet. He stood for a moment, deep in thought. Finally he got out his cigarettes and lit up slowly, a frown on his beefy face.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ Loyce said.

  The Commissioner offered him a cigarette. Loyce pushed it impatiently away. ‘Suit yourself.’ The Commissioner moved over to the window and stood for a time looking out at the town of Oak Grove. ‘I believe you,’ he said abruptly.

  Loyce sagged. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘So you got away.’ The Commissioner shook his head. ‘You were down in your cellar instead of at work. A freak chance. One in a million.’

  Loyce sipped some of the black coffee they had brought him. ‘I have a theory,’ he murmured.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘About them. Who they are. They take over one area at a time. Starting at the top—the highest level of authority. Working down from there in a widening circle. When they’re firmly in control they go on to the next town. They spread, slowly, very gradually. I think it’s been going on for a long time.’

  ‘A long time?’

  ‘Thousands of years. I don’t think it’s new.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘When I was a kid . . . A picture they showed us in Bible League. A religious picture—an old print. The enemy gods, defeated by Jehovah. Moloch, Beelzebub, Moab, Baalin, Ashtaroth—’

  ‘So?’

  ‘They were all represented by figures.’ Loyce looked up at the Commissioner. ‘Beelzebub was represented as—a giant fly.’ The Commissioner grunted. ‘An old struggle.’

  ‘They’ve been defeated. The Bible is an account of their defeats. They make gains—but finally they’re defeated.’

  ‘Why defeated?’

  ‘They can’t get everyone. They didn’t get me. And they never got the Hebrews. The Hebrews carried the message to the whole world. The realization of the danger. The two men on the bus. I think they understood. Had escaped, like I did.’ He clenched his fists. ‘I killed one of them. I made a mistake. I was afraid to take a chance.’

  The Commissioner nodded. ‘Yes, they undoubtedly had escaped, as you did. Freak accidents. But the rest of the town was firmly in control.’ He turned from the window, ‘Well, Mr Loyce. You seem to have figured everything out.’

  ‘Not everything. The hanging man. The dead man hanging from the lamppost. I don’t understand that. Why? Why did they deliberately hang him there?’

  ‘That would seem simple.’ The Commissioner smiled faintly. ‘Bait.’

  Loyce stiffened. His heart stopped beating. ‘Bait? What do you mean?’

  ‘To draw you out. Make you declare yourself. So they’d know who was under control—and who had escaped.’

  Loyce recoiled with horror. ‘Then they expected failures! They anticipated—’ He broke off. ‘They were ready with a trap.’

  ‘And you showed yourself. You reacted. You made yourself known.’ The Commissioner abruptly moved toward the door. ‘Come along, Loyce. There’s a lot to do. We must get moving. There’s no time to waste.’

  Loyce started slowly to his feet, numbed. ‘And the man. Who was the man? I never saw him before. He wasn’t a local man. He was a stranger. All muddy and dirty, his face cut, slashed—’

  There was a strange look on the Commissioner’s face as he answered, ‘Maybe,’ he said softly, ‘you’ll understand that, too. Come along with me, Mr Loyce.’ He held the door open, his eyes gleaming. Loyce caught a glimpse of the street in front of the police station. Policemen, a platform of some sort. A telephone pole—and a rope! ‘Right this way,’ the Commissioner said, smiling coldly.

  As the sun set, the vice-president of the Oak Grove Merchants’ Bank came up out of the vault, threw the heavy time locks, put on his hat and coat, and hurried outside onto the sidewalk. Only a few people were there, hurrying home to dinner.

  ‘Good night,’ the guard said, locking the door after him.

  ‘Good night,’ Clarence Mason murmured. He started along the street toward his car. He was tired. He had been working all day down in the vault, examining the layout of the safety deposit boxes to see if there was room for another tier. He was glad to be finished.

  At the corner he halted. The street lights had not yet come on. The street was dim. Everything was vague. He looked around—and froze.

  From the telephone pole in front of the police station, something large and shapeless hung. It moved a little with the wind.

  What the hell was it?

  Mason approached it warily. He wanted to get home. He was tired and hungry. He thought of his wife, his kids, a hot meal on the dinner table. But there was something about the dark bundle, something ominous and ugly. The light was bad; he couldn’t tell what it was. Yet it drew him on, made him move closer for a better look. The shapeless thing made him uneasy. He was frightened by it. Frightened—and fascinated.

  And the strange part was that nobody else seemed to notice it.

  Introduction by Tony Grisoni

  Story Title: Sales Pitch

  Script Title: Crazy Diamond

  Tony Grisoni is a writer and director known for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Red Riding trilogy, Southcliffe and In This World. He is currently adapting China Mieville’s novel The City and the City into a television series for the BBC.

  Some years ago, when researching into the life of Philip K. Dick, I chanced upon a small green frog that sat motionless on the shower head. Every morning the frog was there in the same position. I worried in case he should jump and land on me—the thought of that damp amphibious body!—but he remained motionless. For three days. Then on the third day I studied his face clo
sely and was just thinking how there was a certain resemblance to PKD when he moved for the first time, turned his green head and looked straight back at me. I decided it was time to go home.

  Philip K. Dick wrote Sales Pitch for Future Science Fiction magazine in 1954. The short story describes the stagnating lives of Ed and Sally. Ed’s tedious commute from Ganymede to Earth, plagued by intrusive advertising, is not light-years away from many commuters’ experience in this 21st century of rampant consumerism and surveillance that has invaded the most private corners of our lives. Ed’s dream of starting over on the new worlds of Proxima Centaurus remains just that—an escapist fantasy. Meanwhile Ed’s wife, Sally, opens the door to a ‘Fasrad’—a domestic robot which has the answer to every problem a homeowner might have. What begins as a humorous—if insistent—flirtation spirals into full-blown farce as the Fasrad aggressively attempts to sell itself. The interloping robot terrorises the human couple and, in an effort to exorcise the Fasrad, Ed takes it on a doomed journey towards Proxima.

  The story is powerfully informed by the burgeoning consumerism of the 50s, but there was something touching about this couple crushed by market forces. Ed and Sally are trusting and stoical and hopeful, they don’t ask for much, but what they get is drudgery and economic slavery. So when freely adapting for the screen I kept Ed and Sally as the central characters, developing them and their relationship in line with other couples I found in Philip K. Dick’s writing. Ed remains a dreamer—though now a fantasy mariner of the Seven Seas—and Sally, though apparently conventional and fond of homespun philosophy, harbours her own dark desires of adventure. The suburban couple are prisoners to relentless exhortations to care for an environment they have little control over—decisions being made from somewhere far outside their orbit.

  In my version of the tale—guided by Phildickian themes—the interloper becomes a noir femme fatale and Ed is compromised by his attraction to her. Of course, in the end the femme fatale surprises us all with her serpentine scheming, but so does Sally, and Ed too when he is freed of everything he believed he owned. So in many ways the story returns to the original concerns of consumerism. PKD voiced his worries about the tale in 1978: ‘I really deplore the ending. So when you read the story, try to imagine it as it ought to have been written. The Fasrad says, “Sir, I am here to help you. The hell with my sales pitch. Let’s be together forever.”’ And so I hope Phil would approve of our new ending where humans and quasi-humans are indeed married forever—or at least for a foreseeable future—and I need worry no longer about a small green frog leaping on me in the shower.

  Tony Grisoni

  Stoke Newington, London

  17 May 2017

  Sales Pitch

  Commute ships roared on all sides, as Ed Morris made his way wearily home to Earth at the end of a long hard day at the office. The Ganymede-Terra lanes were choked with exhausted, grim-faced businessmen; Jupiter was in opposition to Earth and the trip was a good two hours. Every few million miles the great flow slowed to a grinding, agonized halt; signal-lights flashed as streams from Mars and Saturn fed into the main traffic-arteries.

  ‘Lord,’ Morris muttered. ‘How tired can you get?’ He locked the autopilot and momentarily turned from the control-board to light a much-needed cigarette. His hands shook. His head swam. It was past six; Sally would be fuming; dinner would be spoiled. The same old thing. Nerve-wracking driving, honking horns and irate drivers zooming past his little ship, furious gesturing, shouting, cursing . . .

  And the ads. That was what really did it. He could have stood everything else—but the ads, the whole long way from Ganymede to Earth. And on Earth, the swarms of sales robots; it was too much. And they were everywhere.

  He slowed to avoid a fifty-ship smash-up. Repair-ships were scurrying around trying to get the debris out of the lane. His audio-speaker wailed as police rockets hurried up. Expertly, Morris raised his ship, cut between two slow-moving commercial transports, zipped momentarily into the unused left lane, and then sped on, the wreck left behind. Horns honked furiously at him; he ignored them.

  ‘Trans-Solar Products greets you!’ an immense voice boomed in his ear. Morris groaned and hunched down in his seat. He was getting near Terra; the barrage was increasing. ‘Is your tension-index pushed over the safety-margin by the ordinary frustrations of the day? Then you need an Id-Persona Unit. So small it can be worn behind the ear, close to the frontal lobe—’

  Thank God, he was past it. The ad dimmed and receded behind, as his fast-moving ship hurtled forward. But another was right ahead.

  ‘Drivers! Thousands of unnecessary deaths each year from inter-planet driving. Hypno-Motor Control from an expert source-point ensures your safety. Surrender your body and save your life!’ The voice roared louder. ‘Industrial experts say—’

  Both audio ads, the easiest to ignore. But now a visual ad was forming; he winced, closed his eyes, but it did no good.

  ‘Men!’ an unctuous voice thundered on all sides of him. ‘Banish internally-caused obnoxious odors forever. Removal by modern painless methods of the gastrointestinal tract and substitution system will relieve you of the most acute cause of social rejection.’ The visual image locked; a vast nude girl, blonde hair disarranged, blue eyes half shut, lips parted, head tilted back in sleep-drugged ecstasy. The features ballooned as the lips approached his own. Abruptly the orgiastic expression on the girl’s face vanished. Disgust and revulsion swept across, and then the image faded out.

  ‘Does this happen to you?’ the voice boomed. ‘During erotic sex-play do you offend your love-partner by the presence of gastric processes which—’

  The voice died, and he was past. His mind his own again, Morris kicked savagely at the throttle and sent the little ship leaping. The pressure, applied directly to the audio-visual regions of his brain, had faded below spark point. He groaned and shook his head to clear it. All around him the vague half-defined echoes of ads glittered and gibbered, like ghosts of distant video-stations. Ads waited on all sides; he steered a careful course, dexterity born of animal desperation, but not all could be avoided. Despair seized him. The outline of a new visual-audio ad was already coming into being.

  ‘You, mister wage-earner!’ it shouted into the eyes and ears, noses and throats, of a thousand weary commuters. ‘Tired of the same old job? Wonder Circuits Inc. has perfected a marvelous long-range thought-wave scanner. Know what others are thinking and saying. Get the edge on fellow employees. Learn facts, figures about your employer’s personal existence. Banish uncertainty!’

  Morris’ despair swept up wildly. He threw the throttle on full blast; the little ship bucked and rolled as it climbed from the traffic-lane into the dead zone beyond. A shrieking roar, as his fender whipped through the protective wall—and then the ad faded behind him.

  He slowed down, trembling with misery and fatigue. Earth lay ahead. He’d be home, soon. Maybe he could get a good night’s sleep. He shakily dropped the nose of the ship and prepared to hook onto the tractor beam of the Chicago commute field.

  ‘The best metabolism adjuster on the market,’ the salesrobot shrilled. ‘Guaranteed to maintain a perfect endocrine-balance, or your money refunded in full.’

  Morris pushed wearily past the salesrobot, up the sidewalk toward the residential-block that contained his living-unit. The robot followed a few steps, then forgot him and hurried after another grim-faced commuter.

  ‘All the news while it’s news,’ a metallic voice dinned at him. ‘Have a retinal vidscreen installed in your least-used eye. Keep in touch with the world; don’t wait for out-of-date hourly summaries.’

  ‘Get out of the way,’ Morris muttered. The robot stepped aside for him and he crossed the street with a pack of hunched-over men and women.

  Robot-salesmen were everywhere, gesturing, pleading, shrilling. One started after him and he quickened his pace. It scurried along, chanting its pitch and trying to attract his attention, all the way up the hill to his living-unit. It didn’
t give up until he stooped over, snatched up a rock, and hurled it futilely. He scrambled in the house and slammed the doorlock after him. The robot hesitated, then turned and raced after a woman with an armload of packages toiling up the hill. She tried vainly to elude it, without success.

  ‘Darling!’ Sally cried. She hurried from the kitchen, drying her hands on her plastic shorts, bright-eyed and excited. ‘Oh, you poor thing! You look so tired!’

  Morris peeled off his hat and coat and kissed his wife briefly on her bare shoulder. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  Sally gave his hat and coat to the closet. ‘We’re having Uranian wild pheasant; your favorite dish.’

  Morris’ mouth watered, and a tiny surge of energy crawled back into his exhausted body. ‘No kidding? What the hell’s the occasion?’

  His wife’s brown eyes moistened with compassion. ‘Darling, it’s your birthday; you’re thirty-seven years old today. Had you forgotten?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Morris grinned a little. ‘I sure had.’ He wandered into the kitchen. The table was set; coffee was steaming in the cups and there was butter and white bread, mashed potatoes and green peas. ‘My golly. A real occasion.’

  Sally punched the stove controls and the container of smoking pheasant was slid onto the table and neatly sliced open. ‘Go wash your hands and we’re ready to eat. Hurry—before it gets cold.’

  Morris presented his hands to the wash slot and then sat down gratefully at the table. Sally served the tender, fragrant pheasant, and the two of them began eating.

  ‘Sally,’ Morris said, when his plate was empty and he was leaning back and sipping slowly at his coffee. ‘I can’t go on like this. Something’s got to be done.’