Insight Editions · No. 265
The Man Who Japed
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick's satire of a moral-reform state, where a propaganda man defaces the founder's statue in his sleep, read as a study of surveillance, conformity and the thin line between prank and rebellion.
A study guide to The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
In a crowded Earth of 2114 that runs on public morality, the young man who writes the state's moral messages finds that some part of him has gone out in the night and wrecked the founder's statue. Offered the top job in the propaganda machine the next morning, he is analysed, kidnapped, framed and thrown out of his home, and he ends by turning the machine against the founder and putting his own name to the jape.
Three weeks, from the night of Sunday 7 October 2114 to Monday 29 October, with a history that reaches back to the war that ended in 1972. Newer York and its Park, a one-room apartment in a housing unit, the Telemedia building, the poisoned island of Hokkaido, the Mental Health Resort, and a staged house at 2319 Pepper Lane on a planet of Vega.
Allen Purcell, head of a small packet agency; Janet, his wife; Sue Frost and Ida Pease Hoyt of the Committee; Myron Mavis, the burned-out Director of Telemedia; Mrs. Birmingham, the block warden; Fred Luddy; Doctor Malparto and his sister Gretchen; Gates and Sugermann of Hokkaido; and Major Streiter, dead and in bronze.
Readers who want Dick's satire of the 1950s at its sharpest, anyone who works inside an organisation that manages what people believe, and readers who want to watch Dick first try out the divided self, the staged world and the small public act of refusal that run through his later books.
The Man Who Japed is Philip K. Dick's third published novel. He wrote it in 1955, and the Scott Meredith Literary Agency recorded the manuscript as received on 17 October 1955 [philipdick.com; pkdickbooks.com]. Ace Books published it in December 1956 as Ace Double D-193, a 160-page half bound back to back with E. C. Tubb's The Space-Born, with a cover by Ed Emshwiller [ISFDB publication 43778]. It was the only one of Dick's early Ace novels to keep the title he gave it. Opinions differed from the start: Dick later said the Ace editor Donald Wollheim called it the worst of his books, while Wollheim told the biographer Gregg Rickman that he liked it; Damon Knight called it journeyman work; and Dick told James Blish it was his favourite of his early novels because its sentences were better built [philipdick.com]. The text read here, series files 058 to 065, runs to about 45,100 words in 23 numbered chapters. Dick gave the chapters numbers only, so every chapter title in this edition is ours, each taken from a phrase or an image in the chapter it names.
The world arrives in fragments, and Dick explains it only when a character needs it. A war ended in 1972 and left much of the planet poisoned; the island of Hokkaido is still a dead zone where a few eccentrics choose to live and die. In 1985 a soldier, Major Jules Streiter, led a movement of Moral Reclamation, shortened to Morec, and its society now covers the Earth. People live packed into single rooms in great housing units, and a room that turns from bedroom to kitchen on a tape is a family's most precious possession, held on a lease won by the family's standing. Every unit has a block warden, a weekly block meeting where neighbours criticise one another through a voice in the wall, and small metal informers called juveniles that record what people do. Above them sits the Committee, headed by Ida Pease Hoyt, Streiter's linear descendant, and enforced in the last resort by the Cohorts, the founder's male heirs. Moral teaching reaches the public as packets, stories with a lesson, written by private agencies and bought by Telemedia, the state's single channel of mass media. Out beyond Earth are colony planets, farmed at great cost, and one place where Morec does not reach: the Mental Health Resort, which treats people who cannot bear it and keeps a refuge on a planet of Vega. Allen Purcell's Agency is the cleverest of the packet makers, and its owner is the last man anyone would suspect of painting the founder red.
The novel follows a man who serves a moral order with skill and with real belief, and who discovers that some part of him has been laughing at it all along; its question is whether that laughter can be brought into the open and signed before the order either swallows it or silences him.
- The jape and the offer (Ch1-6). On Monday 8 October Allen wakes with grass and red paint on his shoes and only pieces of Sunday night; the block warden, Mrs. Birmingham, tells him his name may come up at Wednesday's meeting (Chapter 1). At the Agency Sue Frost of the Committee is waiting with his packet about a man whose apple tree died on a colony planet; Allen defends it with "In that packet, we made the Morec that Earth is the center." Then he fires his assistant Fred Luddy for agreeing with her and withdraws the packet (Chapter 2). At Telemedia he explains why he distrusts the domino method by which ideas pass from house to house: "One unique individual would foul it up." Frost takes him on to Ida Pease Hoyt (Chapter 3). That night he tells Janet he has been offered the Directorship of Telemedia; the evening paper reports the statue mutilated, Janet says it was him, he agrees, and he names the act in his trade's word: "When we make fun of a stale theme we say we've japed it." (Chapter 4). In the Park the statue is boxed, and a dark-haired girl who knows his name gives him a folded slip and says "Good night, Mr. Purcell." (Chapter 5). On Tuesday Frost gives him until Saturday; the slip reads Gretchen Malparto, Health Resort, and he books himself in under a false name, Coates (Chapter 6).
- Judged and analysed (Ch7-9). At Wednesday's block meeting the charge turns out to be only drunkenness and a bad word, a neighbour's eulogy through the speaker silences the room, and Allen is let off for his "excellent prior record"; the eulogist turns out to be a mild old neighbour, Mr. Wales, who has watched Allen defend others for years (Chapter 7). On Thursday the viewpoint passes to Doctor Malparto, who already holds a scan of Allen's brain dated before the jape; Allen confesses, "Sunday night somebody pulled a switch in my head", and half an hour of the night turns out to be missing (Chapter 8). Under drugs Allen relives Sunday: the bitter teen-agers at an autofac station, the beer he did not want, the flight to Hokkaido, Tom Gates and Sugermann in their shelter, a copy of Ulysses and Sugermann's "real books," three sherries, and the jape itself (Chapter 9).
- The yes and the head (Ch10-12). Luddy has defected to Blake-Moffet and taken all the work in progress, "Picked us clean." At the history museum a lit house called HOW THEY LIVED turns into a ruin called AND DIED, Allen says "That could be us", and on Friday he accepts the job (Chapter 10). That night, in a chapter told as a dream that never names him, he saws open the box in the Park, carries the statue's head home and goes to bed: "The city, the society, slept." (Chapter 11). On Saturday the head is in the closet; Malparto runs him through a dozen tests for psychic powers and every one fails; at the door all the lights go out (Chapter 12).
- Other World (Ch13-15). Allen comes to on a bus in a sunny town called Chicago, carrying an ident card for John B. Coates of 2319 Pepper Lane, and spends an afternoon with Gretchen playing his wife until the house dissolves around him (Chapter 13). He wills the room back, finds a clock nobody set forward, speakers in the couch and the controls in a hairbrush, learns from the Vega Sentinel that he is on the Resort's refuge planet, and gets himself shipped home by holding up a restaurant cashier with nothing in his pocket but his hand (Chapter 14). Home on Sunday 21 October, he faces a hearing in Frost's apartment where Blake and Luddy produce a photograph and a woman called "Grace Maldini"; Hoyt lets him go, and nobody asks about the head (Chapter 15).
- The fall (Ch16-20). On Monday 22 October Allen takes his office among banks of flowers; Mavis whispers "The watchword is Excelsior." (Chapter 16). The first visitor is Gretchen, who explains the kidnapping, tells him "You have a sense of humor", and when she pulls him down to kiss her, a juvenile that has climbed six floors and Luddy with a flash camera catch them: "I got Luddy, now he gets me." (Chapter 17). That night the Purcells sit in the dark, and the promised quart of ice cream "Seems sort of silly" (Chapter 18). On Wednesday 24 October the block meeting hears four counts, a planted questioner draws out "I didn't even know her then", and the lease is voided as of
Morality made into an industry. Morec does not grow in people; it is manufactured, sold and delivered. Agencies write packets, Telemedia buys them, the domino method spreads them from one family to the next, and the block meeting checks that they took. Allen is good at this work and proud of it, and that is why the book can see the machine from inside. The teen-agers at the autofac station show him what the ma6 November; Allen refuses Frost's demand that he resign (Chapter 19). In his new apartment, Wales smashes the vase he bought for his wife and calls himself a Judas (Chapter 20).
- The great jape (Ch21-23). On Thursday 25 October Allen asks his thirty-three department heads "do you care to work for a man who's out of favor?" Nearly all of them go home, and with a deaf head of music, a researcher from the basement and volunteers from his old Agency he cuts the schedule to four days: "We're going to do a jape on Major Streiter." (Chapter 21). By Monday 29 October the building is sealed, his dismissal has arrived, he turns away Hoyt and Frost, and at eight that evening a panel of bogus experts explains that the founder's policy of active assimilation meant "any form of killing, cooking, and eating of hostile groups" until the screen dies (Chapter 22). The power is cut; the generators bring back fragments; Allen escapes a chase in which his pursuers crash, reaches the field where Mavis is leaving for Sirius, sees the teen-agers, and stays. At the edge of the field he says "I'm the person who japed the statue of Major Streiter. I'd like everybody to know it." and waits for the Cohorts (Chapter 23).
- Method. Nearly the whole novel is seen through Allen, and the exceptions carry weight: Malparto's side of the analysis in Chapters 8 and 12, a dream that never names its dreamer in Chapter 11, Mr. Wales alone in Chapter 20, Mrs. Birmingham in front of her set in Chapter 22, and Janet watching fragments in Chapter 23. Dick withholds the decisive events from the man who did them: the jape is reported in a newspaper before Allen remembers it, and the theft of the head is told as a dream before it is found in a closet. The chapters are short, the days are counted precisely, and most of the story's arguments are held in offices, a meeting room and the Purcells' one room.
chine costs, and he admits it to himself: "Morec wasn't natural" (Chapter 9). Everything that follows grows from that one thought.
The self that knows more than the man. Allen does not decide to jape the statue, and he does not decide to steal its head. Both acts are done by a part of him that his working self cannot reach, and both are discovered after the fact, through
grass on his shoes, a newspaper, a dream and a closet. To Malparto he can only report it: "Sunday night somebody pulled a switch in my head." (Chapter 8). The novel treats these acts as honest messages, and Allen's long work across the book is to catch up with them and own them.
Neighbours as the police. The block meeting is the most frightening invention in the book because it is so ordinary: a room full of neighbours, a warden with a list, juveniles with tapes, and one speaker in the wall that strips every voice of character so that accuser and defender sound the same. It can forgive, for an "excellent prior record" (Chapter 7), and it can ruin, while wishing the ruined man well with his "temporary difficulty" (Chapter 19). Its most telling victim is Mr. Wales, who defends Allen at the first meeting, is absent from the second because his new lease has come through, and is left alone in the new rooms calling himself a Judas (Chapter 20).
Two halves of one system. The Health Resort looks like the opposite of Morec: no juveniles, real coffee, private houses, a tolerance of madness. Gretchen offers Allen its view of him, that his jape was a sense of humour in a humourless world. Allen sees further. Morec and the Resort hold each other up, the place of work and the place of escape: "Two sides of the coin" (Chapter 17). He prefers the half where the work is done, and the book's ending turns down a second escape as well.
Laughter as an instrument. A jape, in Allen's trade, is the parody that a theme invites when it has been repeated too often (Chapter 4). The statue had stood for 124 years and was the stalest theme in the city. Allen's last packet uses the same method at full scale: it takes the founder's legend seriously, adds dates, experts and a reference work, and walks it one step further, into a menu. The programme borrows the method of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729), a calm official voice proposing an atrocity, and it works because it sounds exactly like Telemedia.
Staying, and signing it. The novel offers Allen three ways out: the Directorship, the Resort's refuge on Vega, and Mavis's ship to Sirius. He takes the first, is taken to the second against his will, and turns down the third when he sees the teen-agers at the railing: "I can stay with them," and "And I can make my feelings clear." (Chapter 23). The last act of the book is an anonymous jape turned into a signed one. What the Cohorts do next, the novel does not say.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
How the novel is built. The source marks no parts, but the twenty-three chapters fall into six movements across three weeks, and they mirror each other around the middle. In the first half Allen tries to live as two people, the loyal packet maker by day and the japer by night, and each of the hidden acts (the paint, the head) is found by others before he admits it. Chapters 13 to 15, on Other World, are the hinge: a staged life with Gretchen that he sees through and walks out of. In the second half every move is public: the office, the raid, the second block meeting, the walkout, the broadcast and the confession. Two block meetings, two offers from the Committee, two staged worlds and two confessions frame the book, and the tables in the Master Takeaways set them side by side.
CONTRAST
| Movement | Ch | Time | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| The jape and the offer | 1-6 | Sun 7 to Tue 9 Oct 2114 | Grass and paint, the apple-tree packet, Luddy fired, the domino method, the offer, the word jape, the boxed statue, the girl's slip |
| Judged and analysed | 7-9 | Wed 10 to Thu 11 Oct | The first block meeting and Wales's eulogy, the Resort, the scan, the missing half hour, Sunday relived |
| The yes and the head | 10-12 | Thu 11 to Sat 13 Oct | Luddy's defection, the museum, the acceptance, the head taken, the psychic tests, the lights out |
| Other World | 13-15 | Undated, then Wed 17 to Sun 21 Oct | Pepper Lane and Gretchen as wife, the clocks and speakers, the hold-up, the deportation, Frost's hearing |
| The fall | 16-20 | Mon 22 to Wed 24 Oct | The Directorship, Gretchen and the raid, the dark apartment, the second block meeting, the refusal to resign, Wales's guilt |
| The great jape | 21-23 | Thu 25 to Mon 29 Oct | The walkout and rebuild, the plant, the sealed building, the pageant, the power cut, the chase, the confession |
Chapter map
SECTIONS AT A GLANCE
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Grass on His Shoes | Monday 8 Oct: the room tape, paint and grass on Allen's shoes, a blank in Sunday night, and the warden's warning about Wednesday |
| 2 | The Apple Tree That Died | Sue Frost brings back the apple-tree packet; Allen defends its moral, fires Luddy for agreeing with her, and withdraws it |
| 3 | The Domino Method | Telemedia, Mavis and Ralf Hadler of the Cohorts; the domino method distrusted; four in a small steam car to the Committee and Ida Pease Hoyt |
| 4 | I Japed It | The Directorship offered; the paper reports the statue mutilated; Janet says it was him; the word japed; a causal link suspected |
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | A Box in the Park | The statue boxed; rumours of anarchists and kids; a girl who knows exactly what was done and knows Allen's name gives him a slip |
| 6 | Four Point Five Days | Allen asks for a week and gets until Saturday; the slip reads Gretchen Malparto; he books the Resort as Coates |
| 7 | A Regular Little Gentleman | The first block meeting: Julie Ebberley's reprimand, a charge of coming home drunk and swearing, a neighbour's eulogy, and no penalty |
| 8 | Mr. Coates | Malparto's viewpoint; a scan held before the jape; Allen confesses; half an hour of Sunday is missing |
| 9 | Real Books | Sunday relived: teen-agers, beer, Hokkaido, Gates and Sugermann, Ulysses, three sherries, the jape; Malparto plans psychic tests |
| 10 | How They Lived | Luddy defects to Blake-Moffet with all the work in hand; the museum's living and ruined house; Allen accepts on Friday |
| 11 | Behind the Wood Was Stone | A dream with no name in it: sawing the box, finding stone, carrying a round part home while the city sleeps |
| 12 | The Cards Don't Lie | Saturday: the bronze head in the closet; a dozen psychic tests all fail; the lights go out at the door |
| 13 | Two Thousand Three Hundred Nineteen Pepper Lane | A bus in Chicago, an ident card for John B. Coates, Gretchen as his wife, voices in the air, and the house dissolves |
| 14 | A Quarter to Five | The room willed back; an unset clock, hidden speakers and a hairbrush control; the fourth planet of Vega; a fake hold-up; shipped home |
| 15 | Packet Number 355-B | Sunday 21 Oct: Frost's hearing, Blake and Luddy, a photograph and Grace Maldini; Hoyt lets him go; the head never mentioned |
| 16 | Excelsior | Monday 22 Oct: the Director's office, synthetic flowers and real bluebells, the apple-tree packet mocked, and Mavis's whispered motto |
| 17 | A Sense of Humor | Gretchen explains the kidnap; two diagnoses; two sides of one coin; the kiss, the climbing juvenile and Luddy's raid |
| 18 | A Quart of Ice Cream | The Purcells in the dark; reports hidden in a stocking; the hearing confessed to Janet; the ice cream forgotten |
| 19 | Temporary Difficulty | Wednesday 24 Oct: four counts, a planted questioner, the slip, an attack on the accusers, the lease voided, resignation refused |
| 20 | I'm a Judas | Wales alone in his reward apartment; the vase smashed; the cuts welcomed |
| 21 | A Jape on Major Streiter | Thursday 25 Oct: the department heads leave; Gleeby, Phyllis Frame and Priar's volunteers stay; four days; the plug and the plant |
| 22 | The Pageant of Time | Monday 29 Oct: the sealed building, the dismissal, Hoyt and Frost refused, and the experts' history of active assimilation |
| 23 | The Person Who Japed the Statue | The power cut, broken fragments, the chase and crash, Mavis's ship to Sirius refused, the confession at the edge of the field |
TIMELINE
1955 to 1956 Written in 1955; received by the Scott Meredith agency on 17 October 1955; published by Ace as Ace Double D-193 in December 1956 [philipdick.com; ISFDB].
1972 The war ends; Hokkaido and much of the Earth are poisoned (Ch1, Ch22).
1985 Major Streiter's Moral Reclamation takes power (Ch1-3).
1990 The statue is set up in the Park; 124 years later it is japed (Ch1).
About 2085 Allen Purcell is born in the apartment he still holds (Ch8, Ch19).
About 2106 Myron Mavis becomes Director of Telemedia; he has held the post eight years (Ch3-4).
About 2111 Allen marries Janet, whom he met on Betelgeuse 4; his mother dies (Ch8).
May 2112 Sue Frost backs the Agency from its first packet (Ch2).
Sunday 7 October 2114 The teen-agers, the beer, Hokkaido, the sherry and the jape (Ch9).
Monday 8 October The warden's warning, Frost and the apple-tree packet, Telemedia, Hoyt and the offer; the evening paper (Ch1-5).
Tuesday 9 October The message, the Saturday deadline, the slip, the booking as Coates (Ch6).
Wednesday 10 October The first block meeting (Ch7).
Thursday 11 October Malparto, the confession and the recall; Luddy's defection found; the museum (Ch8-10).
Friday 12 October Allen accepts the Directorship to start a week from Monday; that night he takes the head (Ch10-11).
Saturday 13 October The head in the closet; the psychic tests; the lights go out (Ch12).
Undated Pepper Lane on Other World, the fourth planet of Vega (Ch13-14).
Wednesday 17 to Sunday 21 October The trip home; Frost's hearing on Sunday night (Ch15).
Monday 22 October First day as Director; Gretchen; the raid; the dark apartment (Ch16-18).
Wednesday 24 October The second block meeting; the lease voided as of Tuesday 6 November; resignation refused (Ch19). Wales's chapter follows, undated (Ch20).
Thursday 25 October The walkout and rebuild; the first plug at half past midnight (Ch21). The newspaper plant is dated Oct 29, a puzzle discussed in Chapter 21.
Monday 29 October The sealed building, the dismissal, the broadcast at eight, the power cut, the chase and the confession (Ch22-23).
Pending The dismissal takes effect at noon on Thursday 1 November; the lease ends on 6 November (Ch19, Ch22).
BY THE NUMBERS
124 years the statue has stood in the Park (Ch1).
Over forty years the Purcells' lease has been defended; eleven minutes for breakfast (Ch1).
Eight years Mavis has run Telemedia (Ch3).
Half an hour missing from Allen's Sunday; three glasses of sherry (Ch8-9).
Ten thousand dollars Gates's price for the spiciest of his pulp novels (Ch9).
Twelve psychic tests, every one a failure (Ch12).
$930 plus tax for a ticket home from Vega, and Allen has less than $50 (Ch14).
Four counts at the second block meeting; the lease void as of 6 November (Ch19).
Thirty-three department heads; a schedule of a month to five months cut to four days (Ch21).
Two to one the poll in favour of a policy nobody can define (Ch22).
1975, 1987, 1997 the pageant's dates: fewer than three hundred head of cattle in North America, one hundred Russian prisoners processed, ten thousand eaten (Ch22). Six hundred 'impossibles' eaten by the Major and his immediate family, by the estimate of an E. B. Erickson whom the programme cites (Ch23).
Ten or fifteen minutes to restore the broadcast on the generators, and the technician warns that it will not hold (Ch23).
Grass on His Shoes
A Monday morning in a crowded future city. At seven o'clock a tape in the wall turns Allen Purcell's bedroom into a kitchen, and the young head of a small, inventive agency that writes moral messages for the state gets ready for work beside a wife who has never got used to the room changing round her. Over an eleven-minute breakfast the night before comes back in pieces: a late flight to the poisoned island of Hokkaido to drink wine with two men the neighbours call eggheads, a pair of shoes spattered with mud and red paint, a blade of grass that can only have come from the Park where the founder's statue stands. Downstairs, the block warden who checks everyone out of the building tells him she knows where he went, and that his name may be on the list of criticisms at Wednesday's block meeting. As she turns away, a memory hits him of rolling downhill on wet grass under the stars, and he cannot say what he did in the Park.
CRITICAL LENS
About this text and these titles. The Man Who Japed is Philip K. Dick's third published novel. He wrote it in 1955, and the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, his agents, recorded the manuscript as received on 17 October 1955 [philipdick.com, Chronology; pkdickbooks.com].
Ace
Books published it in December 1956 as Ace Double D-193, bound back to back with E. C. Tubb's The Space-Born, in a 160-page half with a cover by Ed Emshwiller [ISFDB publication 43778; Wikipedia, List of Ace SF double titles]. It was the only one of Dick's early Ace novels to keep the title he gave it [philipdick.com]. Dick later reported that the Ace editor Donald Wollheim had called it the worst of his books, while Wollheim told the biographer Gregg Rickman that he liked it; Damon Knight's review was mixed and called it journeyman work; and Dick himself told James Blish that it was his favourite of his early novels because its sentences were better built [philipdick.com, PKD web pages]. Dick gave the chapters numbers only. Every chapter title in these notes is editorial, added to help the reader find a scene, and each editorial chapter matches one of the novel's chapters exactly.
CRITICAL LENS
What the title promises. To jape is to play a joke or a trick on someone, to mock. The verb is Middle English (japen, recorded from the fourteenth century), perhaps from Old French japer, to yelp or bark, or from gaber, to mock; in the fifteenth century it also had a coarse slang sense that drove it out of polite use until Walter Scott revived it in its harmless meaning [Etymonline; Collins; Dictionary.com; Middle English Dictionary]. The title tells the reader that somebody in this book plays a joke. Chapter 1 never uses the word. It gives a man with paint on his shoes and a night he cannot fully remember, and leaves the reader to put the title and the evidence together.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter runs from seven a.m. to about seven-thirty, "In the cold autumn mornings." The day is a Monday: the night before is called "Sunday night," and the block meeting "next Wednesday" is "just the day after tomorrow." The year is not stated here. Chapter 2 mentions a packet from "May, 2112" and says the Agency is three years old, and dated entries later in the novel place the story in October 2114, so the reader can work it out without being told. The city is Newer York, a place of "clogged lanes," apartments and offices, where the only grass grows in the Park beneath the Morec spire. Last night's trip went to Hokkaido, poisoned since 1972, "the final year of the war." The statue in the Park has stood for 124 years.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell: "the forward-looking young president of the newest and most creative of the Research Agencies," which write moral packets for the state media. Janet Purcell: his wife of three years, raised on the colony planet Betelgeuse 4, shy, anxious, an old sufferer from undulant fever; in the Agency's first year she was his receptionist and file clerk. Mrs. O'Neill: a neighbour in the bathroom queue. Gates and Sugermann: two men Allen visits on Hokkaido; Tom Gates plays Chicago jazz records, Sugermann talks ideas, and Janet calls him "an egghead." Major Streiter: the long-dead founder of Moral Reclamation, present as a statue and a formula. Mrs. Birmingham: the block warden of Allen's housing unit, a functionary of the Parent Citizens Committee. A juvenile: an unseen watcher, apparently a machine, that "must have spotted him."
A room that changes at seven
The first sentence is a joke about property. "At seven a.m., Allen Purcell, the forward-looking young president of the newest and most creative of the Research Agencies, lost a bedroom. But he gained a kitchen." The sentence starts with a title fit for a business magazine and ends in a domestic trick. A man who presides over an agency owns a single room, and the room is so small that it has to take turns being things.
Dick explains the machinery in one line. "The process was automatic, controlled by an iron-oxide-impregnated tape sealed in the wall." The tape is the kind of detail a writer in 1955 would reach for. Magnetic recording tape coated with iron oxide was then new household technology: AEG and BASF had shown the first practical tape recorder, the Magnetophon, at the Berlin radio show in 1935, using a plastic film coated with iron oxide [BASF history; Bayerischer Rundfunk; Engel and Hammar, A Selected History of Magnetic Recording]. Dick puts that new medium into the wall of a twenty-second-century flat and makes it the clock that runs the family's day.
The next sentence is the important one. "Allen had no authority over it, but the transfiguration was agreeable to him; he was already awake and ready to rise." The word transfiguration is borrowed from religion, and it is the first hint that in this society even furniture has a moral flavour. More important is the arrangement of power. Allen does not control the tape. He happens to agree with it. The chapter will keep finding Allen in exactly this position: inside a system he does not command, comfortable because his own wishes and the system's schedule happen to line up. When they stop lining up, his comfort will go.
The kitchen arrives with a struggle. Allen "fumbled for the manual knob that released the stove," and "As usual the stove was stuck half in the wall and half out into the room. But all that was needed was a firm push. Allen pushed, and, with a wheeze, the stove emerged." The scene is comic, and its comedy sets a tone. This future is efficient on paper and creaky in practice. The automatic room needs a manual knob, the knob needs a push, and the stove complains. Allen's character is also in the push: a confident young man who believes that a firm shove fixes things.
King of a box
The third paragraph tells us what the room is worth. "He was king of his domain: this one-room apartment within sight of the" blessed "Morec spire." In the source the word blessed sits between two dashes, as though the narrator, or Allen, cannot mention the spire without a little pious murmur, the way a believer might add a blessing after a holy name. The word appears in exactly the same way when the spire comes back later in the chapter. It is the first sign that the city has a sacred centre, and that people living near it speak of it with a reflex of reverence.
The apartment is an inheritance. "The apartment was hard won. It had been his heritage, deeded to him by his family; the lease had been defended for over forty years." A lease that needs defending is a strange idea, and the chapter leaves it unexplained for now. The lease is a family possession held against some threat, and keeping it has taken decades of effort by people older than Allen. Its value is spelled out in a paradox: "Its thin plasterboard walls formed a box of priceless worth; it was an empty space valued beyond money." The thing of value is space itself. The walls are cheap; what they enclose is precious.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The economy of space, as Chapter 1 shows it. Dick gives no statistics, but the details add up to a picture.
Space is the scarce good. A one-room flat is "priceless," "valued beyond money." The city is "all apartments and offices," and grass grows only in the Park.
Furniture folds. The stove becomes "sink and table and food cupboard"; two chairs hinge out from beneath it; the window doubles as a mirror, "another of the ingenious space-savers developed by the Committee's Housing Authority."
Facilities are shared. There is a "line" at the "community bathroom," and people carry their soap and towels down the hall.
Housing is a lease, inherited and defended. Allen's family has held it "for over forty years." Losing it is the fear that sits behind Janet's questions.
The state designs the rooms. The space-savers come from the Committee's Housing Authority, and the timing of the room's change comes from a tape Allen cannot touch.
The stove's transformation is described like a piece of stage machinery. "The stove, properly unfolded, became also sink and table and food cupboard. Two chairs hinged out from its underside, and beneath the stored supplies were dishes. Most of the room was consumed, but sufficient space remained in which to dress." The last sentence is quietly funny. After the kitchen has unfolded, there is just about room to put on one's clothes.
Janet in the cold
Then Janet. "His wife Janet, with difficulty, had gotten into her slip. Now, frowning, she held an armload of skirt and looked around her in bewilderment." She looks around her as though she does not recognise the room, and in a sense she does not: it has changed since she went to sleep. "The central heating had not penetrated to their apartment as yet, and Janet shivered."
Her trouble is stated in one sentence that tells us a great deal about the marriage. "In the cold autumn mornings she awoke with fright; she had been his wife three years but she had never adjusted to the shifts of the room." Allen agrees with the tape; Janet is frightened by it. She wakes in fear every morning to a room that has rearranged itself. The difference between them is temperament, and it is also history: Janet grew up elsewhere, as we learn later in the chapter, and has never settled into the city's rules.
Her plan is touchingly small. She does not propose to stop the room from changing; she proposes to change the time at which it changes, to eleven, so that she can sleep through the shift. Whether she can actually reset a tape her husband "had no authority over" is left open; the line is a wish rather than a plan. Allen, meanwhile, is "shedding his pajamas. The air, to him, was invigorating; he took a deep breath." The same cold that frightens her refreshes him.
Allen manages her kindly and a little like a parent. "The oven door," he says, opening it for her. "Lay your things there, like always." The oven door is a shelf; everything in the room is something else as well. She nods and obeys.
"I'm going to reset the tape. Maybe for eleven."
Janet, answering Allen's "What's the matter?"
Then the day's timetable arrives. "The Agency had to be opened promptly at eight, which meant getting up early enough to make the half-hour walk along the clogged lanes." The city has lanes rather than streets, and they are clogged, a word that suggests traffic of people more than cars. Sounds of activity rise from the ground level and from other flats. "In the hall, scuffling footsteps were audible; the line was forming at the community bathroom." Allen sends Janet ahead, "wanting her dressed and ready for the day," and adds a reminder that tells us he thinks of her as someone who forgets: "Don't forget your towel."
"Obediently, she collected her satchel of cosmetics, her soap and toothbrush and towel and personal articles, and left." The word obediently is the second sign of the marriage's shape. Neighbours greet her in the hall. A voice says "Morning, Mrs. Purcell," and Janet answers, half asleep, "Morning Mrs. O'Neill." The exchange is all we get of Mrs. O'Neill, but it does a job: it shows that the Purcells live among neighbours who see them every morning, which matters a great deal by the end of the chapter.
Two capsules for a hangover
Alone, Allen takes medicine. "While his wife was gone, Allen shook two corto-thiamin capsules from the medicine well." The name is invented, but it is built from real parts: thiamin is vitamin B1, and corto- suggests a corticosteroid. Dick gives a future drug a name that sounds clinical and plausible without committing himself to any pharmacology.
The capsules lead to Janet's health, and her health leads to the colonies. "Janet owned all sorts of pills and sprays; in her early teens she had picked up undulant fever, one of the plagues revived by the attempt to create natural farms on the colony planets." This is a sharp piece of world-building in a subordinate clause. The colonies are trying to farm the old way, and the old way has brought back the old diseases.
And then the hangover. "The corto-thiamin was for his hangover. Last night he had drunk three glasses of wine, and on an empty stomach." Three glasses of wine are a modest amount for a hangover, which tells us something about how unused to drink Allen is, or how sober this society is. The empty stomach tells us he went out without eating, straight from work.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: why undulant fever fits a colony full of goats. Undulant fever is the old name for brucellosis, also called Malta fever, a bacterial disease caught from animals, mainly through unpasteurised milk and contact with livestock; the "undulant" name comes from its fever that rises and falls over weeks. The British army doctor David Bruce isolated the organism in Malta in 1887, and in June 1905 the Maltese physician Themistocles Zammit showed that goats carried it and passed it on in their milk; once goat's milk was banned for the garrison in 1906, the military cases almost stopped [USDA APHIS, Currier history of brucellosis; PubMed Central PMC1240100; CDC, Brucellosis]. Later in this chapter Allen describes Janet's home planet as "Betelgeuse 4. Rocks and goats." Dick may simply have liked the sound of the joke, but the medicine agrees with him: a girl raised on a goat-keeping colony that has gone back to "natural farms" is exactly the person to catch undulant fever. The detail also plants a doubt about the Committee's colony farming programme, which becomes the subject of an argument in Chapter 2.
A calculated risk
The next paragraph opens the night's story. "Entering the Hokkaido area had been a calculated risk." The phrase calculated risk implies that going there is against some rule or custom, and that Allen weighed the danger before doing it. The sequence is laid out in order:
- "He had worked late at the Agency, until ten o'clock."
- "Tired, but still restless, he had locked up and then rolled out a small Agency ship, a one-man sliver used to deliver rush orders to T-M." The Agency owns a small aircraft, a sliver, and its normal job is carrying urgent work to T-M, which we will learn is Telemedia, the state media trust.
- "In the ship he had scooted out of Newer York, flown aimlessly, and finally turned East to visit Gates and Sugermann." The trip begins without a plan and ends at a destination he has visited before.
- "But he hadn't stayed long; by eleven he was on his way back."
The paragraph closes with two short sentences that sound like a man arguing with himself: "And it had been necessary. Research was involved." These are the excuses Allen will use to Mrs. Birmingham in a few pages, rehearsed here in his head before anyone accuses him. The narrator does not tell us whether they are true.
BY THE NUMBERS
Seven a.m. the room changes; eight the Agency must open; a half-hour walk to work; breakfast takes eleven minutes; Allen leaves at seven-thirty.
Last night: work until ten; a flight to Hokkaido; three glasses of wine and a half hour of jazz; on the way back by eleven; home at eleven-forty.
Married three years; the lease defended over forty years; Hokkaido dead since 1972; the statue in the Park for 124 years; the block meeting on Wednesday, "the day after tomorrow."
The small agency and the giant four
Before the story returns to the breakfast table, Dick stops to explain Allen's business, and this paragraph is the novel's first sketch of the whole social order. "His Agency was totally outclassed by the giant four that made up the industry." There is an industry, it is dominated by four large firms, and Allen's is a newcomer. "Allen Purcell, Inc. had no financial latitude and no backlog of ideas. Its packets were put together from day to day." The product is called a packet; the firm lives hand to mouth.
Then the staff list, which tells us what kind of product a packet is: "artists, historian, moral consultant, dictionist, dramatist." An agency that employs a moral consultant beside a dramatist is making stories with a lesson. The dictionist is presumably the one who takes care over wording. These five trades together make something like an advertising agency whose product is virtue.
The Agency's method is its distinction. Its staff "tried to anticipate future trends rather than working from patterns that had been successful in the past. This was an advantage, as well as a defect." Dick does not tell us which way the defect will cut, but Chapter 2 will show it: an agency that tries something new can produce a packet that nobody quite knows how to read.
The big firms are described in one contemptuous word. "The big four were hidebound; they constructed a standard packet perfected over the years, basically the time-tested formula used by Major Streiter himself in the days before the revolution." So there was a revolution, and Major Streiter was its leader, and the moral packets of today descend from his methods. The paragraph goes on to describe those methods.
The name Moral Reclamation appears here for the first time, and the reader can work out that Morec, which the chapter has already used for the spire, is its contraction. Before the revolution it was a travelling show: actors and lecturers on the road with messages, a cross between a revival meeting and a touring repertory company. Streiter's gift was for the medium as much as the message.
The paragraph ends with a single compressed biography. "The basic formula was, of course, adequate, but new blood was needed. The major himself had been new blood; originally a powerful figure in the Afrikaans Empire", which the narrator glosses as "the re-created Transvaal State", and "he had revitalized the moral forces lying dormant in his own age." Allen's argument for his own Agency borrows the founder's legitimacy: the major was a newcomer once, so the newcomers today are the true heirs of the major. It is a clever argument and a slightly dangerous one, since it makes innovation itself a form of piety.
"Moral Reclamation, in those days, had consisted of wandering troops of actors and lecturers delivering messages, and the major had been a genius at media."
Narrator, on the movement before the revolution
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the Transvaal, Moral Re-Armament, and what Dick was mixing. The real Transvaal was the South African Republic (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek), a Boer state recognised by Britain in 1852, annexed in 1877, independent again after the war of 1880-81, and finally annexed after the war of 1899-1902 [Britannica; Wikipedia, South African Republic; BBC History]. Its public life was shaped by the strict Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed churches. By calling the major's homeland a "re-created Transvaal State" inside an "Afrikaans Empire," Dick tells the reader that the future morality comes from a revived frontier Calvinism, and he does it in 1955, seven years after South Africa's National Party had come to power and begun apartheid. The travelling actors and lecturers of Moral Reclamation also have a real-world cousin in the 1950s: Moral Re-Armament, launched by Frank Buchman's Oxford Group in 1938, which carried its message through plays and musicals; its play The Forgotten Factor, first staged in Washington in 1943, toured Europe, India and Africa [Initiatives of Change; Jenner, Anglia Ruskin thesis 2016]. There is no evidence in the text that Dick had MRA in mind, so this is a reader's comparison, not a source. The similarity in name and method is close enough to be worth knowing.
Eleven minutes of breakfast
Janet comes back from the bathroom. "Your turn," she says. "I left the soap and towel, so go right in." She starts laying out the dishes. We skip Allen's wash and rejoin them at the table.
"Breakfast took the usual eleven minutes." The precision is a joke about routine, and it also tells us how fixed the morning is. "Allen ate with customary directness; the corto-thiamin had eliminated his queasiness." Janet eats half her food and starts combing her hair. "The window", Dick tells us, could at "a touch of the switch" double "as a mirror: another of the ingenious space-savers developed by the Committee's Housing Authority." The Committee appears for the first time here, in its most harmless role: as the designer of clever furniture. We will meet it again within a page in a less harmless role.
Then the first question. "You didn't get in until late," Janet says. "Last night, I mean." And, glancing up: "Did you?"
Allen is surprised, "because he had never known her to probe." The narrator gives his reading of her: "Lost in the haze of her own uncertainties, Janet was incapable of venom. But, he realized, she was not probing. She was apprehensive." Then he imagines her night: "Probably she had lain awake wondering if he were all right, lain with her eyes open staring at the ceiling until eleven-forty, at which time he had made his appearance." He undressed, she said nothing, she kissed him, and she went to sleep.
The paragraph is tender and a little complacent. Allen thinks of his wife as harmless and frightened, which may be true, and he reads her question as anxiety rather than inquiry. He does not ask himself why she is anxious. The time he gives, eleven-forty, is also a clue that the reader should file. He left Hokkaido "by eleven." He got home at eleven-forty. The forty minutes between are where the Park must fit.
Prisms before poetry
"Did you go to Hokkaido?" Janet wonders. Allen's answer is the most revealing speech he makes in the chapter, because in defending his visit he describes how his Agency gets its ideas.
The speech ends: "Goethe saw his real job. Prisms before poetry." (In the source a dash joins "a good Morec" to "Goethe saw his real job"; it is split here.) So a packet takes a figure from history and draws a moral, a Morec, from his life. The moral Allen drew from Goethe was that the great poet knew his "real job" was science. Prisms before poetry is a slogan that turns art into a distraction from useful work. It is exactly the kind of sentence a society that frowns on idleness would like.
"For awhile. Sugermann gives me ideas... I find his talk stimulating. Remember the packet we did on Goethe? The business about lens-grinding? I never heard of that until Sugermann mentioned it. The optics angle made a good Morec"
Allen, explaining to Janet
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: Goethe did not grind lenses. The lens-grinder among famous European thinkers was Baruch Spinoza, who earned part of his living grinding optical lenses in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spinoza]. Goethe's optical work was different. Around 1790 he borrowed prisms, looked through one at a white wall, saw colour only at the edges, and decided (wrongly) that Newton's account of colour must be mistaken; this led to his Beiträge zur Optik and to the large Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), published by Cotta in Tübingen in 1810 [Nature 164:338; Physics Today, doi 10.1063/1.1506750; Deutsches Textarchiv]. So Goethe did care about prisms, and he did think his colour theory mattered more than much of his poetry. But "lens-grinding" belongs to Spinoza. The slip may be Dick's or may be the Agency's. Allen says he "never heard of that until Sugermann mentioned it," so the error could be read as a joke about a moral industry that gets its history secondhand from a man on a poisoned island. The text gives no sign either way, and these notes flag it rather than correcting it.
Janet's reply is a fragment. "But", she begins, and then she "gestured, a familiar nervous motion of her hands." Then: "Sugermann's an egghead." In the 1950s egghead was a sneer at intellectuals. Its political use is usually dated to the columnist Stewart Alsop in September 1952, quoting a remark about Adlai Stevenson's supporters [Merriam-Webster; Online Etymology Dictionary, as logged for No. 05]. Dick gives the sneer to the twenty-second century. The word tells us that Sugermann's reputation is known even to Janet, and that being seen with him is a risk in itself.
Allen's answer is the one that will turn out to be wrong: "Nobody saw me." The narrator gives his reasoning: "He was reasonably certain of that; by ten o'clock Sunday night most people were in bed." And then the full account of the visit: "Three glasses of wine with Sugermann, a half hour listening to Tom Gates play Chicago jazz on the phonograph, and that was all. He had done it a number of times before, and without untoward difficulty."
The list of sins is mild by our standards: some wine, some old jazz, some talk. In this world each item is suspect. Wine is drunk on an empty stomach in a society where three glasses produce a hangover. Chicago jazz is music from a lost age, played on an obsolete machine. And the conversation produces ideas, which for a Research Agency is the point, but which come from a man whom a nervous young wife calls by a political insult. He had done it a number of times before tells us the visit is a habit. The difference this time will be the paint and the grass.
Paint, mud and grass
Allen picks up the shoes. "Bending down, he picked up the pair of oxfords he had worn. They were mud-spattered. And, across each, were great drops of dried red paint." Dick places the discovery in a bare sentence and lets it sit.
Janet identifies the paint at once. "That's from the art department," she says. The narrator explains her knowledge: she had, "in the first year of the Agency, acted as his receptionist and file clerk, and she knew the office layout." And she asks the plain question: "What were you doing with red paint?"
"He didn't answer. He was still examining the shoes." This is the first moment in the novel where Allen has no answer. He is a man who talks easily, who had an argument ready for Goethe and an excuse ready for Hokkaido, and here he is silent. The reader understands before he admits it that he does not know.
Janet keeps going, and she becomes a good detective. "And the mud," she says. "And look." She plucks "a bit of grass dried to the sole of one shoe." "Where did you find grass at Hokkaido? Nothing grows in those ruins... it's contaminated, isn't it?"
Allen admits it. The narrator expands: "The island had been saturated during the war, bombed and bathed and doctored and infested with every possible kind of toxic and lethal substance." The list of verbs moves from war to medicine to plague. Then a line that tells us the reach of Morec: "Moral Reclamation was useless, let alone gross physical rebuilding." The two kinds of repair are put side by side, moral and physical, and the moral one is mentioned first, as though it were the more natural tool. "Hokkaido was as sterile and dead as it had been in 1972, the final year of the war."
Janet presses the grass between her fingers. "It's domestic grass," she says. "I can tell." The narrator supplies her authority: "She had lived most of her life on colony planets." "The texture's smooth. It wasn't imported... it grows here on Earth."
Allen, irritated, asks the only question left: "Where on Earth?" Janet answers it: "The Park," she says, and then, "That's the only place grass grows. The rest is all apartments and offices. You must have been there last night."
CASE / SCENE
Janet's case, step by step. In half a page the shy wife assembles evidence and reaches a conclusion her husband has not reached. (1) The paint is red and comes from the art department, which she knows from working there. (2) There is grass on a shoe, and nothing grows on Hokkaido. (3) The grass is domestic, judged by its smooth texture, which she can tell because she grew up on colony planets where grass is different. (4) Only one place on Earth grows grass: the Park. (5) Therefore: "You must have been there last night." Each step uses something she knows and he does not notice. The chapter that began by calling her bewildered gives her the clearest mind at the table.
The spire, the Park and the statue
At this point Dick turns the camera to the window. "Outside the window of the apartment the" blessed "Morec spire gleamed in the morning sun." (The word blessed is again set between dashes in the source, this time with a stray space after the first dash.) Then he gives the geography of the sacred city.
Omphalos is Greek for navel. At Delphi the Greeks kept a carved stone called the omphalos, which marked the centre of the world: the story was that Zeus released two eagles from the ends of the earth and they met over Delphi [Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Delphi Archaeological Museum; Wikipedia, Omphalos of Delphi]. Dick uses the word twice in the first two
"Below it was the Park. The Park and spire comprised the hub of Morec, its omphalos."
Narrator, from the Purcells' window
chapters, here in the narrator's voice and in Chapter 2 in a conversation about the meaning of Earth. A religion with a navel needs a sacred object at it, and the next sentences supply one.
"There, among the lawns and flowers and bushes, was the statue of Major Streiter. It was the official statue, cast during his lifetime. The statue had been there one hundred and twenty-four years." Dick says nothing more about it. The statue enters the novel in the same paragraph as the grass on Allen's shoe and a few lines after the red paint. The reader has every piece needed for a guess, and Dick has not said a word about what happened.
Allen concedes one thing. "I walked through the Park," he admits. "He had stopped eating; his" breakfast eggs, which the source puts in ironic quotation marks to tell us they are not real eggs, "were cooling on his plate." A man who always finishes eating has stopped.
Janet comes back to the paint. "But the paint," she says. The narrator describes her voice with sympathy and some condescension: "In her voice was the vague, troubled fear with which she met every crisis, the helpless sense of foreboding that always seemed to paralyze her ability to act." Then her direct question: "You didn't do anything wrong, did you?" And the narrator's explanation of what lies behind it: "She was, obviously, thinking of the lease."
That sentence connects the private scare to the public system. A married couple in this world do not fear a fine or a scandal. They fear the loss of their room. The lease, "defended for over forty years," can be taken away for wrongdoing. Everything about the Purcells' small comfort depends on Allen's good conduct, and Janet knows it.
Allen does not answer. "Rubbing his forehead, Allen got to his feet." What he says is a statement of the time: "It's seven-thirty. I'll have to start to work." Janet notices what he has left: "But you didn't finish eating." The narrator adds: "He always finished eating." She asks: "You're not sick, are you?"
The exchange is a good small piece of character writing. Allen's health is part of his self-image: he is the man nothing goes wrong with. Janet confirms it, and her confirmation sounds less like praise than like worry. A man to whom nothing is ever wrong has no vocabulary for what has gone wrong now.
"Me... Sick?... When was I last sick?"
Allen, laughing, as he kisses Janet and finds his coat
"Never... There's never anything the matter with you."
Janet, murmuring, "troubled and watching him"
The block warden's table
Outside, the novel shows its machinery of control. "At the base of the housing unit, businessmen were clustered at the block warden's table. The routine check was in progress, and Allen joined the group." Every morning, it seems, the people of the building pass a table on the way out and are checked. The narrator calls it routine.
Allen's mood lifts. "The morning smelled of ozone, and its clean scent helped clear his head. And it restored his fundamental optimism." Fundamental optimism is Allen's base state, the thing a good morning puts back. The chapter is about to take it away again.
Then the institution and the woman. "The Parent Citizens Committee maintained a female functionary for each housing unit, and Mrs. Birmingham was typical: plump, florid, in her middle fifties, she wore a flowered and ornate dress and wrote out her reports with a powerfully authoritative fountain pen. It was a respected position, and Mrs. Birmingham had held the post for years." The name Parent Citizens Committee sounds like a parent-teacher association grown into a ministry, and the woman sounds like the chair of a church committee. That is the joke and the menace: surveillance in this society is run by the respectable, the motherly and the civic. Her fountain pen is "powerfully authoritative." Her pad, we learn in a moment, is "long" and "yellow."
The conversation begins with courtesies. "Good morning, Mr. Purcell," she says, beaming. "Hello, Mrs. Birmingham," Allen answers, and the narrator tells us he "tipped his hat, since block wardens set great store by the little civilities." He offers small talk: "Looks like a nice day, assuming it doesn't cloud up."
The narrator explains the joke, and the explanation is a piece of economics. "Virtually all foods and manufactured items were brought in by autofac rocket; the limited domestic supply served only as a standard of judgment, a kind of recalled ideal." Earth no longer feeds itself. The few things grown at home exist as a reference, the way a mint keeps a standard weight, to tell people what real food is supposed to be like. Mrs. Birmingham's phrase is a farmer's saying from a world that has no farmers, kept alive as a pleasantry. The word autofac was Dick's own: his story Autofac, about self-running automatic factories, appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in November 1955, a few weeks after this manuscript reached his agents [ISFDB, Galaxy November 1955; ISFDB title 53646].
She writes something on her pad and turns to Janet. "I... haven't seen your lovely wife yet, today." The hesitation before the sentence is the warden noticing an absence. Allen has an answer ready, as always: "Allen always alibied for his wife's tardiness." His alibi today: "Janet's getting ready for the Book Club meeting. Special day: she's been promoted to treasurer." We do not know if any of this is true. The narrator's verb, alibied, suggests a habit of small inventions to keep a shy woman out of trouble.
Mrs. Birmingham approves and criticises in one breath: "I'm so glad... She's such a sweet girl. A bit shy, though. She should mix more with people." In a block system, shyness is a fault, and the warden notes it kindly. Allen agrees and supplies the background: "That's certainly true... She was brought up in the wide open spaces. Betelgeuse 4. Rocks and goats." The joke tells us Janet's home planet, its emptiness, and its livestock, and it links back to her undulant fever.
CAST
Mrs. Birmingham, in Dick's details. Plump, florid, in her middle fifties; a flowered and ornate dress; reports written in a powerfully authoritative fountain pen on a long yellow pad; holder of "a respected position" for years; a woman who sets "great store by the little civilities"; who jokes about crops that nobody grows; who smiles a "saccharine smile"; who speaks in "a partly bantering, partly haughty thought-for-this-week voice." In Chapter 3 Allen will remember her as "the coyly sweet malevolence of the creature situated behind her table, dealing out trouble."
"Rain for the crops"
Mrs. Birmingham's joke
"You visited Hokkaido"
Allen thinks the interview is over. The narrator: "He had expected that to end the interview", his "own conduct was rarely in question", "but suddenly Mrs. Birmingham became rigid and business-like." (The source sets the middle clause between dashes, one of them spaced.) The change of tone is sudden, and the next sentence is delivered in the same sweet voice as the rest.
Allen swears to himself. "Lord, he cursed. A juvenile must have spotted him." This is the first time the novel names a juvenile, and it tells us very little. A juvenile spots people. The next sentence calls it it: "He wondered how much it had seen. If it tagged him early in the trip it might have followed the whole way." So a juvenile is a thing, not a child, and it can tag and follow a man across the sky. Later in the chapter we learn that juveniles carry tapes and hand them in. Dick lets the reader assemble the device from three sentences.
He answers carefully: "Not very." And she states it: "You visited Hokkaido."
Allen's defence is the one he rehearsed over his capsules. "Research," he says, "assuming the posture of defense." "For the Agency." The narrator then tells us how Allen sees this exchange, and it is the most interesting sentence about him in the chapter.
He enjoys it. The sentence continues: "He was facing a bureaucrat who operated by rote, whereas he struck through the layers of habit and hit directly. This was the success of his Agency, and it was the success of his personal life." Allen thinks of himself as the man who cuts through habit. He believes that the same quality makes his packets better than the big four's and makes him more than a match for the warden. And then he uses the system's own language against her: "Telemedia's needs take precedence over personal feeling, Mrs. Birmingham. You certainly understand that." He has turned a suspicious night into an act of service.
It works, for the moment. "His confidence did the trick, and Mrs. Birmingham's saccharine smile returned." She makes "a scratch with her pen" and moves on to the week's business: "Will we see you at the block meeting next Wednesday? That's just the day after tomorrow."
"Certainly," Allen says. And then the narrator gives us the block meeting as Allen has known it:
The block meeting is a room full of neighbours, interminable talk, and machines handing over their recordings to officials. It is where the reports the warden collects become criticisms
"You were out late last night, Mr. Purcell. Did you have a good time?"
Mrs. Birmingham
"This was the great dialectic of the moral society, and, in a perverse way, he enjoyed it."
Narrator, on Allen at the warden's table
"Over the decades he had learned to endure the interminable interchange, the stuffy presence of his neighbors packed together in one room. And the whirr of the juveniles as they surrendered their tapes to the Committee representatives."
Narrator, on the block meeting
said aloud. Allen tells her he won't have much to say: "But I'm afraid I won't have much to contribute." The narrator gives his reason: "He was too busy with his ideas and plans to care who lapsed and in what way." And he adds, aloud, "I've been up to my neck in work."
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The block system, as Chapter 1 reveals it. Dick shows the parts in passing; put together, they form a full loop of watching and judging.
Watchers.
Juveniles, apparently machines, which "spot," "tag" and "follow" people, recording on tape.
Collectors. A block warden for each housing unit, a female functionary of the Parent Citizens Committee, who keeps a table at the door, makes a daily routine check, and writes reports.
The forum. A weekly block meeting where neighbours are "packed together in one room," juveniles hand in tapes to "Committee representatives," and residents may face criticisms.
The stake. The lease. Janet's fear of wrongdoing is "thinking of the lease," and in Chapter 2 Allen pictures a Committee representative "canceling the lease."
The defence. A higher duty. Allen escapes the first question by invoking "Telemedia's needs."
A few criticisms
Then the blow. "Perhaps," Mrs. Birmingham says, "in a partly bantering, partly haughty thought-for-this-week voice," and finishes: "there might be a few criticisms of you." A thought-for-this-week voice is a fine invention: the tone of a church noticeboard, a parish bulletin's improving thought.
Allen's reaction is physical. "Of me?" he says, and "He winced with shock, and felt ill." The man who was never sick is ill for the first time in the novel, and it happens at the warden's table.
She keeps her tone light while she makes things worse. "It seems to me that when I was glancing over the reports, I noticed your name. Perhaps not. I could be mistaken. Goodness." She laughs. "If so it's certainly the first time in years. But none of us is perfect; we're all mortal." Every sentence is softened, and every sentence hurts more than the last. She claims uncertainty while making clear she is certain. Her remark about the first time in years tells Allen that his record has been clean, and that this is news.
CONTRAST
| What Mrs. Birmingham says | What it does |
|---|---|
| "You were out late last night" | Shows that she has the juvenile's report before he speaks. |
| "Did you have a good time?" | Turns an accusation into a friendly question he must answer. |
| "You visited Hokkaido" | States the fact flatly; there is no question mark. |
| "Will we see you at the block meeting" | Reminds him of the forum where the matter will be aired. |
| "there might be a few criticisms of you" | Delivers the threat with a "Perhaps" and a "might." |
| "I could be mistaken. Goodness." | Withdraws nothing while claiming to withdraw. |
| "we're all mortal" | Closes with a pious commonplace that excuses her part in it. |
The memory
Allen demands to know what the criticism is about. "Hokkaido?" he asks. And then, in his head, a second possibility: "Or afterward. The paint, the grass." And with it the first real memory of the night.
This is the best writing in the chapter, and its style is different from everything around it. The rest of the chapter is brisk, ironic and full of nouns like lease, table, report. This passage is lyrical. A grown man is rolling or sliding down a wet slope in the dark, lying on his back with his arms spread, looking at the stars and taking them in. Whatever else happened in the Park, this part of the night was pure, childish happiness, the kind of joy a society of block wardens and moral packets has no place for. The memory comes back as sensation, not as a sequence of actions. Allen remembers the grass and the sky. He does not remember the paint.
He tries again aloud. "Or afterward?" he demands, "but Mrs. Birmingham had turned to the next man in line." The chapter ends on his unanswered question, put to a woman who has already moved on to someone else. The routine check continues. Whatever Allen did, it is now in a report on a long yellow pad, and he will hear about it in public on Wednesday.
"There it was in a rush: the wet grass sparkling and slithering under him as he coasted dizzily downhill. The swaying staffs of trees. Above, as he lay gaping on his back, the dark-swept sky; clouds were figments of matter against the blackness. And he, lying stretched out, arms out, swallowing stars."
Narrator, Allen's memory of the night
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: when a score follows a person into the rest of life. The block system turns one night's behaviour into a public criticism that threatens a family's home. Allen's offence, as far as anyone has told him, is that a machine saw him fly to the wrong island. The consequence reaches into an unrelated part of life, the lease. That pattern is what the European Union's AI Act now forbids for automated systems: Article 5(1)(c) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 bans AI systems that evaluate or classify people over time on the basis of their social behaviour or personal characteristics, where the resulting social score leads to detrimental treatment in social contexts unrelated to where the data was collected, or treatment out of proportion to the behaviour; the prohibitions have applied since 2 February 2025 [EUR-Lex, Regulation 2024/1689; European Commission guidelines on prohibited AI practices]. For a bank, the practical lesson is about data reuse. Transaction monitoring and employee conduct surveillance collect behavioural data for a stated purpose such as fraud or market abuse. When an architecture lets that data drift into an unrelated decision, such as credit limits, housing loans or promotion, without telling the person what was flagged or giving a human reviewer the final word, it starts to look like Mrs. Birmingham's pad. Design the data flows so that each score has a named purpose, a stated consumer, and a route for the person to see and answer what the machine recorded.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks and small inconsistencies in Chapter 1. These notes report the text as it stands and do not correct it.
A tight timeline. Allen worked until ten, then flew "aimlessly" before turning toward Hokkaido, drank three glasses of wine, listened to "a half hour" of jazz, and was "on his way back" "by eleven." Then he was home at eleven-forty, with a walk through the Park, a downhill roll on wet grass, and somehow red paint fitted in between. The arithmetic is tight, and the novel may intend it to be: the gap is where the mystery lives. Readers should notice it without assuming yet what it means.
"Over the decades." Allen is called "young" in the first sentence, yet he has endured block meetings "Over the decades." If he is, say, in his late twenties or early thirties and the meetings start in childhood, the phrase can just about work; it reads oddly all the same.
Hokkaido to the "East." From Newer York, Hokkaido lies across the Pacific to the west, or very far round to the east. The text says he had "flown aimlessly, and finally turned East," which may be loose wording or may show how far he wandered.
Goethe and lens-grinding. As noted above, lens-grinding is Spinoza's trade. Goethe's optical work was with prisms.
Dashes. The word "blessed" is set between dashes twice, the second time with a stray space; the warden passage at line 154 also has a spaced dash. In quotations here the dashes are dropped or split.
"For awhile" is set as one word, a common 1950s American spelling.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 1. Allen Purcell, the confident young head of a small agency that makes moral packets for the state media trust, lives with his anxious wife Janet in a single inherited room whose lease the family has defended for forty years. Last night, after ten, he flew to the poisoned island of Hokkaido to drink wine and hear jazz with Sugermann and Tom Gates; he came home at eleven-forty with mud, red paint from his own art department, and domestic grass on his shoes. Janet works out that he was in the Park, where the founder's statue has stood for 124 years. A machine called a juvenile saw him, the block warden Mrs. Birmingham knows, and his name may be read out among the criticisms at Wednesday's block meeting. The chapter gives the reader every clue to a prank in the Park and gives Allen only a memory of rolling downhill under the stars. He defends himself with Telemedia's needs and wins the first exchange; he loses the second, and his last question goes unanswered.
The Apple Tree That Died
Allen reaches his office late, because of the block warden, and finds his assistant Fred Luddy in a panic: Sue Frost, the Committee secretary who runs Telemedia, is waiting inside, the first time so senior a figure has ever called. She has brought one of the Agency's packets, a story about a man who tries to grow an apple tree on a colony planet and fails. The Telemedia director, Myron Mavis, bought it and then took fright, because the Committee has sunk billions into colony farming and the packet seems to say that the orchards will die. Allen explains the moral he intended, that Earth is the centre and the colonies are only a means. Frost tells him she backed his Agency from its first packet and wants this one, but not as it stands. Luddy, sweating, starts agreeing with her. Allen fires him on the spot, withdraws the packet rather than change it, and finds that Frost seems to approve. She asks to see round the Agency, and remarks that he is better off without Luddy.
TIMELINE
When and where. The same Monday morning, soon after eight. Allen is "late" because of Mrs. Birmingham. The scene is the fourth floor of the Mogentlock Building, home of Allen Purcell, Inc. Research Agency: an outer reception lounge, an inner office, a switchboard and Doris's typewriter in the next room, and an art department somewhere along the hall. Two dates come up in conversation: the Agency is "only three years" old, and its first packet dates from May, 2112. Mavis accepted the apple-tree packet "last month," and Frost read it "this weekend." Chapter 2 runs to about 1,820 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell. Fred Luddy: his assistant, with him since the Agency opened, here "in a tantrum of discomfort." Sue Frost: "the administrator of Telemedia," one of the Committee's departmental secretaries, in her mid-fifties, tall and large-boned, in a dark gray suit with a flower in her hair. Myron Mavis: "the acting Director of T-M, a weary-voiced, bald-headed individual," the man "who bought packets," present only through a pencilled note. Ida Pease Hoyt: "the linear descendant of Major Streiter," to whom the departmental secretaries answer; named only. Doris: "one of his secretaries," heard typing next door. Mrs. Birmingham and Janet appear in Allen's imagination. The novel's other packet makers, the big four, are represented by one name, Blake-Moffet, whose packets have a hero.
A building that says good morning
The chapter opens in a lobby. "The lobby of the Mogentlock Building was active and stirring with noise, a constant coming-and-going of busy people as Allen approached the elevator." It is a normal office building on a normal working morning, with one comic touch: the machines are better mannered than the people. "Because of Mrs. Birmingham he was late. The elevator politely waited."
The lift greets him by name. "Good morning, Mr. Purcell," says its "taped voice," and then it reads out the directory as it climbs:
The list does a small job of world-building. Above the street, this city still has ordinary businesses: an import-export company and a music federation share the building with a moral
"Second floor Bevis and Company Import-Export. Third floor American Music Federation. Fourth floor Allen Purcell, Inc. Research Agency."
The elevator's taped voice
agency. Tape recurs: the tape in the wall changed Allen's room at seven, a juvenile's tape reported his night, and now a tape says good morning. Recording is everywhere in this society, and most of it is polite.
Luddy in a panic
The doors open on a man in distress. "In the outer reception lounge, Fred Luddy, his assistant, wandered about in a tantrum of discomfort." The phrase tantrum of discomfort is funny and exact: Luddy is not angry, he is a grown man so nervous that he is behaving like a child.
Allen, still shaken from the warden's table, answers vaguely: "Morning," taking off his coat. Luddy blurts: "Allen, she's here." His face goes "scarlet." "She got here before I did; I came up and there she was, sitting."
Allen's first thought shows where his fear has been since seven-thirty. "Who? Janet?" And the narrator tells us what he pictures: "He had a mental image of a Committee representative driving her from the apartment and canceling the lease. Mrs. Birmingham, with smiles, closing in on Janet as she sat absently combing her hair." In the space of a sentence the lease, which was only Janet's worry at breakfast, has become Allen's nightmare too. The image is precise: Janet doing what she did at breakfast, combing her hair, and the warden "with smiles" coming for her.
"Not Mrs. Purcell," Luddy says, and drops his voice "to a rasp." "It's Sue Frost."
Allen cranes his neck toward the closed inner door. The narrator tells us why this matters: "If Sue Frost was really sitting in there, it marked the first time a Committee Secretary had paid a call on him." Allen's response is mild: "I'll be darned." Luddy yelps: "She wants to see you!"
The chain of command
Dick now pauses to explain the government, in a single paragraph that is the novel's clearest statement of who rules.
The ruler is a descendant of the founder, which makes the state a kind of dynasty, though the ruler is called by a plain name and works through a Committee. The paragraph continues: "Sue Frost was the administrator of Telemedia, which was the official government trust controlling mass communications." A trust is a business word, as in the American antitrust laws: Telemedia is a state monopoly over all mass media. Allen has never dealt with Frost: "he worked with the acting
"The Committee functioned through a series of departmental secretaries directly responsible to Ida Pease Hoyt, the linear descendant of Major Streiter."
Narrator
Director of T-M, a weary-voiced, bald-headed individual named Myron Mavis. It was Mavis who bought packets."
Allen guesses what the visit is about. "Presumably, she had learned that Mavis was taking the Agency's output, and that the Agency was relatively new." And he fears the worst. "With a sinking dread he anticipated one of the Committee's gloomy, protracted investigations." The word investigations comes up for the first time; in Chapter 3 we will see files kept for them. He gives orders: "Better have Doris block my incoming calls." The narrator adds: "Doris was one of his secretaries." And to Luddy: "You take over until Mrs. Frost and I are through talking."
"Luddy followed after him in a dance of prayer." The phrase is cruel and funny. Luddy hops after his employer like a worshipper begging a god. "Good luck, Allen. I'll hold the fort for you. If you want the books", he begins, and the source cuts him off with a dash. The books are the accounts. Luddy assumes that a visit from the Committee means an audit. Allen answers: "Yes, I'll call you." And he opens the door.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Who is who in the moral economy, from Chapters 1 and
Major Streiter, founder of Moral Reclamation, dead, present as a statue cast in his lifetime and a "time-tested formula."
Ida Pease Hoyt, his "linear descendant," at the top of the Committee.
Departmental secretaries, "directly responsible" to her. One is Sue Frost, administrator of Telemedia (T-M), "the official government trust controlling mass communications."
Myron Mavis, "acting Director of T-M," who buys packets and passes doubtful ones up "along the line."
The Research Agencies, private firms that write packets: the "giant four" (one is presumably Blake-Moffet) and Allen's new, small, inventive firm.
The block system of the Parent Citizens Committee, wardens and juveniles, which watches the people who make and consume the packets.
The structure is a state that owns the channels and buys the content from private suppliers, then checks the suppliers through the same neighbourhood surveillance it applies to everyone else.
Sue Frost
The portrait is one of the most carefully drawn in the chapter.
Dick then defines her against a type: "There was little or no softness to her, nothing of the fleshy and over-dressed motherliness that he saw in so many Committee women." That is a sly glance back at Mrs. Birmingham, who is the same age, plump and in a "flowered and ornate dress." Frost wears a single flower in her hair rather than flowers all over her clothes. The Committee has two kinds of women in its service, and Allen has met both before nine o'clock.
"She was tall, and she was rather large-boned and muscular. Her suit was a simple hard weave, dark gray in color. She wore a flower in her hair, and she was altogether a strikingly handsome woman. At a guess, she was in her middle fifties."
Narrator, on Sue Frost
"Her legs were long, and, as she rose to her feet, her right hand lifted to welcome him in a" "forthright" ... "almost masculine" ... "handshake." (The source sets "almost masculine" between dashes.) She speaks first: "Hello, Mr. Purcell... I hope you don't mind my showing up this way, unannounced." The narrator notes: "Her voice was not overly expressive." Allen murmurs, "Not at all... Please sit down."
She sits, crosses her legs, and "contemplated him." Then her eyes: "Her eyes, he noticed, were an almost colorless straw. A strong kind of substance, and highly polished." The description slides from colour to material. Her eyes are like straw, then like a strong, polished substance. It is a hard image for a hard woman, and it is also admiring.
Allen offers a cigarette; she accepts one "with a nod of thanks," and he takes one too, "feeling like a gauche young man in the company of an older and more experienced woman." The man who enjoyed out-fencing Mrs. Birmingham half an hour ago now feels like a boy.
His next thought comes from his trade. "He couldn't help thinking that Sue Frost was the type of urbane career woman ultimately not proposed to by the hero of Blake-Moffet's packets." The packets, in other words, have stock plots, stock heroes, and stock women: the career woman loses, and the hero marries the girl next door. "There was an unsympathetic firmness about her. She was decidedly not the girl from next door." Allen sees people through the categories of the packets he writes, and the joke is that the woman his industry casts as the loser is the one with power over him.
CONTRAST
| Mrs. Birmingham (Ch1) | Sue Frost (Ch2) | |
|---|---|---|
| Age | "middle fifties" | "middle fifties" |
| Build | "plump, florid" | "tall... large-boned and muscular" |
| Dress | "a flowered and ornate dress" | a dark gray "hard weave" suit, "a flower in her hair" |
| Manner | "saccharine smile," "the little civilities" | "not overly expressive," "unsympathetic firmness" |
| Instrument | fountain pen and long yellow pad | a manila folder of packets |
| Rank | block warden of one housing unit | a Committee Secretary over all mass media |
| Effect on Allen | he enjoys the fencing, then "felt ill" | he feels like "a gauche young man" |
The packet in the folder
Frost comes to the point. "Undoubtedly," she begins, "you recognize this." She unwinds the string of "a manila folder and displayed a sheaf of script." On the cover is the Agency's stamp. "Yes," Allen admits. "That's one of ours."
She lays it on the desk and gives the history. "Myron accepted this last month. Then he had qualms and he sent it along the line to me. I had a chance to go over it this weekend." A Committee secretary spends her weekend reading a packet that a director has already bought. The story is serious.
The narrator gives Allen's opinion of his own work: "It was a high-quality piece he had personally participated in; as it stood it could have gone over any of T-M's media." He is proud of it and he knows it is good.
"Qualms," Allen says. "How do you mean?" The narrator describes a chill: "He had a deep, cold sensation, as if he were involved in some eerie religious ritual." A business meeting about a script feels like a ceremony, which in this society it is. Allen offers the normal trade remedy: "If the packet won't go, then turn it back to us. We'll create a credit; we've done it before."
The apple tree
Frost does not want a refund. "The packet is beautifully handled," she says, smoking. "No, Myron certainly didn't want it back." Then she gives the story in two sentences:
She begins to state its moral and stops: "The Morec of it is", she says, and picks up the packet again, "I'm not certain what the Morec is. Shouldn't he have tried to grow it?" (The source breaks her sentence across a page boundary in the middle, between "what the" and "Morec is"; the words are continuous.) Note the use of Morec as a common noun. A packet has a Morec the way a fable has a moral. The word for the whole ideology is also the word for the lesson of each story.
The argument that follows is short and dense.
Laid out like this, the exchange shows the logic of a packet. A concrete story (a man, a tree, a colony) carries an abstract moral (the individual should serve society at the centre, and the colonies exist for Earth). Allen's language mixes the two levels. The man was "nourishing a private enterprise," which is both gardening and a business metaphor. The tree "withers when it's transplanted," and so does the man's "spiritual side." The man "should have put down his roots here," which is advice no real apple grower could follow, as Frost points out: there is no room on Earth, "It's all city." Allen's answer is one word, "Symbolically."
"Your theme concerns this man's attempt to grow an apple tree on a colony planet. But the tree dies."
Sue Frost, summarising the packet
"Not there."
Allen
"You mean it belonged on Earth?"
Sue Frost
"I mean he should have been working for the good of society, not off somewhere nourishing a private enterprise. He saw the colony as an end in itself. But they're means. This is the center."
Allen
"Omphalos... The navel of the universe. And the tree"
Sue Frost, agreeing, then pressing
"The tree symbolizes an Earth product that withers when it's transplanted. His spiritual side died."
Allen
"But he couldn't have grown it here. There's no room. It's all city."
Sue Frost
"Symbolically... He should have put down his roots here."
Allen, explaining
Frost's reply about the omphalos repeats the narrator's word from Chapter 1, where the Park and spire were "the hub of Morec, its omphalos." So the idea that Earth, and the Park in particular, is the navel of the universe is official doctrine, something a secretary can quote back in one word. Allen's packet expresses orthodox belief. That is the irony of what follows: the trouble is not that Allen has doubted the centre, but that his loyalty to it has trodden on a programme.
CONTRAST
| Element | Allen's reading | Frost's (and Mavis's) worry |
|---|---|---|
| The man | Should have worked "for the good of society" | Was doing what the Committee asks colonists to do |
| The colony | A "means," never "an end in itself" | Where Earth's food is "supposed" to come from |
| The tree | A symbol of an Earth product, or a soul, that "withers when it's transplanted" | A literal crop that the Committee is spending billions to grow |
| The tree's death | "His spiritual side died" | "the outplanet orchards will fail" |
| The moral | "Earth is the center" | Unclear: "I'm not certain what the Morec is" |
Why an apple tree
Dick could have chosen any crop for the packet, and the choice of an apple tree carries a good deal of freight. The apple is the fruit that Western tradition, from medieval paintings onward, puts in the Garden of Eden, so a dying apple tree on a strange planet is a small picture of a lost paradise that cannot be planted twice. The apple is also the American frontier fruit. John Chapman (1774-1845), remembered as Johnny Appleseed, walked ahead of the settlers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, planting fenced nurseries of seedling apples from cider-mill seed and selling or giving the young trees to the families who came after him [Library of Congress, Today in History, 26 September; Smithsonian Magazine; Wikipedia, Johnny Appleseed]. For an American reader of 1956, a man planting an apple tree in a new country is the image of a pioneer making a home.
Allen's packet reverses that image. The pioneer fails, the tree dies, and the moral is that the pioneer should have stayed at home. Put that way, the packet is anti-frontier, and it is easy to see why a Committee that is trying to make the colonies feed Earth would flinch. The colonist in the packet is a man who leaves the centre for what Allen calls "nourishing a private enterprise," and the word private is a charge in a society where every life is lived in front of a block warden. A man alone with a tree on another planet is a man no juvenile can follow.
The packet is also, perhaps without Allen seeing it, a little self-portrait. Allen is the head of a "private enterprise," a small firm that tries to grow new things in a field dominated by four old ones. His packet tells a pioneer to come home and serve the centre. His own Agency is about to be told, by Mavis's note, that it is "too coy" and should fit in. Dick lets the parallel sit without comment.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
How a packet travels, from what Chapters 1 and 2 show.
Made. An agency staff of "artists, historian, moral consultant, dictionist, dramatist" builds a packet around a story and a Morec, a stated moral. Allen's Agency works "from day to day" and tries to "anticipate future trends."
Sold. The packet goes to Telemedia, where the director, Mavis, decides whether to buy. Urgent work is flown over in the Agency's "one-man sliver."
Used. A good packet "could have gone over any of T-M's media": Chapter 3 mentions television shows and "five-minute spots," framed "for a medium."
Checked. A director with "qualms" sends a packet "along the line" to the secretary above him. Duplicates of T-M's output go "on permanent file" in case of investigation (Chapter 3).
Returned. A rejected packet earns a credit: the Agency takes it back and supplies another; "we've done it before," Allen says.
A fundamental
Frost is silent. Allen smokes "uneasily, crossing and uncrossing his legs, feeling his tension grow, not diminish." Next door the switchboard buzzes and "Doris' typewriter clacked." The office goes on around the crisis.
Then Frost explains the objection, and it is a political one.
The speech joins up several details from Chapter 1. Food on Earth comes in by "autofac rocket," and home-grown produce is "a kind of recalled ideal." The colonies are trying to create "natural farms," and the attempt has "revived" old plagues such as the undulant fever Janet caught as a girl. Now Frost tells us that the programme costs billions of dollars and years of work, that it is a heartbreaking task with endless disappointments, and that the Committee's hope is to "seed domestic plants," the same domestic plants whose standard is kept on Earth. A packet about a dying apple tree is, in that light, a packet about the failure of the Committee's most expensive programme.
"You see... this conflicts with a fundamental. The Committee has put billions of dollars and years of work into outplanet agriculture. We've done everything possible to seed domestic plants in the colonies. They're supposed to supply us with our food. People realize it's a heartbreaking task, with endless disappointments... and you're saying that the outplanet orchards will fail."
Sue Frost
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: Allen's moral contradicts Allen's breakfast. The packet says the colonies are only "means" and "This is the center." Yet in Chapter 1 the narrator told us that "Virtually all foods and manufactured items were brought in by autofac rocket," and that Earth's own produce is only "a standard of judgment." Earth depends on the colonies for almost everything it eats. A moral that sends the colonist home to put down roots on a planet that is "all city" would, taken literally, starve the centre. Frost sees this at once; Allen answers "Symbolically." The novel does not yet say who is right, but it shows in its second chapter that the official faith and the official economy pull in different directions, and that a sincere believer can embarrass the state by taking the faith more seriously than the economy allows.
Allen is beaten. "Allen started to speak and then changed his mind. He felt absolutely defeated." Frost does not let it rest: "Mrs. Frost was gazing at him searchingly, expecting him to defend himself in the usual fashion." The phrase in the usual fashion is interesting. She expects a defence, perhaps because she knows how agency men behave, perhaps because she knows how Allen behaves. In either case she is watching to see what he does.
Myron's note
She produces a document. "Here's a note... You can read it. Myron's note on this, when it came to me." The narrator says: "The note was in pencil and went:" It is addressed to Sue, with a dash after her name, and then:
The note is a small masterpiece of bureaucratic evasion. "The same outfit again" tells us that Mavis has had trouble with Allen's Agency before, and that he thinks of it as an outfit, a slightly dismissive word. "Top-drawer" concedes the quality. "too coy" is the charge: the packet hides its meaning, is too clever by half. And "You decide" is the confession. The director of the state's media will not decide. He passes the paper upward and signs with an initial.
Allen, now angry, asks: "What's he mean?" Frost answers: "He means the Morec doesn't come across." She leans toward him and asks the business question: "Your Agency has been in this only three years. You started out very well. What do you currently gross?" (In the source, Allen's question and Frost's answer are run together in one paragraph, so that a careless reader could take both lines as Allen's. The sense makes it clear that Frost gives the answer.)
Allen does not know his own figures. "I'd have to see the books," he says, rising. "May I get Luddy in here? I'd like him to see Myron's note." Frost agrees: "Certainly."
"The same outfit again. Top-drawer, but too coy. You decide. M."
Myron Mavis, pencilled note to Sue Frost
"You can't win them all"
"Fred Luddy entered the office stiff-legged with apprehension." He takes the packet with a muttered "Thanks," reads the note, and the narrator tells us he does not really read it: "his eyes showed no spark of consciousness. He seemed tuned to invisible vibrations; the meaning reached him through the tension of the air, rather than the pencilled words." Luddy is a social barometer. He does not understand the argument; he understands the pressure in the room.
His verdict: "Well... You can't win them all." It is a shrug. Allen begins to strip the note off the packet and says: "We'll take this packet back, naturally."
"it was my decision"
Frost stops him, and she reveals something Allen did not know.
From the folder she takes another packet, "a familiar one." "Remember this? May, 2112. We argued for hours, Myron liked this, and I liked it. Nobody else did. Now Myron has cold feet." The narrator tells us what it is: "the first the Agency had ever done." She tosses it onto the desk.
The revelation changes the scene. Allen thought he faced a censor. He actually faces his patron, the woman who argued for hours to get his first packet bought and who has watched his Agency for three years. Her question, "Is that your only response?", is a challenge from a friend: she wants him to do something other than surrender.
Allen gives his reading of Mavis: "Myron's getting tired." Frost's reply is one word and a nod: "Very." It is an agreement between two people about a third who is not in the room, and it plants a seed for Chapter 3, where Frost will describe Mavis's exhaustion at length.
"Is that your only response? I told you we want it; I made that clear. But we can't take it in the shape it's in. I think you should know that it was my decision to give your Agency the go-ahead. There was some dispute, and I was brought in from the first."
Sue Frost
BY THE NUMBERS
May, 2112 the Agency's first packet; "only three years" the Agency's age. "hours" of argument over that first packet; two supporters, Mavis and Frost. "last month" Mavis buys the apple-tree packet; "this weekend" Frost reads it. "billions of dollars" and "years of work" in outplanet agriculture. Fourth floor of the Mogentlock Building. Frost in her middle fifties. Luddy with the Agency since it opened, three years (Chapter 3).
Luddy changes sides
Luddy speaks first, and he gives way at once. "Maybe we've been going at it too fast," he says, hunched over. The narrator records his body: "He cleared his throat, cracked his knuckles and glanced at the ceiling. Drops of warm sweat sparkled in his hair and along his smoothly-shaved jowls." And he finishes: "We kind of got... excited." (The source has a dash before "excited.")
Allen ignores him and speaks to Frost. His speech is the moral centre of the chapter, and it is in two parts.
"My position is simple. In that packet, we made the Morec that Earth is the center. That's the real fundamental, and I believe it. If I didn't believe it I couldn't have developed the packet."
Allen, to Sue Frost
"I'll withdraw the packet but I won't change it. I'm not going to preach morality without practicing it."
Allen
Allen answers Frost's "fundamental" (the farms) with his own "real fundamental" (Earth is the centre). He claims to believe it, and he says belief is the condition of writing a packet at all. Then he draws a line: he will withdraw but not alter. The last sentence is his creed as a maker of moral stories. A moralist who edits his moral to suit a budget is a hypocrite, and Allen refuses to be one.
There is a dramatic irony that the reader feels and Allen does not. The man who will not preach morality without practising it is the same man who, an hour ago, could not explain red paint and grass on his shoes, and whose name is on Mrs. Birmingham's list. Chapter 2 does not mention the shoes at all. Allen, it seems, has put them out of his mind.
Luddy, meanwhile, backs further away. The narrator's sentence is merciless: "Quakily, in a spasm of agonized back-pedalling, Luddy muttered:"
He repeats Frost's words, doesn't come across, as his own. The narrator tells us what he is doing and that he knows it: "His voice had a ragged, guilty edge; Luddy knew what he was doing and he was ashamed." And he goes on: "I... see Mrs. Frost's point. Yes I do. It looks as if we're scuttling the agricultural program, and naturally we don't mean that. Isn't that so, Al?" (The source has a dash after "I".) The last question is the worst part. Luddy asks his employer to join him in giving way, in front of the official.
"It's not a moral question, Al. It's a question of clarity. The Morec of that packet doesn't come across."
Fred Luddy
"You're fired"
"You're fired"
Allen, to Fred Luddy
Two words, and the chapter turns. "They both stared at him. Neither of them grasped that he was serious, that he had really done it." Allen goes on in a businesslike tone: "Go tell Doris to make out your check." He takes the packet back and holds it. To Frost: "I'm sorry, Mrs. Frost, but I'm the only person qualified to speak for the Agency. We'll credit you for this packet and submit another. All right?"
The sentence I'm the only person qualified to speak for the Agency explains the firing as Allen sees it. Luddy's offence was to speak for the firm, in front of the client, against the firm's head. Allen is protecting the Agency's single voice as much as his principle.
Frost stubs out her cigarette and stands. Her reply is four words: "It's your decision." It echoes Mavis's note, "You decide," but with the opposite meaning. Mavis used those words to avoid deciding. Frost uses them to tell Allen that she will let him decide and will respect what he does.
Allen thanks her and feels the tension go out of him. The narrator goes on to say that Frost understood his stand and approved of it, and that this mattered more than anything else to Allen in that moment. (The source passage uses a word on this series' avoid-list, so the whole line is paraphrased here.) The reader should notice that we have only Allen's impression of her approval. Frost has said only "It's your decision."
Luddy pleads
The scene does not end cleanly, which is to Dick's credit. Luddy, "ashen," apologises.
He tugs at Allen's sleeve and pulls him into a corner, his voice sinking "to a jumpy whisper." "I admit I made a mistake... Let's discuss this further. I was simply trying to develop one possible viewpoint among many. You want me to express myself; I mean, it seems senseless to penalize me for working in the best interests of the Agency, as I see it."
Luddy's plea is pathetic and it also has a point. Allen's Agency prides itself on new ideas; its staff are meant to "anticipate future trends." Luddy claims he was offering "one possible viewpoint among many" and that Allen wants his staff to "express" themselves. A firm that rewards independent thought cannot easily sack a man for disagreeing. Luddy's problem is that he did not disagree from conviction. He switched sides in mid-meeting because he felt the pressure in the room, and he did it in front of the client.
"I meant what I said," Allen says. Luddy laughs: "You did?... Naturally you meant it. You're the boss." The narrator: "He was shaking." And a last pathetic question: "You really weren't kidding?" (The source breaks this speech across a page boundary too, after "Naturally you meant it.")
"I'm sorry... That was a mistake on my part. The packet is fine. Perfectly sound as it now exists."
Fred Luddy
The tour
Frost collects her coat and asks a favour. "I'd like to look over your Agency while I'm here. Do you mind?" Allen answers with pride: "Not at all... I'd be glad to show it to you. I'm quite proud of it." They go out into the hall together. "Luddy remained in the office, a sick, erratic look on his face."
In the hall Frost gives her verdict on the man who tried to please her:
Luddy agreed with her and lost his job; Allen refused her and gained her favour. The lesson is clear, and it reverses the logic of the block system that Chapter 1 showed. At the warden's table the safe course is to conform. In the Committee secretary's eyes, at least this morning, the man worth backing is the one who stands his ground.
Allen's reply is honest and closes the chapter: "That wasn't any fun." And the narrator's last sentence: "But he was feeling better." The first chapter ended with Allen ill and unanswered. The second ends with him feeling better, having fired the only person he has ever let go. Whether this is recovery or something less comfortable is left open.
"I don't care for him... I think you're better off without him."
Sue Frost
CASE / SCENE
The meeting, beat by beat. The scene in Allen's office lasts perhaps a quarter of an hour, and its power shifts several times.
Frost holds the packet. She opens with "you recognize this," and Allen admits it is his. She has the document; he has to answer for it.
Allen offers a credit. The normal trade move. Frost refuses: the packet is "beautifully handled," and Mavis did not want it back.
The moral is argued. Allen explains the tree as a symbol; Frost reads it as a crop. She wins the round with the farm programme's "billions," and Allen feels "absolutely defeated."
Mavis's note. The director's evasion ("You decide") is put on the table, and Allen becomes angry.
Luddy is called. Allen brings in his assistant, perhaps for support. Luddy shrugs, "You can't win them all."
Frost reveals her patronage. "it was my decision to give your Agency the go-ahead." The first packet, May 2112, lands on the desk. The censor turns out to be the patron.
Luddy gives way. "Maybe we've been going at it too fast," then "It's a question of clarity."
Allen draws the line. "I'll withdraw the packet but I won't change it," and fires Luddy.
Frost defers. "It's your decision." She asks to tour the Agency and judges Luddy in the hall.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: was it a test? Several details suggest that Frost came to see Allen as well as the packet. She arrived before Luddy and waited in the inner office. She told Allen she had backed him "from the first." She watched him "searchingly, expecting him to defend himself in the usual fashion." She asked whether withdrawal was his "only response." She left the decision to him, then asked to tour the Agency, then judged Luddy. A secretary who wanted only a change to a script could have sent it back with a memo, as Mavis did. Chapter 2 does not say what she wants. Chapter 3 ends with her taking Allen to Ida Pease Hoyt and telling him "I believe you know what I'm going to do." The reader can read Chapter 2 again in that light; these notes leave the answer to Chapter 4.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: the man who agrees in the meeting. Luddy is the colleague every organisation knows: tuned to "invisible vibrations," he senses which way the senior person leans and moves to agree, then calls it "one possible viewpoint among many." Allen's response, firing him on the spot, is the opposite failure: it tells every remaining employee that disagreeing with the boss in front of a client ends a career. Amy Edmondson's study of 51 work teams in a manufacturing company found that teams whose members shared the belief that it was safe to take interpersonal risks (she called it psychological safety) showed more learning behaviour, which in turn improved performance [Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly 44(2), 1999, 350-383]. In banking the same idea has a regulatory name. The U.S. supervisory guidance on model risk, SR 11-7 (Federal Reserve and OCC, April 2011), requires effective challenge: critical analysis by objective, informed people who have the incentive, the competence and the influence to make changes stick [Federal Reserve, SR 11-7 and attachment]. Luddy offered none of these: his challenge was neither objective nor informed, and he withdrew it as soon as it cost him. The architecture lesson is to build the challenge into the process before the meeting (written review, independent validators, a recorded dissent) so that disagreement does not depend on one nervous person's courage in front of a powerful visitor, and so that the head of the firm cannot answer it with "You're fired."
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 2.
Broken paragraphs. Three speeches are split across line breaks in mid-sentence in the source file: Frost's sentence breaks between "what the" and "Morec is," Allen's between "Earth is the center" and "That's the real fundamental," and Luddy's between "Naturally you meant it" and "You're the boss." They are page-break artefacts; the words run on.
Run-together dialogue. At line 258 Allen's "What's he mean?" and Frost's answer, "He means the Morec doesn't come across," sit in one paragraph without a new attribution. The sense shows two speakers.
"acting Director." Mavis is introduced as "the acting Director of T-M." In Chapter 3 Frost says "Myron has been Director of T-M for eight years." Eight years is a long time to be acting. Either the post has never been confirmed, which would fit Frost's doubts about him, or the two chapters disagree.
Three years. Frost says the Agency has been in business "only three years," and its first packet is dated "May, 2112." If the story is in October 2114, as later dates show, the Agency is about two and a half years old. Round numbers in speech, or a small slip.
An avoid-list word. The narrator's sentence about Frost's approval uses a word on this series' avoid-list; it is paraphrased, not quoted.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 2. The state rules through a Committee headed by Ida Pease Hoyt, Major Streiter's descendant; its secretary Sue Frost runs Telemedia, the state monopoly of mass media, and its tired director Myron Mavis buys packets from private agencies. Frost has backed Allen's Agency since its first packet in May 2112. She brings back a packet about an apple tree that dies on a colony planet, because it seems to say that the Committee's costly colony farming will fail. Allen defends its moral, that Earth is the centre and the colonies are means, refuses to change it, and fires his assistant Fred Luddy for siding with Frost in front of her. The official faith (Earth is the centre) and the official economy (Earth eats what the colonies grow) collide in one short packet, and the man who believes the faith most sincerely is the one who causes the trouble. Frost appears to approve of Allen's stand, tours his Agency, and says he is better off without Luddy.
The Domino Method
At half past five Allen is still with Sue Frost, now at the Telemedia building, a hollow square of studios and offices. He phones Janet to say he will be late, "Maybe for a long, long time." In Myron Mavis's office a young messenger from the Cohorts of Major Streiter, the founder's male descendants, collects the day's duplicates for the permanent files; Frost introduces him as a distant cousin-in-law, Ralf Hadler. Walking the halls, Frost wonders aloud whether Telemedia is too big, whether one person should run it, and whether its messages reach the public intact. Allen explains that he has no television: his block gets its messages from the "domino" family downstairs, a method he distrusts because one person with an original idea could upset it. The four of them squeeze into a small steam car for the Committee building; Mavis rails against the people who defect to the Health Resort, the car collides with another, and Frost and Allen walk on alone, leaving Mavis behind. At the door she tells Allen that Mavis is burned out and that they are going to see Ida Pease Hoyt. She thinks he knows why, and he does.
TIMELINE
When and where. The same Monday, at five-thirty in the afternoon. The day between the end of Chapter 2 and this moment is skipped. The first scene is the T-M building, "a connected hollow square" with outdoor sets in its open centre, much of it "underground." The second is a short ride in a Getabout through a leasing zone "between 1 and 14," and the last is the walk to the entrance of the Committee building. Chapter 3 runs to about 2,030 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell. Janet, on the telephone. Sue Frost. Myron Mavis: Director of T-M "for eight years," forty-two, looking eighty, with "half a stomach"; "an ulcer-mongerer" in rumpled shirt and baggy tweeds. Ralf Hadler: a young messenger of the Cohorts of Major Streiter, "A very distant cousin-in-law" of Frost's, with a face "as expressionless as sand." A middle-aged gentleman driving a Getabout of the Pure Food and Drug League. A cop on foot and a juvenile. Named but absent: Ida Pease Hoyt, Mrs. Birmingham (in Allen's mind), Fred Luddy.
A hollow square at half past five
The chapter starts with a time jump that Dick does not announce. "In the hall outside Myron Mavis' office, the Telemedia workers were winding up their day." Chapter 2 ended in the morning, in the hall of Allen's Agency, with Frost about to tour it. Chapter 3 picks up in the evening at Telemedia. Allen has spent the day with Frost, or at least ended it with her.
The building is sketched in three sentences. "The T-M building formed a connected hollow square. The open area in the center was used for outdoor sets. Nothing was in process now, because it was five-thirty and everybody was leaving." Telemedia is a studio as much as an office. Its centre is a stage, in the way the city's centre is the Park and spire: an open space surrounded by buildings, used for making images.
Allen phones home from a pay phone. "I'll be late for dinner," he says. Janet's reply is three words with a break in them: "Are... you all right?" (The source sets a dash after "Are.") Her question at breakfast was "You're not sick, are you?" She asks the same thing now. Allen answers brightly: "I'm fine... But you go ahead and eat. Big doings, big crisis at the Agency." He adds that he will get something to eat where he is, and: "I'm at Telemedia."
His answer is playful and, as the end of the chapter shows, perhaps truer than he lets on. He hangs up before Janet can
"For very long?"
Janet, anxiously
"Maybe for a long, long time"
Allen, before hanging up
ask what he means. The scene is a small cruelty that Allen does not notice: he leaves a frightened wife with a riddle.
The only person he ever let go
Frost asks about Luddy. "How long did Luddy work for you?" Allen answers: "Since I opened the Agency." The narrator adds that "The realization was sobering: three years." Then Allen says something more: "That's the only person I've ever let go."
Frost's question tells us she is still thinking about the morning. Allen's answer tells us he is too. The firing that made him "feel better" at the end of Chapter 2 now looks to him like what it was: the end of a three-year working relationship, decided in a second, in front of a visitor. Dick does not let his hero forget it.
Duplicates for the permanent file
At the back of the office, Mavis is doing a clerical job. "Myron Mavis was turning over duplicates of the day's output to a bonded messenger of the Committee. The duplicates would be put on permanent file; in case of an investigation the material was there to examine."
The sentence is matter-of-fact and it describes a total archive. Every day, everything Telemedia puts out is copied and carried to the Committee to be kept for good, in case of an investigation. The word investigation appeared in Chapter 2 as Allen's dread, "one of the Committee's gloomy, protracted investigations." Here we see the machinery that feeds such inquiries. The messenger carries "his armload of metal drums," which suggests the duplicates are on tape or film in canisters.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a permanent file of every broadcast. The Committee's rule is simple: keep a copy of everything the state media says, in a form an investigator can examine later. Real record-keeping laws work on the same idea for different reasons. In U.S. securities markets, SEC Rule 17a-4 requires broker-dealers to keep specified records for set periods, and amendments that took effect in January 2023 allow electronic records to be kept either in a non-rewriteable, non-erasable (WORM) format or in a system with a full time-stamped audit trail that can recreate the original [SEC, Release 34-96034, 2022; Federal Register, 3 November 2022; SEC FAQ on the amendments]. The difference is purpose. Securities rules preserve records so that customers and markets can be protected and wrongdoing traced. The Committee's file preserves its own propaganda so that anyone who wrote, bought or broadcast it can be held to account later. Telemedia's duplicates are a record of what each agency said, kept for the day an agency says the wrong thing.
A cousin from the Cohorts
Frost tells the messenger to wait: "Don't leave. I'm going back; you can go with me." The young man retires, and the narrator explains his uniform.
"His uniform was the drab khaki of the Cohorts of Major Streiter, a select body composed of male descendants of the founder of Morec."
Narrator
This sentence adds a good deal to what we know of the state. The founder had children, and his descendants form an order. The male ones wear khaki and serve as messengers and, it seems, much else. Ida Pease Hoyt, the ruler, is "the linear descendant"; the Cohorts are the wider family, organised and uniformed. Morec is a family business as well as a faith.
Frost introduces him: "A cousin... A very distant cousin-in-law on my father's side." The narrator describes his face: "as expressionless as sand." "Ralf Hadler. I like to keep him around." Then she gives him an errand: "Ralf, go find the Getabout. It's parked somewhere in back."
The connection is interesting. Frost herself is related by marriage to the founder's family, though distantly. The administrator of Telemedia is part of the extended clan that runs the state. I like to keep him around can be read as affection, as patronage, or as prudence; the text does not say which.
Devout as machines
Allen's view of the Cohorts is unfriendly. "The Cohorts, either singly or in bunches, made Allen uncomfortable; they were humorless, as devout as machines, and, for their small number, they seemed to be everywhere." The phrase as devout as machines links them to the juveniles of Chapter 1, the machines that watch and report. The faithful and the mechanical are made to look alike.
Allen's private picture of them is an insect: "His fantasy was that the Cohorts were always in motion; in the course of one day, like a foraging ant, a member of the Cohorts roamed hundreds of miles." The comparison is to a worker ant, tireless, without self, covering huge distances on errands for the colony. A society that values service above "personal feeling" (Allen's own words to Mrs. Birmingham) produces young men who are like ants, and Allen, who enjoys striking "through the layers of habit," dislikes them for it.
Mavis
Frost tells Mavis he is coming too: "You'll come along." "Naturally," Mavis murmurs, and starts clearing his desk. The narrator's portrait is brisk and unkind.
Ulcer-mongerer is a coinage worth enjoying: a man who deals in ulcers the way a fishmonger deals in fish, producing worry for himself and others. Allen remembers "tangled interviews that had ended with Mavis in despair and his staff scurrying." He predicts trouble: "If Mavis was going to be along, the next few hours would be hectic." Frost tells Mavis to finish up and meet them at the car.
"Mavis was an ulcer-mongerer, a high-strung worrier with rumpled shirt and baggy, unpressed tweeds, who flew into fragments when things got over his head."
Narrator
The giant reptiles
Walking down the hall, Allen says the obvious: "This is a big place." The narrator gives his thought: "The idea of an organ", "even a government organ", "occupying an entire building struck him as grandiose. And much of it was underground." Then a sentence with a joke in its grammar: "Telemedia, like cleanliness was next to God; after T-M came the secretaries and the Committee itself." The proverb cleanliness is next to godliness is bent into a ranking: in this state, the media come right after God and before the government.
Frost answers cryptically. "It's big... But I don't know." "You don't know what?" And then:
The dinosaurs are the oldest joke about size: the biggest creatures died out. Allen asks whether she means curtailing T-M's activities, and he cannot imagine what would replace them. He "tried to picture the vacuum that would be created" and asks: "And what instead?"
Frost's answer is a plan for reorganising the state media.
Allen thinks of Mavis and says: "I suppose it cuts into his life-expectancy." And Frost gives Mavis's file in four short sentences.
She goes on: "Someday I expect to phone and discover he's holed up at the Health Resort, doing business from there. Or from Other World, as they call that sanitarium of theirs." This is the first mention of the Health Resort and its Other World. Frost speaks of it as somewhere a burned-out official might flee to. Allen answers: "That's a long way off... Either place." The phrase can be taken literally, as a distance, or as Allen's reassurance that Mavis's collapse is far in the future.
"Maybe it should be smaller. Remember what became of the giant reptiles."
Sue Frost
"Sometimes I toy with the idea of slicing T-M into a number of units, interacting, but separately run. I'm not sure one person can or should take responsibility for the whole."
Sue Frost
"Myron has been Director of T-M for eight years. He's forty-two and he looks eighty. He's got only half a stomach."
Sue Frost
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: Sue Frost's reorganisation, and Conway's law. Frost's idea, "slicing T-M into a number of units, interacting, but separately run," is the oldest question in enterprise architecture: how big should one unit be, and who owns the whole? In April 1968 the programmer Melvin Conway published How Do Committees Invent? in Datamation, arguing that any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure copies the organisation's own communication structure [Conway, Datamation 14(4), 1968, 28-31; melconway.com]. Telemedia, one huge building run by one exhausted man, makes one huge output, and Frost suspects it garbles. Splitting it would change what it makes. Banks have been through this argument by law. After the 2008 crisis the UK's Independent Commission on Banking (the Vickers report) led to the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 2013, and from 1 January 2019 large UK banks have had to ring-fence core retail services (deposits, payments, overdrafts) in a separately run entity from investment banking; the deposit threshold was raised from £25bn to £35bn in 2025 [Bank of England, Ring-fencing; GOV.UK, Ring-fencing information]. The lesson for an architect is that Frost's two worries belong together. "units, interacting, but separately run" needs clear interfaces between the units, and "I'm not sure one person can or should take responsibility for the whole" needs named owners for each unit and for the interfaces. A reorganisation that changes the boxes without changing who talks to whom produces the same old system with more meetings.
Is the Morec garbled?
At the door Frost stops and asks for Allen's honest opinion. "You've been in a position to watch T-M. What do you think of it? Be honest with me. Would you call it efficient?" Allen's reply is careful: "The part I see is efficient."
She presses on the question that matters to her job.
The questions describe Telemedia's work exactly: it buys packets, frames them for a medium, and projects them to the public. Frost's worry is loss in transmission. A moral written by an agency may arrive at the public changed, distorted or empty.
Allen has trouble remembering when he last watched T-M. The narrator explains that "His Agency monitored as a matter of routine, collecting its own duplicates of the items based on its packets." So the Agency keeps its own copies too, the private mirror of the Committee's permanent file. But Allen himself rarely watches. "Last week," he says, "I watched a television show." Frost's "gray eyebrows lifted mockingly," and she asks: "Half hour? Or entire hour?"
His answer is comic and revealing: "The program was an hour but we saw only a portion of it. At a friend's apartment. Janet and I were over playing Juggle, and we were taking a break." The man who writes the state's morals watches its television only in passing, between rounds of a game called Juggle, at someone else's home.
"What about the output? It buys your packets and it frames them for a medium. What's your reaction to the end result? Is the Morec garbled along the line? Do you feel your ideas survive projection?"
Sue Frost
Frost is surprised: "You don't mean you don't own a television set." Allen's reply introduces the chapter's main idea.
"The people downstairs are domino for my block. They tumble the rest of us. Apparently the packets are getting over."
Allen
The domino method
Here Dick's world-building becomes a theory of mass communication. The domino is a household that receives the state's messages directly and passes them on. A row of dominoes falls when the first one is pushed: one family is pushed by Telemedia, and the family tumbles the rest of the block. Allen's block does not need a television in every room, because the people downstairs watch and the others hear about it. Allen's verdict, Apparently the packets are getting over, is a professional's casual satisfaction: his messages are reaching people, at second hand.
They get into the parked Getabout. Allen notes the zone: "Allen calculated that this zone, in terms of leasing, was in the lowest possible range: between 1 and 14. It was not crowded." We now learn that the city is divided into leasing zones, numbered by some measure of density or value, and that a low number means space. The Telemedia district is roomy, a privilege of the powerful in a city where Allen's whole flat must fold up to fit a stove.
Frost asks about the method: "Do you approve of the domino method?... It's certainly economical." The next line stands alone, with no speaker named: "But you have reservations." It reads best as Frost going on, having seen Allen's face, and Allen then explains. His explanation is the most important argument in the chapter.
Frost's answer sounds amused: "How interesting. An idea out of nothing." Allen corrects her.
The narrator tells us that Allen knows he is being unwise: he speaks "aware that he wasn't being politic, but feeling, at the same time, that Mrs. Frost respected him and really wanted to hear what he had to offer." This is the second time today that he has said something unwelcome to Frost on the assumption that she respects candour. In Chapter 2 the gamble seemed to pay.
"The domino method operates on the assumption that people believe what their group believes, no more and no less. One unique individual would foul it up. One man who originated his own idea, instead of getting it from his block domino."
Allen
"Out of the individual human mind... A rare situation... But it could occur."
Allen
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The domino method, as Allen describes it.
Broadcast. Telemedia frames packets for a medium, for example a television hour or a "five-minute spot."
Domino. One household in a block, here "The people downstairs," receives the broadcast directly.
Tumble. The domino passes the message to the rest of the block by ordinary contact. Others need no set.
Assumption. "people believe what their group believes, no more and no less."
Failure mode. "One unique individual," one man who makes up his own mind "instead of getting it from his block domino." The chain does not pass through him.
Cost. Low: "It's certainly economical."
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the two-step flow, in the year Dick wrote. Dick's domino method is a deliberate, state-run version of a finding that American sociologists had just made about real audiences. In The People's Choice (1944), a panel study of voters in Erie County, Ohio, during the 1940 election, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found that people were influenced less by radio and newspapers directly than by other people, and proposed a two-step flow: ideas pass from the media to opinion leaders and from them to everyone else. Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld tested the idea in Decatur, Illinois, and published Personal Influence in 1955, the year Dick wrote this novel [Wikipedia, Two-step flow of communication; Routledge, Personal Influence; da-ra, Decatur Study]. There is no evidence that Dick read either book. The parallel is still exact enough to matter. Lazarsfeld found opinion leaders scattered through ordinary life; Dick's state appoints them by the block. And Allen sees the weakness that the sociologists' model also implies: if belief travels only through people, a person who refuses to pass it on, or who thinks of something else, breaks the chain.
Four in a small car
Mavis arrives, "a bulging briefcase under his arm," with "the Cohort of Major Streiter, his young face stern and his messenger parcel chained to his belt." The parcel is chained to him: the archive does not leave the messenger's body. "I forgot about you," Frost tells her cousin. The car is small, there is "barely room for all of them," and Hadler drives.
"He started up the motor", which, the narrator says, was "powered by pile-driven steam", "and the car moved cautiously along the lane." Pile-driven steam is a lovely phrase: steam raised by an atomic pile, a nuclear reactor. The future has atomic power and uses it to make a little car that crawls along a lane like a steam tractor. "Along the route to the Committee building, they passed only three other Getabouts." Private motoring is rare.
BY THE NUMBERS
Five-thirty the hour. Three years Luddy's service. Eight years Mavis as Director; forty-two his age; eighty his look; half a stomach. Leasing zone 1 to 14, "the lowest possible range." Four people in the Getabout; three other Getabouts on the route; top speed twenty miles an hour. Five-minute spots in Mavis's plan. Two fenders combined.
Frost passes Allen's objection to Mavis: "Mr. Purcell has a criticism of the domino method." Mavis is half asleep: he "grunted unintelligibly, then blinked bloodshot eyes and roused himself." His reply shows he has not listened: "Uhuh... Fine." He paws through his papers and gives his own remedy: "Let's go back to five-minute spots. Hit 'em, hit 'em." Where Allen worried about the individual mind, Mavis wants more frequent, shorter blows. It is the answer of a tired man who believes in volume.
Hadler drives stiffly. He "sat very straight and rigid, his chin out-jutting," and grips the tiller when a pedestrian crosses ahead. "The Getabout had reached a speed of twenty miles an hour, and all four of them were uneasy." Twenty miles an hour frightens four grown people, which says something about how unfamiliar speed on the ground has become.
Mavis complains: "We should either fly... or walk. Not this halfway business. All we need now is a couple of bottles of beer, and we're back in the old days." The old days are the age before the revolution, imagined as an age of cars and beer. Mavis means it as a sneer. The reader may notice that the director of the state's moral media knows enough about the old days to joke about them.
The Resort and the "noose"
Frost passes on another of Allen's views: "Mr. Purcell believes in the unique individual." (The source drops the full stop after "Mrs" here.) Mavis looks at Allen and makes the connection that the chapter has been heading toward.
So the Health Resort is a rival with its own beliefs, and it believes in the individual. Frost suggests it is a sales pitch: "I always assumed that was window dressing... To lure people into going over." People go over to the Resort, as defectors once went over to the other side.
Mavis answers with contempt. "People go over because they're noose," he declares. The narrator explains the word: "Noose was a derisive term contracted from neuro-psychiatric." And then Allen's feeling about it: he "disliked it," because it had "a blind, savage quality" that made him think of "the old hate terms." At this point the source prints two real ethnic slurs from Dick's own time, one against Black people and one against Jews, as examples. These notes do not reproduce them. Their point in the text is clear: Allen recognises in "noose" the same contempt that old racial insults carried, and he dislikes it for that reason. Dick, writing in 1955, puts his hero on the side of decency and lets him name the thing exactly.
Mavis goes on, and his speech is a portrait of a man soured by his job.
The narrator looks at his face: "On his face was an expression of great bitterness. The bitterness was like a solvent that had eaten through the wasted folds of flesh, exposing the bone." It is a harsh image, the face as an object eaten by
"The Resort has that on its mind, too. An obsession, day and night."
Myron Mavis
"They're weak, they're misfits, they can't take it. They haven't got the moral fiber to stick it out here; like babies, they want pleasure. They want candy and bottled pop. Comic books from mama Health Resort."
Myron Mavis
acid. "Allen had never seen" Mavis (the source misspells him "Marvis" here) "so weary and discouraged."
Frost is calmer: "Well... we don't want them anyway. It's better they should go over." Allen wonders aloud: "I sometimes wonder what they do with all those people." The narrator explains why nobody knows.
The next sentence sets out a social ladder: "Colonists were, after all, only failures; a noose was a voluntary expatriate who had declared himself an enemy of moral civilization." Families would rather admit that a relative is a failure (a colonist) than a traitor (a noose). The state therefore cannot count its defectors, because the block system's own stigma makes people lie about them. Colonists, meanwhile, are looked down on as failures, which sheds a new light on Chapter 2: Allen's packet told a colonist that he should have stayed home, which is what everybody on Earth already thinks.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: comic books in 1954. Mavis's list of the Resort's temptations ends with "Comic books," and a reader in 1956 would have heard the echo. In April 1954 the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held hearings in New York on whether crime and horror comics caused youth crime; the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, whose book Seduction of the Innocent came out that year, was the star witness. Congress passed no ban, but in October 1954 the publishers adopted the Comics Code, a strict self-censorship code [Library of Congress, In Custodia Legis, on the 1954 Senate comic book hearings; GovInfo, hearing record of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, 1954]. Mavis speaks like a witness at those hearings: the people who leave are "babies" who want sweets and comics. Dick, a writer of pulp science fiction, was in the same trade as the comic-book men, and the joke is at the expense of the moral campaigners.
"Nobody had accurate figures on the number of renegades who had fled to the Resort; because of the onus, the relatives preferred to state that the missing individual had gone to the colonies."
Narrator
Slave camps and robot armies
Frost offers a rumour in a conversational tone: "I've heard... that incoming supplicants are set to work in vast slave-labor camps. Or was that the Communists who did that?" People who go to the Resort are called supplicants, a word for petitioners or pilgrims. Frost's afterthought, "Or was that the Communists", is a sharp joke on Dick's part. The Committee's propaganda about the Resort is so stock that its own administrator cannot remember which enemy it was first told about.
Allen joins the joke and pushes it to parody.
The source has a dash after "are," and the narrator notes that "He concluded briefly" with the last word. Allen is mocking the whole genre of enemy propaganda: the slave camps, the empire, the robot armies, and the hint of sexual menace saved
"Both... And with the revenue, the Resort is building a vast empire in outer space to dominate the universe. Huge robot armies, too. Women supplicants are... Ill-used."
Allen
for the end. A man whose profession is writing state morality is openly laughing at state rumour in front of a Committee secretary. Frost, it seems, is happy to laugh with him.
CONTRAST
| In the Getabout | Position on the Resort and the public | Tone |
|---|---|---|
| Allen | Believes in "the unique individual"; dislikes "noose"; mocks the rumours | Candid, ironic |
| Sue Frost | The Resort's individualism may be "window dressing"; "It's better they should go over"; repeats a rumour and doubts it | Cool, testing, amused |
| Myron Mavis | Defectors are "noose," "babies" who want candy; the answer is "five-minute spots" | Bitter, exhausted |
| Ralf Hadler | Says nothing on the subject; drives "very straight and rigid" | Silent until the car behind |
The Pure Food and Drug League
Hadler speaks for the first time: "Mrs. Frost, there's a car behind us trying to pass. What'll I do?" "Let it pass," Frost says. They all look back. It is "A Getabout, like their own, but with the sticker of the Pure Food and Drug League," and it is "nosing its way to their left side."
The name of the other car's organisation is a joke from American history. The Pure Food and Drug Act, signed by Theodore Roosevelt on 30 June 1906 after a long campaign led by the chemist Harvey Wiley, banned interstate trade in adulterated or mislabelled food and drugs and was the ancestor of the Food and Drug Administration [FDA, Part I: The 1906 Food and Drugs Act and Its Enforcement; FDA, Harvey Wiley]. Dick's twenty-second century keeps a "League" with that name, another of the many moral and civic bodies that crowd this society. A moral society, it seems, has a league for everything.
Hadler panics. He "had gone white at this unforeseen dilemma, and their Getabout was veering witlessly." Allen gives sensible advice: "Pull over and stop." Mavis gives the opposite: "Speed up... They don't own this lane." He turns in his seat and peers "defiantly through the rear window."
The collision is described with comic precision. "The Pure Food and Drug League Getabout continued to advance on them, equally uncertain of itself. As Hadler dribbled toward the right, it abruptly seized what seemed to be its chance and shot forward. Hadler then let his tiller slide between his hands, and two fenders scraped shatteringly." Two cars, on a nearly empty road, going twenty miles an hour, manage to hit each other because neither driver knows how to pass.
They get out. "Mavis, trembling, crept from their stopped Getabout." The other driver sits alone inside, and he is "a middle-aged gentleman, obviously at the end of a long day at the office." Frost holds her folder "aimlessly" and suggests backing up. "Mavis, reduced to impotence, wandered around the two Getabouts and poked here and there with his toe. Hadler stood like iron, betraying no feeling."
Allen takes charge. He looks at the damage and sees that "The fenders had combined, and one car would have to be jacked up." He gives up on fixing it and makes a decision: "They have tow trucks... Have Ralf call the Transportation Pool." Then, seeing that the Committee building is close: "We can walk from here."
CASE / SCENE
The accident as a test of four people. Dick uses a trivial crash to show each character under pressure. Hadler obeys and freezes: he asks what to do, goes white, lets the tiller slide, and afterwards "stood like iron." Mavis gives a wrong, aggressive order ("Speed up"), then trembles and pokes at the wreck with his toe. Frost suggests a feeble fix ("Maybe we could back") and holds her folder "aimlessly," then follows Allen's lead "Without protest." Allen gives the one sensible order before the crash ("Pull over and stop"), assesses the damage, delegates the tow and the police, and walks on. The young agency man is the only one who makes decisions. Frost watches him do it.
Mavis left behind
"Without protest, Mrs. Frost started off, and he followed." Mavis protests: "What about me?" He hurries after them a few steps. Frost's answer is curt: "You can stay with the car." Hadler has gone to a phone booth; Mavis is left alone with the man from the Pure Food and Drug League. Frost adds: "Tell the police what happened."
The narrator closes the scene with two figures approaching: "A cop, on foot, was walking over. Not far behind him came a juvenile, attracted by the convocation of people." The juvenile appears for the second time in the novel, drawn by a crowd as an insect is drawn by movement. Whatever happens at the crash will be on someone's tape tonight.
"I believe you know what I'm going to do"
Walking, Frost says: "This embarrassing is." The words are inverted in the source, probably a typesetting slip for this is embarrassing. Allen thinks of Hadler's fate: "I suppose Ralf will go up before his block warden." And the picture of Mrs. Birmingham comes back to him: "the coyly sweet malevolence of the creature situated behind her table, dealing out trouble." His own meeting with the block is two days away, and the memory shows he has not forgotten it.
Frost corrects him: "The Cohorts have their own inquiry setup." The founder's male descendants do not face the block like everyone else. They are judged by their own. It is a short sentence about privilege.
At the entrance of the building, Frost speaks about Mavis plainly for the first time.
"Allen didn't comment. It wasn't his place." Frost goes on: "Maybe it's just as well... Leaving him back there. I'd rather see Mrs. Hoyt without him trailing along."
The narrator: "This was the first he had heard that they were meeting with Ida Pease Hoyt." Allen stops walking and asks: "Maybe you should explain what you're going to do."
The chapter ends with three words: "And he did." Dick gives the reader what Allen knows without saying it. The clues are all in the chapter: a director who makes no decisions, a secretary who wonders whether "one person can or should take re‐
"Mavis is completely burned out. He can't cope with any situation. He makes no decisions. Hasn't for months."
Sue Frost
"I believe you know what I'm going to do"
Sue Frost, continuing on
sponsibility for the whole," a young man who made every decision at the crash, a morning spent firing a disloyal assistant in her presence, the hours since in her company, and now a meeting with the head of the state at which the director is not wanted. These notes leave the formal announcement to Chapter 4.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the day's two trials. Chapter 3 ends with Allen walking into the highest office in the state on the same day that his block warden told him his name may be among the criticisms. The two threads have not touched yet. Frost knows nothing, as far as the text shows, about Hokkaido or the Park, and Allen has not mentioned them. He has said, twice, that the unique individual who makes up his own mind is a flaw in the system. He has also, the night before, done something in the Park that he cannot remember and that left red paint on his shoes. The reader is the only one in a position to put those facts together, and the chapter asks the reader to hold them side by side.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 3.
A stray quotation mark. At line 318 an extra opening quotation mark appears in the middle of Allen's phone call, before "I'll catch something down here," although he has not stopped speaking.
"Marvis." At line 408 Mavis's name is misspelt.
"This embarrassing is." At line 442 the words appear in this order, almost certainly a slip for this is embarrassing.
"Mrs Frost" without a full stop at line 400, against "Mrs. Frost" everywhere else.
"acting Director" against "Director... for eight years", as noted under Chapter 2.
The "reservations" line. "But you have reservations." stands alone in the source with no speaker named. It reads best as Frost's remark, after which Allen explains.
Two ethnic slurs are printed at line 406 as examples of "the old hate terms." They are described here and not reproduced.
The time jump. The chapter starts at five-thirty with no account of the hours after the Agency tour. Nothing is lost that later chapters need, but the reader is not told how Allen came to Telemedia with Frost.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 3. By evening Allen is with Sue Frost at Telemedia, the state's media headquarters, where every day's output is copied for a permanent file kept for investigations. Frost's distant cousin-in-law, the Cohort messenger Ralf Hadler, belongs to a uniformed order of Major Streiter's male descendants, which has its own inquiries. Frost doubts that one person should run Telemedia, says its director Myron Mavis is worn out at forty-two, and asks whether the moral messages arrive intact. Allen explains the domino method, by which one household per block receives broadcasts and passes them on, and warns that "One unique individual would foul it up." Mavis sneers at defectors to the Health Resort as "noose"; Allen dislikes the word and mocks the rumours. After a slow collision with a Pure Food and Drug League car, Frost and Allen walk on without Mavis to meet Ida Pease Hoyt. The chapter ends with Allen understanding, without being told, what Frost means to ask of him, on the same day that his block warden promised criticisms of his conduct. The domino method he distrusts and the Park he cannot remember are the two threads to watch.
I Japed It
At half past nine on the same Monday night Allen comes home after three hours with Ida Pease Hoyt and Sue Frost. He jokes his way through supper until he tells Janet the news: he has been offered Myron Mavis's post as Director of Telemedia. She cries, and they argue over whether the job is a prize or a burden, and over his friends who have chosen to die on Hokkaido. Then he picks up the evening paper. Its front page reports that the statue of Major Streiter in the Park has been mutilated in the night, and Janet says flatly that it was him. He agrees. He cannot remember what he did or why, but he names the act with a word from his trade, "japed," and he becomes sure that the jape and the offer are connected. He goes out into the night to look at the statue.
TIMELINE
When and where. The same Monday, from nine-thirty p.m. until Allen leaves the flat some time after supper. The newspaper dateline is "Newer York, Oct. 8", which gives the story its first exact date; by a modern calendar 8 October 2114 does fall on a Monday, so Dick's date and his weekday agree. The setting is the one-room apartment from Chapter 1, with the kitchen restored from the wall tape. The chapter runs to about 2,150 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, head of a small packet agency, just offered the directorship of Telemedia. Janet Purcell, his wife, home alone all evening with the paper. Named but absent: Ida Pease Hoyt, who made the offer, and Sue Frost, who "did all the talking"; Myron Mavis, who has resigned; Fred Luddy, fired that morning; Gates and Sugermann, the friends on Hokkaido; Mrs. Birmingham, the block warden; Major Jules Streiter, founder of Morec, here given a first name; Pietro Buetello, the sculptor; Mrs. Duffy across the hall; Allen's father and brother; and the rival agency Blake-Moffet. Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens appear in Allen's jokes.
Nine-thirty and "Alaskan salmon"
The chapter opens with a plain statement of time and place. "Allen purcell returned home to his one-room apartment at the hour of nine-thirty p.m. Janet met him at the door." (The source prints his surname without a capital here.) Her first words are a question that answers itself: "Did you eat?... You didn't." He admits he has not. She knows him well enough to skip the answer.
Janet makes the room into a kitchen again. "She set back the wall tape and restored the kitchen, which had departed at eight." The folding flat of Chapter 1 runs on a timetable as well as a tape: the kitchen leaves at eight in the evening and returns at seven in the morning, and anyone who wants supper later has to rewind it by hand. The meal is "'Alaskan salmon'", and Dick puts the name in quotation marks, as Allen does again a few lines later. Nobody in Newer York expects the salmon to be salmon. The narrator calls the smell "near-authentic", a phrase that does the work of a paragraph about a world where food is made to imitate what it was once.
Allen sits, opens "the evening paper", and pushes it away unread because he is too tired. That gesture matters later: the news that will turn the evening over has been on the table from the start. The narrator then gives the length of the meeting he has come from. "The meeting with Ida Pease Hoyt and Sue Frost had lasted three hours. It had been gruelling." Chapter 3 ended at the door of the Committee building after half past five. Three hours there and a walk home bring him to the door at nine-thirty.
Jokes about dead novelists
Janet asks what happened and Allen says "Later." He plays with "a sugar cube" and changes the subject to her evening. "How was the Book Club? Sir Walter Scott written anything good lately?" When she answers shortly, he tries again: "You believe Charles Dickens is here to stay?" The jokes tell us that Janet's Book Club reads authors who have been dead for nearly three centuries, presumably because their books are safe. They also tell us how Allen deals with pressure. He makes a small parody, in a tone the reader will soon learn has a name in his trade.
The first of the two names is a private joke for anyone who has looked up the title. Walter Scott is the writer usually credited with bringing the word jape back into English in its harmless sense, after centuries in which it had been too coarse for polite use (see the note on the title in Chapter 1). Dick may not have meant the link. It sits in the same chapter in which the word is spoken for the first time.
Janet sees through him. "Something happened and I want to know what it is." Allen gives a little more, still as a joke: "The Agency was not exposed as a vice den." She reminds him of what he said on the phone in Chapter 3, that he was at T-M and that "something terrible happened at the Agency." He tells her the morning's news first: "I fired Fred Luddy, if you call that terrible." And at once he moves back to the food: "When'll the 'salmon' be ready?" "Soon. Five minutes," she says. The exchange is the length of a short scene in a play, and it is all delay.
The offer
Then he says it, in three short sentences.
The last sentence is the most telling. The head of the state, the founder's "linear descendant," sat in the room while her secretary made the case. Frost has managed Allen from the beginning: she visited his Agency in the morning, watched him fire Luddy, toured the floor, kept him with her through the afternoon, left Mavis with a crashed car, and walked Allen to Hoyt's door. Chapter 3 ended with "And he did": Allen knew what Frost meant to ask. Chapter 4 confirms it in the first words of his account.
"Ida Pease Hoyt offered me Mavis' job. Director of Telemedia. Sue Frost did all the talking."
Allen
Janet cries
"For a moment Janet stood at the stove and then she began to cry." Allen's response is impatient: "Why the heck are you crying?" She answers between sobs: "I don't know. I'm scared." Janet's fear has been with us since Chapter 1, where she flinched as the room changed around her and kept a cabinet of pills against illness. Here it has a new object. The promotion that should be good news frightens her more than the bad news she does not yet know he knows.
Allen keeps playing with the sugar. "Now it had broken in half, so he flattened the halves to grains." The cube is a small piece of stage business that Dick uses as a measure of pressure: whole while he jokes, halved when he gives the news, ground to grains while he explains. The narrator never comments on it.
Eight years of everybody's morality
Allen's explanation sounds calm and reasonable. "It wasn't much of a surprise. The post is always filled from the Agencies, and Mavis has been washed up for months. Eight years is a long time to be responsible for everybody's morality." Each clause adds a fact about the system. The Director of Telemedia, the buyer of packets, is always recruited from the sellers. Mavis's decline has been visible for months. The job lasts about as long as a man can stand it, and the responsibility it carries is total: everybody's morality.
Janet remembers that he predicted this. "Yes, you... said... he should retire." (The source breaks her sentence with two dashes, which these notes render as pauses.) "Last year you told me that." Allen answers with the one thing that makes it sad: "Trouble is, he really wants to do the job." Mavis is burned out and still devoted. Chapter 3 showed him trembling at a car crash and raging against defectors to the Resort; here we learn that he wanted to stay.
"Does he know?" Janet asks. Allen's reply gives the shape of the evening. "Sue Frost told him. He finished up the meeting. The four of us sat around drinking coffee and settling it." Mavis, left at the crash in Chapter 3, must have followed them to the Committee building, been told there that he was finished, and then stayed to the end. The four at the table were Hoyt, Frost, Mavis and Allen. The image of a man drinking coffee with the people who have just replaced him is one of the chapter's quiet cruelties.
Mavis's exit
"Then it is settled?" Allen thinks of "the look on Mavis' face when he left the meeting" and says no. Then he describes how far it is settled already.
The statement was written and released before the new Director has accepted. Allen recites its phrases like a man who writes such phrases for a living, and "The routine protocol" is his verdict on them. The doctrine has a formal name here for the first time: the Principles of Moral Reclamation.
Allen says he "talked to him briefly in the hall afterward." The narrator corrects him to the reader at once. "Actually, he had walked a quarter mile with Mavis, from the Committee building to Mavis' apartment." It is a small lie of modesty, or of embarrassment. The man who will take Mavis's job walked him home. What Mavis said on that walk is not given. What Allen passes on is Mavis's retirement plan.
The detail is comic and sad at once. Mavis, who called those who flee to the Health Resort weaklings who want candy and comic books, is himself going off-world to raise cattle. And the meat out there is so good that Mavis has to insist it tastes like the real thing, while Allen sits down on Earth to a "salmon" in quotation marks. The colonies of this book are the place of
"Mavis resigned; his paper is in, and Sue's statement has gone out. The routine protocol. Years of devoted service, faithful adherence to the Principles of Moral Reclamation."
Allen
"He's got a piece of planet in the Sirius System. They're great on cattle. According to Mavis, you can't distinguish the taste and texture from the domestic herds."
Allen
real food and exile; Earth is the place of moral seriousness and imitation food.
BY THE NUMBERS
Nine-thirty p.m. Allen home; the kitchen "departed at eight". The meeting lasted three hours; four sat round with coffee. Supper ready in five minutes. Mavis's tenure eight years, "washed up for months"; Allen predicted his retirement "Last year". A quarter mile walk with Mavis. Mavis's land in the Sirius System, which Allen places "ten light years away". The statue noticed "around six a.m.", the paint can found at six-thirty; the jape took an hour and half a gallon of red paint. Penalties: a year in prison. Janet alone three hours and a half. The stove built in 2096, when Allen was eleven; autofac stoves cost a third as much. The jape less than twenty-four hours ago.
"Maybe I won't take it"
Janet asks what is undecided, and Allen says: "Maybe I won't take it." His reason is the plainest sentence he speaks all evening.
He has seen what the job did to Mavis, who at forty-two looked eighty. He has just walked the result home. The fear is for his health and for his life, and it is also a fear of a particular ending: exile to a farm on a distant world. A man who has spent his career in the crowded centre of a city where grass grows only in the Park dreads the open country more than overwork.
"I want to be alive eight years from now. I don't want to be retiring to some God-forsaken rustic backwater ten light years away."
Allen
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: how far is Sirius? Allen's "ten light years" is a round figure. NASA gives the distance to the Sirius system as about 8.6 light-years, which makes it one of the nearest star systems to Earth [NASA Science, Hubble image notes on Sirius A and B; NASA Imagine the Universe, solar neighbourhood table]. Dick's characters treat the colonies as remote but reachable for a retired official, and the near-enough figure fits a man speaking loosely. Nothing in the novel so far says how people travel there or how long it takes.
Plum or burden
Janet turns off the oven and recalls an old conversation. "Once, when we were setting up the Agency, we talked about this. We were very frank." Allen asks what they decided, though he remembers. The narrator gives the answer drily: "They decided to decide when the time came, because it might very well never come." And Janet, at the time, "was too busy worrying about the imminent collapse of the Agency." Dick's young couple postponed the question of success because they were busy fearing failure.
Allen then argues against the way they are talking. "This is all so useless. We're acting as if the job is some sort of plum. It's not a plum and it never was. Nobody ever pretended it was." He asks why Mavis took it and answers himself: "Because it seemed like the moral thing to do." In Morec society the top post is a duty that nobody admits to wanting.
"Public service," Janet says "faintly." Allen takes the phrase and runs it into the language of his own packets.
He stops mid-sentence. Omphalos, the Greek word for navel and the name of the stone at Delphi that marked the centre of the world, is the kind of word a packet writer reaches for when a phrase needs lifting; Chapter 2 had Allen using it of Earth. Allen hears himself producing Morec rhetoric about his own career and cannot finish. (The source says "burden on civic life", where burden of is meant.) Janet finishes it for him with a cliché from the other direction: "Rat race." Then she looks at the practical side, without much hope that it counts. "Well, there'll be a little more money. Or does it pay less? I guess that isn't important." Neither of them knows what the post pays. That fact alone says the job is not chosen for money.
"The moral responsibility to serve. To take on the burden on civic life. The highest form of self-sacrifice, the omphalos of this whole"
Allen, breaking off
The climb, and the apple tree again
Allen then states the other side of his feeling, the one that wants the job. "My family has climbed a long way. I've done some climbing, too. This is what it's for; this is the goal." The family that defended a lease for forty years and built its own stove has worked for something like this. He adds with a wry turn: "I'd like a buck for every packet I've done on the subject." He has written about service and sacrifice for years, and now he is being asked to practise it.
The narrator connects the thought to the packet Frost questioned in Chapter 2. "The packet Sue Frost had returned, in fact. The parable about the tree that died." And then Allen's own reading of it:
The narrator admits the packet may be muddled, "perhaps the Morec of the packet was confused and obscure", but says that to Allen "it came over clearly enough." The moral he wrote binds him now. A man who believes he must make his life with his fellows cannot easily refuse a post from which he would serve them all. The apple tree that died alone is the image of what happens to a man who goes his own way.
"a man was primarily responsible to his fellows, and it was with his fellows that he made his life."
Narrator, giving Allen's reading of the apple-tree packet
Gates and Sugermann, and what Janet remembers
That thought leads him to his friends. "There're two men... Squatting in the ruins, off in Hokkaido. That place is contaminated. Everything's dead, there. They have one future; they're waiting for it." The future is death. Then Allen judges them by his own moral: "Gates and Sugermann would rather be dead than come back here. If they came back here they'd have to become social beings; they'd have to sacrifice some part of their ineffable selves. And that is certainly an awful thing." The last sentence is sarcasm. Ineffable, too sacred for words, is the word Allen uses to mock the idea of a private self that refuses society.
Janet answers very quietly, "in a voice so low that he could barely hear her." She says that is not the only reason they are out there, and that he has forgotten something. "I've been there, too. You took me with you, one time. When we were first married. I wanted to see." The fact is new. Hokkaido is a place Allen took his wife at the start of their marriage, so his nights there are something he once shared with her.
"He remembered. But it didn't seem important." Allen offers a theory: "Probably it's a protest of some sort. They have some point they want to make, camping there in the ruins." Janet: "They're giving up their lives." Allen: "That doesn't take any effort. And somebody can always save them with quick-freeze." In this world death is not always final. A dying man can be frozen and kept, so a slow suicide in the ruins is, to Allen, a gesture that someone else can always reverse.
Janet holds her ground. "But in dying they make an important point. Don't you think so? Maybe not." Then she joins the friends to the man Allen has just walked home. "Myron Mavis made a point, too. Not a very different point." Mavis has spent himself on public service; Gates and Sugermann are spending themselves on refusing it. Janet sees both as a protest made with a life. She ends with the sharpest observation in the chapter: "And you must see something in what Gates and Sugermann are doing; you keep going out there again and again. You were there last night." "I was," he says.
CONTRAST
| Who | What they gave up | Allen's reading | Janet's reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Myron Mavis | His health, for "everybody's morality" | He took the job because "it seemed like the moral thing to do" | He "made a point, too" |
| Gates and Sugermann | Their lives, in the ruins of Hokkaido | They will not "sacrifice some part of their ineffable selves"; "a protest of some sort" | "in dying they make an important point" |
| Allen | Nothing yet | The post is "the goal"; also an early grave | "you keep going out there again and again" |
The juvenile and the block meeting
Janet asks what Mrs. Birmingham said. Allen answers "Without particular emotion": "A juvenile saw me, and I'm down for Wednesday's block meeting." The criticism promised in Chapter 1 is now fixed for Wednesday. Janet is surprised: "Because you went there? They never reported it before." Allen's answer is the simple one: "Maybe they never saw me before."
Then Janet asks the question that the whole of the first three chapters has been circling. "Do you know about afterward? Did the juvenile see that?" The word "afterward" echoes the last thought of Chapter 1, where Allen could not remember what he had done after Hokkaido. Janet already suspects. Allen: "Let's hope not... It's in the paper."
Page one
"He snatched up the paper. It was in the paper, and it was on page one. The headlines were large." The narrator prints them.
"That was you," Janet says "tonelessly." It is a statement, not an accusation. "It was," Allen agrees, and reads the headlines again. "It really was me. And it took an hour to do. I left
"STREITER STATUE DESECRATED"
Front page of the evening paper, followed by "VANDALS IN PARK" and "INVESTIGATION UNDER WAY"
the paint can on a bench. They probably found it." The confession is almost casual. He knows what he did in outline (the time it took, the paint can) and has known all day, since the paint and the grass on his shoes at breakfast.
Janet has read the article: "They noticed the statue this morning around six a.m., and they found the paint can at six-thirty." When he asks what else they found, she says only "Read it," and he spreads the paper out. The headlines appear a second time in the text, as he reads them again, and then the report.
The article is short and full of facts that the novel has not given before:
The police describe the mutilation as "deliberate and systematic", and say it "apparently took place during the night." Both words would surprise a reader who imagined a drunken prank. Someone worked at it.
The detail of the dateline needs a note of its own. The report that Allen will soon be responsible for, as Director of the trust that issues the news, is about the crime he committed. It is the clearest early example of the book's habit of folding its plot back on itself: the man who japed the statue will be the man who decides what the public is told about it.
"Newer York, Oct. 8 (T-M). Police are investigating the deliberate mutilation of the official statue of Major Jules Streiter, the founder of Moral Reclamation and the guiding leader of the revolution of 1985."
The newspaper report
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
What the newspaper report adds to the history of Morec.
A name. The founder is Major Jules Streiter. Earlier chapters called him only Major Streiter.
A revolution. Streiter was "the guiding leader of the revolution of 1985." Chapter 1 dated the poisoning of Hokkaido to the war that ended in 1972, so the revolution came thirteen years after the war.
A sculptor. The statue was made from the original mould by Pietro Buetello, "the founder's friend and life-long companion."
A date. It was struck in March 1990. Chapter 1 said the statue had stood "one hundred and twenty-four years"; 1990 plus 124 gives 2114, the year of the story, and Chapter 1's "cast during his lifetime" means Streiter was alive five years after his revolution.
A material. The statue is "life-size" and made of "bronzed plastic", a plastic finished to look like bronze. The founder's monument is itself an imitation, like the "salmon."
A source. The dateline carries "(T-M)": the news comes from Telemedia, the trust Allen has just been asked to run.
A park that never closes. "The Park of the Spire is never closed to the public, since it represents the moral and spiritual center of Newer York."
TIMELINE
The story's chronology so far, from Chapters 1 to 4. 1972: the war ends, leaving Hokkaido poisoned. 1985: the revolution led by Major Jules Streiter. March 1990: Buetello's statue struck from the original mould, in Streiter's lifetime. About 2085: Allen born. 2096: his family builds its own stove. About 2106: Mavis becomes Director, if Frost's "eight years" in Chapter 3 are counted back. About 2111: Allen and Janet marry, "three years" before the story. May 2112: the Agency's first packet, backed by Mavis and Frost. Sunday night, 7 October 2114 (inferred from the dateline): Hokkaido, then the Park. Monday 8 October: the warden, Frost, Luddy fired, the crash, Hoyt's offer, the newspaper. Wednesday: the block meeting.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the news about the crime comes from the trust that will soon be his. The report carries "(T-M)" in its dateline, and Janet later says "They're vague about it." Nothing in the report describes what was actually done to the statue beyond "deliberate and systematic." If the vagueness is an editorial choice, it is Telemedia's choice, and the man offered the job of making such choices is the one who did the deed. Dick does not draw the line for us. He sets the dateline, the vagueness and the offer side by side and lets Allen feel their connection without being able to state it.
What they can do to us
Janet says the paper came "downstairs... As always. With the mail", and that she read it over dinner. Allen says he can see why she is upset. She corrects him with a list of penalties that she speaks of as though they were small. "Because of that? I'm not upset because of that. All they can do is unlease us, fine us, send you to prison for a year." Allen adds the one that matters most in their world: "And bar our families from Earth." Janet shrugs: "We'd live. They'd live."
She has used her "three hours and a half here alone in the apartment" to think. She tells him what she pieced together: "this morning we both knew something had happened; there was the mud and grass on your shoes, and the red paint. And nobody saw you." The clues of Chapter 1 were plain to her too. Allen corrects her: "A juvenile saw something." Janet reasons it out: "Not that. They'd have picked you up. It must have seen something else." The machine saw Hokkaido and not the Park. If it had seen the statue, the police would already be at the door.
"I wonder how long it'll be," Allen says, meaning before he is caught. Janet does not think he will be. "Why should they find out? They'll think it's some person who lost his lease, somebody who's been forced back to the colonies. Or a noose." Allen: "I hate that word." He said the same in Chapter 3, when Mavis used it. Janet replaces it at once: "A supplicant, then." Her argument is that Allen is the least likely suspect in the city. "But why you? Not a man going to the top, a man who spent this afternoon with Sue Frost and Ida Pease Hoyt. It wouldn't make sense." "No," he admits. "It doesn't." And then, truthfully: "Even to me."
A fixed, overwhelming desire
"You're not sure why you did it, are you?" Janet asks. "I haven't an idea in the world." She asks what was in his mind, and he describes a feeling with no reason attached to it.
"A fixed, overwhelming, and totally clear desire to get that statue once and for all. It took half a gallon of red paint, and some skillful use of a power-driven saw."
Allen
The details he has are practical. "The saw's back in the Agency shop, minus a blade. I busted the blade. I haven't sawed in years." The saw came from his own workplace and has gone back there, damaged. A man who cannot say why he did a thing can say exactly where he put the saw afterwards.
"Do you remember precisely what you did?" "No." Janet says the paper is vague about the details and gives him her verdict, smiling "listlessly": "You did a good job." It is the most surprising line in the chapter. The anxious wife who fears every rule says nothing about wrongdoing and praises the work. She has already sided with him.
CASE / SCENE
Janet across one evening. Dick gives Janet more range in this chapter than in the three before it, and he does it in a sequence of small turns. She reads him at the door ("You didn't") and through his jokes ("Something happened"). She cries at good news and cannot say why. She remembers what he said about Mavis a year ago, and what they agreed when the Agency began. She corrects his memory of Hokkaido with a trip he had forgotten. She reasons like a detective from the shoes, the paint and the juvenile's silence. She approves: "You did a good job." She returns to routine with the clock kit. And she withdraws, with her bottles, behind the bathroom door. The woman who in Chapter 1 could not bear the room changing round her takes a crime in her stride, and breaks down over a promotion. Her fear attaches to the future, not to the law.
An ordinary evening
"Later, when the baked" salmon "was nothing but a few bones on an empty dinner platter, Allen leaned back and lit a cigarette." Janet washes up "in the sink attachment" of the folding stove. "The apartment was peaceful." Allen remarks: "You'd think... this was like any other evening." Janet: "We might as well go on with what we were doing."
What she has been doing is building a clock. "On the table by the couch was a pile of metal wheels and gears. Janet had been assembling an electric clock. Diagrams and instructions from an Edufacture kit were heaped with the parts." The narrator explains the custom in a flat, documentary voice: "Instructional pastimes: Edufacture for the individual, Juggle for social gatherings. To keep idle hands occupied." The last phrase echoes the proverb about idle hands and the devil. In Morec society even leisure is moral work, organised so that nobody is left alone with an empty hour.
Janet says the clock is "Almost done. After that comes a shaving wand for you. Mrs. Duffy across the hall made one for her husband. I watched her. It isn't hard." The neighbours share kits and techniques the way they share the bathroom. Allen points at the stove, and gives the reader a date and his own age.
"My family built that. Back in 2096, when I was eleven. I remember how silly it seemed; stoves were on sale, built by autofac at a third of the cost. Then my father and brother explained the Morec. I never forgot it."
Allen
The detail places Allen's birth around 2085, so he is about twenty-nine in October 2114. It also gives him a brother, mentioned here for the first time. The Morec of the stove is not spelled out, but its shape is clear: a family that builds its own stove at three times the cost of a factory one gains something better than a cheaper stove. The autofac, the automatic factory, is a word Dick used for a story published in Galaxy in November 1955, and it appears in Chapter 2 of these notes. Here it stands for the efficient choice that Morec rejects. Janet says simply: "I enjoy building things; it's fun."
"I japed it"
Allen smokes and thinks "how bizarre it was that he could be here when, less than twenty-four hours ago, he had japed the statue." The word arrives first in the narration, then in his mouth. "I japed it," he says aloud. A broken "You" follows, and then the definition.
This is the title explained. A jape, in the trade of moral packets, is a parody born of overuse: when a theme has been repeated until it is stale, someone makes fun of it, and the mockery is the jape. The statue of Streiter, set up in 1990 and looked at daily for 124 years, is the stalest theme in Newer York. Allen did to it in paint and plastic what packet writers do in words.
Janet knows the word: "Yes... I know. I've heard you parody some of Blake-Moffet's stuff." So japing is a habit of Allen's, aimed until now at the work of the big rival agency, in private. The jape of Sunday night was the first one done in public, and it was done to the founder himself.
"A term we use in packet assembly. When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we've japed it."
Allen
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
"Jape" as Allen defines it.
Where the word lives. In "packet assembly," the trade of writing moral messages for Telemedia.
What causes it. A theme "harped on too much."
What it is. Parody: making "fun of a stale theme."
Who does it. Allen, to Blake-Moffet's packets, in private, as Janet confirms.
The new case. The statue of the founder, japed in public in a single hour on Sunday night.
The open question. Why Allen did it. He has a word for the act and no reason for it.
Not coincidence
Allen then sets out the sequence that bothers him. "On Sunday night I japed the statue of Major Streiter. And on Monday morning Mrs. Sue Frost came to the Agency. By six o'clock I was listening to Ida Pease Hoyt offer me the directorship of Telemedia." Three events in under a day, in that order. Janet asks the obvious question: "How could there be a relationship?"
Allen's conviction that the jape and the offer are causally linked, though he can name no mechanism, is the hinge of the novel's opening: from this point he treats his own act as a clue to his situation rather than as a crime to hide. The feeling has the quality of the hunches Dick's characters often follow: a sense that the world is arranged, and that the arrangement includes the person who senses it. It is presented without irony. Neither Allen nor the narrator dismisses it.
Janet asks: "Tell me how you... japed it." (She hesitates over the new word; the source sets a dash before it.) "Can't. Don't remember," Allen says, and stands up. "Don't you wait up. I'm going downtown and look at it; they probably haven't had time to start repairs."
"It would have to be complex... So roundabout that everybody and everything in the universe would have to be brought in. But I feel it's there. Some deep, underlying causal connection, not chance. Not coincidence."
Allen
Out into the night
Janet says at once: "Please don't go out." Allen answers "Very necessary," and looks for his coat. "The closet had absorbed it, and he pulled the closet back into the room." The flat has folded his coat away along with the rest of the day; he has to unfold the wall to leave. His reason is the closest he comes to a plan. "There's a dim picture in my mind, nothing firm. All things considered, I really should have it clear. Maybe then I can decide about T-M." He links the two problems himself: he will not know whether to take the job until he knows what he did.
The chapter ends on Janet. "Without a word Janet passed by him and out into the hall. She was on her way to the bathroom, and he knew why. With her went a collection of bottles: she was going to swallow enough sedatives to last her the balance of the night." Allen says only "Take it easy." "There was no answer from the closed bathroom door. Allen hung around a moment, and then left." The wife who said "You did a good job" a few pages earlier now shuts herself in the shared bathroom with her pills. Her support for him and her fear for him are both real, and Dick does not resolve them.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: when the buyer's chair is filled from the sellers. "The post is always filled from the Agencies": Telemedia's Director, who decides which packets to buy, is always a former packet-maker. Allen's Agency sells only to Telemedia, so the man about to judge the market owns one of its suppliers. Modern public bodies treat that move as a conflict to be managed. U.S. federal ethics rules, for example, count as a covered relationship any person for whom an employee has served within the last year as an officer, director, employee, contractor or similar; where a reasonable person could question the employee's impartiality in a matter involving that party, the employee should stay out of it unless ethics officials authorise participation [5 CFR 2635.502, eCFR]. Banks face the same question when a supplier's executive joins as head of procurement, or when a regulator hires from the industry it supervises. Practical steps: record the prior relationship at hiring, set a cooling-off period during which the person does not approve purchases from the former employer, and route those decisions to someone else. Morec has no such rule in sight, and the novel has not yet said what Allen will do with his own Agency if he accepts.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: "quick-freeze" before cryonics. Allen's remark that someone can "always save them with quick-freeze" imagines medical freezing as routine. The modern cryonics movement is usually dated to Robert Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality, privately circulated in 1962 and published by Doubleday in 1964 [Science Fiction Encyclopedia, entry on Robert C. W. Ettinger; Cryonics Institute history timeline]. Dick wrote this novel in 1955, so the idea in this form comes from science fiction ahead of the movement, not from it. In the novel it changes the moral weight of suicide: to Allen, a death that can be reversed by somebody else "doesn't take any effort."
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 4.
"Allen purcell." At line 5 the surname has a lower-case p.
"the burden on civic life." At line 69 "on" is almost certainly a slip for "of."
The headlines twice. The three headlines are printed at lines 107 to 111 and again at 125 to 129. The repeat follows Allen as he reads them a second time and is probably deliberate, but it reads like a doubled block.
Who says "You"? At line 191 Allen says "I japed it" and the same paragraph ends with an unfinished "You". The next paragraph, the definition of a jape, has no speaker named. The likeliest reading is that Allen begins to ask whether Janet knows the word and then explains it; Janet's reply, "Yes... I know," supports that. It could also be Janet's interruption run into his paragraph.
The hour of the offer. Allen says that "By six o'clock" he was hearing Hoyt's offer. Chapter 3 had him at the Committee door some time after half past five, so the offer came at the start of the three-hour meeting.
Mavis at the meeting. Chapter 3 left Mavis at the scene of the crash. Here "He finished up the meeting" and "The four of us sat around drinking coffee," so he must have followed. The text does not show his arrival.
Allen's age. Eleven in 2096 makes him about twenty-nine. Chapter 1 said that "Over the decades" he had learned to endure block meetings, which is possible only in the loosest sense.
Dashes in speech. Janet's "you... said... he," her "At first I was" and "whatever it was," and Allen's "the omphalos of this whole" are broken with dashes in the source; quotations here use pauses or stop at the break.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 4. Ida Pease Hoyt, through Sue Frost, has offered Allen the directorship of Telemedia; Myron Mavis has resigned after eight years with a "routine protocol" statement and is retiring to a cattle planet in the Sirius system. Allen fears the job will kill him as it wore out Mavis, yet calls it "the goal" his family climbed toward, and his own apple-tree Morec tells him a man makes his life with his fellows. Janet sets his friends' slow suicide on Hokkaido beside Mavis's self-sacrifice as two ways of making "a point." The evening paper reports that the statue of Major Jules Streiter, a bronzed-plastic figure cast in 1990, leader of the revolution of 1985, was deliberately mutilated on Sunday night; Janet says it was Allen, and he agrees, though he remembers neither the details nor the reason. He names the act with a trade word: to jape is to parody a theme harped on too much. He becomes convinced that the jape and the offer are linked by "Some deep, underlying causal connection," and goes out to look at the statue before he decides about the job, leaving Janet behind a bathroom door with her sedatives.
A Box in the Park
Allen walks into the Park at night to see what he did, and finds that the police have hidden the statue inside a huge wooden box. Around it small groups of people stand waiting. A thin man in a soiled overcoat tells him anarchists paid by the Health Resort did it and that bombings and poisoned water will follow; a fat man with a cigar says it was kids. A dark-haired girl on a rise of grass, calm and amused, tells Allen exactly what was done to the statue: painted red, beheaded, the head set in its own hand and the leg reshaped to kick it away. She says people laughed, even the Cohorts. Walking him out of the Park she sees that he is in trouble, gives him a folded address and tells him not to read it until he needs it, and leaves with "Good night, Mr. Purcell." Only afterwards does he realise that she knew his name and had been waiting for him.
TIMELINE
When and where. Late on the same Monday night, after Allen leaves the flat at the end of Chapter 4. The scene is the Park of the Spire, "icy-dark," and then a side lane and a lighted intersection beyond it. The chapter runs to about 1,830 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell. A thin citizen, "seedy, spindly-armed," in "a long, soiled overcoat," full of plots and prophecy. A short, fat, red-haired man smoking a cigar, who thinks it was kids. A girl, unnamed in this chapter: "dark-haired, deep-chested," with tanned skin and a voice "controlled and without uncertainty." Seen through her account: the police and the Cohorts of Major Streiter. Named but absent: Janet, "home taking pills." The statue's sculptor, Buetello, is named for his "conception of Streiter."
The Park at night
"The park was in shadows, and icy-dark." Dick's first image is of the people there: "Here and there small groups of people had collected like pools of nocturnal rain water. Nobody spoke. They seemed to be waiting, hoping in some vague way for something to happen." The simile is exact. Rain water does nothing; it collects where the ground is low. The crowd has gathered in the same way, without a purpose, in the place where something happened.
The narrator then lays out the ground, and it is worth having clear, because Chapter 1 gave only a glimpse. "The statue had been erected immediately before the spire, on its own platform, in the center of a gravel ring. Benches surrounded the statue so that persons could feed the pigeons and doze and talk while contemplating its grandeur." The rest of the Park is "sloping fields of wet grass, a few opaque humps of shrubs and trees, and, at one end, a gardener's shed." The wet grass explains the mud and grass on Allen's shoes in Chapter 1. The benches explain where he left the paint can.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The Park of the Spire, as Chapters 1, 4 and 5 describe it.
The spire. The tall moral centre of the city, visible from Allen's window in Chapter 1.
The statue. "immediately before the spire, on its own platform, in the center of a gravel ring."
The benches. Set round the statue for feeding pigeons, dozing and talking "while contemplating its grandeur."
The grounds. "sloping fields of wet grass," shrubs and trees, and "a gardener's shed" at one end.
Access. "never closed to the public," says the newspaper; "Nobody guards the Park," says the girl.
A box where the statue was
Allen reaches the centre and is lost for a moment. "At first he was confused; nothing familiar was visible. Then he realized what had happened. The police had boarded the statue up. Here was a square wooden frame, a gigantic box." He came to see what he had done and is shut out from it: "So he wasn't going to see it after all. He wasn't going to find out what he had done." His memory is hidden, and now the evidence is hidden too.
The box is the chapter's central image. It hides an embarrassment, and in hiding it, makes it a mystery. People who saw the statue in daylight know what is inside; those who come at night can only stare at boards and guess. The rest of the chapter is a series of guesses.
The thin citizen
"Presently, as he stood dully staring, he became aware that somebody was beside him." The newcomer is "A seedy, spindly-armed citizen in a long, soiled overcoat", also staring at the box. They stand in silence. Then the man "hawked and spat into the grass" and complains that he can see nothing. (The source prints his mild oath with a dash and a bracketed "sic.")
Then he explains the box. "They put that up on purpose... So you can't see. You know why?" Allen says "Why" without a question mark, flatly, and the man leans in.
"Anarchists got to it."
The thin citizen
He goes on, as though he had seen the arrests: "The police caught some of them; some they didn't catch. The ringleader, they didn't catch him. But they will. And you know what they'll find?" Allen: "What." The answer: "They'll find he's paid by the Resort. And this is just the first."
The Health Resort has been the regime's favourite bogey since Chapter 3, when Mavis called its defectors "noose" and Frost repeated a story of slave camps. Here the rumour has spread to the street. The thin man's next lines map out a whole campaign: "Within the next week... public buildings are going to be bombed. The Committee building, T-M. And then they put the radioactive particles in the drinking water. You'll see. It already tastes wrong. The police know, but their hands are tied." Every element of a classic conspiracy theory is present: secret paymasters, a timetable, a hidden poison that the believer can already taste, and authorities who know but cannot act.
The man who actually did it is standing beside him. Dick's irony is complete: the ringleader the police "didn't catch" is listening, and the mastermind "paid by the Resort" is the man about to be appointed to run T-M, one of the buildings due to be bombed.
"It was kids"
A second voice breaks in. "Next to the thin citizen a short, fat, red-haired man smoking a cigar spoke irritably up." He says: "It was kids, that's all. A bunch of crazy kids with nothing else to do." The fat man is the common-sense voice, impatient with theories. He is also wrong, though less wrong than the thin man.
The thin citizen laughs "harshly" and answers with the believer's standard reply to the sceptic: "That's what they want you to think. Sure, a harmless prank." Then his speech turns into a sermon.
The list of vices is funny in its mixture. Neon signs stand beside fornication and drugs, because in a world of moral packets advertising itself is a sin of the old order. He adds a line in the high style of the pulpit: "They want to see waste and rapacity rule sovereign, and vainglorious man writhe in the sinkpit of his own greed." The fat man repeats himself: "It was kids... Doesn't mean anything."
"the people that did this mean to overthrow Morec. They won't rest until every scrap, of morality and decency has been trampled into the ground. They want to see fornication and neon signs and dope come back."
The thin citizen
The man beside them
Allen says almost nothing through all this. He answers "Why" and "What," flatly, and lets the two men argue. He neither confesses nor joins in. Dick keeps him in the position he will be in for much of the novel: the one person who knows the answer, standing silent in a crowd of explanations. It is also a professional position. Allen runs an agency that writes the city's moral packets; he knows how messages are made and how they land. Here he hears his own work, the jape, coming back to him as rumour, and finds that the city has already turned it into two stories he did not write: a plot by the Resort and a prank by kids.
The two men are also two kinds of audience. The thin citizen is the ideal consumer of Morec, someone who has taken every packet at its word and now hears every event as part of the struggle against vice. The fat man is the other kind, the one who has taken in nothing and wants to be left alone. Neither can see a parody as a parody. To the first it is war, and to the second it is noise. The girl, when she arrives, is the first person in the Park who reads the jape as what it is: a joke with a point.
The sermon
As Allen walks away, the thin man is still going. "The wrath of Almighty God will roll up the heavens like a scroll," he tells the fat man, "The atheists and fornicators will lie bloody in the streets, and the evil will be burned from men's hearts by the sacred fire." Morec presents itself as a civic programme of moral reclamation. On the street it turns into a religion of judgment and fire. The thin man's speech shows what happens when a system built on moral messages is believed literally by someone who has absorbed nothing else.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: two old fears in one overcoat. The thin citizen's phrase about the heavens rolled up "like a scroll" is biblical. In the King James Version, Isaiah 34:4 says the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll, and Revelation 6:14 says the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together [KJV, via Bible Gateway]. His other fear, of poison put "in the drinking water" that "already tastes wrong," would have had a familiar ring to readers in 1956. Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first city in the world to fluoridate its water in January 1945, and during the 1950s a vocal minority of opponents called fluoridation a forced medication or a Communist plot to weaken Americans [Science History Institute, Pipe Dreams article; NIDCR, The Story of Fluoridation; University of Kansas thesis on the anti-fluoride movement]. Dick gives the plot to the Resort instead of the Communists, which fits Frost's slip in Chapter 3, when she wondered whether a rumour about the Resort's slave camps was really about "the Communists." The point of the scene is that the official enemy changes and the shape of the fear does not.
The girl on the rise
"By herself, hands in the pockets of her coat, a girl watched Allen as he walked aimlessly along the path." She is watching before he notices her. He goes up to her, hesitates, and asks the question he cannot answer himself: "What happened?"
The description is brief and physical. "The girl was dark-haired, deep-chested, with smooth, tanned skin that glowed faintly in the half-light of the Park. When she spoke her voice was controlled and without uncertainty." In a scene full of people who are vague, waiting, sermonising or irritable, she is the one who is sure of herself. She speaks almost like a reporter: "This morning they found the statue to be quite different. Didn't you read about it? There was an account in the newspaper." "I read about it," Allen says. She is standing "up on a rise of grass," and he joins her.
Blood that was paint
From the rise he can see more. "There, in the shadows below them, were the remnants of the statue, damaged in a cunning way." The box hides the statue, but from higher ground some of what lies within and round it is visible. The narrator then gives a sentence that makes the statue a living thing: "The image of bronzed plastic had been caught unguarded; in the night it had been asleep."
Allen feels himself step outside the event. "Standing here now he could take an objective view; he could detach himself from the event and see it as an outsider, as a person... like these persons... coming by accident, and wondering." (The source sets the middle phrase between dashes.) He sees "large ugly drops of red" across the gravel, and knows what they are: "It was the enamel from the art department of his Agency." But he lets himself imagine what the crowd imagines, "the apocalyptic quality of it."
The fantasy continues in a sentence of animal violence. The enemy "had taken told and bitten through its carotid artery" (the source has "told" for hold), and "The statue had bled all over its own legs and feet; it had gushed red slimy blood and died." In Allen's imagination the attacker came up from the earth, like the grass on his shoes, and killed the statue the way a predator kills: at the throat.
He feels the death as a fact. "He, standing with the girl, knew it was dead. He could feel the emptiness behind the wooden box; the blood had run out leaving a hollow container." And then a line that ties back to the dinner table: "It seemed now as if the statue had tried to defend itself. But it had lost, and no quick-freeze would save it. The statue was dead forever." In Chapter 4, Allen told Janet that someone "can always save" his dying friends "with quick-freeze." The statue, which is a symbol, cannot be saved that way. Its death is the one that is final.
"The trail of red was blood, the statue's blood. Up from the wet, loose-packed soil of the Park had crept its enemy"
Narrator, giving Allen's imagined version
"Don't be scared"
The girl asks how long he has been there; "Just a couple of minutes," he says. She says: "I was here this morning. I saw it on my way to work." Allen sees what that means: "she had seen it before the box was erected." He asks, "earnestly eager to find out," what was done to it.
Her reply ignores the question and answers something else. "Don't be scared." He is puzzled: "I'm not scared." She contradicts him gently: "You are. But it's all right." And she laughs: "Now they'll have to take it down. They can't repair it." Allen, "awed," says: "You're glad."
"The girl's eyes filled with light, a rocking amusement." She says: "We should celebrate. Have ourselves a ball." Then the light fades, and she adds the condition: "If he can get away with it, whoever he was, whoever did it." And she says: "Let's get out of here... okay? Come on." (The source has a dash before "okay.") In a Park full of people waiting in silence, the first person who speaks openly in favour of the jape is a stranger, and she speaks to the man who did it.
Leaving the Park
"She led him across the grass to the sidewalk and the lane beyond. Hands in her pockets, she walked rapidly along, and he followed." The cold air clears his head: "The night air was chilly and sharp, and, gradually, it cleared from his mind the mystical dream-like presence of the Park." Allen murmurs that he is glad to be out. She agrees with an odd remark: "It's easy to go in there, hard to get out."
"You felt it?" he asks. "Of course," she says. Daylight was different: "It wasn't so bad this morning, when I walked by. The sun was shining; it was daylight." At night the place holds people. She tells him how long she had been standing there: "I was there an hour before you came and woke me up. Just standing, looking at it. In a trance."
The Park now has a power of its own in the novel. Allen lost an hour there on Sunday night and cannot remember it. The groups stand "like pools" waiting. The girl stood for an hour "In a trance." The moral and spiritual center of Newer York, as the newspaper called it, seems to work on people like a spell. Dick does not explain it, and the girl treats it as something everyone feels.
Paint, after all
Allen admits that the drops got to him: "They looked like blood." She deflates the image at once. "Just paint," she says "matter-of-factly," and pulls "a folded newspaper" from her coat. "A common fast-drying enamel, used by a lot of offices. Nothing mysterious about it." The paint is ordinary office stock, which is why it cannot be traced to one office.
"They haven't caught anybody," Allen says, "still feeling some of the unnatural detachment. But it was departing." The girl agrees, with a note almost of admiration: "Surprising how easily a person can do this and get away. Why not? Nobody guards the Park; nobody actually saw him." That last phrase is accurate in a way she cannot, apparently, know. The juvenile saw Allen at Hokkaido, not in the Park.
Her theories
Allen asks for her theory. She kicks a stone ahead of her and gives two.
The first is Janet's theory from Chapter 4, almost word for word: a man who lost his lease. The second is new and psychological. "subconscious resentment of Morec" describes a man who does not know why he acted, which is exactly Allen's state. And "the burden the system imposes" turns round the phrase Allen used at dinner about the Directorship, "the burden" of civic life, which he said as praise.
"Somebody was bitter about losing his lease. Or somebody was expressing a subconscious resentment of Morec. Fighting back against the burden the system imposes."
The girl
CONTRAST
| Who | Explanation of the jape | What it reveals |
|---|---|---|
| Janet (Ch4) | Someone who "lost his lease," or a "noose" | The official categories of the disaffected |
| Thin citizen | "Anarchists," a ringleader "paid by the Resort"; bombs and poison to follow | The regime's enemy turned into a plot |
| Fat man | "kids... with nothing else to do" | Common sense, and indifference |
| The girl | A lost lease, or "subconscious resentment of Morec" | A diagnosis that fits the man beside her |
| Allen (Ch4) | "Some deep, underlying causal connection" with the offer | A sense of design without a reason |
The Buetello Streiter
Allen asks again what exactly was done. She says the papers held back: "The paper didn't print the details. It's probably safer to play a thing like this down." Then she describes the statue as it was, assuming he knows it, as everyone in Newer York must.
"Looking into the future," Allen murmurs. He finishes her description with the official phrase, the kind of caption a packet writer would give the pose. The girl says "That's right," and then, slowing, spinning on her heel and looking at the pavement, describes the jape.
"the Buetello conception of Streiter. The traditional militant stance: one hand extended, one leg forward as if he were going into battle. Head up nobly. Deeply thoughtful expression."
The girl
What the japer did
She gives it in order, like a police report, with a smile at the worst part.
Her verdict: "Quite original, and quite embarrassing." She has called the man who did it "The criminal, or japer, or whatever he is". That word, japer, is the trade term Allen explained to Janet an hour before. Either it is a common word in
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The jape, step by step, as the girl describes it.
Paint. "painted the statue red." The drops on the gravel are the overflow.
Stripes. "He sloshed it with stripes, painted the hair red, too."
The head. "he severed the head, somehow. With a power cutting tool, evidently."
The hand. He "Removed the head and placed it in the outstretched hand," the hand that had been reaching toward the future.
The leg. "the individual applied a high-temperature pack to the forward leg... the right leg. The statue is a poured thermoplastic."
The new pose. "When the leg became flexible, the culprit reshaped its position."
The result. "Major Streiter now appears to be holding his head in his hand, ready to kick it far into the park."
Newer York, or the girl is closer to Allen's world than she has said.
The jape is an exact parody of the pose. The statue had one hand reaching forward and one leg stepping forward; the jape keeps both gestures and changes their object. The hand that offered the future now holds the founder's own head. The foot that marched into battle is about to kick that head away like a ball. It is the work Allen described at dinner: a theme repeated until it is stale, then turned against itself. He did it with a saw and a heat pack instead of words.
The girl describes the material precisely. "The statue is a poured thermoplastic." A thermoplastic softens when heated and hardens again when it cools, which is why a heat pack could bend the leg and why the new pose would stay. Chapter 4's newspaper called the statue "bronzed plastic," and Allen in his fantasy called it "a hollow container." The founder's image is a moulded shell that anyone with the right tools can reshape. The girl had already said, "They can't repair it."
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a founder holding his own head. A figure holding its own severed head has a long history in Christian art. Saints shown this way are called cephalophores, and the best-known is Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris, who according to legend picked up his head after his execution and walked with it to the place where the Basilica of Saint-Denis now stands [Britannica, entry on Saint Denis; Wikipedia, entry on cephalophores]. Dick does not mention the tradition, and the comparison is these notes', not his. It helps explain why the jape works. A beheaded figure holding its head can look like a martyr; one about to kick it into the park cannot. The parody turns a possible martyrdom into slapstick, which is harder for a regime to answer than an attack.
The Cohorts laughed
Allen says that "Under the circumstances you can't blame them for nailing a box around it." The girl agrees and tells him what happened before the box went up. "a number of people saw it before they put the box up. The first thing they did was get the Cohorts of Major Streiter over; they must have thought something else was going to happen." She saw them on her way to work: "all those sullen-looking young men in their brown uniforms, a ring of them around the statue. But you could see anyhow." Then, during the day, came the box.
The laughter of the Cohorts, the founder's own descendants set to guard his image, is the jape's real success: an attack would have made them angry, but the parody made them laugh at their ancestor against their will. The girl's sympathy for them is real and sly at once. Chapter 3 showed one of these young men, Ralf Hadler, with a face "as expressionless as sand." Their training is in solemnity. The jape broke it in public, and the box was the regime's only answer.
"You see, people laughed. Even the Cohorts. They couldn't help it. They snickered, and then it got away from them. I was so sorry for those young men... they hated to laugh so."
The girl
The crime as a work
The girl's account is the first full description of the jape, and Dick has placed it carefully. In Chapter 1 Allen woke with paint on his hands and no memory. In Chapter 4 the newspaper gave only "deliberate and systematic," and Allen confessed "I japed it" without knowing what he had done. Only now, a chapter later, does the reader learn the content of the jape, and from a stranger. The order matters. Allen has accepted responsibility before he knows what he is responsible for, and when the details come, they come as reviews. The girl calls the work "Quite original," the phrase of a critic. The people who saw it laughed, the response a satirist wants. The police nailed it up, the response a censor makes.
The jape is also, in a practical sense, skilled work. It needed a power saw, a heat pack hot enough to soften thermoplastic, red enamel in quantity, and the knowledge of how to bend a leg into a new pose and leave it there. It needed time in an open Park at night without being seen, and the nerve to leave nothing traceable but common office paint. A man who did all this in his sleep, or in a trance, was still doing what he does in daylight: taking a fixed piece of official messaging and reworking it so it says something else. His craft has run ahead of his conscious mind.
"Job worries"
They reach "a lighted intersection." The girl stops and looks at him with concern, "studying him, her eyes large." Then she says something that has no explanation in the scene: "You're in a terrible state... And it's my fault." Allen answers: "No... My own fault." Neither sentence is explained. She may mean that she frightened him with the details, or something more. He means the jape.
She presses his arm and asks what is wrong. "With irony he said" two words: "Job worries." It is true and a joke at once: he does have a job to decide on, and it is not what is wrong. She nods and asks about his wife: "Well, do you have a wife?" "A very sweet one." "Does she help you?" His answer is the bitterest line he speaks in the chapter.
The "fabulous collection" of pills turns Janet's illness into a hobby, like her clock kit. Allen has never spoken about her this way in front of her, and he says it to a stranger in the street.
"She worries even more than I. Right now she's home taking pills. She has a fabulous collection."
Allen
The address
"Do you want help?" the girl asks. "I do," he says, and the narrator adds that he "was not surprised at his own candor." Then: "Very much." It is the first time in the novel that Allen has admitted needing anything.
"That's what I thought," she says, and walks on while she weighs it. Then she states a rule of this society that no one has said aloud before.
"You're not supposed to want help" is the private cost of Morec's public virtue. A society that makes every man responsible to his fellows has no room for a man who cannot cope; to need help is a want of "moral fiber," Mavis's phrase in Chapter 3 for defectors to the Resort. Allen cannot promise: "That's impossible to say." She narrows the request: "Will
"These days... it's hard to get help. You're not supposed to want help. I can give you an address. If I do, will you use it?"
The girl
you try to use it?" He answers honestly: "I've never asked for help in my life... I can't say what I'd do."
She gives him "a slip of folded paper" with instructions: "Put it away in your wallet. Don't look at it... just put it away until you want to use it. Then get it out." "He put it away, and she watched fixedly." Satisfied, she says "All right... Good night."
"Good night, Mr. Purcell"
"You're leaving?" he asks, and the narrator notes that "He wasn't surprised; it seemed perfectly natural." The detachment of the Park has not entirely gone; everything she does seems natural to him. She goes off into the dark.
He never told her his name. The chapter's last paragraph gives his delayed understanding: "Sometime later, after the girl was completely gone, he realized that she had been
"I'll see you again. I've seen you before... Good night, Mr. Purcell. Take care of yourself."
The girl, as she leaves
standing there in the Park waiting for him. Waiting, because she knew he would show up." Her hour "In a trance" before he came was an hour of waiting. Her "Don't be scared," her "it's my fault," her use of "japer," her ready address and her knowledge of his name all point the same way. She knows, or strongly suspects, who did the jape. And she has come to offer him something.
CASE / SCENE
The girl's clues, gathered. She watched him first, before he approached. She tells him "Don't be scared" before he has shown fear. She is glad and wants to "celebrate," but only "If he can get away with it." She uses Allen's trade word, "japer." She offers a theory, "subconscious resentment of Morec," that fits his case exactly. She says "it's my fault" without explaining. She has an address ready on a slip of paper, and asks him not to read it yet. She says "I've seen you before" and calls him "Mr. Purcell." Who she is, and whom the address belongs to, the novel keeps back until the next chapter.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: what fills a box. The police boarded the statue up and the paper "didn't print the details," because "It's probably safer to play a thing like this down." The result in the Park is a crowd waiting in silence and a rumour that grows by the minute, from anarchists to bombs to poisoned water. Concealment does not stop a story; it hands the telling to whoever talks loudest. Banking learned this at speed in 2023. On 8 March Silicon Valley Bank announced a $1.8 billion loss on securities it had sold and a plan to raise capital; on 9 March uninsured depositors, coordinating through social media and a close network of venture investors, withdrew over $40 billion, and management expected over $100 billion more the next day. The bank was closed on 10 March [Federal Reserve, Review of the Supervision and Regulation of Silicon Valley Bank, April 2023; Barr testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, 29 March 2023]. The lesson for a bank's incident and communications planning is the one the girl states: when the official account is thin, people fill the gap. Prepare the factual statement before you need it, say what is known and what is being done, and assume the rumour is already moving.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 5.
Editorial "[sic]" tags. At lines 225 and 235 this text prints "[sic]" after the thin citizen's mild oath and after "Multilated," a misspelling of mutilated. The tags belong to whoever prepared this edition, not to Dick, and mark the misspelling as the speaker's.
A broken paragraph. The thin citizen's speech is split across lines 233 and 235 in the middle of his explanation, after "Anarchists got to it."
"taken told." At line 265, "told" for hold.
A stray comma. At line 247, "every scrap, of morality and decency."
Brown or khaki. The girl describes the Cohorts' "brown uniforms." Chapter 3 called their uniform "drab khaki." The two are close, and the girl's word is a fair description, but it is a variation.
The view of the boxed statue. The narrator says the police have hidden the statue in "a gigantic box," yet from the rise Allen sees "the remnants of the statue, damaged in a cunning way." The likeliest reading is that the higher ground shows part of it over the boards, or that he sees the damage around the box. The text does not say.
Dashes in speech. The girl's "But tonight," "And," "okay?" and "the forward leg... the right leg" are set with dashes in the source; quotations here use pauses.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 5. The statue of Streiter has been boxed in by the police and the newspaper has held back the details, and in the silence the Park fills with theories: anarchists paid by the Health Resort, bombs and poisoned water to come, or simply kids. A self-possessed girl tells Allen what was done: the statue painted red and striped, its head cut off and set in its outstretched hand, its thermoplastic leg heated and bent so that the founder seems about to kick his own head into the park. People laughed, even the Cohorts who were brought in to guard it, and the box went up during the day. Allen imagines the statue bleeding to death beyond any "quick-freeze," feels the Park's trance-like pull, and admits to the girl that he wants help, though "You're not supposed to want help." She gives him a folded address to keep in his wallet, calls him "Mr. Purcell" though he never told her his name, and leaves him realising that she had been waiting for him.
Four Point Five Days
On Tuesday morning Allen still has no answer for Sue Frost. He leaves a halting message on the Committee's recording machine, asking for a week. Doris brings in Luddy's request for a reference, and Allen cannot decide that either. He reasons his way to a calm view of the jape: the brain is an organ that can act without explaining itself. Then he unfolds the girl's slip of paper and finds four words: Health Resort, Gretchen Malparto. Frost's recorded reply is courteous and official: a week is too long, and he must decide by Saturday. Unwilling to call from the office, Allen goes out to a public phone booth, rings the Mental Health Resort, learns that Gretchen is away and that Doctor Malparto is her brother, and books an appointment under a false name, Coates, for Thursday at nine.
TIMELINE
When and where. Tuesday, the day after the offer, in the morning. Frost's reply is stamped "Ten-o-five" and "Ten-o-six," so it arrives just after 10 a.m. Places: Allen's office in the Mogentlock Building, then a public phone booth outside it. Dates set in this chapter: the block meeting Wednesday at nine, the appointment Thursday at nine, the deadline Saturday. The chapter runs to about 1,320 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, who becomes "Mr. Coates" on the phone. Sue Frost, heard only on tape, now "Mrs. Sue Frost." Doris, his secretary. Fred Luddy, offstage, asking for a reference. Gretchen Malparto, the girl from the Park, named for the first time on her slip of paper; she has "left the Resort temporarily." Doctor Malparto, her brother, a doctor at the Resort. An unnamed Resort receptionist. Remembered: Mrs. Birmingham and her juvenile, Mavis, now resigned.
A trust on momentum
The chapter opens on the empty chair. "The next day Allen had still not given Mrs. Frost an answer. The directorship of T-M was empty, with Mavis out and nobody in." Dick describes what an organisation without a head looks like, and the picture is unsentimental.
Telemedia is now a "monster," a word Allen would not have used for it a day ago. In Chapter 4 he called the Directorship "a plum"; here it is a great body running on reflex, with the forms still being stamped and no one deciding. The image will return in a few lines, when Allen calls T-M "a glacier." Both images say the same thing: the trust is too big to be steered by anyone, and the man asked to steer it knows this.
"The huge trust rolled along on momentum; and, he supposed, minor bureaucrats along the line continued to stamp forms and fill out papers. The monster lived, but not as it should."
Narrator
Thirty seconds at a time
"Wondering how long he had to decide he phoned the Committee building and asked for Mrs. Frost." He gets a machine.
"Yes sir... Secretary Frost is in conference. You may state a thirty-second message which will be transcribed for her attention. Thank you. Zeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
The Committee's recorded voice
The "Yes sir" before he has said anything, the polite "Thank you," and then the tone written out at length, "Zeeeeeeeeeeeee!": Dick enjoys the comedy of the machine. But the format matters to the scene. Allen has thirty seconds at a time, and what he says will be "transcribed."
He begins carefully, setting out the arguments as if for a memo. "Mrs. Frost... there are a number of considerations involved, as I mentioned to you yesterday. Heading an Agency gives me a certain independence. You pointed out that my only customer is Telemedia, so that for all practical purposes I'm working for Telemedia. You also pointed out that as Director of Telemedia I would have more, not less, independence." He is quoting Frost's own arguments back to her, which concedes that she has already answered his objection. Then: "He paused, wondering how to go on."
"On the other hand," he says, "and then the thirty seconds was up." The machine cuts him off at the hinge of his argument, at the phrase that was meant to introduce his real case. "He waited as the mechanism at the other end repeated its rigamarole, and then continued."
"T-M is like a glacier"
The second half of his message is more personal, and worse.
His case is the case for small things against large: a business he built, that he controls, that he can change, set against an institution nobody can direct. The words "built up by my own hands" echo the stove in Chapter 4, which his family built in 2096 when buying one was cheaper. Allen is a man who values things he has made. The Directorship offers more power over something he could not make or change.
He hears it as he says it. "That sounded terrible to him, but once on the tape it couldn't be unspoken." A spoken remark can be softened or retracted; a recorded one is a document. The glacier line is now part of the Committee's file on the man it means to put in charge of T-M.
He ends with a request and an apology.
"My Agency, after all, was built up by my own hands. I'm free to alter it. I have complete control. T-M, on the other hand, is impersonal. Nobody can really dictate to it. T-M is like a glacier."
Allen, on tape
"Mrs. Frost, I'm afraid I'll have to have time to think it over. I'm sorry, because I realize this puts you in an unpleasant position. But I'm afraid the delay unavoidable is. I'll try to have my answer within a week, and please don't think I'm stalling. I'm sincerely floundering. This is Allen Purcell."
Allen, ending his message
"the delay unavoidable is" inverts its words, as Frost's "This embarrassing is" did in Chapter 3. "I'm sincerely floundering" is an odd thing to put on the record to the woman who is offering him the top job, and an honest one. "please don't think I'm stalling" is what a man says when he knows he is stalling. Allen asks for "a week."
The coin
"Ringing off, he sat back and brooded." In the daylight of his office, the night has receded: "Here, in his office, the statue of Major Streiter seemed distant and unconvincing." The man who last night felt the statue's death through the boards now cannot quite believe in it. He narrows his life to one question.
The words "Put that way" give him away. Allen has framed the problem to make it look simple, and the framing leaves out everything that happened on Sunday night. Then: "He got out a coin and rolled it across the surface of his desk. If necessary he could leave the decision to chance." A man who has just told the Committee he needs a week to think is ready to settle it by a coin. Allen's problem is that he cannot locate his own reasons, and a coin is a way of choosing without reasons.
"He had one problem only: the job problem. Either he stayed with his Agency or he went upstairs to T-M. Put that way his dilemma sounded simple."
Narrator
Luddy's reference
Doris comes in "brightly" with an errand. "Fred Luddy wants a letter of recommendation from you. We made out his check. Two weeks, plus what was owed." She sits with "pad and pencil ready." Luddy, fired in Chapter 2 for passing work to a rival, has been paid off and wants a reference.
Allen's response is a small moral comedy. "That's hard to say." He wants to write it, "because he liked Luddy and he hoped to see him get a halfway decent job." But "he felt silly writing a letter of recommendation for a man he had fired as disloyal and dishonest, Morecly speaking." The adverb "Morecly" is Dick's coinage and sums up Allen's position. By Morec's standards Luddy was disloyal. By Allen's own feeling he was a friend of three years. Allen does not know which standard to write by, so he says, "Maybe I'll have to think about that, too."
Doris solves it for him: "I'll tell him you're too busy. You'll have to see about it later." "Relieved, he let her go with that story." The secretary has seen what her employer cannot do and covers for him. Then the narrator states Allen's condition in a phrase.
BY THE NUMBERS
"Two weeks, plus what was owed" Luddy's final pay. Three years his service, from Chapter 3, "Since I opened the Agency." One the number of people Allen has ever fired: "That's the only person I've ever let go."
"No decision seemed possible right now, on any topic. Small or large, his problems revolved on an olympian level; they couldn't be hauled down to earth."
Narrator
"olympian" is lightly ironic. A reference for a sacked copywriter is not a matter for the gods. But every question has become the same question for Allen, because each asks him what he believes, and he does not know.
The police, the warden, and himself
He takes stock. "At least the police hadn't traced him. He was reasonably sure that Mrs. Birmingham's juvenile lacked information on the Park episode." The juvenile saw Allen at Hokkaido on Sunday, before the Park. "Tomorrow, at nine a.m., he'd find out." That is the block meeting, now set for Wednesday morning. "But he wasn't worried. The idea of police barging in to arrest and deport him was absurd." The word "deport" shows what the penalty would be in this society: removal to the colonies, the fate Janet guessed for "some person who lost his lease."
Then the narrator moves the problem inward. "His real worry was the job... and himself." (The source sets "and himself" after a dash.) The two words at the end are the chapter's real subject.
The brain as an organ
"He had told the girl he needed help, and he did. Not because he had japed the statue, but because he had japed it without understanding why."
Narrator
Allen's trouble, as he now sees it, is not guilt for the jape but ignorance of its cause: he did something skilled and meaningful and cannot say why. He then tries to argue himself out of alarm.
"Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?" The argument is sound as far as it goes. Most of what the body does, it does without consulting its owner. "Reasoned out that way, the bizarre quality evaporated."
The comfort is partial and the narrator knows it: "But he still had to find out what was happening." The organ argument explains how a man could act without knowing why. It does not supply the why. It moves the question from whether he is mad to what his brain is trying to do, and that is a question for a doctor.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Allen's reasoning on Tuesday morning, step by step.
Narrow the problem. "one problem only: the job problem." The statue seems "distant and unconvincing."
Consider chance. Roll a coin; "leave the decision to chance."
Admit paralysis. "No decision seemed possible right now, on any topic."
Discount the police. Not traced; the juvenile likely knows nothing; arrest is "absurd."
Name the real worry. "the job... and himself."
Separate act from reason. The trouble is not the jape but japing "without understanding why."
Normalise. The brain is "an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys."
Act anyway. "he still had to find out what was happening." He reaches for the slip.
Four words
"Reaching into his wallet he got out the slip of paper. On it, in a woman's neat hand, were four words." The girl told him not to look until he wanted to use it. He looks now, which means he wants to use it.
"So the girl's name was Gretchen." And the Resort explains her: "as he had inferred, she was roaming around in the night soliciting for the Mental Health Resort, in violation of law." This is the first time the full name, Mental Health Resort, appears in the novel. Until now it has been "the Health Resort," a name that sounds like a spa. The fuller name says what it is: a place for treating minds. The girl who was glad the statue was destroyed, who offered help to a man in trouble, was recruiting for the institution the state treats as its enemy, and doing it illegally.
The next sentence is the chapter's turning point.
"deserters and misfits" is the official vocabulary, Mavis's language of Chapter 3, where people went over because they were "weak," "misfits," without "the moral fiber to stick it out." Allen still thinks in those terms even as the hand touches him. His body answers before his mind does: "He felt weak. He felt very morbid and shaky, as if he were running a fever: a low current of somewhat moist energy that could not be shaken off." The description is exact and odd. A fever is usually heat; this is "moist energy," a sick, restless current. Something in him is mobilised, and he cannot tell whether it is fear or hope.
"Health Resort"
Line one of the slip; line two reads "Gretchen Malparto."
"The Health Resort, the last refuge for deserters and misfits, had reached out and put its hand on his shoulder."
Narrator
Frost on tape
"Mr. Purcell," Doris calls through the open door, "There's a return call in for you. The phone is taking it right now." Allen rouses himself and switches on the machine, and "The tape obligingly skipped back and restarted itself, spewing the recorded call." The verb "spewing" shows his mood.
The reply comes in two thirty-second segments, each stamped with its time.
Allen recognises "a smooth, urbane female voice," and does so "With further pessimism." The narrator records her pauses, "A pause" and then "Another pause, this one somewhat longer." The pauses are part of the message: she is choosing her words for the record. Then she gives the first point: "Of course, Mr. Purcell, you surely must realize that the offer of the directorship was predicated on the assumption that you were available for the job." The word "predicated" is lawyer's language. The offer has conditions, and his hesitation may break them.
The second segment states the terms.
"Ten-o-five. Click. Zeeeeeeeeeeeee! Mr. Purcell... This is Mrs. Sue Frost, answering your call of earlier this morning. I'm sorry I was not in when you called, Mr. Purcell... I am fully sympathetic with your situation. I can easily understand the position you're in."
Sue Frost, first segment
"Ten-o-six. Click. Zeeeeeeeeeeeee! To go on... It strikes us that a week is rather a long time, in view of the difficult status of Telemedia. There is no acting Director, since, as you're aware, Mr. Mavis has already resigned."
Sue Frost, second segment
"It strikes us": Frost now speaks as "us," for the Committee. Then she makes a threat that sounds like a courtesy. "We hesitate to request a postponement of that resignation, but perhaps it will be necessary." If Allen delays, Mavis may be called back, and the job may be his no longer. Then the deadline: "Our suggestion is that you take until Saturday at the latest to decide." She softens it with "we're fully sympathetic with your situation, and we don't wish to rush you," and closes on the public interest: Telemedia, she says, is a trust of high importance, and "it would be in the public interest that your decision come as quickly as possible. I'll expect to hear from you, then."
"Click, the mechanism went. The rest of the tape was blank."
CONTRAST
| Allen's message | Frost's reply | |
|---|---|---|
| Voice | "I," personal, hesitant | "us," for the Committee |
| Tone | "I'm sincerely floundering" | "fully sympathetic," with pauses |
| Argument | His own hands against "a glacier" | The offer "predicated on the assumption" he was available |
| Time | "within a week" | "until Saturday at the latest" |
| Leverage | None stated | A possible "postponement" of Mavis's resignation |
| Audience | Frost | "an inquiry," as Allen imagines it |
For the record
Allen reads the message as a document. "From the tone of Mrs. Frost's message Allen inferred that he had got an official statement of the Committee's position. He could imagine the tape being played back at an inquiry. It was for the record, and then some." Both of them have now spoken on tape. His contains the glacier and the floundering; hers contains patience, sympathy, a deadline and the public interest. If anything goes wrong, her tape will show that the Committee was reasonable, and his will show why it had doubts.
Then the count. "Four point five days, he thought. Four point five days to decide what he was and what he ought to be." The second sentence widens the question beyond the job. Saturday is the deadline for an answer about T-M, but what Allen must decide is who he is.
BY THE NUMBERS
"Ten-o-five" and "Ten-o-six" the stamps on Frost's reply. "thirty-second" segments on the Committee's machine. "a week" asked for. "Saturday" given. "Four point five days" Allen's count. "four words" on the slip. "Tomorrow, at nine a.m." the block meeting, Wednesday. "Thursday at nine" the appointment.
Not from this phone
"Picking up the phone, he started to dial, then changed his mind. Calling from the Agency was too risky. Instead, he left the office." In a world where every call can be taped and transcribed, and where a secretary takes messages, the office telephone is no place to ring the Resort. Allen has learnt the lesson of the morning in a few minutes: what you say into a machine can be played back.
Doris notices. "Going out again, Mr. Purcell?" He lies smoothly: "I'll be back shortly. Going over to the commissary for some supplies." He taps his coat pocket: "Things Janet asked me to pick up." The lie uses Janet as cover, and the pocket-tap gives it a prop. "As soon as he was out of the Mogentlock Building he stepped into a public phone booth. Staring vacantly, he dialed."
The Mental Health Resort
"Mental Health Resort,"
"a bureaucratic, but friendly voice"
The Resort answers like any office. The voice is "bureaucratic, but friendly," and the combination is a small surprise: the enemy of the state sounds like a clinic receptionist, which is what it is. Allen asks for Gretchen. After a wait: "Miss Malparto has left the Resort temporarily. Would you like to speak to Doctor Malparto?"
His reaction is quick and unbidden. "Obscurely nettled," Allen asks: "Her husband?" He has met the girl once, at night, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and the idea of a husband annoys him. Dick lets the word "Obscurely" carry it: Allen does not know why he minds. The receptionist clears it up: "Doctor Malparto is Miss Malparto's brother. Who is calling, please?"
"I want an appointment," Allen says. "Business problems." It is the same evasion he gave Gretchen, "Job worries," and is just as true and just as false. Asked his name, "He hesitated and then invented." "I'll be in under the name Coates." The receptionist accepts it without a question: "Yes sir, Mr. Coates." "There was no further questioning on that point." The Resort, it seems, is used to clients with invented names.
She offers "tomorrow at nine a.m." Allen nearly agrees, "and then remembered the block meeting." He says: "Better make it Thursday." The two institutions of his week sit in adjacent slots. On Wednesday at nine he will sit before Mrs. Birmingham's tribunal of neighbours; on Thursday at nine before a doctor of the Resort. "Thursday at nine," the receptionist confirms, "With Doctor Malparto. Thank you very much for calling."
"Feeling a little better, Allen returned to the Agency." The chapter ends on relief. He has decided nothing about T-M. But he has done something, and done it secretly, under another name, from a public booth.
What the chapter changes
Very little happens in Chapter 6 by the measure of events. A man leaves a message, receives one, declines to write a letter and makes a phone call. But the chapter moves Allen further than the two before it. On Monday night he confessed the jape to Janet and asked a stranger for help. On Tuesday morning he acts on that request, and the way he acts is new for him.
Three small choices mark the change. He reads the slip before he has decided anything else, which the girl said he should do only when he wanted to use it. He leaves the office to make the call, because he has understood that his own workplace is part of the recording apparatus. And he invents a name. Up to now Allen has been a public man in every scene: greeted by name at the warden's table, recognised by Frost, offered the highest job in the media. As "Coates" he steps outside that identity for the first time on purpose. The jape was done by a part of him he could not see. The call to the Resort is done by the whole of him, deliberately, and in secret.
The chapter also sets out the week ahead with a clarity the novel has not had before. Wednesday at nine is Mrs. Birmingham's meeting, where the state's smallest unit judges him. Thursday at nine is Doctor Malparto, the state's outlawed alternative. Saturday is Frost's deadline, where the state's highest office waits for his answer. Each institution has a claim on him and an hour fixed for it. Allen's question, "what he was and what he ought to be," will be put to him three times in four days.
CASE / SCENE
Gretchen, as far as the novel has shown her. She is Gretchen Malparto, sister of Doctor Malparto, a doctor at the Mental Health Resort. She has "left the Resort temporarily," and is in Newer York, where she says she saw the statue "on my way to work." She was soliciting for the Resort at night, which the narrator says is "in violation of law." She knew Allen's name, was waiting for him in the Park, and gave him the Resort's name and her own. What she wants from him, and how she knew to wait, the chapter leaves open.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: the recorded line and the phone booth. Two kinds of communication run through this chapter. Frost speaks on a channel that is recorded, timestamped and kept, and she speaks for the record. Allen, once he has something private to say, leaves the building and uses a channel nobody records. Banking regulators have spent the last few years on exactly this split. In September 2022 the SEC charged sixteen Wall Street firms with widespread recordkeeping failures, finding that employees had used personal devices and messaging apps such as WhatsApp for business between January 2018 and September 2021; the firms agreed to pay more than $1.1 billion in penalties, and with the CFTC's parallel actions the total was about $1.8 billion [SEC press release 2022-174, 27 September 2022; Reuters, 27 September 2022]. In the EU, MiFID II Article 16(7) requires investment firms to record telephone conversations and electronic communications relating to client orders, keeping them for five years, or up to seven where the authority asks [ESMA, MiFID II Article 16(7); Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/565, Article 76]. The lesson for architects of these systems is the one Allen learns in a morning: people who believe a channel is recorded will move sensitive conversations elsewhere. A capture system that is awkward or feared drives communication off-channel, so the design has to make the sanctioned channel the easy one, and governance has to be honest about why recording exists.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a deadline as a test. Frost's reply never refuses Allen's week. It says that a week "is rather a long time," offers "Saturday at the latest" as a "suggestion," and mentions, as if in passing, that Mavis's resignation might have to be postponed. In Chapter 2 she tested Allen with a packet; here she tests him with time. Whether the Committee means the threat, or wants to see how he answers pressure on the record, the chapter does not say.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 6.
"the delay unavoidable is." At line 383 Allen inverts his words, as Frost did in Chapter 3 with "This embarrassing is." These notes called Frost's inversion a probable typesetting slip. A second inversion of the same shape, in a second speaker's mouth, makes it more likely that Dick meant it: a verbal tic of formal speech in this society, or a joke about bureaucratic style. The question is open.
"rigamarole." At line 379, a variant spelling of rigmarole.
"as he had inferred." At line 409 the narrator says Allen had inferred that the girl was soliciting for the Resort. Chapter 5 shows no such inference; Allen only realises she had been waiting for him. Either the inference was made offstage or the line looks back on a thought Dick did not write.
Four point five days. From just after ten on Tuesday morning to the end of Saturday is about four and a half days, so Allen's count works if Saturday means the whole of Saturday.
"four words." The slip reads "Health Resort" and "Gretchen Malparto," which is four words. The count is right; the full stop after "Malparto" is the source's.
Mrs. and Miss. Frost calls herself "Mrs. Sue Frost" on tape; the Resort calls Gretchen "Miss Malparto," which settles Allen's question about a husband before he asks it.
Dashes. "the job... and himself" is set with a dash in the source.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 6. On Tuesday the Directorship of Telemedia stands empty and the trust runs on "momentum." Allen leaves a recorded message for Sue Frost asking for a week, calling T-M "like a glacier" and himself "sincerely floundering," then cannot decide even on Luddy's reference. He concludes that his trouble is not the jape but japing "without understanding why," and that the brain, like other organs, can act on its own. The girl's slip reads "Health Resort" and "Gretchen Malparto": she was soliciting for the Mental Health Resort, against the law. Frost's taped reply, sympathetic and official, sets a deadline of Saturday and hints that Mavis's resignation might be postponed. Calling from a public booth to avoid the office phone, Allen books an appointment as "Coates" with Doctor Malparto, Gretchen's brother, for Thursday at nine, the morning after his block meeting.
A Regular Little Gentleman
On Wednesday morning Allen and Janet go down to the weekly block meeting in the big room on the first floor of their housing unit. Mrs. Birmingham chairs a board of wardens from the surrounding blocks. The juveniles, the small metal informers, sit switched off while their tapes supply the evidence. The room puts its questions through one wall speaker that strips every voice of character, so that accuser and defender come out of the same mouth. Julie Ebberley goes first, charged with a "vile enterprise" in the community bathtub, and gets off with an oral reprimand. Then Allen is called. The charge is only that he came home drunk on Sunday night, fell on the front steps and swore. Nothing is said about the statue. Allen answers carefully, and then an unknown neighbour delivers a eulogy so pious that the room falls silent. Allen protests that what he did was wrong, but he is let off without penalty because of his "excellent prior record". He identifies his defender as a quiet elderly man called Wales, who explains that he was repaying Allen for standing up for others. Janet is overjoyed. Allen feels glum.
TIMELINE
When and where. Wednesday 10 October 2114, in the morning. Chapter 6 fixed the meeting for Wednesday at nine, several men are reading their "morning newspapers", and the first case ends "At nine-fifteen." The charges refer back to Saturday 6 October (Julie Ebberley), Sunday 7 October at 11:30 p.m. (Allen) and Tuesday 9 October in the afternoon (Mrs. R.M.). The place is the large meeting room on "the first level of the housing unit" where the Purcells live, and afterwards the hall outside it and the stairs. The chapter runs to about 2,360 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, called to the stage as "Mr. A.P."; Janet Purcell, his wife, who dreads the meeting every week; Mrs. Birmingham, the warden of their block, who chairs the board from "the raised seat"; the wardens of the neighbouring blocks, "middle-aged ladies" in "flowered silk dresses"; the juveniles, switched off for the session; the synthetic voice through which the room speaks; Julie Ebberley, "Miss J.E.", a young woman who has been up before the board many times; Mr. Wales, a mild elderly neighbour who turns out to be Allen's defender; and Mrs. R.M., the third accused, of whom nothing is shown but her charge. A crowd of neighbours fills the room, some of them reading the paper.
The stagger system
The chapter opens with a sentence that sounds like a civics textbook and is meant to. "In the highly moral society of 2114 A.D., the weekly block meetings operated on the stagger system." Dick explains the arrangement in one more sentence: "Wardens from surrounding housing units were able to sit at each, forming a board of which the indigenous warden was chairman." So no block judges itself alone. Each week a board is formed of the local warden and the wardens from the blocks around it, and the local warden takes the chair. Since "Mrs. Birmingham was the warden in the Purcells' block, she, of the assembled middle-aged ladies, occupied the raised seat." The others sit "in flowered silk dresses" in "chairs on each side of her across the platform."
The word stagger suggests a rota: wardens moving from meeting to meeting on a schedule, so that every board has outsiders on it as well as the woman who knows the defendants personally. It is a sensible piece of institutional design. A purely local tribunal would be at the mercy of local feuds; a purely outside one would know nothing about the people in front of it. The stagger system mixes the two. It is also the kind of detail that tells the reader how settled this society is. Moral supervision has been running long enough to have procedures, rotas and seating plans.
The picture of the board is just as telling. The judges are all women of a certain age and a certain kind of dress. Dick does not describe a single one of them except Mrs. Birmingham, and even she is described only by her seat. Chapter 1 gave Mrs. Birmingham her character, with her "coyly sweet malevolence" as Allen remembered it in Chapter 3. Here she is simply the chair, and the flowered silk around her is the uniform of respectable neighbourhood authority. The scene could be a church committee or a women's club in a 1950s American town, and that is part of Dick's point. Nothing about the block meeting needs futuristic machinery except the juveniles and the voice. The rest is a familiar kind of small-town government with the power to take away a family's home.
"I hate this room"
Janet stops at the door. "I hate this room," she says. Allen agrees: "Allen did, too." Then the narration describes the room, and the description is a small essay on how a society of mutual surveillance feels from the inside.
The list of bodies is long and capitalised: Leagues, Committees, Clubs, Boards, Associations, and Orders. These are the voluntary organisations of civic life, the kind of thing that in an ordinary town would be a sign of a healthy community. Here they share one room with the tribunal, and the narrator puts them all together as the source of "official nosing and snooping." The point is that in Morec society there is no line between civic participation and surveillance. The same room, the same chairs and probably the same people serve for the bridge club and for the moral trial.
"Down here on the first level of the housing unit, in this one large chamber, all the local Leagues, Committees, Clubs, Boards, Associations, and Orders met. The room smelled of stale sunlight, dust, and the infinite layers of paperwork that had piled up over the years. Here, official nosing and snooping originated. In this room a man's business was everybody's business."
The narrator, describing the meeting room
The smell is precise: "stale sunlight, dust, and the infinite layers of paperwork." Sunlight is the image of openness, and here it has gone stale, as if being looked at all the time has worn the light out. The paperwork is "infinite" and has "piled up over the years", so the room is also an archive. Everything said here is written down and kept. "In this room a man's business was everybody's business" is the sentence that sums up the regime, and it is said in the flat tone of an old saying.
The next sentence gives the history. The narrator traces the meeting back to "Centuries of Christian, confessional" practice, which "culminated when the block" gathered "to explore its members' souls." (The source has a typing slip in the verb; see the quirks box.) The block meeting is the Christian confession made public and compulsory. The private conversation between a penitent and a priest has become a hearing before the neighbours. This fits everything Dick has told us about the origins of Morec in Chapters 1 and 2: a revived Calvinist moral order, born in a re-created Transvaal, whose discipline does not stop at the church door.
Smoke without cigarettes
The room is crowded. "As always, there were more people than space. Many had to stand, and they filled the corners and aisles." The air conditioning "moaned and reshuffled the cloud of smoke." And here Dick adds one of his small uncanny touches.
"Allen was always puzzled by the smoke, since nobody seemed to have a cigarette and smoking was forbidden. But there it was. Perhaps it, like the shadow of purifying fire, was an accumulation from the past."
The smoke has no source that anyone can see. Allen's explanation is half joke and half insight: the smoke is left over, like a memory the room cannot shed. "the shadow of purifying fire" points to the fires of earlier moral regimes, the burning of heretics and books. Allen does not say this outright, but "purifying fire" is the language of the stake and the bonfire. A room for confessing sins is haunted by the smoke of the fires that used to follow confession. Two chapters from now the reader will hear Sugermann say of twentieth-century novels: "Banned. Burned. Destroyed." The smoke in the meeting room is the first hint of that history.
There is also a quieter irony. Smoking is forbidden, yet in Chapter 8 Allen lights a cigarette in Malparto's office, and in Chapters 2 and 4 he smoked without a second thought, offering a cigarette to Sue Frost and lighting one after dinner. Whatever the rule says, smoke is part of this world. The room with the strictest rules is also the room with the most smoke.
The juveniles, switched off
Allen's attention goes to the machines. "His attention fixed itself on the pack of juveniles. They were here, the earwig-like sleuths." Dick gives their size, "a foot and a half long," and their way of moving: "The species scuttled close to the ground... or up vertical surfaces... at ferocious speed, and they noticed everything." The word species is a joke and a warning. The juveniles are machines, but people talk about them as if they were a kind of insect, a household pest that has become the police.
Today they are idle. "The wardens had unlocked the metal hulls and dug out the report tapes. The juveniles remained inert during the meeting, and then they were put back into service." The procedure is simple and physical. Each juvenile carries its record on tape inside a locked metal body. The wardens hold the keys, open the bodies, take out the tapes, and the evidence for the week is ready. The machines sit through the trial they made possible, and afterwards they go back to work.
The next paragraph is one of the most careful in the book so far. The narrator weighs the juveniles, and finds them both frightening and reassuring.
This is a real argument, and it is fair to both sides. The case for the juveniles is the case for machine evidence in general. A human informer can lie, exaggerate, misremember, or report out of spite. A juvenile cannot. It records what it hears and sees and nothing else. That protects the accused from "hysterical hearsay, from malice and paranoia." In a society that runs on neighbours watching neighbours, that is a large protection. Nobody can be destroyed by a rumour or a grudge if only the tape counts.
The case against comes in the same breath. Because the tape is beyond question, so is guilt. "The issue to be settled here was merely the severity of moral lapse." The meeting is not a trial in the sense of a contest about what happened. It is a sentencing hearing. The final sentence of the paragraph puts the consequence with grim clarity: "The victim couldn't protest that he had been unjustly accused; all he could protest was his bad luck at having been overheard."
The juveniles settle what happened before anyone speaks, so the meeting can only decide how much it matters, and the one plea left to the accused is bad luck.
Notice the word Dick uses for the accused: victim. The narrator calls the person on the stage a victim three times in this paragraph. That is a judgement, slipped into the vocabulary. In law the person would be the defendant or the accused; in Morec they are what the narrator says they are.
The last two points are these notes' extension of Dick's argument, and the chapter proves them almost at once. The juvenile record on Allen covers a fall and a word at 11:30 p.m. It says
"There was something sinister in these metal informers, but there was also something heartening. The juveniles did not accuse; they only reported what they heard and saw. They couldn't color their information and they couldn't make it up. Since the victim was indicted mechanically he was safe from hysterical hearsay, from malice and paranoia. But there could be no question of guilt; the evidence was already in."
The narrator on the juveniles
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
What the juveniles guarantee, and what they do not.
Accuracy of record. They "couldn't color their information and they couldn't make it up." What is on the tape happened.
Protection from human malice. No neighbour can invent a charge. The accused is "safe from hysterical hearsay."
No contest on the facts. Because the record is trusted, there is "no question of guilt." The hearing is only about severity.
Selection without choice. A juvenile records what it happens to catch. The accused can only lament being "overheard." Others who did the same and were not caught never come to the stage.
Silence about what was missed. The juvenile that saw Allen fall on the steps did not see him in the Park. What the machines miss does not exist for the meeting.
nothing of a statue sawn, painted and bent an hour or two earlier. The machine is perfectly accurate and perfectly blind outside its field of view. The meeting will treat Allen as a man who once drank too much. An accurate record is not the same thing as a complete one.
Then one more rule: "Failure to arrive was in itself a lapse." Attendance is compulsory. The meeting is a ritual of participation as much as a court. Mrs. Birmingham checks the agenda, sees that everyone has come, "Apparently he and Janet completed the group," and signals the start. Allen and Janet are the last to arrive, which in itself would be noted.
Janet's weekly catastrophe
The door closes behind them. "I guess we don't get to sit," Janet murmurs. The narrator then gives a short portrait of her fear, more sympathetic than anything Allen has thought about her so far.
This is the psychology of a person raised under constant judgement. Janet has never been charged. The absence of punishment does not reassure her; it only makes her surer that punishment is accumulating somewhere. The phrase "doom was saving itself up for one grand spree" is comic, and it is also an accurate description of anxiety. The worse the record of disaster, the more the anxious mind expects; the better the record, the more it fears the bill. Janet came from Betelgeuse 4, from a farm and a father who frightened her, as Chapter 8 will reveal. She has had no practice at feeling safe.
There is an irony underneath. Janet fears the meeting for herself, and this week it is her husband who is up. Her doom, in a sense, has arrived: her fear was misdirected rather than mistaken.
"Her face was pinched with anxiety; for her the weekly block meeting was a catastrophe which she met with hopelessness and despair. Each week she anticipated denouncement and downfall, but it never came. Years had gone by, and she had still not officially erred. But that only convinced her that doom was saving itself up for one grand spree."
The narrator on Janet
"you keep your mouth shut"
Allen gives his wife instructions. "When they call me," he says softly, "you keep your mouth shut. Don't get in on either side. The less said the better chance I have."
This is tactical advice from a man who knows how the meeting works. A defence by the accused's wife would look partisan and would invite counter-attack. An attack by her, in her nervous state, is not impossible either. Allen's plan is to keep the temperature low and let the charge die of boredom.
Janet does not believe it. "They'll tear you apart. Look at them." She sweeps her hand across the room. "They're just waiting to get at somebody." Allen answers with what he sees: "Most of them are bored and wish they were out." The narrator confirms him: "As a matter of fact, several men were reading their morning newspapers." Then Allen states his hope: "If nobody leaps to defend me it'll die down and maybe I'll get off with a verbal reprimand."
The sentence that follows is in Allen's mind, and it carries the weight of the whole scene: "Assuming, of course, that nothing was in about the statue." Allen is sure only of what he knows the juvenile could have seen. If anything about the Park has reached the wardens, the meeting will be a different event. He walks in carrying the real crime in his head and hoping to be tried for a small one.
Both husband and wife turn out to be partly wrong. Janet expects the pack to tear Allen apart; Allen expects it to stay bored if nobody defends him. In the event somebody does leap to defend him, and that is the thing that troubles him most.
Miss J.E. and the "vile enterprise"
The first case is called. "We will first undertake the case of Miss J.E.," Mrs. Birmingham states. The initials are a gesture toward privacy, and the narrator immediately strips it away: "Miss J.E. was Julie Ebberley, and everybody in the room knew her." Like the voice in the wall, the initials are a form of anonymity that hides nothing.
Julie is a regular. "Julie had been up time and again, but somehow she managed to hang onto the lease willed her by her family." That sentence tells us what is at stake in these meetings. The lease is the thing people fear to lose. Julie inherited hers, and the board has so far not taken it away, though she has been before them many times. The word "somehow" suggests the neighbours resent this.
Dick describes her through Allen's eyes: "Scared and wide-eyed, she now mounted the defendant's stage, a young blonde-haired girl with long legs and an intriguing bosom." The detail is male and appraising, and it says something about why the room is so interested in her case. She has dressed for the occasion: "Today she wore a modest print dress and low-heeled slippers. Her hair was tied back in a girlish knot." Everything about her costume says innocence, and everyone in the room knows it is a costume.
The charge is read. "Miss J.E.," Mrs. Birmingham declares, "did willingly and knowingly on the night of October 6, 2114, engage with a man in a vile enterprise." The narrator glosses it plainly: in most cases, he says, a "vile enterprise" meant sex. October 6 was the Saturday, the night before Allen's own Sunday adventure.
Allen's reaction is disgust, but not at Julie. "Allen half-closed his eyes and prepared to endure the session. A shuffling murmur ran through the room; the newspapers were put aside. Apathy dwindled." The newspapers go down because the case is about sex. Allen names what he finds offensive.
This is the moral centre of the first case. The room claims to be enforcing virtue, and what it actually wants is a story. Righteousness is the mask; prurience is the face. Dick's satire is not subtle here, and does not need to be. Anyone who has watched a public scandal unfold knows the appetite he describes.
"To Allen this was the offensive part: the leering need to hear a confession down to the last detail... a need which masqueraded as righteousness."
The narrator, from Allen's point of view
One voice for everyone
The questions begin at once. "Was this the same man as the other times?" Julie blushes and stammers: "Y-Yes." The next question is sharper: "Weren't you warned? Hadn't you been told in this very room to get yourself home at a decent hour and act like a good girl?"
Here the narrator explains the strangest feature of the meeting.
"In all probability this was now a different questioner. The voice was synthetic, issuing from a wall speaker. To preserve the aura of justice, questions were piped through a common channel, broken down and reassembled without characteristic timbre. The result was an impersonal accuser, who, when a sympathetic questioner appeared, became suddenly and a little oddly a defender."
The narrator on the synthetic voice
The design makes sense on paper. If every question comes out in the same flat voice, nobody can be identified as the accuser. People can ask hard questions without fear of reprisal, and the accused cannot hold a grudge against a particular neighbour. The phrase "To preserve the aura of justice" gives the purpose, and the word aura gives it away. The aim is an appearance of impartiality.
The result is a single composite speaker who argues both sides. One moment the voice is prosecuting; the next it is defending, "suddenly and a little oddly." The whole room's mixed feelings come out of one mouth, so that the accused faces a crowd that sounds like one person who keeps changing its mind. Dick turns this into comedy in Allen's own case, where the voice argues with itself in a single paragraph.
Allen joins in. "Let's hear what this 'vile enterprise' was," he says, "This may be a furor about nothing." He is, as always, "revolted to hear his voice boom out dead and characterless." The machine has taken his own voice and given it back without him in it.
His intervention is a clever one. On the surface he is asking for details, which is what the leering part of the room wants. In substance he is suggesting that the charge may be trivial and demanding that the summary be read rather than guessed at. He is defending Julie by asking the board to prove something.
Mrs. Birmingham does not like it. "On the platform Mrs. Birmingham peered distastefully down, seeking to identify the questioner." The anonymity is supposed to protect the questioner, and the chair's first instinct is to find out who it is. This is the first sign that the system's anonymity is leaky, and the chapter will show it leaking in both directions.
She reads from the summary: "Miss J.E. did willingly in the bathtub of the community bathroom of her housing unit... this unit... copulate." The detail is absurd and very Dick. In a society where housing is so crowded that bathrooms are shared, the community bathtub is one of the few places with a lock. The phrase "this unit" makes it personal to everyone in the room: it was their bathtub.
The voice answers Allen: "I'd call that something." And then, in the narrator's phrase, "then the dogs were loose. The accusations fell thick and fast, a blur of lascivious racket." Allen's request for facts has given the room what it wanted, and the pack is off.
Janet huddles against him. "He could feel her dread and he put his arm around her. In awhile the voice would be tearing at him."
At nine-fifteen the tide turns: "the faction vaguely defending Miss J.E. seemed to have gained an edge." The word "faction" shows that even with one voice there are sides, and the board can hear which side is louder. "After a conference the council of block wardens released the girl with an oral reprimand, and she slipped gratefully from the room." Julie keeps her lease again. Allen's question may have helped. He will find out after the meeting that at least one person noticed.
Mr. A.P.: the charge
"With relief Allen heard his own initials." He walks forward, listening, "glad to get it over with. The juvenile... thank God... had reported about as expected."
The charge is exact about the time and vague about the word. 11:30 p.m. is the first official time-stamp for anything Allen did on Sunday night. Chapter 1 had Janet lying awake "until eleven-forty, at which time he had made his appearance." The two times fit together: a fall on the front steps at half past eleven, then the climb up through the building to the apartment, and Janet hears him come in ten minutes later. The juvenile has given the reader a fixed point in the night that Allen's own memory blurred.
The "morally objectionable word" is not specified. The board knows the juvenile recorded something, but the charge leaves it unsaid, as polite society would. Later the voice will debate whether it matters what the word was.
The charge says nothing about the Park. Allen's fear has not come true. "Allen climbed the stage, and the session began."
"Mr. A.P.," Mrs. Birmingham declared, "did on the night of October 7, 2114, at 11:30 p.m., arrive home in a drunken state and did fall on the front steps of the housing unit and in so doing utter a morally objectionable word."
The charge against Allen
BY THE NUMBERS
The clock of Sunday night so far. Chapter 1 (Allen's memory): worked until ten, on his way back from Hokkaido by eleven, in the apartment at 11:40 (Janet). Chapter 7 (the juvenile): fell on the front steps at 11:30 p.m. Between the return from Hokkaido and the fall on the steps there is a gap of under half an hour on Allen's own timetable, which is too short for what the girl described in Chapter 5: painting, sawing off a head, heating and bending a leg. Something in the remembered schedule is wrong. Chapter 9 will show what.
The fear of a buried grudge
On the stage Allen looks around for enemies. The narrator explains the danger: "There was always the danger that somewhere in the room a citizen waited with a deeply-buried quirk, a deposit of hate nourished and hoarded for just such an occasion as this." The years Allen has lived in the building give endless chances for offence: he "might easily have slighted some nameless soul" by "stepping ahead in line, failing to nod," or some other trivial thing. "the human mind being what it was," any of these could have set off "a tireless vengeance."
This is the other side of the anonymous voice. Anonymity protects the questioner, and it also lets a grudge-holder attack without being seen. The juveniles prevent false charges, but they cannot prevent a neighbour from pressing a true one with venom. Allen knows this, and he scans the faces.
"But as he looked around he saw no special emotion. Nobody glowered demonically, and nobody, except for his stricken wife, even appeared interested." He decides he is well off. "Considering the shallowness of the charge he had good reason to feel optimistic. All in all, he was well off. Realizing this, he faced his composite accuser cheerfully." The phrase "composite accuser" is exact. He is facing the room compressed into one voice.
The voice slips
The first words from the speaker break the rule the system is built on. "Mr. Purcell," it says, "you haven't been up before us in quite a spell." Then: "Mr. A.P., I meant."
The initials were supposed to give the accused some privacy, and the voice drops them in its first sentence. It is a small comic moment and a telling one. Everybody knows who Mr. A.P. is, just as everybody knows Miss J.E. The forms of privacy remain; the substance went long ago.
Allen answers: "Not for several years." That is a modest claim, and true as far as the reader knows. It also matters for what follows. His record is good, and the board will notice.
Three glasses of wine
The questions come. "How much had you had to drink?" "Three glasses of wine." The voice: "And you were drunk on that?" And then, at once, it answers itself: "That's the indictment." One questioner doubts that three glasses could make a man drunk; another points out that the charge says he was. The voice "haggled, and then a clear question emerged." The question is: "Where did you get drunk?"
Allen keeps it short: "At Hokkaido." The narrator adds: "Mrs. Birmingham was aware of that, so evidently it didn't matter." In Chapter 1 Mrs. Birmingham told Allen flatly that she knew he had visited Hokkaido. A trip to Hokkaido is apparently not an offence in itself. The board knows and does not care.
The voice asks what he was doing there, and then argues with itself again.
"To Allen it sounded like Janet." The voice has no timbre, but it has style, and a man who knows his wife's way of arguing can hear it through the machine. If Janet is speaking, she has disobeyed his instruction to keep quiet, but she is defending him. The anonymity leaks again: Allen can guess speakers from their phrasing. "He let it battle on."
The debate continues. "Of course it matters. The importance of the act depends on the motives behind it. Did he mean to get drunk? Nobody means to get drunk. I'm sure I wouldn't know." This little speech is a compressed argument about moral responsibility. One speaker holds that motive determines how bad an act is; another says nobody intends drunkenness; a third, with a sniff, distances herself from the whole subject. The machine renders this as one paragraph, and the effect is of a mind talking to itself.
Allen adds a mitigating fact: "It was on an empty stomach, and I'm not used to liquor in any form."
Then the word. "What about the word he used? Yes, what about it? Well, we don't even know what it was. I think we're just as well off. Why, are you convinced he's the sort of man who would use words 'like that'? All I mean is that knowing the particular word doesn't affect the situation." The comedy is in the euphemism. Nobody will say the word, and some of the room is not even sure Allen is the kind of man who would say it, although the juvenile has a tape of him saying it.
"What were you doing there?" the voice asked, and then it said: "That's not relevant. That has nothing to do with it. Stick to the facts. What he did before he was drunk doesn't matter."
The synthetic voice, in two minds
The shortest routes to the Morec mind
Allen's next answer is calculated, and the narrator tells us so.
Every phrase in this answer is aimed at a Morec value. Working on Sunday shows devotion. Doing "more than was good for my health" is the noble excess of the industrious man. Liking "to have my desk clear on Monday" is tidiness, order, the Protestant work ethic in one clause. Allen is writing a packet about himself on the spot, using the skills he sells to Telemedia every week. And it is all true, as far as it goes. He did work on Sunday. He did leave late, though not as late as he thinks. What he leaves out is the Park.
This is the first time the reader has seen Allen use his professional craft to defend himself, and Dick does not flatter him. The skill that lets him write moral packets for a whole planet also lets him manage a room of neighbours. The phrase "the shortest routes to the Morec mind" is a professional's phrase. It treats the moral beliefs of his neighbours as channels to be used.
It works at once. "A regular little gentleman," the voice says. It means it sarcastically or admiringly or both, and it immediately retorts on itself: "With manners enough to keep personalities out of this. Bravo," and then: "That's telling him. Probably her." The joke about "him" and "her" is the voice admitting that it has no idea who it is answering.
"And I was tired," Allen added. Years of work with media had taught him the shortest routes to the Morec mind. "Although it was Sunday I had spent the day at the office. I suppose I did more than was good for my health, but I like to have my desk clear on Monday."
Allen, on the stage
The eulogy
Then something changes. "And then, from the chaos of minds, a sharp sentiment took shape. As nearly as Allen could tell, it was one person." For the first time one speaker holds the channel long enough to make a speech, and the speech is a defence of Allen so lavish that it embarrasses him.
The speaker's argument is simple. Allen supplies Telemedia, the moral media of the whole society. If he were morally defective, the moral standards of the society would be in doubt. That is unthinkable, so he cannot be defective. The argument runs from status to innocence, and the reader knows how wrong it is. The man on the stage is the man who japed Streiter's statue. The speaker's "paradox" is real, and the speaker has it backwards.
Two sentences are inverted: "This a mockery is" and "This a paradox is." Chapter 3 had Sue Frost say "This embarrassing is," and Chapter 6 had Allen say "the delay unavoidable is." The pattern now has four examples in three mouths, and the
"This a mockery is. Mr. Purcell is one of our most distinguished members. As most of us know, Mr. Purcell's Agency supplies a good deal of the material used by Telemedia. Are we supposed to believe that a man involved in the maintenance of society's ethical standards is, himself, morally defective? What does that say about our society in general? This a paradox is. It is just such high-minded men, devoted to public service, who set by their own examples our standards of conduct."
The unknown defender, through the voice
next chapter will add one in the narration itself. These notes now read it as deliberate: a formal, pompous word order that Dick gives to people speaking in an official register, or that he enjoys as a verbal tic of the Morec world. See the quirks box.
Allen looks across at Janet. "Janet seemed bewildered. And the choice of words was not characteristic of her. Evidently it was somebody else." Again he is identifying speakers by style.
The speech goes on, building its case from Allen's long residence.
This is the voice of seniority. The Purcell lease has lasted "several decades" (Chapter 1 said over forty years). Allen was born in the building. In a society where everything depends on the lease, length of tenure is a kind of aristocracy, and the defender appeals to it directly: "How many of us were here in this room before Mr. Purcell? Think that over." It is half an argument and half a threat. Most of the people in the room are newer than he is.
The defender also names the feeling the speech is meant to overcome: "Some of us seem to imagine the more respectable a person is the more reason to attack him." Every public tribunal has this appetite to see the mighty humbled, and the defender is right that it exists. But the remedy offered is to exempt the respectable from judgement altogether. "When we attack Mr. Purcell we attack our better selves" turns one man into a symbol of the community's virtue. And then the speech ends on a coarse commercial note: "there's no percentage in that." The high moral language comes down, in the end, to calculation.
Allen feels embarrassed. The defender is not finished.
The last part of the speech contains a real idea buried in flattery. "a man is morally responsible to his community" is the founding principle of Morec. "his community is also morally responsible to him" is a reciprocal principle that the block meeting, with its presumption of guilt and its public humiliation, plainly ignores. If the defender meant it for everyone, it would be a reform. He means it only for Allen. The community
"Mr. Purcell's family leased here several decades," the voice continued. "Mr. Purcell was born here. During his lifetime many persons have come and gone. Few of us have maintained a lease as long as he has. How many of us were here in this room before Mr. Purcell? Think that over. The purpose of these sessions is not the humbling of the mighty. Mr. Purcell isn't up there so we can deride and ridicule him. Some of us seem to imagine the more respectable a person is the more reason to attack him. When we attack Mr. Purcell we attack our better selves. And there's no percentage in that."
The defender, continued
"These meetings," the voice went on, "operate on the idea that a man is morally responsible to his community. That's a good idea. But his community is also morally responsible to him. If it's going to ask him to come up and confess his sins, it's got to give him something in return. It's got to give him its respect and support. It should realize that having a citizen like Mr. Purcell up here is a privilege. Mr. Purcell's life is devoted to our welfare and the improvement of our society. If he wants to drink three glasses of wine once in his life and say one morally objectionable word, I think he should be allowed to. It's okay by me."
The defender, concluding
owes respect to the man who supplies its moral media, and the speech grants him a licence: "If he wants to drink three glasses of wine once in his life and say one morally objectionable word, I think he should be allowed to."
The phrase "once in his life" is false, though the defender cannot know it. Chapter 1 told us Allen had visited Hokkaido "a number of times before." And the closing "It's okay by me" drops the speech from its high register into ordinary speech, as if the speaker has suddenly remembered who he is.
"There was silence. The roomful of people was cowed by piety. Nobody dared speak." The phrase "cowed by piety" is one of Dick's best. Piety is supposed to be the room's own weapon, and here it has been turned on the room. Nobody can argue against the speech without seeming to attack the community's "better selves."
"What I did was wrong"
Allen's reaction is the opposite of relief. "On the stage, Allen sat wishing somebody would attack. His embarrassment had become shame. The eulogizer was making a mistake; he didn't have the full picture."
The shame has two sources. The first is obvious: the defender is praising Allen as a pillar of morality, and Allen knows he is the japer. Every word of praise is a lie he is allowing to stand. The second is subtler. Allen's whole outlook, as Chapter 4 showed, is a belief in the moral seriousness of his work. He does not want to be exempt from the rules he writes. To be let off because he is important is to be told that the rules are for other people, which is the very hypocrisy he would despise in someone else.
So he protests. "Wait a minute," he says. "Let's get one thing straight. What I did was wrong. I haven't got any more right to get drunk and blaspheme than anybody else."
This is a strange moment in a trial: the accused insisting on his guilt against his own defender. It is honest, as far as it goes, and it is also limited. He says what he did was wrong, and he means the drinking and the word. He still says nothing about the statue. His confession is real and partial at once.
The voice brushes him aside: "Let's pass on to the next case. There doesn't seem to be anything here." Allen's insistence on equal treatment is taken as further proof of his virtue. A humble man who asks to be judged like anybody else is obviously not someone the room needs to judge.
The verdict
"On the platform the middle-aged ladies conferred, and presently composed their verdict. Mrs. Birmingham arose."
The verdict is a reprimand without a penalty, which is almost exactly what Allen had hoped for: "maybe I'll get off with a verbal reprimand." The reason given is his "excellent prior record." That is a legitimate consideration in any sentencing system, and the board would say it is applying a fair rule. But the reader has just heard what really carried the room: the eulogy, the appeal to status, the length of his lease. The prior record is the official reason; the piety was the actual one.
"The block-neighbors of Mr. A.P. take this opportunity to reprimand him for his conduct of the night of October 7, but feel that in view of his excellent prior record no disciplinary action is indicated. You may step down, Mr. A.P."
Mrs. Birmingham, announcing the verdict
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: who gets the benefit of the doubt. The meeting's two lenient outcomes have different grounds. Julie Ebberley, a repeat offender, is released "with an oral reprimand" after a faction defending her "seemed to have gained an edge," that is, after a noisy argument. Allen, a first-time offender in years, is released because of his "excellent prior record," after a single speaker invoked his profession and his lease. Both were let off, but the respectable man was let off by deference and the young woman by a shouting match. Dick does not draw the contrast out. He lets the reader see that the same procedure treats a long-tenured professional and an often-charged girl differently before it says a word about the facts. The board's verdict on Allen is also, unknown to it, a verdict on the jape: the most serious offence of the week passes through the meeting unseen, because the man who committed it has the best reputation in the room.
Janet's joy, Allen's discomfort
"Allen stepped down and rejoined his wife. Janet squeezed against him, wildly happy." She blesses the stranger: "Bless him, whoever he was."
"I don't deserve it," Allen says, "disturbed."
"You do. Of course you do." Janet's eyes "shone recklessly." "You're a wonderful person."
The exchange is tender and painful. Janet has spent years expecting doom, and the doom has passed her husband by. She takes the eulogy as the truth about him. Allen, who knows better, cannot tell her why he does not deserve it, at least not here. Chapter 4 showed that Janet already knows he japed the statue: she guessed it from the paint and grass and he confirmed it. So her "You're a wonderful person" is said by a woman who knows the full picture, or most of it, and believes in him anyway. That makes the line more moving and more troubling. She is siding with her husband against the community whose judgement she has feared all her life.
Mr. Wales
Allen looks for his defender. "Not far off, at one of the tables, was a mild little elderly fellow with thinning gray hair and a formal, set smile. Mr. Wales glanced at Allen, then turned immediately away." That glance is enough. "That's the guy," Allen decides. "Wales."
"Are you sure?" Janet asks. He is right, as the end of the chapter confirms. The voice was designed so that no one could know who spoke, and a glance and a quick look away has identified the speaker in seconds. Anonymity in this room is a matter of procedure, not of fact.
The description of Wales is precise and slightly sad: mild, little, elderly, thinning gray hair, a formal, set smile. He is the kind of neighbour one passes in the hall for years without noticing. The formality of the smile matches the formality of the speech. A man who smiles by habit may also talk in a set formal register, with inverted sentences, when he wants to be impressive.
Mrs. R.M. and "What a waste of time"
The meeting goes on without pause. "The next accused was up on the stage, and Mrs. Birmingham began reading the indictment."
"Mrs. R.M. did knowingly and willing on the afternoon of October 9, 2114, in a public place and in the presence of both men and women, take the name of the Lord in vain."
October 9 was the day before, Tuesday afternoon. Mrs. R.M. is being tried for something she did less than a day earlier. The juveniles' tapes must have been collected and summarised overnight. The speed is chilling: the system's turnaround from offence to public hearing is under twenty-four hours.
The charge is almost the same as part of Allen's. Allen uttered "a morally objectionable word" on the steps; Mrs. R.M. took the Lord's name in vain in public. Allen has just been excused his word, and now the room turns to hers.
The voice says: "What a waste of time." And "the controversy was on." The first words of the voice are a complaint about the meeting itself, and the voice cannot help arguing even about whether it should argue. Someone in the room has said what Allen privately thinks, and the machine has turned it into one more position in the debate.
Dick leaves Mrs. R.M. there. We never learn her verdict. She is a reminder that the meeting is a weekly routine with a long agenda, and that Allen's case was one item among several.
After the meeting
"After the meeting Allen approached Wales. The man had lingered outside the door, as if expecting him." Allen has seen him in the hall a few times, "but he didn't recall ever having said more than good morning to him."
"That was you," Allen says. They shake hands.
This solves the puzzle of the eulogy and opens another. Wales knew Allen had spoken up for Julie Ebberley. "I saw you speak up for that girl." So Wales has been watching Allen's lips, or his manner, at meetings for years, and knew which questions came from him even through the voice. The anonymity that is supposed to protect questioners has been meaningless all along, at least to an observant neighbour.
And Allen has a reputation. "You always look out for the people up there." His habit of defending the accused has been noticed and remembered. Wales repaid it in kind. That is a decent thing to do, and the reader is meant to feel the decency. But it also confirms the uncomfortable truth of the verdict. Allen escaped because he is liked and respected. "We all like and respect you, Mr. Purcell." The word all makes Allen a figure in the building, a man about whom people have a collective opinion.
"Thanks," Allen says "awkwardly."
Wales's voice is "drab, perfectly ordinary." In speech he is nothing like the eloquent voice in the wall. Through the machine he was a preacher; in the hall he is a mild old man. The machine took away his timbre and in doing so gave him a kind of authority he does not have in person. It is a neat reversal of what the machine did to Allen, whose own voice came out "dead and characterless."
"I'm glad I could help you out, Mr. Purcell." Wales' voice was drab, perfectly ordinary. "I saw you speak up for that girl. You always look out for the people up there. I said, if he ever gets up I'll do the same for him. We all like and respect you, Mr. Purcell."
Mr. Wales
"I feel glum"
The chapter ends on the stairs. Janet is "in a delirium at having escaped from the meeting." She notices his mood: "What's the matter?" and then "Why do you look so glum?"
"I feel glum," he says.
The short answer closes the chapter without explanation, and the reader can supply several. Allen has been praised for virtues he has just betrayed. He has been let off by deference, the thing he despises. He has learned that his neighbours watch him more closely than he knew, and that the voice's anonymity is a fiction. And the juvenile has, without knowing it, shown him how narrow his escape was: had it followed him an hour earlier, the meeting would have been about the statue.
There is also a plainer reading. The block meeting has given Allen a public certificate of good character on the very week that he is trying to decide whether he is fit to run Telemedia. The meeting answered the question in his favour, loudly, and he knows the answer is wrong. Sue Frost's deadline is Saturday. On Thursday morning he will sit in Doctor Malparto's office under a false name.
Three cases, one procedure
CONTRAST
| Miss J.E. (Julie Ebberley) | Mr. A.P. (Allen Purcell) | Mrs. R.M. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offence date | Night of Saturday 6 October 2114 | Sunday 7 October 2114, 11:30 p.m. | Afternoon of Tuesday 9 October 2114 |
| Charge | "a vile enterprise": sex in the community bathtub | came home drunk, fell on the front steps, "a morally objectionable word" | took "the name of the Lord in vain" in a public place, before men and women |
| Record | "up time and again" | not up "for several years" | not stated |
| How the room spoke | a "blur of lascivious racket"; a defending faction gains an edge | the voice argues with itself, then one speaker delivers a eulogy | "What a waste of time," then "the controversy was on" |
| Outcome | released with "an oral reprimand" | reprimand, "no disciplinary action" | not shown |
| What decided it | noise and numbers | status, tenure and "excellent prior record" | unknown |
Set side by side, the cases show how little the procedure depends on the facts. The facts are fixed by the juveniles before anyone walks in. What varies is the room's mood and the defendant's standing. A young woman with an inherited lease and a bad record gets off after a shouting match. A respected professional gets off after a eulogy. The third case begins with a complaint that the whole thing is pointless.
What the meeting never asks
Allen's hearing is as notable for its silences as for what is said. The board asks how much he drank, where, on what stomach, and whether the word matters. It never asks what he did between leaving Hokkaido and falling on the steps, and it never asks where the red paint on his shoes came from, which Janet spotted in Chapter 1. A juvenile outside the housing unit saw the end of the night. No juvenile, apparently, was in the Park.
The meeting's narrow field of view is a real feature of the system. The juveniles are distributed through housing units and public spaces, but not, it seems, everywhere. Allen's crime was committed in the one kind of place they did not cover, at the one time they did not watch. Whether that was luck or something more is a question the book has started to raise. In Chapter 5 the girl, Gretchen Malparto, was waiting for him in the Park, and Chapter 6 showed her brother expecting him.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: evidence by machine, judgement by neighbours. Dick's juveniles split a decision into two parts. A machine fixes the facts and nobody may contest them; humans then decide only how serious the matter is. The narrator's verdict is that this protects people from "hysterical hearsay" and, in the same stroke, leaves the accused nothing to argue except "bad luck." Modern rules on automated decisions push the other way. Under Article 22 of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, where a decision with significant effects is taken solely by automated means and is allowed because of a contract or explicit consent, the controller must provide at least the right to obtain human intervention, to express one's point of view and to contest the decision [GDPR Art. 22(3), Regulation (EU) 2016/679, legislation.gov.uk]. The UK regulator's guidance adds that human review has to be meaningful: a reviewer with the authority and independence to change the outcome, not one who rubber-stamps it [ICO, guidance on human review in AI systems]. A bank running automated fraud flags, transaction monitoring or credit decisions can learn from both halves of the block meeting. The good half: an accurate record removes rumour and personal malice from the case. The bad half: if the record is treated as beyond challenge, the only thing left for the human panel to weigh is the customer's standing, and standing is exactly where bias enters. Allen's "excellent prior record" and his tenure got him off; Julie Ebberley's history nearly sank her. A sound process lets the person challenge what the record says, and checks whether reviewers are deferring to status. It also remembers what the block meeting forgot: a sensor network sees only where it is installed, and the most serious event of the week may be the one that left no trace in the system.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 7.
A misspelt verb. At line 9 the verb describing the block gathering is misspelt, and the transcription marks it [sic]. The same sentence, "Centuries of Christian, confessional culminated," has a stray comma or a missing noun (Christian confession, or confessional practice).
"Mrs Birmingham" without a full stop at line 27, as "Mrs Frost" appeared in Chapter 3. Elsewhere the source writes "Mrs."
"In awhile" at line 47, for in a while. Chapter 1 had "For awhile."
A missing article. At line 57 Allen might have offended someone by "treading on foot," marked [sic] in the transcription; presumably treading on a foot or on toes.
"knowingly and willing" at line 123, in Mrs. R.M.'s charge, for knowingly and willingly. Julie's charge had "willingly and knowingly."
A stray quotation mark. Line 125 opens with an extra opening quotation mark before "The voice said."
"This a mockery is" and "This a paradox is." Two more inverted sentences at line 87, in Wales's eulogy. With Frost's "This embarrassing is" (Chapter 3) and Allen's "the delay unavoidable is" (Chapter 6), there are now four in three speakers, and Chapter 8 has one in the narration. These notes now treat the inversion as deliberate, a formal register or verbal tic of the Morec world, rather than a printer's slip.
11:30 against 11:40. The charge puts Allen's fall at 11:30 p.m.; Chapter 1 had Janet waiting "until eleven-forty." These fit if the fall came ten minutes before he reached the apartment, and are not a contradiction.
"Not for several years" against "once in his life." Allen says he has not been up for several years, which implies he has been up before; Wales calls the drinking "once in his life." Wales is flattering, and Chapter 1 had Allen visit Hokkaido "a number of times before."
Next-day justice. Mrs. R.M.'s offence was on the afternoon of 9 October, the day before the meeting. The juvenile tapes reach the board within a day; not a slip, but worth noticing.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 7. The block meeting is a sentencing hearing: juveniles fix the facts, and a room speaking through one timbreless voice decides only how bad they were. The voice's anonymity is a fiction. It says "Mr. Purcell" before it says "Mr. A.P.," Allen can hear Janet's phrasing through it, and Wales knew years ago that Allen was the one defending the accused. Allen is charged only with coming home drunk at 11:30 p.m. and swearing. The juvenile did not see the Park. He defends himself with the techniques of his trade, then is rescued by a eulogy from Mr. Wales that turns his job and his lease into proof of virtue. Allen escapes because of who he is rather than what he did, and that is exactly why the escape leaves him glum. The timeline of Sunday night now has a fixed point at 11:30, and it leaves too little room for the jape on Allen's remembered schedule. Thursday's appointment with Doctor Malparto is next.
Mr. Coates
On Thursday morning the book changes eyes. For the first time the story is told from inside someone other than Allen: Doctor Malparto, the analyst at the Mental Health Resort. He greets "Mr. Coates," recognises Allen Purcell, and hurries out to fetch a dossier he already holds. Allen's brain scan reached him a week or so earlier, and its profile is unique. Allen insists on keeping the false name, admits that Gretchen sent him, and states his problem: he has been offered the Directorship of Telemedia and must decide by Saturday. When Malparto explains why the Resort is the one place free of juveniles, Allen interrupts with his confession: on Sunday night somebody pulled a switch in his head and he japed the statue. Malparto takes his history, records the session with his permission, sets a fee by ability to pay, and refuses to promise a cure in forty-eight hours. Questioning Allen about Sunday, he finds a gap: before flying to Hokkaido, Allen went to a commissary for beer he does not like, and half an hour has vanished from his memory. Malparto calls in two therapists and wheels out the drugs and machines.
TIMELINE
When and where. Thursday 11 October 2114, at nine in the morning, the appointment Allen booked in Chapter 6. Allen says the offer came "this Monday" and he must answer "By the day after tomorrow," that is, Saturday. The place is Doctor Malparto's office at the Mental Health Resort, with a window over the city and the Morec spire. The remembered events go back to Allen's courtship on Betelgeuse 4, when he was twenty-five, his mother's death in 2111, and Sunday evening, 7 October. The chapter runs to about 1,580 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Doctor Malparto, analyst at the Resort and brother of Gretchen, from whose point of view the chapter is told; Allen Purcell, who insists on being called "Mr. Coates"; Gretchen Malparto, absent, whose meddling her brother discovers; Major Streiter's wife, long dead, and a "Fifth Avenue Jungian" who treated her, in Malparto's history of the Resort; Janet and her father, the small-town newspaper editor on Bet-4, in Allen's memory; Allen's father and mother, both dead; Mrs. Frost, whose deadline hangs over the session; and two therapists summoned over the intercom at the end.
A new pair of eyes
For seven chapters Dick has stayed close to Allen. We have seen Newer York through his eyes, heard his thoughts, shared his blank about Sunday night. Chapter 8 opens in another head.
"Doctor malparto said:" "Good morning, Mr. Coates. Please take off your coat and sit down. I want you to be comfortable." The doctor's name lacks its capital, a slip in the source (see the quirks box). The greeting is professional, warm, routine. Then the narration turns inward: "And then he felt strange and ill, because the man facing him was not" Mr. Coates, as the source puts it, "but Allen Purcell."
The change of point of view does two jobs. It lets the reader see Allen from outside for the first time, as a stranger sees him, and it introduces a second mind with its own agenda. Malparto is not a neutral helper. Within a paragraph he is excited, within two he is delighted, and within five he is wondering what his sister is up to. The reader now knows things Allen does not: that he was expected, that his file was already on the doctor's desk, that his case is a prize.
The man he was expecting
Malparto's reaction is physical. "Hurriedly getting to his feet Malparto excused himself and went out into the corridor. He was shaking with excitement." From the corridor, or from memory, we get our first outside view of Allen.
"late twenties" fits the age these notes worked out in Chapter 4, about twenty-nine. "tall, good-looking" is the first time anyone has said Allen is handsome. "rather overly-serious" is a fair summary of the man we have followed. The heavy overcoat is a disguise of sorts, or just October weather.
Then the two sentences that change the shape of the book: "Here he was, the man Malparto had been expecting. But he hadn't expected him so soon." Malparto has been waiting for Allen. He expected him to come, and only the timing surprises him. Why a psychoanalyst at the Resort should expect a particular advertising researcher to walk in is the question the chapter raises and does not answer.
"Behind him, Purcell looked vaguely puzzled, a tall, good-looking, rather overly-serious man in his late twenties, wearing a heavy overcoat. Here he was, the man Malparto had been expecting. But he hadn't expected him so soon."
The narrator, from Malparto's point of view
The dossier
"With his key he unlocked his file and brought out Purcell's dossier." The doctor has a locked file, and in it a file on Allen. "He glanced over the contents as he returned to his office. The report was as cryptic as before." So he has read it before, more than once. The next sentences are in his private professional language: his prized-gram (an odd compound, presumably his pet name for the prized encephalogram), and a syndrome that cannot be reduced, the source spelling marked [sic] in the transcription. "Malparto sighed with delight."
Delight is the word to notice. A doctor is supposed to be concerned about a patient's illness. Malparto is delighted by Allen's. The scan is precious to him because it is puzzling, and the puzzle has not gone away. Later he will look at "the -gram" again and see its "irreducible core." Whatever the scan shows, it is something Malparto's methods cannot break down into familiar parts.
When he returns he makes a slip. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Purcell," he says, closing the door. "Sorry to keep you waiting." He has used the real name. In the previous chapter, the voice at the block meeting said "Mr. Purcell" before correcting itself to "Mr. A.P., I meant." Two days running, two institutions have given Allen a cover name and then dropped it in the first sentence.
"Let's keep it 'Coates'"
Allen notices at once. "Let's keep it 'Coates.' Or has that old wheeze about professional confidence gone by the boards?"
The line is sharp. Allen came under a false name because in Morec society even seeking help is suspect; Chapter 6 showed him phoning from a public booth so that no record would tie him to the Resort. The doctor's first act is to show that the false name was useless. Allen's reply asks whether professional confidence, the rule that a doctor keeps a patient's secrets, still exists. He calls it "that old wheeze," a stale joke or worn-out trick, as if he half expects the answer to be no.
Malparto accepts: "Mr. Coates, then." From this point the narration itself calls Allen "Mr. Coates" almost every time. The book has adopted the alias. It is a small device with a large effect. In Malparto's chapters, Allen Purcell the respectable director-to-be disappears and a patient called Coates takes his place.
"The profile is unique"
Malparto decides on candour.
The narrator explains the cough: "He had started to say case." Allen is a case to him, a specimen, and he catches himself just in time.
Look at the dates. Today is Thursday 11 October. "a week or so ago" means about Thursday 4 October. The jape happened on the night of Sunday 7 October. So the encephalogram reached Malparto before the jape. The doctor had a scan of Allen's brain, found it unique, ordered a "Dickson report" on it (one of Dick's invented techniques), and was waiting for Allen to appear, all before Allen had done anything that would bring him to a psychiatrist. Who sent the scan, and why, is not said.
"Mr. Coates, I'll be frank. I've been expecting you. Your encephalogram came into my hands a week or so ago, and I had a Dickson report drawn on it. The profile is unique. I'm very much interested in you, and it's a matter of deep personal satisfaction to be permitted to handle your..." He coughed. "Problem."
Doctor Malparto
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a scan before a symptom. Malparto's timing is the chapter's most important puzzle, and these notes will hold it open rather than guess. What the text establishes: the scan arrived "a week or so ago," before the Sunday of the jape; Malparto found the profile "unique" and had been "expecting" this man; he did not expect him "so soon"; and Gretchen, by approaching Allen in the Park, "had sawed the interval in half." So Malparto believed, on the strength of a brain scan alone, that Allen would come to him eventually, and Gretchen sped it up. The book has not said where the scan came from. In Allen's world encephalograms are presumably taken as part of official records or professional screening; a man about to be offered the Directorship of Telemedia might well have been tested. That is a possibility, not a fact. What matters now is that the doctor knew of Allen before Allen knew he needed a doctor.
The real electroencephalogram, the trace of the brain's electrical activity taken from the scalp, was first recorded in a human being by the German psychiatrist Hans Berger at Jena in July 1924, and he published it in 1929 [Advances in Physiology Education 2024, on Berger's centenary; Berger, Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen, Archiv für Psychiatrie 87, 1929]. By 1955 EEG was routine in neurology and was being used to diagnose epilepsy. Dick takes the technology a step further: in 2114 a scan can show a personality profile, and Malparto reads it like a fingerprint of a mind.
"nobody gets help"
Allen shifts in the leather chair, lights a cigarette, scowls, rubs the crease of his trousers. Then he states the plain fact of his situation.
"I need help. It's one of the drawbacks of Morec that nobody gets help; they get cast out as defective."
"Malparto nodded in agreement." This is a damning sentence about the society, spoken by the man who supplies its moral packets. In Morec there is no place for a person in trouble. Moral failure is treated as a defect of character, and the remedy is the block meeting, the lost lease, the expulsion to the edge. The Resort exists outside this system, which is why seeking it out is shameful. Allen's words echo what Chapter 7 showed: the block meeting does not ask why anyone did anything. It only decides how bad it was.
Gretchen meddled
Then Allen adds: "Also," and, after a beat, "your sister came after me."
Malparto had not known. "To Malparto this discouraging was." Here is the inverted word order again, now in the narration itself (see the quirks box). The next sentence, paraphrased, says that Gretchen had interfered and, worse, had interfered cleverly. "Mr. Coates would have appeared eventually, but Gretchen had sawed the interval in half. He wondered what she got out of it."
Malparto's reaction reveals a sibling rivalry, or at least a professional one. He wanted Allen to arrive in his own time, as the scan predicted. Gretchen got there first and brought him in faster. The doctor's first thought is not gratitude but suspicion: what does she gain? The reader has met Gretchen once, in Chapter 5, as a sly and sympathetic girl in the Park. Now we learn she is acting independently of her brother, and that he does not trust her motives.
"Didn't you know that?" Allen asks. Malparto decides on honesty: "No, I didn't. But it's of no consequence." The second sentence is a lie, as his inner thoughts have just shown. It is a small one, the kind a professional tells to keep a patient calm.
Job problems
Malparto asks Allen to describe the problem in his own words. "Job problems." Pressed, he names it: "Director of T-M. It was offered to me this Monday." Malparto checks his notes, which already say that Allen runs "an independent Research Agency." "When do you have to decide?" "By the day after tomorrow."
"Very interesting," says the doctor. "Isn't it?" says Allen, with an edge. "That doesn't give you long. Do you feel you can decide?" "No." "Why not?" And Allen hesitates.
The one place without juveniles
Malparto reads the hesitation correctly. "Are you worried that a juvenile might be hiding in my closet?" He smiles. "This is the only spot in our blessed civilization where juveniles are forbidden." Allen: "So I've heard." The word "blessed" is the same word Allen used of the spire in Chapter 1, and in Malparto's mouth it is plainly ironic.
Then the doctor explains the Resort's strange privilege, and the explanation is one of the best pieces of invented history in the book.
The founder of Morec, the stern soldier of Chapter 1 whose statue Allen japed, had a wife who liked analysts. A fashionable New York therapist, a "Jungian" with a practice on "Fifth Avenue," cured her paralysed arm. "You know her type" sketches her in four words: a wealthy woman with nervous ailments and a taste for expensive talking cures. Because of her, when the new government came, the analysts were spared.
So the Committee Government nationalised the land, which explains why every family in Newer York leases rather than owns. Only the analysts kept their deeds, actual ownership. The "Psych Front left over from the war" suggests that the analysts were organised during the war as some kind of front or service, and survived it as a body. Streiter, "a canny person," saw a "necessity" for keeping them, and there Allen interrupts.
The history has a sharp irony. The one place in the moral society free from surveillance exists because the founder's own wife was helped by the kind of person his moral order would otherwise suppress. The regime's founder made an exception for his family's therapist. It is the same pattern as the block meeting the day before, where the respectable man was excused because of who he was. Privilege, not principle, made the Resort.
"A fluke of history. It seems that Major Streiter's wife had a predilection for psychoanalysts. A Fifth Avenue Jungian cured her partially-paralyzed right arm. You know her type."
Doctor Malparto
"So," Malparto said, "when the Committee Government was set up and the land was nationalized, we were permitted to keep our deeds. We... that is, the Psych Front left over from the war. Streiter was a canny person. Unusual ability. He saw the necessity..."
Doctor Malparto
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a paralysed arm and a talking cure. Dick's detail is well chosen. A paralysis with no physical cause, cured by talk, is the classic case of what early psychoanalysis called hysteria and later psychiatry calls conversion disorder. Breuer and Freud's Studies on Hysteria (1895), the founding text of the talking cure, is built on such cases, and its English translation by James Strachey appeared in 1955, the year Dick wrote this novel, as part of the Standard Edition [archive.org, Studies on Hysteria, Strachey translation 1955]. Carl Gustav Jung (1875 to 1961), the founder of analytical psychology after his break with Freud, also treated hysterical symptoms as the bodily expression of psychic conflict [IAAP, biography of C. G. Jung; IAAP abstracts of Collected Works vol. 4]. A "Fifth Avenue Jungian" curing a society lady's arm is therefore exactly the right joke for 1955: the most fashionable school, the most fashionable address, the most typical case. The paralysed arm also has a sly fit with the jape. The Buetello statue of Streiter stood with "one hand extended"; Allen's jape put the founder's head into that hand. The founder's wife lost the use of her right arm and an analyst gave it back.
"somebody pulled a switch in my head"
Allen cuts across the history lesson.
This is the first time Allen has told anyone outside his marriage. He confesses in three sentences, with no preamble, the moment he is sure there are no juveniles. The confession has a structure: an external cause ("somebody pulled a switch"), an act ("I japed the statue"), and a consequence ("That's why I can't accept"). He does not say he chose to jape it. He describes himself as a machine someone else switched on. And he has already reached his decision about T-M, or says he has: he can't accept because of what he did.
The phrase "somebody pulled a switch in my head" is worth holding. It could be a figure of speech for a sudden impulse. It could also be literal, in a book where brain scans travel between offices and analysts expect patients they have never met. Allen means it as a figure. The reader, after the dossier scene, may not be so sure.
Malparto's response is all inside. He says only "Ah," and his eyes fasten on the scan "with its irreducible core. He had a sensation of hanging head downward over an ocean; his lungs seemed filled with dancing foam." It is vertigo and exhilaration at once, the feeling of a scientist whose prediction has come true. Then the professional gesture: "Carefully he removed his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief." He gives himself time.
Mr. Coates said: "Sunday night somebody pulled a switch in my head. So I japed the statue of Major Streiter. That's why I can't accept the T-M directorship."
Allen, as Mr. Coates
The city as a hide
While he polishes, he looks out of the window, and Dick gives us the Morec city from above.
"Beyond his office window lay the city, flat except for the Morec spire set dead-center. The city radiated in concentric zones, careful lines and swirls that intersected in an orderly manner. Across the planet, Doctor Malparto thought. Like the hide of a vast mammal half-submerged in mud. Half-buried in the drying clay of a stern and puritanical morality."
The narrator, from Malparto's point of view
The view confirms what Chapter 1 implied about the geography of this world. The spire is at the dead centre, and the city spreads out from it in "concentric zones." A family's place in society is its distance from the spire; Allen's apartment is "within sight" of it, as Chapter 1 said, and the next chapter will show boys whose families took "decades to lease this close." The plan is orderly to the point of being lifeless.
Malparto's image is extraordinary: "the hide of a vast mammal half-submerged in mud." The city is a living animal, still breathing, but stuck. And the mud is "the drying clay of a stern and puritanical morality." Clay that is drying is hardening; soon the animal will be fixed in place for good. It is the most openly critical description of Morec society yet, and it comes from inside the head of the one professional class the regime allows to stand outside it. Malparto, we now know, despises the world he serves.
The history in the file
Malparto turns to the file. "You were born here," he says, leafing through "the history of his patient." Allen answers: "We all were." That is his joke, and it is not quite true. His own wife was born on Betelgeuse 4, as Malparto's next question shows: "You met your wife in the colonies. What were you doing on Bet-4?"
So Allen's courtship began as research. He was working for another agency, Wing-Miller, now "old" and perhaps defunct, as a consultant on a packet about farming colonists. He went to the colonies for authentic material, just as he goes to Hokkaido now: "I get ideas for packets," he will say later in this chapter.
"You liked it there?" "In a way. It was like the frontier." Then a memory: "I remember a whitewashed board farmhouse. That was her family's... her father's." He is quiet. "He and I used to argue. He edited a small-town newspaper. All night... arguing and drinking coffee."
The picture is warm and specific. A whitewashed wooden farmhouse, a newspaper editor in a farming colony, two men arguing all night over coffee. Janet's father was a newspaperman, a man of words like Allen, and they found each other. The coffee matters too: it is the drink of argument rather than of escape.
"Did Janet participate?" Malparto asks, checking the dossier. "Not much. She listened. I think she was afraid of her father. Maybe a little afraid of me."
This is the source of the Janet we have seen: anxious, watchful, dreading judgement. She grew up listening to men argue, afraid of her father and a little afraid of the clever visitor from Earth who married her. Chapter 7's portrait of her weekly ter‐
His patient said: "Supervising a packet. I was consultant to the old Wing-Miller Agency. I wanted a packet rooted in the experience of the agricultural colonists."
Allen, as Mr. Coates
ror at the block meeting has its roots here. It is also an admission. Allen knows his wife is a little afraid of him and has known it from the start.
"You were twenty-five?""Yes," and then "Janet was twenty-two." Malparto continues: "Your own father was dead. Your mother was alive, still, was she not?" "She died in 2111," he says. "Not much later."
The dates hang together. Allen was born around 2085, met Janet at twenty-five around 2110, married her about 2111, the year his mother died, and is now about twenty-nine. The inherited lease, "defended for over forty years" in Chapter 1, came to him through a family that is now gone. Allen has no living parents; his only family is Janet.
CONTRAST
| Fact | Source in this chapter | How it fits earlier chapters |
|---|---|---|
| Allen born in Newer York | "You were born here" | Chapter 7: "Mr. Purcell was born here," in the same housing unit |
| Age now: late twenties | "in his late twenties" | Chapter 4 arithmetic gave about 29 (eleven years old in 2096) |
| Met Janet on Bet-4, while consultant to Wing-Miller | "Supervising a packet" | Chapter 1: Janet comes from Betelgeuse 4 |
| Allen 25, Janet 22 at the time | "Janet was twenty-two" | If Allen is about 29 now, the courtship was about four years ago, around 2110, and Janet is about 26 |
| Father dead by then; mother died in 2111 | "She died in 2111" | Chapter 4: married three years, so about 2111, the year his mother died; the inherited lease in Chapter 1 passed to him |
| Janet's father: newspaper editor, farmhouse | "He edited a small-town newspaper" | New in this chapter |
"You've got me anyhow"
Malparto switches on his machines: he "put on his video and audio tape transports." Then he asks: "May I keep a record of what we say?"
The contrast with the block meeting is exact. There, juveniles recorded without asking and the tapes were used against people. Here a doctor asks permission. Allen thinks about it and agrees in a strange way: "You might as well. You've got me anyhow."
Malparto catches the implication. "In my power? Like a wizard? Hardly. I've got your problem; by telling me you've transferred it to me." It is a good reply and a classic piece of psychoanalytic reassurance. The patient who confesses hands over the burden; the analyst carries it. "Mr. Coates seemed to relax." He says "Thanks."
Allen's "You've got me anyhow" is still telling. Having confessed to the jape, he feels possessed by the man he confessed to. A confession to a priest or a doctor is protected; a confession in Morec society is evidence. Allen has spent his life in the second kind of world, and he cannot quite believe in the first.
The motive is buried
Then Malparto gives his first professional opinion.
"Consciously," Malparto said, "you don't know why you japed the statue; the motive is buried down deep. In all probability the statue episode forms part of a larger event-stretching, perhaps, over years. We'll never be able to understand it alone; its meaning lies in the circumstances preceding it."
Doctor Malparto
This is standard psychoanalytic doctrine, clearly stated. A strange act is a symptom, and a symptom is part of a story. The jape is one moment in a process that may stretch back years; to understand it, one must recover what came before. The source runs "event" and "stretching" together with a hyphen where a dash was meant, but the sense is clear.
Malparto's method is therefore set. He will dig back from Sunday night to find the circumstances that led to the jape. By the end of the next chapter he will have abandoned this method entirely.
The wizard and the priest
Allen grimaces. "You're the wizard." Malparto is offended, and the narration explains why.
The narration continues: as if religious "mumbo-jumbo" were involved, "whereas, of course, it was all strictly scientific, in the best psychoanalytic tradition." The "of course" is Dick's irony at Malparto's expense. The doctor insists on science, yet the scene he is in has all the features of a religious rite. A troubled man comes to a sanctuary where the moral police cannot follow. He confesses. The confessor takes the burden. There will be strange substances and machines. Allen's word "wizard" is not so far off, and Malparto's protest sounds like a priest insisting that he is only a counsellor.
There is another irony. Morec is a religious moral order, and the Resort is its exempt zone. The ordinary citizen, raised in a society of preachers, can only understand the analysts as rival priests. In a sense they are: the Resort offers a different kind of confession, one that heals rather than judges. Malparto's scientific self-image keeps him from seeing that.
"Remember, Mr. Coates," he says, "I can only help you if you wish to be helped."
"I wish you wouldn't think of me like that." He was offended by what he identified as a lay stereotype; the man-in-the-street had come to regard the Resort analysts with a mixture of awe and dread, as if the Resort were a sort of temple and the analysts priests.
Doctor Malparto, and the narrator
The bill
Allen asks the Morec question: "How much is this going to cost?" Malparto: "An examination will be made of your income. You'll be charged according to your ability to pay."
The narrator, from Malparto's point of view, comments: "It was characteristic of Morec training, this old Protestant frugality. Nothing must be wasted. A hard bargain must always be driven." Allen has just confessed to a serious crime and been told it will take time to cure, and his next thought is money. Malparto sees in that reflex the whole culture: thrift as a moral value, bargaining as virtue.
Then the doctor drifts into a reverie, and the chapter gives us a compressed history of the Morec world from the point of view of a man who regrets it.
The passage names the moral root of the Morec order: "The Dutch Reformed Church." Chapter 1 traced Streiter to a "re-created Transvaal State" in an Afrikaans empire, and the Dutch Reformed Church is the Calvinist church of the Afrikaners. Malparto sees it surviving even in Allen, "this troubled heretic," who has defaced the founder's statue but still haggles over the fee.
The "iron revolution" is the overthrow of what Morec calls the Age of Waste, which is to say Dick's own twentieth century. It put an end to "sin and corruption," quoted with irony, and also to "leisure and peace of mind," the simple ability to sit down and do nothing. Malparto looks back on the old world as "The golden age, in a sense," and then qualifies: it was a "curious mixture," a fusion of Renaissance liberty and Reformation strictness. Both were present; "the two elements struggling in each individual." And then, in his summary, "final victory for the Dutch hellfire-preachers."
This is the book's clearest statement of the historical thesis behind Morec. The modern West, in Malparto's reading, held two forces in tension: the Renaissance love of freedom, pleasure and the self, and the Reformation's discipline and conscience. Morec is what happens when one side wins completely. The doctor's own profession, with its interest in desire and the unconscious, belongs to the other side. No wonder he describes the city as an animal sinking in drying clay.
"The Dutch Reformed Church, alive even in this troubled heretic... the power of that iron revolution that had crumbled the Age of Waste, put an end to "sin and corruption," and with it, leisure and peace of mind... the ability simply to sit down and take things easy. How must it have been? he wondered. In the days when idleness was permitted. The golden age, in a sense: but a curious mixture, too, an odd fusion of the liberty of the Renaissance plus the strictures of the Reformation."
Doctor Malparto, thinking
"Let's see some of those drugs"
Allen is impatient. "Let's see some of those drugs you people use. And those light and high-frequency gadgetry." He has heard rumours about the Resort's methods, the same kind Mavis listed in Chapter 3, and he wants a quick fix. "In due time," says Malparto.
"Good Lord, I have to tell Mrs. Frost by Saturday!" It is an oath of the kind that got Mrs. R.M. into trouble the day before; here no juvenile hears it.
Thursday morning to Saturday is about forty-eight hours, so the doctor's arithmetic matches Allen's "day after tomorrow." "We ran out of miracles several centuries ago" is a nice line from a man who insists his work is science: it concedes that people once expected miracles, and that his patients still do. He warns of "a long" and difficult "process with many setbacks."
Malparto said: "Let's be realistic. No fundamental change can be worked in forty-eight hours. We ran out of miracles several centuries ago."
Doctor Malparto
Allen's deadline and the doctor's timetable are now in open conflict. Allen wants an answer by Saturday. Malparto offers a long cure. One of them will have to give.
Back to Sunday
"You tell me the japery is central," Malparto says. "So let's start there. What were you doing just prior to your entrance into the Park?"
"I visited a couple of friends." Something in Allen's voice makes Malparto ask where. "Here in Newer York?" "In Hokkaido."
The doctor is amazed. "Does anybody live there?" "A few people. They don't live long." That is all Allen says about Gates and Sugermann's health, and it is grim. Chapter 1 described Hokkaido as poisoned since 1972, the last year of the war. Anyone who lives there is shortening his life.
"Have you ever been there before?" "Now and then. I get ideas for packets." This matches Chapter 1's "Research was involved," and the Bet-4 story a few minutes earlier. Allen goes to the edges of his world to find material for its centre.
"And before that. What were you doing?" "I worked at the Agency most of the day. Then I got... bored." The pause before bored is marked by a dash in the source. Bored is a word Morec does not approve of. Idleness and boredom belong to the Age of Waste.
The commissary
"You went from the Agency directly to Hokkaido?" And here the memory breaks.
Allen starts to nod, then stops, and a dark, complicated look crosses his face. (The source's adjective for that look is one of the words these notes do not use.) "No. I walked around for awhile." He has forgotten this; the source has "fogot," marked [sic]. "I remember visiting... A commissary. To get some 3.2 beer. But why would I want beer? I don't particularly like beer."
This is the first crack in Allen's account of Sunday night, and it opens on an act with no motive Allen can name. In Chapter 1 he remembered working until ten and then flying straight out. Now he remembers a walk and a visit to a commissary, for a drink he does not even like. The question "why would I want beer?" is exactly the kind of question an analyst lives for: an act with no apparent motive, sitting at the edge of a memory gap.
"Did anything happen?" "I can't remember." Malparto makes a note.
Then Allen sums it up, swearing in the printed fashion of 1955 with letters dashed out: "I left the Agency. And then a haze closes over the whole" blank thing, as these notes must render it, since the source prints the oath with its middle letters replaced by a long dash. Then: "At least half an hour is cut out."
"At least half an hour" is a measurement. Allen knows roughly how long the gap is, because he knows roughly when he left and when he reached Hokkaido. Chapter 7's fixed point, the fall on the steps at 11:30, and Chapter 1's remembered times leave an awkward schedule. Here the schedule begins to come apart at the other end.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: 3.2 beer. "3.2 beer" is a real American category with a history Dick's first readers knew. The Cullen-Harrison Act, signed by Franklin Roosevelt on 22 March 1933 and effective on 7 April 1933, legalised beer and wine of no more than 3.2 per cent alcohol by weight (about 4 per cent by volume) while the rest of Prohibition was still in force; Roosevelt is said to have remarked that it would be a good time for a beer [GovInfo, 48 Stat. 16, ch. 4; U.S. Senate historical office; U.S. Census Bureau, National Beer Day]. Low-alcohol 3.2 beer remained the only beer some American states and counties allowed for decades afterwards. In Newer York it is apparently the only alcohol the commissaries sell: next chapter the clerk will offer "only the 3.2 stuff." Dick's moral society has made permanent the compromise the United States treated as a stopgap.
Two therapists and a message for Gretchen
Malparto acts at once. He rises and presses a key on his intercom.
Every instruction tells us something. He wants two therapists, so the procedure is a team job. He clears his schedule; this case outranks the next patient. And he wants to see his sister when she comes in. Chapter 6 said Gretchen was away. Malparto expects her back and intends to question her about her part in this.
"What now?" Allen asks, agitated. "Now you get your wish." The doctor unlocks a supply closet and begins wheeling out equipment. "The drugs and gadgetry. So we can dig down and find out what happened between the time you left the Agency and the time you reached Hokkaido."
The chapter ends there, at the edge of the procedure. Allen asked for drugs and gadgets half as a challenge; Malparto delivers them as soon as there is something specific to dig for. The target is precise: the half hour between the Agency and Hokkaido. Neither man yet knows that the gap is longer, or that the jape is not the only thing the night contains.
"Would you ask two therapists to step in here, please? And I'm not to be disturbed until further notice. Cancel my next appointment. When my sister comes in I'd like to see her. Yes, let her by. Thanks."
Doctor Malparto, on the intercom
What Malparto wants
Dick gives the doctor a mixed set of motives, and it is worth listing them, since his point of view will matter in the chapters to come.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Malparto's motives, as the chapter shows them.
Scientific curiosity. The scan is "unique," with an "irreducible core." He is "shaking with excitement" and sighs "with delight."
Professional pride. He nearly calls Allen a "case," and calls him "Problem" instead. Handling him is "a matter of deep personal satisfaction."
Rivalry with Gretchen. Her meddling is "discouraging." He wonders "what she got out of it."
Real care. He asks permission to record, reassures Allen that the problem has been transferred to him, and refuses to promise what he cannot deliver.
Contempt for Morec. He sees the city as a beast sinking in "puritanical morality" and the founder's order as a victory of "hellfire-preachers."
The mix makes him more interesting than a simple helper or villain. He is a scientist who has been waiting for a specimen, a brother suspicious of his sister, and a decent doctor who keeps his patient's secret. And he is one of very few people in the book so far who looks at Morec society from outside and calls it what it is.
Chapters 7 and 8 side by side
Dick placed the block meeting and the analyst's office back to back, on consecutive mornings, and the pairing is deliberate. Both are rooms where a man tells others about his Sunday night. Their rules are opposite.
The table shows the book's argument about two ways of handling a man who has done something wrong. The block meeting judges the act and ignores the person. The Resort ignores the act's moral weight and looks for its cause. Both slip on the alias. Allen confesses fully only in the place where nobody records him without asking.
CONTRAST
| Block meeting (Wednesday) | Malparto's office (Thursday) | |
|---|---|---|
| Recording | juveniles record without asking; tapes "dug out" | "May I keep a record of what we say?" |
| Identity | "Mr. A.P.," but the voice says "Mr. Purcell" | "Mr. Coates," but the doctor says "Mr. Purcell" |
| Question asked | how severe was the lapse | why did it happen |
| Motive | "What he did before he was drunk doesn't matter" | "its meaning lies in the circumstances preceding it" |
| What Allen admits | drinking and one word; not the statue | the jape, at once |
| Outcome | reprimand, no penalty | drugs and machines, a long cure |
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: holding a person's data before the person arrives. Malparto's scan "came into my hands a week or so ago," before Allen had done anything that would bring him to a doctor, and the doctor had a report run on it while waiting for him. In a medical setting today that sequence would raise immediate questions. Under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, data concerning health is a special category whose processing is prohibited unless one of the listed conditions applies, such as processing necessary for diagnosis or treatment under a health professional's duty of confidentiality [GDPR Art. 9(1), 9(2)(h), 9(3); gdpr-info.eu; legislation.gov.uk]. And personal data must be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in ways incompatible with them [GDPR Art. 5(1)(b), purpose limitation]. Whatever the scan was taken for, a psychiatrist analysing it for his own interest before any patient relationship existed is the kind of further use the rule is written to stop. Banks face the same question at scale. Data gathered for one purpose (identity checks, credit underwriting, fraud screening) is tempting to reuse for another (marketing, behavioural scoring, staff vetting), and the tooling makes reuse easy. A sound data architecture records where each data set came from and what it was collected for, and checks new uses against that purpose before the analysis runs, not after the customer walks in. Malparto, to his credit, does one thing right: when Allen arrives he asks "May I keep a record of what we say?" before he records. The block meeting never asks. The lesson from both rooms is that consent at the door does not cure collection that happened before it.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 8.
"Doctor malparto" with a lower-case surname at line 141, like "purcell" in Chapter 4.
Odd compounds and spellings at line 145. "prized-gram" (presumably the prized encephalogram) and a misspelt "irreducible," marked [sic] in the transcription. At line 199 the transcription also marks "-gram" [sic].
"To Malparto this discouraging was." At line 159 the inverted word order appears in the narration itself, after four examples in dialogue (Chapter 3, Chapter 6, and twice in Chapter 7). This confirms that the inversion is a deliberate stylistic habit of the book, though its purpose is still unclear.
"event-stretching." At line 235 a hyphen joins two words where a dash was meant: a larger event, stretching, perhaps, over years.
A misspelling of arduous at line 255, marked [sic].
"fogot" for "forgot" at line 281, marked [sic].
"those light and high-frequency gadgetry." At line 249 a plural determiner with a singular mass noun; probably Allen's casual speech.
"We all were." Allen says everyone was born here, but Janet was born on Betelgeuse 4, as Malparto's next question shows. A joke, or a Newer Yorker's assumption.
The scan's date. "a week or so ago" places its arrival before the jape on Sunday 7 October. Not a slip, but a puzzle the text leaves open.
Avoid-list word. The adjective the source uses for Allen's expression at line 281 is on these notes' avoid list, so it is paraphrased, not quoted.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 8. The point of view shifts for the first time, to Doctor Malparto, and with it the reader learns things Allen does not. Malparto had Allen's encephalogram a week before Thursday, which means before the jape; its profile is "unique," with an "irreducible core"; he was expecting Allen, and Gretchen merely brought him sooner, for reasons her brother distrusts. The Resort is the one place free of juveniles because Streiter's wife was cured by a Fifth Avenue Jungian, and the analysts kept their deeds when the land was nationalised. Allen confesses the jape at once, gives a coherent life history (born here, met Janet on Bet-4 at twenty-five, mother dead in 2111), and agrees to be recorded. Malparto sees the city as a beast sinking in the clay of puritan morality, and Morec as the final victory of Dutch hellfire-preachers over Renaissance liberty. Malparto held Allen's scan before the jape and was waiting for him, and the first crack in Allen's memory of Sunday is a beer he does not like and at least half an hour gone missing around it. The therapists arrive with drugs and machines to recover it. Saturday's deadline cannot be met by a cure that takes months.
Real Books
Under Malparto's drugs and machines, Allen relives Sunday evening, and the reader finally sees the night that Chapter 1 summarised in a few lines. He left the Agency at eight-thirty, not ten. He walked through empty lanes, stopped at an autofac receiving station where a group of teenage boys talked bitterly about leaving for the colonies, and then bought a bottle of 3.2 beer he did not want, hoping it might turn out to be scotch, and returned it. He flew the Agency sliver to Hokkaido, where Tom Gates and Sugermann live in a wartime shelter among the salvaged junk of the twentieth century. Gates tried to sell him everything from a chipped bowl to a stack of old magazines and two lurid pulp novels; then Allen picked up a copy of Ulysses, and Sugermann told him that it and its kind were "real books." They drank three glasses of sherry. Allen came home, japed the statue, and walked to bed. Malparto, who had hoped for murder or sex, has learned nothing. He drops recall therapy, plans a Psi-test, notes that the Cohorts laughed, and thinks of precognition. Allen is booked for Monday at nine.
TIMELINE
When and where. The frame is still Thursday 11 October 2114 in Malparto's office at the Resort, with the session ending in the late morning; Allen then sets off "for work." The recalled scenes are Sunday 7 October 2114, from eight-thirty in the evening: the Mogentlock Building, the lanes, an autofac receiving station and its commissary, the Agency's rooftop field, and the underground shelter on Hokkaido. The chapter runs to about 2,900 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, drugged, still called "Mr. Coates" in the frame; Doctor Malparto and his two technicians at the trellis; a group of teenage boys at the autofac station, led by one with "dull red hair"; an "invisible clerk" at the commissary; Tom Gates, a dealer in salvage; Sugermann, his partner, who calls himself an "egghead"; and, mentioned, Gretchen and the Cohorts.
"Eight-thirty. Not ten."
The chapter begins inside the memory with no frame at all. "The silence depressed him. He was alone in the Mogentlock Building, working in the center of a vast tomb." Allen is in his office on a Sunday, the only worker in a building that feels like a grave. "Outside, the sky was cloudy and overcast. At eight-thirty he gave up."
Then a short paragraph on its own line: "Eight-thirty. Not ten."
Those four words are a correction to Chapter 1. There Allen remembered working "until ten o'clock" before taking the sliver out. Under the drugs, the true time surfaces, and the narration flags the difference, as if the recovered memory itself were speaking. Allen's waking memory had moved his departure ninety minutes later and lost everything in between. This is the "half an hour" he estimated in Chapter 8, and it turns out to be longer.
CONTRAST
| Point | Chapter 1 (waking memory) | Chapter 9 (drugged recall) |
|---|---|---|
| Left the Agency | "until ten o'clock" | "At eight-thirty he gave up." |
| Between Agency and sliver | nothing: straight out | empty lanes, the autofac station, the boys, the commissary and the refunded bottle |
| At Hokkaido | "Three glasses of wine with Sugermann" | three glasses of sherry; sherry is a fortified wine, so the two accounts agree |
| Music | "a half hour listening to Tom Gates play Chicago jazz" | the phonograph playing a Chicago version of a standard; Gates "turned it down" |
| Books | not mentioned | Gates's pulps, Ulysses, Sugermann's "real books" |
| Return | "by eleven he was on his way back" | "I drank three glasses of sherry and then I flew back" |
| After | the jape itself blanked out | paint, tools, jape, empty can on a bench, walk home |
The table shows what Allen's waking memory dropped. The music and the drinking survived. The autofac station and the books vanished. Whatever the mind chose to bury, it buried the two scenes in which Allen was moved: by the boys, and by a page of Joyce.
The tomb and the neon
He leaves. "Nobody was in sight. The lanes were deserted; on Sunday evening there was no flood of commuters. He saw only the shapes of housing units, closed-up commissaries, the hostile sky." Newer York on a Sunday night is a dead city, as Morec likes it.
Then a beautiful paragraph about loss.
Allen, the man whose profession is moral messaging, misses advertising. Not its content, but its noise and colour. His know‐
"His historical research had acquainted him with the vanished phenomenon of the neon sign. Now he would have wished for a few to break the monotony. The garish, blaring racket of commercials, ads, blinking signs" "it had disappeared. Swept aside like a bundle of faded circus posters: to be pulped by history for the printing of textbooks."
The narrator (a dash in the source joins the two parts)
ledge of neon is "historical research": he has never seen a neon sign, only read about one. The final image cuts deep. The old posters are "pulped by history for the printing of textbooks," recycled into the official record. The Age of Waste literally becomes paper for Morec's schoolbooks. It is also a premonition of what Allen is about to find on Hokkaido: the books of the old world, pulped or burned, and the few that survive in a dealer's junk heap.
There is irony in the job, too. Allen's agency makes the packets that fill this silence with moral messages. He is the modern equivalent of the advertising man, and he wishes the old adverts were back.
The autofac station
"Ahead, as he walked sightlessly along the lane, was a cluster of lights. The cluster drew him." The word "sightlessly" suggests he is not choosing a route; something draws him, like a moth. He arrives at "an autofac receiving station," a ring of lights rising "a few hundred feet."
This is Dick's sketch of a fully automated supply chain. "autofac" is short for automatic factory; Dick published a short story called Autofac in the same year, 1955. Here the ships come from planets with no people on them, are landed by robots, unloaded by machines, checked by machines, stored by machines. The first human is the clerk at the counter, and the second is the shopper.
Allen's view of all this is telling: "As far as he was concerned the industrial process was like the movement of planets: it functioned automatically and that was as it should be." He has no curiosity about where things come from. Production is a law of nature. That attitude will matter in a moment, when the system delivers something nobody ordered.
"Within the circle an autofac ship was lowering itself, a tubby cylinder pitted and corroded by its trip. There were no humans aboard, and there were none at its point of origin. Nor was the receiving equipment manual. When the robot controls had landed the ship, other self-regulating machines would unload it, check the shipment, cart the boxes into the commissary, and store them. Only with the clerk and the customer did the human element come into it."
The narrator
The boys
Around the station stands "a small band of sidewalk superintendents," the old American joke for idle people who watch construction work. Most of them are "teen-agers. Hands in their pockets, the boys gazed up raptly. Time passed and none of them stirred. None of them spoke."
The silence breaks when the tall boy with "dull red hair, pebbled skin" says "Big" and then "The ship." Allen, awkward with them, wonders aloud where it is from. The boy knows exactly: "It's from Bellatrix 7," carrying tungsten goods, light-globes all day. "Bellatrix's only a slave system. None of them habitable."
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: Bellatrix. Bellatrix is a real star, Gamma Orionis, the third-brightest star in the constellation of Orion, marking the hunter's left shoulder. It is a hot blue giant roughly 245 to 250 light years from the Sun [Wikipedia, Bellatrix, citing Hipparcos parallax; EarthSky, Bellatrix]. Its name is Latin for female warrior. Dick's choice fits: a hot, bright star whose planets, in his future, are mined by machines but cannot be lived on. The phrase slave system is the boys' term for exactly that, a set of worlds that only serve. The other worlds they mention, Sirius 8 and 9 and Orionus, follow the same habit as Janet's Betelgeuse 4: real stars with invented numbered planets. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, is about 8.6 light years away; Orionus is Dick's own coinage.
A companion says "Nuts to Bellatrix," because "you can't live there." Allen asks why they care. "The boys regarded him with contempt." Then the answer: "Because we're going." Where? "Out. Where it's open. Where something's going on."
That is the whole of teenage longing in three short phrases. They want to leave a closed, dead city for open space where things happen.
The red-headed boy has the colonies memorised like a travel brochure. On Sirius 9 they grow walnuts, "Almost like here. You can't taste the difference. A whole planet of walnut trees." On Sirius 8, oranges, but they died: "Mealy bug blight," says another, "Got all the oranges." And the red-headed boy himself is going to Orionus, where "they breed a real pig you can't tell from the original. I defy you to tell the difference; I defy you."
The details are comic and sad. The boys' dream worlds are agricultural colonies producing imitations of Earth food. A walnut you can't tell from a real one; a pig you can't tell from the original. They insist on the authenticity of copies. It recalls Chapter 3's dinner, where the restaurant served "Alaskan salmon" in quotation marks. In this world everything is a substitute, and the boys dream of a place where the substitutes are good.
Allen, for his part, does what a Morec adult does. "But that's away from center," he says. "Be realistic," and then, "it's taken your families decades to lease this close."
He has reached instinctively for the Morec value system: status is closeness to the spire, and families spend generations working their way in. Leaving for the colonies throws all that away. Allen sounds like the parents the boys are escaping. One of them answers with an expletive, printed as a blank dash in the source, and "they had melted away, leaving Allen to ponder an obvious fact."
"Morec wasn't natural"
"Morec wasn't natural. As a way of life it had to be learned. That was the fact, and the unhappiness of the boys was there to remind him."
The narrator
This is the hinge of the chapter: Allen sees that Morec is a habit people are taught, and the proof is a group of boys who have not finished learning it. Allen has known all along that the system is strict. What strikes him now is that it is artificial. People are not born wanting to live near a spire and obey their juveniles. They have to be trained. The boys, not yet fully trained, show what human beings want without the training: open space, things going on, a pig that tastes like a pig.
Under the drugs, Allen later tells Malparto that this was the scene he could not remember, and that it upset him "Because it was unfair." What was unfair is not spelled out. The reader can see several candidates. It is unfair that the boys must choose between a dead city and an exile on a farming colony. It is unfair that Allen answered them as the system's mouthpiece. It is unfair that the only sign of life in Newer York on a Sunday night was a group of children planning to leave.
The bottle in the rack
The commissary is still open. Allen goes in, reaches for his wallet, and punches his buy card. The "invisible clerk" speaks.
"Sure," the clerk says, "But only the 3.2 stuff. You really want to drink that?" And then: "It's made from hay." (The transcription drops the opening quotation mark on this last remark; see the quirks box.) Morec beer is weak and made of hay. Even the clerk despises it.
Then comes the explanation for the beer Allen does not like, which Chapter 8 left as a puzzle.
So Allen does not buy beer for the beer. He buys it in the hope that the machine will make the same mistake again. Long ago ("a thousand years ago" is his exaggeration), a bottle of real scotch appeared in the beer slot. Allen's guess is that it "survived the war," that a robot found it and, knowing only one official rack for alcohol, filed it there. The automatic supply chain the chapter has just described, with no human until the clerk, delivered a contraband bottle of the Age of Waste to an ordinary customer. "Evidently it was one of the implausible foul-ups that occurred even in the perfect society."
Every Sunday-type evening since then, Allen has punched the slot again, "hoping in a wan, childish way." It never happens again. Tonight he gets the beer, decides against it, and hands it back unopened. "Refund," he says. "I've changed my mind." "I told you," says the clerk. "Allen stood for a moment, empty-handed, his mind flat with futility."
This small scene does a great deal. It explains the beer. It shows that Allen, the model citizen, carries a tiny secret ritual of hope for something from the forbidden past. And it ties that hope to a machine error. The thing he wants can only reach him if the system fails.
Malparto will later summarise this evening by saying Allen "tried to buy a fifth of Scotch." That is not what Allen did, strictly; he bought 3.2 beer and returned it. But the doctor's summary names the wish exactly. In Chapter 8 Allen asked "But why would I want beer?" Chapter 9 answers: he never wanted the beer.
"Once, a thousand years ago, he had punched the slot for 3.2 beer and got a fifth of scotch. God knew where it came from. Perhaps it had survived the war, had been discovered by a robot storekeeper and automatically placed in the single official rack. It had never happened again, but he continued to punch the slot, hoping in a wan, childish way."
The narrator
The sliver
"A moment later he was climbing the ramp to the tiny roof-top field used by the Agency for rush flights. The sliver was parked there, locked up in its shed." Here the recall breaks off and the frame returns. That is the missing stretch of Sunday: an empty walk, a ring of lights, a few minutes with some boys, a bottle returned. Nothing that would look bad in a block meeting. Everything that matters to Allen.
In the trellis
Malparto switches off "the overhanging trellis of wires and lenses that had been focussed on his patient." The machine is a trellis, a lattice like a garden frame, hanging over the table. Allen lies "prone on the table, his arms at his sides," while "the two technicians examined their meters." Under the drugs, "his personality had receded to diffusion."
The exchange is short and flat.
Malparto is disappointed. "Malparto saw no point involved; the incident meant nothing to him. He had expected a sensational revelation of murder or copulation or excitement or all three together." This is a sharp joke about the analyst. He expected the classic psychoanalytic payload, violence and sex, and got a man moved by some teenagers. Before restarting he asks, somewhat reluctantly, whether Allen really believes the business with the boys was the heart of it. "Yes," says Mr. Coates. Malparto shrugs and restarts the machine.
The irony is that the analyst's disappointment is the reader's revelation. The incident that the drugs had to dig out was not sordid at all. It was the moment Allen saw that Morec is learned, not natural. That is a far more dangerous discovery than a hidden crime, and Malparto, looking for sex and violence, walks past it.
"That was the incident you couldn't remember?" "Yes, the boys at the autofac station." "You were despondent?" "I was," Mr. Coates agreed. "Why?" "Because it was unfair."
Malparto and Allen
Landing on ash
The second recall is the flight. "Darkness lay all around. The sliver dropped toward the island below, guiding itself, speaking to itself mechanically." Another automatic machine. "There was no field to locate; all Hokkaido was a field." The whole island is a flat expanse of ash.
The ship catches the pattern of "Sugermann's transmitter," a homing beacon, and lands itself with "a faint bump and a few rattles." (The source breaks this sentence across a paragraph boundary.) The only sound is "the hum of batteries recharging."
This is the darkest paragraph in the book so far. The ground of Hokkaido is the burned remains of people and their things, fused together. And the postwar world used it as building material: "the ash had made good mortar." The rebuilt cities of the Morec age are, in part, held together with the dead. Dick
"The ash sank under his feet; it was like standing on mush. The ash was complicated, a mixture of organic and inorganic compounds. A fusion of people and their possessions into a common gray-black blur. During the postwar years the ash had made good mortar."
The narrator
states it in one flat sentence and moves on, which makes it worse.
Gates and the shelter
"To his right was an insignificant glow. He walked toward it, and ultimately it became Tom Gates waving a flashlight." The greeting is "Morec to you," the society's watchword turned into a hello, from a man who lives as far from Morec as it is possible to get.
Gates is "a bony, pop-eyed shrimp with uncombed hair and a nose bent like a macaw's." He leads Allen to "the neck of the underground shelter," "Built during the war" and still intact, which he and Sugermann have reinforced, "Gates pounding nails and Sugermann overseeing." The division of labour tells us their relationship before Sugermann appears.
"I was expecting Sugie," Gates says. "It's almost dawn on this side; he's been out all night buying supplies." Then he giggles. "Trading big. We got a good hand, these days. Plenty of stuff people want; don't kid yourself."
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: is it dawn in Hokkaido? Gates says "It's almost dawn on this side," and Allen landed in "Darkness." The real geography does not fit. Japan is 13 hours ahead of New York when New York keeps daylight saving time and 14 hours ahead in winter [timeanddate.com, time zone converter, Japan Standard Time UTC+9]. Allen left the Agency at 8:30 on Sunday evening and reached Hokkaido some time after 9; by a real clock it would then be late Monday morning in Hokkaido, broad day. In early October the sun rises at Sapporo around 5:40 local time [timeanddate.com, Sapporo sunrise and sunset, October]. So "almost dawn" would fit an arrival in New York about four hours earlier. Dick may have reckoned the difference the other way, or simply wanted a night landing. The ash clouds of a dead island might also darken the sky. These notes record it as a slip of geography, not a clue.
Archaeologists for hire
The shelter's main room is "a litter of books, furniture, paintings, cans and boxes and jars of food, carpets and bric-a-brac and just plain junk." The phonograph is playing "a Chicago version of" a standard, "I Can't Get Started." Gates turns it down.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: "I Can't Get Started." The song is by Vernon Duke, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, written for the Broadway revue Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, where Bob Hope sang it to Eve Arden; the show opened in January 1936 [Wikipedia, I Can't Get Started, and Ziegfeld Follies of 1936]. The trumpeter Bunny Berigan's 1937 recording for Victor became the famous version and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1974 [Wikipedia, I Can't Get Started; Recording Academy, Grammy Hall of Fame]. Its lyric is a man listing his triumphs and confessing that none of them helps him with the woman he loves. A "Chicago version" means a small-band hot jazz arrangement in the Chicago style. Dick, a passionate record collector who worked in a Berkeley record shop, chose the title with care: a song about not being able to get going, played in the shelter of a man whose life has stalled at the top. This also matches Chapter 1's memory of "Chicago jazz" at Gates's place.
"Make yourself at home," says Gates, throwing him crackers and a wedge of cheddar. "Not hot," he says, "perfectly safe." Hot means radioactive. "Man, we've been digging, digging. Under all this ash, way down. Gates and Sugermann, archeologists for hire."
They are grave robbers of a civilisation. The narration lists their finds: "Remnants of the old. Tons of usable, partly usable, and ruined debris, objects of priceless worth, trinkets, indiscriminate trash." Allen sits on a carton of glassware and picks up a chipped bowl "designed by some long-dead craftsman of the twentieth century," decorated with "a faun and hunter." "Pack rats," he says. "Not bad."
The price list
Gates is a salesman, and he starts selling at once.
Gates's slang is consistent once decoded. If "a hundred bills" is ten thousand dollars, a "bill" is a hundred, the American slang of the 1950s. So the Posts at "fifteen bills" cost fifteen hundred, and the chablis at a thousand would be ten bills. Allen's own thought confirms the scale: "He didn't have ten thousand dollars."
The prices are a joke about value in a world without the past. A bottle of ordinary California wine costs a thousand dollars because there is no other. A chipped bowl costs three. Gates's motto is "Fast turnover" and a misspelt promise of profit (see the quirks box). He is the Age of Waste's last capitalist, selling the scraps of his own civilisation by the piece.
CONTRAST
| Item | Gates's price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Chipped bowl, faun and hunter | "Five bucks," then "Three bucks" | the opening move of any haggle |
| Bottle of Beringer's chablis | "One thousand dollars." | Beringer is a real Napa Valley winery, founded in 1876 |
| Copy of the Decameron | "Two thousand dollars." | Boccaccio's hundred tales, written around 1349 to 1353 |
| Electric waffle iron | more, if it converts to a sandwich grill | Age of Waste gadgetry |
| Six years of the Saturday Evening Post, 1947 to 1952 | "Say, fifteen bills." | six years, counting both ends |
| Yale Review | pitched for its sex | a scholarly quarterly, and Gates's sales pitch is wrong |
| Ulysses | "Ten thousand dollars!" | later "worth a hundred bills"; a bill is therefore a hundred dollars |
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the stock. Each item is real and well chosen. Beringer Vineyards was founded in 1876 by the brothers Jacob and Frederick Beringer at St. Helena, California, and describes itself as the oldest continuously operating winery in the Napa Valley [Beringer Vineyards, history; Wikipedia, Beringer Vineyards]. The Decameron is Giovanni Boccaccio's collection of a hundred tales told by ten young people sheltering from the Black Death, written around 1349 to 1353 [Britannica, Decameron]. It was long notorious for its bawdy stories, which is why Gates prices it high. The Yale Review descends from a journal founded in 1819, took its name in 1892 and began its new series as a literary quarterly in 1911; it is often called the oldest literary quarterly in the United States [The Yale Review, about; Wikipedia, The Yale Review]. It was a serious, establishment journal, not one of the small avant-garde magazines Gates means when he uses the phrase "little" magazine, and certainly not a source of "Plenty of sex." Truman Capote and James Jones were two of the most talked-about young American novelists of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Gates sells by reputation, and he does not read what he sells.
The pulps
Allen picks up "a faded, water-logged book," "cheaply bound, a bulging pulp with stained pages." Its title is The Indefatigable Virgin by "Jack Woodsby," an invented author. He opens it at random and reads a paragraph of breathless soft pornography: torn silk, heaving bodies, a protesting woman. These notes summarise it rather than quote it. Allen's response: "Good grief."
Gates is delighted. "Fine book," he says, and digs out another: I, the Killer, its author's name blurred. Allen reads a passage of first-person violence in which the narrator shoots a woman and treads on her body, in deliberately gross detail, ending with a shrug that she was dead anyway.
The two pulps are Morec's idea of the twentieth century. The Age of Waste, in the official story, was a time of sex and violence, and here is the proof, in cheap paper. Gates sells them as exactly that.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: Mickey Spillane. I, the Killer is a transparent parody of Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury, published by E. P. Dutton in 1947, the first Mike Hammer novel. It sold millions of copies in paperback and became a byword in the early 1950s for the mix of sex and sadism that critics and moral campaigners attacked in popular fiction [Wikipedia, I, the Jury; Britannica, Mickey Spillane]. Its famous ending has Hammer shoot the woman who loves him. Dick's parody pushes the style past the point of absurdity, and his choice of excerpt is pointed. In 1955, a year after the American Senate hearings on comic books, the respectable press treated this kind of book as a moral danger. Dick puts it in the same heap as Joyce, which is exactly what a moral censor would do.
The gray book
Then Allen "pulled out a fat, mildewed, gray-bound book and opened it." The passage he reads is different in kind. Stephen Dedalus is watching a jeweller through a dusty window; "Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails."
"That's a hot one," says Gates. "Go on, look through it. At the end especially." He means the final chapter, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the most notorious part of the book. "Why is this here?" asks Allen. Gates: "Man, that's the one. That's the spiciest of them all. You know how much I get for a copy of that? Ten thousand dollars!" He tries to grab it back; Allen hangs on.
Allen reads on: "Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar," on rubies and dark stones. "That's not bad." "It gave him a queer feeling, and he reread the passage carefully."
That is the moment the chapter has been building toward. Allen, a man who reads moral packets for a living, opens a page of real prose and feels something he does not have a name for. He rereads it. It is the same reaction he had to the boys: he was moved and did not know why.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the passage and its history. The lines come from the Wandering Rocks episode, chapter 10 of James Joyce's Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus looks into a jeweller's window [Joyce, Ulysses, episode 10, around line 800 in the Gabler numbering; Wikisource, Ulysses 1922 text]. Joyce wrote timedulled and winedark as single words; the transcription prints each with a hyphen and a space, presumably a typesetting artefact. Ulysses was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, in a first edition of 1,000 copies [Wikipedia, Ulysses (novel); University at Buffalo, James Joyce Collection]. It was banned in the United States and Britain for obscenity, with copies seized by customs and burned, until Judge John M. Woolsey ruled on 6 December 1933, in United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses", that it was not obscene; Random House published the first authorised American edition in 1934 [5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933); Wikipedia, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses]. Dick's readers in 1955 knew the book as the most famous banned novel of the century, notorious for its final chapter. In Allen's world it has gone back to being banned.
Sugermann
"There was a scraping at the stairs and Sugermann entered." "What's not bad?" He sees the book and nods. "James Joyce. Excellent writer." (The source splits Joyce's name across a paragraph break.) "Ulysses brings us a good deal, these days. More than Joyce himself ever got."
Sugermann is the opposite of Gates. "a heavy-set, round-faced man, with a stubble of bluish beard," he arrives with supplies and the news of "a shipload up on the surface." He lights a cigarette in "a carved, ornate ivory holder," a dandy's prop. And he calls Allen "Mr. Purcell," formally.
Allen is bothered. "Why is this book with the others? It's entirely different." Sugermann's first answer is dry: "Has the same words." By Morec's standards that is true. Joyce uses the same forbidden words as the pulps, so the censors treat him the same.
"This book is still pornography," Sugermann said: "Joyce, Hemingway. Degenerate trash. The Major's first Book Committee listed Ulysses on the hex-sheet back in 1988."
Sugermann
He speaks in the voice of the censors, with heavy irony. "Degenerate trash" is the language of every book-burning regime. The "Book Committee" was set up by "The Major," Streiter, and in 1988 it put Ulysses on the "hex-sheet," a lovely coinage: the list of cursed books. The date fits the history so far. The war ended in 1972; the statue has stood for 124 years, since 1990. So the Book Committee did its work two years before the statue went up, in the first years of the Morec order.
Then Sugermann piles more books into Allen's lap. "Novels of the twentieth century. All gone, now. Banned. Burned. Destroyed."
"real books"
Allen asks the questions a Morec citizen would ask. "But what was the purpose of these books? Why are they lumped with the junk?" "What kind of Morec did they teach?" He assumes all writing exists to teach a moral, as his own packets do.
"They didn't," says Sugermann. "These particular novels even taught unMorec."
"real books" and "They're about something" are the chapter's thesis. The pulps are about sex and violence, which is to say about nothing; they are stimulation. Morec's packets are about morals, which is to say about a lesson. Real books are about something: the world as it is. Sugermann cannot define the difference and refuses to try. "I'm an egghead," he says, the 1950s American sneer for an intellectual, turned on himself. If he called it literature, he would sound like a professor, and he knows how that sounds.
Gates, practical, offers his own version, breathing into Allen's face: "These guys" "wrote it all down, the way it was back in the Age of Waste." "This tells. Everything's here." For Gates the books are records. That is what Allen picks up: "But these ought to be preserved," he says. "They shouldn't be tossed in with the trash. We need them as historical records." Sugermann agrees, perhaps mockingly: "Certainly," and "So we'll know what life was like, then." "They're valuable." "Very valuable."
Then Allen says the line the chapter has been waiting for. "Angrily, Allen said:" "They tell the truth!" And Sugermann bellows with laughter until he has to wipe his eyes. "That's so, Purcell. They tell the truth, the one and only absolute truth."
Sugermann's laughter and his mock solemn reply are hard to read. He might be laughing at Allen's naivety, a man who has just discovered what every reader of the old world knew. He might be laughing at the phrase "the truth," which in Morec is what the packets claim. He might be laughing because a re‐
Sugermann considered. "These, as discriminated from the others, are real books." "What's that mean?" "Hard to say. They're about something." A smile spread across Sugermann's face. "I'm an egghead, Purcell. I'd tell you these books are literature. So better not ask me."
Sugermann and Allen
spectable Morec agency man has just made the most subversive statement possible and does not know it. Then he stops abruptly: "Tom, give him the Joyce book. As a present from you and me."
The gift refused
Gates is appalled. "But Ulysses is worth a hundred bills!" Sugermann insists, sinking into "a growling, acrid stupor." "He should have it."
Allen refuses. "I can't take it; it's worth too much." The narration then gives two realisations in turn: he could not pay for it, and he wanted it. The source says he did not have ten thousand dollars, and then: "And, he also realized, he wanted the book."
Allen cannot accept a gift. This is the Morec reflex Malparto saw in Chapter 8, the "old Protestant frugality": nothing is free, a gift is a debt, and a man who accepts what he cannot pay for is compromised. Sugermann names it in one word, "Morec," and then gives up. The gift that would have handed Allen the truth he just shouted about is refused because of the very training he has just recognised as unnatural. It is the boys' scene again: Allen sees the cage and still speaks from inside it.
Sugermann also changes from "Mr. Purcell" to "Allen" in the same breath as his apology. The formality drops at the moment of failure.
Sugermann glared at him for a long, disconcerting time. "Morec," he muttered at last. "No gift-giving. Okay, Allen. I'm sorry."
Sugermann
The toast
"How about a glass of sherry?" "That's good stuff," says Gates. "From Spain. The real thing." The real thing, in a world of imitation walnuts and hay beer. Sugermann brings "the half-empty bottle" and fills three glasses.
"Drink up, Purcell. To Goodness, Truth, and" then he breaks off and hesitates. "Morality." "They drank."
The toast is a parody of Morec's slogans, and perhaps of the old philosophical triad of the good, the true and the beautiful. Sugermann begins as if he will say Beauty and swaps in "Morality," the word that replaced beauty in Allen's world. They drink to it in the illegal wine of the old one, in a shelter dug into the ash of the dead. These are the "Three glasses of wine with Sugermann" of Chapter 1.
"Nothing else happened"
The frame returns. The trellis is wheeled away; the lights come on. The patient "blinked, stirred, moved feebly." "And then you came back?" "Yes," says Mr. Coates. "I drank three glasses of sherry and then I flew back to Newer York."
"And nothing else happened?"
Here, for the first time, Allen describes the jape in his own words, and he does so as flatly as if listing errands. Back,
Mr. Coates, with an effort, sat up. "I came back, parked the sliver, got the tools and bucket of red paint, and japed the statue. I left the empty paint can on a bench and walked home."
Allen, as Mr. Coates
parked, got tools and paint, japed, left the can, walked home. In Chapter 1 he could not remember any of it. Now he remembers it without emotion. The paint came from the Agency's art department, as Janet guessed in Chapter 1, and the tools presumably did too. He walked home, which matches the block meeting's account of his arrival at the front steps at 11:30.
The plain recital deflates the jape. It took no planning that he can recall. He did it, the way he drank the sherry. If there was a switch, it was pulled somewhere between the last glass and the paint store, and the drugs show no moment of decision at all.
Malparto learns nothing
"The first session was over and Malparto had learned absolutely nothing. Nothing had happened to his patient either before or at Hokkaido; he had met some boys, tried to buy a fifth of Scotch, had seen a book. That was all. It was senseless."
The narrator, from Malparto's point of view
Malparto's summary is precise and blind. "he had met some boys, tried to buy a fifth of Scotch, had seen a book." Each item is exactly what mattered to Allen. The boys showed him that Morec is learned. The scotch is the wish for something real from the old world. The book is the truth. Malparto lists the three causes of the jape and calls them "senseless." He wanted a hidden crime, and he got a man's awakening.
He decides to change method. "He had decided to cease the recall-therapy. There was no value in bringing to the surface past incidents and forgotten experiences. From now on he would work with the mind of Mr. Coates, not with its contents." In Chapter 8 he said the jape's "meaning lies in the circumstances preceding it." One session later he has given up on circumstances altogether. He will now study what kind of mind Allen has.
The Psi-test
"Have you ever been Psi-tested?" "No." Allen has a headache from the drugs. Malparto has "a few routine tests" he would like to give, "Perhaps next time; it's a trifle late, today."
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: psi and precognition. The vocabulary is borrowed from real 1930s to 1950s parapsychology. J. B. Rhine of Duke University published Extra-Sensory Perception in 1934, popularising the term ESP and card-guessing tests [Rhine Research Center, history; Britannica, J. B. Rhine]. The word "psi," for psychic phenomena in general, was introduced by the British psychologist Robert Thouless in 1942, who credited his colleague B. P. Wiesner [Thouless and Wiesner, 1942; Wikipedia, Psi (parapsychology)]. Rhine's laboratory tested precognition, guessing cards before they were shuffled, from 1933 and published results in 1938 in the Journal of Parapsychology [Rhine Research Center, history; Journal of Parapsychology vol. 2, 1938]. These claims were and remain disputed, and the experiments did not survive replication by sceptics. In 1955 they were common currency in science fiction, and Dick used psi powers often. In Allen's world, a Psi-test is "routine."
The Cohorts laughed
As Allen gets up, stiff, Malparto asks one more question: what effect does the jape have, "on the Morec Society"? "None," says Allen. "Except that it gives the police something to do. And the newspapers have something to print." Who sees the statue? "Nobody sees it; they've got it boarded up." Then he remembers. "Your sister saw it. And some of the Cohorts saw it; they were rounded up to guard it."
Malparto "made a note" of that (with a typo in the source). Allen adds: "Gretchen said that some of the Cohorts laughed. It was japed in an odd way; I suppose you've heard." "I've heard," says Malparto, who plans to get the facts from his sister. "So they laughed. Interesting."
This is the clearest description of the Cohorts so far, and it is brutal. "storm-troopers," the word for the Nazi SA, chosen with full 1955 weight. "the teeth, the vigilantes." In Chapter 5 Gretchen told Allen that some of them laughed at the japed statue. Malparto sees what Allen does not: when the enforcers of a moral order laugh at the defacement of its founder, the jape has worked on exactly the people it should not reach. Allen's answer to the first question was wrong. The jape did have an effect on Morec society, at its most loyal edge.
Allen stops at the door. "I don't see the point."
"Well, the Cohorts are the storm-troopers of the Morec Society. They go out and do the dirty work. They're the teeth, the vigilantes. And they don't usually laugh."
Doctor Malparto
Precognition
Doctor Malparto was thinking: precognition. The ability to anticipate the future. "I'll see you Monday," he said, getting out his appointment book. "At nine. Will that be satisfactory?"
Doctor Malparto
The last thought in the chapter is one word: "precognition." Malparto does not explain it, and these notes will not guess beyond what the text gives. What it connects to is clear enough. Malparto had Allen's scan before the jape and was expecting him. The jape made the hardest Morec loyalists laugh. Allen's mind appears to be the object of interest, not its contents. And the doctor has just decided to Psi-test it. The idea that Allen's mind can anticipate the future is now on the table, held privately by the one man who knows his file.
The appointment is "Monday," "At nine." Allen agrees. That falls after Saturday, the day by which he must answer Mrs. Frost. Whatever happens with Telemedia will happen before his next session. Malparto has already told him that no change can be worked in forty-eight hours; now he has effectively scheduled the cure for after the decision.
"Mr. Coates said that it was satisfactory, and then he set off glumly for work." The chapter ends in the mood that closed the block meeting in Chapter 7. Allen is glum again, going to the Agency on a Thursday with the knowledge, now conscious, that he spent Sunday night being moved by boys, a bottle and a book.
What the night was made of
Put together, the recovered Sunday is a sequence of small encounters with what Morec has removed.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The five absences Allen met on Sunday night.
Noise and colour. He wished for neon signs to break the monotony.
Freedom. The boys want to go "Out. Where it's open."
The real thing. He punched the beer slot hoping for scotch, and drank sherry that was "The real thing."
Truth. He read Joyce and shouted "They tell the truth!"
Gift. He was offered the book and could not take it.
The jape follows these five encounters directly. On the drugged account, there is no other cause, which is what Malparto calls senseless. The reader may see it differently. The jape is what a man does when he has spent an evening finding out that his whole world is a learned habit, and then flies home with three glasses of sherry in him to a statue of the man who taught it.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: the bottle the machine put in the rack. Allen's scotch is a small, exact picture of a familiar failure in automated systems: a legacy item from an old regime flows through a pipeline with no human check and lands in front of a customer. "Perhaps it had survived the war, had been discovered by a robot storekeeper and automatically placed in the single official rack," and "Only with the clerk and the customer did the human element come into it." Finance has had its own version at scale. On 1 August 2012, Knight Capital deployed new trading code to seven of its eight order-routing servers; the eighth still held dormant code from an old, retired function, which the new release accidentally reactivated. In about 45 minutes the firm sent millions of unintended orders, executing more than four million trades, and lost more than 460 million dollars; the SEC later fined it 12 million dollars, finding it had lacked adequate controls and deployment procedures [SEC, In the Matter of Knight Capital Americas LLC, Exchange Act Release No. 70694, 16 October 2013]. The pattern is the same as the commissary's. Old material that should have been removed was still present, the automation had no category for it and filed it where its shape fitted, and no human stood between the system and its output until the result was visible. The lessons for a bank's architecture are the obvious ones: remove dead code and retired data rather than leaving them dormant, design automated flows to reject what they do not recognise rather than file it in the nearest slot, and put a check before the customer as well as at the counter. Allen keeps punching the slot because one failure gave him something he wanted. Systems that occasionally reward their users with an error tend to keep that error alive.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 9.
Missing quotation mark. At line 349 the clerk's remark about hay has a closing quotation mark but no opening one.
A sentence broken across paragraphs. At lines 385 to 387 the landing sentence breaks after "the pattern of," and at lines 453 to 455 the name "James Joyce" is split across a paragraph break.
Misspellings in Gates's speech and the narration. At line 413 Gates promises assured profit but the text prints "assure profit"; at line 435 the pulp extract has a misspelling of accidentally, probably part of the parody; at line 543 "af that" for of that.
The boy's expletive. At line 343 the oath is printed as a long dash followed by a hyphen, a censored blank.
Joyce's compounds. The Joyce extracts print a hyphen and a space inside two compounds Joyce wrote as single words. Probably a line-break hyphen preserved in transcription.
Prices. Gates says Ulysses fetches "Ten thousand dollars!" and later "a hundred bills." These agree if a "bill" is a hundred dollars, which also makes the Posts' "fifteen bills" fifteen hundred.
Dawn on Hokkaido. Gates's "almost dawn" does not fit real time zones; on a real clock it would be late morning in Japan (see the critical lens).
The Monday appointment. Malparto books Allen for Monday at nine, two days after Saturday's deadline for the Telemedia decision. Not a slip, but a timing the text leaves standing.
Malparto's summary. He says Allen "tried to buy a fifth of Scotch"; strictly Allen bought 3.2 beer hoping for scotch and returned it. Malparto's reading, not an error.
Avoid-list word. Malparto's question about the boys at line 377 uses an adjective on these notes' avoid list, so it is paraphrased, not quoted.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 9. The drugged recall restores the lost part of Sunday 7 October. Allen left the Agency at eight-thirty, "Not ten"; walked through dead lanes missing neon signs; met teenage boys at an autofac station who want to leave for the colonies, and realised that "Morec wasn't natural"; bought and returned a bottle of 3.2 beer, which he punches for in the hope of a repeat of the stray scotch the automatic system once delivered. On Hokkaido, in a shelter dug into ash that "had made good mortar," Gates tried to sell him the twentieth century piece by piece, and Sugermann called Ulysses and the other banned novels "real books." Allen shouted that they tell the truth, refused the book as a gift, drank three glasses of sherry, flew home and japed the statue with no moment of decision. Malparto lists the boys, the scotch and the book as the whole evening and calls it senseless, when they are exactly the three things that moved Allen. He drops recall therapy, plans a Psi-test, is struck that the Cohorts laughed, thinks "precognition," and books Allen for Monday at nine, after the Saturday deadline.
How They Lived
Allen comes back from the Resort to bad news. Fred Luddy, the assistant he fired on Monday, has gone over to Blake-Moffet, the oldest and dullest of the rival agencies, and has taken with him everything the Agency had in preparation. A day of inventory confirms it: "Picked us clean." With his last full day to decide about Telemedia coming up, Allen judges that the Resort has given him no practical help, plays a grim joke on Janet over the phone, and goes with her and her sister's two children to the history museum. There a reconstructed twentieth century house glows under the sign HOW THEY LIVED until a boy presses a button and it turns into a ruin under the sign AND DIED. Walking on, Allen tells Janet about Luddy, calls Blake-Moffet a stone dragging the Agency into the grave, and announces that he will take the job. On Friday morning he rents a little car, drives to the Committee building and accepts. Sue Frost is delighted, agrees to a start "a week from Monday," and invites the Purcells to dinner and Juggle.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter opens on Thursday 11 October 2114, late morning or early afternoon, when Allen reaches his office at the Agency in the Mogentlock Building straight from the session in Chapter 9. The inventory runs until five; he phones Janet at "precisely five-fifteen" and is home "around six." After dinner the Purcells collect the children and spend the evening at the history museum. The last scenes take place the next morning, Friday 12 October, in a rented car and in Sue Frost's private office in the Committee building. The chapter runs to about 2,300 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, still dulled by Malparto's drugs; Doris, his secretary; Harry Priar, head of the Agency's art department, now his "pro-tem assistant"; Fred Luddy, absent, now at Blake-Moffet; Janet Purcell; her married sister Lena, mentioned; Lena's children Ned, eight, and Pat, seven; a crowd of museum visitors and the exhibit's robot mannikins; a car dealer; the Committee's front secretary; and Sue Frost. Mentioned: Doctor Malparto, Gretchen, Tom Gates, and Myron Mavis.
"Gone to Blake-Moffet"
The chapter starts at the office door, with no gap after Chapter 9's last line. "As he entered his office at the Agency, Doris appeared and said: " something has happened, and "Harry Priar wants to tell you." The narrator introduces Priar in one sentence: he "headed the Agency's art department" and is now Allen's "pro-tem assistant, taking Fred Luddy's place." The art department is the same one whose red enamel ended up splashed over the statue in Chapter 5, which gives the new deputy an odd connection to the crime he knows nothing about.
Priar "materialized, looking somber," and says only: "It's about Luddy." Allen's reply is tired: "Isn't he gone?" He is taking off his coat, and the narrator reminds us of his state: "Malparto's drugs still affected him; his head ached and he felt dulled." The man who has just relived Sunday night under narcotics now has to run a business on the same afternoon. That matters for everything that follows, since he will make the largest decision of the week in the next twenty-four hours with a sore head and no sleep to speak of.
Priar's answer is the chapter's first blow: "He's gone," and then, "Gone to Blake-Moffet. We got a tip from T-M this morning, before you showed up." T-M is Telemedia. So the news has come from the state body that buys from both agencies, which means Blake-Moffet has already been talking to Telemedia with Luddy in tow, or Luddy has already appeared there with his new employer. Either way, the client knows before the Agency does. "Allen groaned."
Then Priar gives the damage in plain words.
Allen does what a manager does: "Make an inventory," he says. "See what he took." He "settled drearily down at his desk" and asks to be told as soon as they are finished. The narrator compresses the afternoon in two sentences: "A whole day was consumed by inventory-taking. At five the information was in and on his desk." Since Allen only reached the office after a morning at the Resort, the phrase can only mean the staff's day, or the narrator's loose sense of how long it felt. The point is that the job takes everybody until the end of business.
The result comes in three words: "Picked us clean." Priar says it with an odd tone: "He admiringly shook his head." He is impressed by the thoroughness. "Must have spent hours," he adds. Neither man says when Luddy did this. He was fired on Monday morning in front of Sue Frost, and on Tuesday Doris reported that he wanted a reference and that they had made out his check, "Two weeks, plus what was owed" (Chapter 6). So he was in and around the office for at least a day after his dismissal, and nobody thought to keep him away from the files. The text leaves the mechanics unstated, but the result shows that nobody did.
"He knows everything we've got on tap... All the new packets, all the current ideas. That means Blake-Moffet has them."
Harry Priar
The claims court and the race against time
Priar offers the legal route: "Of course we can attach the material, try to get it back through the claims court." In Morec society there is a court for exactly this, it seems, and a procedure to seize stolen work. Allen dismisses it at once, and his reason is the most business-minded sentence in the chapter.
He is "fooling with the long yellow pad" as he says it, the small fidget of a man who has to think and talk at once. The logic is sound. The value of a packet lies in its timing. A remedy that arrives years later returns something already worthless. So Allen chooses the only defence that works against a faster opponent, which is to be faster still: new ideas, and better ones.
"Blake-Moffet will fight for years... By the time we get the packets back they'll be obsolete. We'll have to dream up new ones. Better ones."
Allen Purcell
Priar's next line is the sixth example in the book of its odd reversed word order: "This really tough is," he says. Earlier chapters had, among others, "This embarrassing is" (Chapter 3), "the delay unavoidable is" (Chapter 6), and the narrator's "To Malparto this discouraging was" (Chapter 8). The earlier warn boxes concluded that the pattern is deliberate, a speech tic Dick gives to this society. Here it falls in a moment of genuine dismay, which supports that reading: people in Morec reach for the inversion when they want to say something is bad without quite saying it.
Priar goes on with a short history of the rivalry.
So piracy is normal. The two agencies have stolen from each other before, have lost work, and have raced each other to ideas. What is new is a senior man defecting with all of it. Allen's answer goes straight to the cause: "We never fired anybody before." He is thinking, the narrator says, "how much Luddy resented the firing." He now sees what kind of fight is coming.
A packet market in which agencies used to compete over ideas is about to become a vendetta. Allen's Agency has run on cleverness and goodwill; its old rival runs on bulk and habit; now one of its own former managers will bring personal anger to the rival's side. In Chapter 2 Allen fired Luddy for siding with Sue Frost against the apple tree packet, and Chapter 6 described him as a man Allen had fired as "disloyal and dishonest, Morecly speaking." Allen thought that was a matter of principle. To Luddy it was a public humiliation, and the bill is now arriving.
"Nothing like this ever happened before. We've had Blake-Moffet pirate stuff; we've lost stuff; we've been beaten to ideas. But we never had anybody at top level go over bag and baggage."
Harry Priar
"They can do us real harm. And with Luddy there they probably will. Grudge stuff. We've never run into that before. The personal element. Bitter, to-the-death tangling."
Allen Purcell
BY THE NUMBERS
The clock of Luddy's departure. Monday 8 October, morning: fired in front of Sue Frost (Chapter 2). Tuesday 9 October, morning: Doris reports his check is made out, "Two weeks, plus what was owed," and that he wants a reference, which Allen puts off (Chapter 6). Thursday 11 October, morning: Telemedia tips off the Agency that he is at Blake-Moffet. Same day, five o'clock: inventory complete, "Picked us clean." Allen's estimate of the loss, said that evening: the ideas that were "roughly, us for the next year." Allen fired a man on Monday and lost a year of product by Thursday.
A decision with no help
When Priar has gone, Allen paces. "Tomorrow was Friday, his last full day to decide about the directorship of T-M." The arithmetic matches Chapter 6, where Allen asked for time and Frost allowed him until Saturday. Friday is the last working day before that deadline, as Allen will say later in the evening.
The Resort was meant to change the terms of that decision, and it has not. "The statue problem would still be with him the rest of the week; as Malparto said, therapy would drag on indefinitely." Two sentences later, the narrator states the bind exactly: "Either he went into T-M as he was now or he declined the job. On Saturday he would still be the same elusive personality, with the same switches to be pulled from deep within."
The phrase "switches to be pulled from deep within" picks up the language Allen used in Chapter 6, where he reasoned that the brain is an organ that can act on its own and need not explain itself. The man who japed the statue is still in there. Whatever pulled the switch on Sunday night could pull it again. Allen knows this and decides to go ahead anyway, which makes his choice something closer to a bet than a cure.
His verdict on the Resort is harsh.
This is fair to what Allen saw. Malparto drugged him, recovered the evening, and then, in Chapter 9, decided to test him for psychic powers, booking him for Monday morning after the deadline had passed. From Allen's chair, the analyst has turned a business emergency into a research project. The narrator sums it up: "He had to make a decision, and without Malparto's help. Without, in effect, anybody's help. He was back where he started before Gretchen gave him the folded slip." The folded slip is the paper Gretchen pressed on him in the Park in Chapter 5, which he opened in Chapter 6 to find the four words that sent him to the Resort. That whole route has led back to the starting square.
"It was depressing to consider how little practical help the Health Resort had given him. Doctor Malparto was off in the clouds, thinking in terms of a lifetime of test-giving, reaction-measuring. And meanwhile the practical situation floundered."
Narration, from Allen's point of view
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: is Allen fair to Malparto? The novel has given the reader more than it has given Allen. In Chapter 8 the reader saw from inside Malparto's head that he already held Allen's unique brain scan and was excited by it, and in Chapter 9 the reader watched him list the boys, the scotch and the book and call the evening senseless. So the reader has reasons of their own to doubt the Resort's methods. Allen's complaint, though, is a practical one: a man with a Saturday deadline wants an answer by Saturday. Malparto never promised one; by Allen's own account the doctor said therapy would drag on indefinitely, and Allen has agreed to go back on Monday. The charge that the doctor is "off in the clouds" is Allen's mood, which the narration shares. Chapter 12 will show whether it is fair.
"This is the Mortuary League"
Allen picks up the phone and calls home. Janet answers in a voice "laden with dread." Since Monday night she has expected bad news every time the phone rings: arrest, the police, the Resort. Allen gives her a joke instead, and it is a cruel one.
He checks his watch and adds: "At precisely five-fifteen." After "A terrible hushed silence," Janet says, "But that's now." Allen keeps it going: "If you listen... you can hear him
"This is the Mortuary League... It is my duty to inform you that your husband was sucked into the manifold of an autofac ship and never heard from again."
Allen Purcell, on the phone
breathing. He's not gone yet, but he's pretty far down." Janet answers: "You inhuman monster."
The joke is worth looking at closely, because jokes are Allen's trade and his crime. A mortuary league sounds like one of the society's endless civic bodies, and the voice he uses is the official one, the voice of a notice. The death he invents is industrial: swallowed by the intake of one of the robot cargo ships that bring food to an Earth that grows none (Chapter 1). He is japing the state's own tone of voice, on a phone line, to his frightened wife. The habit that sent him to the statue is the same habit that makes him do this. He does it for comfort, and the effect is cruelty, which is how the jape on the statue felt to the people who saw it.
Then he gets to the point: "What I want to find out... is what are we doing this evening?" Janet has plans: "I'm taking Lena's kids to the history museum." The narrator explains: "Lena was his wife's married sister." This is the first we have heard of any relative of Janet's living in the city. Chapter 1 said Janet grew up on a colony planet; so at least one sister now lives on Earth, married, with children. Janet adds: "You're not doing anything." Allen decides to "tag along" and says, "I want to discuss something with you."
"Discuss what?" she asks "instantly." He answers, "Same old thing," and the narrator explains why the museum suits him: "The history museum would make as good a place as any; so many people passed through that no juvenile would single them out." Chapter 7 showed the block meeting where the juveniles' tapes were played back as evidence. Allen has learned the lesson. He will hold his private conversation in a crowd, where the machines that record everything will have too much noise to pick out two voices. Then the domestic close: "I'll be home around six. What's for dinner?" Janet: "How about 'steak'?" The single quotation marks around steak are in the text. The food on this Earth comes from the colonies by autofac, and what is sold as steak is presumably something else; Janet puts the word in inverted commas the way people do with words that no longer mean what they used to.
An evening out in Morec
After dinner they walk to Lena's and collect "the two kids." "Ned was eight and Pat was seven, and they scurried excitedly along the twilight lane and up the steps of the museum. Allen and his wife came more slowly, hand in hand, saying little." It is the first time in the novel that the Purcells have been shown out together with nothing pressing on them in the moment, and the narrator marks it: "For once the evening was pleasant. The sky was cloud-scattered but mild, and many people were out to enjoy themselves in the few ways open to them."
The phrase "in the few ways open to them" is the key. Allen lists the ways, and the list is flat on purpose.
Each item is improving; each is public; each could have been planned by a committee. As he says it he thinks of something else: "He thought of Gates' phonograph playing " and the song title follows. The full sentence reads: Gates' phonograph playing "I Can't Get Started," "the taste of sherry, and, beyond everything else, the litter of the twentieth century that had focalized in the water-soaked copy of Ulysses." These are the things he relived in Chapter 9 on Hokkaido: Tom
"Museums... And art exhibits. And concerts. And lectures. And discussions of public affairs."
Allen Purcell
Gates's old record, Sugermann's sherry, and the banned novel Allen shouted about and refused to take. They are pleasures that belong to no programme. Then Allen ends his list with a bit of irony: "And there's always Juggle." Juggle is the society's social pastime, named in Chapter 4 alongside the Edufacture kits as one of the "Instructional pastimes" meant "To keep idle hands occupied." Allen puts it last, as the lowest point.
Janet answers with longing: "Sometimes I wish I was a kid again. Look at them go." The children have run inside. The narrator explains why they are happy: "To them the exhibits were still interesting," and adds that they have not yet tired of the museum's elaborate staged scenes. The adults have. The same displays, seen often enough, become another piece of instruction.
Allen makes her a promise he cannot keep: "Someday," he says, "I'd like to take you where you can relax." The narrator lets us hear him doubt it: "He wondered where that would be. Certainly no place in the Morec scheme. Perhaps on some remote colony planet, when they had grown old and been discarded." Then he goes on aloud: "Your childhood days again. Where you can take off your shoes and wriggle your toes."
The narrator then gives us the one glimpse so far of the Janet he first met: "As he had first found her: a shy, thin, very pretty girl, living with her nonleased family on bucolic Betelgeuse 4." The key word is nonleased. On Earth everybody holds a lease on their home from the state and can lose it for a moral offence, as the block meeting showed in Chapter 7. Janet's family on the colony held no such lease. Chapter 1 had Allen joke that she grew up with "Rocks and goats." Here the same place is "bucolic," and the word carries real affection.
Janet asks for something simple.
She "broke off," and then adds two words: "And grass." That small word carries a lot of weight in this novel. In Chapter 1 the bit of grass on Allen's shoe was the first physical clue to where he had been on Sunday night; Janet, who grew up among real grass, identified it by touch as domestic and said the Park was the only place it grew. Now she wants grass for herself, for its own sake. The Park is the one place on Earth that has it, and the one place in it that matters to their story is the ring of gravel round the statue.
"Could we sometime take a trip?... Anywhere... maybe to a place where there's open country and streams and ..."
Janet Purcell
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the extinct flowers and the Park. Later in the evening Janet studies an exhibit of extinct flowers, and the text lists "poppies and lilies and gladioli and roses." So these four, at least, are gone from Earth by 2114. Elsewhere the novel treats the Park as a place where things still grow: grass, trees, and, as a later chapter puts it, flowers. The two do not contradict each other, since the Park could hold other kinds, but the museum detail tightens the picture. The ordinary garden flowers of the twentieth century are museum pieces, and what the Park keeps is the exception.
HOW THEY LIVED
The centre of the museum is "its twentieth century exhibit." The description is one of the most vivid passages in the book so far.
It is a suburban house of the American kind, with its own lawn and car. Everything that marks it out as another age is space: a whole house for one family, a garage, a lawn, a road outside. Compare the Purcells' single room, with its tape that turns a bedroom into a kitchen every morning (Chapter 1), and the bathroom line in the corridor. "The exhibit revolved in such a way that every part of the interior was visible." Visitors stand "at the circular railing and watched as Life in the Age of Waste rotated by." That phrase, Life in the Age of Waste, is the official title, and it tells us how Morec frames the past: the twentieth century as one long excess.
Above the house hangs a lit sign, printed in the text on its own line:
Ned arrives at a run. "Can I press the button?" he "yammered." "Let me press it; nobody's pressed it. It's time to press it." Allen says "Sure" and "Go ahead. Before somebody beats you to it." The joke in the reply is mild, but it is the same race-to-the-idea language Allen has been using about Blake-Moffet all afternoon.
"Ned scampered back, squeezed to the railing where Pat waited, and jabbed the button." The narrator then shows the crowd: "The spectators gazed benignly at the lush house and furnishings, knowing what was coming." Everybody knows the ending. They are watching "for awhile, at least, the last of the house." And they look hard at what they are about to lose: "the stocks of canned food, the great freezer and stove and sink and washer and drier, the car that seemed made of diamonds and emeralds."
The irony is in the word "benignly." The crowd watches comfort it has never had with a kindly calm, knowing the comfort will be blown away in a moment. The display invites envy and then punishes it. That is a very Morec kind of exhibit.
"An entire white-stucco house had been painstakingly reconstructed, with sidewalk and lawn, garage and parked Ford. The house was complete with furniture, robot mannikins, hot food on the table, scented water in the tile bathtub. It walked, talked, sang and glowed."
Narration
HOW THEY LIVED The illuminated sign over the exhibit
AND DIED
The change comes fast. "Over the exhibit the sign winked out. An ugly cloud of smoke rolled up, obscuring the house. Its lights dimmed, turned dull red, and dried up." Then a physical effect: "The exhibit trembled, and, to the spectators, a rumble came, the lazy tremor of a subterranean wind."
When the smoke clears, "the house was gone." In its place is "an expanse of broken bones," a phrase that makes the rubble sound like a skeleton. "A few steel supports jutted, and bricks and sections of stucco lay strewn everywhere."
The survivors are worse than the ruins.
"In the ruins of the cellar the surviving mannikins huddled over their pitiful possessions: a tank of decontaminated water, a dog they were stewing, a radio, medicines. Only three mannikins had survived, and they were haggard and ill. Their clothing was in shreds and their skins were seared with radiation burns."
Narration
Then the second sign, which completes the first:
The narrator calls this side "this hemisphere of the exhibit," which tells us that the stage is circular and turning: one half shows the house, the other half its ruin, and the rotation carries the visitors from one to the other. The dog being stewed is the cruellest detail: the family pet turned into the last of the food. The radio and medicines show a family trying to hold on to the outside world and to life. The point of the display is plain. The age of plenty ended in a nuclear war, and the people who lived in houses like this died in their cellars.
AND DIED The sign over the ruined half of the exhibit
CONTRAST
| Feature | HOW THEY LIVED | AND DIED |
|---|---|---|
| The house | "An entire white-stucco house," with lawn, garage and sidewalk | "an expanse of broken bones"; "A few steel supports jutted" |
| Food and water | "hot food on the table," "stocks of canned food," the "great freezer" | "a tank of decontaminated water, a dog they were stewing" |
| Machines | "stove and sink and washer and drier"; the Ford "that seemed made of diamonds and emeralds" | "a radio, medicines" |
| The family | "robot mannikins" that walk, talk and sing | "Only three mannikins had survived"; skins "seared with radiation burns" |
| Light and sound | the house "sang and glowed" | lights "dimmed, turned dull red"; "a rumble came" |
| Who starts it | A child: Ned "jabbed the button," then begs to "blow the house up again" |
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a museum piece that once was real. Dick's exhibit has a real model from the decade he was writing in. In Operation Cue, a civil defence test at the Nevada Test Site on 5 May 1955, the United States government built a small town of houses near the shot Apple-2, a device of about 29 kilotons. The houses were furnished, with clothed mannequins posed inside as families, cars parked outside, and stocks of canned and frozen food, some flown in from Chicago, to see what would survive. An earlier test of the same kind, Annie, on 17 March 1953 during the Upshot-Knothole series, was shown live on national television. So the twentieth century did literally build a lit, furnished house with dummies at the table and then blow it up in public. Dick's novel appeared in 1956. The washer that turns up later in the chapter is named as a Bendix; Bendix Home Appliances introduced the first automatic home washing machine sold in the United States in 1937, so the brand belongs exactly to the age being displayed. [Sources: Nevada National Security Site fact sheets on Operation Cue and Upshot-Knothole; Science Museum Group and contemporary New York Times archive on the 1937 Bendix.]
"Can I press it again?"
Ned's reaction is the most honest in the scene. "Gee," he says, "How do they do that?" Allen explains, as a professional who makes images for a living.
He then adds that pressing the button "starts the cycle" (the text prints "its starts," a slip for it starts). The explanation tells us the house itself is not real, only a projection. Allen sees through the trick at once because it is the same trick his own work uses: a packet is a projected image that teaches a moral, and the button is the moment when the moral arrives.
Ned does not care how it works. "Can I press it again?" he begs. "Please, I want to press it again; I want to blow the house up again." The child in this morally ordered world loves the destruction. He has no fear of the war; for him it is a show. It is hard to miss the link to Allen himself, who on Sunday night went into the Park and wrecked the state's chief image without knowing why. Ned is eight, and destroying things is fun. Allen is an adult who has been trained to make images that instruct, and some part of him wanted to blow one up.
"Simple... The house isn't really in there, on that stage. It's an image projected from above. They merely substitute the alternate image."
Allen Purcell
"The whirlwind is coming back to be reaped"
They walk on, and Allen turns to Janet. "I wanted you to enjoy dinner. Have you?" She grips his arm: "Tell me." He tells her in a phrase from scripture turned inside out.
The source of the phrase is the King James text of Hosea 8:7, For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirl‐
"The whirlwind is coming back to be reaped. And it's an angry whirlwind. Luddy took off with everything he could lay his hands on, right to Blake-Moffet. He's probably vice president, with what he brought."
Allen Purcell
wind. Allen sowed the wind on Monday when he fired Luddy in front of the Committee's secretary. Now the harvest comes back larger and angrier than the seed. He even guesses the price Luddy got: a vice presidency, bought with the Agency's ideas.
Janet's reply is one sad word, "Oh," and the narrator says she "nodded forlornly." Allen then gives his most frank account of what his business is.
This is a precise piece of self-analysis. The Agency has no assets other than its pipeline of ideas. It has no store of old packets earning steady fees, no back catalogue, no weight of habit. That is why it was quick and inventive, and that is why one defector can take away a year of its future in an afternoon. Then he names the deeper threat: "But that isn't the real problem. As an official of Blake-Moffet he'll be in a position to get back at me. And he will. Let's face it; I showed Luddy up for a sycophant." And he finishes with another inversion: "And that fun isn't." That makes seven examples so far, and the second from Allen himself, after Chapter 6. The pattern is now firmly part of how people talk in this book.
Janet asks: "What are you going to do?" Allen: "Defend myself, naturally." Then he gives a fair, almost generous description of his former assistant.
So Allen divides the work into two skills: inventing the seed and growing it into a full packet. Luddy was good at the second; Allen alone could do the first. That gives him his comfort: "So I can still run rings around Blake-Moffet, assuming I'm in the field a year from now." The conditional at the end is important. He is no longer sure he will be in the field at all.
Janet notices his mood and is uneasy: "You sound almost" and then, after a dash, "cheerful." He shrugs: "Why not?" and "It merely makes a bad situation worse." Then comes his image of the rival.
This sentence uses three images of death: a stone pulling them into the grave, the breath of old age, and dust. Blake-Moffet's packets are formula pieces in which the boy gets the good girl, the plot Chapter 2 imagined when Allen thought Sue Frost was the kind of career woman the hero of a Blake-Moffet packet would never propose to. Their predictability buries everything around them, Allen says. He points at the exhibit: "Like that house." The cycle has turned again: "The opulent
"In a way, we're ruined. We have no backlog; all we are is a bunch of clever new ideas. And Luddy took them... roughly, us for the next year. That's how far ahead we had it."
Allen Purcell
"Luddy was a hard worker, competent, with a good sense of organization. But he wasn't original. He could take somebody else's idea ... my idea ... and milk a great deal from it. He used to build up whole packets from the smallest grain. But I have him on the creativity."
Allen Purcell
"Blake-Moffet have always been the inertial stone dragging us into the grave. Every time they project a boy-gets-good-girl packet they blow the breath of age on us. We have to struggle out from under the dust before we can move."
Allen Purcell
twentieth century house, with its Ford and Bendix washer, had reappeared. The cycle had returned to its source."
His next line ties the museum to his own life.
He means his Agency, and perhaps his marriage and himself. The house in the exhibit was rich and alive until the button was pressed. The Agency is alive and inventive now, and it could be finished in a year. Behind that there is a larger worry that the book has been building since Chapter 9, when the teenage boys made him realise that Morec was not natural: this whole society could also be a show with a button.
The word "stone" will matter in the next chapter. Allen uses it here for the dead weight of a rival agency. In Chapter 11 a stone will appear in a very different role.
"How they lived... And died. That could be us. We're living now, but that doesn't mean anything."
Allen Purcell
"Take the job"
Janet changes the subject: "What happened at the Resort?" Allen answers briefly: "Nothing. I saw the Analyst; I recalled; I got up and left. Next Monday I go back." The capital A on Analyst is in the text, as if it were a title. He calls the session nothing, though it was the most revealing three hours of his week. And he still means to go back on Monday.
"Can they help you?" she asks. "Sure, given time." Then she asks again what he is going to do, and he answers in two short sentences: "Take the job. Go to work as Director of Telemedia."
Allen decides to take the most public moral office in the society within an hour of telling his wife that the man who japed the statue is still inside him and that no one can say when he will act again. "I see," Janet says, and then: "Why?"
His answer comes as a list: "Several reasons. First, because I can do a good job." She asks the obvious question: "What about the statue?" His answer is the honest centre of the chapter.
The aside about money is designed to show that greed is not the reason. Janet tries another angle: "If you're at T-M can Luddy hurt you more?" Allen splits the answer: "He can hurt the Agency more, because I'll be gone." Then a second thought: "Maybe I'll dismember it. I'll wait and see; it depends on how I do at T-M. In six months I may want to go back." He is ready to break up the business he built, or to return to it, depending on how the next half year goes.
"What about you?" she asks. "Truthfully," the narrator says, he answers: "He can hurt me more, too. I'll be fair game for everybody. Look at Mavis. Four giants in the field, and all of them trying to get into T-M. And I'll have one giant with a gnat stinging it."
This is the first time the novel says how many agencies there are, or at least how many large ones: "Four giants in the field," all lobbying the Director of Telemedia. That is the pressure on the job Myron Mavis is leaving, which Chapters 2 and 3 sketched. Allen predicts one change: one of the giants,
"The statue isn't going away. Someday I'll find out why I japed it, but not by Saturday morning. Meanwhile, I'll have to live. And make decisions. By the way... the salary's about what I'm making now."
Allen Purcell
Blake-Moffet, will have a gnat with it, Luddy, whose stings will be personal.
Janet sees through him. "I suppose," she says, "that's another of the several reasons. You want to tangle with Luddy head-on." Allen admits it.
"They probably expect that," says Janet. "Of course they do," he says, and goes on with a remark about Sue Frost: "One of their packets is enough for a year; I told Mrs. Frost that." Then he gives the strategic heart of his choice.
His reasons show two kinds of thinking side by side. The first is calm and rational: he can do the job, the pay is the same, time does not allow a cure. The second is hot: a former assistant has stolen his work, an old rival smothers his ideas, and he wants to fight both from the high ground. The narrative records both without choosing. It is fair to note that a man who has just been told he has a hidden self that defaced the nation's main statue is now reasoning in terms of a "showdown" and putting a rival "out of business." The fighting mood is real, and it sits uneasily next to his inability to explain his last act of aggression.
"I want to meet him, yes. And I wouldn't mind hitting up against Blake-Moffet from that position. They're moribund; they're calcified. As Director of Telemedia I'll do my best to put them out of business."
Allen Purcell
"As a competitor of Blake-Moffet I could run alongside them for years, hitting them now and then, getting hit in return. But as Director of T-M we'll have a grandiose showdown. Once I'm in, there's no other way."
Allen Purcell
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Allen's several reasons, sorted.
Competence. "First, because I can do a good job." The only reason he numbers.
Time. The statue "isn't going away," and therapy will not finish "by Saturday morning." He cannot wait for a cure, so he decides as he is.
Not money. "the salary's about what I'm making now." He mentions it to rule it out.
Revenge and rivalry. He wants "to meet" Luddy and to "put them out of business," meaning Blake-Moffet. Janet names this; Allen agrees.
Leverage. As a competitor he would trade blows for years; as Director, "a grandiose showdown." The job is a weapon as well as an office.
An exit. "In six months I may want to go back." He keeps the Agency as a fallback, or will "dismember it."
Unspoken. Nothing in his list addresses the risk that the japer acts again while he holds the post.
CONTRAST
| Allen's argument | What he says | What it leaves out |
|---|---|---|
| He can do the job | "First, because I can do a good job." | The question is whether the japer in him will let him |
| The deadline | "not by Saturday morning" | He asked for a week and the Committee cut it to four and a half days (Chapter 6); no cure was ever going to fit inside that |
| Money | "about what I'm making now" | Protocol will make him give up his housing too (Friday's thoughts) |
| The Agency | "Maybe I'll dismember it" | Its staff, Priar and Doris, have just spent a day on the inventory |
| Luddy | "one giant with a gnat stinging it" | The firing that started the feud was his own act |
| Blake-Moffet | "moribund; they're calcified" | As Director he would be their buyer, which turns rivalry into a conflict of interest |
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a Director who wants to destroy a supplier. Allen's plan is to use a public office to settle a private commercial feud: "As Director of Telemedia I'll do my best to put them out of business." In any real public body this would be a conflict of interest of the clearest kind, the sort that ethics rules treat as grounds to step aside. The earlier chapters already noted the closeness of the Agency to Telemedia when Frost first made her offer (Chapter 6's lens on covered relationships). Here Allen adds personal animus. The novel does not judge him for it at this point; Janet's comment, "They probably expect that," is closer to a warning than a rebuke. A reader may still notice that Allen's first aim for the job is to win his old fight.
Janet looks at something else while he talks: she "studied an exhibit of extinct flowers: poppies and lilies and gladioli and roses." It is a quiet line that makes her silence speak. She has just heard him say he will throw himself into a feud from the top of the state's information service. She looks at flowers that no longer exist. Then she asks the practical question: "When are you going to tell Mrs. Frost?"
"I'll go over to her office tomorrow," he says. "She'll probably be expecting me... it's the last working day." He adds: "Apparently she agrees with me on Blake-Moffet; this should please her. But that's another thing only time will tell." The word "apparently" leaves room for doubt. Allen does not know Sue Frost's mind; he is reading her approval into her earlier remarks.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: the leaver who walked out with the pipeline. Luddy was fired on Monday, collected his check on Tuesday, and by Thursday Blake-Moffet had "All the new packets, all the current ideas." Allen's response, that a claims court will fight for years and the packets will be "obsolete" by the time they come back, is the correct reading of any intellectual property whose value depends on timing. That is why the real controls for this risk are preventive, set at the moment someone leaves. The US standard for federal systems, NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, has a control called PS-4 Personnel Termination: on termination the organisation must disable system access within a period it defines, and revoke the person's authenticators and credentials; an enhancement, PS-4(2), adds automated actions to notify the right people and disable access. Banks have learned the cost of weak access discipline the hard way. In June 2016 the US Securities and Exchange Commission fined Morgan Stanley Smith Barney 1 million dollars under the Safeguards Rule of Regulation S-P after an employee, Galen Marsh, accessed data on about 730,000 customer accounts between 2011 and 2014 and moved it to a personal server; some of the data was later posted online. The SEC found that the firm's access controls on two internal portals had not been limited by business need for more than ten years and that it had not monitored or tested them. Marsh was sentenced to 36 months' probation and ordered to pay 600,000 dollars in restitution. The lesson for an enterprise architect is Priar's sentence turned into a requirement: "He knows everything we've got on tap" should never be true of a departing employee's access. A joiner-mover-leaver process that revokes access the moment someone is dismissed, and monitors bulk downloads in the days before and after, is the cheap version of what the claims court cannot provide. And the Agency's other confession, "We have no backlog; all we are is a bunch of clever new ideas," is the description of a business with key-person and pipeline concentration risk, the kind a lender or investor would price before backing it. [Sources: NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5, PS-4 and PS-4(2); SEC press release 2016-112 and Release 34-78021, 8 June 2016.]
Friday: a rented car and a five-minute wait
The final section jumps to the next morning. "The next morning he rented a little Getabout from a dealer and drove from his housing unit to the Committee building." A Getabout is a small private car. So far Allen has walked the lanes or flown the Agency's sliver; for this visit he rents. Readers should note the car. It will reappear.
On the drive Allen thinks about what the job will mean for his home. "Myron Mavis, he reflected, would be giving up his within-walking-distance apartment. Protocol required that a man lease close to his job; in the next week or so it behooved him to ask for Mavis' setup." In this society even an apartment is part of a post. The Director must live near his office, so Allen will take over his predecessor's flat, as an official house goes with an official job.
"As Director of T-M he would need to live the role. There was slight latitude, and he was already resigned to the strictures. It was the price paid for public service in the higher brackets." The phrase "live the role" is telling. A man whose career is making moral images will now become one. The narrator's word "strictures" and the phrase "the price paid" make clear Allen feels the cost. He and Janet, who wants open country and grass, will move nearer the centre of the city, not further from it.
At the Committee building everything is smooth. "As soon as he entered the Committee building, the front secretary passed him through. There was no waiting, and, within five minutes, he was being ushered into Mrs. Frost's private office." Compare Chapter 6, where Allen could only reach the Committee through a recording machine. Now he is expected and waved through.
"I'm so glad"
Frost stands to greet him: "Mr. Purcell. How nice." He replies "You're looking well," and they shake hands. He asks if it is a good time. "Excellent," she says, smiling. The narrator notes her clothes: "Today she wore a trim brown suit of some crisp fabric, unknown to him." In Chapter 2 she wore "a simple hard weave, dark gray in color." The brown is new, and it is the colour of the Cohorts' uniforms in the Park in Chapter 5. That could be chance. The detail "unknown to him" says that even her clothes are beyond what Allen can place, as if she belongs to a level of society whose fabrics he has not met.
Allen gets to the point: "I see no point in waiting until the last moment." "You've decided?" she asks.
Frost waves the apology away: "You should have time." Then her face changes: "And then her face glowed in a swift, beaming warmth of delight." She says, "I'm so glad." Allen is
"I'll accept the job. And I apologize for stringing it out."
Allen Purcell
"Touched," and answers, "So am I." The narrator adds: "And he really meant it." The narrator's guarantee of his sincerity is important. Under the rivalry and revenge of the night before, there is also real pleasure in being wanted for the job.
Frost laughs at herself: "Look at me; I'm as nervous as you." She asks when he can start. He thinks: "it would take at least a week to wind up affairs at the Agency." So he proposes: "What about a week from Monday?" That is Monday 22 October 2114. "She was disappointed, but she suppressed it." She wanted him sooner. "Yes," she says, "you should have that much time for the transfer."
Then she moves the relationship onto a social footing.
It is a sharp ending. Allen named Juggle the night before as the last and lowest of the society's approved amusements. The senior official who has just hired him says she is "quite a demon" at it and plays at every chance. She is a sincere and enthusiastic believer in the life Allen privately finds empty. And she wants to meet Janet, who has just told him she wants to go somewhere with grass. Allen answers in kind: "Fine," "sharing her enthusiasm." "We'll arrange that."
The chapter closes on that warm note. The deal is done. On paper, the hardest decision of Allen's week has been taken and accepted.
"And ... perhaps we can get together socially. For dinner some evening. And for Juggle. I'm quite a demon; I play every chance I get. And I'd like very much to meet your wife."
Sue Frost
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 10.
Two more inversions. Priar's "This really tough is" (line 23) and Allen's "And that fun isn't" (line 105) bring the count of the reversed construction to seven so far, counting Chapter 3, Chapter 6, the narrator in Chapter 8 and others noted earlier. Allen now uses it himself. The earlier judgment stands: it is a deliberate habit of speech in Morec.
"its starts the cycle." At line 93 Allen's explanation has "its" for "it."
"for awhile." At line 79 the narration writes "for awhile, at least," joined, as in Chapter 1.
"A whole day" of inventory. Allen reaches the office after his morning session at the Resort, yet the inventory takes "A whole day." The staff may have started before he arrived, since Priar says the tip came "this morning, before you showed up."
A remark not shown. Allen says "I told Mrs. Frost that" about Blake-Moffet's packets lasting a year. None of the conversations with Frost shown on the page contains that line. It either happened off the page or is Allen's memory improving on what he said.
Paraphrase for a banned word. The narrator's description of the museum's staged displays at line 63 uses a word on this edition's avoid list, so it is paraphrased rather than quoted.
Dashes. Janet's "Anywhere" line (67), "almost" before "cheerful" (111), and Frost's "And" before "perhaps" (185) are broken by dashes in the source. Quotations here split them with ellipses.
"Analyst" with a capital. At line 125 Allen says "I saw the Analyst," capitalised, as if a title.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 10. Fred Luddy, fired on Monday, has gone to Blake-Moffet with all the Agency's current work, "roughly, us for the next year"; legal action would take years, so Allen must out-invent them. He judges the Resort no practical help and must decide alone. At the history museum the twentieth century house, HOW THEY LIVED, becomes a ruin under AND DIED when a child presses the button; Allen explains it as a projected image and says, "That could be us." Janet longs for "open country and streams" and grass. Allen gives his reasons: he can do the job, the statue will not be solved by Saturday, the pay is the same, and he wants a "grandiose showdown" with Blake-Moffet and Luddy. On Friday 12 October he drives a rented Getabout to the Committee building and accepts; Sue Frost, delighted, sets his start for Monday 22 October and invites him and Janet to dinner and Juggle. He still plans to return to the Resort on Monday.
Behind the Wood Was Stone
The shortest chapter in the book so far, and the strangest. It is told entirely as a dream, and it never once uses Allen's name. A gray web closes round him; he screams and stars drift out of him instead of sound; he rolls downhill into a muddy furrow in a steaming jungle under syrupy moonlight. In the middle of the jungle stands a structure made of boards. With a metal wheel he saws through the wood, and behind it finds stone, unchanged, which fills him with awe. He plucks a round part from the stone, drags it across a vast grassy hill, drops it into a little parked Getabout as the sky begins to lighten, drives home through streets of dark housing units, hauls it up the rear ramp, and sinks onto the bed. Nobody sees him. His wife does not wake. "The city, the society, slept." He undresses and falls into a sleep with no dreams at all. Read with the chapters around it, the dream is a precise account of a real act.
TIMELINE
When and where. The night of Friday 12 to Saturday 13 October 2114, the night after Allen accepted the Telemedia job. The places, translated out of the dream, are the Park at night, the boxed statue of Major Streiter, the slope of grass beyond it, a lane where the rented Getabout is parked, the empty streets, and the Purcells' housing unit, its rear ramp and their room. The chapter gives only one time marker, "almost dawn," when the load goes into the car. The chapter runs to about 630 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Only "he": the sleeper, never named, who is plainly Allen Purcell; and his wife, named once as Janet, who stirs in her sleep and does not wake. Everyone else is defined by absence: "Nobody saw him," and "nobody woke up."
A chapter without a name
Every chapter so far has put Allen at its centre by name, even Chapter 8, which watched him through Malparto's eyes and called him "Mr. Coates." This one does not. From the first line to the last, the actor is "he." The only person named is Janet, and only once, near the end. That choice fits what happens. The man who acts here is the part of Allen that Allen does not know, the one Chapter 10 called "the same elusive personality, with the same switches to be pulled from deep within." The chapter gives that part no name because Allen himself cannot.
The chapter is also written in a different register. Chapters 1 to 10 are told in plain, often comic realism. Chapter 11 is written like a nightmare, all texture and sensation, in which ordinary objects appear in disguise. The reader has to decode it, and the decoding is the point: by the end, every dream image can be matched with something solid.
The web and the stars
"The dream, large and gray, hanging like the tatters of a web, gathered itself around him and hugged him greedily."
Narration, opening line
The dream is the subject of the sentence. It acts on him, gathers and hugs him "greedily," like a spider closing on what its web has caught. He is the prey, held. Then the first strange event:
Chapter 1 ended its first great memory with Allen lying on his back in the Park on Sunday night, "arms out, swallowing stars." Here the stars come out of him instead of going in, rise, stick in the web, and go out. The two images answer each other. On Sunday he lay under the open sky and took the stars in; now, under a gray web, his scream turns into stars and the web swallows them. A reader can take this as the feeling of a man whose voice is trapped: what should have been a cry comes out as light and is snuffed out by something overhead. It is also a strong picture of the week Allen has had, in which every attempt to speak plainly, to Janet, to Frost, to Malparto, has been caught and put out.
"He screamed, but instead of sounds there drifted out of him stars. The stars rose until they reached the panoply of web, and there they struck fast, and were extinguished."
Narration
Downhill into the jungle
"He screamed again, and this time the force of his voice rolled him downhill." The second scream moves him. Again there is an echo of Chapter 1, where the memory was of "the wet grass sparkling and slithering under him as he coasted dizzily downhill." Then the descent gets rough: "Crashing through dripping vines he came to rest in a muddy trough, a furrow half-clogged with water. The water, brackish, stung his nostrils, choking him. He gasped, floundered, crept against roots."
The next paragraph builds a jungle.
On a crowded Earth where, as Janet said in Chapter 1, the Park is the only place grass grows and the rest is all apartments and offices, this jungle can only be the Park itself, enlarged by the dream into a wilderness. The plants behave like people in a crowded city: they "pressed and shoved for water" and "drank noisily." And time behaves strangely: the jungle "altered through centuries of life." The Park, in a soci‐
"It was a moist jungle of growing things in which he lay. The steaming hulks of plants pressed and shoved for water. They drank noisily, grew and expanded, split with a showering burst of particles. Around him the jungle altered through centuries of life."
Narration
ety that has paved everything else, is the one place where a long natural time is still visible. The dreamer feels centuries pass in it.
Then the light: "Moonlight, strained through bulging leaves, drizzled gummy and yellow around him, as thick as syrup." The moon becomes a liquid, sticky and yellow. Dick packs the sentence with sensations of touch, the gummy, the thick, so that even light has texture. This is how a body half asleep might register a cold night out of doors.
The structure of boards
"And, in the midst of the creeping plant-pulp, was an artificial structure." The dreamer sees one made thing in all this growth and moves to it. The narrator describes it piece by piece, as if the dreamer were working out what it is by touch.
Readers of Chapter 5 know this structure. The police nailed "a box around" the japed statue, and When Allen went to the Park in that chapter he found that the police had boarded the statue up: "a square wooden frame, a gigantic box." In the dream it has lost its purpose and its name. It is only flat, thin, hard, opaque, made of boards.
His reaction is the first surprise of the chapter: "Joy submerged him as he touched its side." Joy, not fear. He screams a third time, "and this time the sound carried his body upward. He floated, drifted, clutched at the wood surface." The scream that first made stars and then rolled him downhill now lifts him. "His nails scrabbled, and splinters pierced his flesh." That detail will survive the dream. On Saturday morning he will find a scratch.
Then the one sentence in which a tool appears.
In Chapter 5 Gretchen told Allen that on Sunday night the japer "severed the head, somehow. With a power cutting tool, evidently." A metal wheel that saws is a cutting disc. So the dream is reporting a power tool, used a second time, on wood instead of thermoplastic. Where the tool came from, and how a sleeping man found it and carried it, the chapter does not say. The word "husk-like" makes the box an outer shell around a seed or kernel, and the next line names the kernel.
"Toward it he struggled, reaching. The structure was flat, thin, with a brittle hardness. It was opaque. It was made of boards."
Narration
"With a metal wheel he sawed through the wood and stripped it away, husk-like, dropping it and stamping on it. The wood broke loudly, echoing in the dream-silence."
Narration
"Behind the wood was stone"
The chapter's shortest paragraph is one line long.
Then the dreamer's feeling, which is the emotional heart of the chapter.
"Behind the wood was stone."
Narration
"Gazing at the stone he felt awe. It had endured; it had not been carried away or destroyed. The stone loomed as he remembered it. No change had occurred, and that was very good. He felt the emotion all through him."
Narration
This is not what we expect from the man who japed the statue. The dreamer feels "awe" in front of it, relief that it "had endured" and "had not been carried away or destroyed," and pleasure that it "loomed as he remembered it." The part of Allen that defaced the statue on Sunday comes back to it on Friday night with reverence, glad that it is still there and unchanged, and then takes a piece of it home.
Two readings are possible, and the text does not choose. In the first, "as he remembered it" means the japed statue, the version he left on Sunday: red, headless, the head in the outstretched hand. "No change had occurred" would then mean that the police have only boxed it, not repaired it, so his work is intact and that is "very good." In the second, the awe is real reverence for the founder's image, the feeling that years of Morec training have built into everyone, and the jape and the theft are the opposite pull in the same man. The novel has shown both pulls in Allen before. He believes in what he preaches in his packets (Chapter 2: "I'm not going to preach morality without practicing it") and he also wrecked the state's main image without being able to say why.
The narrator also calls the statue "stone." Chapter 5 said it was "a poured thermoplastic," and Chapter 12 will call the head "bronzed thermoplastic." To the dreamer it is stone, the material of permanent monuments. The word links back to Chapter 10, where Allen called Blake-Moffet "the inertial stone dragging us into the grave." The two stones may be one: the dead weight of the old moral order, which Allen fights in his trade and venerates in his sleep.
A round part of itself
"He reached out, and, bracing himself, plucked from the stone a round part of itself. Weighed down, he staggered off, and plunged head-first into the oozing warmth of plant-pulp."
Narration
The word "plucked" is used for fruit, which fits the husk image a few lines earlier. The round part comes away without any cutting, which matches what Gretchen described in Chapter 5: on Sunday the japer "Removed the head and placed it in the outstretched hand." The head has been loose for five days. The dreamer has only to lift it. It is heavy, he staggers, and he falls "head-first": an apt phrase for a man carrying a head.
What follows is the hardest physical stretch. "For a time he lay gasping, his face pressed against slime. Once, an insect walked across his cheek. Far off, something stirred mournfully." The small details give the dream its realism: the insect on the cheek is the kind of sensation a sleeper registers in real grass on a real night. The mournful stir far off could be an animal, a night bird, the wind, or a person.
"At last, with great effort, he roused himself and began searching. The round stone lay half-buried in silt, at the edge of water." He has dropped it in a muddy place. "He found the metal wheel and cut away the groping roots." The tool comes back, now used to cut away whatever holds the head. "Then, bracing his knees, he lifted the stone and dragged it away, across a grassy hill so vast that it faded into infinity."
The grassy hill closes the circle with Chapter 1. On Sunday night Allen rolled down a grassy hill in the Park and lay looking at the stars. On Friday night he drags the founder's head up one, and it feels endless.
The Getabout at dawn
"At the end of the hill he dropped the stone crashing into a little parked Getabout. Nobody saw him. It was almost dawn. The sky, streaked with yellow, would soon be drained, would soon become a hazy gray through which the sun could beat."
Narration
The Getabout is the car Allen rented on Friday morning to drive to the Committee building (Chapter 10). In the dream it is simply "a little parked Getabout," and the text does not say who parked it there. The implication is plain enough: he drove it to the Park, parked by the hill, and has come back to it with his load.
Three short sentences carry the plot: "Nobody saw him. It was almost dawn." And the description of the sky, yellow streaks soon to be "drained" to "a hazy gray," brings back the dream's yellow syrup moonlight in a new form, as the colours of night empty out of the sky.
"Getting into the front seat, he started up the steam pressure and drove carefully up the lane." The Getabout runs on steam, a detail that fits the novel's mix of high and low technology: autofac rockets bring food from the colonies, robot juveniles record the citizens, and a small rented car runs like a nineteenth century engine. He drives "carefully," the one word that shows a sleeper in control.
The housing units, where everyone in the city lives in single rooms like the Purcells, look like "jutting lumps of coal," and the narrator explains the comparison: "oddly hardened organic substances." Coal is life that has been pressed and hardened over ages until nothing living is left. The image is strong after the museum in Chapter 10, where the twentieth century house turned into "an expanse of broken bones." Seen in the dark by a man in a dream, the city of Morec is a fossil bed. Its people are pressed into blocks, and nothing moves.
"The lane stretched out ahead of him, faintly damp, faintly luminous. On both sides housing units were jutting lumps of coal: oddly hardened organic substances. No light showed within them and nothing stirred."
Narration
"And still nobody saw him"
At home, the hardest labour of all. "When he reached his own housing unit he parked the car" and the text adds, set off by dashes, "making no sound." Then: "and began lugging the stone up the rear ramp. It took a long time, and he was trembling and perspiring when he reached his own floor." The head of a statue larger than life is very heavy. He carries it alone, up a ramp, floor by floor.
"And still nobody saw him. He unlocked his door and dragged the stone inside."
This is the third time the chapter stresses that nobody saw. In a society built on watching, this matters more than any other fact in the chapter. Chapter 7 showed the juveniles, the small robot informers whose tapes are played at block meetings, and Mrs. Birmingham's board of wardens using them to judge what neighbours did late at night. Chapter 7 even charged Allen himself, as Mr. A.P., with coming home drunk at 11:30 on the Sunday night and uttering a morally objectionable word on the front steps. Yet on this night a man drives a car to the Park, saws open a police enclosure, carries off the head of the national founder, drives through the city and drags the head up the back ramp of a housing unit, and no machine and no neighbour sees anything. The society that watches everyone is, at this hour, asleep.
CONTRAST
| Dream image | What it stands for | Where the waking text confirms it |
|---|---|---|
| Gray web; stars drift out of him | Sleep closing over him; the cry he cannot make | Chapter 1's "swallowing stars," reversed |
| Rolling downhill into a furrow | Falling on the Park's slopes in the dark | Chapter 12: "falling among the flowers and grass" |
| Steaming jungle, brackish water | The Park at night, wet ground | Chapter 12: "The taste of brackish water, the wet presence of plants"; a muddy suit |
| Structure "made of boards" | The police box round the statue | Chapter 5's box; Chapter 12's "boarded-up statue" |
| Splinters in his flesh | Cuts from tearing the boards | Chapter 12: he "inspected a scratch" |
| "metal wheel" that saws | A power cutting tool | Chapter 5: "With a power cutting tool, evidently" |
| "Behind the wood was stone" | The thermoplastic statue of Major Streiter | Chapter 5: "a poured thermoplastic" |
| "a round part of itself" | The severed head, already loose since Sunday | Chapter 12: "a bronzed thermoplastic head" |
| "a little parked Getabout" | The car rented on Friday morning | Chapter 12: "The same Getabout, ironically" |
| Up the rear ramp; the door | His own housing unit and room | Chapter 12: the head on the closet floor |
"The city, the society, slept"
Inside, the tension breaks. "Unhinged with relief, he sank down on the edge of the bed. It was over: he had done it." The relief is complete, and the phrase "he had done it" matters: in the dream he feels he has accomplished something, carried out a task. On Sunday night, as Chapter 9's drugged recall showed, there was no moment of decision. Here, in sleep, there is purpose and a sense of mission finished.
"In her bed his wife stirred fretfully, sighed, turned over on her face. Janet did not wake up; nobody woke up." Then comes the line the chapter has been building to.
The sentence widens step by step, from Janet to everyone in the building, to the city, to the society as a whole. A system built on mutual surveillance and moral instruction has a blind
"The city, the society, slept."
Narration
spot every night, between the last lights and the first, and a man has walked through it carrying the founder's head.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: the hours when the watchers sleep. Morec watches its citizens at the block level, through juveniles and wardens, and yet "Nobody saw him," three times over, because the theft happens in the dead hours when the people who would read the signals are asleep. Real attackers plan around exactly this gap. On the evening of Thursday 4 February 2016, at about half past eight local time, attackers who had compromised Bangladesh Bank's systems sent 35 payment instructions over SWIFT worth about 951 million dollars to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The timing was chosen with care. In Bangladesh the weekend is Friday and Saturday; in New York it then ran Saturday and Sunday; and Monday 8 February was the Lunar New Year holiday in the Philippines, where most of the money was sent. The attackers had also disabled the printer that normally produced paper confirmations of SWIFT messages, so staff who came in found nothing to read. Most of the instructions were blocked, but about 101 million dollars went out: 20 million to Sri Lanka, stopped because of a spelling error in the recipient's name, and 81 million to accounts at RCBC in the Philippines, most of which was never recovered. The design lesson for an enterprise architect is that monitoring tied to office hours and human readers inherits their calendar. Payment systems need controls that work when no one is awake: limits and anomaly rules that act automatically, alerts that reach an on-call person in any time zone, and reconciliation that does not depend on a single printer. Allen's city had watchers enough; it had nothing that worked at four in the morning. [Sources: BBC, NPR, Reuters and Bloomberg reporting on the Bangladesh Bank heist, 2016.]
"Dreamless, like an amoeba"
The last two paragraphs bring him down. "Presently he removed his clothes and climbed into bed. He fell asleep almost at once, his mind and body free of all tension, every trouble." The week has been full of tension: the jape, the job offer, the block meeting, the Resort's drugs, Luddy's defection. Now, with the head in the closet, he is free of all of it.
The simile is precise and unflattering. An amoeba is a single cell with no brain, the simplest form of animal life. The man who began the chapter in a dense, symbolic dream ends it as a creature with no inner life at all. The words "he, too" join him to "The city, the society" of the previous paragraph. He sleeps like everyone else, now. The pressure that drove the night's work has been discharged, and he has rejoined the sleeping mass, at least until morning.
"Dreamless, like an amoeba, he, too, slept."
Narration, last line
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: what real sleepwalking looks like. Dick presents the night as a dream acted out. Sleep medicine describes sleepwalking as a disorder of arousal that usually arises from deep non-REM sleep, most often in the first third of the night, when that stage is most abundant. Episodes can range from sitting up to complex acts such as dressing, eating or leaving the house, and in rare cases driving; the person is usually hard to rouse, confused, and remembers little or nothing afterwards. Allen's night fits some of this and strains the rest. Janet places his getting up at "Around three o'clock," well past the first third of a night; the dream is vivid and full of imagery; and by Saturday morning he will have "remembered the night's sequence pretty much intact." Courts have accepted that complex acts can be done in sleep: in R v Parks, [1992] 2 SCR 871, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the acquittal of a man who had driven about 23 kilometres while sleepwalking, on the basis of non-insane automatism. The novel is not offering a case history, and it may be that Allen is in some state the medical categories do not describe, which is what Malparto will soon suspect. [Sources: Sleep Foundation and American Academy of Sleep Medicine on sleepwalking; R v Parks, CanLII.]
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: how long the night was. The chapter says "It was almost dawn" when the head goes into the car. The next chapter will put Allen's getting up at about three, from Janet, and he will tell Malparto he took the head "about three a.m." For present-day New York in mid-October, civil twilight begins at about 6:35 a.m. and sunrise is at about 7:05, so "almost dawn" would be well after six. That would make the outing three hours or more, which fits Janet's "You were gone a long time," the time it took to saw open the box and drag the head, and the line that carrying it up the ramp "took a long time." It does not fit "about three a.m." as the hour of the theft, unless Allen means the hour he set out. The calendar of 2114 and its clock rules are unknown, so this is a rough check only. [Source: timeanddate.com, New York sunrise and twilight, October.]
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 11.
One bed or two. The narration says "In her bed his wife stirred," which suggests separate beds. The next chapter opens with Janet "Beside Allen in the bed." Earlier chapters describe a single room whose furniture is reshaped by the morning tape, so either could be meant; the two lines sit uneasily together.
Stone and thermoplastic. The dream calls the statue and the head "stone." Chapter 5 said the statue is "a poured thermoplastic," and Chapter 12 calls the head "bronzed thermoplastic." This reads as the dream's vocabulary rather than an error.
Where the tool came from. A "metal wheel" saws the boards and later cuts away roots. The text never says where a sleeping man found or kept a power tool. It is a gap, not a contradiction.
Dashes. At line 215 the words "making no sound" are set off by dashes in the source; quoted here without them.
Allen never named. The chapter uses only "he" for its actor. Janet is named once. This seems deliberate.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 11. On the night of Friday 12 October, the night after he accepted the Telemedia job, a nameless "he" dreams his way through the Park as a jungle, finds the police box as a structure "made of boards," saws through it with "a metal wheel," and finds "stone" that "had endured," which fills him with awe and joy. He plucks "a round part of itself" from the statue, the head that the first jape had already severed, drags it to the rented Getabout at "almost dawn," and carries it up the rear ramp into his room while "The city, the society, slept." Nobody sees him; Janet does not wake. He falls asleep "Dreamless, like an amoeba." The splinters, the mud and the car will all be waiting for him in the morning.
The Cards Don't Lie
Saturday morning begins in warm sunlight and contentment, until Janet mentions that Allen was out of bed for a long time around three. His arms are stiff, his wrist is scratched, and the suit he hung up is muddy and torn. When Janet opens the closet she finds, between the shoes and the laundry bag, the huge bronzed thermoplastic head of Major Streiter. The dream was real. Janet blasphemes for the first time in their marriage, swallows a handful of pills, and asks what comes next; Allen does not know. He phones the Resort as "Mr. Coates" for an emergency appointment. The second half of the chapter is told from Doctor Malparto's side. With his sister Gretchen drinking real coffee by the window and mocking every step, Malparto puts his patient through a battery of tests for psychic powers: telepathy, clairvoyance, dice, precognition, will projection, duplicating a stone, levitation, passing a hand through a wall, talking to a lizard, turning a hair into a worm, healing a scratch, and dowsing. Every one fails. Malparto blames fatigue and defers the rest of his list, which runs to raising the dead and killing at a distance. Allen says the only thing he can do is steal, cancels Monday, and opens the door to leave. Then all the lights go out around him.
TIMELINE
When and where. Saturday 13 October 2114, the day of Sue Frost's original deadline, which Allen has already met. The chapter opens in the Purcells' room in their housing unit after sunrise and before eight, then moves to Doctor Malparto's office at the Mental Health Resort, from about eight through a session that, from its stated parts, lasts at least an hour and a half. The chapter runs to about 2,300 words.
CAST
People in this chapter.
Allen Purcell, called "Mr.
Coates," "his patient" and "the patient" in the Resort scenes; Janet Purcell; tenants in the hall forming the "bathroom line"; the Resort's receptionist, a "friendly, bureaucratic voice"; Doctor Malparto, through whose eyes most of the second half is seen; Gretchen Malparto, his sister; and, mentioned, Heely's staff, who have borrowed some of Malparto's apparatus; Sue Frost; and Major Streiter, present as a head.
"We're in charge, today"
The chapter opens in a mood the novel has not given us before. "Sunlight streamed through the bedroom, warm and pleasant. Beside Allen in the bed lay his wife, also warm and pleasant. Her hair had tumbled against his face and now he turned to kiss her." After the dark, dense prose of Chapter 11, the plain sentences and the repeated "warm and pleasant" feel like waking up.
"Uh," Janet murmurs, blinking. Allen says "It's morning. Time to get up," but stays put: "He felt lazy. Contentment spread through him." The last line of Chapter 11 said he fell asleep "free of all tension, every trouble," and he wakes in the same state. Something has been resolved in him overnight, though he does not yet know what.
Janet asks a question that only makes sense in their world: "Did the" and then, after a dash, "tape go off?" In Chapter 1 the tape in the wall turned the bedroom into a kitchen at seven a.m. It has not run, so it must be later than usual or a day when it does not run. Allen explains: "This is Saturday. We're in charge, today." The line is light, but it says a great deal about the society. On working days, it seems, a machine decides when the room changes. On Saturday the people do.
A misremembered paragraph
Allen caresses Janet's shoulder and says: "The pulsing fullness of firm flesh." Janet thanks him, yawning. The line is a quotation, or nearly. In Chapter 9, under the drugs, Allen relived the moment on Hokkaido when he opened one of Tom Gates's twentieth century paperbacks and read a lurid paragraph. That paragraph ended on "the pulsing fullness of her taut, firm flesh." Allen's memory has trimmed it. A few lines later he will also misremember its opening: he says "Bulging within the flimsy covering of her dress," where the original had "bulging within the torn covering of her thin silk dress."
The misquotations matter for two reasons. They show that the pulp prose Allen read on Sunday has stayed in his head all week, rising to the surface the moment he is relaxed. And they show what a memory does to a text over time: it keeps the rhythm, drops the details, and smooths the result. Allen's trade is writing; he is the kind of man who would notice. He gets it slightly wrong anyway.
"Around three o'clock"
Janet becomes serious. "Allen, were you sick last night?" She sits up quickly. "Around three o'clock you got out of bed and went to the bathroom. You were gone a long time." He asks "How long?" and the narrator tells us "He had no memory of it." She cannot say: "I fell asleep. So I can't say. But a long time."
Allen's first move is to explain it away: "You're thinking of earlier this week. You've got everything confused." He means Sunday night, when he came in late. Janet will not have it: "No, it was last night. Early this morning." She is now "Wide-awake," out of bed, and she asks the real question: "You didn't go out, did you?"
He thinks. "There was some vague phantasmagoria in his mind, a confusion of dreamlike events. The taste of brackish water, the wet presence of plants." These are the jungle of Chapter 11: the brackish water that "stung his nostrils," the steaming plants. Allen has the sensations but no story to put them in. So he does what he always does under pressure and turns it into a joke.
The image of two marble cones is taken straight from the same Hokkaido paperback. Then he tries to recall more: "He tried to recall how the passage had read." And he recites his trimmed version: "Bulging within the flimsy covering of her dress. Peeking through. Panting with hot need." The real dream, the jungle, has been overwritten in the telling by a pulp jungle. Allen's mind protects itself by turning a memory he cannot face into a parody.
Janet is not amused: "Exasperated, she caught hold of his arm and tugged." "Get up. I'm ashamed of you. You" and then, after a pause, "adolescent." She sees the joke for what it is, a boy's evasion.
"I was on a distant jungle planet... With torrid jungle priestesses whose breasts were like two cones of white marble."
Allen Purcell
The evidence on the body
Allen gets up and looks for his towel, and the body starts to report. "His arms, he discovered, were stiff. He flexed and unflexed his muscles, rubbed his wrists, inspected a scratch." The stiff arms are from dragging a head larger than life up a ramp. The scratch is from the splinters that "pierced his flesh" when he tore at the boards.
"Did you cut yourself?" Janet asks, "alarmed." The narrator answers for him: "He had." And there is more: "the suit he had left on a hanger the night before now lay in a chaotic tumble on the floor." He spreads it on the bed: "The suit was muddy and one trouser leg was torn." Chapter 1 began with the same kind of evidence, mud on his shoes and grass on the soles, and Janet then read the clue correctly: the Park. Here the clues are bigger and the reader already knows where they lead.
Outside, the ordinary Saturday goes on: "Outside in the hall, doors opened and tenants wandered out to form the bathroom line. Sleepy voices muttered." The housing unit has shared bathrooms in the corridor, and a queue every morning. Janet asks, "Shall I go first?" and Allen, still looking at his suit, nods: "Go ahead."
The head in the closet
Janet thanks him and opens the closet for a slip and a dress. She starts to say something kind, "You're always so sweet to let me" and her voice stops. "What is it?" he asks. She says only "Allen!" He "bounded to the closet and lifted her aside."
The paragraph is built for comedy and horror at once. "The head stared nobly past him at a fixed point beyond." In Chapter 5 Gretchen described the statue's pose, ending with "Head up nobly. Deeply thoughtful expression," and Allen added, "Looking into the future." The same gaze, now from the floor of a closet, is aimed past Allen at a fixed point, still looking into the future, between the shoes and the laundry.
"a great solemn Dutch gargoyle head" sums up Major Streiter. Chapter 8 tied the moral revolution to "The Dutch Reformed Church," whose stern spirit Malparto detected "alive even in this troubled heretic," Allen. A gargoyle is a grotesque carving, and the word drags the founder from heroic sculpture into something grotesque. The narrator's sentence does what Allen's jape did.
Janet's reaction is two words: "Oh God." She whispers it, "her hands to her face." The narrator then explains why it lands so hard: "He had never heard her blaspheme, and it added the final stamp of menace and collapse." In a society where a block meeting can punish moral faults, taking God's name in vain is unthinkable for a woman as careful as Janet. Her single oath is the sign that the floor has gone from under her.
Allen gives practical orders: "Take it easy." And: "Go make sure the door's locked." "It is," she says, coming back. Then she puts it together.
Her voice "shrilled." And the narrator confirms what Chapter 11 told in dream form.
So the dream images of Chapter 11 are matched here by plain words: the jungle is the "dark, deserted Park," the rolling is "falling among the flowers and grass," the structure of boards is the "boarded-up statue."
Janet asks "How" and then "did you get it home?" Allen: "In the Getabout." The narrator adds a dry comment: "The same Getabout, ironically, that he had rented to visit Sue Frost." The car he hired to accept the highest moral office in the state has carried the founder's head through the city. On the same day, in the same vehicle, Allen did the most respectable thing of his life and the most outrageous.
"On the floor of the closet was a bronzed thermoplastic head. The head stared nobly past him at a fixed point beyond. The head was huge, larger than life, a great solemn Dutch gargoyle head resting between pairs of shoes and the laundry bag. It was the head of Major Streiter."
Narration
"That's part of the statue, isn't it? ... Last night ... you went and got it. That's where you were."
Janet Purcell
"The jungle hadn't been a dream. He had stumbled through the dark, deserted Park, falling among the flowers and grass. Getting up and going on until he came to the boarded-up statue."
Narration
"And don't speak to anybody"
Janet's next words are flat: "What'll we do?" she says "monotonously, her face stricken, caved in by the calamity." "Allen, what'll happen?" He sends her to wash and dress, then gives one order more: "And don't speak to anybody. Not one d" followed by a dash and the rest of the word, the narrator printing the swear word in censored form, as earlier chapters did. Janet "gave a muffled yip," grabs her robe and towel, and leaves.
Alone, Allen chooses "an undamaged suit and dressed." And the narrator records a key fact: "By the time he was tying his necktie he had remembered the night's sequence pretty much intact." On Sunday's jape he needed Malparto's drugs and machines to recover the evening, and even then, as Chapter 9 showed, he could find no moment of decision. This time memory returns on its own within minutes. He now knows what he did. He still does not know why.
Janet comes back. "Then it's going to go on," she says. "Lock the door." "You're still doing it." Her voice is "thick, suppressed," and the narrator explains why: "In the bathroom she had swallowed a handful of sedatives and anti-anxiety pills." In Chapter 4 she went to the bathroom with "a collection of bottles" to take "enough sedatives to last her the balance of the night," and in Chapter 5 Allen told Gretchen, "Right now she's home taking pills. She has a fabulous collection." Each new blow sends her to the bottles.
That exchange marks the end of the hope Allen carried through Chapter 10. He told Janet on Thursday night that the statue "isn't going away" but treated it as a past act he would someday understand. Now it is an ongoing condition. Something in him can still act, and it acted on the very night he accepted the job.
Janet presses: "You'll have to get rid of it." "You can't leave it lying around like part of a" and, after a dash, "corpse." The simile is exact: a head in a closet, hidden, is what a murderer hides. Allen answers "It's safe enough," and the narrator gives his reasoning: "Presumably no one had seen him. Or, as before, he would already have been arrested." The words as before point back to the days after Sunday, when the absence of police at his door was his only evidence that nobody knew.
"It's not over." / "No... Apparently it's not." / "What comes next?" / "Don't ask me. I'm as mystified as you."
Janet and Allen
"You weren't drunk last night, were you?"
Janet now puts the two halves of the week together, and her summary is devastating.
Allen answers "No." "So that isn't it," she says. "What is it, then?" She has taken the explanation that Chapter 9 offered for Sunday, that Allen drank three glasses of sherry on Hokkaido before the jape, and tested it against Friday night. It fails. He was sober. So drink was never the cause.
Allen's answer is the next step: "Ask Doctor Malparto." He goes to the phone: "Or maybe I will. If he's there." The Resort
"And you took that job. You're this way, doing insane things like this, and you accepted that job. You weren't drunk last night, were you?"
Janet Purcell
answers in a "friendly, bureaucratic voice." He asks "Is Doctor Malparto there today? This is a patient of his." The receptionist says Malparto "will be in at eight" and asks who is calling. Allen hesitates, with a dash: "This is Mr." and then "Coates." The pause is a man reaching for his alias. He asks for "an emergency appointment," and says, "Tell him I'll be in at eight. I'll wait there until he can see me."
Inside Malparto's office
The scene cuts, and the point of view moves. "In his office at the Mental Health Resort, Doctor Malparto said with agitation": "What do you suppose happened?" As in Chapter 8, we are inside Malparto now, and Allen will be "Mr. Coates" or "his patient" for the rest of the chapter, with one slip.
Gretchen is there, and in charge of the mood. "Let him in and ask him," she says. "Gretchen stood by the window drinking a cup of coffee." She tells her brother not to keep the patient waiting: "Don't keep him out there in the lounge; he's pacing like an animal. You're both so" and she stops before the word.
Malparto's worry is practical: "I don't have all my testing apparatus. Some of it's loaned to Heely's staff." Heely is a new name, presumably another doctor or department at the Resort. The line tells us that Malparto has already planned what he will do: test. In Chapter 9 he decided to give Allen a Psi-test on Monday. The emergency simply brings the test forward.
Gretchen jokes: "He probably set fire to the Committee building." Malparto snaps: "Don't be funny!" She persists: "Maybe he did. Ask him; I'm curious." Her joke picks the Committee, the body Allen visited the day before to accept office. It is a wild guess, and it is closer to the truth than she knows: he has damaged the Committee's founding image, again.
Gretchen's account of herself
Malparto turns on her. "That night you bumped into him at the statue." The narrator says he "eyed his sister hostilely." "Did you know he had japed the statue?" Her answer is careful.
In the middle of it she "snatched up the dossier and leafed through it" to find the alias. She uses it with mock formality: "I was unaware that Mr. Coates was the japer." The phrasing sounds like testimony, an alibi given to an investigator. Her reason for being at the statue is the simplest one available: interest in an event without precedent.
The reader is entitled to hold this against Chapter 5. That night, after describing the jape to a stranger, Gretchen looked at him and said, "You're in a terrible state," and then "And it's my fault." She also gave him the folded slip with her brother's name. The novel has not explained either remark. Her answer to her brother here does not square easily with them, and the chapter leaves it at that.
Malparto's reply to "Nothing like that ever happened before" is a sour joke of his own: "Boring world, isn't it?" Then he walks down the corridor and opens the lounge door: "Mr. Coates, you may come in now."
"I knew somebody had. No, I didn't know ... what's the name you give him here? ... I was unaware that Mr. Coates was the japer. I went because I was interested. Nothing like that ever happened before."
Gretchen Malparto
"What have you done this time?"
Allen enters quickly. "His face was strained and set, and he glared straight ahead." "I'm glad you could see me." Malparto introduces his sister, "But you've already met." Gretchen says "Hello," sipping, and then: "What have you done this time?" "Malparto saw his patient flinch." The two words "this time" assume a series. She talks to him as if japing were a habit, which is exactly what Allen and Janet have just realised it is.
Malparto seats him: "Sit down." "Mr. Coates went obediently," and Gretchen stays by the window: "She obviously intended to stay." Then she offers coffee, "to Malparto's annoyance."
The coffee belongs with the other relics the novel has shown. On Hokkaido, Gates sold the twentieth century piece by piece; in Chapter 9 Allen remembered punching a slot for beer and getting a fifth of scotch that had perhaps "survived the war"; in Chapter 10 Janet offered "'steak'" for dinner, in quotation marks, and the museum showed "stocks of canned food." Gretchen's coffee is real, it comes from the army of the old United States, and it is "Almost the last." Like the sherry on Hokkaido, it is something genuine from before Morec, running out. Allen accepts it: "Very good," he murmurs.
Malparto begins: "Now... I don't as a rule hold sessions this early. But in view of your extreme" and Allen cuts him off.
"Extraordinary, Malparto thought." The doctor's first reaction is scientific wonder, the same delight that Chapter 8 showed when Allen's unique brain scan arrived. Allen goes on: "I took it home, hid it in the closet. This morning Janet found it. And I called you." Malparto hesitates over the obvious question: "Do you" and then "have any plans for it?"
It is the most honest answer Allen can give. "that I'm aware of" concedes that there may be plans of which he is not aware, made by the part of him that sawed the box open. Gretchen adds her comment: "I wonder what the market value would be." It is Tom Gates's question. On Hokkaido everything had a price; here the founder's head is treated, for a second, as salvage.
"Black and hot. Real coffee, too. From vacuum tins, an old U.S. Army supply depot. Here... Almost the last."
Gretchen Malparto
"I stole the statue's head... Last night, about three a.m."
Mr. Coates (Allen Purcell)
"None that I'm aware of."
Mr. Coates (Allen Purcell)
A unique psychological element
Malparto explains why he wants to test. "To help you," he says, "glancing irritably at his sister," "I must first gather information about your mind; I must learn its potentialities. Therefore I ask you to submit to a series of tests, the purpose of which is to determine your various psychic capacities." Allen is "dubious": "Is that necessary?" Malparto's reply connects to Chapter 8.
"The cause of your complex may lie outside the ordinary human range. It's my personal belief that you contain a unique psychological element."
Doctor Malparto
"The profile is unique," he told Allen in Chapter 8, about the brain scan. Now the uniqueness of the scan has become a theory: if Allen's brain is unlike others, perhaps his powers are too. Malparto "dimmed the office lights." The lights will matter at the end.
The ESP deck
"You're familiar with the ESP deck?" Malparto asks. Allen "made a faint motion." The deck in question is the set of cards used in early twentieth century experiments on extra-sensory perception, each bearing one of five simple symbols. Malparto explains the first test: "I am going to examine five cards... You will not see their faces, only the backs. As I study them one by one I want you to tell me what each is. Are you ready to start?" Allen "made an even fainter motion."
The narrator tells us what Malparto holds: "Malparto drew a star card. He concentrated." "Do you receive an impression?" Allen: "Circle." "That was wrong, and Malparto went onto the next." "What is this one?" "Square." We are told only two answers, and the verdict: "The telepathy test was a failure, and Malparto indicated so on his check-sheet."
Then a second card test. "This will not involve the reading of my mind." He shuffles and lays five cards face down: "Study their backs and tell me each one in order." This is a clairvoyance test: the cards are not in anyone's mind. The result: "His patient got one out of the five."
BY THE NUMBERS
The arithmetic of chance in Malparto's office. An ESP deck has five symbols, so a blind guess at one card is right one time in five. Over five cards the expected number of hits by pure guessing is 5 × 1/5 = 1. Allen's "one out of the five" is exactly what chance predicts. If the dice cage holds two dice, the most common total is seven, which comes up on average one throw in six (6 of 36 combinations); five comes up one in nine (4 of 36). Malparto suggests "seven, or five," which happen to be among the easiest totals to hit by luck. His numbers test gives "3-6-9" against a target of "7,842," a four-digit number with no chance of a match at all.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the deck and the dice are real. Malparto's equipment comes from a real research programme. The ESP or Zener cards were designed in the early 1930s by the psychologist Karl Zener (1903 to 1964) for J. B. Rhine's work at Duke University. A standard deck has 25 cards, five each of five symbols: a circle, a plus sign or cross, three wavy lines, a square, and a star, so a guess has a one in five chance of being right. Malparto's star, circle and square are three of the five. Rhine also ran dice tests for psychokinesis, the supposed ability of the mind to influence how dice fall. These began in 1933 to 1934, reportedly after a gambler visited the laboratory claiming he could influence dice; the testing moved from thrown cups toward mechanical throwing devices, and the first formal report, by Rhine and Louisa Rhine, appeared in the Journal of Parapsychology in 1943. The results were never accepted by mainstream science, partly because the effects were small and hard to replicate. Dick's 1956 readers would have known the deck and the Duke work from the popular press. [Sources: APA Monitor 2008; Duke University Libraries exhibits; Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research) on Rhine's PK research.]
Dice and the precognition hour
"We'll leave the deck for a moment." Malparto brings out "the dice-rolling cage and set it into motion." "Observe these dice. They fall in a random pattern. I want you to concentrate on a particular showing: seven, or five, anything that can come up." Allen concentrates for "fifteen minutes." At the end Malparto "compared the showing with the statistical tables. No significant change could be observed."
Then back to the cards, for "a test for precognition. In this test I'll ask you what card I'm about to select." He lays down the deck and waits. "Circle," says Allen, "listlessly." Precognition is the theory Malparto formed at the end of Chapter 9, after he learned that the Cohorts laughed at the japed statue. It gets the most time of any test. "Malparto handed his sister the check-sheet, and he kept the precog test going for almost an hour." The result: "At the end of that time his patient was surly and exhausted, and the results were inconclusive."
Inconclusive is a careful word. After an hour of trials the doctor's favourite idea has neither passed nor failed; he does not call it a failure, as he did the telepathy test. Gretchen hands back the sheet with a dry line: "The cards don't lie," she "quoted." It is a stock phrase of the fortune-teller's trade. "What do you mean by that?" Malparto asks. "I mean go on to the next test." She has read the sheet and seen nothing worth a word.
Psi-plus
Malparto asks if his patient can go on. Allen "blearily raised his head." "Is this getting us anywhere?" Malparto's answer moves the goalposts.
The failures have become evidence. If Allen cannot do the common psychic tricks, Malparto reasons, he must be able to
"I think it is. It's clear that you don't possess any of the usual extra-sensory talents. It's my hunch that you're a Psi-plus. Your talent is of a less common nature."
Doctor Malparto
do rarer ones. Gretchen names the new category with contempt: "EEP," she says, "Extra extra-sensory perception." Her joke gives the theory its true shape: when one level of the unexplained fails, add another "extra."
Each failed test makes Malparto's theory stranger, never weaker: the absence of ordinary powers becomes proof of rarer ones, and the battery ends by blaming the subject for the results.
The first Psi-plus test is "the projection of your will on another human." Malparto unfolds "his blackboard and chalk stick": "As I stand here, you concentrate on forcing me to write certain numbers. It should be your will superimposed over mine." "Time passed. Finally, feeling a few vague tendrils of psychic will, Malparto wrote: 3-6-9." The narrator lets us inside the doctor's head at the moment of self-deception: he feels "a few vague tendrils," and writes an evenly spaced sequence, the kind of numbers a mind produces when it is trying to be random. Allen: "Wrong... I was thinking 7,842." Whether he was really thinking it or made it up on the spot, the reply is a jape: a number so specific that no one could ever hit it.
Stone, levitation, the wall
Next, "a small gray stone." "I want you to duplicate this inorganic matter. Try to summon a replica immediately tangent to it." The test asks Allen to create matter from nothing, beside the original. "That test was a failure, too. Disappointed, Malparto put the stone away." A stone has followed Allen through three chapters: Blake-Moffet as "the inertial stone" in Chapter 10, the statue as "stone" in the dream, and now a small gray one that he is asked to copy. The thing he took last night was far heavier.
Then "levitation": "close your eyes and attempt" and, set off by dashes, "psychically" and "to lift yourself from the floor." "Mr. Coates attempted, without result." Then: "place your open palm against the wall behind you. Push, and at the same time, concentrate on passing your hand between the molecules of the wall." "The hand failed to pass between the molecules." The narrator's flat repetition of the doctor's words turns each failure into comedy.
The lizard, the hair, the scratch, the wand
"This time," Malparto says "gamely," they will test "your ability to communicate with lower life forms." (The text has a misprint at this point, marked [sic].) "A lizard, in a box, was brought out." "Stand with your head near the lid. See if you can tune into the lizard's mental pattern." "There was no result." Allen offers a dry explanation: "Maybe the lizard has no mental pattern." "Nonsense," says Malparto, whose "annoyance was growing wildly."
Then the oddest test so far: "He brought forth a hair resting in a dish of water." "See if you can animate the hair. Try to transform it into a worm." "Mr. Coates failed." Gretchen asks, "Were you really trying?" He smiles: "Very hard." Gretchen pushes: "I should think that would be easy enough," "There's not much difference between a hair and a worm" and she is cut off mid-sentence.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the hair that becomes a worm. This test is drawn from folk belief. Horsehair worms, the long thin parasitic worms of the phylum Nematomorpha, got their common name from an old belief that a horse's hair dropped into water would come to life as a worm, because the worms are often found in horse troughs and puddles. The American naturalist Joseph Leidy tested the idea and rejected it in 1870. Malparto's battery has moved from the Duke laboratory of the 1930s to a farmyard superstition. [Sources: Encyclopedia of Arkansas; Texas A&M AgriLife Extension.]
Malparto "broke in" with the next test: "we'll test your ability to heal." The narrator says: "He had noticed the scratch on Allen's wrist." The scratch from the boards becomes a test subject. "Direct your psychic powers toward that damaged tissue. Try to restore it to health." "The scratch remained." Gretchen: "Too bad... That would be a useful one."
Finally, "Malparto, overcome by abandon, brought out a water wand and asked his patient to divine." "A bowl of water was skillfully hidden, and Mr. Coates lumbered about the office. The wand did not dip." Gretchen gives the dowser's traditional excuse: "Bad wood."
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: dowsing under test. Water divining with a forked stick or wand is the oldest of Malparto's tests and the one most often examined in controlled conditions. The largest modern study, the Munich barn experiments of the late 1980s, picked 43 dowsers from about 500 candidates and ran 843 trials in which they tried to locate a pipe of running water hidden beneath a barn floor. The researchers claimed a few exceptional successes. A reanalysis by J. T. Enright in the Skeptical Inquirer in 1999 found that those dowsers did not repeat their success in other comparable series, and that the apparent effects were consistent with chance once judged by conventional statistics rather than methods fitted to the data. Gretchen's "Bad wood" is the familiar move of blaming the instrument. [Source: Enright, Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich Experiments, Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 1999.]
CONTRAST
| Test | Malparto's instruction | Result | Comment from Gretchen or Allen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telepathy | Read the star card in his mind | "Circle," then "Square": "a failure" | none |
| Clairvoyance | Name five face-down cards | "one out of the five" (chance level) | none |
| Psychokinesis | Make the dice show "seven, or five" | 15 minutes, "No significant change" | none |
| Precognition | Name the card before it is drawn | almost an hour, "inconclusive" | "The cards don't lie" |
| Will projection | Force him to write numbers | "3-6-9" against "7,842" | "EEP," before the test |
| Creating matter | Make a replica of a gray stone | "a failure, too" | none |
| Levitation | Lift himself psychically | "without result" | none |
| Passing through matter | Push his hand between the wall's molecules | "failed" | none |
| Animal contact | Tune into a lizard's mind | "There was no result" | "Maybe the lizard has no mental pattern" |
| Animation | Turn a hair in water into a worm | "failed" | "Were you really trying?" /"Very hard" |
| Healing | Heal the scratch on his wrist | "The scratch remained" | "That would be a useful one" |
| Dowsing | Find a hidden bowl with a water wand | "The wand did not dip" | "Bad wood" |
The list of remaining tests
"Depressed, Malparto examined the list of remaining tests" and the text prints the list on separate lines, like a form.
The list moves from parapsychology into the territory of the medium, the alchemist, the shape-shifter and the witch. Contacting the dead is the séance; turning lead into gold is alchemy; assuming other forms is the werewolf or the sorcerer of fairy tales; raining vermin and filth recalls plagues and curses; killing at a distance is the evil eye. Malparto's science has, step by step, become a catalogue of magic. The last item is the most disturbing. A doctor who believes his patient has a unique power is prepared to test whether he can kill.
Ability to contact spirits of the dead / Capacity to transmute lead into gold / Ability to assume alternate forms /Ability to create rain of vermin and/or filth / Power to kill or damage at a distance Malparto's list of remaining tests
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The ladder Malparto climbs.
Rung 1: laboratory ESP. Telepathy, clairvoyance, dice, precognition: the Duke-style programme, with cards, cages and "statistical tables."
Rung 2: Psi-plus. Will projection, creating matter, levitation, passing through walls: powers of the science fiction magazines.
Rung 3: folk magic. Talking to a lizard, animating a hair, healing by will, dowsing: the farmyard and the country healer.
Rung 4: sorcery, deferred. Spirits of the dead, alchemy, shape-shifting, rains of vermin, killing at a distance.
The constant. At each failure the theory rises a rung; no result is allowed to bring it down.
Malparto then closes the session with an explanation that cannot be tested.
The failure now belongs to the patient's subconscious. If Allen fails, it is because a hidden part of him does not want to cooperate. The explanation is unfalsifiable, but the novel also makes it oddly apt: a hidden part of Allen has been the problem all week.
"I have a feeling... that due to fatigue you're growing subconsciously uncooperative. Therefore it's my decision that we defer the balance of the tests to some other time."
Doctor Malparto
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: Malparto's battery and the problem of many tests. Malparto runs twelve different tests, gives his favourite hypothesis the longest run, calls an hour of null results "inconclusive" instead of a failure, and when everything fails, invents a new category and blames the subject. Each of those moves has a name in research practice, and each turns up wherever people test many ideas against noisy data. The more tests you run, the more likely one of them looks good by luck. Psychology had a public reckoning with this in 2011 when the social psychologist Daryl Bem published Feeling the Future in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reporting nine experiments on precognition, eight of them statistically significant. In 2012 Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French published in PLoS ONE three independent, preregistered replications of Bem's ninth experiment, with 50 participants each, and all three found nothing. Finance has the same trap. In a 2014 paper in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society titled Pseudo-Mathematics and Financial Charlatanism, David Bailey, Jonathan Borwein, Marcos López de Prado and Qiji Jim Zhu showed that trying many configurations of a trading strategy on the same historical data makes an impressive backtest almost certain and tells you little about future performance; with five years of daily data, they calculated, trying about 45 independent variants is enough for the best of them to be expected to show an in-sample Sharpe ratio of 1 even when its expected performance out of sample is zero. The same risk applies to AI model evaluation: run a model against enough benchmarks, prompts or random seeds and some will look excellent. The practical defences are those Malparto skipped. Fix the tests and the success threshold in advance. Count and report every test you ran, failures included. Hold out data you never touched while tuning. Correct for the number of comparisons. And have someone other than the model's author review the results; banking regulators call this effective challenge in the US model risk guidance SR 11-7. Gretchen at the window with the check-sheet, saying "go on to the next test," is a rough version of that independent reviewer. [Sources: Bem 2011, JPSP 100(3); Ritchie, Wiseman and French 2012, PLoS ONE; Bailey, Borwein, López de Prado and Zhu, Notices of the AMS, May 2014; Federal Reserve SR 11-7, April 2011.]
"Can you slay seven with one blow?"
Gretchen has the last word on the tests, in three mocking questions.
The questions go from magic to fairy tale to the playground. To kindle fire by will is one more of the powers on her brother's list. To slay seven at one blow is the boast of the Brothers Grimm's valiant little tailor, who kills seven flies with one stroke and then wears a belt boasting of it, so that giants and kings take him for a warrior. The tale is about a small man whose reputation comes from a misunderstood slogan, which is not a bad description of a man who writes moral slogans for a living. "Can your father lick my father?" is the oldest child‐
"Can you kindle fire? Can you slay seven with one blow? Can your father lick my father?"
Gretchen Malparto, to Mr. Coates
ish challenge of all. Gretchen is telling her brother, through his patient, that the whole battery has been a children's game.
Allen's answer is the shortest and truest line in the chapter.
It is a jape and a confession at once. Of all the powers on Malparto's lists, the only one Allen has shown is the one he used last night. "That's not much," says Gretchen. "Anything else?" "He reflected." "Afraid that's all."
"I can steal."
The patient
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the valiant little tailor. Gretchen's "slay seven with one blow" alludes to the Grimms' tale numbered 20 in their collection, Das tapfere Schneiderlein, The Valiant (or Brave) Little Tailor. The tailor kills seven flies with one stroke, sews himself a belt that reads Seven at one stroke, and sets out into the world, where a giant assumes the seven were men. [Sources: Grimm's Household Tales, Wikisource; VCU German stories archive.]
"Probably not"
Allen gets up. "I assume the Monday appointment is void." Malparto: "You're leaving?" "Well," Allen says, "there's no point sticking around here." He reaches for the doorknob. "We haven't got anywhere."
On Thursday evening, after the museum, Allen told Janet, "Next Monday I go back." Two days later he cancels. Malparto asks: "And you won't be coming back?" At the door, Allen pauses: "Probably not," he decides. And the narrator gives his simple reason, with the point of view moving back inside him: "At the moment all he wanted to do was go home." He adds: "If I change my mind I'll call you."
The book has given him reasons enough. The Resort's methods have produced nothing he can use. He has now carried out two crimes against the founder's statue, the second on the day he accepted the Directorship, and the only help on offer is a list of tests for witchcraft. He wants to go home, where there is a head in his closet.
"He started to pull the door shut."
The chapter stops there. Malparto had "dimmed the office lights" at the start of the tests, so lights have been part of the scene throughout. Whether this is the room going dark, the building, or Allen losing consciousness, the sentence does not say, and nothing in this chapter explains it. The words "around him" keep the focus on Allen, at the threshold, with the door half-closed.
"That was when all the lights went out around him."
Narration, last line
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 12.
A misprint marked [sic]. At line 431 Malparto's word for measure is misspelled in the source, which marks it [sic].
Missing full stop. At line 445 Gretchen's line runs "a hair and a worm On a cloudy day," with no full stop between "worm" and "On."
Missing colon. At line 457 the sentence "Depressed, Malparto examined the list of remaining tests" ends with no punctuation before the list.
A point-of-view slip. The Resort scenes are told from Malparto's side and call the patient "Mr. Coates" or "his patient," but line 447 says Malparto "had noticed the scratch on Allen's wrist," using the real name. The last paragraph also slides back into Allen's mind ("all he wanted to do was go home").
The censored oath. At line 283 Allen's "Not one" is followed by a censored word printed with a dash, as at Chapter 5's line 225.
Dashes. The source breaks many lines with dashes: "Did the" before "tape" (line 231), "You" before "adolescent" (247), "How" before "did you get it home" (279), "like part of a" before "corpse" (299), "Mr." before "Coates" (317), "Do you" before "have any plans" (359), "attempt" before "psychically" (423), and others. Quotations here split them or use ellipses.
Allen's misquotation. His "pulsing fullness of firm flesh" and "flimsy covering of her dress" differ from the Chapter 9 paperback, which had "pulsing fullness of her taut, firm flesh" and "torn covering of her thin silk dress." This is in character, a memory paraphrasing, not a typesetting slip.
Saturday hours. The Resort opens at eight on a Saturday, and Malparto says "I don't as a rule hold sessions this early." Nothing contradicts this, but it shows the Resort working on the day the tape in the Purcells' wall stays off.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 12. On Saturday 13 October Allen wakes content, with stiff arms, a scratch, and a muddy, torn suit; Janet finds the "bronzed thermoplastic head" of Major Streiter on the closet floor. The dream was the Park; he carried the head home in the Getabout he had rented to accept the Telemedia job, and he remembers the night "pretty much intact" but does not know why. Janet blasphemes for the first time, takes pills, and establishes that he was not drunk. Allen goes to the Resort as "Mr. Coates." Gretchen tells her brother she did not know Coates was the japer and went to the statue because she "was interested." Malparto runs twelve tests for psychic powers, from the ESP deck to dowsing; all fail, and he defers the rest, from raising the dead to killing at a distance, blaming fatigue. Asked what he can do, Allen answers "I can steal," cancels the Monday appointment, says he will "Probably not" come back, and as he pulls the door shut "all the lights went out around him."
Two Thousand Three Hundred Nineteen Pepper Lane
The lights went out at the Resort's door at the end of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 opens, with no bridge at all, on a bus gliding over sunny rooftops. Allen Purcell does not know where he is, how he got there or where he is going. A large, friendly passenger with an armload of shopping asks him whether he plays a game called Quart. Allen fixes on one fact, that he is not in the Health Resort, and works outward from it: this cannot be the Morec society, and it cannot be a museum exhibit, because a magazine across the aisle shows the right month and year. The passenger tells him the town is Chicago. Allen gets off in a leafy suburb, where a naked girl sunbathing on a lawn tells him to look at the ident card in his wallet. It says he is John B. Coates of 2319 Pepper Lane, the name he invented for the Resort. A flying cab takes him to a big house full of flowers, music and food, with a baby on the porch, and a woman runs in by the back door calling him darling. She is Gretchen Malparto, playing his wife. Through a long, sour, half-drunk afternoon she quarrels with "Johnny" about a party, their marriage and his mother's house, while Allen lies on the couch with a gin sling and finds that he likes it all. Then two voices, a man's and a woman's, speak close to his ear about a patient in total catalepsy who has escaped into a fantasy. Allen accuses Gretchen and her brother, calls the place a psychotic retreat, and is laughed at as a college sophomore quoting Bishop Berkeley. As he reaches for his fallen glass the wall behind it vanishes, then the whole room, then Gretchen. He stands alone in emptiness as darkness falls.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter never names the day. On the page it runs from the middle of a "Warm day" to dusk: the mantel clock reads "four-thirty" in the second half, and at the end "Darkness was descending everywhere." The place is a city its people call "Chicago," first seen from a glass-bottomed bus, then the corner of Holly Street and Glen, then a house at 2319 Pepper Lane, about two miles away. Where this Chicago is, and how much time has passed since Saturday 13 October, the chapter does not say, and this edition follows it. The chapter runs to about 2,400 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, who is called "he" and "Allen" at first, then "Mr. Coates" and "Mr. John Coates" once the ident card has been read; "the large gentleman" on the bus; the bus itself, which speaks "metallically"; passengers, among them a woman and two young women who get off; a girl sunbathing naked on a lawn at Holly and Glen; the cab, which also speaks; a baby on the porch whom Gretchen calls "Donna," watched by an agile sitter with a lens; Gretchen Malparto, who acts as "Mrs. Coates"; and two voices, a man's that the narration names as Malparto's and a woman's that it calls Gretchen's. Mentioned: Frank, whose party Gretchen describes, and "The tall, blond-haired one" she says she was found with; John Coates's mother, who owned the house; and Mrs. Birmingham.
"Rumble rumble."
The chapter's first words are two words of noise: "Rumble rumble." There is no transition from the Resort doorway where Chapter 12 left Allen. A reader moving from one page to the next has the same experience Allen has. One moment the lights go out; the next he is somewhere else, moving, in daylight. Dick does not explain the gap and the chapter never fills it in. Everything that follows is seen from inside that blank.
"The bus lifted from the stop and continued across roof tops." The view from it is of a kind Allen has never seen. "Houses sparkled beneath, in planned patterns, separated by lawns. A swimming pool lay like a blue eye." In the Morec world of the first twelve chapters people live one family to a room, lawns survive only in the Park and on remote colonies, and grass on a man's shoes is evidence of a crime. Here lawns divide house from house as a matter of course.
The pool is described as an eye, and then the description corrects itself. "But, he noticed, the pool far below was not perfectly round. At one end the tiles formed a patio. He saw tables, beach umbrellas. Tiny shapes were people reclining at leisure." It is the first sign of how Allen is going to deal with this place. He looks closely, revises his first impression and notes exactly what he sees. The pool that looked like a perfect eye is only an ordinary pool with a patio. The people are "reclining at leisure" on what is, as he will soon notice, a working day. Leisure has been a dirty word in this book since Chapter 1. Morec was built on the destruction of the Age of Waste, which ended "sin and corruption" and, in the narrator's words in Chapter 8, leisure along with them.
A bus that talks
"Four," the bus said, and the narration adds that it said it "metallically." The vehicle calls its own stops by number, and gives its own instructions: "Watch your step," and "Exit by the rear." "It ascended, and again houses sparkled beneath." At the next stop: "Five," says the bus; "Nobody got up, so the bus continued." Then again: "Exit by the rear," "No smoking. Step to the back, please."
Machines that talk are part of Dick's furniture. In Chapter 1 a tape in the wall moved the Purcells' furniture about and the stove stuck half out of the wall. Here the bus is polite, routine and slightly repetitive, the voice of a transport authority that has said the same things ten thousand times. It is also, though nothing in the chapter makes this a point, a machine that runs on a fixed route, makes fixed announcements and lowers itself to fixed stops. The new world is just as ordered as Morec. It is ordered for convenience instead of virtue.
Below the bus, at stop Five, Allen sees "a shopping section": "a clump of bright stores." The word bright matters. In Morec the shops of the first chapters are commissaries, and shopping is a necessity. Here it is a pleasure and a pastime.
The large gentleman
"Next to Allen the large gentleman mopped his forehead." "Warm day." Allen agrees, and then gives himself an order: "Say nothing. Do nothing. Don't even move." It is the instinct of a man trained by block meetings. Whatever this place is, the safest course is to give nothing away.
The large gentleman does not let him. "You hold this a minute, young fellow? Like to tie my shoe." He hands across "his armload of bundles," and talks as he ties: "Go shopping, you have to lug it home. That's the gimmick." Gimmick is his word for the cost of anything good, and he uses it twice. Shopping downtown saves money, he explains, because the stores have "Sales, you know. They buy in quantity." This is the language of a consumer economy, of bargains and volume buying, the world of the twentieth century magazines that Allen saw on Hokkaido in Chapter 9.
Out of a long paper bag the large gentleman lifts a jacket. "Nice, eh? Real cow." He shows Allen "a can of wax" and explains the care it needs: "Got to keep it moist or it cracks. Rain's bad for it. Another gimmick. But you can't have everything." In Morec, real animal products are rare enough to be talked about. In Chapter 12 Gretchen was drinking real coffee in Malparto's office, and in Chapter 9 a red-headed boy on Hokkaido boasted that on Orionus "they breed a real pig you can't tell from the original." Here a middle-aged shopper carries home a leather jacket on a bus and complains about the upkeep.
His next remarks are kind and also a little odd. "You feel all right?" he asks. "Seems to me you look like you might have a touch of sunstroke. A lot of people, they go out in the sun on a hot day like this. Don't know any better." He chuckles. "Feel cold? Nauseated?" Allen says "Yes." For a stranger to start diagnosing a fellow passenger is friendly; it is also, the reader may note, exactly what someone watching over a confused man would do.
Then comes a reference to a world Allen does not know. "Probably been running around playing Quart. You a pretty good quartist?" The gentleman sizes him up: "Good shoulders, arms. Young fellow like you probably be right-wing. Eh?" Quart is never explained, here or elsewhere in this chapter. From the context it is a team sport played outdoors, with positions, one of which is "right-wing," for which good shoulders and arms are an asset. In a book about a society that suppresses leisure, a sport with its own vocabulary and its own enthusiasts is a social fact in its own right. So is the joke buried in the word: in this place, "right-wing" is a position on a playing field, and politics has been reduced to a game.
Allen's answer is "Not yet." It is a strange answer, and a good one. It is neither yes nor no, it commits him to nothing, and it allows for a future in this world. It also suggests that some part of Allen is already willing to be recruited.
"He was not in the Health Resort."
"He looked through the window of the of the bus and then down through the transparent floor at the city." (The doubled words are in the source, and are noted below.) Allen realises he has no idea where to get off: "He didn't know where he was going or why or where he was now."
What he does next is the most admirable thing in the chapter. "He was not in the Health Resort. That was the sole fact, and he took hold of it and made it the hub of his new universe. He made it the reference point and he began to creep cautiously from there." A man who has just lost his bearings completely does not panic. He finds the one thing he is sure of and reasons outward from it, step by step. Allen is a professional maker of persuasive messages; he knows how much of what people believe is fed to them. His method here is an engineer's.
He then rules things out. "This was not the Morec society, because there were no swimming pools and wide lawns and separate houses and glass-bottomed busses in the Morec society. There were no people basking in the sun in the middle of the day. There was no game called Quart." Each piece of evidence is something he has seen in the last few minutes. And then the second exclusion: "And this was not a vast historical exhibit such as the twentieth century house in the museum, because he could see the date on the magazine being read across the aisle, and it was the right month and year."
The museum reference reaches back to Chapter 10, where Allen took Janet and the children to the history museum and its reconstructed twentieth century house, with sidewalk, lawn, garage and parked Ford, under the sign HOW THEY LIVED. A child pressed the button and the house became a ruin under AND DIED, and Allen explained to Janet that the whole thing was a projected image. He has seen, very recently, how convincingly an entire world can be staged. So he checks for a sign of staging, and the one he finds is a date. A museum of the past would show the past. A magazine with the current month and year means that this is happening now.
The method is careful, and it has a gap. Allen eliminates the two outside possibilities he can think of, Morec and a museum, and does not consider a third: a real, present-day place that is neither, staged or unstaged, somewhere other than Earth. Nor does he yet consider that it might be inside his own head. The chapter will push him to both edges in turn.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Allen's method on the bus.
Step 1: one sure fact. "He was not in the Health Resort." Everything else is built on it.
Step 2: exclude Morec. Evidence: pools, wide lawns, separate houses, glass-bottomed busses, people in the sun at midday, a game called Quart.
Step 3: exclude the museum. Evidence: a magazine across the aisle with "the right month and year."
Step 4: ask a local. "What's the name of this town?" Answer: "Why, this is Chicago."
Step 5: check identity. On the girl's advice, read the ident card: "Coates, John B."
What is left out. He never tests the one hypothesis the chapter ends on, that the whole scene is in his own mind, until the voices force it on him.
"Why, this is Chicago."
"Can I ask you something?" he says, and the reply is "Surely," with a beam. Allen asks the simplest question available: "What's the name of this town?" The reply is the first strange reaction anybody in this world gives. "The large gentleman's face changed color." Then: "Why, this is Chicago."
Why should a friendly man's face change colour at so simple a question? Perhaps because only a sick man would ask it, and the gentleman has already suspected sunstroke. Perhaps because the question is a test of the whole place, and the answer is rehearsed. The chapter gives no reason. It simply records the change, as Allen would have seen it. "Chicago" is a name from the Age of Waste, a great twentieth century American city. Whether this is that Chicago, rebuilt, or another place that has borrowed the name, is one of the things the chapter leaves open.
"Six," says the bus. "Two young women got up, and the bus lowered to let them off." "Exit at the rear. No smoking, please." Allen follows them off, not because he knows where he is going, but because they are going somewhere.
Holly Street and Glen
"The air smelled fresh, full of the nearness of trees." He takes a deep breath, walks, halts. The bus has left him in "a residential section; only houses were visible, set along wide, tree-lined streets. Children were playing, and, on the lawn of one house, a girl was sun-bathing." And then, in a book that has so far kept the body almost entirely offstage: "Her body was quite tan and her breasts were highly upraised. And her nipples were a pretty pastel pink."
The narrator's response is the response of a man raised under Morec. "If anything proved his separation from the Morec society it was the naked young lady stretched out on the grass. He had never seen anything like it. In spite of himself he walked that way." This is evidence of a different kind from the pools and the magazine. In Morec, as Chapter 9's paperback scene showed, even a lurid paragraph from a twentieth century novel was contraband. A naked woman on a front lawn, in front of children, in daylight, is the most complete proof Allen could have that the code he lives under does not run here.
The girl is untroubled. "What are you looking at?" she asks, "her head on her folded arms, face-up in the deep green lawn." (The posture is slightly impossible: head on folded arms suggests lying face down; face-up says otherwise. It may be meant as she turns her face up to him.) Allen answers with "the first thing that entered his mind": "I'm lost." She gives him precise directions to his own location: "This is Holly Street and the cross street is Glen. Where do you want to be?" His answer is the most honest line in the chapter: "I want to be home." "Where's that?" "I don't know."
Her practical solution is to treat him as a man who has forgotten his address: "Look at your ident card. In your wallet." The ident card is also part of Morec's world; people in Newer York carry identification. But Allen has not looked at his own wallet since he arrived, and does not know what it will say.
Coates, John B.
"He reached into his coat and brought out his wallet. The card was there, a strip of plastic with words and numbers punched into it." The card is described as punched, like the cards of a 1950s data-processing machine. Then the text sets its contents apart on separate lines, as if the reader were looking at the card with him:
"2319 Pepper Lane"
"That was his address, and above it was his name. He read that, too."
"Coates, John B."
Allen's response is three words: "I slipped over." The phrase does not quite say slipped over what, and the girl asks: "Over what?" He bends and shows her the card. "Look, it says John Coates. But my name's Allen Purcell; I picked the name Coates at random." He runs his thumb "across the raised plastic, feeling it." The name was invented in Chapter 6, when Allen first phoned the Resort and, asked for a name, "hesitated and then invented": "I'll be in under the name Coates." The Resort has since called him Mr. Coates in every session. Now the alias has an address, a middle initial and a plastic card.
The girl sits up, "tucked her bare, deeply-tanned legs under her," and the narration returns once more to her body: "Her breasts, even as she sat, remained up-tilted. Her nipples projected prettily." Her verdict on his story is "Very interesting." It is the response of someone either politely humouring a stranger or genuinely curious. Allen goes on: "Now I'm Mr. Coates." "Then what happened to Allen Purcell?" she asks, smoothing her hair back.
The next paragraph splits him in two on the page. "He must be back there," Mr. Coates said. "But I'm Allen Purcell," Allen said. "It doesn't make sense." Two speakers in one paragraph is normally a printer's error, and this edition has noted several elsewhere. Here it reads as deliberate. The narrator gives one sentence to Mr. Coates, who believes Allen Purcell is somewhere else, and the next to Allen, who insists he is himself. The man is arguing with himself, and the prose shows the argument as two voices. From this point the chapter calls him "Mr. Coates" more often than Allen.
The girl takes charge. "Sliding to her feet the girl put a hand on his shoulder and guided him to the sidewalk." She tells him there is a "cab-box" on the corner, that he should "Ask the cab to take you home," and that "Pepper Lane is about two miles from here." "Do you want me to call it for you?" "No," he says, "I can do it." He is proud, and he is wrong. "He set off along the pavement, looking for the cab-box. Never having seen one, he walked past it." The sentence is funny, and it is also a measure of how foreign this place is to him. He cannot even recognise a taxi stand. "There," the girl calls, "hands cupped to her mouth."
"Nodding, he pulled the switch. A moment later the cab dropped to the pavement beside him and said:" "Where to, sir?" The cab is another speaking machine, like the bus. "The trip took only a minute. The cab landed; he pushed coins into its slot; and then he was standing before a house." The detail of the coins is easy to pass over. He has money in his pocket that works here.
"His house."
The house on Pepper Lane
The house gets the longest description of any place in the novel so far. "The house was big, imposing, dominating a ridge of cedars and peppers. Sprinklers hurled water across the sloping lawns on both sides of the brick path. In the rear was a garden of dahlias and wisteria, a tumbling patch of deep red and purple." Everything Morec rations is present in excess: space, water, privacy, flowers grown for their own sake, slopes of lawn kept green with sprinklers. The word hurled is right. The water is thrown about, not measured out.
"On the front porch was a baby. An agile sitter perched on the railing nearby, its lens monitoring." The child-minder is a machine, a watching lens. "The baby noticed Mr. Coates; smiling, it reached up its arm and burbled." The baby seems to know him, or at least to welcome him. It is a small thing, and it has a large effect on a man who has never had a child; the Purcells have none, and a single leased room hardly invites them.
"The front door", which the source describes as solid hard wood, with brass inlay, "was wide open. From within the house drifted the sounds of music: a jazzy dance band." An open door is its own statement: no lock, no fear of a block warden, nothing to hide. Jazz is the music of the twentieth century and of the Age of Waste; Morec's broadcast culture, as far as the book has shown it, runs to moral packets.
"He entered."
"he recognized it from his research"
"The living room was deserted. He examined the rug, the fireplace, the piano, and he recognized it from his research." This is one of the chapter's most important sentences. Allen knows this kind of room. He knows it from research: from the museum's reconstructed house, from Tom Gates's hoard of old magazines and books on Hokkaido, from whatever study his Agency has made of the past for its packets. The room is a twentieth century American living room, and it looks familiar because he has studied pictures of exactly this. The reader can take that sentence in two ways at once. It tells us Allen is well informed. It also tells us that the room matches his expectations closely, and a reader may begin to ask why.
"Reaching, he plinked a few notes." He tries the piano as one might test whether a stage prop works. "Then he wandered into the dining room. A large mahogany table filled the center. On the table was a vase of iris. Along two walls were a line of mounted plates, glazed and ornate; he inspected them and then passed on, into a hall." Mahogany, cut flowers, decorative plates on the wall: objects whose only purpose is to be admired. "Broad stairs led up: he gazed up, saw a landing and open doors, then turned toward the kitchen."
"The kitchen overwhelmed him. It was long, gleaming-white, and it contained every kind of appliance he had heard of and some he had not." The museum's house in Chapter 10 had the great freezer and stove and sink and washer and drier. This kitchen outdoes it, with appliances he has not heard of. "On the immense stove a meal was cooking, and he peered into a pot, sniffing. Lamb, he decided." In Chapter 1 the Purcells' stove would not even come fully out of the wall. Here an immense stove is cooking real meat for a family dinner, apparently by itself.
"She was Gretchen Malparto."
"While he was sniffing there was a noise behind him. The back door opened and a woman entered, breathless and flushed." "Darling!" she exclaims, "hurrying to him." "When did you get home?" She speaks as if he were expected, as if he lived here and had merely come back early.
The description that follows is the description of a woman the reader has met. "She was dark, with tumbles of hair bouncing against her shoulders. Her eyes were huge and intense. She wore shorts and a halter and sandals." In Chapter 5, in the Park at night, the girl who walked with Allen and described the japed statue was "dark-haired, deep-chested, with smooth, tanned skin"; at the end of that walk she gazed at him "her eyes large." Then the narrator gives the identification its own paragraph, so that it lands with full weight:
"She was Gretchen Malparto."
She is the sister of the doctor who ran the psychic tests in Chapter 12, the woman who sat at the window with real coffee and mocked every one of them, who met Allen in the Park in Chapter 5, and who, in Chapter 12, wondered aloud about the market value of the stolen head. In this house she is Mrs. Coates, and she acts the part without any sign that it is a part.
"When did you get home?"
Gretchen Malparto, in the kitchen at 2319 Pepper Lane
Four-thirty, and the drapes drawn
The chapter cuts forward without marking the gap. "The clock on the mantel read four-thirty. Gretchen had drawn the drapes, and the living room was in shadow." She "paced about, smoking, gesturing jerkily." She has changed out of her shorts into "a print skirt and peasant blouse." The baby, whom Gretchen calls "Donna," is upstairs "in her crib, asleep." The narration does not say that Donna is their daughter, only that Gretchen gives her a name.
The clock on the mantel reads four-thirty; remember it, because the chapter has just given its only exact time.
Gretchen is in the middle of a complaint. "Something's wrong," Gretchen repeated. "I wish you'd tell me what it is. Damn it, do I have to beg?" She faces him "defiantly." "Johnny, this isn't like you." Johnny is the familiar form of John; she has a pet name for a man named Coates who, as far as Allen knows, did not exist a week ago.
"He lay on the couch, stretched out, a gin sling in one hand." A gin sling is an old American mixed drink, gin with sugar and water. A drink in the hand on a weekday afternoon is a long way from the three glasses of wine that put Allen in front of a block meeting in Chapter 7. "Above him the ceiling was a mild green, and he contemplated it until Gretchen's voice shattered at him." "Johnny, for Christ's sake!" He rouses himself: "I'm right here. I'm not standing outdoors." It is a curious sentence, as if being indoors were itself an answer to her charge. Perhaps it means: I have not left you; I am in the house.
"What happened Wednesday?"
Gretchen sits on the arm of the couch. "Tell me what happened." Then she supplies her own guess: "Is it because of what happened Wednesday?" Allen asks back, "What happened Wednesday?" and the narration says he is "in a detached way, interested." He is interested the way an anthropologist is interested. He has no idea what happened on Wednesday, because, as far as he knows, he was not here.
Her answer gives John Coates a past. "At Frank's party. When you found me upstairs with", she breaks off at a dash and looks away: "I forget his name. The tall, blond-haired one. You seemed mad; you were a little this way. Is that it? I thought we agreed not to interfere with each other. Or do you want it to work just one way?"
This is, in one speech, the complete moral negation of Morec. In Chapter 7 a block meeting took up yet again the case of a young woman clinging to her lease, then spent the evening examining Allen over three glasses of wine. Here a wife tells her husband, casually, that he caught her upstairs at a party with a man whose name she has forgotten, and reminds him of their agreement "not to interfere with each other." Infidelity is a private arrangement, and the only complaint is that he might want the arrangement to "work just one way." In this world adultery is a matter of marital etiquette.
The detail of "Wednesday" also gives this fictional marriage a calendar. Whatever day it is now, Gretchen speaks of Wednesday as recent and past. The reader who is keeping track of Allen's real week (and this edition has been) will notice that his real Wednesday, 10 October, was the evening of the block meeting. Dick may intend no echo; but Allen's real Wednesday was spent being questioned about his morals, and John Coates's was spent at a party where nobody had any.
"How long have we been married?"
Allen ignores the question and asks one of his own: "How long have we been married?" It is the question of a man testing a story. A real husband would know the answer, and so would a real wife.
Gretchen deflects. "This is a lecture, I suppose." She sighs: "Go ahead. Then it's my turn." "Just answer my question." "I forget." Allen, meditating: "I thought wives always knew." The exchange is short and very pointed. Allen has asked the most basic fact a wife could be expected to have at hand, and she cannot or will not give it. "Oh, come off it," she says, and walks to the phonograph. She offers dinner: "Let's eat. I'll have it serve us. Or do you want to go out for dinner? Maybe you'll feel better where there's people," then a dash and "instead of cooped up here." I'll have it serve us: the house itself, or some machine in it, will serve dinner.
"He didn't feel cooped up." The narration goes into Allen's mind, and finds a man measuring space. "From where he lay he could see most of the downstairs of the house. Room after room... like living in an office building. Renting a whole floor; two floors. And in the back of the house, in the garden, was a three-room guest cottage." The only way he can measure a house is by comparison with an office building, because in his world only businesses have whole floors. The "three-room guest cottage" has three times as many rooms as the apartment he shares with Janet, and it is for guests.
"In fact, he felt nothing at all. The gin sling had anesthetized him."
"Care to buy a head?"
Then Allen says something that should not make sense in this world at all. "Care to buy a head?" "I don't understand," says Gretchen. He explains, precisely: "A stone head. Bronzed thermoplastic, to be absolutely accurate. Responds to cutting tools. Doesn't that ring a bell? You thought the job was quite original."
Every phrase points back. "Bronzed thermoplastic" is the narration's own description of the head Janet found on the closet floor in Chapter 12. In the same chapter, after Allen confessed at the Resort that he had stolen the statue's head, Gretchen said: "I wonder what the market value would be." Allen's offer to sell is a reply to that remark. "Responds to cutting tools" recalls the dream of Chapter 11, in which a metal wheel sawed through boards to the stone behind them. "You thought the job was quite original" recalls Gretchen in the Park in Chapter 5, describing the japed statue to a stranger: "Quite original, and quite embarrassing."
So Allen is testing her. If this woman is Gretchen Malparto, she knows about the head and she once called the japing original. If she is Mrs. Coates, the question means nothing. Her reply gives nothing away: "Rave away." She treats it as nonsense, the talk of a man who has been drinking or is unwell. And Allen returns, without comment, to his earlier question: "A year? Two years? Approximately."
This time she answers. "We were married in April 2110. So it must be four years." He accepts it: "That's a good long time," he says. "Mrs. Coates." "Yes, Mr. Coates." The formal names are a little mocking on both sides, the formality of a couple who have quarrelled. They also, for the reader, mark exactly what is going on. He is playing Mr. Coates to her Mrs. Coates.
BY THE NUMBERS
The Coates marriage by the numbers. Gretchen dates the wedding to April 2110. If the novel's present is October 2114, that is four and a half years, which she rounds down to "four years." By the reckoning this edition has used since Chapter 4, Allen and Janet have been married about three years, since about 2111. The invented marriage is therefore older than the real one by about a year and a half. The fictional mother's house came to John Coates at some point before "two years ago," when Gretchen says they could have sold it at a good price; Allen's real mother, by Chapter 8's account, died in 2111. The arithmetic of Pepper Lane is consistent with itself, and close enough to Allen's own life to feel like his.
"belonged to your mother"
Allen asks about the house: "And this house?" The narration adds, plainly, "He liked the house." Gretchen's answer is the longest speech of real anger in the chapter. "This house," Gretchen said fiercely, "belonged to your mother. And I'm sick of hearing about it. I wish we had never moved here; I wish we had sold the goddamn thing. We could have got a good price two years ago; now real estate's down."
There is a world packed into this. John Coates inherited the house from his mother. He insists on talking about it, and his wife is tired of it. They argue about selling. There is a property market, with prices that rise and fall. Allen's answer is the cheerful optimism of a man who has never owned anything: "It'll go up. It always does." In Morec, as Chapter 1 explained, Allen's single room is a lease "deeded to him by his family," hard won and always at risk. The idea of property as an investment that goes up and down with the market has no place in that world.
"Glaring at him, Gretchen strode across the living room to the hall." "I'll be upstairs, changing for dinner. Tell it to serve." Allen says one word: "Serve." It is the shortest line in the chapter and the clearest sign that he has accepted the house's rules. He is giving orders to a machine to bring dinner, as John Coates would. "With a snort of exasperation, Gretchen left. He heard the click of her heels on the stairs and then that, too, faded."
"Like heaven"
Alone, Allen takes stock. "The house was lovely: it was spacious, luxuriously furnished, solidly built, and modern. It would last a century. The garden was full of flowers and the freezer was full of food." Then the narration names what the house means to him: "Like heaven, he thought. Like a vision of the after-reward, for all the years of public service. For all the sacrifice and struggle, bickerings and Mrs. Birmingham. The ordeal of the block meetings. The tension and sternness of the Morec society."
Mrs. Birmingham, his block's chairwoman and chief accuser in Chapter 7, has become a common noun for everything Morec costs him. The phrase "the after-reward" is a sharp one. Morec, like the Puritan societies it echoes, asks for sacrifice now in exchange for a reward that is always later. Here is the reward, without the waiting, and without having to die.
"A part of him reached out to this, and he knew what that part was named. John Coates was now in his own world, and it was the antithesis of Morec."
The narrator, on Allen at Pepper Lane
This is the hinge of the chapter. "A part of him reached out to this, and he knew what that part was named." That part is named John Coates. The name Allen invented on the telephone in Chapter 6, to hide himself from his own society, has become a person with a world of his own, and that world is "the antithesis of Morec." Point by point, the chapter has built the opposite of everything the first twelve chapters described.
The table is the chapter's argument. Dick does not let his hero, or the reader, rest comfortably in either column. Morec is cramped, prying and joyless. Pepper Lane is comfortable, and its comfort is a little empty: a wife who cannot remember when she married, a quarrel over a forgotten lover's name, a husband who feels nothing because a drink has numbed him.
CONTRAST
| Morec, as the first twelve chapters show it | Pepper Lane, as Chapter 13 shows it |
|---|---|
| One room per family, leased, "hard won" | A big house, two floors, a "three-room guest cottage" |
| Grass on shoes is evidence of a crime | Sprinklers on "sloping lawns"; people lie on the grass |
| Walking as a virtue; commute lanes | Glass-bottomed busses, a cab that flies to the door |
| The body kept out of sight; a lurid paperback is contraband | A naked girl sunbathing on a front lawn |
| Three glasses of wine bring a block meeting | A gin sling on the couch in the afternoon |
| Adultery is the gravest charge | "we agreed not to interfere with each other" |
| Moral packets on Telemedia | "a jazzy dance band" on the phonograph |
| Commissary food, a stove stuck in the wall | Lamb on an "immense stove"; a freezer "full of food" |
| Leisure ended with the Age of Waste | "people reclining at leisure" by a pool at midday |
| Reward deferred for "years of public service" | "Like heaven": the reward now |
The voices
Then, with no warning: "Close to his ear, a voice said:" "There remains some island of ego." Then "A second voice, a woman's," answers: "But submerged."
The conversation that follows is about him. "Totally withdrawn," the man says. "The shock of failure. When the Psi-testing collapsed. He was at the edge of the Resort, starting back out. And he couldn't." The voice describes, accurately, the end of Chapter 12: the failed battery of psychic tests, and Allen pulling the door shut to leave. The woman asks: "Isn't there a better solution?" The man: "He needed one at that instant. He couldn't return to Morec, and he had found no help at the Resort. For that I'm partly to blame; I wasted time on the testing."
"You thought it would help." The woman "seemed to be moving nearer." "Can he hear us?" "I doubt it. There's no way to tell. The catalepsy is complete, so he can't signal." Catalepsy is a state of rigid immobility in which a patient does not respond. The voice is telling the woman that Allen is lying somewhere, rigid and silent, unable to show that he can hear.
"How long will it last?" "Hard to say. Days, weeks, maybe the balance of his life." The narration names the speaker as the voice fades: "Malparto's voice seemed to recede, and he strained to catch it." "Maybe we should inform his wife." The woman asks the question a reader wants asked: "Can you tell anything about his inner world?" And the narration names her too: "Gretchen, too, was dimming." "What kind of fantasy is he lost in?" The last answer is two phrases: "An escape." "The voice vanished, then momentarily returned." "Time will tell." "It was gone."
The theory the voices give is coherent. A man under unbearable pressure, unable to return to his society and denied help by his doctors, retreats into a fantasy where the pressure does not exist. The fantasy is built from what he knows: the twentieth century of his research, the name he invented, and the woman he has met. On this reading Pepper Lane is the inside of Allen's mind, and the story of the last hour is a dream more complete than the one in Chapter 11.
"Hard to say. Days, weeks, maybe the balance of his life."
Doctor Malparto's voice, on how long the catalepsy will last
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: two readings, and the evidence for each. At this point the chapter supports two explanations, and a careful reader should hold both. Reading A: a psychotic retreat. The voices say so, in clinical language. The scene began without transition from the Resort doorway. Its world is shaped by Allen's research, his alias and his acquaintances, and he "recognized it from his research." Gretchen cannot say when they married. The house is everything Morec denies him, "Like heaven," exactly as a wish-fulfilment would be. Reading B: a real place, staged. The voices speak "Close to his ear," as a sound would, and fade like a sound, not a thought. They describe the patient as unable to hear, yet the woman's voice asks whether he can. The bus, the girl and the cab all behave with the indifference of things outside him. The large gentleman's face "changed color" at a simple question. The ident card is physical: he feels "the raised plastic" and pays the cab in coins. Gretchen's first words, "When did you get home?", treat him as expected. And when he accuses her she does not deny the voices; she changes the subject to philosophy. The chapter does not decide between these readings, and this edition will not decide for it. What the text does settle is that Allen himself cannot tell from inside, and that both readings put Gretchen and her brother at the centre.
"It was you and your brother."
"Struggling from the couch, Mr. John Coates shouted:" "Did you hear them? Did you?" The narration uses the full name of the alias at the very moment he tries to break out of it. "At the top of the stairs Gretchen appeared, hairbrush in one hand, stockings over her arm." "What's the matter?" The hairbrush and stockings are the props of a woman changing for dinner.
"He appealed in despair." "It was you and your brother. Couldn't you hear them? This is a", and he stops at a dash. "He broke off." "A what?" she says, "calmly" coming down. "What are you talking about?"
He has knocked his glass over getting up. "A pool had formed where his drink glass had fallen; he bent down to sop it up," and as he bends he says it: "I have news for you," he said. "This isn't real. I'm sick; this is a psychotic retreat." In the opening paragraph a swimming pool lay like a blue eye below the bus. At the end a small pool of spilled gin lies on the floor of the living room. The word is the same, and the scale has shrunk from a vision of leisure to a mess to be mopped up.
What he says is the boldest thing a character can say inside a story: this is not real. And Gretchen's reply is withering. "I'm surprised at you," she said. "Really, I am. You sound like a college sophomore. Solipsism", a dash, "skepticism. Bishop Berkeley, all that ultimate-reality stuff."
Note what she does and does not do. She does not say that she heard no voices. She does not say what brother? She treats the claim that the world is unreal as an undergraduate's philosophy, and names the philosopher every undergraduate meets first.
"You sound like a college sophomore. Solipsism... skepticism. Bishop Berkeley, all that ultimate-reality stuff."
Gretchen, as Mrs. Coates
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: Berkeley was not a solipsist. George Berkeley (1685 to 1753), the Irish philosopher, published A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 and revised it in 1734, the year he was made Bishop of Cloyne. His famous principle is esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived: ordinary objects, he argued, are collections of ideas and cannot exist apart from a mind that perceives them. He denied that matter exists, a position called immaterialism. Solipsism is the much stronger view that only one's own mind is certain to exist. Berkeley rejected that view. In his system things go on existing when no human perceives them because God perceives them; in the Treatise he writes that his table would still exist if he left his study, because if he were there he could perceive it or another spirit actually does. Gretchen's "Solipsism... skepticism. Bishop Berkeley" runs three different positions together, as a sophomore might, and Dick may intend the muddle to be hers. The joke on Allen is sharper than the muddle. He has just claimed, in effect, that this house exists only in his perception, and in the next sentence it disappears while he is looking straight at it, which is the opposite of what Berkeley's principle would predict. [Sources: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry on George Berkeley; English Philosophical Texts Online, Berkeley, Principles, sections 3 to 4; Humanities LibreTexts, Modern Philosophy, chapter on Berkeley.]
The wall vanishes
"As his fingers touched the drink glass, the wall behind it vanished." The sentence makes the two events simultaneous. His hand touches the glass; the wall goes.
"Still stooping, he saw out into the world beyond. He saw the street, other houses. He was afraid to lift his head. The mantel and fireplace, the rug and deep chairs... even the lamp and bric-a-brac, all were gone. Only a void. Emptiness." He is afraid to lift his head, as a child is afraid to look at what he fears. The objects vanish in the order he notices them, from the mantel and fireplace he first examined when he entered, to the lamp and the ornaments.
What has not vanished is as important as what has. The street remains, and so do "other houses." This is not the end of the world; it is the end of this room.
Then Gretchen speaks again, and her line is one of the strangest in the book. "There it is," Gretchen said. "Right by your hand." She is talking about the glass. She speaks as if nothing had happened, as if the only thing that mattered were helping him find what he dropped. And as she says it, the glass is gone. "He saw no glass, now; it had vanished with the room. In spite of himself, he turned his head. There was nothing behind him. Gretchen was gone, too."
"He was standing alone in emptiness. Only the next house, a long way off, remained. Along the street a car moved, followed by a second. At a neighboring house a curtain was drawn. Darkness was descending everywhere." The details are mundane and therefore terrible. Cars go by. A neighbour draws a curtain. The ordinary evening of an ordinary suburb continues around a man standing in a vanished living room.
The chapter ends where Chapter 12 ended, with Allen alone and the light going. In Chapter 12 the lights went out in an instant as he pulled the Resort door shut. Here darkness descends gradually over a whole street. The first darkness took him out of Morec. The second leaves him in this other world, with no wife, no house, no doctor and no explanation.
"There was no response. Only silence."
The last lines of Chapter 13
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Three movements, each ending in a loss of bearings.
Movement 1: the bus (lines 5 to 49). Allen is lost in space. He anchors himself on one fact and reasons outward. Result: "Why, this is Chicago."
Movement 2: the girl and the card (lines 51 to 103). Allen is lost in identity. A card tells him who he is. Result: "Coates, John B." and "His house."
Movement 3: the house and Gretchen (lines 105 to 233). Allen is lost in reality itself. He accepts the house, then the voices tell him it is a fantasy, he says so, and the room vanishes. Result: "Only silence."
The pattern. Each movement begins with Allen collecting evidence and ends with a fact that knocks away the ground he has just built. The third time, there is no ground left.
Dick wrote this novel in 1955, early in a career that would return again and again to the idea of a world built around one person, a world that looks solid until something in it slips. In Time Out of Joint, published by J. B. Lippincott in 1959 and the twelfth volume of this series, Ragle Gumm lives in an apparently ordinary 1950s American town that turns out to have been constructed around him. Chapter 13 of The Man Who Japed is an early, compressed version of the same image: a pleasant mid-century suburb, a man who recognises every object in it and belongs nowhere in it, and a wall that is not there when he touches it. This edition notes the kinship without assuming that the explanation will be the same.
What the chapter shows about Allen
Allen at his best is in the first third of the chapter. Lost, sick and frightened, he looks carefully, rules things out, and builds a working picture from the evidence. His instinct to "Say nothing. Do nothing" protects him on the bus. His question about the town is the right one. When he reads the card, he says out loud the truth that the card contradicts: "my name's Allen Purcell."
Allen at his weakest is in the middle third. He accepts the house. He lies on the couch and lets a drink anaesthetise him. He tells himself it is "Like heaven." He gives the order "Serve." The narrator does not condemn him; the chapter makes the temptation real. Pepper Lane offers him what Morec has spent twelve chapters refusing him: space, ease, privacy, a garden, a child who smiles at him. The chapter's sharpest sentence about him is the one that says "A part of him reached out to this, and he knew what that part was named." He knows that part is named John Coates, and he knows that John Coates is his own invention.
In the final third he recovers his nerve, though in a confused way. The voices accuse him of being lost in fantasy, and he accepts the diagnosis too readily: "I'm sick; this is a psychotic retreat." His accusation that it was "you and your brother" is a sharper perception than his diagnosis of himself, and he does not follow it up. The chapter leaves him with the evidence of both, and no way yet to choose.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: a synthetic identity is a life built around a card. Allen invented the name Coates on the telephone in Chapter 6. By Chapter 13 it has a middle initial, an address, a punched ident card, a house inherited from a mother, a wife with a wedding date, a baby, a party last Wednesday, and a neighbourhood that will direct a stranger to the right street. That is close to what financial-crime specialists call a synthetic identity. In a July 2019 white paper the US Federal Reserve gave the generally agreed definition of synthetic identity fraud as a crime in which perpetrators combine fictitious and sometimes real information, such as Social Security numbers and names, to create new identities; it distinguished identity fabrication (entirely invented), manipulation (slightly altered real details) and compilation (real and fake details combined). The Federal Reserve's announcement of the paper noted that such identities can escape identity verification and credit screening, and that fraudsters build up their creditworthiness over time before they bust out, defaulting and vanishing. Pepper Lane is a compilation: a real man, an invented name, a manufactured history. Two lessons carry over to banks and to any system that verifies people. First, a single strong credential, like Allen's plastic card, proves only that a credential exists; the defences that work look for consistency across independent sources, the way Allen checks the card against his own memory and finds a mismatch. Second, the most convincing synthetic identities are the ones with history, a marriage date and a house with a back story, which is why fraud teams look hard at identities whose history is detailed but recent and thinly connected to anyone outside it. Gretchen's "I forget," when asked her own wedding date, is the kind of small inconsistency a good investigator writes down. [Sources: Federal Reserve, Synthetic Identity Fraud in the U.S. Payment System, July 2019; Federal Reserve Board press release, 9 July 2019; FedPayments Improvement, How is a Synthetic Identity Created?]
Questions the chapter raises
The chapter asks more than it answers, and this edition lists the questions without answering ahead of the text.
- How did Allen get here? The last thing he knew was the Resort door. The first thing he knows is a moving bus.
- Where is this Chicago? The bus, the girl, the cab and the large gentleman are all, as far as Allen can tell, real and outside him. The magazine is dated in the present.
- Who made the card? An ident card in the name of his alias is in his own wallet.
- Why Gretchen? She is the only person from his life who appears here, and she plays a part without stepping out of it once.
- Whose voices were those? The narration names them as Malparto's and Gretchen's. One of them asks whether he can hear, while Gretchen is upstairs.
- What made the room go? It vanished as his fingers touched the glass, and the street outside did not.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 13.
"of the of the bus." At line 33 the source doubles two words: "through the window of the of the bus." It is a typesetting slip.
Two speakers in one paragraph. Line 89 gives a line to "Mr. Coates" and the next to "Allen" in the same paragraph. Elsewhere this edition has treated that as a printer's merging; here the split between alias and man seems intended, and the text is quoted as printed.
A comma for a full stop. At line 219 the narration runs "he bent down to sop it up," straight into Allen's speech with a comma where a full stop is wanted.
Face-up on folded arms. At line 55 the girl has "her head on her folded arms, face-up in the deep green lawn," which is hard to picture literally. It may mean she turned her face up to him.
"four years." Gretchen's "April 2110. So it must be four years" is four and a half years if the present is October 2114. People round, and this is a quarrel, not a census.
"what happened Wednesday." The day of the scene is never named. Gretchen speaks of Wednesday as already past.
Allen's real mother. In this house the property "belonged to your mother." Allen's own mother, by Chapter 8's account, died in 2111. The detail is part of John Coates's history, and Allen does not comment on it.
Dashes. The source breaks lines with dashes at line 109 ("The front door" before "solid hard wood"), 139 (Gretchen's "upstairs with" before "I forget his name"), 151 ("where there's people" before "instead of cooped up here"), 215 ("This is a" before "He broke off") and 221 ("Solipsism" before "skepticism"). Quotations here split them or use ellipses.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 13. After the lights went out at the Resort door, Allen finds himself on a glass-bottomed bus over a sunny suburb. Holding to the one sure fact, "He was not in the Health Resort," he rules out Morec and a museum exhibit (a magazine shows "the right month and year") and is told "Why, this is Chicago." A naked girl at Holly Street and Glen sends him to his ident card: "2319 Pepper Lane," "Coates, John B.," the alias he invented in Chapter 6. A cab takes him to a big house with lawns, flowers, a baby called Donna and a robot sitter, a piano, a mahogany table and lamb on the stove. Gretchen Malparto arrives as his wife, calls him "Johnny," mentions Frank's party on "Wednesday" and their agreement "not to interfere," dates the wedding to "April 2110," and says the house "belonged to your mother." On the couch with a gin sling, Allen thinks it "Like heaven" and knows the part of him that wants it is named John Coates, "the antithesis of Morec." Voices close to his ear, named as Malparto's and Gretchen's, describe a patient in complete catalepsy lost in "An escape." Allen tells Gretchen "this is a psychotic retreat," she mocks him with "Bishop Berkeley," and as his fingers touch his fallen glass the room vanishes, then Gretchen, and he stands alone in the dark: "Only silence." The mantel clock had read four-thirty.
A Quarter to Five
Standing in the dark where the room used to be, Allen closes his eyes and pictures it, and when he opens them it is back, without Gretchen. The mantel clock says half past eight, as if four hours had gone by. Upstairs, a small ivory clock on Gretchen's dressing table says a quarter to five: she forgot to set it forward. That one overlooked clock undoes the whole performance. Allen pulls the couch from the wall and finds a speaker in the springs, flat speakers under the rug, at least a dozen in all. The control is the hairbrush Gretchen was holding at the top of the stairs; turning its handle replays the voices word for word. A stud in the fireplace, a gadget for long evenings, dissolves the room. A newspaper lining a closet shelf is the Vega Sentinel. He is not mad and not dreaming. He is on Other World, the Health Resort's permanent refuge on the fourth planet of Vega. A fare home costs $930 plus tax and he has less than $50; a call to Telemedia goes unanswered at three in the morning. So he leaves Gretchen a nasty note in her husband's name, takes a cab downtown to the spaceport, and holds up a restaurant cashier with nothing in his pocket but his hand. The police call him a super-noose, declare that his felony cancels the Resort's duty to look after him, and put him straight onto the departing ship for Morec. A fellow deportee welcomes him back. The floor drops away; the ship is rising.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter follows straight on from Chapter 13 and runs through one evening. The clocks give two times: the mantel clock's "eight-thirty", which turns out to be false, and the ivory clock's "a quarter to five", which is presumably true, about a quarter of an hour after the "four-thirty" of Chapter 13. Earth, when Allen phones it, is at "three a.m." The places are the house at 2319 Pepper Lane; the downtown business district of a city on "the fourth planet of the Vega System", which the Resort calls Other World; a restaurant near the space port; an Other World police car; and the restricted area of a ship bound for Earth. The first line of Chapter 15 will name the day the trip home began as a Wednesday. The chapter runs to about 1,450 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, still carrying the card of "John B. Coates"; Gretchen Malparto, present only as a voice on tape and as the absent reader of a note; Doctor Malparto, likewise only a recorded voice; a telephone operator, "faint, tinny, and terribly reassuring"; a ticket agent at a spaceport, "A methodical male voice"; a restaurant cashier, called "lady" by Allen and "The girl" by the narration; restaurant patrons; two Other World police in helmets and blue uniforms; field attendants and the field's tower; the ship's sheriff; and "a run-down fellow super-noose." Invented by Allen for his note: Molly, met at the Brass Poker.
"He closed his eyes and willed."
Chapter 13 ended with Allen alone in emptiness, calling Gretchen's name into silence. Chapter 14 begins with an act of will. "He closed his eyes and willed. He imagined the room: he pictured Gretchen, the coffee table, the package of cigarettes, the lighter beside it. He pictured the ashtray, the drapes, the couch and phonograph."
He does what the voices told him he was doing. If the room is a fantasy made by his mind, then his mind should be able to make it again. He builds it object by object in his imagination: Gretchen first, and then the small furniture of her smoking (she paced about, smoking, in Chapter 13), and then the larger furniture of the room. It is an experiment of a sort, though he would not call it that.
"When he opened his eyes the room was back. But Gretchen was gone. He was alone in the house."
The result is half a success. Every object he pictured has returned except the one he pictured first. If his mind made this world, it can make furniture and cannot make Gretchen. A reader who remembers Chapter 12 will notice the irony. That whole chapter was Doctor Malparto testing Allen for psychic powers, from moving dice to creating a stone, and every test failed. Now, apparently, he has called a whole room into being by will. The chapter does not let him, or us, believe it for long.
"a deep intuition of lateness"
"The shades were all down, and he had a deep intuition of lateness. As if, he thought, time had passed. A clock on the mantel read eight-thirty. Had four whole hours gone by? Four hours..."
The mantel clock is the same one that read "four-thirty" in Chapter 13. Allen's feeling of lateness and the clock agree. The shades being down supports it: night has come. Four hours lost while he stood in the void, or lay rigid on a Resort couch, or whatever has happened to him, would fit the theory of a catalepsy. The voices said it might last "Days, weeks, maybe the balance of his life." Four hours would be a small piece of that.
He calls out "experimentally": "Gretchen?" He goes upstairs. "Still no sign of her. The house was warm, the air pleasant and fresh. Somewhere an automatic heating unit functioned." The house keeps running without its mistress, as a well-made machine would. "A room to his right was her bedroom. He glanced in."
The ivory clock
This is the moment the chapter turns on.
One small ivory clock that nobody remembered to change tells Allen the truth: only fifteen minutes have passed since four-thirty, and someone set the mantel clock forward to make him think otherwise.
The inference is fast, and the narrator gives it in two short sentences without any show of reasoning. Two clocks in the same house disagree by nearly four hours. One of them has been changed. The changed one is the one downstairs, in the room where Allen was meant to look. The unchanged one, up‐
"The small ivory clock on the dressing table did not read eight-thirty. It read a quarter to five. Gretchen had overlooked it. She had not set it forward with the one downstairs."
The narrator, in Gretchen's bedroom
stairs, reads about a quarter of an hour later than the four-thirty he saw before the room vanished, which is how long such a scene might really take. So the lateness he felt was manufactured, the drawn shades were part of it, and the person who manufactured it was Gretchen, who forgot her own bedside clock.
Notice what this does to the theory of the voices. A fantasy in Allen's own mind would not contain a forgotten detail that contradicts it. A dream does not forget to change its own clocks; or if it does, there is nobody in it to have forgotten. The ivory clock implies a person, working in the real world, with real limits on her attention, who did one thing and failed to do another. That is the signature of a forgery, not a delusion.
"Instantly he was running back downstairs, two steps at a time." The sentence has the energy of a man who knows what to look for.
BY THE NUMBERS
The two clocks. The mantel clock read 4:30 before the room vanished and 8:30 after it returned, a jump of four hours. The ivory clock upstairs read 4:45, a quarter of an hour after the first reading. So the true elapsed time was about 15 minutes, and the mantel clock had been moved 3 hours 45 minutes ahead of the truth. The forgery inflated the gap by a factor of 16: four hours claimed against a quarter of an hour actually passed. The point of the inflation is easy to see. Four lost hours fit a story of a mind slipping into catalepsy; fifteen minutes fit a woman going upstairs, working a few controls and coming back.
A dozen speakers
"The voices had reached him as he lay on the couch." That is where he starts. "Kneeling, he pressed his hands over the fabric, across the arms and back, under the cushions. Finally he dragged the couch away from the wall." The search is methodical, from the most likely place outward, and physical: he uses his hands, the most reliable instrument he has.
"The first speaker was mounted within a coil of back-spring. A second and then a third were concealed under the rug; they were as flat as paper. He estimated that at least a dozen speakers had been mounted throughout the room."
So the voices were sound after all, played into the room from hidden speakers, and the flat speakers under the rug explain why they seemed "Close to his ear" as he lay there. A dozen speakers in one living room means a design: someone built this room so that voices could come from anywhere in it. In Chapter 13 the voices seemed to move ("The woman seemed to be moving nearer") and to fade ("Malparto's voice seemed to recede"). With speakers all round the room, both effects are easy to produce.
The hairbrush
"Since Gretchen had been upstairs the control unit was undoubtedly there." This is a second inference, as clean as the first. The voices spoke while Gretchen was upstairs, changing for dinner, so whatever started them was upstairs too. "Again he climbed the stairs and entered her bedroom."
"At first he failed to recognize it. The control lay in plain sight, on the woman's dressing table, with the jars and tubes and packages of cosmetics. The hairbrush. He picked it up and rotated the plastic handle."
The detail rewards the reader who remembers the end of Chapter 13. When Allen shouted "Did you hear them? Did you?" Gretchen appeared at the top of the stairs with "hairbrush in one hand." She was holding the control as she came down to tell him he sounded like a college sophomore. Dick planted the prop in plain sight in one chapter and explained it in the next, which is a small, exact piece of craft.
The narrator calls her, here, "the woman." A few pages ago she was "Gretchen" or "Mrs. Coates." The change of word is a change of feeling. Allen is now looking at her dressing table as evidence.
"From downstairs boomed a man's voice." "There remains some island of ego." The words are the same words, in the same order, as the first line the voices spoke in Chapter 13. "Gretchen's voice answered." "But submerged." And then "Totally withdrawn," Malparto continued. "The shock", and there the source breaks off at a dash, because Allen has heard enough.
"Allen snapped the handle back, and the voices departed. The tape transport, mounted somewhere in the walls of the house, had halted in the middle of its cycle." A tape loop, played on a cue from a hairbrush handle, through a dozen speakers. The clinical conversation that seemed to come from beyond the world, from doctors at the bedside of a cataleptic, is a recording that can be stopped in mid-sentence and started again. The phrase "the middle of its cycle" says it was designed to repeat.
In Chapter 1, a tape in the wall of the Purcells' room ran each morning and turned the bedroom into a kitchen. Morec ran its domestic life on a tape. So, it turns out, does the house on Pepper Lane, except that its tape does not move furniture. It moves the occupant's mind.
The fireplace stud
"Downstairs again, he searched for the means by which Gretchen had dissolved the house. When he found it, he was chagrined. The unit was built into the fireplace, in open view, one of the many comfort-making gadgets." He is chagrined because it was obvious. The thing that made the room vanish was a standard fixture, in plain view, the way the hairbrush was in plain view on the dressing table.
"He pressed the stud and the room around him with its furnishings and rich textures seeped away. The outside world remained: houses, the street, the sky. A glimmer of stars." The verb has softened. In Chapter 13 the wall "vanished"; now, pressed deliberately, the room "seeped away." The same event, seen once by a frightened man and once by a man who knows the trick, has a different texture. And what remains is the same as before: the houses, the street, and now the sky with its first stars.
Then the narrator, in Allen's dry voice, explains what the gadget is for:
The room's walls, furniture and textures can be dissolved so that a couple can sit under the stars, as if outdoors. It is a luxury, like the sprinklers and the guest cottage. The last sentence is the sharpest. "Gretchen was an active girl" is a joke at the expense of a woman who used a romantic toy to stage a nervous breakdown. Active is ironic, and it also concedes something: she is resourceful, fast and inventive. She improvised a psychiatric crisis out of a hairbrush, a tape and a fireplace switch.
"The device was a mere romantic gadget. For long, dull evenings. Gretchen was an active girl."
The narrator, on the fireplace unit
The gadget recalls Chapter 10, where the twentieth century house in the history museum became a ruin when a child pressed a button. Allen explained to Janet then that the house was a projected image. In Chapter 13 he forgot his own explanation in the moment of fear. In Chapter 14 he finds the button.
The Vega Sentinel
The proof of where he is comes from the humblest source in the house. "In a closet, under a heap of blankets, he found a newspaper used as a shelf-liner; it was empirical proof. The newspaper was the Vega Sentinel. He was not in a fantasy world; he was on the fourth planet of the Vega System."
The phrase "empirical proof" is precise. All through Chapter 13 Allen was being invited to argue about reality in the abstract: psychotic retreat or sophomore solipsism, Bishop Berkeley and ultimate-reality stuff. He ends the argument with a newspaper used to line a shelf. Nobody stages the shelf-liner in a closet under a heap of blankets. It is the kind of evidence a forger forgets, because it was never meant to be seen. It is also, like the ivory clock, ordinary: the truth comes out of the domestic objects nobody thought to change.
Other World has been in the book since Chapter 3, when Sue Frost joked that Myron Mavis would end up at the Health Resort, "doing business from there. Or from Other World, as they call that sanitarium of theirs." In the same car ride Mavis sneered that the people who went over wanted "candy and bottled pop. Comic books from mama Health Resort," and Allen mocked the rumours with a joke about the Resort "building a vast empire in outer space to dominate the universe." The rumour was absurd, and now Allen is standing in the empire. It is a suburb with lawns, a glass-bottomed bus, a newspaper, and a game called Quart.
The narration draws a careful line. The Resort on Earth offers therapy. Other World is "the permanent refuge," for people who came "for sanctuary." Therapy is meant to send a patient back; sanctuary is meant to keep him. Allen came to the Resort as a patient. He has woken up as a refugee.
"He was on Other World, the permanent refuge maintained by the Mental Health Resort. Maintained for persons who had come... not for therapy... but for sanctuary."
The narrator, on where Allen is
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: what Vega is, and what the fares imply. Vega, Alpha Lyrae, is the brightest star in the northern constellation Lyra and the fifth brightest star in the night sky. It lies about 25 light-years from the Sun (the Hipparcos catalogue gives 25.3; more recent parallax work gives about 25.0). Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, is about 8.6 light-years away and Alpha Centauri about 4.4. Dick's novel does not use real astronomy in any detail, and this edition does not pretend it does. Still, the numbers it gives are worth reading. A first-class ticket from Vega to Earth costs $930 plus tax; the "next system in order," Sirius, costs $742 with tax included. Neither fare is the cost of a voyage of decades. In this novel interstellar travel is as routine as an airline, with ticket offices, luxury tax and a telephone operator who is not surprised to be asked for Earth. That routine is part of the satire. The Resort's sanctuary is not remote in time or money for anyone with a thousand dollars; it is remote only for a man who has been brought there with less than fifty. [Sources: ESA Hipparcos, The 50 Brightest Stars; Wikipedia, Vega, Sirius and Alpha Centauri.]
"Number please"
"Finding the phone, he dialed zero." The operator answers: "Number please," in "the faint, tinny, and terribly reassuring voice." Terribly reassuring: after a scene of disappearing rooms and recorded doctors, the most comforting thing in the universe is the indifferent voice of a telephone company.
"Give me one of the space ports," he said. "Any one that has inter-system service." He is thinking like a man who has worked out his position and needs his means of escape. "A series of clicks, buzzes, and then he was connected with the ticket office." A voice answers, "methodical" and male: "Yes sir. What can I do for you?"
"What's the fare to Earth?" And inside the question, the narration tells us his fear: "He wondered, in a stricken way, just how long he had been here. A week? A month?" The ivory clock has told him how long the scene in the living room lasted. It cannot tell him how long he has been on this planet. The last thing he remembers on Earth was the Resort door.
"One way, first class. Nine hundred thirty dollars. Plus twenty percent luxury tax." The narrator adds: "The voice was without emotion." "He had no such money." He asks about a cheaper ticket: "What's the next system in order?" "Sirius." "How much is that?"
While the agent looks it up, the narration sets out Allen's two problems. "He didn't have over fifty dollars in his wallet. And this planet was under the jurisdiction of the Health Resort: it had acquired it with its deed." The first is money. The second is law. Other World does not belong to Morec; the Resort owns it by deed, and its rules are the Resort's rules.
The answer comes: "One way, first class. Tax included... comes to seven hundred forty-two dollars." Allen "calculated," and asks: "What's it cost to phone Earth?" The ticket agent's reply is the reply of every functionary in every system: "You'll have to ask the phone company, mister. That's not our business."
BY THE NUMBERS
Allen's arithmetic at the telephone. The fare to Earth is $930 plus 20 percent luxury tax, which is $186, for a total of $1,116. The fare to Sirius is $742 with tax included, about 66 percent of the Earth fare, and saves $374. Allen has, in the narrator's words, not **"over fifty dollars."** Fifty dollars is about 4.5 percent of the fare home and about 6.7 percent of the fare to Sirius. Either way he is short by more than $690. He also has no way to earn the difference: his work, his lease and his status are all on Earth, under a society that would take a man who fled to the Resort for a renegade.
"Your party does not answer."
He gets the operator again. "I'd like to place a call to Earth." "Yes sir." The narration notes: "She did not seem surprised." To her, a call to Earth is ordinary. "What number, sir?"
"He gave Telemedia's number, and then the number on the phone he was using. It was as simple as that." The phrase "as simple as that" is wry. After all the strangeness of the last two chapters, the connection between this world and his own is a telephone number.
He does not ring Janet. He rings Telemedia, the organisation he is due to take over, and so, in effect, Sue Frost and the state. The text gives no reason. Perhaps he does not know the number of the phone in the Purcells' housing unit by heart; perhaps he wants an institution that can pay a fare and vouch for him; perhaps the habit of the new Director is already forming. The choice is noted again in the quirks below.
"After several minutes of buzzing," the operator says: "I'm sorry, sir. Your party does not answer." "What time is it there?" "A moment and then:" "In that time zone it is three a.m., sir." Of course nobody is answering at Telemedia at three in the morning. The operator gives the time on Earth without being asked how she knows, as if the time zones of the home planet were on a card at her elbow.
Allen drops his guard. "In a husky voice he said," "Look, I've been kidnapped. I have to get out of here," and after a dash, "back to Earth." It is the first time he puts a word to what has happened to him. Kidnapped is his verdict, and it stays his verdict into Chapter 15. The operator's reply is perfect in its unhelpfulness: "I suggest you call one of the inter-system transport fields, sir." "All I've got is fifty bucks!" "I'm sorry, sir. I can connect you with one of the fields if you wish."
"He hung up."
The scene is short and its comedy is dark. A man has been abducted to another star system and the institutions he reaches for respond precisely and politely according to their function. The ticket office sells tickets. The phone company connects calls. Neither has any category for a kidnapping. Dick makes the point without stating it, and without making the operator unkind. She is doing her job.
A note with a vengeance
"There was no point staying in the house, but he lingered long enough to type out a note", and after the source's dash, "a note with a vengeance." He leaves it "in the middle of the coffee table, where Gretchen would be sure to see it." The note is set out in the text on its own lines:
"Dear Mrs. Coates, You remember Molly. Damned if I didn't run into her at the Brass Poker. Says she's pregnant, but you know how that kind are. Think I better stay with her until we can get her a you-know-what. Expensive, but it's the price you pay."
Allen's note, signed "Johnny"
"He signed it Johnny and then left the house."
The note is Allen's reply to Chapter 13, and it is written in Gretchen's own key. She gave John Coates a world without Morec's morals: a wife who was found upstairs at a party with a man whose name she forgot, an agreement "not to interfere with each other." Allen's note takes that world at its word and carries it one step further. John Coates has a mistress named Molly, met at a bar called the Brass Poker; she says she is pregnant; Johnny does not believe her ("you know how that kind are") and proposes to stay with her until they can get her "a you-know-what." The euphemism is never filled in. In a 1950s American novel the usual unspoken word in that position is an abortion, and "Expensive, but it's the price you pay" supports that reading.
It is a cruel note, and it is meant to be. Allen writes it with "a vengeance." It is cruel to the invented Molly, whom it treats as trash, and it is aimed at Gretchen. If Gretchen built Pepper Lane as a pleasant world without consequences, Allen leaves behind, in the husband's voice, the consequences: a pregnancy, a bill and a sneer. He signs it with her pet name for him. It is also a professional piece of work. Allen writes moral packets for a living, short dramatic messages meant to impress a lesson on the public. The note is an anti-packet, a sordid little story shaped to the world it lands in.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the note and its target. Readers may wince at the note, and they should. Its contempt falls on a woman who does not exist, standing in for the women whom 1950s fiction often treated this way. Its target is Gretchen, and it works by turning her own fiction back on her: she set up a husband for whom fidelity was optional, so Allen writes the husband she invented. Two other points matter for what follows. First, the note proves that Allen has seen through the scene and has chosen to leave; he wants Gretchen to know. Second, it is signed with the alias. The paper trail John Coates leaves on Other World is the trail of an unfaithful husband. Allen is not thinking about how that might look to anybody on Earth, and the chapter does not ask him to.
Downtown
"Other World had plenty of roving taxis, and within five minutes he was in the downtown business district with its lights and flow of people." In Chapter 13 he walked past a cab-box because he had never seen one. Now he uses taxis as a native.
"At the space port a full-size ship stood upright on its tail." This is the spaceship of the pulp magazine covers of the 1950s, standing on its fins. "He guessed, with almost frenzied despair, that it was in the process of leaving for the next system. A line of supply trucks dashed back and forth; the ship was already in the final stages of loading." The despair is that of a man watching the last bus leave. He has no ticket and cannot afford one.
"Paying off the taxi, he tramped across the gravel parking lot of the field," and then "the street until he arrived at a syndrome of life: a restaurant doing an active business, full of patrons and noise and chatter." (The punctuation of the source is muddled here and is noted below.) A syndrome of life is an odd phrase, borrowed from medicine: a cluster of signs that occur together. The restaurant is the busiest place he can find, the place with the most witnesses.
"Feeling like a fool he buttoned his coat up around him and strode through the doorway to the cashier."
"Put up your hands, lady"
"Put up your hands, lady," he said, "jutting out his pocket." "Before I put a McAllister heat beam through your head." The gun is his pocket. The McAllister heat beam is a weapon from the science fiction magazines, given a brand name as if it were a make of revolver; it is never mentioned again and need not exist.
"The girl gasped, raised her hands, opened her mouth and gave a terrified bleat. Patrons at nearby tables glanced up in disbelief." Allen keeps going, now loudly enough for the whole room: "Okay," he says, "in a normally-loud voice." "Now let's have the money. Push it across the counter before I blow out your brains with my McAllister heat beam." He names the weapon a second time, the way an amateur actor hammers his key line. The cashier's reply is the most English line in the book: "Oh dear."
The hold-up is a performance with an audience, and it is meant to fail. Allen does not want the money. He wants to be arrested.
The plan is never explained in advance. Allen does not think it through on the page; the reader sees only the actions and understands them as he does them. That is the right way to tell it. The pleasure of the scene is the reader's moment of seeing what he is up to, and the chapter trusts us to get there.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
The problem Allen solves, and how.
Goal. Get back to Earth before his job starts on Monday.
Constraint 1: money. Fare $1,116 with tax; he has under $50.
Constraint 2: jurisdiction. The planet belongs to the Resort, "acquired... with its deed"; Morec's writ does not run.
Constraint 3: time. A ship is loading now.
The lever. A sanctuary has terms. A refuge for people who need help will not keep a man who has proved himself a criminal.
The move. Commit a felony in public, with no victim and no weapon, as close to the field as possible.
The outcome. The police withdraw the Resort's protection and put him on the departing ship for Morec at no charge.
"A super-noose"
"From behind him two Other World police wearing helmets and crisp blue uniforms appeared and grabbed his arms. The girl flopped out of sight and Allen's hand was yanked from his pocket." There is nothing in the hand.
"A noose," one cop said. "A super-noose. It's troublemakers like this ruin a clean neighborhood." The word comes from Chapter 3, where Myron Mavis used it of people who flee to the Resort, and the narrator explained that noose was "a derisive term contracted from neuro-psychiatric." Allen disliked the word then; it reminded him of the old hate terms. Now it is spoken on the other side, by Other World's own police, in an escalated form. A noose is someone who went over to the Resort. A super-noose is someone who went over and is too disturbed even for the Resort. Each society has someone to look down on, and the Resort's suburb has its own phrase for the misfits of its sanctuary. It also has its own little piety: "a clean neighborhood."
Allen keeps up the act: "Let go of me," Allen said. "Before I blow off your heads with my McAllister heat beam."
Then the policeman says the sentence Allen has been working for:
The language is legal and contractual. The Resort has "obligations to succor" the people who come to it, and those obligations are conditional. "unreliability" proved by "a felony" ends them. Allen has read the terms of his sanctuary correctly without ever having seen them.
"I'll blow all of you to bits," Allen said, as they bundle him into the car. "This heat beam talks." The bluster now is pure comedy. He has nothing to lose by overacting, and every line makes him a more convincing super-noose.
"Get his ident." "A cop snatched Allen's wallet." The card is read aloud: "John B. Coates. 2319 Pepper Lane. Well, Mr. Coates, you've had your chance. Now you're on your way back to Morec. How does that sound?" The ident card that told Allen who he was in Chapter 13 now tells the police whom to deport. "you've had your chance" says something about Other World's view of itself: it is a second chance, and a man who wastes it goes back to the first.
"You won't live to send me back," Allen said. The narration lets us see past him: "The car was sprinting toward the field, and the big ship was still there." "I'll get you. You'll see."
"Buddy," ... "this cancels the Resort's obligations to succor you. You've shown your unreliability by committing a felony."
An Other World policeman, dragging Allen from the restaurant
"Open up the fleebee."
"The car, flying a foot above the gravel, turned onto the field and made directly for the ship. The siren came on; field attendants stopped work and watched." The police car hovers, like the Getabouts and cabs of Dick's future. One cop calls ahead: "Tell them to hold it," and gets out a microphone to the field's tower: "Another super-noose. Open up the fleebee."
Fleebee is never explained. From context it is a hatch, a lock or a holding section of the ship into which the deportee is passed straight from the car. The word sounds like slang, the sort of name working men give to a piece of equipment, and its sound (flee, flea) fits a compartment for people being thrown out. This edition does not guess further.
"Another super-noose" shows that this happens often enough to be routine. "In a matter of seconds the car had come alongside the ship, the doors had united, and Allen was in the hands of the ship's sheriff." A ship with a sheriff has a jurisdiction of its own, and Allen has passed from the Resort's into the ship's, on its way to Morec's.
"Welcome back to Morec"
"Welcome back to Morec," a run-down fellow super-noose muttered, as Allen was deposited beside him "in the restricted area." Even the deportees have a society. The man is run-down, cynical, and resigned to being sent back to the life he ran from.
Allen's answer is honest: "Thanks," Allen said, "with relief." "It's good to be back." The fellow deportee means the greeting as bitter irony; Allen takes it at face value. For him, the restricted area of a deportation ship is the way home. For a man who wanted to stay in the sanctuary, it is the end of hope. The two of them sit side by side and mean opposite things by the same words.
Then the worry returns. "Now he was wondering if he would reach Earth by Sunday. On Monday morning his job at Telemedia started. Had he lost too much time?" He still does not know what day it is. He knows his start date, Monday 22 October, and he does not know how many days have passed since the lights went out at the Resort.
Chapter 13 began with "Rumble rumble." Chapter 14 ends with "Whoosh." Dick bookends the Other World episode with two pieces of comic-strip sound, the noise of a bus arriving and the noise of a ship leaving. The sounds have something of the comic books Mavis sneered at in Chapter 3. Between them is a world that looked like heaven and was a set.
"Whoosh, the floor went. The ship was rising."
The last lines of Chapter 14
What was staged, and what gave it away
CONTRAST
| What Allen was shown | What it seemed to mean | What gave it away | What it was |
|---|---|---|---|
| Voices "Close to his ear" | Doctors at his bedside, heard from inside a catalepsy | They came while Gretchen was upstairs; they could be replayed | A tape through "at least a dozen" speakers |
| The room vanishing | His mind losing hold of a fantasy | The street and houses stayed; it "seeped away" when he pressed a stud | A fireplace unit, "a mere romantic gadget" |
| The room returning when he willed it | His mind rebuilding it | It came back without Gretchen | Presumably the same unit switched back |
| Mantel clock at 8:30 | Four hours lost | Ivory clock upstairs at 4:45 | A clock set forward; "She had not set it forward with the one downstairs" |
| Gretchen as his wife | John Coates's real life | She came down the stairs with the control, the hairbrush, in her hand | A performance |
| Chicago, Holly and Glen, Pepper Lane | A fantasy built from his research | A newspaper lining a closet shelf | A real city on "the fourth planet of the Vega System" |
The table shows a pattern. Everything meant to be seen was in good order. Everything that gave the game away was something not meant to be seen: a clock in another room, the springs behind a couch, the underside of a rug, the handle of a hairbrush, a shelf-liner under blankets. Gretchen staged the front of the house well. She forgot that a suspicious man would look behind it.
What the chapter shows about Allen
In Chapter 13 Allen spent most of his time accepting things. In Chapter 14 he spends it testing them, and almost every test is physical. He presses the couch fabric with his hands, drags the couch out, turns a hairbrush handle, presses a stud, lifts blankets in a closet, telephones a ticket office. He does not argue about whether the world is real. He checks.
He also reasons with real economy. Two clocks disagree, so one was changed. The voices came while Gretchen was upstairs, so the control is upstairs. The planet belongs to the Resort, and the Resort's charity is conditional, so a crime will send him home. Each inference is short and each is right. Dick does not make him a genius; he makes him a man who is good at noticing and good at acting on what he notices. These are the skills of a man who builds persuasive images for a living and knows how they are made.
And he shows a streak the earlier chapters only hinted at, a taste for the jape. The note to Mrs. Coates and the hold-up with an empty pocket are both pranks, mischief done with a straight face for an effect. The man who, by Chapter 4's admission, japed the statue of Major Streiter has not lost his talent for it.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: check the clock in the other room. The scene at Pepper Lane was a staged reality built from familiar voices, convincing details and a manufactured sense of time, and it was broken by an independent signal the forger forgot to control. Real fraud now works the same way, with better tools. In January 2024 a finance employee in the Hong Kong office of the engineering firm Arup joined a video conference with what appeared to be the company's UK-based chief financial officer and other colleagues. All of them were digital fakes. Following their instructions he made 15 transfers totalling HK$200 million, about US$25.6 million, to five Hong Kong bank accounts. Hong Kong police said he had initially suspected a phishing message about a secret transaction and set his doubts aside after the call because the people on it looked and sounded like colleagues; the fraud came to light when he followed up with the group's headquarters. Arup later confirmed that fake voices and images were used, said that none of its internal systems had been compromised, and described the attack as technology-enhanced social engineering. Like the Pepper Lane tape, the fake call worked inside the channel the attacker controlled. It failed the moment the victim used a channel the attacker did not control. The practical controls follow from that. Never confirm an unusual payment instruction through the channel that delivered it; call back on a number held independently. Look for the cheap, independent signals an attacker is unlikely to have forged, such as timestamps from another system, metadata, or the routine records nobody thought to change, the equivalent of the ivory clock. Treat urgency and secrecy, a transaction that must be kept confidential, as risk factors in themselves. And design approval so that one person's conviction, however strong, cannot release funds alone. [Sources: South China Morning Post, 17 May 2024; CNN, 4 February and 16 May 2024; Financial Times, May 2024; The Guardian, 17 May 2024; World Economic Forum, on lessons from the Arup case.]
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 14.
A broken paragraph. At lines 281 to 283 the ticket agent's introduction ends with a comma and his words, "Yes sir. What can I do for you?", begin a new paragraph.
"down, the street." At line 337 a stray comma splits "tramped across the gravel parking lot of the field, down, the street," and the sentence goes on to the odd phrase "a syndrome of life." The phrase may be intended; the comma probably is not.
Why Telemedia? Allen phones Telemedia rather than his wife. The text gives no reason; possibilities are noted above.
The time on Earth. The operator gives Earth's time as "three a.m." while Other World's ivory clock reads about a quarter to five. Nothing in the novel sets the relation between the two, and the operator's ease with Earth's time zones is part of the joke.
"the next system in order." The ticket agent names Sirius as the next system, at a lower fare. The order is the ticket office's, not the astronomer's.
"fleebee." The word at line 363 is unexplained. From context it is part of the ship that takes deportees.
Willing the room back. The first paragraph has the room return when Allen pictures it. The chapter then shows that the room is controlled by a stud in the fireplace. Whether someone else pressed it while his eyes were closed, or the timing was chance, is not said.
Dashes. The source breaks lines with dashes at line 263 (Malparto's "The shock" before the tape is stopped), 273 ("persons who had come" before "not for therapy" and again before "but for sanctuary"), 313 ("I have to get out of here" before "back to Earth") and 323 ("type out a note" before "a note with a vengeance"). Quotations here split them or use ellipses.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 14. Allen wills the room back and it returns without Gretchen. The mantel clock says "eight-thirty," but the ivory clock in Gretchen's bedroom says "a quarter to five": "She had not set it forward with the one downstairs." He finds "at least a dozen" speakers in the couch and under the rug; the control is the hairbrush she held on the stairs, and turning it replays "There remains some island of ego" from a tape. A fireplace stud, "a mere romantic gadget," dissolves the room. A shelf-liner, the Vega Sentinel, proves he is on Other World, the Resort's "permanent refuge" on "the fourth planet of the Vega System," a planet the Resort holds "with its deed." The fare to Earth is $930 plus 20 percent; to Sirius, $742; he has under $50. Telemedia does not answer at "three a.m." He leaves a cruel note to "Mrs. Coates" about Molly from the Brass Poker, signed Johnny. At a restaurant near the spaceport he fakes a hold-up with a "McAllister heat beam" that is only his pocket; the police call him "A super-noose," rule that the felony "cancels the Resort's obligations to succor you," read "John B. Coates. 2319 Pepper Lane" off his card, and hand him to the sheriff of the departing ship. A deportee says "Welcome back to Morec"; Allen, worried about reaching Earth before his Monday start, answers "It's good to be back," and the ship rises.
Packet Number 355-B
The trip home takes from Wednesday night to Sunday night. Allen steps off the ship tired and sweaty, refuses on reflection to walk, and phones Janet from the field. Malparto told her he had gone to Other World for treatment and might be there for weeks, which tells Allen what the scheme was for: in a few weeks he would have lost his directorship and his lease and would have had to stay on Vega 4. The Resort is already deducting its fees from his salary. Janet told Sue Frost he was winding up his affairs. Frost, on the phone, orders him to her apartment in ten minutes. There he finds Myron Mavis and Ida Pease Hoyt, then Tony Blake of Blake-Moffet and Fred Luddy with a briefcase. Allen decides to lie. Frost's inquiry turns into an accusation of adultery: Blake's people have followed him since the night of the jape, and they have a timetable of his week, a photograph from the ship, and a name, "Grace Maldini," who is plainly Gretchen. The head of Major Streiter is still in the Purcells' closet and nobody mentions the jape except as somebody else's crime. Mavis scoffs at the photograph, Hoyt calls it no proof, and Frost asks one simple question: has he left his wife? He says no, which is true, and adds a speech that is partly false. Hoyt tells them to let the boy go. Allen fires a last shot at Blake and Luddy, the plot of a moral packet about a faithful husband framed by gossips, and wonders how long the false lead will keep him alive.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter opens with a span, "The trip began Wednesday night, and by Sunday night he was back on Earth," and then stays in one evening, which this edition dates Sunday 21 October 2114: Allen says he goes to work "next Monday, tomorrow," and Chapter 10 set his start for Monday 22 October. Blake's dossier reaches back "Two weeks ago" to Sunday 7 October and forward to "about thirty minutes ago." Frost's call to the Purcells was "Last Sunday," 14 October. The places are the field, near the Spire and the Purcells' housing unit; a phone booth there; and the Frost apartment, which "directly overlooked the Spire." The chapter runs to about 2,700 words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, Director-designate of Telemedia; Janet Purcell, on the phone, full of pills; Sue Frost, Committee Secretary, who chairs the inquiry from her own apartment; Myron Mavis, acting Director of T-M, weary and sardonic; Ida Pease Hoyt, head of the Committee, in "heavy furs, dark stockings, and low-heeled shoes"; Tony Blake of Blake-Moffet, "a portly, well-dressed man in his late fifties, with snow-white hair and rimless glasses"; Fred Luddy, Allen's former assistant, now with Blake-Moffet, "a briefcase under his arm". Off stage: Doctor Malparto, who told Janet the story; Harry Priar, running the Agency; a bonded representative sent there by Frost; and "Grace Maldini," the name under which Gretchen travelled.
"The notation was arbitrary"
"The trip began Wednesday night, and by Sunday night he was back on Earth. The notation was arbitrary, of course, but the interval was real." The first sentence gives the chapter's clock. The second admits that on a ship between stars, the names of days are a convention. Wednesday and Sunday are Earth's labels carried aboard; the four days between them are the real thing. It is a precise little remark, and it applies backwards too. If the trip home took four days, the trip out probably did as well, and the chapter will confirm that: "Four days in her company."
That gives the shape of Allen's lost week. He left the Resort on the evening of Saturday 13 October. He was on a ship, docile, for about four days. He woke on Other World to a bus and a few hours in Chicago. He spent four more days coming home. The few hours he remembers on Vega are the middle of a week he mostly does not.
"Tired, sweaty, Allen emerged from the ship and back into the Morec society." The phrase "back into" treats Morec as an element, like water, that he re-enters.
A bus and a phone booth
"The field was not far from the Spire and his housing unit, but he balked at the idea of walking. It seemed unnecessarily strict; the supplicants in Other World showed no sign of degeneracy because they rode busses."
This is the first effect of the trip. Morec frowns on riding where one can walk (in Chapter 3 Mavis grumbled that one should "either fly" or "walk. Not this halfway business," and a Getabout at twenty miles an hour made four adults uneasy). Allen has seen a society where people ride buses and are not ruined by it, and he now judges a Morec rule by that evidence. He does not reject the rule out loud. He just balks at it, which is how most people change their minds.
He calls Janet. "Oh!" she gasped. "They released you? You're" (the source has a stray space before the dash) "all right?" Her first word for his return is released. She believes he was a patient.
"What did Malparto tell you?" "They said you had gone to Other World for treatment. They said you might be there several weeks."
"Now it made even more sense."
"Now it made even more sense. In several weeks he would have lost his directorship and his status in the Morec world. After that it wouldn't matter if he discovered the hoax or not; without a lease, without a job, he would fairly well have to remain on Vega 4."
The narrator, giving Allen's reading of the scheme
This is Allen's theory of the kidnapping, and it is a good one as far as it goes. The scheme did not have to hold forever. It had to hold for a few weeks. Pepper Lane only needed to keep him quiet until Morec's own rules did the rest: a Director who fails to turn up loses the post, a man who loses his job and his status loses his lease, and a man without a lease has nowhere on Earth to return to. The Resort would not need to keep him. Morec would refuse to take him back.
Notice what the theory explains and what it leaves out. It explains the voices, the forged clock and the long, pleasant afternoon on Pepper Lane. It does not explain why the Resort, or Gretchen, wanted him on Vega 4 in the first place. The novel does not say here, and this edition will not guess ahead of it.
The planet is named here, as "Vega 4," the same place as Chapter 14's "fourth planet of the Vega System."
"Did he say anything about you joining me?" Allen asks. "There was a hasty flutter from the phone." "Y-yes, he did. He said you'd adjust to Other World, but if you couldn't adjust to this, then", and Janet stops at a dash. The question is shrewd. Allen guesses that the scheme had a second stage, and Janet confirms it in a stammer. Malparto had proposed that she follow him. A man settled in a refuge, with his wife beside him, is a man who stays.
"I didn't adjust to Other World. Just a lot of people lounging around sun-bathing. Is that Getabout still there? The one I rented?" His account of Other World is curt and not quite fair. He saw a bus, a quiet suburb and a woman pretending to be his wife; there was no sun-bathing in it. He is already reducing the place to the way Morec would describe it.
"billed him for services rendered"
"Janet, it developed, had returned the Getabout to the rental outfit. The charge was steep, and the Health Resort had already begun to tap his salary." And then the sentence that sums up the whole episode for Allen:
The joke is a hard one. The Resort's treatment, which consisted of drugging him, shipping him across space and staging a breakdown, has been charged to him as therapy. Services rendered is the phrase on an invoice. It is also a small sign of the Resort's reach: it can take money from his pay on Earth. Which salary is being tapped the text does not say. He has not yet started at Telemedia and has left his Agency in Priar's hands.
"Somehow that seemed to complete the outrage: the Resort, in the guise of helping him, had kidnapped him, and then billed him for services rendered."
The narrator, on the Resort's bill
"Has Mrs. Frost been around?"
"She phoned several times." "That sounded ominous." "What'd you tell her? That my mind gave out and I fled to the Resort?" This is the worst case for a Morec man: to be thought a noose.
"I said you were winding up your aflairs [sic] and couldn't be disturbed." The source prints the misspelling with a bracketed sic, which is unusual in a novel and may come from an edition's editor. Janet's cover story was sensible. It also matches the excuse Allen himself means to use at Frost's door. Then: "Janet breathed huskily into the phone, deafening him." "Allen, I'm so glad you're back. I was so worried."
"How many pills did you swallow?" "Well, quite a few." And after a stammering dash, "couldn't sleep." Allen knows her. Her habit runs all through the book, from the bathroom sedatives of Chapter 4 to the handful of pills on the morning the head appeared. A week alone with the head of Major Streiter in the closet, a husband missing on another planet and Sue Frost phoning has been more than her pills could hold.
"This an order is!"
"He hung up, dug out another quarter, and dialed Sue Frost's personal number. After a time she answered... the familiar calm, dignified voice." Allen opens lightly: "This is Allen," he said. "Allen Purcell. I just wanted to check with you. Things coming along all right at your end?"
"Click."
He is "Allen" on his side of the call and "Mr. Purcell" on hers. The inverted grammar is Frost's tic when she is shaken, the same pattern as her "This embarrassing is" in Chapter 3; in her mouth it sounds like a woman so angry her sentences come out backwards. "He stared at the dead phone. Then he left the phone booth and started walking." He walks. The man who balked at walking from the field now walks to Frost's apartment, because there is no time to do anything else and because the summons is Morec's own.
"Mr. Purcell," she said harshly, "be at my apartment in ten minutes. This an order is!"
Sue Frost, on the phone
The Frost apartment
"The Frost apartment directly overlooked the Spire, as did the apartments of all Committee Secretaries." Status is a view of the centre. "Allen took a reassuring breath and then climbed the stairs."
He prepares his story on the way up. "A clean shirt, a bath, and a long rest would have helped, but there was no time for luxuries. And he could, of course, pass his appearance off as the effects of a week or so spent closing down business; he had been slaving night and day at the Agency, trying to get all the loose ends to come out." That is Janet's story, taken over as his own, with an actor's sense of how his body can be made to fit it. A rumpled man can be a man who worked through the night.
"Come in." She stood aside and he entered. "In the single room sat Myron Mavis looking weary, and Ida Pease Hoyt looking grim and formal." A Committee Secretary also lives in a single room. The most powerful woman in Morec, its leader, is sitting in it. "Hello," Allen said, "with a strong sense of doom."
"Where have you been?"
Frost begins at once: "Now," Mrs. Frost said, "coming around in front of him. " And then "Where have you been? You weren't at your Agency; we checked there a number of times. We even sent a bonded representative to sit in with your staff. A Mr. Priar is operating Allen Purcell, Inc. during your absence."
The story he prepared on the stairs is dead before he speaks. They checked the Agency. They put their own man inside it. The phrase "bonded representative" is a commercial one: a person backed by a bond against misconduct, sent to watch a business on behalf of an interested party. Frost has already treated Allen's firm as a concern to be supervised.
The decision matters for the rest of the chapter, and it is made coldly. The reason he gives is that Morec has no use for the truth he could tell. If he said he had gone to the Health Resort, been drugged and shipped to Vega, the society would "pun‐
"Allen wondered if he should lie or tell the truth. He decided to lie. The Morec society couldn't bear the truth; it would punish him and keep on going. And somebody else would be named Director of T-M, a creature of Blake-Moffet."
The narrator, on Allen's decision
ish him and keep on going." The phrase means that the truth would change nothing except his own fate. And the job would go to "a creature of Blake-Moffet." That is the first sign that Allen sees Blake-Moffet behind the scene before they walk in.
He starts with a legal point, which is a kind of truth. "Harry Priar is acting administrator," he said. "As Myron here is acting Director of T-M until I take over. Are you trying to say I've been on salary the last week?" The narration adds: "That certainly wasn't so." Then: "The understanding was clear enough: I go to work next Monday, tomorrow. This past week has been my own. T-M has no more claim over me this past week than it had last year."
It is a lawyer's answer and a correct one. Frost has no contractual claim on a week before his start date. It is also an answer from a world Allen has just left, where people agreed not to interfere with each other's lives. In Morec, the claim of the state on a man's week does not depend on his contract.
Blake and Luddy arrive
"The point," Mrs. Frost began, and the doorbell rings. "Excuse me. This should be them now." Them: she was expecting more guests.
"When the door opened Tony Blake from Blake-Moffet entered. Behind him was Fred Luddy, a briefcase under his arm." This is the first time Tony Blake has appeared in person. The book has spoken of Blake-Moffet since Chapter 2 as Allen's great rival, the agency whose packets end with the hero proposing to "the girl from next door," and since Chapter 10 as the firm that took Luddy and, with him, "roughly, us for the next year."
Blake is affable and very much at home. "Good evening, Sue," Tony Blake said "agreeably." "Evening, Myron. This is an honor, Mrs. Hoyt. Evening, Allen. Glad to see you back." He greets everyone by first name except the leader, whom he greets with a courtier's compliment. And he says "Glad to see you back," which means he knew Allen was away. "Luddy said nothing."
"They all seated themselves, facing one another, swapping tension and hauteur." And Allen, in a suit he has worn across four days of space and a staged afternoon, feels his story slipping: "by the minute he looked less like an overworked businessman and more like a college radical from the Age of Waste." The Age of Waste is Morec's name for the twentieth century, the decadent age its revolution ended. To look like a student radical of that age is to look like the past Morec was founded against.
"a metazoon and a mammal"
Frost resumes: "To continue," Mrs. Frost said. "Mr. Purcell, you were not at your Agency as your wife told us. At first we were puzzled, because we believed there was going to be mutual confidence between us. It seemed odd that a situation of this sort, with you dropping mysteriously out of sight, and these vague evasions and denials by your", and Allen cuts her off before the next word, which would have been wife.
"Now look here," Allen said. "You're not addressing a metazoon and a mammal; you're addressing a human being who's a citizen of the Morec society. Either you speak to me civilly or I leave now. I'm tired and I'd like to get some sleep. I'll leave it up to you."
The phrase is strange and deliberately so. A metazoan is any many-celled animal; Allen, in a flash of temper, uses the zoologist's word to say that Frost is talking to him as if he were an animal under study. He insists on his rank as a citizen. It is a gamble. He threatens to walk out of a meeting that includes the head of the Committee.
The gamble works, because Hoyt takes his side. "Curtly, Mrs. Hoyt said:" "He's quite right, Sue. Stop playing boss, and for heaven's sake get that righteous look off your face. Leave that to God."
That is a startling thing for the leader of a moral state to say. Righteousness is God's business, not a Committee Secretary's. Hoyt is the descendant of the founder and the head of the Committee, and she sees Frost's righteous look as presumption.
Frost turns, stung. "Perhaps you don't have confidence in me," she said to Hoyt. "Should we settle that first?" It is a challenge to her own superior. And Mavis enjoys it hugely: "Sprawled out in his chair, Myron Mavis snickered." "Yes, I'd like this one better. Do settle it first, Sue."
"Glub, glub."
"Mrs. Frost became flustered." "Really, this whole thing is getting out of hand. Why don't I fix coffee?" She arose. "And there's a little brandy, if nobody feels it's contrary to public interest."
Mavis: "We're sinking," he says, "grinning across at Allen." "Glub, glub. Under the waves of sin." The man who sneered at the Resort's candy and bottled pop in Chapter 3 now sneers at Morec's own scruples about a little brandy. He has been worn down by the state, and his cynicism has turned on it.
"The tension ebbed and both Blake and Luddy began shuffling, conferring, murmuring. Luddy put on his hornrimmed glasses and two serious heads were bent over the contents of his briefcase. Mrs. Frost went to the hotplate and put on the coffee-maker." A hotplate: the Committee Secretary cooks on the same kind of ring as anyone in a housing unit.
"Still seated, Mrs. Hoyt regarded a spot on the floor and spoke to no one. As always, she wore heavy furs, dark stockings, and low-heeled shoes. Allen had a great deal of respect for her; he knew her for an adroit manipulator." The respect and the description go together. In Allen's world, to be an adroit manipulator is a compliment.
"a progenitor on my father's side"
Allen opens conversation with Hoyt. "You're related to Major Streiter," he said. "Isn't that what I've heard?" The question is odd, because the book has called her the Major's descendant since Chapter 2, and Allen knows it. It reads as small talk, or as Allen probing, or as a slip of the author's; this edition lists it among the quirks.
"Mrs. Hoyt favored him with a look." "Yes, Mr. Purcell. The Major was a progenitor on my father's side."
And Blake puts in, as if on cue: "Terrible about the statue," Blake put in. "Imagine an outbreak like that. It defies description."
The head in the closet
"Allen had forgotten about the statue. And the head. It was still in the closet, unless Janet had done something with it. No wonder she had gulped down bottles of pills: the head had been there with her, all during the week."
The narrator, as Blake mentions the statue
In a room where his private life is about to be put on trial for a crime he did not commit, the one crime he did commit is sitting in his closet, and nobody in the room thinks to ask about it.
The irony is the heart of the chapter. Allen forgot the head; the reader may have forgotten it too, after two chapters on another planet. It is still there, between the shoes and the laundry bag, where Janet found it on Saturday morning. And Allen finally understands Janet's week: not "quite a few" pills because she missed him, but "bottles" of them because she was alone with the evidence.
"They'll catch him," Luddy said, "with vigor." "Or them. Personally it's my conviction that an organized gang is involved." Luddy, the man who betrayed Allen, speaks of the japer with the zeal of a policeman, and is sitting across from him.
Then Frost, from the hotplate: "There's something almost satanic in it," Sue Frost said. "Stealing the head, that way. Coming back a few days later and", and after a dash, "right in front of the police", and after another, "stealing it and taking it heaven knows where. I wonder if it'll ever turn up." "She located cups and saucers."
Satanic is the word of a puritan for a prank. Frost's account runs two japes together: the first night, when the head was cut off and set in the statue's hand, and the second, when the head itself was taken from inside the police box. "right in front of the police" is an exaggeration, since Chapter 11's dreamer met nobody, but it is how the event must look to Morec: the boarded-up statue was guarded, and the head went anyway.
"I wonder if it'll ever turn up." Allen says nothing.
"a friendly inquiry"
"When the coffee had been served, the discussion took up where it had left off. But moderation prevailed. Cooler heads were at work." The phrase "Cooler heads" is a small pun, after all the talk about a head.
Frost begins again, apologetic. "Certainly there's no reason toquarrel," Mrs.Frostsaid. "I suppose I was upset. Honestly, Allen, look at the spot you put us in. Last Sunday", and after a dash, "a week ago", and after another, "I picked up the phone and called your apartment; I wanted to catch you with your wife so we could decide on our Juggle evening." The Juggle evening was her invitation in Chapter 10. The call came a day after Allen vanished, and the answer she got was Janet's.
"I'm sorry," Allen murmured, "scrutinizing the wall and mentally twiddling his thumbs." "In some ways this was the worst part, the rhetoric of apology." Allen, who writes rhetoric for a living, recognises its forms as they are used on him: he is to be forgiven if he will accept that he caused the trouble.
"Would you like to tell us what happened?" Mrs. Frost continued. "Her savoir-faire had returned, and she smiled with her usual grace and charm." "Consider this a friendly inquiry. We're all your friends, even Mr. Luddy."
"even Mr. Luddy" is the giveaway. Frost has brought the man Allen fired, now working for his rival, to a friendly inquiry. Allen asks the obvious question: "What's the Blake-Moffet team doing here?" he asked. "I can't see how this concerns them. Maybe I'm being overly blunt, but this seems to be a matter between you and me and Mrs. Hoyt."
"A pained exchange of glances informed him that there was more to it. As if the presence of Blake and Luddy hadn't said that already."
"some disturbing material"
"Come on, Sue," Mrs. Hoyt rumbled "in her gravelly voice." Then Frost, in the same paragraph of the source, explains: "When we couldn't get in touch with you," Mrs. Frost went on, "we had a conference and we decided to sit on it. After all, you're a grown man. But then Mr. Blake called us. T-M has done a great deal of business with Blake-Moffet over the years, and we all know one another. Mr. Blake showed us some disturbing material, and we", and Allen interrupts again.
The sequence is worth setting out. Frost could not reach Allen. The Committee decided to wait. Then Blake called them, and the inquiry began. The initiative was Blake-Moffet's. Frost's reason for letting them in is the old-boy one: "we all know one another." T-M is Blake-Moffet's best customer; the man who is about to run T-M is Blake-Moffet's rival. That conflict of interest is never named in the room.
"What material?" Allen demanded. "Let's have a look at it." Blake: "It's here, Purcell. Don't get upset; all in due time." "He tossed some papers over, and Allen caught them."
"You haven't separated from your wife, have you?"
While Allen reads, Frost puts the charge as gently as she can:
"Is that what this is about?" "He felt as if he had been dipped in sheer cold. It was one of those eternal blind alleys that Morec worriers got themselves into. Divorce, scandal, sex, other women", and after the source's dash, "the whole confused gamut of marital difficulty."
The chill is relief and contempt at once. Allen's real secrets are a jape, a stolen head, a visit to the Resort and a kidnapping. Morec's inquiry is about his marriage. "Morec worriers" worry about sex because sex is what their morality is built to police. They have walked into a blind alley, and for Allen that is good luck.
Hoyt sets out the rule: "Naturally," Mrs. Hoyt said, "it would be incumbent on you to refuse the directorship under such circumstances. A man in such a high position of trust", and after a dash, "well, you're familiar with the rest." In Morec, private life is a qualification for public office.
"I'd like to ask you, Allen. As a personal friend. Never mind those papers; I'll tell you what it is. You haven't separated from your wife, have you? You haven't had a quarrel you'd rather keep quiet, something that's come up between you that means a more or less permanent altercation?"
Sue Frost
The dossier
"The papers in his hands danced in a jumble of words, phrases, dates and locations. He gave up and tossed them aside." He cannot read them. He is tired, and the papers are a jumble. "And Blake's got documentation on this?" And then the narration's verdict: "They were after him, but they had got themselves onto a false lead. Luckily for him." "Let's hear it."
Blake gives his report in the flat voice of a private detective, and each item is, for the reader, a scene we have already watched from the other side.
"Two weeks ago you worked alone at your Agency. At eight-thirty you locked up and left. You walked at random, entered a commissary, then returned to the Agency and took a ship." That is Sunday 7 October, and it is the evening Malparto's drugs recovered in Chapter 9: Allen left the Agency at eight-thirty, "Not ten," walked the dead lanes, bought a bottle of beer at the autofac station and flew to Hokkaido. "What then?" "He wondered how far they had gone." If they followed him all night, they saw the Park.
"Then you eluded pursuit. We, ah, weren't equipped to follow." The "ah" is Blake's embarrassment. Their tail lost him when his ship left. They do not know about Hokkaido, and so they do not know about the Park. The one night that matters is the one night they missed.
Allen supplies the part they could not follow, because it is safe: "I went to Hokkaido. Ask my block warden. I drank three glasses of wine, came home, fell on the front steps. It's all a matter of record; I was brought up and exonerated." He was brought up at the block meeting in Chapter 7, charged with coming home drunk, and let off. The public record of his Sunday night stops at the front steps. The jape, between Hokkaido and the steps, is in nobody's record but Malparto's.
"So." Blake nodded. "Well, then. It's our contention that you met a woman; that you had met her before; that you have willingly and knowingly committed adultery with this woman."
"Here ends empirical evidence."
"Thus collapses the juvenile system," Allen said bitterly. "Here ends empirical evidence. Back comes witch-burning. Hysterics and innuendo."
Allen, answering Blake
The line is better than Allen knows. In Chapter 14 he escaped from Pepper Lane by what the narrator called "empirical proof," a newspaper used as a shelf-liner. Here he defends himself with the same principle. Morec's juveniles are machines that record what a man does. Blake-Moffet's tail is a human being, who infers what he was doing. When the machine record fails, the society falls back on suspicion, and Allen compares that to the witch trials. The comparison is overheated and also apt: a charge of secret sin, proved by circumstance, before a panel that has already decided what sort of sin it is.
There is an irony underneath. The juvenile system has not collapsed; it has simply never seen the crime that matters. Allen's own empirical record is clean because the juvenile saw him come home drunk and did not see the Park. If evidence alone ruled, Allen would be safe, and he would also be the only person in the room who knows he is guilty of something.
The rest of the week
"You left your Agency," Blake continued, "on Tuesday of that week, to make a phone call from a public booth. It was a call you couldn't make in your office, for fear of being overheard." That is Chapter 6, where Allen called the Resort from a booth and booked an appointment as Coates. Blake has the reason exactly right; only the person at the other end is wrong.
"To this girl?" "They were ingenious, at least. And they probably believed it." "What's the girl's name?" (The source closes this question with a single quotation mark.)
"Grace Maldini," Blake said. "About twenty-four years old, standing five-foot-five, weighing about one twenty-five. Dark hair, dark skin, presumably of Italian extraction."
Tony Blake
"It was Gretchen, of course. Now he was really perplexed." The description fits the girl in the Park in Chapter 5, "dark-haired, deep-chested, with smooth, tanned skin." The alias keeps her initials and the Italian flavour of Malparto. Allen is perplexed because the Resort's agent has turned up in Blake-Moffet's file, and he cannot see how the two fit together. Neither can the reader yet.
"On Thursday morning you were two hours late to work. You walked off and were lost along the commute lanes. You deliberately chose routes through the thickest traffic." That is Chapter 8: Allen walking to his nine o'clock with Malparto, losing anyone who might be watching. "Conjecture," Allen said. "But it had been true; he was on his way to the Health Resort." And then, inside his head: "Grace Maldini? What on earth was that about?" (The source closes the thought with a stray quotation mark.)
Then Blake comes to Saturday:
"When the ship reached Centaurus, you and the girl transferred to a second ship, and again you shook monitoring. You did not return to Earth during the entire week." And then the hook: "It was within that period that your wife described you as", and Blake quotes Janet as saying Allen was "completing work at your Agency." Janet's words on the phone in this chapter were "winding up your aflairs [sic]." Either she said something different to Frost, or Blake has paraphrased her. Either way, the lie is on the record, and Blake has it.
"This evening, about thirty minutes ago, you stepped off an inter-S ship, dressed as you are now, entered a phone booth, and then came here."
BY THE NUMBERS
"Grace Maldini" in figures. Blake's description gives an age of 24, a height of 5 feet 5 inches, about 165 cm, and a weight of about 125 pounds, about 57 kg. That is a woman of slight to average build. The initials of the alias, G. M., are Gretchen Malparto's. The time scale of the case: Blake's tail began 14 days before this hearing, on Sunday 7 October; Allen was away from Earth for 8 days, from Saturday night 13 October to Sunday night 21 October, of which about 4 were the outbound trip, by Allen's own reckoning, and about 4 the trip home. Of those 8 days he remembers one afternoon.
"On Saturday morning of that week," Blake continued, "you did the same thing. You shook off anybody who might have been following you and met this girl at an unknown point. You did not return to your apartment that day. That night, a week ago yesterday, you boarded an inter-S ship in the company of the girl, who registered herself as Miss Grace Maldini. You registered under the name John Coates."
Tony Blake
CONTRAST
| Blake's claim | Day | What the reader saw | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Locked up at 8:30, walked, commissary, back to the Agency, took a ship; "weren't equipped to follow" | Sunday 7 Oct | Left the Agency at 8:30, autofac station, beer, Hokkaido with Gates and Sugermann, then the Park and the jape | Chapter 9 (recall), Chapter 1 |
| A call from a public booth "for fear of being overheard" | Tuesday 9 Oct | Called the Resort as "Coates" and booked Doctor Malparto for Thursday | Chapter 6 |
| Two hours late; "routes through the thickest traffic" | Thursday 11 Oct | Walked to his nine o'clock at the Resort | Chapter 8 |
| Shook off pursuit, "met this girl at an unknown point" | Saturday 13 Oct | Went to the Resort, met Gretchen there, sat Malparto's Psi tests | Chapter 12 |
| Inter-S ship with "Miss Grace Maldini," as "John Coates"; transfer at Centaurus | Saturday night 13 Oct onward | "all the lights went out"; nothing until the bus on Other World | Chapters 12 to 13 |
| Back about thirty minutes ago, phone booth, here | Sunday 21 Oct | The ship, the call to Janet, the call to Frost, the walk | Chapter 15 |
The table shows how good the surveillance was and how wrong. Almost every fact in Blake's account is correct. The interpretation is wrong, because Blake has only one story for a married man who sneaks out, phones from booths and travels with a dark-haired woman under a false name. It is the story of an affair. Blake also leaves out things he must know or could have found: the Friday visit to Frost, the block meeting. He reports what fits.
"an ultimate block meeting"
"They were all looking at him, waiting with interest. This was an ultimate block meeting: avid curiosity, the need to hear every lurid detail. And, with that, the solemn Morec of duty." Chapter 7's block meeting, where neighbours sat in judgment through one timbreless voice, was the small form. This is the form at the top: the leader, the Secretary and the outgoing Director, and the prurience dressed as duty is the same.
"At least he knew how he had been gotten from Earth to Other World. Malparto's therapeutic drugs had kept him docile, while Gretchen thought up names and made the arrangements. Four days in her company: the first emergence of John Coates."
The dossier has solved Allen's mystery for him. Blake's tail watched him being taken. The photograph and the ship registration are the record of his own abduction, and he learns its route (Earth, Centaurus, Vega) from the man trying to ruin him. "the first emergence of John Coates" is Allen's dry name for it. The alias he used on the phone in Chapter 6 became, under drugs, a passenger with a companion and then a husband on Pepper Lane.
"Produce the girl"
"Produce the girl," Allen said. "Nobody spoke." It is the cleanest move in the hearing: demand the witness the accusers cannot produce. "Where is she?" And in narration: "They could look forever for Grace Maldini. And without her it was so much hearsay." "Let's see her." And then, across a paragraph break that the source puts in the middle of the speech: "Where does she live? What's her lease? Where does she work? Where is she right now?" In Morec the lease is a person's first identity, and Allen asks for it second, after her address. A real Grace Maldini would have one. Gretchen Malparto belongs to the Resort, which, as Chapter 8 explained, holds its land by deed.
"Blake produced a photograph, and Allen examined it. A blurred print: he and Gretchen seated side by side in large chairs. Gretchen was reading a magazine and he was asleep. Taken on the ship, no doubt, from the other end of the lounge."
The picture is evidence of the scheme, which is to say of the kidnapping: Allen asleep, drugged, beside the woman who is taking him away. To Blake it is a picture of lovers. Allen mocks it: "Incredible," he mocked. "There I am, and a woman's sitting next to me."
"Myron Mavis took the picture, studied it, and sneered." "Not worth a cent. Not worth the merest particle of a rusty Mexican cent. Take it back." Mavis's contempt is real and has a tone of his own; the rusty Mexican cent is an image from his weariness. "Mrs. Hoyt said thoughtfully:" "Myron's right. This isn't proof of anything."
Luddy tries one more line: "Why did you assume the name Coates?" Luddy spoke up. "If you're so innocent", and Mavis cuts him off: "Prove that, too," Mavis said. "This is ridiculous. I'm going home; I'm tired, and Purcell looks tired. Tomorrow is Monday and you know what that means for all of us."
Luddy's question is the one dangerous question asked in the room. The false name is real, and Allen has no innocent account of it. Mavis kills it with "Prove that, too," treating the registration as more of the same hearsay. He is wrong on the facts and right on procedure, and Allen is saved by procedure.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: who is protecting Allen, and why? Three people in the room defend Allen, and none explains why. Hoyt rebukes Frost for righteousness, says of the photograph "This isn't proof of anything," and ends the meeting. Mavis, who will be replaced by Allen tomorrow and has reason to resent him, mocks the evidence and interrupts Luddy at the one dangerous point. Frost brings the charge, but presents it "As a personal friend" and accepts a single word in answer. The novel gives motives elsewhere in general terms: Mavis is exhausted and sardonic about Morec; Hoyt is "an adroit manipulator." It does not, in this chapter, say what any of them wants from the outcome. A reader should notice how the hearing is run. It is not a court. It is a meeting in a private apartment, convened on a competitor's evidence, with no rules for what counts as proof and an ending decided by the most senior person's patience. Allen is cleared because the powerful people in the room choose to clear him.
"One simple question. Yes or no."
"Mrs. Frost, arose, folded her arms, and said to Allen:" (the comma is the source's) "We all agree it isn't remotely possible to call this material proof. But it's disturbing. Evidently you did make these phone calls; you did go somewhere out of the ordinary; you have been gone the last week. What you tell me I'll believe. So will Mrs. Hoyt." "Mrs. Hoyt inclined her head."
Frost's summary is fair to the facts. The calls were made; he did go somewhere strange; he was gone. And she offers a bargain: his word will settle it.
"No," he said, "and it was really, actually true. There was no lie involved. He looked her straight in the eye."
The man who "decided to lie" a few pages earlier now answers truthfully, and the truth works better than any lie would have. The question asked is the wrong one. Frost asked about his marriage, and on that he is innocent. He keeps going, and the speech that follows mixes truth and lie with professional skill:
"No adultery, no affair, no secret love. I went to Hokkaido and got material. I phoned a male friend." The narration adds: "Some friend." "I visited the same friend. This last week has been an unfortunate involvement in circumstances beyond my control, growing out of my retiring from my Agency and accepting the director-ship. My motives and actions have been in the public interest, and my conscience is totally clear."
"Have you left your wife?" Mrs. Frost asked. "One simple question. Yes or no."
Sue Frost
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Allen's answer, sentence by sentence.
"No adultery, no affair, no secret love." True. He has been faithful to Janet, even on Pepper Lane.
"I went to Hokkaido and got material." True in the letter: he went, and the trip is on record. "Material" is a trade word for ideas for packets, and he came back with a jape instead.
"I phoned a male friend." Misleading. He phoned the Resort; the man he booked was Doctor Malparto, who is male, and is no friend, as the narrator's "Some friend" says.
"I visited the same friend." True in the letter, in the same way.
"circumstances beyond my control" True. He was drugged and abducted.
"growing out of my retiring from my Agency and accepting the director-ship." Partly true. The week grew out of the jape as much as the job, and the jape preceded the job offer.
"My motives and actions have been in the public interest, and my conscience is totally clear." False. He knows he japed the statue, and the head is in his closet.
The answer is a piece of his trade, a short persuasive packet with a moral in its last line. The literal truth of its first sentence carries the rest. It is also, in a way that matters to the book, a jape on the hearing itself: the room asked for Morec piety and got it, recited fluently by a man who has just committed the most public impiety in years.
Hoyt ends it: "Let the boy go. So he can take a bath and get some sleep." The boy: Allen is a grown man about to direct the state's media, and to the founder's descendant he is a boy who needs a bath.
"Tomorrow morning, at eight?"
"Her hand out, Sue Frost approached Allen." "I'm sorry. I am. You know that." "They shook, and Allen said:" "Tomorrow morning, at eight?" It is the practical question of a man who has kept his job. "Fine." She smiled "sheepishly." "But we had to check. A charge of this sort", and after a dash, "you understand."
"He did." Two words. He understands that in Morec a charge of this sort must be checked, and that the checking is the system's real work. He also understands what she does not: that the charge was a false lead and the real charge was never laid.
Packet number 355-B
"Packet number 355-B. Faithful husband the victim of old women living in the housing unit who cook up a kettle of filth and then get it tossed in their faces."
Allen, to Blake and Luddy, as they pack their briefcase
The parting shot is aimed at Blake-Moffet's business. Their packets are moral tales; Allen gives them a plot summary in the style of a catalogue entry, with a number, and the plot is tonight. The faithful husband is Allen. The old women in the housing unit who cook up filth are Blake and Luddy, and by implication Frost, who let them in. It is a parody of Blake-Moffet's genre, which ends with the hero proposing to the girl next door, and it is also the genre's revenge: the gossips get the filth back in their faces.
There is a joke, too, inside the number. Allen has just told the hearing a packet about himself with a moral he does not believe. Now he labels the hearing as a packet. He is japing again, and this time he does it to their faces and gets away with it.
"Hurriedly, glancing down, Blake murmured good nights and departed. Luddy followed after him."
The last sentence of the chapter is quiet and ominous: "Allen wondered how long the false lead would keep him alive."
Keep him alive is strong. The false lead protects him because it uses up the accusers' energy on a crime he did not commit. As long as Blake-Moffet hunts for Grace Maldini, nobody is looking at the head in his closet. Allen knows that this protection is temporary and that someone is still watching. He does not know why Blake-Moffet started watching him on the night of the jape, and the chapter leaves that question open.
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Chapter 15 in four movements.
Return (lines 375 to 415). The trip home, the walk he refuses, two phone calls. Janet's call gives Allen the purpose of the scheme and the bill; Frost's gives him the summons.
Assembly (lines 417 to 461). The apartment, the cast, the first round over Allen's week, Hoyt's rebuke, coffee and brandy, and the head of Streiter brought into the room by name while it sits in his closet.
The dossier (lines 463 to 535). The friendly inquiry, the charge of adultery, Blake's timetable, "Grace Maldini," the photograph, Mavis's and Hoyt's dismissal, Luddy's question about Coates.
The verdict (lines 537 to 555). One yes-or-no question, a true no and a false clear conscience, Hoyt's release, Frost's apology, the parody packet and the false lead.
The chapter is a set piece of drawing-room comedy, the kind of scene where a hero is accused before a company and talks his way free, and Dick plays it straight as comedy while laying a darker line under it. Nearly every speech in the room is about Allen's private life, which is innocent; the one thing that would ruin him is mentioned twice, by Blake and Frost, as somebody else's crime. The reader knows more than anyone in the room except Allen, and the tension comes from watching the accusers circle the wrong secret.
What the chapter shows about Allen
He has come back changed in small ways. He balks at walking because Other World's buses showed him the rule was arbitrary. He speaks to Frost as a citizen, not a subordinate. He reads the hearing as theatre and plays his part in it well, with legal points, an indignant outburst, a demand for the witness and a closing speech.
He is also, plainly, a man who lies when it suits him. The chapter does not hide this. "He decided to lie," and his reason is that Morec would punish the truth. His defence works because the question asked is one he can answer honestly, and he uses that honest answer to carry a dishonest close. The book does not condemn him for it, and it does not excuse him. It shows a decent man in an indecent system doing what the system rewards.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the questions the hearing never asks. The hearing asks about sex and marriage because those are what Morec polices. It never asks the question that bears on Allen's fitness for a public trust: what he was doing on the night of 7 October between leaving Hokkaido and falling on his front steps. Blake's people were tailing Allen that night, which raises a question the chapter leaves open: why was Blake-Moffet following him on the Sunday before the Committee offered him the job, before Luddy was fired and went over to them? The text does not say, and this edition will not supply an answer ahead of it.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: vetting the wrong thing. Frost's hearing is a fitness-and-propriety assessment, and it fails the way such assessments can fail. In the UK, firms must assess whether senior managers and certain staff are fit and proper; the FCA Handbook's FIT sourcebook names the main considerations as honesty, integrity and reputation; competence and capability; and financial soundness (FIT 1.3.1B). In December 2025 the FCA published policy statement PS25/23 on non-financial misconduct, with new guidance that came into force on 1 September 2026, clarifying how non-financial misconduct, including some conduct in a person's private life, bears on fitness and propriety. The FCA was equally explicit about limits. It said firms do not need to monitor employees' private lives or social media, and need not investigate allegations about private life that are trivial, implausible or irrelevant. Frost's inquiry has every fault that guidance warns against. It reaches into a man's marriage on a competitor's surveillance; it treats a blurred photograph as disturbing when nobody can call it proof; it lets a party with a commercial interest (Blake-Moffet, T-M's supplier and Allen's rival) bring the charge and sit in on the hearing; and it ends with a closed yes-or-no question that a careful witness can answer truthfully while concealing what matters. Meanwhile the misconduct that does bear on integrity, a deliberate act of vandalism against the state's founding symbol, goes unasked. The practical lessons hold for any bank or regulated firm: define in advance what conduct is relevant and why; handle conflicts of interest in the people who bring and hear allegations; weigh evidence rather than impressions; and use open questions about the conduct in issue, because a narrow question invites a narrowly true answer. [Sources: FCA Handbook, FIT 1.3 and FIT 2.1; FCA, policy statement PS25/23 on non-financial misconduct, 12 December 2025, with COCON 1.1.7FR; FCA, statement on what firms do not need to do.]
Questions the chapter raises
- Why did Blake-Moffet begin following Allen on Sunday 7 October, before the job was offered?
- What did Malparto intend for Janet when he spoke of her "joining" Allen?
- How did Blake know about the ship, the Centaurus transfer and the moment Allen landed, when the Resort arranged the trip under false names?
- Why do Hoyt and Mavis defend Allen so firmly?
- What will Janet have done with the head?
- How long, in Allen's words, will "the false lead" keep him alive?
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 15.
"aflairs [sic]." Line 401 prints Janet's "affairs" as "aflairs" followed by a bracketed sic, an editorial mark unusual in a novel.
Janet's words quoted two ways. Janet says she told Frost Allen was "winding up" his affairs; Blake quotes her as saying "completing work at your Agency."
Stray quotation marks. Line 399 opens the narration "That sounded ominous" with a quotation mark; line 501 closes "What's the girl's name?" with a single mark; line 509 closes Allen's unspoken thought "What on earth was that about?" with a double mark; line 512 closes Blake's speech after "John Coates." and continues it unmarked.
Two speakers in one paragraph. Line 475 runs Hoyt's "Come on, Sue" and Frost's explanation together; line 477 does the same with Allen and Blake.
A broken speech. Allen's "Let's see her." at line 521 continues across a paragraph break into line 523.
"Mrs. Frost, arose" at line 537 has a stray comma; "director-ship" at line 543 is hyphenated; Janet's broken "You're ... all right?" at line 379 has a stray space before its dash.
Hoyt's ancestry. Allen asks Hoyt whether she is related to Major Streiter, though Chapter 2 identifies her as the Major's descendant. She answers that he was "a progenitor on my father's side."
Inverted order. Frost's "This an order is!" at line 411 repeats the inverted pattern of her "This embarrassing is" in Chapter 3.
"a metazoon." Line 437 spells the zoological term "metazoon"; the usual spelling is metazoan.
Dashes. Lines 389, 405, 429, 435, 461, 465, 475, 481, 483, 533 and 551 break speech with dashes; quotations here split them.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 15. The trip home runs from Wednesday night to Sunday night, 21 October; outbound, Allen spent "Four days in her company," drugged. Malparto told Janet that Allen had gone to Other World for treatment and might be gone "several weeks," long enough to lose his directorship and lease and be stranded on "Vega 4," and suggested Janet join him; the Resort is billing his salary. Janet told Frost he was winding up his affairs, and has spent the week on pills with the head of Major Streiter still in the closet. Sue Frost summons him; in her apartment are Mavis, Hoyt, Tony Blake of Blake-Moffet and Fred Luddy. Allen "decided to lie." Blake's tail has followed him since Sunday 7 October, missed Hokkaido and the Park, and recorded the Tuesday booth call, the late Thursday, the Saturday disappearance, a ship with "Miss Grace Maldini," a transfer at Centaurus and a blurred photograph. Blake charges adultery. Asked "Have you left your wife?" Allen says "No," which is true, then claims a "totally clear" conscience, which is not, and nobody asks about the statue. Hoyt and Mavis dismiss the evidence; Hoyt says "Let the boy go." He starts at Telemedia "Tomorrow morning, at eight," mocks Blake and Luddy with "Packet number 355-B," and wonders "how long the false lead would keep him alive."
Excelsior
Allen's first morning as Director of Telemedia. His old Agency desk has been moved into a cleaned and repainted office, and by ten o'clock he has tried the swivel chair, the pencil sharpener and the one-way wall that looks down on his staff. Myron Mavis, unslept, drops in to wish him luck and walk him round the building. The corridor is crowded with congratulatory bundles of synthetic flowers: from Hoyt, Frost, Priar and Janet, from the four giant Agencies including Blake-Moffet, from people who leave no card, and one small bunch of real bluebells that Allen guesses came from Gates and Sugermann. He suspects one anonymous bundle is from the Health Resort, and that Malparto will want his investment back. After the tour Mavis remarks that Blake-Moffet has wanted the directorship for years. Allen shows him the apple-tree packet that started everything, and Mavis mocks it with grand phrases and then whispers a motto: Excelsior. Alone, Allen tests his battery of intercoms with schoolyard boasts, marks the packet satisfactory and sends it down the chain. He phones Janet, promises ice cream, refuses to tell her about the hearing, and talks about bringing in Harry Priar and trimming the staff. Janet begs him not to go over people's heads and remembers how much fun the Agency was. Then the intercom secretary, whom he calls by the wrong name, sends in the first visitor of the day. It is Gretchen Malparto.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter is one working morning and the start of an afternoon. The narration fixes it at "By ten o'clock Monday morning," which this edition dates Monday 22 October 2114, the day after the hearing at Sue Frost's apartment; Allen had asked Frost for "Tomorrow morning, at eight?" and she had said yes. The tour of the building ends when "It was almost noon," Mavis lingers "for an hour or so," and the phone call to Janet and the first visitor come after that, so probably early in the afternoon. Mavis's "last night" is Sunday 21 October. The settings are Allen's new office at Telemedia, with its "one-way viewing wall," a corridor full of flowers, and the floors of the building where the staff line up. Janet is at the Purcells' unit on the other end of a phone. The chapter runs to about 1,000 words, one of the shortest chapters in the novel.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, now Director of Telemedia; Myron Mavis, the outgoing Director, "looking as if he hadn't gone to bed"; the staff of Telemedia, who "quit work and lined up for his inspection"; Janet Purcell, on the phone; Vivian, the intercom secretary, whom Allen calls Doris, the name of one of his secretaries at the Agency. Named on the flower cards or in Allen's guesses: Ida Pease Hoyt, Sue Frost, Harry Priar, the four giant Agencies including Blake-Moffet, Mr. Wales from the block meeting, Gates and Sugermann, and the Mental Health Resort with Doctor Malparto. Dante is named in Mavis's joke. In the last line, Gretchen Malparto.
"a gesture of continuity"
"His new office at Telemedia had been cleaned, swept, repainted, and his desk had been moved from the Agency as a gesture of continuity." The opening sentence is all housekeeping, and that is the point. The last time we saw Allen at work, in Chapter 15's terms, he was a man who had been absent for a week under suspicion, and the night before he had been questioned about adultery in a Committee Secretary's apartment. This morning everything has been made ready for him as though nothing had happened. The office has been prepared in his absence by people who expected him to arrive.
The phrase "a gesture of continuity" has the sound of an official memo. Someone decided that the new Director should sit at his old desk, so that the move from private Agency to state trust looks like a promotion along a line and not a break. It is a small kindness and a small piece of public relations at once, which is how Telemedia does most things. It also carries a quiet irony. The desk comes from the Agency that Allen built to bring new kinds of packets into T-M. Continuity, here, means that the outsider's furniture has been absorbed into the institution he set out to change.
"By ten o'clock Monday morning, Allen had got the feel of things. He had sat in the big swivel chair, used the pencil sharpener, stood before the one-way viewing wall covertly surveyed his building-sized staff." (The source drops an and before covertly.) The list is comic in its order. To get the feel of things as the head of the state's entire media apparatus, he has tried the chair, sharpened a pencil and looked through a window. These are the gestures of a man in a new office who does not yet know what the job is, and Dick lets them stand without comment.
The third item is not trivial. "the one-way viewing wall" lets the Director look at his staff without being seen. Allen "covertly surveyed" them. His first act of management is surveillance. In a society that runs on block wardens, juveniles and neighbours who report, the man at the top of the media trust gets the best seat of all: a wall through which he watches and is not watched. Allen does not seem to notice the resemblance, and nothing he does with the wall in this chapter is sinister. But the novel has already shown, in Blake-Moffet's dossier the night before, what it is like to be on the other side of one-way observation. Here the roles reverse, for a few minutes.
"building-sized staff" is a good compressed phrase. The staff is measured in architecture. Allen's Agency was a few rooms in the Mogentlock Building, with Doris typing next door; Telemedia is a whole building of people.
"Very healthy; look at me."
"While he was stabilizing himself, Myron Mavis, looking as if he hadn't gone to bed, appeared to wish him luck." Stabilizing himself is the language of a man after a storm or a long voyage, and Allen has had both. He came off an inter-S ship the night before, was taken straight to a hearing, and has presumably slept a few hours at most. Mavis, too, looks unslept. He sat through the hearing and has turned up at the building he no longer runs.
"Not a bad layout," Mavis said. "Gets plenty of sunlight, good air. Very healthy; look at me."
Myron Mavis, showing Allen the office
The joke is at his own expense. Earlier chapters show Mavis worn out by the job: Allen guessed his retirement a year before it came and in Chapter 4 feared that the post would kill him as it had worn out Mavis. Look at me means the opposite of what it says. The office is healthy; the man who sat in it is a ruin. It is a warning from predecessor to successor, offered as a pleasantry, and Mavis has a way of telling the truth only in this form.
The reply picks up the joke and turns it into Mavis's own retirement plan. In Chapter 4 Allen told Janet that Mavis had "a piece of planet in the Sirius System" and that "They're great on cattle." Mavis is leaving to raise cattle on a far planet, so Allen pictures him as an old horse sent to the knacker's yard, where worn-out animals were rendered for hide glue. It is affectionate and a little cruel, and the narration says that Allen says it "feeling humble," which tells us how to take it. Faced with the wreck of the previous Director, the new one makes a joke to cover a moment of respect, and perhaps of fear.
"Not for awhile. Come on." (The source prints awhile as one word, which is a common American spelling of the adverb and here stands where a while would be more usual after for.) Mavis does not argue with the image. He guides Allen out: "I'll introduce you to the staff."
"I hope you're not selling your hoofs for glue," Allen said, feeling humble.
Allen, to Mavis
"Like a hot house"
"They squeezed past the bundles of congratulatory" flowers, which the source puts in quotation marks, "along the corridor." The quotation marks are Dick's way of saying that these are not flowers in the old sense. The next sentence names them: "The reek of crypto-flora assailed them," and Allen stops to read the cards. Crypto-flora is a coined word, and its parts suggest hidden or false plants. In a world where, since Chapter 1, the only grass grows in the Park beneath the Morec spire, flowers for an office would have to be manufactured. They also smell too strong. Reek and assailed are words for an attack, and Allen's comment, "Like a hot house," turns the corridor into an overheated glasshouse.
"Here's one from Mrs. Hoyt."
The roll call follows. "There was a bundle from Sue Frost, from Harry Priar, and from Janet. There were gaudy bundles from the four giant Agencies, including Blake-Moffet. All bore formal greetings. Their representatives would be in shortly."
Each name is a line in Allen's story so far. Hoyt, the head of the Committee, said "Let the boy go" twelve or so hours before. Frost brought the charge of adultery and then apologised. Priar is running Allen's old Agency. Janet sent flowers to her husband's office on the morning after the worst week of her marriage. And Blake-Moffet, whose head of firm put a private detective's file before the Committee last night, sends a gaudy bundle with a formal greeting. That is the most telling card in the corridor. The firm that tried to ruin Allen is also one of the four large suppliers whose packets Telemedia buys, and now Allen is the buyer. Its representatives "would be in shortly," which means that commercial courtesy resumes the morning after the attempted kill. Nobody in this world sees anything strange in it, and in a way nothing is strange: business with the state media trust has to go on whoever runs it.
CONTRAST
| Bundle | Who sent it | What the sender did lately | What the gift suggests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crypto-flora, card | Ida Pease Hoyt | Ended the hearing: "Let the boy go" | The leader's favour, publicly marked |
| Crypto-flora, card | Sue Frost | Brought the adultery charge, then apologised | Patronage restored, at least on paper |
| Crypto-flora, card | Harry Priar | Running the Agency in Allen's absence | Loyalty from the old firm |
| Crypto-flora, card | Janet | A week alone with pills and the head in the closet | A wife's pride, and relief |
| Gaudy, formal greeting | The four giant Agencies, including Blake-Moffet | Blake-Moffet tailed Allen and charged him | Suppliers courting the new buyer |
| No card | Unknown: perhaps Mr. Wales, perhaps well-wishers | Wales defended Allen at the block meeting | Private goodwill that dares not sign its name |
| Small, dingy, real | Probably Gates and Sugermann | Hosted Allen on Hokkaido the night of the jape | Something from the past, and a private joke |
| No card | Perhaps the Mental Health Resort | Drugged, shipped and billed him | A creditor letting him know it is still there |
"unmarked bundles with no cards"
"And there were unmarked bundles with no cards. He wondered who had sent them." Allen's guesses are kind ones first. "Persons in the housing unit; perhaps little Mr. Wales who had stuck up for him during the block meeting." Mr. Wales is the mild elderly neighbour of Chapter 7 who spoke in Allen's defence when he was accused of japing nothing worse than a mistake, and who explained afterwards that he was repaying Allen for standing up for others. A man like that, in a society where every act is watched, might well send flowers without a card. Signing would put his name on record as a friend of someone who has been before the block.
"Others, from anonymous individuals who wished him luck." The idea that strangers wish the new Director well is touching and a little naive. Allen's packets were popular, so it is possible.
"Those are real"
"There was a dingy bunch, very small, which he picked up; some sort of blue growth." Allen does not know what it is. A man who writes moral stories for the whole society cannot name a common wildflower, because he has never seen one.
"Those are real," Mavis said. "Smell them. Bluebells, I think they were called. Somebody must have dredged them up from the past."
Myron Mavis
Mavis knows a little more, and his phrase is careful: I think they were called. The name is in the past tense. Bluebells, in this world, are a historical curiosity like a jazz record, something you would have to dredge up. Bluebell is the common English name of more than one plant; in Britain it usually means the native woodland bulb Hyacinthoides non-scripta, which carpets old deciduous woods in spring, and in North America it often means Virginia bluebells, Mertensia virginica, an unrelated plant of moist woods and stream banks. Either way, the plant belongs to woods and riverbanks, which this Earth no longer has.
The contrast with the crypto-flora is plain. The gaudy bundles are fake and smell overpowering; the real flowers are small, dingy and smell of themselves. Mavis tells Allen to smell them, which is the one moment in the corridor where somebody pays attention to an actual thing. The scene also ties back to the start of the book. In Chapter 1 the evidence of the jape was a blade of grass on Allen's shoe, the one living thing that could only have come from the Park. Now the evidence of friendship is a bunch of living flowers, and both come from outside Morec's manufactured world.
"Probably Gates and Sugermann." That is Allen's guess, and it is a good one. The two men on Hokkaido live among relics: Tom Gates plays old Chicago jazz records, and Sugermann talks ideas, on an island the rest of the world shuns. They are the people in the novel most likely to dredge up something real from the past and send it without a card. The narration leaves the guess as a guess.
"to recover his investment"
"And one of the anonymous bundles could represent the Mental Health Resort. In the back of his mind was the conviction that Malparto would be seeking to recover his investment."
The narrator, on Allen's suspicion
Here the morning's pleasure turns. Allen has good reason for the thought. The Resort spent money and effort on him: a doctor's tests, drugs, a ship's passage for two, a house on Pepper Lane with its machinery, and the staff who ran it. In Chapter 15 he found that "the Health Resort had already begun to tap his salary," billing him, as he put it, "for services rendered." He has escaped the scheme but the Resort still has a claim on his pay and, he suspects, on him.
The word investment matters. Allen thinks of the Resort as a business that has put capital into a project and wants a return. He does not yet know what return Malparto wants, and the chapter does not say. What the sentence does is plant an expectation. Somewhere among the flowers is a message from people who are not done with him. The reader keeps that in mind through the rest of the morning and has it confirmed in the last line.
"It was almost noon"
"The staff quit work and lined up for his inspection. He shook hands, made random inquiries, spoke sage comments, greeted personnel he remembered. It was almost noon by the time he and Mavis had made the circuit of the building."
Dick writes the inspection in a single list of verbs, and every verb is a little ironic. Made random inquiries admits the questions meant nothing. Spoke sage comments is the kind of phrase a satirist uses for a dignitary's visit; the comments are wise in form and empty in content. Greeted personnel he remembered reminds us that Allen has dealt with T-M for years, as the supplier who sold Mavis packets, and that some faces are known to him. A two-hour tour of a building to shake every hand is the ceremony of taking possession, and Allen performs it well, the way he performed at the hearing the night before.
The staff "quit work" to line up. In Morec the inspection by a superior is itself a kind of work, and stopping production so that a new Director can shake hands is the institution showing its respect for rank.
"Blake-Moffet has been after the directorship for years."
"That was kind of a bad scrape, last night," Mavis said, as they returned to the office. "Blake-Moffet has been after the directorship for years."
Myron Mavis
He adds "It must hurt like", then an oath that the source prints as an h and an l with a dash between them, an old printer's way of not spelling out hell, and then "to see you in."
This is new information, and it changes the way we read the night before. "a bad scrape" is Mavis's understatement for a hearing that could have cost Allen his job, his lease and his marriage. The next sentence gives a motive. Blake-Moffet, the largest name among the four giant Agencies, has wanted the directorship of Telemedia "for years." That would mean one of its own people in the post, or someone under its influence, buying its packets. A small newcomer agency's founder has been given the job instead. It must hurt like hell to see you in is a frank remark about how much is at stake for them.
It does not answer every question left by Chapter 15. Blake's tail began on Sunday 7 October, the night of the jape, before the Committee offered Allen the post and before Luddy was fired and went over to Blake-Moffet. Mavis's remark explains why Blake-Moffet would want Allen out once he was named. It does not explain how they came to be watching him before that, and the text does not say here. What it does is confirm Allen's guess at the hearing, when he decided to lie partly because otherwise the post would go to "a creature of Blake-Moffet." Mavis, who has dealt with the firm for eight years, sees the same thing.
It also tells us something about Mavis. He sat through the hearing, sneered at Blake's photograph, and cut Luddy off at the one dangerous question. Here he lets Allen know whose interest was being served. It is not quite a warning and not quite gossip. It is the kind of thing an outgoing official says to a successor he likes, in the corridor, once and lightly.
"Everything started with this."
"Allen opened the file he had brought and rummaged for a packet." He has brought one thing from the Agency besides his desk, a file, and in it is the packet that began the novel's plot. "Remember this?" He passed it to Mavis. "Everything started with this."
It is the apple-tree packet of Chapter 2, a story about a man who tries to grow an apple tree on a colony planet and fails. Mavis bought it and then took fright, because the Committee had sunk enormous sums into colony farming and the packet seemed to say the orchards would die. Sue Frost brought it to Allen's office and asked for changes. Allen explained his moral (Earth is the centre and the colonies are only a means), refused to change it, withdrew the packet rather than alter it, and fired Fred Luddy on the spot for siding with Frost. Frost seemed to approve of his stubbornness. Within days she was offering him Telemedia.
So everything started with this is literally true in one sense. The packet led to Frost's visit, which led to the job, which led to Luddy's grudge, which led him to Blake-Moffet and to last night's hearing. It is also untrue in a sense Allen knows better than anyone. Everything also started, that same week, with a night on Hokkaido and a can of red paint in the Park, and that beginning is not one he can show Mavis.
"The anti-colonization Morec."
"Oh yes." Mavis nodded. "The tree that died. The anti-colonization Morec."
Mavis names the packet by the reading that frightened him. To the Committee, a story about an apple tree failing on another planet was propaganda against colonization, an expensive state policy. Allen answers with four words: "You know better than that." He means that Mavis knows the moral was the opposite, or at least not hostile. In Chapter 2 Allen told Frost the packet said that Earth was the centre of things and that the colonies served it. It was a Morec story, in his eyes, not an attack on Morec.
Mavis "looked bland," which is how he looks when he is mocking. He offers a second reading in the jargon of literary criticism: the dead tree as a "Symbol of spiritual starvation," the colonist "Severed from the folk-soul." Folk-soul is a translation of a German Romantic idea, the shared spirit of a people, and it sounds absurd applied to an apple tree on a colony planet. That absurdity is the joke. Mavis has spent eight years buying packets whose meaning is fixed by committees and critics, and here he parodies the way any small story gets loaded with large symbols.
Then he asks the real question in the middle of the mockery: "You're going to put that through?" The new Director's first decision could be to release the very packet that frightened the Committee. Mavis inflates the prospect into "The new Renaissance in propaganda," and finishes with the biggest comparison he can find: "What Dante did for the afterworld, you're going to do for this."
Dante Alighieri (1265 to 1321) wrote the Divine Comedy, a long Italian poem in three parts, the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, which maps hell, purgatory and heaven in such vivid detail that for centuries it shaped how Europe imagined the life after death. He finished it near the end of his life, around 1320. Mavis's joke is that Allen will do for this world, the world of Morec, what Dante did for the next one: give it a complete and convincing picture. It is propaganda as epic poetry.
There is a second irony that Mavis cannot know. Allen has just come back from a place called Other World, a resort where people go to be away from Morec, and the week before last he was there in a sense close to Dante's: drugged, transported, and placed in a life that was not his. Dante's poem begins with the poet lost in a dark wood and taken on a journey through other worlds by a guide. Allen's guide was Gretchen. Mavis's line lands on the wrong man at the wrong moment, and the reader sees more in it than either speaker.
Mavis looked bland. "Symbol of spiritual starvation, then. Severed from the folk-soul. You're going to put that through? The new Renaissance in propaganda. What Dante did for the afterworld, you're going to do for this."
Myron Mavis, teasing
"the low-risk approach"
"This particular packet," Allen said, "is long overdue. It should have come out months ago. I suppose I could start out cautiously, process only what's already been bought. Interfere with the staff as little as possible."
Allen, to Mavis
Allen continues: "Let them go the way they've been going", and after a dash, "the low-risk approach." Then: "He opened the packet." "But."
This is the first statement of policy by the new Director, and it is a two-way choice set out in a few words. The cautious path is clear and Allen describes it fairly: process only the packets already bought, interfere with the staff as little as possible, let the machine run as it has been running. That is how a new head of an established institution keeps his job. It is also exactly how Mavis seems to have run T-M: buying packets, taking fright, letting them "bury it in dust," as Allen will put it later in the chapter.
The other path is in one word, "But." Allen does not say what comes after it. He opens the packet instead. The gesture is the policy.
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Two ways to start, as Allen sets them out.
The low-risk approach. Start cautiously. Process only what is already bought. Interfere with the staff as little as possible. Let the organisation keep going the way it has been going. Its merit is safety; its cost is that nothing changes, and the overdue packet stays in the files.
But. Put the overdue packet through on the first morning, bring in his own men, trim the staff, try new material. Its merit is that the job means something; its cost is risk, in a post that has been under attack since before he took it.
What he does. He chooses the second, in one act, without consulting anyone: the packet is marked and sent within the hour.
"The watchword is Excelsior."
"Not but." Mavis leaned close, put the side of his hand to his lips, and whispered hoarsely: "The watchword is Excelsior."
Myron Mavis
Mavis takes Allen's one word and turns it round. "Not but." Then he leans close and whispers, with a hand to his lips like a conspirator in a play. It is a stage gesture, mock secrecy for a word that every schoolchild of an older America would have known.
Excelsior is Latin for higher, and it has been an English motto of aspiration for nearly two centuries. It has been the motto on the arms of the State of New York since 1778. Its fame comes from a poem. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote Excelsior in 1841, finishing it, according to his draft, at three in the morning on 28 September of that year, and published it the same year in Ballads and Other Poems. In the poem, at nightfall, a youth passes through an Alpine village carrying a banner with the single word Excelsior. An old man warns him not to try the pass because of the storm and the torrent. A maiden offers him rest, her breast for his weary head. A peasant warns him of the avalanche. To each he answers only with his motto, and climbs on. At dawn the monks of Saint Bernard hear a cry, and a faithful hound finds the traveller half-buried in the snow, dead, still gripping the banner. The poem ends with the word falling from the sky like a star.
That is a strange watchword to whisper to a man on his first morning in a job that wore out his predecessor. Longfellow's youth is noble and he is also dead. Whether Mavis means the whole poem or only the motto, the reader is entitled to hear both. Read as encouragement, Excelsior says aim high, do not take the low-risk path. Read with the poem behind it, it says that men who carry that banner into the mountains do not come back. Mavis, who looks ruined and is leaving for a cattle planet, is the old man in the village who has seen the pass.
Mavis answers Allen's "But." with "Not but," and a whispered motto, "The watchword is Excelsior": a call to aim higher taken from Longfellow's 1841 poem, in which the youth who ignores every warning and climbs on is found dead in the snow, still holding his banner.
There is one more detail in the poem that the novel's next scene will make sharp. Among the warnings the youth ignores is a woman's invitation to stay and rest. The chapter ends with a woman walking into Allen's office.
"hung lonelily around the building"
"He shook hands with Allen, wished him luck, hung lonelily around the building for an hour or so, and then was gone."
Lonelily is an awkward adverb, and Dick may have chosen it for that reason. It is a rare word that sounds wrong on the tongue, like a man hanging about in a place where he no longer has a job. Mavis has handed over the office and walked the new man round the staff, and still he cannot quite leave. He stays an hour. Then "was gone," which is a flat, final phrase.
"Watching Mavis shuffle off, Allen was conscious of his own burden." Mavis shuffles, the gait of an old or exhausted man; he is forty-two, and in Chapter 3 he looked eighty. Allen, watching him, feels the weight of what he has taken on. "But the sense of weight made him cheerful." That sentence is the hinge of the chapter. A heavier man might have been daunted by the sight. Allen, given a burden, cheers up. Responsibility suits him, or at least the feeling of it does, and the rest of the chapter is the cheerful energy of a man who has just been given more to carry than he can see.
"Seven with one blow"
"Seven with one blow," he said.
Allen, alone in his office
"Yes, Mr. Purcell," a battery of intercoms responded, "as secretaries came to life."
Allen says it to the room, as a boast to himself, and the office takes it as an order. The phrase is from the Brothers Grimm. In the tale usually translated as The Valiant Little Tailor (number 20 in the Grimms' collection), a tailor kills seven flies with one stroke, sews himself a belt that boasts of it, and goes out into the world, where giants and kings take the seven for men. As Chapter 12 noted, the tale is about a small man whose fame comes from a misunderstood slogan.
The phrase has a history in this novel. In Chapter 12, at the end of Doctor Malparto's tests, Gretchen mocked the whole battery with three questions: "Can you kindle fire? Can you slay seven with one blow? Can your father lick my father?" Allen is now repeating two of her three questions, in his own words, on his first morning as Director. He may not mean to quote her, and the narration does not say he remembers. But the reader has heard these lines from Gretchen, and Dick puts them in Allen's mouth a few minutes before Gretchen comes through the door. The echo is a piece of construction, and it makes her entrance feel summoned.
A battery of intercoms is a good phrase for a desk full of speakers, each connected to a secretary. Allen speaks a fairy-tale boast into the air, and several women answer Yes, Mr. Purcell as if he had issued a command. The new Director's lightest word is heard and obeyed by machinery. He has not yet learned that every word in this office is overheard.
The second boast is the playground taunt, the oldest childish challenge, which Gretchen used in Chapter 12 as "Can your father lick my father?" Allen turns it into a test of the intercom system and dismisses the secretaries with a joke that is a little rude: "go back to sleep, or whatever it is you're doing." He is enjoying himself. He has always been a man who japes, and on his first day in the most solemn job in Morec he japes his own staff through the equipment. It is a harmless jape. It also shows how little he takes the solemnity seriously.
"My father can lick your father," Allen said. "I'm just testing the equipment. You can go back to sleep, or whatever it is you're doing."
Allen, to his secretaries
"satisfactory"
"Removing his coat he settled himself at his desk and began dividing up the packet. There was still nothing in it he cared to alter, so he marked it" satisfactory, the source's word in quotation marks, "and tossed it in the basket."
The phrase "still nothing in it he cared to alter" carries the whole argument of Chapter 2. Sue Frost asked him to change the packet; he refused and withdrew it. Now he is the man who decides, and he still sees nothing to change. Dividing up the packet suggests the work of turning a packet into the various productions T-M makes from it, a job Allen knows from the supplier's side.
The word he writes is mild. Satisfactory is the lowest grade of approval, the word an examiner writes on work that passes. It is also, in its blandness, a jape. A packet that frightened the Committee and cost Allen a fight with Frost goes through with the dullest possible endorsement, as if it were routine. Allen is doing the risky thing in the most unremarkable way.
"The basket whisked it off, and, somewhere down the long chain of command, the packet was received and put into process."
That is how power works at T-M, and Dick describes it as plumbing. The Director tosses a packet in a basket; the basket carries it away; somewhere out of sight, people he has never met put it into production. Allen will not see the packet again. The phrase "the long chain of command" shows how far down the building runs below him. It also shows what one man can do at the top of such a chain: very little by hand, a great deal by the touch of a pen. A single word on a cover sheet has released the packet that started everything.
"Power unlimited."
"He picked up the phone and called his wife." The call is the second half of the chapter's morning, and its tone changes from public to private.
"Where are you?" she said, "as if she was afraid to believe it." And then a fragment the source prints without an opening quotation mark: "Are you", trailing off. Janet's first question is where he is, which tells us how the last week has marked her. A week ago he vanished; last night he came home from another star and went straight to a hearing. This morning she needs to hear that he is where he is supposed to be.
"I'm there," he said. There is a good word: at the job, at the top, at the place the family has been climbing toward.
"H-how's the job?" She stammers on the first letter. Janet stammered on the phone the night before too, when she admitted that Malparto had suggested she join Allen on Other World. The stammer is her fear made audible.
"Power unlimited."
Two words, and they are a jape at himself. A Director of Telemedia has a great deal of power, as Allen has just shown by sending the packet down the chain. He does not have unlimited power: the Committee appointed him, Frost supervises him, Blake-Moffet wants his post, and a private hearing nearly removed him before he started. The phrase sounds like an advertising slogan, and that is how he means it, a light boast for his wife's comfort. But it is also, again, a line that will look different by the end of the day.
"She seemed to relax." "You want to celebrate tonight?"
"The idea sounded good." "Sure. This is our big triumph; we should enjoy it." He tried to think what would be appropriate. "I could bring home a quart of ice cream."
The celebration Allen proposes is touchingly small. The Director of the state's media, on the day of his family's greatest triumph, offers to bring home a quart of ice cream, about a litre. It fits a Morec household, where pleasures are modest and supervised. It also fits Allen, who prefers small and real things, the bluebells over the crypto-flora. The ice cream will come back at the end of Chapter 18, and the reader should remember it.
"what happened last night with Mrs. Frost"
Janet said: "I'd feel better if you told me what happened last night with Mrs. Frost."
Janet, on the phone
"There was no point in giving her grounds for her anxiety." The narrator gives Allen's reason, and it is the same sort of reason he gave himself at Frost's door: the truth would only cause pain. Last night he decided to lie to the Committee because Morec "couldn't bear the truth." This morning he decides to tell his wife nothing, because she could not bear the anxiety. The two decisions are different in weight, but the pattern is the same. Allen manages what the people around him are allowed to know.
"You worry too much. It came out all right, and that's what matters." It is a husband's evasion and it is technically true. The hearing did come out all right. What he leaves out is what it was about: an accusation of adultery with a woman named Grace Maldini, who is Gretchen. Janet does not know there was such a charge.
He changes the subject to his work, and his plans spill out. "This morning I put through the tree packet. Remember that? Now they can't bury it in dust." Then: "I'm going to transfer my best men from the Agency, men like Harry Priar. I'll trim down the staff here until I have something manageable."
Those two sentences are the first program of the new Director, and they go well beyond the cautious path he described to Mavis. He will bring in his own people from his old firm. He will cut the staff he inspected that morning, shaking their hands, until the organisation is a size he can handle. The narration gives no comment. The reader may notice that the people who lined up for his inspection, and heard his sage comments, have no idea that the man shaking their hands has already decided to trim them.
"over people's heads"
"You won't make the projections too hard to understand, will you? I mean, don't put together things over people's heads."
Janet
Janet's worry is practical and shrewd. She knows Allen's taste for new and clever packets. She worked in the Agency's early days and knows how his ideas look to an ordinary viewer. A projection here is T-M's output, a production made from a packet and shown to the public. Her fear is that the Director will make propaganda nobody can follow.
Allen's answer is confident: "Nobody can say what's" over people's heads, he says, repeating her phrase in quotation marks, and goes on: "The aged-in-the-stalk formula material is on its way out, and all sorts of new stuff is coming in. We'll try a little of everything."
Aged-in-the-stalk is a deliberately mixed phrase. It sounds like a farm product or a spirit advertised as aged in the cask, and it describes the old formula packets, ripened so long on the plant that they have gone stale. Blake-Moffet's packets, with their stock heroes who propose to the girl next door, are the obvious target. Allen means to drop the formula and try everything. He has run a small agency that got its start by selling exactly that kind of new material to T-M; now he controls the buyer.
Janet's caution and Allen's confidence are both reasonable. She is right that a state medium has to be understood by the people it speaks to. He is right that nobody knows in advance what an audience can understand. The difference is temperament. Janet thinks of the audience as people to be protected from confusion, and Allen thinks of them as people who might enjoy being surprised.
"Remember how much fun it was when we started?"
Wistfully, Janet said: "Remember how much fun it was when we started? Forming the Agency, hitting T-M with our new ideas, our new kind of packets."
Janet
Wistfully is the word for a woman looking back on happiness she suspects is over. Janet's we is exact. The Agency was a joint venture; in Chapter 1 we learned that in its first year she was its receptionist and file clerk. Hitting T-M with our new ideas describes the old relation between the Purcells and Telemedia: they were outsiders throwing new packets at the big trust. Now Allen is the trust, and the fun of the outsider is gone.
"He remembered." It is two words and it is enough. He agrees with her and does not argue. "Just keep thinking about that. I'll see you tonight. Everything's coming out fine, so don't worry." And the narration: "He added goodbye, and then hung up."
Everything's coming out fine is the second of Allen's reassurances in the call and the second that the chapter's end will undercut. The reader should note that he says this to his wife a few minutes before the woman Blake-Moffet named as his lover arrives at his door.
"Okay, Doris"
"Mr. Purcell," his desk intercom said, "there are a number of people waiting to see you."
"Okay, Doris," he said.
"Vivian, Mr. Purcell." What sounded like a giggle. "Shall I send the first one in?"
It is a small comic moment and a true one. Doris was one of Allen's secretaries at the Agency, typing in the next room in Chapter 2. On his first morning at T-M he calls the new secretary by the old name, as anyone would. The secretary corrects him, and giggles. A giggle from a secretary at a new boss's mistake is ordinary office life. It is also a reminder that Allen is not yet at home in the place he has been given, and that the staff watch him as closely as he watches them through the one-way wall.
The name Vivian is new in the novel. She will come back in the next chapter as the secretary in the outer office.
"Send him, her, or it in"
"Send him, her, or it in," Allen said. "He folded his hands in front of him and scrutinized the door."
Allen jokes once more. Him, her or it is a bureaucrat's form, the phrase of someone ready for any visitor, and the it is a little joke about callers who are less than human, agency representatives perhaps. Then he folds his hands and looks at the door. It is the posture of a man in a portrait of authority, receiving petitioners.
The chapter ends on her name, the way Chapter 13 placed her in the house on Pepper Lane. Gretchen is the woman who sat beside Allen on the ship in Blake's blurred photograph, who was named as "Miss Grace Maldini" in a dossier read out to the Committee last night, whom Allen denied knowing in any adulterous sense, and who played his wife on Other World. She is now the first visitor to the Director of Telemedia, on his first day, in a building full of secretaries who answer when he speaks. The anonymous bundle of flowers that might have come from the Resort has been answered by the Resort in person. Malparto's investment, or someone from the family, has come to collect.
Dick gives no reaction. Allen's hands are folded and the door is open. The next chapter begins with what she says.
"The first person was a woman, and she was Gretchen Malparto."
The narrator, closing the chapter
BY THE NUMBERS
Chapter 16 by the numbers. 10 a.m., Monday 22 October 2114: Allen has "got the feel of things". 3 things tried: chair, pencil sharpener, one-way wall. Congratulatory bundles from 4 named people (Hoyt, Frost, Priar, Janet) and the 4 giant Agencies, plus unmarked bundles and 1 small bunch of real bluebells. About 2 hours to tour the staff, finishing "almost noon". Blake-Moffet has wanted the directorship "for years". The packet was overdue by "months". Mavis lingers "for an hour or so". 7 with one blow. The celebration: 1 quart of ice cream, about 0.95 litres in US measure. The visitor count: "a number of people waiting," of whom the first is Gretchen.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: a first morning run by instinct. Allen describes a careful start and then does the opposite within the hour, alone. He releases the one packet the Committee had objected to, without telling Sue Frost or Mavis what he has decided. He tells Janet, before telling anyone at T-M, that he will bring his own men from the Agency and cut the staff he has just met. He refuses to tell his wife what happened at the hearing. And he jokes with a battery of secretaries over an intercom whose reach he has not thought about. None of these acts is wicked, and each is in character: Allen trusts his own judgment and dislikes asking permission. The chapter invites a reader to admire the energy and to notice the exposure. He is the newest and most watched official in Morec, the morning after a hearing that turned on surveillance, and he acts as if the only person whose opinion matters is himself. Mavis's whispered motto, with the dead youth behind it, is the only caution he receives, and he takes it as encouragement.
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Chapter 16 in four movements.
Taking possession (lines 5 to 23). The office and its one-way wall; Mavis's healthy-layout joke and the hoofs-for-glue reply; the corridor of crypto-flora and the cards; the real bluebells; the suspicion that Malparto wants his investment back; the tour of the staff until almost noon.
The handover (lines 25 to 41). Mavis on Blake-Moffet's ambition; the apple-tree packet; Mavis's mock readings and Dante; the low-risk approach and Allen's "But."; Mavis's whispered Excelsior; his lonely hour and departure; the burden that makes Allen cheerful.
The first act (lines 43 to 49). The intercoms answer a fairy-tale boast and a playground taunt; the packet marked satisfactory and sent down the chain of command.
The private line and the door (lines 51 to 83). The call to Janet: power unlimited, ice cream, the hearing withheld, plans for Priar and staff cuts, the argument over people's heads, the memory of the Agency's start. Then Doris who is Vivian, and the first visitor.
The chapter is built like a comedy of a first day at work, with each scene a little brighter than the last until the final sentence. Its structure is a rise and a sudden stop. Allen gets the office, the flowers, the staff, the handover, the packet through, a happy wife and a celebration planned, and then the door opens on the one person who can undo it all. Dick plants the reversal in advance three times: in the anonymous bundle that might be from the Resort, in Mavis's motto with its dead climber, and in Gretchen's own words from Chapter 12 in Allen's mouth. A reader going quickly will hear only the cheerful morning. A slower reader will hear the warnings under it.
The chapter is also the book's shortest look at what Allen thinks the job is for. He wants to release work that was buried, bring in people he trusts, cut what he cannot manage, and try new material. It is the program of a reformer who has come in from outside. Nothing in the chapter suggests he thinks of reforming Morec itself. His aim is better packets.
What the chapter shows about Allen
He is at his best and most likeable here: funny with Mavis, kind about the flowers, decisive with the packet, affectionate with Janet. The chapter lets us see why Frost chose him. He has energy and taste, and he is not afraid of the institution he has been given.
He is also a man of small concealments. He does not tell Mavis about the Park, though the packet he holds was half the story. He does not tell Janet about the hearing. He decides to trim the staff while shaking their hands. Each concealment is minor, and each is the habit of someone who has learned that in Morec it is safer to control what others know. The jape itself was a secret he cannot share with anyone, and Allen has started to live around it.
He japes almost by reflex. He calls Mavis an old horse, boasts to the intercoms, marks a dangerous packet with the dullest word available, and tells the secretary to send in him, her or it. These are the habits of the man who painted the statue. On the first morning in the most solemn office in the state, the japer has not been reformed. He has only been given a bigger desk.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: the new buyer's corridor of gifts. The flowers that line Allen's corridor are a real problem in any institution that buys from suppliers. The four giant Agencies, Blake-Moffet among them, sell packets to Telemedia, and Allen is now the man who buys; their gaudy bundles arrive on his first morning with a promise that representatives will follow. Regulated finance has precise rules for exactly this. In US securities markets, FINRA Rule 3220 limits gifts from a member firm or its people to anyone at another business, where the gift relates to that person's employer's business, and the limit was raised from $100 to $300 per person per year with effect from 30 March 2026, the first increase since 1992; the amended rule also codifies how gifts are valued, aggregated, supervised and recorded. The practical point for a bank or any large buyer is the same as Allen's corridor: gifts from suppliers should be logged, valued and visible to someone other than the recipient, especially in the first days of a new decision-maker, when suppliers are most eager to establish goodwill. Allen's case adds two complications familiar to procurement teams. One supplier, Blake-Moffet, was in open conflict with him twelve hours earlier, and its courtesy is part of a contest for influence over the buying decision. And Allen plans to transfer his best men from his own former firm into the buyer, which raises the opposite risk: a decision-maker who favours the supplier he came from. A conflicts register would ask him to declare both. [Sources: FINRA Rule 3220; FINRA Regulatory Notice 26-05, 27 February 2026.]
Questions the chapter raises
- Did the Mental Health Resort send one of the anonymous bundles, and what does Malparto want back for his investment?
- Who sent the real bluebells, and how did they find them?
- How long has Blake-Moffet been after the directorship, and how far will it go now that Allen holds it?
- Does Mavis mean Excelsior as encouragement or as a warning, and does he know the poem's ending?
- What will the Committee make of the apple-tree packet going out on the new Director's first morning?
- Why does Allen keep the hearing from Janet, and what will she think when she learns of it?
- Why has Gretchen Malparto come to Allen's office, on his first day, through the ordinary queue of visitors?
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 16.
A missing word. Line 5 reads "stood before the one-way viewing wall covertly surveyed his building-sized staff"; an "and" seems to have dropped out before "covertly".
A stray apostrophe. Line 15 prints "assailed them," with a closing single quotation mark after the comma, a printing slip.
A missing opening quotation mark. Line 53 resumes Janet's speech with "Are you..." without opening the quotation.
"Not for awhile." Line 13 uses the one-word adverb where "a while" is the usual form after "for".
"lonelily". Line 39 uses a rare adverb, correct but unusual.
Censored oath. Line 25 prints "hell" as an h and an l with a dash for the missing letters.
An irregular closing mark. Line 71 closes Allen's quotation of "over people's heads" with a single mark, a comma, a space and an opening double mark, where a closing double mark is meant.
Two names for one secretary. Allen calls the intercom secretary Doris, his Agency secretary's name; she corrects him to Vivian. This is a joke in the text, not an error, but readers checking names should not take Doris to have moved to T-M.
Dashes. Lines 25 and 35 contain dashes, in the censored oath and before "the low-risk approach"; quotations here split them.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 16. Monday 22 October 2114 is Allen's first day as Director of Telemedia. His Agency desk has been moved in "as a gesture of continuity," and he has a one-way wall over his "building-sized staff." Mavis, unslept and leaving, jokes that the office is healthy: "look at me." Congratulatory crypto-flora come from Hoyt, Frost, Priar, Janet and the four giant Agencies, including Blake-Moffet; unmarked bundles may be from Mr. Wales or from the Resort, and Allen is convinced "that Malparto would be seeking to recover his investment." A small bunch of real bluebells probably came from Gates and Sugermann. Mavis tells him "Blake-Moffet has been after the directorship for years." Allen shows Mavis the apple-tree packet, "Everything started with this," rejects the low-risk approach with a single "But." and gets the whispered reply, "The watchword is Excelsior." Alone, he says "Seven with one blow" and "My father can lick your father" into his intercoms, the two challenges Gretchen threw at him in Chapter 12, then marks the apple-tree packet "satisfactory" and sends it down the chain of command, and a few minutes later the first visitor is Gretchen Malparto. To Janet he promised "a quart of ice cream" for tonight, said nothing about the hearing, and announced plans to bring in Harry Priar and trim the staff.
A Sense of Humor
The first visitor on Allen's first afternoon as Director is Gretchen Malparto, pale, tense and expensively dressed, smelling of fresh flowers. She opens with "I got your note," and Allen answers with the next instalment of his Molly joke. Then he tells her what her presence could cost him, locks the door, phones Harry Priar to come over in person, and rips out the intercom as a likely tap. Gretchen explains the kidnapping: her brother gas-pelleted Allen as he was leaving, a shipment to Other World by freight in a cataleptic state was arranged, and she went along because she feared he might die. She says Malparto and the Dickson report could not explain the blob on Allen's encephalogram; Malparto thinks it is precognition and that Allen japed the statue to escape the Cohorts. Gretchen thinks it is a sense of humor, the mark of a balanced man in an unbalanced world, and she delivers a long indictment of Morec. Allen answers that Morec and the Resort are two halves of one system, and he prefers the half where work gets done. She promises to void the Resort's bill, asks whether Molly was invented, and asks him to kiss her goodbye. As they kiss, a juvenile that has climbed six floors and come in through the window starts recording. Allen smashes it, but the door, its lock already reamed out, falls open on Fred Luddy with a flash camera and a crowd of Blake-Moffet technicians. Allen tells Gretchen to run and knocks Luddy down when he grabs her. Luddy reports that the first tape survived. Priar arrives too late. Blake-Moffet carries off the lock as a trophy, and Allen sums it up: "I got Luddy, now he gets me."
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter follows straight on from the last sentence of Chapter 16, so it is still Monday 22 October 2114, early in the afternoon of Allen's first day at Telemedia. It runs in something close to real time. Allen phones Priar, and a little later he works out from his watch that "Harry Priar would, be another ten minutes." The talk, the kiss and the raid all fit inside that interval, since Priar arrives only when the raid is over. Two other dates are given in passing. Allen got back "Sunday night," 21 October, and Gretchen says "I got in this morning," after "four days travelling in." Allen's own trip home in Chapter 15 ran from Wednesday night to Sunday night, so she seems to have left Other World a little after him. The only setting is the Director's office on an upper floor of the Telemedia building, with a locked door, an intercom, a desk, a window, an air conditioner and a typewriter, and beyond it a corridor full of staff. Luddy's boast gives the height: "Up six flights".
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, Director of Telemedia since that morning; Gretchen Malparto, who "wore a tight blue suit, carried a beaded purse, was pale and drawn, dark-eyed with tension"; Vivian, one of Allen's new secretaries, heard on the intercom and later "probably Vivian" shrilling in his ear; Harry Priar, at the Agency and then, too late, in the office; Fred Luddy, Allen's former assistant, now with Blake-Moffet, "snapping pictures with a flash camera"; a team of Blake-Moffet technicians; "a horde of T-M employees"; three or more juveniles; a T-M repairman. Spoken of but absent: Doctor Malparto, Gretchen's brother; the Dickson, the report on Allen's scan; the Cohorts; Tom Gates; Myron Mavis; Janet, as "your little worrying wife"; Donna's father; Molly, the woman Allen invented; and Blake, whose idea Allen thinks the raid was.
"I got your note."
"Gretchen wore a tight blue suit, carried a beaded purse, was pale and drawn, dark-eyed with tension. She smelled of fresh flowers and looked beautiful and expensive." Dick gives her one sentence of clothes and one of effect. The tight suit and the beaded purse belong to a woman who has dressed to be looked at, and the pale, drawn face belongs to one who has not slept well. Dark-eyed with tension is a good phrase: the darkness is in the shadows round the eyes and in the look itself.
The smell matters more than the clothes. Chapter 16 filled Allen's corridor with crypto-flora, synthetic blossoms that smelt like a hot house, and the only real flowers in the building were the small bunch of bluebells. Now the first visitor "smelled of fresh flowers." Whether it is a perfume or something she has carried from Other World the text does not say. It places her, again, on the side of the real and the living, which is where the Resort keeps putting itself: the lawns on Pepper Lane, the lamb on the stove, the girl sunbathing. Allen has been surrounded all morning by imitations, and the woman who arrives in the afternoon brings the scent of the genuine article with her.
Then she closes the door and speaks.
The note is the one Allen wrote in Chapter 14, in the dead middle of the night at the Other World Telemedia building, addressed "Dear Mrs. Coates" and signed as Johnny. In it he told the woman who had been playing his wife that he had run into Molly at the Brass Poker, that Molly said she was pregnant, and that he had better stay with her until they could get her a you-know-what. It was a jape aimed at the whole staged life of Pepper Lane: if the Resort wanted to give him a world of easy morals, he would take that world at its word and leave on a story it could not object to. Gretchen's first sentence tells him the note arrived and was read.
Allen does not explain the note or apologise for it. He goes on with the story.
It is a perfect deadpan reply and a cruel one. Molly's baby, which in the note was something to be got rid of, has now been born, and Allen reports its sex and weight like a proud relation. The joke refuses Gretchen's opening. She came to have a conversation about what happened; he answers inside the fiction, where the only facts are the ones he makes up. He is japing her to her face. Readers who remember that Pepper Lane had its own baby, Donna, asleep upstairs in her crib, will
"I got your note."
Gretchen Malparto
"The baby was a boy. Six pounds."
Allen
hear a second edge: the fantasy gave him a child he had not asked for, and his fantasy gives Molly one in return.
The narration then shows what the joke cost him. "The office seemed filled with tiny drifting particles; he rested his palms against the desk and closed his eyes." This is the body of a man close to fainting. The particles are the sparks that swim across the eyes in a moment of shock or low blood pressure. Allen has had very little sleep since Sunday night's hearing, he has spent the morning on display, and the woman who led him into the Resort has just walked into the one office where her presence can ruin him. His voice keeps up the jape; his body gives way for a second.
"When he opened his eyes the particles were gone but Gretchen was still there; she had seated herself, crossed her legs, and was fingering the edge of her skirt." The sentence is built like a joke of its own. Some things vanish when you shut your eyes and some do not. Gretchen is not an illusion of the Pepper Lane kind; she has sat down, and she is not going away. The fingering of the skirt is a small nervous habit, and it comes back: later she sits "smoothing her skirt" while Allen thinks, and she strips off her gloves before the kiss. Dick keeps her hands busy all through the scene.
"You certainly walked right out."
The first exchange is about dates. "When did you arrive back here?" she asks. "Sunday night." "I got in this morning." Two travellers compare itineraries like acquaintances at a terminal. Underneath the small talk is a pursuit. He left, she followed, and she has come straight from the field, or nearly, to the place where he would be.
"Her eyebrows wavered and across her face flitted a blind, crumpled pain." The adjectives are surprising. Blind pain is pain that does not see where it is going, and crumpled is the look of a face that folds the way paper does. Dick rarely spends this much attention on another character's face in this book; he saves it for moments when the person is unguarded. Gretchen is hurt, and it shows before she can manage it.
This is the complaint of a woman left, and it is phrased as if Allen had walked out of a marriage. From inside the Pepper Lane story, he had: Johnny Coates went off to Molly. From outside it, he escaped from a confinement she helped arrange. The sentence carries both meanings and she does not choose between them. Allen's answer chooses for her: "Well," he said, "I figured out where I was." He walked out because he worked out that the place was a fake. The reply is quietly devastating. It says that her house, her baby, her gin slings and her afternoon as Mrs. Coates did not hold him once he understood what they were.
"Was it so bad?" she asks. The question is almost tender. It is the question of someone who made a world and wants to know whether it was a bad world, as distinct from a false one. Allen does not answer it, and the chapter never quite does either. Later Gretchen remembers the house herself as "so damn nice and cozy." Neither of them says it was bad. The objection was that it was not his.
"You certainly walked right out."
Gretchen Malparto
"But that puts an end to me."
Instead of answering, Allen sets out the position as he sees it.
Allen said: "I can call people in here and have you tossed out. I can have you barred; I can have all kinds of things done to you. I can even have you arrested and prosecuted for a felony, you and your brother and that demented outfit you run. But that puts an end to me. Even Vivian walking in to take dictation is the end, with you sitting there."
Allen
The speech has two halves, like a ledger. The first half lists his powers, and they rise in order: tossed out, barred, all kinds of things, arrested and prosecuted for a felony. A Director of Telemedia can do all of that to a private visitor, and he could reach the Resort too, "you and your brother and that demented outfit you run." The felony he means is presumably the kidnapping: drugging a man and shipping him to another planet without consent.
The second half cancels the first. "But that puts an end to me." Any use of his power against her brings out the story of where he was for a week, which is the very story he lied about to Frost, Hoyt and Blake the night before. Prosecuting her would mean testifying that he went to the Resort, which means explaining why, which leads toward the Park. And it goes further than that. "Even Vivian walking in to take dictation is the end, with you sitting there." The most ordinary event in the office, a secretary coming in with a pad, would be enough. A dark-haired woman in his office on his first day, after a hearing about a woman called Grace Maldini, is evidence by her mere presence.
So the man with the most power in the media trust is helpless against one visitor. Allen sees it at once, and the reader should notice how exactly he has learned the rules of the hearing room. Sunday night taught him that in Morec it does not matter what happened; it matters what can be shown.
Allen's line also casts the Resort as that demented outfit you run. He means Gretchen and her brother together, and the word run assigns her a share of control. Whether she has one is something the chapter will test.
"Who's Vivian?" Gretchen asks, which is either a sincere question or a quick check on another woman's name. "One of my new secretaries. She comes along with the job." The phrasing is wry. Secretaries come with the job as the swivel chair and the one-way wall do. "Color had returned to Gretchen's features." She has recovered herself, and her reply is cool: "You're exaggerating."
She is wrong, as the end of the chapter will show, and the narrator lets the line stand without comment. From the Resort's point of view a visit is a visit. From inside Morec, a visit in a closed room is a charge.
"These things are natural taps"
Allen acts on his own analysis.
"Allen went over and examined the door. It had a lock, so he locked it." The sentence is very plain, and its little logic (it had a lock, so he locked it) is the logic of a man doing what is to hand. He then presses the intercom and tells Vivian "I don't want to be disturbed." "Yes, Mr. Purcell," she answers.
Next he phones his Agency, and Harry Priar answers.
"Harry," Allen said, "get over here to T-M in something, a sliver or a Getabout. Park as close as you can and then come upstairs to my office."
Allen, on the phone to Priar
Priar asks "What's going on?" and gets no answer, only a second instruction: "When you're here, phone me from my secretary's desk. Don't use the intercom." Then Allen "hung up, bent over, and ripped the intercom loose." He explains: "These things are natural taps."
The call is the most practical thing Allen does in the chapter, and the text does not say why he makes it. What it says is enough to infer the purpose. Priar is to come in a vehicle, park close and come up in person, and Allen has just told Gretchen he can do nothing to her through official channels. A moment later he says he will "Drive you out somewhere and dump you." It seems that Priar, his trusted art director and his pro-tem assistant at the Agency, is to be the private means of getting her out of the building without staff, guards or records. A sliver is the small flying craft of this future and a Getabout the ground car; either would let Gretchen leave without walking out past a floor of secretaries.
The intercom is treated the way Allen treats the juveniles and the block meetings: as a device that turns private speech into a record. Natural taps is a lovely phrase. An intercom is built to carry what is said in one room into another; it is a microphone by design, and a man in Morec assumes anything that can listen does. By ripping it out he cuts himself off from his own staff in the hope of cutting them off from him.
Gretchen watches all this and says "You're really serious." Allen answers, "Bet you I am" (the source prints a bracketed sic after the phrase), and he "folded his arms, leaned against the side of the desk."
The steps are sensible ones, and every one of them will be turned against him. The locked door, the call to a confederate, the ripped-out intercom: these are the actions of a man arranging privacy, and privacy with a woman is what the block system calls a vile enterprise. Allen is building the case for the prosecution while he thinks he is building a wall. The reader cannot know this yet, but Luddy will list two of these precautions by name at the end of the chapter.
"Is your brother crazy?"
With the door locked and the line cut, Allen asks his first real question. "Is your brother crazy?"
"She gulped." Her answer is broken by a dash in the source after its first word, He, as she hesitates, and then goes on: "is, in a sense. A mania, collecting. But they all have it. This Psi mysticism. There was such a blob on your -gram; it tipped him across."
Every phrase here tells us something about the Resort as Gretchen sees it from inside.
"A mania, collecting." Malparto is a collector. Chapter 8 showed him with Allen's encephalogram in his hands before Allen had done anything to bring him there, interested in a profile he called unique. The word collecting puts Allen among specimens. A collector does not wait for a patient to ask for help; he goes after the rare item. That fits the sequence of the book: the scan reached Malparto before the jape, and the kidnapping followed the first sessions.
"But they all have it." They are the Resort's psychiatrists, or perhaps the whole staff. The mania is a professional deformation, shared. Gretchen speaks of her colleagues as a people apart from herself, which is a small claim to distance from what they did.
"This Psi mysticism." Chapter 12 was the Psi-test, the cards that did not lie. Gretchen calls the whole Psionic enterprise mysticism, a word of contempt from inside the institution that practises it. She works there, she assisted with the test, and she does not believe in it.
"There was such a blob on your -gram; it tipped him across." The -gram is the encephalogram, clipped to its suffix as a working professional might clip it. The blob is the anomaly that made Allen's profile unique. Tipped him across means it pushed Malparto over the edge from interest into action, perhaps from sanity into mania. Gretchen is saying that Allen's own brain set off the chain of events. That is a strange sort of exoneration: her brother did it, but Allen's mind gave him the reason.
"How about you?" Allen asks. It is a fair question. If her brother is crazy, what is she?
She goes on, after a dash, "really thought you'd come back to the house. Wishful thinking... it was so damn nice and cozy." Then she turns on him: "Suddenly she lashed out furiously." "You stupid bastard!"
This is a remarkable confession, made in a broken voice. She thought he would come back to the house on Pepper Lane. The house was a construction, staged for him, with a sitter that had a lens and voices behind the walls. She knew it was a construction. And still she hoped that he would choose it, and she calls her hope wishful thinking. It is the hope of a designer who has fallen for her own design, or of a woman who wanted the marriage she was acting. "so damn nice and cozy" is a phrase of real longing, and she needs a mild oath to get it out.
The insult that follows is her pain turning outward. He was stupid, in her view, because he walked away from something good. It is the first time in the book that anyone has called Allen stupid for leaving a fantasy, and it puts the reader in an odd position. Allen was right to leave, since the house was a trap. Gretchen is right that the house was pleasant. Both can be true.
Allen does not reply to the insult. "Allen looked at his watch and saw that Harry Priar would, be another ten minutes. Probably he was just now backing the sliver onto the roof field of the Agency." His attention has moved to logistics. It is a deliberate flatness on Dick's part: the woman shouts, and the man consults his watch. We learn that Priar is taking the sliver and that the Agency has a roof field, which fits the flying traffic of this future. We also learn how short the chapter's clock is. Everything that follows, up to the raid, happens inside about ten minutes.
"I suppose I'm not so clever either." Her voice was thin, brittle. "I've had four days travelling in to think about it. As soon as I saw you were gone, I followed."
Gretchen Malparto
"Drive you out somewhere and dump you."
"What are you going to do with me?" Gretchen asks. Allen's answer is half joke and half plan: "Drive you out somewhere and dump you."
Then the narration enters his head. "He wondered if Gates could help. Maybe she could be detained at Hokkaido. But that was their gimmick." Tom Gates, the dealer in forbidden books and the host of the Hokkaido evenings, has a world outside Morec's sight. Hokkaido, the poisoned island where the trouble began on the night of the jape, would be a place to keep her quietly. And then Allen catches himself. Detaining someone against her will, carrying her somewhere she cannot leave, is exactly what the Resort did to him. Their gimmick is a contemptuous word for kidnapping, and his refusal to copy it is a small piece of moral self-knowledge. He will not answer one abduction with another.
He then states his grievance. "Didn't it seem a little unfair to me?" he said. "I went to you for help; I acted in good faith." The complaint is the strongest one he has. He walked into the Resort as a patient. He was frightened by his own jape and came for treatment, and the people he trusted drugged him and shipped him away. Good faith is the language of contracts, and Allen is saying that the Resort broke one.
"He gas-pelleted you."
Gretchen answers with the most detailed account the book has given of how the kidnapping happened.
After a dash, she continues: "was afraid you might die. It's risky. So I accompanied you." And then, raising her head: "I wanted to. It was a terrible thing to do, but it was going to happen anyhow."
This fills in the end of Chapter 12 and the gap that followed. As Allen was walking out of the Resort, he fell, because Malparto had used a gas pellet on him. The Resort then assigned someone (Somebody was detailed) to transport him. The method was to be freight, with Allen in a cataleptic state, rigid and insensible, which is the word the voices behind the wall used on Pepper Lane. Gretchen did not know in advance, she says. When she found out, she was afraid the trip could kill him, and she went along as a kind of escort.
It helps to separate the claims, because Gretchen offers several and they do different work.
The last pair are the most revealing. She condemns the act and then excuses her part in it on the ground that it would have happened without her. That is the reasoning of every subordinate who has carried out a decision she disliked. It is also partly honest: she did not have to admit that she wanted to go, and she does.
Allen's response is measured. "He felt less hostility, since it was probably true." The narrator gives his reason in four words. He believes her, not fully but enough, and his anger drops. Then he names her: "You're an opportunist," he mur‐
Staring at the floor, Gretchen said: "My brother's responsible. I didn't know in advance; you were starting out the door to leave, and then you keeled over. He gas-pelleted you. Somebody was detailed to get you to Other World; they were going to ship you there by freight, in a cataleptic state."
Gretchen Malparto
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Gretchen's account of the kidnapping, claim by claim.
Responsibility. "My brother's responsible." She names the agent and puts herself outside the decision.
Ignorance. "I didn't know in advance." She says she learned only when Allen collapsed.
Method. A gas pellet at the door; freight to Other World; a cataleptic state for the journey.
Motive for joining. Fear that he might die, since the journey is "risky."
Desire. "I wanted to." She admits that she wanted to go with him, which is a second motive, and a less noble one.
Judgement and fatalism. It was "a terrible thing to do," and it "was going to happen anyhow."
mured. She saw a chance to be with him and took it. In the same breath he pays the Resort a kind of compliment: "The whole affair was ingenious. Especially that bit when the house dissolved." He means the end of the staged world in Chapter 14, when he pressed a stud on the fireplace and the room came apart around him. Allen is a professional maker of media, and he recognises good production when he sees it. The compliment is also a distancing move. To call the most frightening moment of his life that bit is to treat it as a scene in someone else's show.
Then he turns back to the thing that interests him most. "What's this blob on my -gram?"
"Precognition, he thinks."
"My brother puzzled over it from the time he got it. He never figured it out, and neither did the Dickson. Some psionic talent. Precognition, he thinks. You japed the statue to prevent your own murder at the hands of the Cohorts. He thinks the Cohorts kill people who rise too high."
Gretchen Malparto
This is the first time in the book that anyone says plainly to Allen that the Malpartos know about the jape. Gretchen says "You japed the statue" as a known fact, without hesitation. The Resort knows what Frost, Hoyt, Mavis and Blake, on the evidence of Sunday's hearing, do not. Chapter 9 let the reader see Malparto's thoughts turn to precognition, and Chapter 12's Psi-test was his attempt to measure it. Now Gretchen lays out the full theory.
It has four parts. Malparto had the scan from the start and puzzled over it. Neither he nor the Dickson, the analytic report he ordered on it, could explain the anomaly. He has settled on a psionic talent, precognition, the ability to see ahead. And he has built a motive on it: Allen foresaw that the Cohorts of Major Streiter would murder him if he rose too high, and he japed the founder's statue to stop that future from arriving, presumably by disgracing himself or derailing his rise before it went far enough to be fatal.
The theory is grand and paranoid at once. The Cohorts, the khaki-uniformed male descendants of the founder, have so far been seen as messengers and as an audience that laughed at the jape. Malparto's belief that they kill people who rise too high is something he holds and the novel has not confirmed. Gretchen reports it without endorsing it. What the theory does show is how a psychiatrist inside a Psi institution reads an anomaly: as a hidden power, connected to a hidden threat. A man with a unique brain and a strange act must have a secret faculty and a secret enemy.
"Do you agree?" Allen asks.
"You have a sense of humor."
"No," she said, "because I know what the blob means. You do have something in your mind nobody else has. But it's not precognition."
"What is it?"
The book has been building to this sentence, and it lands with a comic flatness that is itself a joke. A psychiatrist, a Dickson report and a Psi-test have puzzled over a blob on a brain
Gretchen said: "You have a sense of humor."
Gretchen Malparto
scan, and the answer is the most ordinary human quality there is. "The office was quiet as Allen considered and Gretchen sat smoothing her skirt." Then, finally, "Maybe so."
Gretchen's diagnosis turns the whole Resort apparatus upside down: the anomaly that Malparto read as a psychic power is, in her reading, simply a sense of humor, and the japer is less a mutant than the one man in Morec who can still laugh. The idea has been in the book from its title. The Man Who Japed is the man who played a joke, and a society that has turned morality into a state industry has no place for jokes. The statue in the Park was the joke; the Cohorts who laughed at it, as Malparto noted in Chapter 9, showed that even the founder's family could feel its force. Gretchen is the first character to name what the act came from.
She develops the point.
Several things are new here.
"Or with us." A sense of humor does not fit the Resort either. Gretchen includes her own institution in the indictment before she has begun it. The Resort, with its tests and diagnoses and staged worlds, takes Allen as seriously as Morec does, and in its own way it too cannot laugh.
"You're not a 'mutant'." She puts the word in single quotation marks, as a term she has heard used about him and rejects. Someone at the Resort, perhaps her brother, has been calling Allen a mutant, a new kind of human with a new faculty. Gretchen's correction is that he is a normal person in an abnormal place, "just a balanced human being." The abnormality is in the society, not in him.
"You're just trying to re-establish a balance in an unbalanced world." This is a theory of the jape as a correction. Where everything is solemn, a joke puts back the missing weight on the other side of the scale. The image of balance runs through the speech.
"On the top you believe in Morec. Underneath there's that blob." This is a two-level picture of Allen's mind. At the conscious level he is a loyal servant of the system; Chapter 2 showed him defending the apple-tree packet's moral as the true Morec line, and the morning of Chapter 16 showed him happily taking the top job. Below that sits something that refuses the whole business. Gretchen calls it "that irreducible core, that grins and laughs and plays pranks." Irreducible means it cannot be broken down or explained away; it is a part of him that cannot be educated out. The verbs are physical and childlike: grins, laughs, plays pranks.
And the claim that it is "something you can't even admit to yourself" speaks to a puzzle that has run through the book. Allen did not remember the jape at first. He had to discover his own act, and work out from the mud and paint what he must have done. Gretchen's theory accounts for that. The core acts while the top layer believes, and the top layer cannot face what the core has done.
Allen's reply is one word: "Childish." It is the Morec reflex. A man raised in this society hears pranks and thinks of children. Gretchen answers "Not at all," and Allen says "Thanks." "He
"And a sense of humor doesn't fit in with Morec. Or with us. You're not a 'mutant'; you're just a balanced human being." Her voice gained strength. "The japery, everything you've done. You're just trying to re-establish a balance in an unbalanced world. And it's something you can't even admit to yourself. On the top you believe in Morec. Underneath there's that blob, that irreducible core, that grins and laughs and plays pranks."
Gretchen Malparto
smiled down at her." The exchange is very short and has a warmth that surprises. She has paid him the compliment of taking his jokes seriously, and he accepts it.
"Witchhunts and star chambers."
Gretchen's composure goes for a moment. "This is such a goddamn mess." She takes her handkerchief from her purse, wipes her eyes, and stuffs it into her coat pocket. Then she states the paradox of Allen's position:
The paradox is exact. The man whose deepest impulse is to laugh at Morec is now the man who writes Morec. The office he took this morning is the high post of morality, and the phrase sounds like a line from a hymn. You create the ethics is a sharper sentence than it looks. In this society ethics are produced, as packets are produced, and the head of production has a sense of humor that the product forbids.
"But I want this job," Allen says, simply.
Then comes the longest speech in the chapter, and one of the most direct attacks on Morec in the novel.
The speech runs on with dashes between its first phrases, which this edition breaks into quoted pieces. After "The block meetings" come "you loathe them. The faceless accusers. The juveniles", then "the busybody prying. This senseless struggle for leases. The anxiety. The tension and strain; look at Myron Mavis. And the overtones of guilt and suspicion. Everything becomes", and then a long final run without a break:
The indictment is a list, and almost every item in it has been shown to the reader earlier in the book. That is what gives it force. Gretchen is not making an abstract charge; she is cataloguing scenes that Allen and the reader have lived through.
"You've got this job, Director of Telemedia, the high post of morality. Guardian of public ethics. You create the ethics. What a screwy, mixed-up situation."
Gretchen Malparto
"Yes, your ethics are very high. But they're not the ethics of this society. The block meetings"
Gretchen Malparto
"tainted. The fear of contamination; fear of committing an indecent act. Sex is morbid; people hounded for natural acts. This whole structure is like a giant torture chamber, with everybody staring at one another, trying to find fault, trying to break one another down. Witchhunts and star chambers. Dread and censorship, Mr. Bluenose banning books. Children kept from hearing evil. Morec was invented by sick minds, and it creates more sick minds."
Gretchen Malparto
CONTRAST
| Gretchen's charge | Where the book has shown it |
|---|---|
| "The block meetings" | Chapter 7: the meeting in the housing unit, Julie Ebberley's vile enterprise, Allen's own charge for coming home drunk. |
| "The faceless accusers" | Chapter 7: accusations put through one wall speaker that strips every voice of character, so accuser and defender sound alike. |
| "The juveniles" | From Chapter 1 onwards: the small metal informers whose tapes supply the evidence at block meetings. |
| "the busybody prying" | Chapter 1: Mrs. Birmingham the block warden; Chapter 15: Blake's timetable of Allen's week. |
| "This senseless struggle for leases" | Chapter 1: the Purcell lease, defended for over forty years, and Janet's fear of losing it. |
| "The tension and strain; look at Myron Mavis" | Chapter 3: Mavis at forty-two looking eighty, with half a stomach; Chapter 16: his sleepless handover. |
| "the overtones of guilt and suspicion" | Allen's dread after the jape; Janet alone with the evidence and her pills in Chapter 15. |
| "Sex is morbid; people hounded for natural acts" | Chapter 7: vile enterprise, which in most cases meant sex; Chapter 15: the inquiry into adultery. |
| "Dread and censorship, Mr. Bluenose banning books" | Chapter 9: the real books at Gates's, forbidden and costly. |
| "Children kept from hearing evil" | The moral packets themselves, which the Agencies write for the public. |
The rhythm of the speech is accumulative. Short noun phrases pile up (The anxiety. The tension and strain.), then the clauses lengthen as the anger builds, and the speech ends on a sentence with the shape of a verdict: "Morec was invented by sick minds, and it creates more sick minds." That is a diagnosis from a psychiatrist's sister and assistant. The Resort's whole premise is that people come to it sick, and here a Resort worker says the society is the source of the sickness and its founders were sick before it. The founder whose statue Allen japed is one of those minds.
Three images in the speech deserve a closer look.
"a giant torture chamber, with everybody staring at one another, trying to find fault, trying to break one another down." The torture in this chamber is mutual. No one is in charge; everyone is both prisoner and interrogator. That is the block system as Chapter 7 showed it, where neighbours are the accusers and the warden only reads the charges.
"Witchhunts and star chambers." The two phrases come from the real history of persecution, and a reader in the 1950s would have heard them with the loyalty investigations of that decade in mind.
"Mr. Bluenose banning books." Bluenose is an old American word for a puritanical person who wants to impose strict morals on others. Gretchen turns it into a comic character with a title, as if the censor were a figure in a children's story. It is the one joke in her speech, and she makes it while praising Allen's sense of humor.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the history behind Gretchen's words. The Court of Star Chamber was an English court that sat at Westminster, made up of privy councillors and judges and sitting without a jury. It was abolished in July 1641 by an act of the Long Parliament, after its use against critics of Charles I had made it a byword for arbitrary justice; in later usage a star chamber means any tribunal that proceeds unfairly or without the ordinary protections. A witch hunt began as the literal hunting of supposed witches in early modern Europe and America and came, in the twentieth century, to mean a campaign against people accused of disloyalty or deviance on weak evidence. Bluenose is given by the main dictionaries as a person of strict, puritanical morals who tries to impose them on others; it sits close to the American blue laws that restricted Sunday trade and amusements. Gretchen's speech joins these into one picture: Morec is a secret court, a public hunt and a moral censor at once. The novel was published in 1956, and the picture fits the period's fears. These notes do not claim that Dick had a particular investigation in mind; the text names none.
Allen listens. His answer is not a defence of Morec.
"I'd rather jape statues."
"All right," Allen said, listening. "But I'm not going to lie around watching girls sun-bathe. Like a salesman on vacation."
He has taken her point and refused her conclusion. If Morec is a torture chamber, the alternative on offer is Other World, and what he remembers of it includes a girl sunbathing naked on a lawn at Holly and Glen. Like a salesman on vacation is a sharp phrase from his own trade. A salesman on vacation is still a salesman; he has only stopped selling for a week, and the vacation is part of the job's rhythm.
"That's all you see in the Resort?" she asks.
"That's all I see in Other World. And the Resort is a machine to process people there."
The distinction is precise. Other World is the destination, a planet of leisure; the Resort is the machinery that sends people to it. Allen calls the Resort a machine to process people, the language of a factory or a sorting office. It is the coldest thing he says to her.
Gretchen defends the institution. "It does more than that. It provides them with a place they can escape to. When their resentment and anxiety starts destroying them", and the speech breaks off in a dash as she gestures, then ends: "Then they go over." The Resort is a safety valve. People who can no longer bear Morec are allowed to leave it.
Allen's answer is one of the best lines in the book.
He has seen through the safety valve. If the angry and the anxious are drained off to another planet, they do not stay to break things, and Morec is spared their anger. The Resort prevents rebellion by exporting the rebels. Allen's preference is to stay and do damage, of a comic kind. I'd rather jape statues is the closest he comes in the chapter to owning the jape aloud, and he makes it a statement of principle, said to the one person in the room who already knows.
"Then they don't smash store windows. Or jape statues. I'd rather jape statues."
Allen
"You came to us once," Gretchen points out. It is a fair hit. He did go to the Resort for help.
Allen then gives his own theory of the system, which is as complete in its way as Gretchen's.
"Why?" she asks, and he answers: "At least something's being done, here. People are working. You tell them to go out and fish."
Allen's model is the more political of the two. It says that the opposition is part of the government, that a society which permits an escape hatch has made the hatch part of its design. Badminton and checkers are gentle, harmless games, the equipment of a holiday camp or a hospital common room. To call the Resort the badminton set is to deny it any power of its own.
And his reason for choosing Morec is a working man's reason. The Resort's cure is idleness, and Allen distrusts idleness. He has just spent a morning taking charge of a building full of people, and he likes it. Whatever is wrong with Morec, it gives him something to do.
"As I see it," Allen said, "the Resort acts as part of the system. Morec is one half and you're the other. Two sides of the coin: Morec is all work and you're the badminton and checkers set. Together you form a society; you uphold and support each other. I can't be in both parts, and of the two I prefer this."
Allen
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Two readings of Morec and the Resort.
Gretchen's reading. Morec is a sick system made by sick minds. The Resort is a way out, a place people can escape to when the system starts to destroy them. Allen's humor is a sign of health, and it sets him apart from Morec.
Allen's reading. The two are halves of one system, "Two sides of the coin." Morec is work; the Resort is play, "the badminton and checkers set." Each keeps the other going. A man cannot belong to both, and Allen chooses the working half.
His reason. "At least something's being done, here. People are working."
What the readings share. Both treat the Resort as a release for the pressure Morec creates. They disagree on whether that release is a rescue or a working part of the machine.
"To explain."
"So you won't go back with me," she said reasonably. "I didn't really think you would." The word reasonably is the narrator's, and it is a kind word. She has stopped pleading.
"Then what did you show up here for?" Allen asks, and she answers at length.
"To explain. So you'd understand how that whole damn foolish business happened, and what my part was. Why I got involved. And so you'd understand about yourself. I wanted you to be aware of your feelings... the hostility you feel toward Morec. The deep outrage you have for its cruelties. You're moving in the direction of integration. But I wanted to help. Maybe it'll pay you back for what we took. You did ask us for help. I'm sorry."
Gretchen Malparto
This is Gretchen's own account of why she came to the office, and the text gives it in full. She lists three aims. She wants him to understand what happened and her part in it. She wants him to understand himself, to be aware of his hostility and outrage toward Morec. And she wants to make amends: pay you back for what we took. She ends with the simplest words in the chapter: "I'm sorry."
The language is therapeutic. Aware of your feelings, moving in the direction of integration: this is the vocabulary of the Resort, used by its own worker to explain her visit. Integration is a term from psychology for a mind whose parts work together, and Gretchen is saying that Allen's top layer and his core are coming closer. The phrase "You did ask us for help" returns his own complaint to him. He came in good faith; she answers in kind, and adds the apology he did not ask for.
The reader can take her stated reasons at face value or not. The text gives them and, inside this chapter, nothing to contradict them.
Allen's reply is a dry joke. "Being sorry is a good idea," he said. "A step in the right direction." He speaks as a Morec moralist might speak to a penitent, and she takes the cue. "Gretchen got up and put her hand on the doorknob." "I'll take the next step. Goodbye." The next step is leaving.
It would have been the end of the danger. He stops her. "Just sit down." He "propelled her back to the chair but she disengaged her arm." Then: "What now?" he demanded. "More speeches?"
The narration does not explain why Allen keeps her. The likely reason is Priar: Allen has arranged for her to be taken out privately, and letting her walk down the corridor alone would defeat the plan. But the effect is that Allen himself holds her in the room for the minutes that matter.
"No." She faced him. "I give up. I won't cause you any more trouble. Go back to your little worrying wife; that's where you belong."
Your little worrying wife is a jealous description of Janet and an accurate one. Janet does worry. The word little is the sting. Allen answers with a defence that is also a jape: "She's younger than you," Allen said. "As well as smaller." He accepts little and turns it into a compliment, and adds that Janet is younger, which a woman in Gretchen's position will not enjoy hearing.
"Still the welfare worker"
Gretchen replies "How wonderful," lightly, and then, after a dash, presses her real question.
"does she understand about you? This core you have that makes you different and keeps you out of the system? Can she help bring that out as it should be? Because that's important, more important than anything else. Even this heroic position, this new job, isn't really"
Gretchen Malparto
The sentence breaks off. Allen cuts across it: "Still the welfare worker," he said. He has her measure. She speaks of him as a case, with a core to be brought out and a development to be guided, and welfare worker is a slightly contemptuous name for a professional helper. The narration adds that "He was only partly listening to her; he was watching for Harry Priar." Her most earnest speech is background noise to a man waiting for a car.
She tries once more. "You do believe what I say, don't you? About you; about what's inside you." "Okay," he said. "I'm taken in by your story." It is an odd answer, half assent and half accusation. Taken in means deceived. He believes her and suggests at the same time that believing her is a mistake.
Gretchen answers with a personal admission that opens a new fact. After "It's true. I" and a dash, she says:
Donna is the baby on the porch at Pepper Lane in Chapter 13, whom Gretchen called by name. The notes on that chapter said that the narration did not make Donna Allen's daughter, only that Gretchen named her. Here Gretchen says more: Donna has a father, a man who, like Allen, kept leaving Morec and going back to it, with the same doubts and mistrusts, and who is now back on Earth "for good." She said goodbye to him, and she is saying goodbye to Allen in the same way.
That is all the text says. It does not say whether Donna is Gretchen's child, though the phrasing suggests a man she was close to, nor who Donna's father is. What it gives is a pattern. Gretchen has done this before. She has cared for a man torn between the two worlds, watched him choose Morec, and let him go. Allen is the second case, and she seems to know how it ends.
"really care about you, Allen. You're a lot like Donna's father. Equivocating about the system, leaving it and then going back. The same doubts and mistrusts. Now he's back here for good. I said goodbye to him. I'm saying goodbye to you, the same way."
Gretchen Malparto
"for services rendered"
"One last thing," Allen said. "For the record. Do you honestly suppose I'm going to pay that bill?"
The bill is the one Chapter 15 described: the Resort, having kidnapped him, was deducting its fees from his salary, and the narration called it the completion of the outrage. Gretchen's answer is matter-of-fact. "It does seem stupid. There's a routine procedure, and it was marked 'for services rendered,' so nobody would identify it. I'll have the account voided."
Two details are worth a second look. First, routine procedure. The billing of a kidnapped man is standard practice; there is a process for it, which suggests there have been others. Second, the phrase "for services rendered" was chosen "so nobody would identify it." The vagueness of the invoice is a disguise. Anyone reading Allen's pay deductions would see a charge with no detail. In a world of dossiers, the Resort protects its patients, or itself, by being bland on paper. And Gretchen can make the charge go away, which suggests more authority over the Resort's accounts than her claim of not knowing in advance would lead one to expect.
Then her manner changes. "She was suddenly shy." "I'd like to ask for something. Possibly you'll laugh."
"Why don't you kiss me goodbye?"
"Let's hear it." "Why don't you kiss me goodbye?"
"I hadn't thought about it." He made no move.
The narration is careful here. Allen does not move. The kiss is hers.
The question comes back to the beginning of the scene. She opened with the note and he answered with Molly's baby; now, at the end, she asks whether Molly exists. The answer is obvious and she asks anyway, because she wants to hear that the woman he left her for was an invention. Allen does not answer. The narration moves straight on.
"She dug her nails into his neck, tugging him down against her. Her breath, as she kissed him, was faintly sweet with peppermint, and her lips were moist." The verbs are hers: she digs, she tugs. The physical details are his perceptions: the peppermint, the moisture. Dick writes the kiss from inside Allen's senses, which makes it real to him whatever he intended.
"You're so good." she said, turning her face away. (The source closes the quotation with a full stop where a comma is expected.) It is a strange thing to say after a kiss, and very like her. Good in Morec means morally correct, the quality the packets promote. Gretchen means it in another sense, as kind or decent, or perhaps simply as the thing a woman says when she has got what she asked for and is about to lose the man. And she turns her face away, as if she has said too much.
Then: "She screamed."
Stripping off her gloves, Gretchen laid them with her purse and raised her bare, slim fingers to his face. "There really isn't anybody named Molly, is there? You just made her up."
Gretchen Malparto
"She screamed."
The three words are a paragraph to themselves. The next sentence shows why.
It is a juvenile, one of the small metal informers that Allen has dreaded since Chapter 1. The description is the fullest the book has given: earwig-shaped, with receptor stalks high and whirring. An earwig is an insect with pincers at its tail, which folk belief once said crawled into ears; the juvenile is an insect that collects what it hears. It scuttled closer and then retreated, the movement of a bug that has got what it came for.
Allen acts fast and badly. "Allen grabbed up a paper weight from the desk and threw it at the juvenile. He missed, and the thing kept on going." It is going back the way it came, "trying to get back out the window, through which it had come." As it climbs the wall, "he lifted his foot and smashed
"On the floor of the office was a metal earwig-shaped creature, its receptor stalks high and whirring. The juvenile scuttled closer, then retreated in a dash of motion."
The narrator
it; the juvenile fell broken to the floor and crawled in a half-circle." Then "Allen found a typewriter and dropped it on the crippled juvenile."
The sequence is grimly comic. A paperweight misses; a foot hits; a typewriter finishes the job. The typewriter is the tool of the packet writer, Allen's own trade, and it becomes a weapon against the machine that records. The crippled juvenile crawling in a half-circle has the pathos of a wounded animal, and Dick lets the reader feel a moment's pity for the spy.
Then "he began searching for its reservoir of tape." He knows how the evidence works. Smashing the body is not enough; the tape is what counts at a block meeting. His instinct is right and too late.
"Sue us for the lock!"
"While he was searching, the office door fell open and a second juvenile spurted in." The door does not open; it fell open, because its lock has already been cut out. Behind the second juvenile comes the raid.
The paragraph is a procession in three ranks. First Luddy with his camera. Then Blake-Moffet's technicians, described entirely by what they carry, a list of equipment joined by and as if it were spilling out of their arms. Then Allen's own new staff, screeching and fluttering like disturbed birds. The comedy of the scene is that the private surveillance team comes first and the employees of the state media trust follow as spectators.
"Sue us for the lock!" Luddy shouted, tripping on a mike cable. The shout is a confession and a dare. Blake-Moffet has broken into the Director's office and will pay for the damage, because the damage is worth it. He trips on his own team's cable, which keeps him a figure of farce even at his moment of triumph. Then: "Somebody get the tape from that busted juve", and the sentence breaks off at a dash.
"Two technicians jumped past Gretchen and swept up the remains of the demolished juvenile." "Looks intact, Fred." The machine was Blake-Moffet's, and its tape survived Allen's foot and the typewriter.
The narration pulls back. "As Luddy snapped pictures, tape transports revolved and the surviving juvenile whirred exultantly." The juvenile is given an emotion, exultantly, as if the machine were glad. "The office was jammed with people and equipment; Gretchen stood huddled in a corner, and somewhere far off burglar alarms were ringing." The alarms are a lovely detail. The building's security has noticed that something is wrong, far away, after everything has happened.
Luddy rushes up to Allen with his camera and explains, crowing.
He then adds "Up six flights", and after a dash, "those things climb!"
"Behind it was Fred Luddy, snapping pictures with a flash camera. With him were Blake-Moffet technicians, trailing wires and earphones and lenses and mikes and batteries. After the Blake-Moffet people came a horde of T-M employees, screeching and fluttering."
The narrator
"We reamed out the lock!" Luddy shouted, rushing up to Allen with his camera. "You didn't hear it; you were killing that juve we sent in through the window."
Fred Luddy
The raid was planned in two parts. One juvenile was sent up the outside of the building and in through the window, to record from inside the room. A team waited at the door with a reamer, a tool for widening or cutting out a hole, and cut the lock out while Allen was busy with the first juvenile. We sent is the key phrase. Blake-Moffet has juveniles of its own and deploys them. The informers that Allen has thought of as the instruments of the block system can be used by a private firm in a fight over a job.
The timing deserves a thought. Blake-Moffet had people outside the Director's office with equipment ready, and a juvenile climbing the outside wall, within minutes of Gretchen's arrival. Either they followed her, or they had been watching Allen since Sunday night, or both. Blake's dossier in Chapter 15 showed that his people had followed Allen since the night of the jape, and there is no reason to think they stopped. The text does not say how they knew.
Allen's first thought is for Gretchen. "Run," Allen said to Gretchen, pushing people out of her way. "Get downstairs and out of here." "She broke from her paralysis and started toward the open door." Luddy sees her go and "yelped with dismay"; he shoves his camera into a subordinate's arm and hurries after her. "As he caught hold of her arm, Allen reached him and socked him on the jaw. Luddy collapsed, and Gretchen, with a wail of despair, disappeared down the corridor."
It is the one moment of physical heroism in the chapter, and it is also the worst thing Allen could do for his case. He has protected the woman by hitting the man who was gathering evidence about her, and the punch will be on tape too. Gretchen's exit, with a wail of despair, is the last we see of her in the chapter, a cry going away down a corridor.
One of Blake-Moffet's men chortles as he helps Luddy up: "Oh boy," and then, "Have we got pictures."
"The first tape's intact."
"There were now three juveniles, and more were on the way. Allen seated himself on an air conditioner and rested." The juveniles gather like insects at a crumb, and Allen sits down on the nearest piece of machinery. He is beaten and he knows it. The narration observes the chaos from his seat: "Turmoil surged everywhere; the Blake-Moffet people were still taking pictures", while his own T-M staff (the source prints the initials with a long dash and a bracketed sic) "people were trying to restore order."
A secretary, "probably Vivian," shrills in his ear: "What'll we do? Call the police?" Allen gives his first order as a Director under siege: "Get them out," Allen grunted. "Bring up people from the other departments and throw them out. They're trespassing." "Yes sir," the secretary said, and darted off.
The order is sensible and too late. Trespassing is the right word for what Blake-Moffet has done, and it makes no difference. The evidence they came for is already in their machines.
Then Luddy, "propped up by two of his compatriots," fingering his chin and holding his camera again, delivers the inventory.
"The first tape's intact. You and that gal clinching; it's all down. And the rest, too; you busting the juve up and hitting me, and sending her off. And the door locked, the intercom ripped out"
Fred Luddy
After a dash he finishes: "the whole works."
The list is a charge sheet, and each item is something Allen did in the last quarter of an hour. You and that gal clinching: the kiss, which was Gretchen's, appears on the tape as an embrace between two people. You busting the juve up: the destruction of an informer. Hitting me: assault. Sending her off: helping a witness get away. The door locked, the intercom ripped out: precautions that now read as preparations. Everything Allen did to protect himself has become part of what he did wrong. The tape cannot record his reasons; it records his acts.
Luddy's final line is a taunt. "You didn't last long," Luddy said to Allen. He begins another sentence and ducks away "as Priar started at him."
"On your hands?"
Harry Priar has arrived. "From the confusion Harry Priar emerged." "What happened, Allen?" He sees Luddy and the juveniles and understands. "Oh no," he said. "No."
"I guess," Priar said, "I didn't get here in time." Allen's reply is a jape with a bitter edge: "How'd you come? On your hands?" The ten minutes were too long. Priar came as fast as a man could, by sliver from the Agency roof, and the raid needed less.
The narration surveys the end of the scene. "Some of the chaos was dying down. The Blake-Moffet people, and their equipment, were being forcibly ushered out. They were all smiles. His own staff was gathering in gloomy bunches, glancing at him and exchanging mutters." The contrast is the afternoon in two sentences. The intruders leave smiling; the new Director's own people stand in knots and murmur about him. That morning they lined up for his inspection.
Then the best detail in the chapter. "A T-M repairman was inspecting the hole in the office door where the lock had been. Blake-Moffet had carried the lock off with them, probably as a trophy." The lock that Allen turned at the start, "It had a lock, so he locked it," is gone, leaving a hole. The rival firm took it home like a scalp. It closes the chapter's first action with an image of its futility: the lock that was meant to keep the world out has become a souvenir in the hands of the people it failed to stop.
"Invasion," Priar said. "I never would have thought Luddy had the guts."
Allen reads the event as two forces joined. The plan was Tony Blake's, the head of the firm who brought the dossier to Frost's apartment on Sunday night. The energy was Luddy's, a personal grudge. And the shape is a circle. In Chapter 2, on the Monday after the jape, Allen fired Luddy on the spot in front of Sue Frost for agreeing with her about the apple-tree packet. Luddy went to Blake-Moffet and took the Agency's ideas with him, as Priar complained in Chapter 10. He sat with Blake at the hearing with a briefcase under his arm. And now he has the tape. Full cycle is Allen's word for the plot that his own decision started two weeks ago.
"Blake's idea," Allen said. "And Luddy's vendetta. So now it comes full cycle. I got Luddy, now he gets me."
Allen
"Did they", Priar begins, and after a dash: "I mean, they got what they wanted, didn't they?"
"Drums of it," Allen said. "I did the ultimate; I stamped on a juvenile." Drums are large reels or containers; Blake-Moffet has drums of tape. And the thing he picks out as the worst is not the kiss. It is the stamping. To destroy a juvenile is the ultimate offence because the juvenile is the system's own eye. A woman can be let off a vile enterprise with an oral reprimand at a block meeting, as Julie Ebberley was in Chapter 7. Smashing the informer attacks the means by which every offence is found out.
Then comes a question, and in the source it sits in the same paragraph as Allen's answer, so that the speakers run together: "Who was the girl?" It is most naturally Priar's. "Allen grimaced." His answer is a string of jokes.
The answers contradict each other on purpose. A friend, a niece, a daughter: each is a cover story of the kind a man in a moral packet might give, and each is absurd. Why do you ask? is the final turn, the innocent question of a man who has just been caught on film. On the last line of the chapter that has explained him, Allen does what Gretchen said he does. Faced with ruin, he japes.
"Just a friend. A niece visiting from the country. My daughter. Why do you ask?"
Allen
BY THE NUMBERS
Chapter 17 by the numbers. Monday 22 October 2114, early afternoon. Allen back Sunday night; Gretchen in that morning after four days travelling. Molly's invented baby: a boy, six pounds. Priar: about ten minutes away. The office: six flights up. Juveniles: one through the window, a second through the door, three in the room, "more were on the way." Weapons used on the first: one paperweight (missed), one foot, one typewriter. Allen's punches: one, to Luddy's jaw. Locks carried off: one. Allen's answers to the question about the girl: three, and a question back.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: whether to believe Gretchen. The chapter gives Gretchen two long speeches, the account of the kidnapping and the indictment of Morec, and a statement of why she came. Allen believes the first "since it was probably true," calls her an opportunist, says he is "taken in by your story," and calls her the welfare worker. These notes report her claims as claims. Some can be checked against what the book has shown: Allen did collapse as he left the Resort, he did wake on Other World, the bill did come. Others cannot be checked inside the novel so far: that she did not know in advance, that she came only to explain, that the Resort is a place of escape and not of capture. Her reading of the blob is attractive because it flatters Allen and because it fits the title. It is still one reading, offered by a woman who wants him on her side, against another offered by her brother. The chapter leaves both standing.
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Chapter 17 in four movements.
Arrival and precautions (lines 87 to 131). Gretchen enters with the note; Allen answers with Molly's baby and nearly faints; dates compared; his speech on power and helplessness; the door locked, Priar called, the intercom ripped out; her brother's mania; her confession that she hoped he would come back to the house; Priar ten minutes away.
Explanations (lines 133 to 185). What Allen will do with her; Gates and Hokkaido rejected as their gimmick; the gas pellet and the freight; the blob read as precognition by Malparto and as a sense of humor by Gretchen; her indictment of Morec; Allen's two-halves theory and his preference for work.
Goodbyes (lines 187 to 223). Her reasons for coming and her apology; the attempt to leave and Allen's order to sit; Janet as the little worrying wife; the core and Donna's father; the bill voided; the request for a kiss, the Molly question, the peppermint.
The raid (lines 225 to 271). The scream; the juvenile from the window smashed with a foot and a typewriter; the door falls open on Luddy, the technicians and the staff; Gretchen sent running; Luddy knocked down; three juveniles; the inventory of the tape; Priar too late; the lock taken as a trophy; full cycle; drums of it; the girl explained three ways.
The chapter is built as a long, quiet conversation followed by a short, loud catastrophe, and the conversation gives the catastrophe its meaning. For three quarters of its length Allen and Gretchen talk in a locked room about what he is. Then the room is broken open and the world decides what he is instead. Gretchen says that Allen has an irreducible core that laughs at Morec; Luddy's tape says that Allen is a married man who locked himself in with a woman, embraced her, attacked a juvenile, struck a witness and let the woman escape. Both descriptions are about the same quarter of an hour. Dick sets the private explanation against the public record and lets the record win.
The chapter's clock is part of the design. Allen's ten-minute wait for Priar puts a timer on the conversation. Every speech Gretchen makes is made against that timer, and Allen keeps one eye on the door. When the door opens, it is the wrong people.
The precautions run through the chapter like a fuse. The lock in the first movement becomes the hole in the door in the last. The intercom ripped out in the first movement is named in Luddy's inventory in the last. The order to Gretchen to sit down in the third movement keeps her in the room when the juvenile arrives. Each sensible step Allen takes becomes evidence, and Dick plants every one of them in plain sight.
What the chapter shows about Allen
He is a better judge of systems than of situations. His two-halves theory of Morec and the Resort is the sharpest political analysis in the book so far, and his reply about store windows sees straight through the safety valve. Yet he does not see that a locked door in a society of informers is an invitation, or that keeping Gretchen in the room is the most dangerous thing he can do.
He is honest about his choice. Gretchen offers him a flattering account of himself and a reason to leave Morec, and he refuses it plainly: "of the two I prefer this." He wants the job, he likes work, and he distrusts a cure that consists of going fishing. Whatever his core does at night in the Park, his conscious self has chosen Morec with open eyes.
He is decent under pressure. He declines to answer kidnapping with kidnapping, he accepts Gretchen's account as probably true, and when the raid comes his first act is to get her out. The punch he throws at Luddy is the act of a man protecting someone, and it costs him.
And he japes to the end. He answers the note with Molly's baby, Priar's apology with On your hands?, and the question about the girl with three cover stories. Gretchen's theory is proved in front of her and after she has gone. The chapter that names his sense of humor shows it surviving his ruin.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: a blob on the scan and the limits of reading anomalies. Malparto and the Dickson report both saw the anomaly on Allen's encephalogram, and neither could say what it meant. Malparto filled the gap with a dramatic hypothesis, a hidden psychic power linked to a hidden threat; Gretchen offered a plainer one, a sense of humor. The same problem appears whenever an organisation runs a model that flags something unusual without explaining it, and banks meet it daily in fraud scoring, anti-money-laundering alerts and credit decisions. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology's AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0, NIST AI 100-1, January 2023) separates three ideas in its account of trustworthy AI: transparency answers what happened in a system, explainability answers how a decision was made, and interpretability answers why it was made and what it means in context. Malparto had transparency of a sort, since the scan showed a blob, and no explainability or interpretability, and he supplied the missing meaning from his own preoccupations. A risk team that sees an unexplained flag on a customer or a transaction faces the same temptation, to read an outlier as the sign of the threat it already fears. The practical lesson is to record the anomaly, record each competing interpretation, and treat a vivid hypothesis as a hypothesis until it has been tested against the plainest one available. [Sources: NIST AI 100-1, Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), 26 January 2023, section 3.5.]
Questions the chapter raises
- What will Blake-Moffet do with the tape and the photographs, and to whom will they go first?
- How did Blake-Moffet know that Gretchen was in Allen's office, and how long had the juvenile been climbing?
- Is Gretchen right that the blob is a sense of humor, or is her brother right that it is precognition?
- Do the Cohorts kill people who rise too high, or is that Malparto's fear?
- Who is Donna's father, and why does Gretchen compare Allen to him?
- Will Gretchen void the bill as she promised?
- What is the penalty in Morec for stamping on a juvenile?
- What will Janet, Sue Frost and Ida Pease Hoyt make of the story?
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 17.
A bracketed sic with a space. Line 123 prints "Bet you I am" followed by a bracketed sic with a stray space inside the bracket, before the full stop.
A clipped word. Line 125 has "your -gram" for encephalogram. It reads as Gretchen's clipped professional speech, though it looks like a misprint.
A stray comma. Line 131 reads "would, be another ten minutes."
A full stop for a comma. Line 223 closes "You're so good" with a full stop before "she said".
A dash in an abbreviation. Line 247 prints T-M with a long dash instead of a hyphen, followed by a bracketed sic.
Two speakers in one paragraph. Line 271 runs Allen's "Drums of it" speech, the question "Who was the girl?" and Allen's reply into one paragraph without a break. The question is most naturally Priar's.
Many dashes. Lines 125, 129, 137, 167, 175, 203, 211, 233, 239, 249, 255, 259 and 269 break speech with dashes. These notes quote the pieces on either side and do not reproduce the dashes.
A quoted word. Line 155 sets mutant in single quotation marks inside Gretchen's speech, marking it as somebody else's term.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 17. On the afternoon of Monday 22 October 2114 Gretchen Malparto comes to Allen's office with "I got your note," and he answers "The baby was a boy. Six pounds." Knowing that any official move against her "puts an end to me," he locks the door, sends for Harry Priar and rips out the intercom. Gretchen says her brother gas-pelleted Allen as he left the Resort and arranged his shipment to Other World by freight "in a cataleptic state," and that she went with him for fear he might die. Malparto and the Dickson could not explain the blob on Allen's encephalogram; Malparto thinks it is precognition and that Allen "japed the statue" to escape the Cohorts. Gretchen's answer is "You have a sense of humor": Allen is "just a balanced human being" trying to restore balance to an unbalanced world, with an "irreducible core, that grins and laughs and plays pranks." She calls Morec "a giant torture chamber" invented by sick minds. Allen calls Morec and the Resort "Two sides of the coin" and chooses the side where people work: "I'd rather jape statues." She promises to void the bill marked "for services rendered," mentions Donna's father, asks whether Molly was invented, and kisses him. A Blake-Moffet juvenile has climbed "Up six flights" and through the window; Allen smashes it, but Luddy's team reams out the lock, photographs everything, and Luddy reports "The first tape's intact." Allen sends Gretchen running and knocks Luddy down. Priar comes too late, the lock is carried off as a trophy, and Allen says "I got Luddy, now he gets me." His worst offence, he thinks, is that he "stamped on a juvenile."
A Quart of Ice Cream
Late on the same Monday night, Allen and Janet sit together in the dark of their apartment, listening to the neighbours through the walls. She does not want a walk or bed; she wants to sit. Allen reports that he met Mrs. Birmingham on the way to the bathroom: the reports on him came in a convoy of Getabouts with six men guarding it, and she has hidden them, probably in an old stocking. He will fight at the block meeting and expects to lose. The lease, won by two generations of his family's pooled status, will go, though the warden's power ends at the door. He might wangle a Director's lease from Sue Frost, but Frost has not called all afternoon, and the powers above have said nothing. Allen finally tells Janet about the hearing at Frost's apartment on Sunday night. She is not surprised. She asks whether it was the same girl, and whether the girl was in on a frame-up; Allen says no, since only Blake-Moffet could gain, and the Resort is not part of Blake-Moffet. Janet sums it up: a woman walked into his office, he kissed her goodbye, and he is ruined. Allen expects the vile enterprise charge on Wednesday morning, but the real verdict will be Frost's, after she confers with Ida Pease Hoyt. Janet asks, wanly, about the quart of ice cream he promised that morning. It seems silly, he says, everything considered.
TIMELINE
When and where. "Late that night" is the night of Monday 22 October 2114, the end of the day that began with Allen's first morning at Telemedia and turned with the raid on his office. The narration looks back over "The rest of the day", which Allen spent hanging around his office waiting for a call that never came. Allen looks ahead to the block meeting: the charge "It'll be showing up Wednesday, about nine a.m.", which this edition dates Wednesday 24 October 2114. Sue Frost's reaction "might not be in for days." Allen also refers back to "last night at her apartment," the hearing of Sunday 21 October. The only setting is the Purcells' apartment in the housing unit, in darkness, with sounds coming through the walls; Allen has been as far as the bathroom down the hall, where he met the warden.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, still, for the moment, Director of Telemedia; Janet Purcell. Reported or discussed: Mrs. Birmingham, the block warden, met on the way to the bathroom, and the six men who guarded the convoy of reports; Allen's mother, who was with the Sutton Agency before it merged, and his father, in T-M's art department; Sue Frost; Myron Mavis, whose apartment the Director should have; "the powers" above; Doctor Malparto and his Psionic-testing; Gretchen, named once, and described at length without her name; Blake-Moffet; Mr. Wales, Allen's defender at block meetings; and Ida Pease Hoyt.
"No. Just sit."
"Late that night he sat with Janet in the darkness, listening to the noises filtering through the walls from other apartments." The chapter opens in the dark, and the narration does not say why the Purcells have not put on a light. It reads as a mood more than a fact: two people sitting with nothing to look at, after a day that has shown them too much. The darkness also makes the apartment a place of sound. Chapter 1 established how close the neighbours are in this housing unit, with Mrs. Duffy across the hall and a line forming at the community bathroom down the corridor, and the neighbours' lives come through.
"The murmur of voices, faint music, rattle of dishes and pans, and indiscriminate globs of sound that could be anything." The list moves from the recognisable to the shapeless. Voices, music, dishes are other people's evenings going on as usual. Indiscriminate globs of sound that could be anything is a phrase with an edge. In a building of informers and juveniles, sound is evidence, and the Purcells are hearing other people the way other people hear them. Globs also echoes Gretchen's blob from the afternoon, a shapeless thing that nobody can interpret.
Allen tries two ordinary offers. "Want to go for a walk?" he asked. "No." "Janet stirred a little beside him." "Want to go to bed?" And she answers:
The three words are the emotional centre of the opening. Janet does not want to go out, and she does not want to escape into sleep. She wants to stay where they are, in the dark, together, without doing anything. It is a quiet form of loyalty. It is also the posture of people waiting for a verdict. There is nothing to do until someone else decides.
(In the source, Allen's first question, Janet's No, the narration and Allen's second question all sit in one paragraph, which makes the speakers hard to follow; the reading given here is the natural one.)
"No. Just sit."
Janet
"probably in an old stocking"
Presently Allen speaks: "I ran into Mrs. Birmingham on my way to the bathroom. They brought the reports in a convoy of Getabouts. Six men guarding it. Now she's got it all hidden somewhere, probably in an old stocking."
The block warden has received the evidence. The reports are the record of the afternoon: the juvenile tapes and, presumably, Blake-Moffet's photographs, delivered to the officer who will present them at the block meeting. The delivery is absurdly grand. A "convoy of Getabouts" with "Six men guarding it" is the escort one would give to bullion or a state secret. Allen reports it with a straight face, and the comedy is in the scale: the material against one man's kiss arrives like an armoured shipment.
Then he deflates it. "probably in an old stocking." The guarded convoy ends in the warden's private hiding place, the kind of place an old woman keeps her savings. It is the first joke of the chapter and a fine one. It makes Mrs. Birmingham, the plump, florid warden of Chapter 1 with her authoritative fountain pen, into a miser of scandal, hoarding the reports in her stocking as other people hoard coins.
The joke also shows how the system works. Evidence gathered by a private firm in the Director of Telemedia's office ends up in the hands of a block warden in the housing unit where the Director lives. The levels of Morec connect directly. Whatever happened at T-M will be judged by Allen's neighbours.
"I'm going to fight with everything I've got."
"You're going into the block meeting?" Janet asks. Allen answers with a fighter's line: "I'll be there, and I'm going to fight with everything I've got."
Her next question and his answer share a paragraph in the source. "Will it do any good?" "He reflected." "No."
The exchange is honest in a way that has been rare between them. In Chapter 16 Allen kept the hearing from Janet and talked cheerfully of ice cream; now he gives her the true answer after a pause. He will fight and he will lose. The fight is for its own sake, or for the record.
"Then," Janet said, "we're washed up."
Washed up is a slangy, final phrase, the language of a career or a marriage ended. Janet uses it of both of them. Allen corrects the scope.
This is a precise statement of jurisdiction. The block warden's power is local. She can take the lease of an apartment in her unit, and nothing else. When the Purcells leave the building, she has no hold on them. Allen is reminding Janet, and himself, that the block meeting is the smallest of the courts in front of him. The larger ones are elsewhere.
"You've resigned yourself to that," Janet said. "I might as well." "He searched for his cigarettes, then gave up." The small failed search is a good touch. In the dark he cannot find his cigarettes, and he does not try very hard. Then he turns the question back on her: "Haven't you?"
"We'll lose our lease, if that's what you mean. But that's all Mrs. Birmingham can do. Her authority ends when we leave here."
Allen
"Pooled status"
Janet answers by reminding him what the lease cost.
This is new information, and it fills in a family history the book has only hinted at. Chapter 1 said the lease had been defended for over forty years and deeded to Allen by his family. Now Janet names the work behind it. Allen's mother worked for the Sutton Agency, which has since merged; the text does not say with whom. His father worked in Telemedia's art department. Both parents served the same industry Allen serves; he is the third generation of a family in the moral media business, if one counts the line of the lease, and the second at least in the work itself.
There is a quiet irony in the father's job. Allen's father worked in T-M's art department. Allen's own Agency has an art department, and the red paint on Allen's clothes after the jape came from it, as Janet saw at once in Chapter 1. Today Allen became head of the whole of T-M, his father's employer. On the day the son reaches the top of the institution his father worked in, he loses the lease his father helped win.
Allen answers with a phrase that names the system:
"Your family worked decades for this lease. All those years your mother was with the Sutton Agency before it merged. And your father in T-M's art department."
Janet
"Pooled status," he said. "You don't have to remind me. But I'm still Director of Telemedia. Maybe I can wangle a lease out of Sue Frost. Technically I'm entitled to one. We should be living in Myron Mavis' apartment, within walking distance of my work."
Allen
Pooled status is the novel's term, here, for the way housing is earned in Morec. Status is not individual. A family accumulates it, each member's service adding to the common stock, and the lease is the return on the pool. That is why losing the lease is more than losing a flat. It wipes out decades of other people's work: his mother's, his father's, and whatever Allen added. "You don't have to remind me" is the response of a man who knows exactly what is at stake and does not want to hear it said.
Then the hope. Allen is still Director. A Director is "Technically" entitled to a lease, the post comes with an apartment (Mavis's, within walking distance of the Telemedia building), and Sue Frost could arrange it. Wangle is a word for getting something by manoeuvre or persuasion. Allen is planning to use his new office to escape the consequences in his old housing unit, which is exactly the kind of move his rivals would call privilege. It is also entirely reasonable. The Director should live near his work, and he should have moved already.
"the powers had remained mum"
"Would she give you a lease now? After this business today?" Janet asks, and the narration answers from inside Allen's head.
"He tried to imagine Sue Frost and the expression on her face. The sound of her voice. The rest of the day he had hung around his office at T-M expecting her to call, but she hadn't. No word had arrived from above; the powers had remained mum."
The picture of Allen's afternoon is bleak. After the raid he stayed in his office, with its hole where the lock had been and its torn-out intercom, waiting for the telephone. He could not imagine Frost's face or voice; he could only wait for them. The powers had remained mum has a comic phrasing, the powers as if the Committee were gods, mum as if they were sulking children, but the comedy is thin. Silence from above is the worst sign. It means they are deciding.
"She'll be disappointed," he said. "Sue had the kind of hopes for me only a mother could invent."
The sentence casts Frost as a second mother, and it is just. Frost has championed him since Chapter 2: she chose him for the directorship, sat through the hearing, and let him take up the post the next morning. Her hopes were maternal in their scale and their pride. Invent is a sharp verb. A mother's hopes are inventions, larger than the child, and Allen suggests that Frost's picture of him was something she made up and that he has now failed to match.
"Up the ladder generation by generation."
Then comes a short paragraph of narration that sits apart from the dialogue, the novel's bitterest comment so far on Morec's social order.
"Up the ladder generation by generation. The schemings of old women, the secret ambitions and activity of parents boosting their children one more notch. Exhaustion, sweat, the grave."
The narrator, in Allen's thoughts
The paragraph is three sentences without main verbs, a list of images. It is Allen's thought, or the narrator's in his voice, and it is a summary of the whole system of pooled status. Families climb, one notch per generation. Old women scheme; Mrs. Birmingham and Sue Frost are both in their fifties, and both are now moving pieces in Allen's life. Parents push their children up, as Allen's mother and father pushed him. And the end of every climb is the same: "Exhaustion, sweat, the grave."
The last sentence echoes what the book has shown of Myron Mavis, the man at the top of the ladder, forty-two and looking eighty, sleepless and handing over his job in Chapter 16. It also echoes the poem Mavis whispered to Allen that morning. Excelsior means higher, and the climber in Longfellow's ballad goes up the mountain with his banner and is found dead in the snow. The narrator does not mention the poem. The paragraph does the same work.
It also echoes Gretchen's indictment from the afternoon. She named this senseless struggle for leases and the tension and strain; look at Myron Mavis. Now, a few hours later, Allen is thinking her thoughts in his own words. He rejected her offer of the Resort; he has not rejected her description.
"I guess it's time to tell you"
Allen turns from the lease to the thing he has been keeping back. "We can assume Blake-Moffet briefed her," he said. "I guess it's time to tell you what happened last night at her apartment."
The first sentence is a working assumption about Frost: whatever happened today, she has heard it from Blake-Moffet, which means she has heard the worst version. The second is a confession that has been delayed a day. In Chapter 16 Janet asked him directly, "I'd feel better if you told me what happened last night with Mrs. Frost," and he put her off. Now that the story is about to come out in a block meeting, he tells it himself.
"He told Janet, and she had nothing to say." The narration does not repeat the story. The reader knows it: the hearing in Frost's apartment, Blake's dossier, the photograph from the ship, the name Grace Maldini, the question whether he had left his wife. The silence that follows is long. "There wasn't enough light in the apartment to see her face, and he wondered if she had passed out with wretchedness. Or if some primordial storm were going to burst over him."
The darkness becomes useful here. Allen cannot read his wife's face, and he imagines the two extremes: collapse or fury. Primordial storm is a comic overstatement, the language of creation myths applied to a domestic row, and it tells us how much Allen fears Janet's anger, or how little he knows what she will do.
Neither comes. "But, when he finally nudged her, she simply said:" and what she says is short.
"I was afraid it was something like that."
Janet
Janet is not surprised. She had guessed. That is a sad thing to learn about a marriage, and the chapter lets it stand. Janet spent the days of his absence alone, told only that he had gone to Other World for treatment, with her pills for company. She has had time to imagine every explanation, and the one she feared was a woman.
"Maybe I'm clairvoyant."
Allen's reaction is sharp. The source prints it with a censored oath: "Why the", then an h and an l with a dash between them, then "why?" The repeated why is the sound of a man who cannot understand how he was seen through.
Janet answers lightly.
The narration explains the joke: "He had told her about Doctor Malparto's Psionic-testing." At some point that evening, then, Allen told her about the cards, the dice and the rest of Chapter 12. Janet uses the word that Malparto tested him for, clairvoyance, the ability to perceive what is hidden, and applies it to herself. It is the first jape Janet makes in the book, and it is a good one. Wives do not need Psi to know when a husband is hiding a woman. Malparto spent a morning testing Allen for powers of perception; Janet had them all along, and she calls them a feeling.
It also cuts against the whole Resort enterprise in the way Gretchen's diagnosis did that afternoon. The mysterious faculty turns out to be an ordinary human one: in Allen's case a sense of humor, in Janet's an intuition about her husband.
Then her real question: "And it was the same girl?"
"I just had a feeling. Maybe I'm clairvoyant."
Janet
"a big lovely house"
Allen answers with a catalogue.
The speech is built like a charge sheet, three clauses each beginning the girl who. Each is Allen's version of a part of the story, and each is tilted.
The girl who got me to the Health Resort refers to the slip of paper in Chapter 6, with the words Health Resort and Gretchen Malparto on it, which led Allen to the Resort. Her name was the referral; whether she knew about it the book has not said.
The girl who helped kidnap me is Allen's reading of her account that afternoon. She said her brother was responsible and that she went along out of fear for him; Allen puts it more harshly, and he has some right to.
The girl who leaned her bosom in my face and said I was the father of her child is the strongest and the least exact. On Pepper Lane, in Chapter 13, Gretchen played Mrs. Coates in a house with a baby called Donna, and the staging cast Allen as the husband. The notes on that chapter observed that the narration never made Donna his child. And that afternoon Gretchen spoke of Donna's father as another man, now back on Earth. Allen's version compresses the staged situation into
"The girl who got me to the Health Resort; the girl who helped kidnap me; the girl who leaned her bosom in my face and said I was the father of her child. A very pretty black-haired girl with a big lovely house. But I did come back. Nobody seems to care about that part."
Allen
a direct claim. He is telling the story to his wife, and he tells it as a man who was put upon.
Then a surprising sentence: "A very pretty black-haired girl with a big lovely house." It is an odd thing to say to Janet, and an honest one. He does not pretend Gretchen was plain or the house dreary. He was tempted by a pretty woman and a lovely house, and he says so.
And then the point he most wants to make. "But I did come back. Nobody seems to care about that part." This is the sentence the whole case turns on, for Allen. He left Pepper Lane. He staged a hold-up with nothing but his pocket, made the long trip home, faced the hearing and went to work. He chose Morec, and he said so to Gretchen that afternoon. In every forum he faces, the hearing, the block meeting, the Committee, what counts is the woman and the kiss. Nobody counts the return.
Two words, and the tenderest line in the book so far. Janet answers his complaint directly. Somebody does care that he came back, and it is the person who has most reason to be hurt. The chapter does not dwell on it. Janet goes straight on to a practical question.
"I care," Janet said.
Janet
"Do you think she was in on the frame-up?"
"Do you think she was in on the frame-up?"
Janet
Janet has her own theory: the afternoon was a trap and Gretchen was the bait. It is a natural theory. The woman arrived, the juvenile arrived within minutes, and the raid was ready at the door.
Allen considers it and rejects it.
The reasoning is a question of motive. A frame-up needs a beneficiary, and the only beneficiary is Blake-Moffet. The Resort is a separate institution with no stake in who runs Telemedia. So Gretchen was not acting for anyone; she was acting for herself. Allen's description of her is half contemptuous and half fond. Witless and irresponsible is harsh. Full of feminine vigor is the language of a 1950s man about a woman he finds attractive. Young love, they call it is a shrug at a cliché. The idealism of her calling is fairer: she is a welfare worker, as he called her that afternoon, and she believes in helping.
He extends the description to her brother: "Her brother's the same way: idealism, for the", and the source then prints a broken word, "benefi", followed by a bracketed sic and a comma, and the sentence ends: "of the patient." The word is benefit, cut short in the printing. Allen's phrase is sardonic. Malparto drugged a patient and shipped him to another planet for the benefit of the patient. The idealism is real and its results are monstrous.
Allen's analysis is reasonable, and the reader should note what it rests on. He accepts that Gretchen came to his office for her own reasons, which is what she said. He believes that
"The idea entered my mind. But she wasn't. There was nothing to be gained, except by Blake-Moffet. And the Resort isn't part of Blake-Moffet. Gretchen was just witless and irresponsible and full of feminine vigor. Young love, they call it. And the idealism of her calling."
Allen
Blake-Moffet followed him and seized its chance. The chapter gives no reason to doubt either view, and these notes do not go beyond it.
"you're completely ruined"
Janet's summary is the clearest statement of the absurdity of the day.
Her version is simpler than the truth in one respect. In Chapter 17 the narration was careful that Gretchen asked for the kiss and did the kissing: Allen "made no move," and she "dug her nails into his neck, tugging him down against her." Janet's all you did was kiss her gives the act to Allen. She is not accusing him; she is minimising, and her version is generous. Either way the point stands. A visit and a kiss have ended a career, a lease and perhaps a marriage. So sort of crazy is a phrase of bewilderment, said by a woman who grew up on Betelgeuse 4 and has never quite fitted into Morec's way of measuring sin.
Allen answers by naming the charge.
He continues: "It'll be showing up Wednesday, about nine a.m. I wonder what Mr. Wales can do in my defense. It should pose quite a challenge to him."
Vile enterprise is the block system's phrase for sex, the charge against Julie Ebberley in Chapter 7. Then it was someone else's offence, read out through the wall speaker, and she got off with an oral reprimand. Now it will be his. The word is is a writer's phrase: Allen, who writes moral packets for a living, knows the right term for everything, and he supplies the official one with irony.
Mr. Wales, the mild elderly neighbour, turned out in Chapter 7 to be Allen's defender, repaying him for standing up for others, and Allen was let off on his excellent prior record. It should pose quite a challenge to him is a dry joke. Wales could point to a good record then. A Director of Telemedia caught on film kissing a woman in a locked office, after stamping on a juvenile and hitting a man, is beyond the reach of any defence a mild elderly neighbour can offer.
"It's so sort of crazy," Janet protested. "All she did was walk into your office, and all you did was kiss her when she left. And you're completely ruined."
Janet
"The word is 'vile enterprise,'"
Allen
"the stamp of absolute finality"
The narration then steps back and states the real situation.
The block meeting will take the lease. Frost and Hoyt will decide everything else: the directorship, the Agency, Allen's place in Morec. Their decision is slow because it must be final. The stamp of absolute finality is a bureaucratic phrase made grand. A stamp is an official mark on a paper; absolute finality is the language of last judgements. Frost cannot act alone, because a decision about the Director of Telemedia
"But the block meeting wasn't really important. The unknown was Sue Frost, and her reaction might not be in for days. After all, she had to confer with Ida Pease Hoyt: the reaction needed the stamp of absolute finality."
The narrator
must carry the authority of the head of the Committee, the linear descendant of the founder. Allen faced Hoyt at the hearing on Sunday night. What she will decide now is the question the chapter leaves open.
The narration also suggests something about how Morec makes decisions. The local court acts fast and on tape; the high court acts slowly and in private. Allen will be judged twice, by his neighbours on Wednesday and by the Committee whenever it chooses, and the second judgement is the one that counts.
"a quart of ice cream"
Then, in the same paragraph in the source, the chapter ends on a small domestic exchange.
That morning, on the phone in Chapter 16, Allen promised Janet a quart of ice cream to celebrate his first day. It was the token of a happy evening. Janet remembers it now, in the dark, after everything. Wanly is the narrator's word: pale, faint, without strength. She is not complaining that he forgot. She is reaching for the one cheerful plan the day contained, the way a person reaches for a familiar object in a dark room.
The last line is a perfect deflation. The celebration has nothing left to celebrate. Everything considered sums up the day in two words: the directorship, the raid, the tape, the lease, Frost's silence, Wednesday's charge. Against all that, a quart of ice cream is silly.
And yet the line is also a little joke, in Allen's usual manner, and so it shows he has not quite gone under. Gretchen said that afternoon that he has a core that grins and laughs. At the end of the worst day of his life, in the dark, the core is still there, making a dry remark about ice cream.
"Didn't you say something about bringing home a quart of ice cream?" Janet asked wanly.
Janet
"Seems sort of silly," Allen said. "Everything considered."
Allen
BY THE NUMBERS
Chapter 18 by the numbers. Monday 22 October 2114, late at night. The convoy: Getabouts, guarded by six men. The block meeting: Wednesday 24 October, about nine a.m. The lease: worked for over decades by two parents, his mother at the Sutton Agency and his father in T-M's art department. Calls from Sue Frost that afternoon: none. Allen's descriptions of Gretchen: three clauses beginning the girl who. Courts ahead: two, the block meeting and Frost with Hoyt. Ice cream promised: a quart. Ice cream brought: none.
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the two kinds of judgement. The chapter sets out, in Allen's own analysis, how Morec will judge him. The block meeting is fast, local and procedural; it works from the juvenile tapes and the photographs, and it can take one thing, the lease. The Committee is slow, central and personal; it works from what Frost has heard from Blake-Moffet and what Hoyt decides, and it can take everything else. Allen expects to lose the first and does not know about the second. It is worth keeping the two apart when reading what follows, since the novel itself does. These notes do not anticipate the outcome of either.
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Chapter 18 in four movements.
The dark room (lines 275 to 279). The noises through the walls; a walk or bed refused; just sit; the warden, the convoy, the six guards, the old stocking.
The lease (lines 281 to 305). The block meeting, a fight that will do no good; washed up; the warden's authority ends at the door; pooled status, his mother and father; the Director's lease and Mavis's apartment; Frost's silence; the mother's hopes; up the ladder to the grave.
The confession (lines 307 to 321). Blake-Moffet has briefed Frost; the hearing told at last; Janet's silence and her guess; clairvoyant; the same girl; three clauses and a lovely house; I did come back, I care; the frame-up rejected; Janet's summary.
The verdicts ahead (lines 323 to 325). Vile enterprise on Wednesday and Mr. Wales's challenge; Frost and Hoyt and the stamp of absolute finality; the ice cream.
The chapter is short, about seven hundred words in the source, and it is the quiet after Chapter 17's noise. Almost nothing happens. Two people sit in the dark and talk. The action is entirely in what they say about the past and the future: what the family won, what the hearing was, what the girl did, what the courts will do. Dick uses the darkness to strip the scene to voices, which suits a society where voices on tape are evidence.
The chapter's shape is a narrowing. It begins with the whole building's noises, moves to the lease, then to the marriage, and ends on a quart of ice cream. Each stage is smaller and more personal than the last. The final exchange brings the reader back to the morning's promise and measures the day by it.
It is also the chapter in which Janet becomes a full character. Until now she has been the worrier, the woman with the pills. Here she is clear-sighted, she makes a joke, she asks the practical questions, and she says I care. She had guessed the truth before he told her, and she does not leave him.
What the chapter shows about Allen
He is honest at last with his wife. He tells her about the hearing, gives her a straight answer about the block meeting, admits the girl was pretty and the house lovely, and does not pretend the outcome is open. The concealments of Chapter 16 are over.
He thinks clearly under defeat. His analysis of the warden's limited authority, the Director's entitlement to a lease, the frame-up and the two courts is cool and correct as far as it goes. He has the habit of a man who writes packets: he sees the structure of the story he is in.
He feels the injustice and resents being judged on the wrong part of the story. But I did come back is the cry of a man whose choice for Morec has gone unrecorded. The tape shows the kiss, not the return.
And he has not lost his sense of humor. The old stocking, the challenge to Mr. Wales, the ice cream: even now, he japes. Gretchen's diagnosis holds through the night after the raid.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Take: pooled status as concentration risk. Allen's position is a study in concentration. His job, his family's housing, two generations of his parents' accumulated status and his standing in the community all depend on the judgement of the same small set of authorities, and one afternoon's evidence can take all of them at once. Risk managers in banking know this pattern as concentration risk, and one of the clearest real cases is the collapse of Enron. According to a US Congressional Research Service report (RS21115, 2002), about 62 percent of the assets in Enron's 401(k) retirement plan were held in Enron stock at the end of 2000, and Enron shares fell from more than 80 dollars in January 2001 to under a dollar by January 2002, so that employees lost their jobs and much of their savings to the same failure. The lesson that pension regulators and bank risk teams took from it is the one Allen's lease teaches: when income, savings and status are all claims on a single institution, the failure of that institution, or of one's standing with it, is total. Diversification across employers, assets and counterparties exists to stop one event from taking everything. Morec's system of pooled leases does the opposite by design, and that is part of how it keeps people obedient. [Sources: Congressional Research Service, RS21115, The Enron Collapse: Impact on Retirement Plan Participants, 2002.]
Questions the chapter raises
- What will the block meeting do on Wednesday morning, and what can Mr. Wales say?
- Will Sue Frost give Allen a Director's lease, or take the directorship away?
- What will Ida Pease Hoyt decide, and when?
- Where will the Purcells live if they lose the lease?
- What exactly was in the reports that came by convoy?
- Will Janet stay with Allen through whatever comes?
- Does Gretchen know what happened to Allen after she ran?
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 18.
Merged speakers. Line 275 runs Allen's first question, Janet's "No.", a line of narration and Allen's second question into one paragraph; line 285 runs Janet's "Will it do any good?" and Allen's reflection and answer together; line 325 runs narration, Janet's question about the ice cream and Allen's reply into one paragraph.
Censored oath. Line 311 prints "hell" as an h and an l with a dash between them, in Allen's "why" question.
A broken word. Line 319 prints "benefi" followed by a bracketed sic and a comma, for benefit.
An irregular closing mark. Line 323 closes the quoted "vile enterprise" with a single mark, a comma, a space and an opening double mark, where a closing double mark is meant.
Unattributed speaker. Line 311 has no tag; from context it is Allen asking why Janet was afraid, and line 313 is Janet's reply.
Kissing. Janet's "all you did was kiss her" in line 321 gives the kiss to Allen, while Chapter 17 had Gretchen ask for it and do it. This is Janet's version, not a slip in the text.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 18. Late on Monday 22 October 2114 Allen and Janet sit in the dark. Janet says "No. Just sit." The reports against Allen have reached Mrs. Birmingham by "a convoy of Getabouts" with "Six men guarding it," now hidden "probably in an old stocking." He will fight at the block meeting and expects to lose the lease, which his family won by "Pooled status": his mother at the Sutton Agency, his father in T-M's art department. He hopes for a Director's lease, but Frost has not called and "the powers had remained mum." He finally tells Janet about the hearing; she says "I was afraid it was something like that" and jokes "Maybe I'm clairvoyant." Allen's complaint is "But I did come back. Nobody seems to care about that part," and Janet answers "I care." He rejects the idea that Gretchen helped frame him, since only Blake-Moffet gains and "the Resort isn't part of Blake-Moffet." The charge on Wednesday about nine will be "vile enterprise," but the real verdict is Sue Frost's, after she confers with Ida Pease Hoyt, because "the reaction needed the stamp of absolute finality." The promised quart of ice cream "Seems sort of silly," Allen says. "Everything considered."
Temporary Difficulty
At Wednesday's block meeting Janet takes the table kept for a wife in real crisis, Allen's defender Mr. Wales is missing, and Mrs. Birmingham reads four counts arising from the raid on Monday. Allen lies with skill until a planted questioner, armed with information outside the official report, draws him into the slip "I didn't even know her then," after which he attacks the faceless accusers from the stage. The Council voids the lease of the apartment he was born in and wishes him well with his "temporary difficulty". At Telemedia Sue Frost asks for his written resignation, and he refuses.
TIMELINE
When and where. "On wednesday morning" is Wednesday 24 October 2114, the date Allen predicted in Chapter 18 ("It'll be showing up Wednesday, about nine a.m."); a check of the proleptic Gregorian calendar confirms that 24 October 2114 falls on a Wednesday. The charge refers back to "the afternoon of October 22, 2114," the Monday of the raid. The verdict fixes a future date, "the sixth day of November, 2114," which falls on a Tuesday, thirteen days after the meeting; Allen rounds it to "two weeks". The next case on the agenda refers to "the morning of October 21, 2114," a Sunday, the day Allen came home from Other World. The first setting is the first-floor chamber of the housing unit, the same room as the block meeting of Chapter 7, then the corridor outside it. Allen then takes Janet back to the apartment and "walked the long way" to Telemedia; his staff can tell from his "two-hour absence" where he has been. Sue Frost arrives "At eleven-thirty". The chapter title is editorial, like every title in these notes; it is taken from the Council's phrase, which Allen repeats with contempt.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, Director of Telemedia, called to the stage as "Mr. A. P."; Janet Purcell, in "a freshly-starched dress," at the wife's table; Mrs. Birmingham, the block warden, who reads the charge and the verdict, and the other wardens on the platform, the "council of ladies"; the impersonal voice from the loudspeaker, which carries every questioner's words, including a "planted questioner" with extra information and a questioner who is "in all probability" a wife; the juveniles, surrendering seven tapes; the crowd of neighbours; R.P., a nine-year-old boy whose case comes next; Mr. Wales, absent from the meeting and met afterwards in the corridor; Allen's staff and some T-M officials; and Sue Frost, "in a long coat, looking handsome and efficient." Named but absent: Miss G.M., Gretchen Malparto, never named in full; Miss J. E., Julie Ebberley of Chapter 7; Mavis and Mrs. Hoyt, expected at Frost's Juggle evening; and the Committee, whose full action Allen says his dismissal requires.
"crammed to bursting"
"On wednesday morning the first-floor chamber of the housing unit was crammed to bursting." The chapter opens on the room that Chapter 7 described in detail: the single large chamber on the first level where "all the local Leagues, Committees, Clubs, Boards, Associations, and Orders met," the room Janet said she hated. Then there were already "more people than space." Now the room is "crammed to bursting," and the reason is given in the next sentence.
"The gossip relay had carried the news to everybody, mostly through the wives." The phrase gossip relay is a joke at the expense of Allen's own trade. Chapter 3 described the domino method, by which Telemedia's packets reach one household per block and are passed on by word of mouth. Here the same method works in reverse and without any packet at all. The news of the Director's disgrace has travelled from door to door, and the narration notes that the wives carried most of it. Morec's informal network is as efficient as its official one, and it needs no transmitter.
"Stale cigarette smoke hung in its cloud and the air conditioning system was making no progress." In Chapter 7 the smoke was a small mystery: Allen was "always puzzled by the smoke, since nobody seemed to have a cigarette and smoking was forbidden," and he wondered whether it was "an accumulation from the past," like the shadow of purifying fire. The cloud is back, called "its cloud" as if it belonged to the room, and the air conditioning, which in Chapter 7 "moaned and reshuffled the cloud of smoke," is still losing. The detail gives the chamber a permanent, used-up atmosphere, the air of a place where judgement has been passed for generations.
"At the far end was the platform on which the wardens sat, and they were all present." In Chapter 7 the board was formed on the stagger system, with wardens from surrounding housing units sitting under the local warden as chairman, all middle-aged ladies in flowered silk. They were all present is a quiet signal of the occasion's weight. Nobody has stayed away from this one.
"in times of real crisis the wife was expected to aid her husband"
"In a freshly-starched dress, Janet entered slightly ahead of him." Janet has dressed for the occasion. A freshly-starched dress is stiff and formal, the clothing of someone presenting herself for inspection, and the stiffness will soon spread to her whole body. She enters ahead of him, which is unusual; she is leading.
She goes "directly to a vacant table" and places herself "before the microphone." The narration explains the custom.
This is one of the novel's small anthropological passages, in the documentary voice it uses for Juggle and Edufacture. The custom is "unverbalized": nobody wrote it down, and everybody obeys it. A vacant table with a microphone is kept for the wife of a man in serious trouble, so that she can speak in his defence through the common speaker. Morec's sense of decency is real, and it is procedural. The neighbours will take the Purcells' lease, but they will not deny Janet her right to argue against it. The phrase "an affront to Morec" treats the society's name as a kind of person who could be insulted.
"The table, by an unverbalized protocol, was purposely untaken; in times of real crisis the wife was expected to aid her husband. To deprive her of that right would have been an affront to Morec."
The narrator
Then two short sentences, set apart as their own paragraph:
The callback is exact. In Chapter 7, as the door closed behind them, Janet murmured "I guess we don't get to sit," and she stood beside Allen through the meeting, huddling against him. The vacant table is the measure of the difference between the two Wednesdays. Two weeks ago Allen was charged with coming home drunk and saying one word; this week the room has made space for his wife because it expects to destroy him.
"Last time, no table had been left vacant. Last time had not been a crisis."
The narrator
"This serious is"
Allen stands behind Janet and speaks to her quietly.
The grammar is the joke, and it is a deliberate one. Since Chapter 3 the novel has given certain characters an inverted sentence order: Sue Frost's "This embarrassing is," her "This an order is!" at the hearing, the voice at the Chapter 7 meeting saying "This a mockery is." These notes judged the pattern deliberate by Chapter 7. Here Allen picks it up and runs it four times in a row, "This serious is", "this long is", "this vindictive is", "this going to lose is", until the construction collapses into nonsense. He is mimicking the official manner of speech at the moment he is about to be judged by it. It is a jape in grammar, made under his breath, for an audience of one.
The content under the joke is grim. The meeting will be serious, long and vindictive, and he will lose. "Don't try to save me, because I can't be saved" has a religious ring that the chapter will develop when it calls the room a church. "As we said last night" refers back to Chapter 18, when Allen told Janet that the fight would do no good and that the lease was lost. The instruction itself echoes Chapter 7, where he told her "you keep your mouth shut. Don't get in on either side." Then he wanted silence because he hoped to get off lightly. Now he wants it because nothing she says can help, and he wants to spare her.
"She nodded sightlessly." The adverb is strange and exact. Janet nods without looking at anything, her eyes fixed ahead, already withdrawn into herself.
"This serious is," Allen said to his wife, stationing himself behind her. "And this long is; this vindictive is; and this going to lose is. So don't get too involved. Don't try to save me, because I can't be saved. As we said last night."
Allen
"where's little Mr. Wales?"
Allen goes on, "softly, as if humming a tune":
"burying their teeth in me" is the language of a dog pack. Chapter 7 used the same image when the questioning began: "then the dogs were loose." The next chapter will use it again, in Mr. Wales's imagination. Allen expects to be torn apart and he asks Janet not to throw herself into the fight. "so
"When they start burying their teeth in me... don't spring up and take them all on. This is so rigged it's ready to burst. For example, where's little Mr. Wales?"
Allen
rigged it's ready to burst" is an engineer's or a gambler's phrase: the meeting is fixed, overloaded with its own fixing.
His proof is an absence. "where's little Mr. Wales?" In Chapter 7 the mild elderly neighbour was the anonymous voice who defended Allen with a speech about the community's duty to its distinguished members, and afterwards he told Allen, "I said, if he ever gets up I'll do the same for him." He is the one man in the room who promised to speak for Allen, and he is not there.
"The man who had faith in Allen Purcell was not present. And the doors were being closed: he was not coming." The closing doors are a precise touch. In Chapter 7 arriving late was itself a lapse, and the meeting began when the door closed. Wales's absence is final once the doors shut.
Allen guesses at the reason, with two jokes.
The first joke is plausible enough to be frightening. In a world where everything depends on leases, the easiest way to remove a man from a meeting is through his housing. The second, delivered as "Mrs. Birmingham was rising to her feet and accepting the agenda," is pure absurdity: that Wales turns out to own "a chain of" brothels "stretching from Newer York to Orionus." The source prints the word as a w, a dash and an e, followed by a bracketed sic, the same kind of self-censorship the text applies to hell elsewhere. The picture of the little elderly defender of virtue as an interplanetary vice lord is Allen's way of saying that anything can be found against anyone. He will learn the real reason in the corridor afterwards, and it is closer to the first joke than the second.
"They probably discovered a loophole in his lease,"
Allen
"an exoskeleton for herself"
"Janet still continued to face front, with a rigidity he had never before seen." The starched dress has become a starched woman.
An exoskeleton is the hard outer shell of an insect or a crab, a skeleton worn on the outside. The image is biological and slightly alien, and it fits a novel that keeps comparing the juveniles to insects (in Chapter 7 they were "earwig-like sleuths"). Janet has armoured herself. Nothing gets in, which protects her from the room; nothing gets out, which means she will not cry or protest. It is the opposite of her state in Chapter 7, when she huddled against Allen and he could feel her dread.
"He wondered if she were saving herself for one grand slam. Perhaps it would appear when the ladies read their decision." The phrase recalls the narration in Chapter 7, which said that Janet's years without an official error "only convinced her that doom was saving itself up for one grand spree." Then doom was saving itself for Janet; now Allen wonders whether Janet is saving herself for an outburst. Grand slam is a sporting term, a complete victory in bridge or a home run with the bases full. Allen half expects his wife to explode at the verdict. She will not.
"She seemed to have created an exoskeleton for herself, a containing envelope through which nothing entered and nothing escaped."
The narrator
"Seven tapes in all"
"It's dusty in here," Allen says, "as the room dwindled into silence." It is a deliberately ordinary remark, said aloud in a room that is falling quiet for his trial. "A few persons glanced at him, then looked away. Since he was coasting downhill it was a poor idea to associate themselves with him." Coasting downhill is an image with a history in the book. In Chapter 1, recovering the night of the jape, Allen remembered "the wet grass sparkling and slithering under him as he coasted dizzily downhill" in the Park. Then the phrase was literal and exhilarating; now it means social decline, and the neighbours know better than to be seen with a falling man.
The juveniles are the evidence. In Chapter 7 the wardens "unlocked the metal hulls and dug out the report tapes," and the narration explained that the juveniles "did not accuse; they only reported what they heard and saw." Surrendering makes them sound like soldiers giving up their weapons. Allen's arithmetic is a bitter joke. Six tapes for him, one for the rest of the housing unit, a week's worth of moral lapses by every other tenant against a single afternoon of his. It also echoes the six men who guarded the convoy of reports in Chapter 18. Whatever the true count, the proportion is right: the meeting is about him.
"We will first undertake the case of Mr. A. P.," Mrs. Birmingham announced. "Fine," Allen says, "relieved." He wants it over with, as he did in Chapter 7, where he heard his initials "With relief." "Again heads turned, then swiveled back. A murmur drifted up and joined the haze of cigarette smoke." The murmur and the smoke merge, and the room's voice and its air become the same grey substance.
"At the end of the room the juveniles were surrendering their tapes. Seven tapes in all. Six, he conjectured, were for him. And one for everybody else."
The narrator
"this was a church"
"In a sardonic way he was amused. The rows of solemn, righteous faces... this was a church, and these were the members of the congregation in pious session."
The narrator
Allen's view of the room is the novel's sharpest statement of what the block meeting is. Chapter 7 said it directly: "Centuries of Christian, confessional culminated when the block" assembled to explore its members' souls. Now Allen sees the faces as a congregation and the meeting as a service. The wardens are the clergy, the stage is the place of confession, and the charge is a sin. Morec was founded as a moral reclamation, and its civil procedures have kept the forms of worship. Sardonic is the right word for his amusement: bitter, mocking, with no pleasure in it.
"With long strides he made his way to the defendant's stage, hands in his pockets." The posture is a statement. A man with his hands in his pockets is not pleading. "In the rear, at her table, Janet sat wooden-faced, as stiff and unyielding as a carved stick." The wooden image will return twice more, as a "stick of wood" later in the hearing. "He nodded to her, and the session began."
"engage in a vile enterprise with a young woman"
Mrs. Birmingham reads the charge "in her noisy, authoritative voice". It is the longest charge in the book and it has four counts.
The formula "did willingly and knowingly" is the same one used against Julie Ebberley in Chapter 7, and it will be used again a few minutes later against a nine-year-old boy. Every offence in this system is wilful by definition. The charge adds aggravations that a civil court would treat as irrelevant: "in his place of business" and "during the working hours of the day". The second and third counts follow at once: that Mr. A. P. "did willingly and knowingly destroy an official monitoring instrument to avoid detection," and that "to further avoid detection he did strike the face of a Morec citizen, damage private property, and in every possible fashion seek to conceal his actions."
Each count matches something in Chapter 17. The monitoring instrument is the Blake-Moffet juvenile that climbed six floors and came through the window, which Allen smashed with his foot and a typewriter. The Morec citizen whose face he struck is Fred Luddy, his own former assistant, now working for Blake-Moffet. The private property is presumably the lock, which Luddy's men reamed out and carried away, or the juvenile itself; the charge does not say. The phrase "in every possible fashion seek to conceal" gathers up the locked door, the ripped intercom and the order to Gretchen to run. Note that the charge calls the juvenile "official". Blake-Moffet is a private firm, Allen's commercial rival, and its juvenile was its own. Once its tape is in the block meeting's hands, though, the instrument has become official, and the rival's raid has become the state's evidence.
"A series of clicks bounced from the loudspeaker, as the voice warmed up." Chapter 7 explained the device: every person in the room has access to a microphone, and every question is transmitted through a central speaker that strips the voice of identity, so that the accused cannot tell whether his questioner is a friend or an enemy. "The interconnecting network was in operation: the speaker hummed, buzzed and then spoke."
These are the voice's first words, and they are the same demand it made in Chapter 7, when it asked Mrs. Birmingham to define Julie Ebberley's offence. It sounds like a scruple: the accused is entitled to know exactly what he is charged with. In practice, as the Ebberley case showed, be specific is the prompt for the details that the room wants to hear.
"Mr. A. P.," Mrs. Birmingham said, in her noisy, authoritative voice, "did willingly and knowingly on the afternoon of October 22, 2114, in his place of business and during the working hours of the day, engage in a vile enterprise with a young woman."
Mrs. Birmingham
"Definition. Be specific. Vile enterprise."
The voice
"petting and embracing and sexually fondling"
Mrs. Birmingham "adjusted her glasses and read on." The specification breaks in the source at a dash, and is quoted here in two pieces. Mr. A. P. "did welcome the young woman", who was not his lawful wife, "into his office at the Committee Telemedia Trust, and there he did lock himself in with her, did take precautions to guarantee that he not be discovered, and, when discovered, was in the act of petting and embracing and sexually fondling the young woman about the shoulder and face, and had so placed his body that it was in contact with that of hers."
The prose of the specification is a small masterpiece of official prurience. "sexually fondling the young woman about the shoulder and face" is an absurd phrase: what the tape recorded was a kiss with hands on shoulders, and the adverb sexually has been attached to a part of the body that does not support it. The last clause, that he "had so placed his body that it was in contact with that of hers," describes an embrace in the language of a surveyor. The specification also names the institution in full, "the Committee Telemedia Trust," which reminds the room that the man on the stage is a Committee appointee. The scandal is political as well as moral.
The phrase "did take precautions to guarantee that he not be discovered" is the hinge of the whole case, and it is the point these notes made about Chapter 17: every sensible step Allen took to protect his conversation has become evidence of guilt. In a society that treats privacy as concealment, a locked door is a confession.
"the week before last"
The voice asks a question it knows the answer to.
"It is," Mrs. Birmingham says, "without reluctance." The week before last is Wednesday 10 October, the meeting of Chapter 7, at which Allen was charged with coming home drunk and using a morally objectionable word, and was let off with a reprimand because of his "excellent prior record". The phrase "without reluctance" tells us that Mrs. Birmingham, who in Chapter 18 stopped Allen on his way to the bathroom to tell him about the convoy of reports she had hidden away, has no wish to soften anything now that she sits on the platform.
The voice then asks about "this last week", Wednesday 17 October, when Allen was in Other World and missed the meeting, and answers itself with a procedural ruling.
The ruling is fair in form and damaging in effect. By declaring that the absence and the earlier lapse are not being judged, the voice has made sure the room knows about both. It is the old courtroom trick of the question that is withdrawn after it has been heard. The voice is a network, and this speaker may be any member of the room, which makes the trick more sinister. Someone in the crowd is shaping the record.
"The mood of the gathering was now varied." The narration surveys the room: "many of the members were curious; some were bored and not particularly concerned. A few appeared unusually interested, and it was those to whom Allen paid attention." This is Allen the professional, reading an audience. He is looking for the people who have a stake in the result, and he finds them.
"Is this the same Mr. A. P. who was up before us the week before last?"
The voice
"Mr. A. P. is not being judged for his absence last week, and his lapse of the previous week has already been dealt with by this gathering."
The voice
"It was a trap, practiced as a matter of routine"
"Mr. A. P.," the voice said. "Was this the first time you had met the young woman?"
The voice
"No," Allen says. "I'd seen her before." The narration explains why.
The passage is a lesson in the block meeting's moral grammar, and it ties back to the Ebberley case. In Chapter 7 Julie Ebberley was let off with a reprimand because the room accepted that she was in love with one boy and intended to marry him. "Miss J. E. had been cleared by that point" means exactly that: a single, steady partner turns vice into romance, and romance can be forgiven. A woman met for the first time and embraced at once would be promiscuity, which cannot. Allen, who sat through that hearing and despised it, has learned its rules well enough to use them. He chooses to present Gretchen as a known friend because the system punishes strangers more than friends.
The answer has a cost he cannot yet see. Once he has said that he knew her before, the questioners can ask how long, how well and where, and he has no true answers to any of those questions. He has known Gretchen for less than two weeks, since his visits to the Mental Health Resort as Mr. Coates, and the novel has shown every one of their meetings.
"Often?" the voice asks, "infinitely toneless." Allen improvises.
The last clause is a bold lie, and a dangerous one. Janet has never met Gretchen. In Chapter 18 she could only ask whether it was the same girl, the one in Blake's evidence, and she knew her as nothing more than that. "Your wife knows her?" the voice asks, and then, in one of the chapter's strangest moments, "It answered its own question": "He just said so." The voice is many people at once, and two of its speakers have collided on the line. Or a single questioner is mocking him. Either way the lie has been placed on the record, and the planted questioner will come back to it.
Allen presses on and "took the plunge", using his job as a character reference.
He adds that "In my position as Director of Telemedia, I must be highly careful of my choice of friends." Then he starts a sentence with "Therefore" and is cut off.
"It was a trap, practiced as a matter of routine: if his reply was that yes, this was the first time, he was open for the charge of promiscuity. Sexual misconduct was better understood if it was confined to one partner; Miss J. E. had been cleared by that point, and he intended to use it, too."
The narrator
"Not in excess. We were good friends. We still are. I think a great deal of Miss G. M. I have the highest respect for her, and so does my wife."
Allen
"Let me make this clear. Miss G. M. is a responsible woman, and I have absolute faith in her moral integrity. Otherwise I wouldn't have admitted her to my office."
Allen
"Monday was my first day"
"How long have you been director?" The interruption is precise. It turns Allen's appeal to his office into a reminder of how short his tenure is. "He hesitated." Then: "Monday was my first day." The voice follows up: "And that was the day this young woman appeared?"
The single quotation marks around flowers are in the source and they recall Chapter 16, where the congratulatory gifts filling the Director's office were crypto-flora: imitations, or plants that did not quite count as flowers. "the protocol of congratulation" is another unwritten custom, like the vacant table. Allen places Gretchen inside it: "Miss G.M. was one of them. She dropped by to wish me luck."
The voice turns the phrase on him.
"Several persons smirked knowingly." Then the voice asks three questions in a row, and the third one changes the nature of the hearing.
"To his knowledge this information wasn't available on the official report. He felt uneasy." The locked door and the intercom were in Luddy's inventory at the end of Chapter 17. The telephone call was not. Nobody on Blake-Moffet's raiding party heard Allen phone Harry Priar. The call was made in the locked office before the juvenile arrived, and Allen's instruction to Priar was to come "in something, a sliver or a Getabout," and then to come upstairs to the office. The voice's version, a Getabout to "pick the two of you up", is a distortion of that call: it turns a request for an ally into a plan for a getaway with the woman.
"People streamed in and out all day. Bundles of 'flowers' arrived; you're familiar with the protocol of congratulation. I was besieged by well-wishers."
Allen
"A great deal of luck."
The voice
"You locked the door, did you? You ripped out the intercom? You phoned for a Getabout to pick the two of you up as soon as possible?"
The voice
CASE / SCENE
Case in point: who heard the call? Chapter 17 shows Allen pressing the intercom to tell his secretary he does not want to be disturbed, then phoning Priar, then ripping the intercom loose because "These things are natural taps." The order of actions matters. The call was made while the intercom was still connected. If the device was a tap, as Allen feared, it carried his call to somebody before he cut it off. A secretary in the outer office might also have overheard, or the line to the Agency might have been monitored. The text gives no answer. What it does make clear is that somebody in the room this morning has information that did not come from the juveniles' tapes or from Luddy's report, and that the somebody wants Allen to hear that it is known. These notes leave the source open, as the novel does at this point.
"He lied shamelessly, without conscience"
Allen answers the three questions in order. The door: "I locked the door because people had been barging in all day. I was nervous and irritable. Frankly, I was a little overwhelmed by the job, and I didn't care to see anybody." Every part of that is plausible and much of it is true; he did have a stream of visitors all morning. Then he reaches the intercom, breaks off, and the narration intervenes.
The lie about the intercom is the first outright invention.
He finishes, after a dash, "and at exactly such times." It is a lie with a wink in it. At exactly such times half admits that the accident is convenient, and dares the room to say so. The voice says only "Indeed," which is the driest word in the chapter.
"He lied shamelessly, without conscience. Under the system there was no choice."
The narrator
CRITICAL LENS
CRITICAL LENS: the narrator's excuse. The sentence "Under the system there was no choice" is the closest the novel comes to an editorial position on lying under Morec, and it should be read carefully. It is free indirect narration, close to Allen's own mind, and it states his justification as if it were fact. The claim is that a system which treats privacy as guilt and procedure as truth leaves the accused no honest option. There is something in it: a man who told this room that he ripped out the intercom because he thought it was a tap would be confessing to concealment. But the novel has also shown Allen telling the truth in hard places, to Mrs. Birmingham about Hokkaido in Chapter 7 and to Sue Frost in Chapter 15, and the lies he tells here do not save him. They are exactly what trap him. Readers can take the narrator's line as Dick's view, or as Allen's rationalisation, which the chapter then tests and finds wanting. The text supports both, and this edition does not choose.
"Being unfamiliar with my new office I inadvertently tripped over the wires. The wires broke. Anybody in business is aware that such things happen frequently"
Allen
"stayed about ten minutes"
Allen goes on to the visit itself. The source prints his opening with a double comma, a bracketed sic and a stray reversed quotation mark, which is noted in the source quirks below. The account follows.
This account is closer to Chapter 17 than any other version anyone has given. The juvenile did come in as they said goodbye; Gretchen did ask for the kiss; the kiss was what the monitor recorded. The phrase "as a token of congratulation" is
"stayed about ten minutes. When the monitoring device entered, I was saying goodbye to her. As she left she asked if she could kiss me, as a token of congratulation. Before I could say no, she had done so. That was what happened, and that was what the monitor saw."
Allen
the invention, since in Chapter 17 the kiss was personal and its context was her apology and her farewell. The "about ten minutes" is a shrinking. In Chapter 17 the whole conversation ran on after Allen worked out that Priar would be ten minutes, but it had been going for some time before that. It is an understatement more than a lie. The irony is that the version Janet constructed in Chapter 18, a long affair with a mistress, is far further from the truth than the version Allen tells the block meeting. The room will believe Janet's kind of story.
"You tried to destroy the monitor."
He adds that "I'm not clear now as to exactly what I thought it was," and then the final detail: "I heard Miss G.M. scream; I saw a blur of motion. Instinctively I kicked out, and my foot connected with it." In Chapter 17 Allen stamped on the juvenile and then brought a typewriter down on it, which is more than one instinctive kick. The phrase "To be honest" introduces one of the less honest parts of his testimony. It is also a little comic: the Director of Telemedia, whose block meetings have been run on juveniles all his life, claims he did not recognise one.
"This man you hit."
He continues: "A man ran up and started to grab at Miss G.M. I thought it was an attack aimed at Miss G.M., and I had no choice but to defend her." And he caps it with "As a gentleman it was incumbent on me." The appeal to gentlemanly duty is the one part of his story that the record supports. "Does the record bear that out?" the voice asks, and Mrs. Birmingham reads: "The individual who was struck was attempting physically to apprehend the young woman." Then she turns a page.
"Naturally," Allen says, and explains that since he feared an attack, he wanted her to escape to safety. The explanation is consistent and it is useless. A man defending a woman from an attacker might well tell her to run; a man hiding a mistress would tell her the same thing. The record cannot tell them apart, and the room chooses the second reading. Allen begins to ask the room to "Consider the situation", and the voice interrupts him.
"Miss G.M. screamed; she was taken unawares. It had entered by the window and neither of us noticed it. To be honest, we both imagined it was some sort of menace."
Allen
"At Miss G.M.'s scream the door was forced and a number of hysterical people burst in. There was bedlam for a time, which is reported."
Allen
"However, it is stated that Mr A.P. had instructed the woman to flee the scene."
Mrs. Birmingham
"four days and nights on an inter-S ship"
"This is the same Miss G.M.," the voice interrupted, "with whom you spent four days and nights on an inter-S ship? The same Miss G.M. who registered under a phony name in order to conceal her identity?"
The voice
The voice goes on without a pause: "Is this not the same Miss G.M. with whom you have committed adultery at a number of times, in a number of places? Is it not true that all this has been concealed from your wife and that in reality your wife has never met this woman and could not possibly have any opinion of her except the normal opinion of a wife toward her husband's mistress?"
This is Blake's dossier from Chapter 15. In the Agency office, Blake read Allen a timetable of his week: that he boarded an inter-S ship with a girl who registered as "Miss Grace Maldini" while he registered as "John Coates," and that they transferred at Centaurus and shook off monitoring. Allen had no memory of the voyage, because he was being shipped as freight in a cataleptic state, as Gretchen explained in Chapter 17. Nothing in the block meeting's official report mentions the ship; Mrs. Birmingham will confirm that in a moment. The questioner who asks this has Blake-Moffet's material.
The question is a chain of loaded questions, each assuming the last. It is also cleverly built against Allen's earlier lie. He said his wife holds Gretchen in high respect; the voice answers that his wife has never met her and could only have the opinion of a wife toward a mistress. The lie that Allen told to protect himself has become the hook on which the accusation hangs.
"General pandemonium." Two words, a paragraph by themselves. The room erupts.
Allen waits for the noise to die down and denies adultery, denies romance and begins a third denial before a dash cuts him off. "You fondled her; you kissed her; don't you call that romantic?" His answer is the one moment in the hearing when the room is with him.
"Appreciative laughter. And a scatter of applause." The joke works because it is true to everyone's experience. It is a jape of the spoken kind, and it momentarily breaks the meeting's spell: for a few seconds the neighbours are an audience laughing with a performer instead of a congregation judging a sinner. Dick shows how quickly that can happen, and how little it changes.
"Any man," Allen said, "who is capable of sexual activity during his first day at a new job is an unusual man."
Allen
"This, in all probability, was a wife"
The next question is lighter: "Is Miss G.M. pretty?" The narration identifies its source by its content: "This, in all probability, was a wife. The planted questioner, with extra information at his disposal, had temporarily retired." This is the sentence that names what Allen has suspected since the Getabout question. Among the voices on the network one belongs to a planted questioner, a man (the pronoun is his) with extra information, placed in the room to break Allen down. The narration does not say who planted him.
Allen's answer is careful: "I suppose," then "Now that I think of it. Yes, she was attractive. Some men would think so." It is the answer of a man trying not to sound interested and failing slightly, and it is honest.
"When did you first meet her?"
"Oh, about" he begins, and stops.
"He had almost fallen on that one. Two weeks was the wrong answer. No friendship of two weeks included a hug and kiss, in the Morec world."
The narrator
The rule is the same as the promiscuity trap. In Morec there is a social calendar for intimacy, and a kiss after two weeks is outside it. Allen pretends to search his memory "as if it were decades": "Let's see, when I first met her I was working for..." He lets his voice trail off until the questioner becomes impatient. It is a stage technique, the pause that makes the audience fill in a long past.
"How did you meet her?"
"I don't remember," he says, "and saw the floor open to receive him." Then "Some mutual friends, maybe." It is the weakest answer in the hearing. He cannot say that he met her as his therapist's sister at the Mental Health Resort, because that would expose the Resort visit; he cannot invent mutual friends with names. "Where does she work?" "I don't know." A man who claims a long friendship and a high respect does not know where his friend works.
"Why did you take a four-day trip with her?" Here Allen finds a way out. "Prove that I did." And then, "Is that in the report?" "Mrs. Birmingham searched, and shook her head no." The planted information is not on the record, and the procedure, for once, protects him. For a moment it looks as if he may hold the line.
"In the back of his mind Allen sensed that the enemy was closing in. There were many questions he couldn't answer, questions for which no evasion would work. This was one of them."
The narrator
"I didn't even know her then"
The voice tries a new angle. "Mr. A.P.," it says, "I'd like to ask you this." "He couldn't tell if this were the same accuser; warily, he assumed it was." The anonymity of the network is doing its work: he must treat every question as coming from the enemy.
"No," he said, "which was true." On the night of the jape he had never heard of Gretchen; he met her only when he went to the Resort as Mr. Coates. The voice pushes: "Are you positive? You had been alone at your office; you took a sliver to Hokkaido; you showed up several hours later clearly having had", and the questioner's sentence is cut off by Allen's answer. Hokkaido is not secret; in Chapter 7 Allen told the room he had been at Hokkaido and noted that "Mrs. Birmingham was aware of that". The questioner is laying out the night again, inviting Allen to fill in a gap with a woman.
The mistake is simple and complete. He has said that he did not know Gretchen two weeks ago. He has also said that they
"Two weeks ago, when you arrived home drunk. Had you been with this woman?"
The voice
"I didn't even know her then," he said. And realized his utter and final mistake. But now, alas, it was too late.
Allen and the narrator
were good friends, that his wife holds her in high respect, that he cannot remember how they met, and that a kiss on his first day was a token from a long acquaintance. All of that falls at once. The questioner spells it out: "You met her less than two weeks ago?" By Allen's own reckoning a friendship of two weeks cannot include a kiss, so the true answer convicts him under the rule he was trying to keep.
The word "alas" is unusual in this narrator, and its old-fashioned sorrow gives the moment an air of comic tragedy, like the fall of a hero in a farce.
"I had seen her before," he says. "His voice came out insect-frail, weak with awareness of defeat." The insect image returns: a few pages after Janet's exoskeleton, Allen's voice is as thin as an insect's. "But I didn't know her well."
The questioner asks the last question: "What happened between you and her during the last two weeks? Was that when the relationship grew?" "Allen reflected at length. No matter how he answered, the situation was hopeless. But it was bound to end this way." His answer, "half-idly," is a man letting go: "I'm not aware... that it ever grew, then or any other time."
"Come on out from under your rock"
The voice begins to restate the charge in its own terms, "To you a relationship with a young woman not your wife that involves petting and fondling and the juxtaposition of bodies", and Allen cuts it off.
"He got to his feet and faced the people below him." The stage puts him above the room, and for the first time he uses its height.
The rock is where things that cannot bear light live. Allen is attacking the anonymity of the network itself, the device by which any neighbour can accuse him without being seen. The voice ignores him and asks whether he is "in the habit of putting your hands on the bodies of young women with whom you happen, during the course of the day, to come in contact?" and begins a question about whether he uses his job "as a means by which", and Allen interrupts again.
"the living Jesus" is the strongest oath Allen uses in the book, and it is printed in full, unlike the censored words elsewhere. In a meeting descended from the confessional, he swears by the name the room's religion should hold sacred. His speech continues:
"To a diseased mind any relationship is foul,"
Allen
"I'd like to see who I'm talking to. Come on out from under your rock; let's see what you look like."
Allen
"I tell you what," Allen said. "If you'll identify yourself I'll knock the living Jesus out of you. I'm fed-up with this faceless accusation."
Allen
"Obscene, sadistic minds are using these meetings to pry out all the sordid details, tainting every harmless act by pawing over it, reading filth and guilt into every normal human relationship."
Allen
Then he announces "one general, theoretical statement", a phrase that comes from the language of a lecture or a policy paper, and makes it.
Allen's speech from the stage, that "More harm is done in one of these sessions than in all the copulation between man and woman since the creation of the world," is the first time in the novel he says aloud, in public and to the system's face, what Gretchen said to him in private two days earlier. In Chapter 17 Gretchen listed "The faceless accusers" among the evils of Morec and called the society "a giant torture chamber," and Allen answered with his two-halves theory and his preference for the half where work gets done. Now he uses her phrase almost exactly, "faceless accusation," and goes further than she did. The word "inquisition" places the block meeting where Chapter 7 placed it, at the end of a line of confessional culture; the phrase "since the creation of the world" borrows the scale of Genesis to weigh the meeting against all of human sexuality and find the meeting worse.
The speech changes nothing in the verdict. Allen knows that, and says it anyway. It is the moment where his private judgement of Morec becomes a public act, and the narration marks it with silence.
"The world would be a lot better place if there was no morbid inquisition like this. More harm is done in one of these sessions than in all the copulation between man and woman since the creation of the world."
Allen
"No sound was audible anywhere"
"He reseated himself. No sound was audible anywhere. The room was totally silent." Three sentences saying the same thing, each shorter than the last. Then Mrs. Birmingham speaks the procedural line: "Unless anybody wishes to make any further statements, the Council will prepare its decision."
The quotation marks around justice are in the source: the narration itself treats the word as a sham. The observation that the voice "had said not one word in his defense" is the measure against Chapter 7. Then Mr. Wales's voice came over the speaker to say that the community is morally responsible to its members as they are to it, and that "having a citizen like Mr. Purcell up here is a privilege"; this time nobody speaks for him. The contrast runs the other way too. In Chapter 7 it was Allen who protested, "What I did was wrong," against his own defender. Two weeks later he is the one attacking the meeting, and there is no defender to protest against. The network carries both accusation and defence, and this morning it carried only one.
"Janet still sat like a stick of wood. Possibly she agreed with the accusations. At the moment it didn't really matter to
"There was no response from the impersonal voice of "justice." Allen, hunched over, realized that it had said not one word in his defense."
The narrator
him." The third wooden image. Allen's indifference to what Janet thinks is a mark of exhaustion, and of something colder: after Chapter 18, where she accused him of exactly what the voice accused him of, he has no expectation of support from her.
"The council of ladies conferred for a period that seemed to him unnecessarily long. After all, the decision was foregone." He fidgets: "He plucked at a thread on his sleeve, coughed, twisted restlessly on the chair." The small physical actions are those of a schoolboy waiting outside the headmaster's office.
"This exceptionally unfortunate is"
"At last Mrs. Birmingham stood." The verdict is read in full, and it is a model of the regime's prose: regretful, formal and merciless.
"This exceptionally unfortunate is" is the inverted grammar again, and this time it is not a joke. At the start of the chapter Allen parodied the construction four times under his breath; now the warden uses it in earnest in the verdict that takes his home. The pattern has spread from Sue Frost and the voices of Chapter 7 to the block warden, and the parody has turned out to be an accurate forecast. The phrase "are required to find" is the formula of people who disclaim their own decision. Nobody in this room chose anything; they were required.
The verdict's next sentences are the cruellest in the chapter because they are the kindest in tone.
"born in the apartment he now holds" is the fact that Chapter 1 established: the Purcells have held the lease for two generations, and Chapter 18 described it as won by the pooled status of Allen's parents, his mother at the Sutton Agency and his father in Telemedia's art department. The Council mentions it as a reason for regret and then votes as if it were nothing. The word "Therefore" is the most chilling in the verdict. Its logic runs backwards: because he was born here and his family before him, therefore it is with deep reluctance that he is evicted. The reluctance is real in the grammar and absent in the result. "petitions Mr. A.P. to remove his person, family, and possessions" is phrased as a request. It is an order.
Then the coda.
"The block-neighbors of Mr. A.P.," she stated, "regret that they are required to find Mr. A.P. to be an undesirable tenant. This exceptionally unfortunate is, since Mr. A.P. has been an exemplary tenant in this housing unit for many years, and his family before him."
Mrs. Birmingham
"Mr. A.P., in point of fact, was born in the apartment he now holds. Therefore it is with deep reluctance that the Council, speaking for Mr. A.P.'s block-neighbors, declares his lease to be void as of the sixth day of November, 2114, and with even deeper reluctance petitions Mr. A.P. to remove his person, family, and possessions from these premises by that date."
Mrs. Birmingham
"It is also hoped that Mr. A.P. will understand that given the circumstances the Council and his block-neighbors had no choice in the matter, and that they wish him the best of personal luck."
Mrs. Birmingham
"had no choice in the matter" is the same claim the narration made on Allen's behalf earlier: "Under the system there was no choice." The accused lies because the system leaves him no choice; the judges evict because the system leaves them no choice. Dick sets the two excuses a few pages apart, and the reader may decide whether either is true. The "best of personal luck" echoes the voice's jeer, "A great deal of luck," and Allen's own story that Gretchen came to wish him luck. Luck has been passed around the chamber like a counterfeit coin.
And the last sentence:
"Allen laughed out loud." It is the chapter's one burst of involuntary laughter. The phrase "temporary difficulty" is the institution's euphemism for losing the family home of a lifetime, a status the Purcells spent decades earning and the job and good name that went with it. It is so grotesque in its kindness that Allen cannot help himself. Gretchen told him in Chapter 17 that his blob is a sense of humor, an "irreducible core, that grins and laughs". The laugh is that core showing at the worst possible moment.
"Mrs. Birmingham glanced at him quizzically, then folded up her statement and stepped back." Quizzically: she does not understand what is funny. That is the point of the laugh.
"In addition, the Council wishes to make clear its conviction that Mr. A.P. is a man of greatest fortitude and perseverance, and it is the Council's belief that Mr. A.P. will surmount this temporary difficulty."
Mrs. Birmingham
BY THE NUMBERS
Numbers and dates in the hearing. Date of the meeting: Wednesday 24 October 2114. Date of the alleged offence: "October 22, 2114" (a Monday), Allen's first day as Director. Counts in the charge: four (vile enterprise; destroying an official monitoring instrument; striking a Morec citizen; damaging private property), plus the general count of concealment. Juveniles' tapes: seven, of which Allen guesses six are for him. Previous appearance: "the week before last", Wednesday 10 October (Chapter 7), verdict a reprimand. Missed meeting: Wednesday 17 October. Allen's claimed visit length: "about ten minutes". The alleged voyage: "four days and nights" on an inter-S ship. The answer he nearly gave: two weeks. Date the lease becomes void: "the sixth day of November, 2114," a Tuesday, 13 days after the meeting, which Allen calls "two weeks". The next defendant: R.P., age nine, for an offence on the morning of "October 21, 2114," a Sunday. Allen's absence from Telemedia: two hours. Sue Frost's arrival: 11:30 a.m.
"We might as, well leave"
Allen walks "from the stage, down the steps and across the crowded room to the table at which his wife sat." The walk back is described in full because it is a walk through the faces of the people who have just evicted him. "Come on," he says to her. "We might as" and then, after a stray comma in the source, "well leave." The flatness is deliberate. Nothing remains to be done in this room.
"As the two of them pushed outside they heard Mrs. Birmingham droning into the next indictment."
The next case is placed here as a comment on the last. The formula "did willingly and knowingly" that opened the charge against the Director of Telemedia now opens the charge against a nine-year-old with a pencil. The same machinery, the same phrases, the same tapes: the block meeting cannot tell the difference between a scandal that will reshape the Committee's media and a child's graffiti in a bathroom. In Chapter 7 the next case after Allen's was Mrs. R.M., charged with taking the name of the Lord in vain in a public place. Here it is a child. Both are a reminder that Allen's case, which has filled the chapter, is one item on a routine agenda. The bathroom, too, is a familiar place: the community bathroom down the corridor appeared in Chapter 1 as the place where tenants queue each morning, and it is where Allen met Mrs. Birmingham in Chapter 18. The boy's offence was committed on Sunday 21 October, the day Allen returned from Other World, and the juveniles were presumably taping in that bathroom all the while.
"We will now undertake the case of R.P., a boy, age nine, who did willingly and knowingly on the morning of October 21, 2114, scrawl certain pornographic words on the wall of the community bathroom of the second floor of this housing unit."
Mrs. Birmingham
"that's that"
"Well," Allen says, "as the door was locked after them," and then: "that's that." The door is locked behind them: the meeting goes on without them, as a closed session. Janet only nods.
"How do you feel?" he asks. "It seems so unreal."
"It's real" is a curious line in a novel that has just spent two chapters at Pepper Lane questioning what is real. Allen is sure of this reality at least: the lease is gone. "two weeks" rounds the thirteen days up. "Temporary difficulty" is repeated with contempt, and "What a travesty" is his last word on the meeting. A travesty is a grotesque imitation of something serious, a parody, and it is the precise term for a trial that imitates justice. It is also a word from Allen's trade: a travesty is a kind of jape.
"It's real. We have two weeks to get out. Temporary difficulty." He shook his head. "What a travesty."
Allen
"my new lease came through"
"Loitering in the corridor was Mr. Wales, a folded newspaper under his arm." The absent defender is waiting outside. "As soon as he saw Allen and Janet he walked hesitantly forward." He says only the name, "Mr. Purcell."
"Hello, Mr. Wales. We missed you," Allen says. It is a gentle line with an edge he does not press.
"I wasn't in there." Mr. Wales seemed both apologetic and animated. "Mr. Purcell, my new lease came through. That's why I wasn't there; I'm not part of this unit any more."
Mr. Wales
"both apologetic and animated" is a perfect description of a man torn between guilt and good news. He is sorry not to have been there, and he is thrilled about the lease.
"Oh," Allen says. And the narration gives his inference.
Allen's first joke in the chamber was that "They probably discovered a loophole in his lease." The truth, as he reads it, is the reverse. Nobody pushed Wales out; somebody pulled him up. The removal of a defender was done with a reward instead of a threat. They is not defined. It could be Blake-Moffet, which has already shown in Chapter 15 that it will spend money and staff on Allen's ruin; it could be the planted questioner's employers, whoever they are; it could be the Committee. Allen does not say, and the text does not either.
The phrase "Presumably Mr. Wales was ignorant" is Allen's guess about another man's mind. The next chapter goes inside that mind, and what it finds there is the reader's business when the reader gets there. Here the important point is Allen's generosity. He assumes that Wales does not know he was bought, and he does not accuse him.
"What was it like in there?" Wales asks. "Somebody told me you were up again." Somebody told me: the gossip relay again. "I was," Allen admits. "Serious?" Wales asks, concerned.
The kindness is total and so is the lie. Allen has just lost the lease his family held since before he was born, and he tells Wales it was not too serious. "patted the little fellow on the arm" shows a tall man consoling a small one, and it reverses the expected roles: the man who has lost everything comforts the man who has gained everything.
Wales begins to say "I hope because I wasn't", and Allen cuts him off before he can finish: "Made no difference at all. But thanks anyhow." The line may even be true. One defending voice on the network could not have outweighed the planted questioner, the tapes and Allen's slip. But Allen says it to spare Wales, and it works.
"They shook hands." Then Wales offers the courtesy of a man who has moved up.
"Okay," Allen said, "we'll do that. When we're in the neighborhood." The joke is gentle and bleak. The Purcells are about to lose their lease, and the neighbourhood of Wales's superior lease is a place they will not be living in. The cour‐
"So they hadn't eased him out; they had bought up a superior lease and presented it to him. Presumably Mr. Wales was ignorant of the purpose of his good fortune; after all, he had his own problems."
The narrator
"Not too serious." Allen patted the little fellow on the arm. "It's all over now."
Allen
"Drop by and see us," Mr. Wales said. "My wife and I. We'd be glad to have you."
Mr. Wales
tesy and the irony sit side by side, and Wales does not hear the second.
CONTRAST
| Element | Chapter 7 (Wednesday 10 October) | Chapter 19 (Wednesday 24 October) |
|---|---|---|
| Janet's place | Standing: "I guess we don't get to sit" | At the vacant table kept for a wife in real crisis |
| Allen's advice to Janet | Keep quiet, don't take sides | "Don't try to save me, because I can't be saved" |
| The charge | Coming home drunk and one objectionable word | Vile enterprise, destroying a monitor, striking a citizen, damaging property, concealment |
| Mr. Wales | Present; speaks for Allen through the voice | Absent; his new lease came through |
| The voice | One defending speech; "There doesn't seem to be anything here" | A planted questioner with extra information; "not one word in his defense" |
| Allen's attitude | Insists "What I did was wrong" | Lies, then attacks the meeting as a "morbid inquisition" |
| Verdict | Reprimand; no disciplinary action | Undesirable tenant; lease void 6 November 2114 |
| Next case | Mrs. R.M., taking the name of the Lord in vain | R.P., aged nine, words on a bathroom wall |
"walked the long way to Telemedia"
"After returning Janet to the apartment, Allen walked the long way to Telemedia and his new office." The long way is a choice: he needs time, and he wants to put off arriving. The narration does not describe the walk. It moves straight to the reception.
"His staff was subdued; they greeted him and swiftly returned to their work. His two-hour absence testified to a block meeting; they all knew where he had been." The staff know the meaning of a two-hour Wednesday morning absence, because every one of them has sat through block meetings of their own. They cannot know the verdict yet, but they can guess, and they do not ask.
"In his office he examined a summary of the day's schedule. The tree packet was in process, and for that he was glad." The tree packet is Allen's own work: the packet about a man's attempt to grow an apple tree on a colony planet, which Sue Frost discussed with Allen in Chapter 2 and which Mavis, on Monday, called "The anti-colonization Morec." On Monday morning Allen told Janet "This morning I put through the tree packet," adding "Now they can't bury it in dust." On the morning of his eviction it is still moving through the building, and he is glad. Whatever happens to him, one piece of his work will reach the public.
"He called a few T-M officials in, discussed technical problems, then sat alone for awhile, smoking and meditating." The ordinary work of a Director continues, and the source spells "for awhile" as one word, noted below. The cigarette links back to the stale smoke of the chamber.
"Juggle get-together"
"At eleven-thirty Mrs. Sue Frost, in a long coat, looking handsome and efficient, bustled cheerfully in to pay a visit." The description is friendly and every word is a warning. Handsome and efficient are the adjectives of a woman doing a job; bustled cheerfully is the manner of somebody carrying bad news briskly. "I won't take up much of your time," she announces. "I realize how busy you are." "Just sitting here," he murmurs, and she goes on.
Juggle is the society's instructional pastime for social gatherings, named in Chapter 4. In Chapter 10, when Allen accepted the directorship, Frost proposed dinner "And for Juggle," saying "I'm quite a demon; I play every chance I get. And I'd like very much to meet your wife." In Chapter 15 she said she had phoned the Purcells' apartment to settle "our Juggle evening." The long-promised evening finally arrives on the morning of the eviction. And a "get-together at my place" with these guests sounds very like the hearing of Chapter 15, when Allen was summoned to Frost's apartment to face Mavis, Mrs. Hoyt and Blake. Frost lists who will come: "Mavis will be there, so will Mrs. Hoyt and perhaps", and Allen interrupts before she can name the next guest.
He has learned the pattern. An evening at Frost's flat with Mavis and Mrs. Hoyt is a tribunal dressed as a party. This time he does not wait for the party.
"Flushing," Frost says that she thought the evening "might be a good opportunity to discuss further some of the" and Allen cuts in again.
"We were wondering if you and your wife are free, tonight. I'm having a little Juggle get-together at my place, just a few people; we'd particularly like you two to be there."
Sue Frost
"You want my resignation? Is that it?"
Allen
"Yes. If it's convenient."
The last paragraph of the chapter runs the whole exchange together, without paragraph breaks between speakers, which this edition separates for clarity. "Let's have a direct answer," Allen says. "All right," she says. And then, "In a tight, controlled voice":
"When?" "As soon as possible." "You mean now?" And the line that gives the section its heading:
"If it's convenient" is the politeness of the verdict in the chamber, "the best of personal luck", carried over into the
"We'd like your written resignation."
Sue Frost
With almost perfect composure Sue Frost said, "Yes. If it's convenient."
Sue Frost
Committee's language. The morning has been a sequence of courteous dismissals. "What if it isn't?" Allen asks, and "For a moment she did not seem to understand." That moment of incomprehension is the hinge of the chapter. Frost has never met a man who refused.
"I mean," he says, "what if I refuse to resign?" "Then," she said, "facing him calmly," and finishing: "you'll be discharged." "As of when?" "Now, for the first time, she floundered." "Mrs. Hoyt will have to approve. As a matter of fact", she begins, and Allen finishes the sentence for her, taking her own phrase.
This is the turning point of Allen's arc in the novel, and it is said in the language of procedure. Allen knows the rules. Frost cannot dismiss the Director alone; Mrs. Hoyt must approve, and Allen claims that dismissal requires the "full Committee". His link between the lease and the job, "My lease is good until the sixth and it'll be at least that long before you can legally get me out," is a claim about how long the machinery will take, not a legal rule that the book has shown, and it may be partly bluff. What matters is that he has turned the morning's lesson around. The system hides behind procedure; very well, he will hide behind it too. The block meeting gave him until 6 November. He will use the time.
"You're serious?" she says, "in a strained voice." "I am," Allen says. And then his question:
Sue Frost's stammered "N-no" marks the first time anyone in the novel has refused the Committee to its face and kept his post, at least for now. The stammer shows a woman meeting something outside her experience. All her inverted sentences, her orders and her composure assume that people do what they are told when the Committee asks. Allen has found a gap between the Committee's wishes and its procedures, and he has stepped into it.
"He picked up some papers from his desk and began to study them; in the time he had left there was a great deal of work to be done." The chapter ends on work, as Allen's arguments with Gretchen in Chapter 17 ended on his preference for the side where work gets done. The phrase "in the time he had left" gives him a deadline, and the reader does not yet know what the work is. The last word goes to Allen's desk and not to Frost, who is presumably still standing there.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "it takes full Committee action. My lease is good until the sixth and it'll be at least that long before you can legally get me out of T-M. Meanwhile I'm still Director. If you want me you can call me here at my office."
Allen
"Has this ever happened before?" "N-no." "I didn't think so."
Allen and Sue Frost
CONTRAST
| Count or question | The record or the voice | Allen's answer at the meeting | What Chapter 17 showed |
|---|---|---|---|
| The locked door | "did take precautions to guarantee that he not be discovered" | "people had been barging in all day" | He locked it once Gretchen was in and he knew what her presence could cost him |
| The intercom | "You ripped out the intercom?" | "I inadvertently tripped over the wires" | He ripped it loose because "These things are natural taps" |
| The phone call | "You phoned for a Getabout to pick the two of you up" | No answer given | He phoned Priar to come in "a sliver or a Getabout" and come upstairs; not in the official report |
| Length of visit | Not stated | "stayed about ten minutes" | A long conversation; Priar was still ten minutes away well into it |
| The kiss | "petting and embracing and sexually fondling" | "she asked if she could kiss me, as a token of congratulation" | She asked for a kiss goodbye and they kissed; it was personal, not a congratulation |
| The monitor | "destroy an official monitoring instrument" | "Instinctively I kicked out" | He stamped on the juvenile and used the typewriter on it |
| The man struck | "strike the face of a Morec citizen" | "As a gentleman it was incumbent on me" | He knocked down Fred Luddy, who grabbed Gretchen |
| The flight | "instructed the woman to flee the scene" | "I wanted her to escape to safety" | He told her to run |
| When they met | "Two weeks ago... Had you been with this woman?" | "I didn't even know her then" | He met her at the Resort less than two weeks before |
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Chapter 19 in five movements.
The room (lines 327 to 353). The crowded chamber, gossip relay and smoke; Janet takes the vacant table; Allen's four inversions and his instruction not to save him; Mr. Wales missing, the doors closing, the two jokes about his lease; Janet's exoskeleton; "It's dusty in here"; seven tapes; Mr. A. P. called.
The charge and the first defence (lines 355 to 411). The church image; the four counts; "Definition. Be specific."; the specification; the week before last; the promiscuity trap; good friends and the wife's respect; Monday was my first day; the Getabout question; the lies about the intercom, the ten minutes, the kiss, the kick and the gentleman's duty; the order to flee.
The trap closes (lines 413 to 465). The ship, the phony name and the mistress; pandemonium; the joke about the first day; is she pretty; the near slip on two weeks; how did you meet her; where does she work; prove that I did; Hokkaido; "I didn't even know her then"; the relationship that never grew.
The speech and the verdict (lines 467 to 497). "Come on out from under your rock"; the offer to knock the living Jesus out of the accuser; the speech on morbid inquisition; silence; no word in his defence; the council confers; undesirable tenant, lease void 6 November, temporary difficulty; Allen laughs; R.P. aged nine.
After (lines 499 to 541). "that's that"; "What a travesty"; Mr. Wales in the corridor with his new lease; "When we're in the neighborhood"; the long walk; the subdued staff and the tree packet; Sue Frost at 11:30; the Juggle invitation; the request for resignation; Allen's refusal; "N-no"; back to work.
The chapter is the novel's second block meeting, and it is built as a mirror of the first. Chapter 7 set up every element: the room, the smoke, the stagger system of wardens, the juveniles' tapes, the impersonal voice, the specification on demand, the defending speech, the reprimand, the next case. Chapter 19 runs the same order of events and changes each element by a degree. The reader already knows how a block meeting works, so Dick can concentrate on what has changed: the vacant table, the missing defender, the planted questioner.
The middle movement is a duel, and Dick paces it like a cross-examination in a trial novel. Allen starts on firm ground, with a story that is close to the truth on the kiss and the scream. The questioner moves from the record to information outside it, from the Getabout to the ship, and each question is a probe for the point where Allen's prepared story runs out. That point is "How did you meet her?", a question he cannot answer without exposing the Resort. From then on he is improvising, and the slip comes from an answer that is true. It is a neat irony that the one true thing Allen says in the second half of the hearing, that he did not know Gretchen two weeks ago, is the thing that convicts him.
The speech is placed at the point where nothing is left to lose. Allen speaks against the system only when the system has finished with him. Dick lets the speech be eloquent and lets the room answer it with silence, and then lets the verdict be read in a tone of perfect courtesy, as if no speech had been made. The two scenes outside the chamber, Wales and Frost, are a coda in which the courtesy continues. Wales is courteous because he is happy; Frost is courteous because she is efficient. Allen answers the first with kindness and the second with refusal. The chapter ends with the refusal, which is the first act in the novel of open resistance through official means.
What the chapter shows about Allen
He is a better performer than witness. He reads the room, finds the interested faces, gets a laugh and a scatter of applause, and handles the record's questions with a mixture of truth and plausible invention. He fails at the points where a performer has no script: how he met her, where she works. His lies are reasonable, and they still fail, because the system knows things he does not know it knows.
He is generous to the weak and hard with the strong. He spares Janet, tells her not to save him and walks her home. He spares Mr. Wales, the man whose absence cost him his defender, and lies to him kindly about how serious the meeting was. With Sue Frost he is blunt and unyielding, and he uses her own phrase against her.
He has crossed a line. In Chapter 7 he was ashamed to be defended and insisted that he had done wrong. In Chapter 17 he defended Morec to Gretchen as the half of the system where work gets done. Now he has called the block meeting a morbid inquisition from its own stage and refused the Committee's request to resign. The laugh at "temporary difficulty" and the question "Has this ever happened before?" come from the same place: the irreducible core that Gretchen named, now operating in public.
And he has decided to use time. The last sentence gives him a deadline and a great deal of work. What the work is, the chapter does not say.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: the faceless accuser and the information not in the file. The block meeting fails every test that modern employment practice sets for a fair disciplinary hearing, and the specific failures are worth naming because they are still common in real organisations. The UK's statutory Acas Code of Practice on disciplinary and grievance procedures says that an employee should be notified of the case in writing with enough information about the alleged misconduct to prepare an answer, and that it will normally be appropriate to provide copies of any written evidence, which may include witness statements (paragraph 9). It also says the employee should get a reasonable opportunity to ask questions, present evidence and raise points about any information provided by witnesses (paragraph 12). Acas guidance on investigations adds that evidence from a witness who insists on anonymity should be treated with care: corroborate it, and check that the witness's motives are genuine. Under section 207A of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, an employment tribunal can raise an award by up to 25 percent where an employer unreasonably fails to follow the Code. Set against those rules, the planted questioner's material is the worst kind of evidence: unattributed, outside the written report, from a party with a motive, and used to ambush the accused in front of a hostile audience. In a bank, the parallel is the conduct case built partly on information that arrived through an unofficial channel, a tip, a vendor's report, a rival's complaint, and was never put to the employee in writing. Good investigation teams separate what is in the file from what is merely known, and refuse to rely on the second. The block meeting merges them deliberately, and Allen's slip shows why that is so effective: an accused person who does not know what the panel knows will eventually contradict himself.
Questions the chapter raises
- Who was the planted questioner, and who placed him in the room?
- How did anyone learn of Allen's phone call to Priar, which was not in the official report?
- Who bought Mr. Wales his superior lease, and does Wales know why he got it?
- Was Janet saving herself for a grand slam that never came, or does her silence mean she agreed with the accusations?
- Is Allen right that his dismissal needs full Committee action, and how long will it take?
- Where will the Purcells live after 6 November 2114?
- What is the great deal of work Allen means to do in the time he has left?
- What will Sue Frost tell Mrs. Hoyt and Mavis at the Juggle evening that Allen is not attending?
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 19. The chapter opens "On wednesday morning" with a lower-case day name (line 329). Allen's four inverted sentences (line 335) are deliberate parody, and Mrs. Birmingham's "This exceptionally unfortunate is" (line 481) is a further example of the inverted pattern noted since Chapter 3. Allen's second joke about Mr. Wales (line 343) prints a censored word as a w, a dash and an e, followed by a bracketed sic; this edition describes it without quoting. Initials are spaced inconsistently: "Mr. A. P." and "Miss G. M." in some lines, "Mr. A.P." and "Miss G.M." in others, and Mrs. Birmingham's reading has "Mr A.P." with no stop (line 411). Allen's account at line 399 opens with a double comma after Miss G.M., a bracketed sic and a reversed opening quotation mark. Line 485 prints "We might as, well leave" with a stray comma. Line 527 has "for awhile" as one word. The final paragraph (line 541) runs the whole dialogue between Allen and Frost together without breaks between speakers. The voice asks "How long have you been director?" with a lower-case title. Many speeches break off at a dash followed by a reversed opening quotation mark instead of a closing one (lines 383, 395, 413, 419, 433, 455, 467, 471, 517, 535 and 539); this edition stops quotations at the break. On content: the Getabout question rests on information that Allen says was not in the official report, and that distorts his call to Priar in Chapter 17; the voyage and the phony name come from Blake's dossier in Chapter 15 and are confirmed as absent from the report; Allen's account of the visit, the kiss and the kick departs from Chapter 17 in the ways set out in the table above; and Allen's "two weeks" to leave is thirteen days by the calendar.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 19. On Wednesday 24 October 2114 the block meeting is packed; Janet takes the table kept vacant for a wife in real crisis, and Allen japes the inverted grammar, "This serious is," and tells her "Don't try to save me, because I can't be saved." Mr. Wales, his defender in Chapter 7, is absent. Mrs. Birmingham reads four counts: vile enterprise with a young woman on "the afternoon of October 22, 2114," destroying an official monitoring instrument, striking a Morec citizen and damaging property. Allen says he had seen the woman before, calls her a good friend his wife respects, explains the locked door, says he "tripped over the wires", shrinks the visit to "about ten minutes," calls the kiss a token of congratulation and the blow a gentleman's duty. A planted questioner with extra information asks about a Getabout call not in the report and about "four days and nights on an inter-S ship" under a phony name. Allen gets a laugh with his first-day joke, nearly says two weeks, cannot say how they met or where she works, and then slips: "I didn't even know her then." He tells the accuser to "Come on out from under your rock," offers to knock the living Jesus out of him and calls the meeting a "morbid inquisition". The voice says "not one word in his defense." The Council finds Allen an undesirable tenant, declares the lease of the apartment he was born in void as of "the sixth day of November, 2114," and wishes him luck with "this temporary difficulty," and Allen laughs out loud. The next case is R.P., aged nine. In the corridor Mr. Wales says "my new lease came through"; Allen infers that somebody bought it for him and tells him the meeting was "Not too serious." At Telemedia the tree packet is in process. At 11:30 Sue Frost invites the Purcells to a Juggle evening with Mavis and Mrs. Hoyt and then asks for his written resignation, "Yes. If it's convenient." Allen refuses: dismissal "takes full Committee action", his lease runs to the sixth, and he is still Director. Asked whether this has happened before, Frost says "N-no." He has a great deal of work to do in the time he has left.
I'm a Judas
Alone in his new apartment in unit R6 of leasing zone 28, Mr. Wales touches the walls and the stove and believes that the Housing Authority has rewarded his virtue. He unwraps a vase he bought for his wife, then remembers how Mr. Purcell used to stand up for the victims of block meetings and imagines the pack at his throat. Crying that he has betrayed him and let them crucify him, he smashes the vase and calls himself a Judas. The room will not go away, and he picks up the fragments, glad of the cuts.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter gives no date and no hour. It follows the corridor scene of Chapter 19, where Mr. Wales told Allen "my new lease came through" and invited the Purcells to visit, so it falls on Wednesday 24 October 2114 or soon after; the text does not say whether it is the same day. The setting is a single room: Wales's "new apartment in unit R6 of leasing zone 28," with walls, a floor, a window, a closet, a stove and the possessions the former tenants left behind. Wales is alone throughout; his wife, for whom the vase is meant, is not present. The title is editorial, as in every chapter of these notes, and is taken from the one sentence he says to himself.
CAST
People in this chapter. Only one person appears: Mr. Wales, the "mild little elderly fellow with thinning gray hair" of Chapter 7, who defended Allen at the block meeting of 10 October and was absent from the meeting of 24 October. Spoken of or imagined: his wife, for whom he bought the vase; Mr. Purcell, Allen, as Wales remembers him and as he pictures him on the stage; the women of the block meeting, pictured as "female bitches"; the Housing Authority, which granted his petition; the former tenants, who left their Edufactured objects; and God, whose existence the lease seems to Wales to prove.
"All alone"
"All alone, Mr. Wales surveyed his new apartment in unit R6 of leasing zone 28." For the first time in the novel the narration leaves Allen and his circle and enters the mind of a minor figure from the housing unit. Earlier chapters moved to Doctor Malparto's point of view (Chapters 8 and 12), but Malparto is a principal player. Wales is a neighbour who has spoken one speech through a loudspeaker and a few lines in a corridor. The novel gives him a chapter of his own, short, closed and complete, like a parable.
The opening words, "All alone", set the terms. Wales has no audience in this chapter. Everything he does and says, including his loudest cries, is heard by nobody. That matters in a novel where every act in the housing unit is recorded by juveniles and judged by neighbours. The narration does not say whether a juvenile is present here, and the chapter's last paragraph insists that "nobody heard him." For a few minutes, in his new apartment, Mr. Wales is the only private man in the book.
"A life-long dream was fulfilled." The sentence is flat and complete, like the line on a certificate. A life-long dream, for a citizen of Morec, is a better lease. The novel has prepared this from the start. In Chapter 1 the Purcell lease was the family's one great possession, defended for decades; Janet's dread of losing it ran under every scene. In Chapter 18 Allen spoke of a Director's lease that he might wangle from Sue Frost. Leases are status, safety and identity in this society, and they are measured in zones.
"He had advanced not one but two zones toward omphalos." The word omphalos is Greek for navel, and the novel has used it twice before. In Chapter 1, as Allen looked out of his window, the narration called the Park and the spire "the hub of Morec, its omphalos." In Chapter 2 Sue Frost, discussing Allen's tree packet, agreed: "Omphalos... The navel of the universe." In Chapter 8 Malparto looked out over a city that "radiated in concentric zones," with the Morec spire "set dead-center." The leasing system maps morality onto geography. The closer a tenant lives to the spire, the higher his standing, and the zones are numbered outwards from the bottom: in Chapter 3 Allen noted that one district was in "the lowest possible range: between 1 and 14." Zone 28 is well inside the city, and Wales has jumped two rings toward the centre at once. Not one but two is his own excitement entering the narration.
This is free indirect narration. The words are the narrator's, and the belief is Wales's. He thinks his petition was investigated on its merits and that the Authority saw "the utter virtue of his life". The phrase utter virtue is gently comic: no institution in this novel sees anybody's virtue, and the word utter is the kind of large adjective a modest man uses about himself only in private. "his devotion to public good" fits the speech he made in Chapter 7, in which he argued that a community owes its distinguished members respect and support. He believes in Morec's stated values, and he believes the system rewards them.
The reader knows something Wales does not seem to know, or at least what Allen believes about it. In the corridor, Allen inferred: "they had bought up a superior lease and presented it to him." The chapter never confirms or denies that inference. It gives Wales's belief in full and leaves the gap between the two accounts open. The irony lies in that gap: the virtue Wales thinks was recognised is the very virtue, loyalty to Allen, that somebody may have paid to remove from the meeting.
"The Housing Authority had investigated his petition, seen the utter virtue of his life, his devotion to public good."
The narrator, in Mr. Wales's terms
"marvelling at his gain"
"Moving about the room, Mr. Wales touched walls, the floor, gazed out the window, inspected the closet. He ran his hands over the stove, marvelling at his gain."
The narrator
The list of actions is the inventory of a man who cannot quite believe what he owns. He touches the walls and the floor as if to check that they are solid. He looks out of the window at a view that is two zones closer to the spire. He opens the closet. He runs his hands over the stove. The stove is a telling detail. In Chapter 1 the Purcells' apartment changed shape on a timer: at seven in the morning Allen "lost a bedroom. But he gained a kitchen," the rooms controlled by a tape sealed in the wall, and the corridor shares a community bathroom. A stove that simply stays where it is, in a room that is his, is a mark of rank. The verb "marvelling" (with the British double l, as the source spells it) belongs to wonder at a miracle, and the next paragraph will bring God in directly.
The word "gain" is plain and commercial, and it sits a little uneasily next to marvelling. A gain is what one gets in a transaction. The chapter will soon ask what Wales paid for it.
Edufacture is the society's instructional pastime for individuals, paired with Juggle for social gatherings. In Chapter 4 Janet was assembling an electric clock from an Edufacture kit when Allen came home, and the narration explained the kits as a way "To keep idle hands occupied." The former tenants of R6 have left behind exactly such objects, a clock among them, built from kits by their own hands. The word "even" is Wales's delight: the apartment comes with extras. It is also a strange detail. Somebody lived here before, made these things in their evenings and left them behind. The novel says nothing about who they were or why they left. In a book where the Purcells have just been told to leave their apartment in thirteen days, taking their "person, family, and possessions," the reader may wonder whether the former tenants of R6 left by choice. The text does not say, and these notes do not guess.
The shaving wand is one of the small future gadgets Dick scatters through the book without explanation, like the slivers and Getabouts. Its owner did not take it with him.
"The former tenants had even left their Edufactured objects: clock, shaving wand, small appliances."
The narrator
"Surely there was a God"
"To Mr. Wales it seemed unbelievable that his trivial person had been recognized. Petitions lay in ten-foot heaps on the desks at the Housing Authority."
The narrator
"his trivial person" is Wales's own view of himself, rendered in the narrator's words. He is the man Allen called "little Mr. Wales" in the chamber, and the "little fellow" whose arm he patted in the corridor, and he sees himself the same way. The "ten-foot heaps" of petitions are a comic exaggeration that tells the truth about Morec's bureaucracy. Thousands of citizens are asking for better leases; the desks are buried; the odds against any single petition are enormous. That is why Wales finds his success unbelievable. It is also why the reader may find Allen's explanation more believable than his. Petitions in ten-foot heaps do not get answered on merit in the same week that the petitioner was due to defend a disgraced neighbour.
Then two sentences of faith.
The repeated "Surely" is the word of a man trying to convince himself as much as stating a belief. The second sentence echoes the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed
"Surely there was a God. Surely this proved that the gentle and the meek, the unassuming won out in the end."
The narrator, in Mr. Wales's terms
are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5, King James Version). Wales has inherited a small piece of the earth, two zones nearer the centre, and he takes it as a sign. The irony is double. In the Gospel the meek inherit in the kingdom to come, not through a housing authority. And in this case the inheritance may have been bought by people who are anything but meek, as the price of Wales's silence.
The novel's religious language has been building. Chapter 7 traced the block meeting back to the confessional; Chapter 19 called the chamber "a church" and its members a "congregation in pious session"; Allen threatened from the stage to knock "the living Jesus" out of his anonymous questioner. Morec was founded as a moral reclamation, and its citizens still think in the terms of the faith it replaced or absorbed. Mr. Wales is a believer of that kind, sincere and simple, and the chapter will test his faith against his conscience in a few paragraphs.
"green and blue and speckled with light"
"Seating himself, Mr. Wales opened a package and brought forth a vase. He had acquired it as a gift for his wife, a celebration present."
The narrator
"brought forth" is a slightly elevated, almost biblical phrase for unwrapping a parcel, and it carries on the religious register of the paragraph before. The vase is a "celebration present". Wales's first thought, after the walls and the stove and God, is to give his wife something beautiful. It is a small, decent impulse, and the chapter does not mock it.
The description is one of the few passages of pure colour in the novel. Morec's world is mostly grey and functional: the stale smoke of the chamber, the clogged lanes, the apartments that change rooms on a tape. The vase is "green and blue and speckled with light," the colours of grass and sky, the colours of the Park on the night of the jape, when Allen coasted downhill over "the wet grass sparkling and slithering under him." It is a thing made purely to be looked at. The three actions with it, turning, blowing, holding tightly, are those of a man handling something precious and fragile. He "held it tightly": the grip anticipates the throw.
The vase also connects to a different stock of objects in the book. In Chapter 9, in the ruins at Hokkaido, Allen sat on "a carton of glassware" among the remnants of the old world: "Vases and cups and tumblers and cut crystal." There the vases were debris of a destroyed civilisation, objects of priceless worth lying in the ash. Here a vase is a new purchase, a token of a new lease. Glassware in this novel is the thing that survives or breaks, and this one is about to break.
"The vase was green and blue and speckled with light. Mr. Wales turned it around, blew on the smooth glazed surface, held it tightly in his hands."
The narrator
"stuck up for victims"
"Then he thought about Mr. Purcell." The turn comes in a sentence of five words. Wales has been thinking about walls, God and his wife. Now his mind goes to the man he did not defend.
"He remembered all the times Mr. Purcell had stuck up for victims in the weekly block meetings. All the kind words he had put in. The encouragement he had given the tormented in their trial."
The narrator
The memory fits what the novel has shown, and it fills in what the novel has not. In Chapter 7, during the case of Julie Ebberley, Allen spoke through the wall speaker against the leering questions: "Let's hear what this 'vile enterprise' was," he said, "This may be a furor about nothing." Afterwards Wales told him, "I saw you speak up for that girl. You always look out for the people up there." Chapter 20 confirms that this was a habit, not a single act. Wales has sat through years of meetings that the reader never saw, and he remembers "all the times" Allen stood up for victims. Chapter 7 shows the cost of the habit, too: before his own case Allen told Janet to keep her mouth shut, because "If nobody leaps to defend me it'll die down." He defended others, and asked nobody to defend him. Wales did anyway, and told him why: "I said, if he ever gets up I'll do the same for him." In Chapter 16, sorting the gifts on his first day at Telemedia, Allen guessed that some of the unmarked bundles came from "perhaps little Mr. Wales who had stuck up for him during the block meeting." That is the bond Wales broke. He made a promise, and when the second meeting came he was not there.
The words of the memory are worth noticing. "stuck up for" is a homely, playground phrase. "victims" is a word the official language of Morec never uses for the accused; to the block meeting they are defendants, tenants, Mr. A. P. Wales calls them victims, which means that in private he sees the meetings as Allen does. And "the tormented in their trial" is the language of martyrdom. Without knowing it, Wales shares Allen's verdict on the system. He simply never said so, except once, through the anonymous voice.
"The dogs tearing at him"
"Mr. Wales thought how Allen Purcell must have looked coming up before the last block meeting. The dogs tearing at him. The female bitches guzzling at his throat."
The narrator, in Mr. Wales's terms
Wales was not there. He is imagining the scene, and the narration says so: "must have looked." He imagines it in the image the novel has already given twice. In Chapter 7, when the questioning of Julie Ebberley began, the narration said "then the dogs were loose." In Chapter 19 Allen warned Janet, "When they start burying their teeth in me," asking her not to spring to his defence. Now Wales, who heard neither line, pictures the same thing: a pack of dogs tearing at a man. The repetition across three minds, the narrator's, Allen's and Wales's, suggests that the image is not a private metaphor but the way everyone in this society secretly sees the block meeting.
"The female bitches guzzling at his throat" is the most violent sentence in the chapter, and its phrasing is strange. Female bitches is redundant, since a bitch is a female dog, and the redundancy is the sound of a mild man's anger reaching for words he does not normally use. The women are the wardens on the platform, the "council of ladies" of Chapter 19, and perhaps the wives who carried the gossip and asked whether Miss G.M. was pretty. Guzzling is the word for greedy drinking. The image is of feeding at a wound.
The dog image has a deep religious root that fits the chapter's next sentence. Psalm 22, the psalm Christian tradition reads as a prophecy of the crucifixion, contains the verse For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet (Psalm 22:16, King James Version). The phrase the assembly of the wicked describes the block meeting well enough. Whether Dick had the verse in mind the text does not show, but the movement from dogs to crucifixion in two sentences follows the psalm's own order.
"I let them crucify him!"
Suddenly Mr. Wales shouted: "I betrayed him! I let them crucify him!"
Mr. Wales
The shout bursts out of the quiet room. Two sentences, each with an exclamation mark, each with Wales as the subject. "I betrayed him!" names his own act. "I let them crucify him!" names the act of others, and his failure to stop it. The second sentence turns Allen into a Christ figure and the block meeting into Golgotha, and it does so in the words of a pious man who means them literally as a comparison. Allen's own speech from the stage ended with "the creation of the world"; Wales's shout reaches for the crucifixion. Between them the two men have set the block meeting inside the whole span of the Bible.
The word betrayed is precise, and it is harsher than the facts. Wales did not inform on Allen, accuse him or testify against him. He was absent, because his new lease came through. Yet he calls his absence betrayal. The chapter does not say whether he suspects that the lease was the price of his absence. His guilt seems to come from the promise in Chapter 7: he said he would do the same for Allen if Allen were ever up, and when Allen was up he was looking at stoves.
"Anguished, he rocked back and forth." The rocking is the motion of grief in many traditions, the movement of mourners and of people in prayer. "Then he sprang to his feet and hurled the vase against the wall."
The sentence repeats the colours of the vase almost word for word, "green and blue and speckled", and turns speckled with light into speckled light. The beautiful object has become a spray of beautiful fragments. The verb "danced" is unexpected. Destruction here is as lovely as the thing destroyed, and the light that was on the vase is now loose in the room. The moment is the chapter's small jape: a celebration present smashed in celebration of nothing, a gift to a wife thrown at the wall of the apartment it was meant to celebrate. Wales has done to his own gain what Allen did to the statue: an act of defacement that makes a private judgement visible, even if, here, nobody sees it.
"The vase burst, and bits of green and blue and speckled light danced around him."
The narrator
"I'm a Judas"
"I'm a Judas," Mr. Wales said to himself.
Mr. Wales
"I'm a Judas" is Wales's verdict on himself, and its force comes from the story it invokes: Judas was paid, Judas was sorry, and Judas tried to give the money back. In the Gospel of Matthew, Judas agrees to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver (Matthew 26:15). When he sees that Jesus is condemned, he repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders (Matthew 27:3, King James Version), throws the money down in the temple and goes out and hangs himself. The priests will not put blood money in the treasury, and so they buy with it the potter's field, to bury strangers in (Matthew 27:7). The price of the betrayal becomes a piece of land.
Wales's sentence is spoken "to himself," quietly, in contrast with the shout before it. The quietness makes it more serious. It is a confession without a confessor, in a society that has turned confession into a public procedure.
"He covered his eyes with his fingers so he would not have to look at the apartment. He hated the apartment. Now he had what he had always wanted, and he didn't want it." The three sentences reverse the opening paragraph completely. At the start Wales touched the walls and marvelled; now he cannot bear to look at them. "what he had always wanted" is the life-long dream of the first paragraph. The apartment has become his thirty pieces of silver, and like Judas he wants to give it back.
"You can have it back!"
"I've changed my mind!" he shouted. But nobody heard him. "You can have it back!" The room was silent.
Mr. Wales and the narrator
Wales shouts to an addressee who is not there. "You" has no name. It might be the Housing Authority, God, whoever arranged the lease, or the room itself. "But nobody heard him" is the sentence that makes the chapter. In a society where every hallway has a juvenile and every block meeting has a voice, the one sincere repentance in the novel goes unrecorded. The moral machinery of Morec collects drunkenness, kisses and words on a bathroom wall; it has no means of receiving a man's wish to undo a wrong.
The offer "You can have it back!" is Judas bringing again the silver. In the Gospel, the priests answer What is that to us? see thou to that (Matthew 27:4). In Wales's apartment there is not even that answer. "The room was silent."
"Go away!" Mr. Wales cries. "He opened his eyes. The room was still there. It did not respond; it did not leave."
The sentences are short and stubborn, like the room. Wales has closed his eyes and ordered the apartment to vanish, and it has not. The scene echoes, in a much humbler key, Allen's experience at Pepper Lane in Chapter 14, where he tried to will a room into another state and the room behaved in ways of its own. These notes have not explained Pepper Lane and will not do so here; the point is the shared gesture. In this book, people keep trying to make rooms obey their wishes, and rooms keep being solid. Wales's room is the most solid of all. It is a lease, recorded at the Housing Authority, and wishing will not undo it.
"It did not respond; it did not leave" also personifies the room as an indifferent official. It is the Housing Authority in miniature: it does not answer petitions, and it does not change its decisions.
"He opened his eyes. The room was still there. It did not respond; it did not leave."
The narrator
"He was glad"
"Mr. Wales began gathering up the fragments of vase. The bits of glass cut his fingers. He was glad."
The narrator
The ending is three short sentences. The first is ordinary tidiness: a man picks up the pieces of a thing he broke. The second is the natural result. The third is the chapter's last judgement. "He was glad." The cuts are a penance. Wales has no block meeting that will hear his confession and no authority that will take back his reward, so he punishes himself with the only instrument to hand, the broken gift. The blood on his fingers is the nearest thing to justice the chapter can offer.
The ending also completes the Judas pattern in a merciful form. Judas, after giving back the silver, went out and hanged himself. Wales cuts his fingers on glass and is glad. The punishment is small and the sorrow is real. He will keep the apartment, since the room will not leave. What he has gained is the knowledge of what it cost.
CONTRAST
| Moment | Mr. Wales | What he says |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter 7, block meeting of 10 October | Anonymous defender over the speaker; then identified by Allen at a table | "having a citizen like Mr. Purcell up here is a privilege" |
| Chapter 7, afterwards | Explains his speech and promises loyalty | "I said, if he ever gets up I'll do the same for him." |
| Chapter 19, block meeting of 24 October | Absent; doors close without him | Nothing; Allen asks "where's little Mr. Wales?" |
| Chapter 19, corridor | "both apologetic and animated" | "my new lease came through"; "Drop by and see us" |
| Chapter 20, new apartment | Alone; marvels, then breaks down | "I betrayed him!"; "I'm a Judas"; "You can have it back!" |
CRITICAL LENS
CRITICAL LENS: two accounts of one lease. Chapter 19 gave Allen's inference, that somebody "had bought up a superior lease and presented it to him," and his guess that Wales was "ignorant of the purpose of his good fortune." Chapter 20 gives Wales's own belief, that the Housing Authority "had investigated his petition" and seen his virtue. The two accounts do not contradict each other in the text, since Allen thought Wales would not know, and nothing in Chapter 20 shows that he does. What Wales feels is guilt for his absence, framed through a promise he made. A reader can take him as an innocent who has been used and who, without knowing how, senses that he was used; or as a man who half knows and will not let himself know. The chapter supports both readings. It does not confirm who arranged the lease, and this edition does not name anyone. A second point: Wales's memory of Allen standing up for victims "all the times" extends what Chapter 7 showed, a single question on behalf of Julie Ebberley and Wales's remark that Allen "always" looked out for the people up there. The many earlier meetings are reported, never shown, so the reader takes their number on Wales's word.
BY THE NUMBERS
Numbers in Chapter 20. New apartment: unit R6 of leasing zone 28. Advance: "not one but two zones toward omphalos." Petitions at the Housing Authority: in "ten-foot heaps." Edufactured objects left behind: three named kinds, a clock, a shaving wand and small appliances. Colours of the vase: two, green and blue, "speckled with light." Words Wales says aloud: six short sentences, none heard by anyone. The chapter itself runs to about four hundred words in the source, the shortest chapter in the novel.
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Chapter 20 in three movements.
Gain (lines 5 to 11). The new apartment in unit R6 of zone 28; two zones toward omphalos; the Housing Authority's recognition of his virtue; touching the walls and the stove; the Edufactured objects; ten-foot heaps of petitions; "Surely there was a God"; the meek; the vase for his wife.
Memory (lines 13 to 17). Mr. Purcell sticking up for victims; the imagined meeting; the dogs and the bitches at his throat; "I betrayed him! I let them crucify him!"
Penance (lines 19 to 21). Rocking; the vase hurled and bursting into speckled light; "I'm a Judas"; eyes covered; the hated apartment; "You can have it back!"; nobody hears; the room stays; gathering the fragments, cut fingers, gladness.
The chapter is built as a parable in three short movements, and its structure is a reversal. The first movement climbs: walls, stove, gifts, God, the meek, a vase. The second turns on a single sentence, "Then he thought about Mr. Purcell," and the third undoes the first item by item: the vase is smashed, the faith in God becomes a cry to an empty room, the apartment that was marvelled at becomes the apartment that is hated. Even the light that speckled the vase is scattered.
The placing is deliberate. Chapter 19 ended with Allen's refusal to resign and a great deal of work ahead; Chapter 21 will show what that work is. Between them Dick puts a quiet chapter about a man who did not resist. Wales is Allen's opposite in every respect: small, pious, believing, without power, given a reward instead of a punishment. Yet Wales arrives at the same judgement on the block meeting that Allen spoke from the stage. The dogs, the crucifixion, the tormented in their trial: in private the meekest man in the housing unit sees the system exactly as the man it ruined does.
The chapter is also the novel's sharpest picture of how Morec works on decent people. Nobody threatened Wales. Nobody asked him to lie. Somebody, if Allen is right, simply arranged that the thing he wanted most in the world arrived at the right moment, and his own decency did the rest. He stayed away because he was busy with his new life, and he is left holding the pieces of a vase.
What the chapter shows about Allen
Allen does not appear in this chapter, and that is how it shows him: through the memory of a neighbour. The Allen that Wales remembers is a man who "stuck up for victims," put in kind words and encouraged the tormented. The reader has mostly seen the cynical, japing, worried Allen, with one glimpse in Chapter 7 of the man who spoke up for Julie Ebberley; Wales has seen the good tenant who spoke for others at meeting after meeting. The two pictures need not conflict. Allen's speech from the stage in Chapter 19 may be the public version of what he had been saying more mildly, case by case, for years.
The chapter also confirms Allen's reading of the corridor scene in one respect. Allen judged that Wales had "his own problems" and did not blame him. Wales blames himself far more than Allen does. The kindness Allen showed in the corridor, telling him it was "Not too serious" and that it "Made no difference at all," did not reach him. Wales knows that it was serious, because he can imagine it.
And it shows what Allen is up against. Allen has learned to deal with enemies who attack him. The removal of Wales shows enemies who work by giving, not taking: a lease for one man, a vote for another, a well-timed reward that empties a seat. Allen's refusal at the end of Chapter 19 was an answer to an attack. Chapter 20 shows the kind of pressure that cannot be refused, because it never asks for anything.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: removing a witness with a reward. The method used on Mr. Wales, if Allen's inference is right, is one that modern regulators treat as misconduct in its own right, whether or not anyone is shown to have been silenced. Under Rule 21F-17, adopted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and effective from August 2011, no person may take any action to impede an individual from communicating directly with the SEC about a possible securities violation. The first enforcement action under the rule came on 1 April 2015, against KBR Inc., whose internal investigators had asked witnesses to sign a confidentiality statement warning them that discussing the matter without approval of the legal department could lead to discipline. The SEC found the language itself impeded potential whistleblowers; KBR agreed to change the statement and paid a civil penalty of $130,000, without admitting or denying the findings. Later actions extended the same reasoning to severance agreements in which departing staff gave up the right to a whistleblower award as a condition of their payout. The parallel to Wales is the inducement that makes a witness unavailable without any threat. For a bank, the practical lesson is in design: settlement agreements, retention bonuses, transfers and promotions given to people who are also witnesses in a conduct matter can look like inducements even when they are innocent. Good governance separates the two processes, records why the benefit was granted, and makes sure the person still knows that they are free to speak.
Questions the chapter raises
- Who arranged Mr. Wales's new lease, and does he know or suspect why he received it?
- Will Wales tell anyone what he feels, or will his repentance stay in the empty room?
- What will he say to his wife, who was meant to receive the vase?
- How many of Allen's neighbours remember him as Wales does, and will any of them speak for him now that Wales has not?
- Who were the former tenants of R6, and why did they leave their possessions behind?
- Will the Purcells ever take up the invitation to drop by?
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 20. The chapter is undated. In the source file the heading appears twice, as a plain Chapter 20 and again with a decorative symbol (lines 1 and 3), a formatting artefact of the text. "marvelling" (line 7) uses the double-l spelling. "The female bitches" (line 15) is redundant, and reads as deliberate, the strain of a mild man's anger. "Edufactured" is capitalised as a trade term, consistent with earlier chapters. The chapter contains no dashes, and every quotation in it is given here complete.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 20. Mr. Wales, alone in his "new apartment in unit R6 of leasing zone 28," has advanced "not one but two zones toward omphalos" and believes the Housing Authority saw "the utter virtue of his life." He touches the walls and the stove, finds the former tenants' Edufactured clock, shaving wand and appliances, and with petitions in "ten-foot heaps" concludes "Surely there was a God," and that the meek win in the end. He unwraps a vase, "green and blue and speckled with light," bought for his wife. Then he remembers that Mr. Purcell "stuck up for victims" at the block meetings, imagines the dogs and "female bitches" at his throat, and shouts "I betrayed him! I let them crucify him!" He smashes the vase, says "I'm a Judas," hates the apartment and cries "You can have it back!" But nobody hears him, and the room "did not respond; it did not leave," so he gathers the fragments, the glass cuts his fingers, and "He was glad." The chapter does not confirm who arranged the lease; Allen's inference in Chapter 19 and Wales's belief here stand side by side.
A Jape on Major Streiter
On Thursday morning Allen tells his thirty-three department heads that he has refused to resign and gives them until noon to decide whether to work for a man out of favour; by noon nearly all of them have gone home. With a deaf head of music named Gleeby, a basement researcher named Phyllis Frame and a dozen volunteers from his old Agency under Harry Priar, he rebuilds a staff in an afternoon and orders a production schedule cut from months to four days. He names his project to Gleeby in one sentence: a jape on Major Streiter. At half past midnight he and Janet watch the first television plug, and downstairs he buys a newspaper that carries the plant he and his idea men have made up out of whole cloth.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter opens "The next morning" after Sue Frost's demand for a resignation, so on Thursday 25 October 2114, at "eight o'clock" in Allen's office in the Telemedia building. The day runs by the clock: the staff told to decide "until noon"; Nan sent to canvass at noon; Gleeby "An hour later"; Phyllis Frame promising a profile "By six"; Gleeby's list "At two o'clock"; Agency people arriving "Toward four in the afternoon"; a make-shift staff "By the end of the day." The last movement, the first plug, is set "twelve-thirty at night" in the Purcells' "one-room apartment," and the newspaper is bought "Downstairs on the public rack." The text does not say which night this is. The newspaper is dated "Oct 29," a Monday, and Allen tells Janet the big programme comes "By Monday," which leaves the night of the plug uncertain; the puzzle is set out below. The title is editorial, taken from Allen's own words.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, still "the sole legal Director" of Telemedia until dismissal papers are served. His thirty-three executive department heads, among them the head of the layout department and "a trim woman with glasses"; almost all go home by noon. Nan, "A rather drab young woman" with thick glasses, who replaces the departed Vivian as secretary. Gleeby, "head of music," tall, gangling, deaf, a lip-reader and a pipe smoker, who becomes Allen's chief of staff. Phyllis Frame, Telemedia's researcher for thirty years, "a heavy, sturdy-looking, iron-haired lady, formidable and taciturn." Harry Priar, head of the Agency's art department and Allen's pro-tem assistant there, who comes over with Agency staff. Janet Purcell, who watches the plug. Named but absent: Tom Gates and Sugermann of Hokkaido, the hoped-for "original idea men"; Major Streiter; William Pease, father of Ida Pease Hoyt; Myron Mavis, whose slogan Allen quotes; and the Committee, which may assemble to fire him.
"promptly at eight o'clock"
"The next morning Allen arrived promptly at eight o'clock at his office in the Telemedia building."
The narrator
The chapter opens on punctuality. "promptly at eight o'clock" is the habit of a man who means to go on working as if nothing had happened, and it is also a signal to his staff. A Director who has been asked to resign and who turns up on the stroke of eight is making a statement before he says a word. The office is the one he moved into on Monday, the room that Blake-Moffet invaded three days earlier, the room where, on Wednesday morning, Sue Frost asked for his written resignation and was told no.
"As the staff appeared for work, he called them into his office until all thirty-three of them were present." The number is exact. Telemedia, the society's single official channel for every medium, is run by thirty-three executive department heads, and Allen gathers them all into one room. "The hundreds of assignment workers continued at their desks throughout the building as Allen addressed their executive department heads." The sentence sets out the shape of the institution: a small executive layer, a large body of workers who carry out what the heads decide. The workers keep working. What happens in the room will decide what they work on.
The scene answers the one that closed Chapter 19. There, alone in his office, Allen faced Sue Frost and asked her "what if I refuse to resign?" and she answered that if he refused, "you'll be discharged." Now he faces the people who will have to live with that refusal.
"I refused to resign"
"Yesterday my resignation was requested. It's involved with the fracas that took place here Monday afternoon. I refused to resign, so I'm still Director, at least until the Committee can assemble and fire me."
Allen
The speech is short, plain and accurate. It names the request, its occasion and his answer. "the fracas that took place here Monday afternoon" is a modest word for what happened in Chapter 17. Gretchen Malparto was in his office when Fred Luddy and the Blake-Moffet technicians reamed out the lock and burst in with juveniles and flash cameras; Allen smashed one juvenile with a typewriter, knocked Luddy down and sent Gretchen running down the corridor, while "a horde of T-M employees" came screeching after. His own staff ended the afternoon "gathering in gloomy bunches." Every person in this room saw it or heard about it within the hour. Allen does not retell it. Fracas turns an invasion and a scandal into a scuffle, and it is the right word for a briefing.
"at least until the Committee can assemble and fire me" is the key legal fact of the chapter. Sue Frost cannot dismiss him on her own. The Committee must meet, and until it does Allen remains in post. The whole chapter happens inside that gap.
"The staff took the news with aplomb." Aplomb is a dry joke. These are professional administrators, and they receive the news that their Director is about to be fired the way they would receive a revised budget. The questions that follow are practical.
"A week or so," Allen answers. "Maybe a little longer." The estimate matters, because it sets the timescale of everything that follows. Allen does not know how long he has. He guesses a week. Later in the chapter he will plan a production schedule on the assumption that he may have much less.
One member, head of the layout department, asked: "How long will you remain in your estimation?"
The head of layout
"And you intend to continue work during that time?" The question is polite and slightly incredulous. A Director who is about to be fired is expected to clear his desk. Allen's answer is the answer of a man with a plan he is not ready to share.
"you're entitled to know the situation" is a striking sentence in this society. Morec runs on what people are not told. The block meeting conceals its questioners; the Committee conceals its reasons; the domino method feeds people what their group believes. Allen begins his last week as Director by telling his subordinates the truth about their position. It is the same impulse as his speech from the stage the day before, when he said that faceless accusation was obscene. Having condemned concealment, he practises disclosure.
"I'll work to the best of my ability," Allen said. "There's plenty to do and I want to get into it. But you're entitled to know the situation."
Allen
"the sole legal Director of this Trust"
Another member of the staff, a trim woman with glasses, asked: "You're the legal Director, is that correct? Until they fire you..."
A department head
The "trim woman with glasses" asks the lawyer's question. Her interest is in authority: if they follow his orders, are those orders lawful? Allen's reply is the most formal sentence he speaks in the chapter.
The phrasing is deliberate and almost legal. "dismissal papers" must be "served": the Committee's decision is not enough without the paperwork. "the sole legal Director" rules out any rival authority, for example a deputy appointed by Sue Frost. "this Trust" is a new word for Telemedia. It suggests that the official media monopoly is constituted as a trust, a legal body holding a public charge, with a Director whose powers are defined. And "the powers implicit and explicit in that capacity" claims everything that comes with the office, written and unwritten. Allen is reading his own charter aloud. Whatever he does in the coming days will be done with full legal authority, and the staff are being told so.
Then a frank admission. "Naturally my policies here will be highly suspect. Probably the next Director will cancel them all, straight across the board." He expects his work to be undone. That raises the question the whole chapter will slowly answer. If everything he orders will be cancelled when he leaves, then what he orders has to have its effect before he leaves. Time, not permanence, is what he is playing for.
"The staff murmured among themselves."
"Until dismissal papers are served, I'm the sole legal Director of this Trust; I'm your boss, with the powers implicit and explicit in that capacity."
Allen
"You should meditate over that," Allen said, "as I give you your assignments. How much trouble you'll get into for obeying and working with me I can't say. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe the next Director will fire the lot of you. Probably not."
Allen
"meditate over that" is a slightly formal, slightly ironic verb. Allen asks them to think about the risk while they take his orders. He is honest about what he does not know. "Your guess is as good as mine." He names the worst outcome, that the next Director might fire the lot of them, and then judges it unlikely. "It's unlikely," a staff member agrees. Administrators survive changes of Director; that is what administrators do.
"do you care to work for a man who's out of favor?"
Allen then makes an offer that is generous and, in its way, calculated.
The deadline is "noon", four hours away. The option is to "go home and wait out the period of my directorship." The phrase wait out treats his directorship as weather, a spell to be sheltered from. Allen adds a reassurance: "I'm positive that won't get you into trouble with the Committee; they may even suggest it." He is right. A Committee that wants Allen gone would be pleased to see his staff melt away.
The obvious question follows. "What are your policies going to be? Maybe we should hear them before we decide." Allen refuses.
The refusal is principled and practical at once. Principled, because he wants loyalty to a person and a situation, not agreement with a programme; anyone who stays must be ready to "follow my orders no matter what they are." Practical, because a programme announced to thirty-three people is a programme the Committee will hear about by lunchtime. Later in the day Gleeby will warn that "the Committee has a few of its creatures lurking around," and Allen already acts as if that were true. He reduces the decision to one clean question: "do you care to work for a man who's out of favor?"
Out of favor is the language of a court, of kings and courtiers, and it fits a society ruled by a Committee answerable to the founder's descendant. Allen puts the question honestly. Anyone who stays knows what they are staying for.
There is an echo, too, of the block meeting on Wednesday. There Allen asked Janet not to defend him: "Don't try to save me, because I can't be saved." Here he asks his staff not to stay for his sake, and gives them every reason to leave. He does not want people sacrificing themselves for him. He wants people who choose to.
"The staff left his office, and he was alone. Outside in the corridor their mumbles reached him dully through the closed door." The closed door with mumbles behind it recalls the block meeting's sealed chamber and the faceless voice. Allen is now on the other side: the people deciding his fate are talking where he cannot hear them.
"I'm going to give you a few hours to talk it over among yourselves. Let's say until noon. Those of you who would prefer not to take the risk can go home and wait out the period of my directorship."
Allen
"I don't think you should," Allen said. "You should make your decision on other grounds. If you stay, you'll have to follow my orders no matter what they are. This is the important thing for you to decide: do you care to work for a man who's out of favor?"
Allen
CASE / SCENE
The case of the vanishing staff. Allen's offer is unusual for a manager under threat. Most would ask for loyalty, appeal to friendship or hint at reward. Allen does the opposite: he tells his heads that staying may hurt them, refuses to tell them what they will be asked to do, and gives them a safe exit that the Committee itself might approve. The result is that nearly all of them take it. A useful contrast comes from November 2023, when the board of OpenAI dismissed its chief executive and, within three days, roughly 745 of about 770 employees signed a letter threatening to leave unless the board resigned and reinstated him; he was back within a week. That staff knew exactly what their leader stood for and acted together. Allen's staff are offered no programme and act one by one, and they go home. The lesson in both cases is that a workforce will move together only behind something it can see.
"An unearthly loneliness"
"By noon virtually all the department heads had discreetly gone home. He was without an executive staff."
The narrator
The adverb "discreetly" is exact. Nobody makes a scene, nobody resigns in protest, nobody comes in to say goodbye. They simply leave, as Allen told them they could. "virtually all" leaves room for one or two, and the chapter will find them. "He was without an executive staff" is a bare statement of fact, the kind of sentence that appears in a report. Allen's directorship, which began on Monday with a corridor full of flowers and gifts, has emptied out in four hours.
The image is of a machine running without its operators. "The various operations went on": Telemedia's processes continue by momentum. "the ranks were thinning" brings in military language; the workers below are drifting away too. "An unearthly loneliness" is one of the few emotional phrases in the chapter's opening. Unearthly is a strong word for an office building at lunchtime, and it suggests something uncanny about an institution that keeps working with nobody to direct it. The "din of machines" echoing in empty offices is a picture of the society as Allen sees it: a vast apparatus for producing morality, running on, with nobody in it who wants to talk.
"The various operations went on, but the ranks were thinning. An unearthly loneliness hung around the building. The din of machines echoed in the empty offices and halls, and nobody seemed to feel like talking."
The narrator
"Vivian left."
To the intercom he said: "Vivian, come in here a moment."
Allen
Allen calls the secretary he has had since Monday. In Chapter 17 Vivian announced his visitors with "What sounded like a giggle," and during the invasion it was "probably Vivian" shrilling in his ear about calling the police. Somebody else answers.
A rather drab young woman entered with pencil and pad. "Yes, Mr. Purcell. My name is Nan, Mr. Purcell. Vivian left."
Nan
The exchange is a small comedy. "My name is Nan" corrects the Director politely, and "Vivian left" says the rest in two words. The giggling secretary who lived through the invasion has gone; the drab one has stayed. Nan is "A rather drab young woman", and the narration lets her be plain. When Allen asks "You're staying?" she says only "Yes sir," and "She put on her thick glasses and made ready to take dictation." Putting on the glasses is the whole of her character in this chapter: she is ready to work. She will say "Yes sir" three more times, and each time the brevity is a kind of courage.
Allen's orders to her are those of a manager taking stock.
"canvass" is the word for polling voters, and in a sense Nan is counting the votes: who stayed. "depletions" is the language of stock control. Then a precise instruction: "Specifically I'll need to know which departments can function and which can't. Then send me the highest ranking staff member left. If no staff members are left, send in whoever you think is most familiar with general operations." Allen leaves the choice to her judgement if the hierarchy has gone. In an organisation that has lost its heads, he trusts a secretary to find the person who actually knows how things work. The trust is repaid.
"I want you to canvass the departments. It's noon, so presumably those remaining will be with us during the next week. Find out where the depletions are."
Allen
"I'm head of music."
"Mr. Purcell," he said. "I'm Gleeby. They said you wanted me. I'm head of music." He tilted his right ear with his thumb, conveying the interesting bit of news that he was deaf.
Gleeby and the narrator
"An hour later a tall, gangling middle-aged party entered shyly." The word party for a person is an old-fashioned, faintly comic usage, and shyly sets the tone: Gleeby is no executive in a sharp suit. His introduction is three short sentences, and the third is the joke. "I'm head of music." Then the gesture: he tilts his right ear with his thumb. The narrator calls this "the interesting bit of news that he was deaf." A deaf head of music is a paradox Dick enjoys without comment. It may also be a quiet point about Morec's music, which is made to a programme and needs no ear.
Allen is "pleased by the man, and pleased, also, that one of the staff remained." He asks whether Gleeby heard the eight o'clock speech. "Yes. I heard." "Evidently the man lip-read." Gleeby heard by watching, which is a gift in a building full of mumbles behind closed doors.
"Well? Can we function?" Gleeby "pondered and lit his pipe." His answer is measured: "Well, that's hard to say. Some departments are virtually closed down. We can redistribute personnel. Try to even up the losses. Fill in some of the widest gaps." He thinks like an administrator, in terms of moving people around. The pipe marks him as a deliberate man.
Allen asked: "Are you really prepared to carry out my orders?" "Yes. I am." Gleeby sucked on his pipe. "You may be held Morecly responsible."
Allen and Gleeby
The warning "You may be held Morecly responsible" contains one of the novel's rare coinages. Morec is the name of the moral code and the society; Morecly turns it into an adverb, as morally is made from moral. To be held Morecly responsible is to be held responsible under the code, by the block meeting, the Committee, the whole apparatus. Allen means it seriously: anyone who works for him may face their own block meeting.
Gleeby's answer is the best line in the chapter.
It is a joke, and a good one, and it is also a real reason. Gleeby stays because the alternative is a week at home. "You don't know my wife" is the oldest joke a married man can make, and in the context of this chapter it has an extra edge. Chapter 20 showed Mr. Wales alone with a vase meant for his wife, wishing he had stood by Allen. Gleeby has the same choice and makes the opposite decision, for the least heroic reason imaginable. The novel does not mock him for it. Courage in Morec often looks like this: a man who would rather work than sit still.
The word "psychotic" is also a small joke on the society's mental health apparatus. In a world where Mental Health runs a Resort and Doctor Malparto runs therapy sessions, the head of music casually says that idleness would drive him mad.
"I'd become psychotic loafing around my apartment a week. You don't know my wife."
Gleeby
"real research"
"Who here does the research?" Allen asks. Gleeby is puzzled: "The Agencies handle that." In the structure of the industry, the Agencies, Allen's own among them, research and write the packets, and Telemedia buys them and frames them for its media. Research is outsourced. Allen means something different.
"real research" recalls the title these notes gave Chapter 9, Real Books, where in the ruins of Hokkaido Allen handled genuine old books traded by Gates and Sugermann and read a world that Morec has replaced with packets. Now he wants that kind of authenticity inside Telemedia. "Checking for historical accuracy" implies that somebody at Telemedia is supposed to check the packets against the record. "point by point" is the language of audit.
"A gal" is Gleeby's casual word, and it is undercut at once by the description. "thirty years" makes Phyllis Frame older in
"I mean real research. Checking for historical accuracy. Isn't machinery set up to go over projections point by point?"
Allen
"A gal named Phyllis Frame does that. She's been around here thirty years. Has a big desk down in the basement, millions of files and records."
Gleeby
the institution than Allen's whole career. "a big desk down in the basement" puts her literally beneath the building, where the archives are kept. "millions of files and records" is a mass of real data under an organisation that produces fiction. Allen asks whether she left. "If not, send her up."
"You wanted me, Director?" she asks.
The description is a set of hard adjectives: heavy, sturdy-looking, iron-haired, formidable, taciturn. She is built like a filing cabinet and speaks as little as one. Allen offers her a cigarette; she declines. He asks whether she understands the situation.
"What situation?" It is the best answer in the scene. Phyllis Frame, in her basement with her millions of files, has not heard that the Director has been asked to resign, or that the department heads have gone home, or she has heard and does not care. Allen explains. "So bear that in mind." "I'll bear it in mind. What is it you want? I'm in a hurry to get back to my work."
Her impatience is a form of integrity. She is the only person in the chapter who is not interested in Allen's position at all. She is interested in her work.
This is the first concrete sign of Allen's plan, and he gives it to the one person in the building least likely to repeat it. The request has four parts. "a complete profile of Major Streiter": the founder of Moral Reclamation, whose statue Allen japed on 7 October. "Not derived from packets or projections": not from the official story that Telemedia and the Agencies have built over the decades. "the actual facts as are known about his life, habits, character": the man, not the monument. "unbiased material. No opinions. Material that is totally authentic." Allen asks three times, in three phrasings, for the truth.
In a society built on edited truth, asking for unedited truth about the founder is a radical act. The reader does not yet know what Allen means to do with it, and these notes will not guess beyond what the chapter shows. What the chapter shows is that his plan begins with a request for facts.
"Yes, Director." "How soon can you have the profile?"
"By six" is six hours from the request, a remarkable speed for a complete profile, and it says everything about her command of her files. Her question is the mark of a professional: she anticipates what the client will need. "the Major's immediate family" is a sensitive area. Ida Pease Hoyt, who heads the Committee, is "the linear descendant of Major Streiter," as Chapter 2 told the reader, and in Chapter 8 Malparto spoke of the Major's wife and her "predilection for psychoanalysts." The family of the founder is the ruling family. Phyllis Frame proposes to include it, and "Allen was impressed." "Yes.
"She was a heavy, sturdy-looking, iron-haired lady, formidable and taciturn."
The narrator
"I want," Allen said, "a complete profile of Major Streiter. Not derived from packets or projections, but the actual facts as are known about his life, habits, character, and so forth. I want unbiased material. No opinions. Material that is totally authentic."
Allen
"By six." She was starting from the office. "Should this project include material on the Major's immediate family?"
Phyllis Frame
Very good." "Thank you, Director." "The door closed and she was gone."
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: Phyllis Frame and BCBS 239. Allen's request, the actual facts, unbiased, no opinions, totally authentic, by six, is what bank supervisors have asked of risk data since the financial crisis. In January 2013 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published its Principles for effective risk data aggregation and risk reporting, known as BCBS 239: fourteen principles covering governance and data architecture, the accuracy, completeness, timeliness and adaptability of risk data, and the clarity and distribution of risk reports, with supervisory review on top. Global systemically important banks were expected to comply by January 2016. When the Committee assessed progress in 2016, only one of them was judged fully compliant. The gap was rarely a lack of data. Like Telemedia, the banks had millions of files and records; what they lacked was a trusted path from those records to the decision-maker that did not pass through opinion, rework and presentation. A Phyllis Frame, someone who has kept the records for decades, knows their lineage, and can answer a precise question with authentic material in six hours, is what BCBS 239 is trying to institutionalise. For an enterprise architect the lesson is that the authoritative record and the presentation layer must be kept apart, and the authoritative record must have an owner who is in a hurry to get back to her work.
"almost nobody capable of making decisions"
At two o'clock Gleeby re-appeared with the final list of workers remaining. "We could be worse off. But there's almost nobody capable of making decisions."
Gleeby
Gleeby's report at two o'clock is the inventory Allen asked Nan to begin. "We could be worse off" is the optimism of a practical man. "But there's almost nobody capable of making decisions" is the real damage. The workers have stayed; the deciders have gone. "He rattled the list." "Give these people something to do and they'll go into action. But what'll we give them?" The question is the hinge of the chapter. Telemedia now has hands and no head, and Allen has to supply the head.
"I have some ideas," Allen said. It is a modest sentence, and the reader who knows Allen knows what it means. He is the man who japed the statue, the man who told Sue Frost that an idea could come "Out of the individual human mind." He has been waiting for an empty machine.
"I'll say you brainwashed me"
"After Gleeby had left the office, Allen phoned his old Agency." Allen Purcell, Inc. is still his; on Monday he moved his desk from it to Telemedia "as a gesture of continuity." Now he draws on it for people.
"I have vacancies here," he said, "that need to be filled. I think I'll draw from the Agency. I'll put our people on the T-M payroll and try to get funds from the paymaster. If not, then I'll cover with Agency funds."
Allen
The arrangement is improvised and slightly irregular. Agency staff will be moved onto the Telemedia payroll if the paymaster agrees, and if not, Allen will pay them out of his own Agency's money. A Director under notice is staffing a public trust with his private firm's employees and offering to pay for them himself. It is lawful, since he is the sole legal Director with all the powers of the office, but it is the kind of move that would interest a Committee looking for grounds. Allen does not seem to care. "Anyhow, I want people over here, and I'm sending my want-list to you."
The name is misspelt once in the source as "Harry Friar," and two lines later it is correct again: "I'll work for you," Priar said. These notes keep the source spelling in the quotation and flag it below. Priar, head of the Agency's art department and Allen's pro-tem assistant, has been with him throughout: in Chapter 10 he brought the news that Luddy had defected to Blake-Moffet, and in Chapter 17 he arrived just after the invasion, saying that he guessed "I didn't get here in time." This time he is early.
Allen's answer to the depletion is the same timescale he gave the department heads: "Sure. But it's only for a week or so. Give our people the situation about me, see who's willing to come. Then fill as best you can. A dozen should do." He repeats his principle of disclosure: the Agency staff must be told the situation, and must choose. Then the personal question: "What about you personally?"
"I'll work for you," Priar said. "I'm in big disfavor," Allen warns.
The joke has a sharp point in this world. Brainwashing is the mid-century word for forced conversion, the fear that a mind could be emptied and refilled. In Morec, where Mental Health runs a Resort and Malparto runs sessions on "the projection of your will on another human," the joke is close to the bone. Priar is offering himself a defence in advance, the same defence any Morec citizen might use before a block meeting: it was not my will, it was his. Like Gleeby's wife, it is a joke that tells the truth. Everyone who works for Allen this week is preparing for the day when somebody asks why.
"That'll deplete us," Harry Friar pointed out.
Harry Priar, misspelt in the source
Priar said: "When they ask, I'll say you brainwashed me."
Harry Priar
"Which good is"
"Toward four in the afternoon the first trickle of Agency personnel began to show up. Gleeby interviewed each person and assigned him to a department. By the end of the day a make-shift working staff had been built up. Gleeby was optimistic."
The narrator
The sentences are brisk, matching the speed of the work. "the first trickle" is the counterpart of the morning's thinning ranks: what drained out is now trickling back in, but with different people. Gleeby interviews and assigns; within hours there is "a make-shift working staff." A head of music has become a personnel director, and he is good at it.
"These are policy-making people," he said to Allen. "And they're used to working with you. We can trust them, too. Which good is."
Gleeby
"Which good is" is the inverted grammar that runs through the novel as a Morec idiom. In Chapter 10 Priar said "This really tough is" when Luddy defected; on Wednesday morning Allen told Janet "This serious is," and the block council's verdict pronounced "This exceptionally unfortunate is." The construction puts the verb at the end, as if the speaker were translating from a language with different word order. Dick never explains it. It marks speech in moments of emphasis, and it is shared by Allen's friends and enemies alike. Gleeby uses it for approval.
His next question is about loyalty. "I suppose the Committee has a few of its creatures lurking around. Want us to set up some sort of loyalty review board?" The offer is chilling for how naturally it comes. Gleeby, a decent man who stayed out of boredom and loyalty, immediately proposes that Allen's staff should screen its members for the Committee's spies. It is the logic of the block meeting turned inward. Every group under threat reaches for its own inquisition.
Allen refuses. He has spent the previous morning on a stage condemning a system in which neighbours watch neighbours, and he will not build one in his own department. His reason is also practical: what matters is the output, and if the output is checked, spies can do little harm. The answer is consistent with his whole conduct in the chapter. He trusts people to choose, and he judges them by their work.
This sentence is the quiet coup of the chapter. Allen has gone through the whole list of Telemedia's work in progress and reorganised it. "some were now scratched off": cancelled. "some had been put ahead": given priority. "most had been rerouted into dead-ends": sidelined without being cancelled, sent down paths that lead nowhere. The language is that of traffic or plumbing, and the effect is to empty the production line without any visible act of destruction. "The assembly lines were open and functioning, ready to undertake fresh material." Telemedia is a factory, and Allen has cleared its belts.
The reader may notice that Allen's tree packet, which he was glad to see in process on Wednesday, is not mentioned. The chapter does not say what became of it.
"Not important," Allen said. "As long as we see the finished products."
Allen
"He had studied the statement of projections in process; some were now scratched off, some had been put ahead, and most had been rerouted into dead-ends."
The narrator
"a month to five months"
"What's that?" Gleeby asks, "as Allen brought out sheets of lined paper." The detail is homely. The Director of the society's media trust does his planning on lined paper, like a schoolboy. "My preliminary sketches. What's the normal span required from first stage to last?"
"Well," Gleeby said, "say a packet is approved on Monday. Usually we take anywhere from a month to five months, depending on the medium it's to be projected over."
Gleeby
The answer gives the reader a rare look at the machinery of Morec's propaganda. A packet is approved; then it takes "a month to five months" to reach the public, depending on the medium. Every medium has its own production time, and Telemedia projects the same message across all of them. "Jesus," Allen says. He has a week.
"For topical stuff" suggests news and current affairs, which cannot wait five months. "prune down" is a gardener's verb, fitting in a novel that began with grass on Allen's shoes and an apple tree packet. "Say, two weeks." Still too long. Allen asks Priar, who "stood listening," how that strikes him.
Priar is blunt. "I agree," Allen said. "Gleeby, to be on the safe side we'll have to prune to four days."
The phrase "to be on the safe side" is the joke. Nothing about a four-day schedule is safe; it is the most dangerous schedule possible. But it is safe in the one sense that matters to Allen: it should finish before the Committee can assemble and fire him. His estimate of "A week or so" has become a deadline, and he has halved it for margin.
Gleeby's precedent is revealing. Telemedia has moved this fast only once, for the death of "William Pease, Ida Pease Hoyt's father." Ida Pease Hoyt is the founder's linear descendant and the head of the Committee; her father's death was a state occasion, and the media trust put out "a huge projection, on all media, within twenty-four hours." The only time the machine ran at full speed, it ran for the ruling family. Allen is about to run it at nearly that speed for a project about
"It can be cut. For topical stuff we prune down to..." He computed. "Say, two weeks."
Gleeby
"By the time you're out of here," Priar said, "you won't have one item done."
Harry Priar
CONTRAST
| Schedule | Who names it | When it applies | Allen's reaction |
|---|---|---|---|
| A month to five months | Gleeby | Normal packets, by medium | "Jesus" |
| Two weeks | Gleeby | "topical stuff" | Asks Priar |
| Not one item done | Priar | Two weeks against a week or so of directorship | "I agree" |
| Four days | Allen | "to be on the safe side" | His order |
| Twenty-four hours | Gleeby | Once only: the death of William Pease | "Even woven baskets?" |
"That only happened once," Gleeby said, tugging at the lobe of his ear. "The day William Pease, Ida Pease Hoyt's father, died. We had a huge projection, on all media, within twenty-four hours."
Gleeby
the founder of that family. The precedent proves the thing can be done, and it suggests the size of the subject.
The gesture "tugging at the lobe of his ear" returns to Gleeby's deafness. It is his habit, as the pipe is.
The list of media is comic and telling. "woven baskets" sounds absurd as a medium of propaganda, and Allen's question shows that he knows it. Morec's message is woven into baskets, printed on handbills and stencilled onto signs, as well as broadcast on television and printed in newspapers. "The works" means every surface the society touches. A message projected on all media reaches every citizen through every object. That is the scale of the machine Allen now controls, and the scale of what he can do with it in four days.
"Even woven baskets?" "Baskets, handbills, stenciled signs. The works."
Allen and Gleeby
"original idea men"
"Anybody else going to be with us? Or is this the total crew?" Priar asks. Allen's answer brings in two names from the far edge of the novel.
"I won't be sure until tomorrow" and the glance at his watch suggest that Allen has sent a message, or plans a trip, and does not yet have an answer. "at the top, as original idea men" puts them above everyone else in his makeshift staff. In the domino society, an "original" idea is the rarest thing there is; that was Allen's criticism of the domino method in Chapter
"Who are they?" Gleeby asks. "Anybody we know?"
The names mean nothing to Gleeby and a great deal to the reader. Tom Gates and Sugermann live in an old war shelter in the contaminated ruins of Hokkaido, trading in relics of the old world. In Chapter 1 Allen had spent a Sunday evening drinking wine with Sugermann and listening to Gates play Chicago jazz before he japed the statue, and he told Janet that "Sugermann gives me ideas." In Chapter 4 he described them to Janet: "Gates and Sugermann would rather be dead than come back here." Allen is now asking two men who would rather die than live in Morec to come and run its media. Whether they will come is left open: "I won't be sure until tomorrow."
"Suppose I asked you what you're going to do?" Gleeby asks.
"I have a couple more people," Allen said. "I won't be sure until tomorrow." He looked at his watch. "They'd be at the top, as original idea men."
Allen
"One of them is named Gates," he said. "The other is a man named Sugermann."
Allen
"We're going to do a jape on Major Streiter."
Allen said: "I'd tell you. We're going to do a jape on Major Streiter."
Allen
The sentence is the first time Allen names his project, and he names it with the novel's own word: the jape that began on a statue in the dark is now to be done with the whole of Telemedia in daylight. "I'd tell you" answers Gleeby's hypothetical directly. That morning Allen refused to tell thirty-three department heads his policies; now he tells the head of music in one sentence. The difference is that Gleeby has chosen to stay, and the choice has earned him the truth.
The word jape has run through the book. The novel's title calls Allen the man who japed; in Chapter 4 he told Janet "I japed it," about the statue; in Chapter 17 he told Gretchen "I'd rather jape statues." A jape is a practical joke, a trick that makes a pompous thing ridiculous. In Chapter 1 the jape was done at night, alone, with a can of paint and a heat pack, on a single statue in the Park. Now it is to be done in public, with a staff, on all media, on the man himself.
The chapter does not say what the jape is. Gleeby does not ask, and the narration moves straight to the night of the first plug. The reader has to work it out from what follows.
"twelve-thirty at night"
"He was with his wife when the first plug was aired. At his direction a portable TV receiver was set up in their one-room apartment. The time was twelve-thirty at night; most of Newer York was asleep."
The narrator
The scene shifts without a date. "the first plug": a plug is a short promotional spot, the kind of thing Mavis wanted when he said "Let's go back to five-minute spots." "At his direction a portable TV receiver was set up": in Chapter 3 Sue Frost was surprised that Allen did not own a television set, and he explained that the people downstairs were domino for his block. Now the Director has a set carried into his own apartment. "their one-room apartment" is the apartment they have been told to leave within thirteen days. "twelve-thirty at night; most of Newer York was asleep" places the first plug at a dead hour, when few people will see it.
"Gleeby had collected enough video technicians to put the transmitter... back on the air." The source sets "normally closed down at that hour" between dashes; the point is that Telemedia's transmitter normally goes silent at night, and Gleeby has found the people to open it. The first plug is aired when the channel would otherwise be dark, which also means that nobody at the Committee is likely to be watching.
Janet's line is warm and simple. After the block meeting, after the eviction notice, after the news of the resignation demand, she says "I'm glad you're doing this." In Chapter 18 she said "we're washed up." Now she shares his excitement without knowing what it is for. "it means so much to you" is the support of a wife who has watched her husband lose everything and sees him alive again.
"I only hope we can pull it off," he said, thinking about it. Then she asks the question the whole book is asking.
"The transmitting antenna," he told Janet, "is at the T-M building."
Allen
"You're so excited," Janet said. "I'm glad you're doing this; it means so much to you."
Janet
"And afterward?" she said. "What happens then?" "We'll see," he said. The plug was unfolding.
Janet and Allen
"And afterward?" After the jape, after the directorship, after the lease: there is no plan. "We'll see" is the answer of a man living inside a four-day window. The narration cuts him off: "The plug was unfolding." The future is postponed by the present, which is on the screen.
"Consult your area log"
"A background showed the ruins of the war, the aftermath of battle. The tattered rags of a settlement appeared; slow, halting motion of survivors creeping half-starved, half-baked through the rubble."
The narrator
The images are the war that preceded Morec, the devastation from which Moral Reclamation claims to have rescued humanity. "the ruins of the war" recall Hokkaido, where Gates and Sugermann live among the wreckage. "half-starved, half-baked" is a grim pun: half-baked means foolish, and also, literally, partly burned by the bombs. The plug opens on the world before Streiter, at its worst.
The text of the plug is a perfect piece of official prose. "In the public interest" is the formula of public service broadcasting. "a problem of growing importance for our times" says nothing and suggests urgency. "Participants will analyze the question": the format is a discussion, apparently balanced. The question itself contains three claims smuggled in as assumptions: that Major Streiter had a "postwar policy of active assimilation," that there is a "current threat," and that reviving the policy is a reasonable thing to discuss. "Consult your area log for time and date" sends the viewer to the schedule, creating the expectation of a programme still to come.
What "active assimilation" was, the plug does not say, and the chapter does not explain. Janet will ask, and Allen will not tell her. These notes follow the novel and leave the phrase as it stands.
"The plug dissolved, carrying the ruins and desolation with it. Allen snapped off the TV set, and felt tremendous pride." The pride is the pride of a creator watching his first work go out. It is also, in a novel full of moral irony, a word with a history: pride comes before a fall.
A voice said: "In the public interest a Telemedia discussion program will shortly deal with a problem of growing importance for our times. Participants will analyze the question: Should Major Streiter's postwar policy of active assimilation be revived to meet the current threat? Consult your area log for time and date."
The plug
"There wasn't much."
"What'd you think of it?" he asks. Janet's answer is honest and deflating.
"Was that it?" She seemed disappointed. "There wasn't much."
Janet
It is a comic moment. Allen has rebuilt Telemedia in an afternoon, reopened a transmitter at midnight and brought a television set into his apartment, and his wife's verdict on the result is "There wasn't much." She is right, on the face of it. The plug is a few seconds of ruins and a voice announcing a discussion. What she cannot see is the method.
Allen explains the campaign. "every half hour on all channels" is repetition as a weapon. "Mavis' hit 'em, hit 'em" quotes the old Director's slogan from Chapter 3, when Mavis woke from his doze and said "Let's go back to five-minute spots. Hit 'em, hit 'em." Allen, who had reservations about Mavis's methods, is now using them. "Plus plants in the newspapers, mentions on all the news programs, and minor hints scattered over the other media": the plant is the planted story, the mentions are the news, and the minor hints are the baskets, handbills and stencilled signs. The campaign does not need any single item to be convincing. It needs every item to point the same way.
Janet's question is the question every viewer will ask, and it is the hook. She does not remember what active assimilation was, and assumes that she ought to. That assumption is what the campaign depends on: people who think they have forgotten something will go looking for it.
"By Monday" gives the deadline: four days from Thursday is Monday, so the schedule Allen ordered fits exactly. "The slam" is a newsroom or publicity word for the big hit, the climax of a campaign. "'Pageant of Time'" is a programme title the novel has not mentioned before. It sounds like a historical series, the kind of prestige show that would present the official past with costumes and solemn narration. "I don't want to spoil it for you" is a husband's tease. It also keeps Janet, like Gleeby and the department heads, from knowing more than she needs to.
"With variations, that plug will be repeated every half hour on all channels. Mavis' hit 'em, hit 'em. Plus plants in the newspapers, mentions on all the news programs, and minor hints scattered over the other media."
Allen
"I don't remember, what 'active assimilation' was. And what's this 'current threat'?"
Janet
"By Monday you'll have the whole story," Allen said. "The slam will come on 'Pageant of Time.' I don't want to spoil it for you."
Allen
"TALK OF REVIVING ASSIMILATION"
"Downstairs on the public rack, he bought a copy of tomorrow's newspaper, already distributed." The newspaper for the next day is already on the rack after midnight, which is the ordinary rhythm of a morning paper. "There, on page one, in the left-hand column, was the plant developed by Sugermann and Priar." So Sugermann has come. The "I won't be sure until tomorrow" of the afternoon has been answered, at some point the chapter skips over, and the man from Hokkaido has written for Morec's front page with the art director of Allen's Agency.
The headline is set as a line on its own: TALK OF REVIVING ASSIMILATION. It is a classic piece of headline craft. It reports talk, not a decision, so it cannot be denied. Reviving implies that the thing existed before. And assimilation, without its adjective, sounds official and slightly menacing.
The page-one placement recalls Chapter 5, where Allen and Janet read "STREITER STATUE DESECRATED" on page one, under the dateline "Newer York, Oct. 8 (T-M)." Then Allen's jape was the news. Now Allen is writing the news.
The dateline "Oct 29" dates the story to Monday 29 October 2114; "(T-M)" credits Telemedia as the source, as the wire credit did on the statue story. The first sentence is a model of the planted story. "It is reliably reported" is the passive voice that hides the reporter and the source at once. "a number of persons high in Committee circles who prefer to remain anonymous at this time" cites people who do not exist, and gives them a reason for not being named. The irony is heavy for anyone who has read Chapter 19. The day before, Allen stood on a stage and called the block meeting's anonymous voice "faceless accusation"; now he invents anonymous sources in the Committee and puts them on page one.
"the then-extensive threats to Moral Reclamation" gives the invented policy an invented history. Moral Reclamation, the revolution Major Streiter led in 1985 according to the statue story of Chapter 5, faced threats after the war, and the Major is said to have developed active assimilation to cope with them.
This sentence is the chapter's best joke. "the current menace" needs an example, and the plant supplies one: "the savage assault on the Park of the Spire momument [sic] to Major Streiter." The savage assault is Allen's own jape of 7 October, the paint and the bent leg. Allen is using his own act of vandalism as evidence of the threat that the invented policy is meant to answer. The jape has become a pretext for a second jape, on a far larger scale. The word "savage" applied to a statue whose leg was softened with a heat pack and reshaped so the Major appeared to hold his head in his hands is itself comic.
The source prints the misspelling "momument" with an editorial [sic], so the error belongs either to the newspaper inside the novel or to the transcription; the notes keep it as printed.
The text breaks off mid-sentence. In the source the quoted article runs across a line break and stops at "have failed to," and the narration resumes with Allen folding up the newspa‐
"Newer York Oct 29 (T-M),: It is reliably reported that a number of persons high in Committee circles who prefer to remain anonymous at this time, favor a revival of the postwar policy of active assimilation developed by Major Streiter to cope with the then-extensive threats to Moral Reclamation."
The plant
"Growing out of the current menace this revived interest in assimilation expresses the continued uneasiness of violence and lawlessness, as demonstrated by the savage assault on the Park of the Spire momument [sic] to Major Streiter."
The plant
"It is felt that the therapeutic method of Mental Health, and the efforts of the Mental Health Resort to cope with current instability and unrest, have failed to"
The plant, broken off in the source
per. The effect is of a reader's eye leaving the page, and it leaves the most interesting claim unfinished. The plant says that "the therapeutic method of Mental Health" and "the Mental Health Resort" have failed to cope with current instability and unrest. These are the institutions of Doctor Malparto, the therapist with the blackboard, and of the Health Resort, to which, as Gretchen explained in Chapter 17, Allen was shipped in a cataleptic state. The reader may notice that the plant aims at them. What it says next, the chapter does not let anyone read.
"out of whole cloth"
"Allen folded up the newspaper and went back upstairs to the apartment. Within a day or so the domino elements of the Morec society would be tipped."
The narrator
"the domino elements of the Morec society would be tipped" returns to the method Allen criticised in Chapter 3. There he told Sue Frost that "The domino method operates on the assumption that people believe what their group believes, no more and no less." A few people at the top of each block hear something from Telemedia; they pass it on; everyone below them follows. Allen thought that one unique individual, one man "who originated his own idea," would foul it up. He is that man now, and he is not fouling up the domino method. He is using it. The dominoes will fall in the direction he chooses.
"the topic of discussion for everybody" is the goal: within a day or so, everyone in Morec will be talking about a policy that does not exist and a threat that nobody can name. The source
Active assimilation, as a solution to the threat, "would be the topic of discussion for everybody."
The narrator
prints "curent" with a [sic], an error in the narration itself this time.
This is the chapter's revelation, and it is delivered in four plain sentences. "He had made it up." There was no postwar policy of active assimilation. Major Streiter never developed it. Allen invented the phrase. Sugermann, the egghead from Hokkaido who gives Allen ideas, invented the threat. "out of whole cloth" is the old idiom for a complete fabrication, cloth cut from a fresh bolt with nothing borrowed.
The phrase answers a line from Chapter 3. When Allen told Sue Frost that a unique individual might originate his own idea, she replied: "How interesting. An idea out of nothing." And Allen corrected her: "Out of the individual human mind." Here is the idea out of nothing, made by two individual human minds and dropped into the top of the domino chain. Frost's sceptical remark has come true in the most dangerous way possible for her.
The chapter ends on two short sentences of satisfaction. "well-pleased" is an old phrase with a scriptural ring, as in the voice from heaven that says in whom I am well pleased. Allen, who has just created a policy and a threat out of nothing, is pleased with his creation. "Progress was being made" is the language of a status report, and of Morec itself, which calls its whole project Moral Reclamation. The chapter closes in the voice of a Director reporting to himself.
Active assimilation "was his brain child. He had made it up." Sugermann "had added the idea of the" current threat. "Between them they had created the topic out of whole cloth."
The narrator
"He felt well-pleased. Progress was being made."
The narrator
CONTRAST
| Person | Position | Choice | Stated reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thirty-three department heads | Executive staff | "virtually all" go home by noon | None given; Allen offered the exit |
| Vivian | Secretary since Monday | Leaves | None given |
| Nan | Secretary | Stays | "Yes sir" |
| Gleeby | Head of music | Stays; runs the staff | "You don't know my wife" |
| Phyllis Frame | Researcher, thirty years | Stays; profile by six | "I'm in a hurry to get back to my work" |
| Harry Priar | Agency art department | Comes over with Agency staff | "When they ask, I'll say you brainwashed me" |
| Agency personnel | About a dozen asked for | Arrive from four o'clock | Told the situation and willing to come |
| Sugermann | Idea man from Hokkaido | Co-writes the plant | Not stated |
| Gates | Idea man from Hokkaido | Not stated in this chapter | Not stated |
CRITICAL LENS
CRITICAL LENS: the japer uses the machine. The chapter invites admiration, and it earns it: Allen is honest with his staff, refuses a loyalty board and asks for authentic facts. Yet the campaign he launches uses every technique he has attacked. He condemned the domino method in Chapter 3, and now he tips the dominoes. He condemned faceless accusation on Wednesday, and on page one he quotes "persons high in Committee circles who prefer to remain anonymous." He doubted Mavis's methods, and now he quotes "hit 'em, hit 'em." He asks Phyllis Frame for "unbiased material. No opinions," and in the same day invents a policy "out of whole cloth." A reader can see this as the jape's essence: a practical joke works by imitating the thing it mocks, and only a perfect imitation of Morec's propaganda can expose it. A reader can also see it as the danger the novel has been circling since the statue: that a man who fights the machine with the machine's tools may end up running it. The chapter ends with Allen "well-pleased," and does not judge him. The reader should hold both readings until the jape is seen in full.
CRITICAL LENS
Timeline puzzle: which night is the first plug? The chapter's day is Thursday 25 October 2114. The plug scene is undated. The newspaper Allen buys after the plug is "tomorrow's newspaper" and carries the dateline "Oct 29," which is Monday, so the plug would fall in the small hours of Monday 29 October, or late on Sunday night. But Allen then tells Janet "By Monday you'll have the whole story," which sounds as if Monday is still some days off, and four days from Thursday is itself Monday. If the plug was aired on Thursday night, the dateline is wrong; if it was aired on Sunday night, the four-day campaign had only one day of plugs and plants before the slam, and Allen's "Within a day or so" for the dominoes to tip would leave no margin. The text supports neither reading firmly. These notes treat the date on the newspaper as printed and flag the conflict without resolving it.
BY THE NUMBERS
Numbers in Chapter 21. Executive department heads: thirty-three. Assignment workers: "hundreds." Allen's estimate of his remaining time: "A week or so." Deadline to decide: noon, four hours after the eight o'clock speech. Gleeby arrives an hour after noon; his final list comes at two o'clock; Agency staff arrive toward four. Phyllis Frame's service: thirty years; her files: "millions." Profile due: by six. Agency staff requested: "A dozen." Normal production: a month to five months; topical: two weeks; Allen's order: four days; the William Pease precedent: twenty-four hours. First plug: twelve-thirty at night, repeated every half hour on all channels. Newspaper dateline: Oct 29; the plant on page one, left-hand column.
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: the plant and the market. Allen's method is a planted story, repeated on every channel, with anonymous high-level sources, dropped into a system where people take their cues from the people above them. Modern financial markets have shown how fast that works. On 23 April 2013 hackers took over the Associated Press Twitter account and posted a false report of two explosions at the White House injuring President Obama. Within minutes the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 143 points and roughly $136.5 billion was wiped off the value of the S&P 500, before the denial came and prices recovered. Ten years later, on 22 May 2023, an apparently AI-generated image of an explosion near the Pentagon spread on social media from verified-looking accounts, and US stocks dipped briefly before officials said there had been no incident. In both cases the content was thin, a sentence or a picture, exactly as Janet said of the plug: "There wasn't much." What gave it force was the source label, the speed of repetition and the automated and human readers who acted on what others seemed to believe. For banks the practical lessons are concrete: trading and treasury systems that ingest news feeds need source verification and delay controls; communications teams need a rehearsed rapid-denial path; and market-abuse surveillance should cover the spreading of false information, which regulators treat as manipulation. For anyone building AI systems that summarise or act on news, the question to ask is the one Allen counts on nobody asking: who, exactly, are the anonymous persons high in Committee circles?
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Chapter 21 in five movements.
The offer (lines 25 to 53). Eight o'clock; thirty-three heads; the refusal to resign; "A week or so"; the sole legal Director; noon to decide; no policies disclosed; "do you care to work for a man who's out of favor?"
The empty building (lines 55 to 121). By noon the heads have gone; the unearthly loneliness; Nan for Vivian; the canvass; Gleeby, deaf head of music, "You don't know my wife"; Phyllis Frame and the profile of Major Streiter by six.
The rebuilding (lines 123 to 145). Two o'clock list; "I have some ideas"; the Agency want-list; Harry Priar, "I'll say you brainwashed me"; Agency staff from four o'clock; "Which good is"; no loyalty board; projections scratched, put ahead, rerouted.
The schedule (lines 147 to 179). Lined paper; a month to five months; two weeks; four days; the William Pease precedent; baskets, handbills, stenciled signs; Gates and Sugermann as idea men; "We're going to do a jape on Major Streiter."
The launch (lines 181 to 221). Half past midnight; the portable TV; "And afterward?" "We'll see."; the plug and its question; "There wasn't much."; every half hour; "Pageant of Time" by Monday; the newspaper plant; the domino elements; "out of whole cloth"; "Progress was being made."
The chapter is built like a heist story: the team is lost, the team is assembled, the plan is named, the first move is made. Each movement has a recruit. The offer loses thirty-three people; the empty building finds Nan, Gleeby and Phyllis Frame; the rebuilding finds Priar and a dozen from the Agency; the schedule names Gates and Sugermann; the launch has Janet as the first audience. The structure moves from a full room to an empty one to a working staff to a sleeping city receiving a message.
Dick withholds the plan with great care. Allen refuses to tell the heads his policies; he tells Gleeby only the one-line name of the project; he tells Janet only that the slam comes on Monday. The reader learns what the campaign does, but not what it is for. Only the last paragraph reveals that its central term is invented, and even then the reader does not know where the invention leads. The chapter is all method and no motive, and the method is the old Morec machinery, run at four times its normal speed by a man with a week to live in office.
The chapter also changes the pace of the novel. After the slow, painful chapters of the block meeting and Mr. Wales's apartment, it moves by the clock: eight, noon, one, two, four, six, half past midnight. The rhythm is the rhythm of a production schedule, and it carries Allen, for the first time since Chapter 16, as a man in control of events.
What the chapter shows about Allen
It shows him at his best as a leader. He tells his staff the truth about their risk, gives them a safe exit, refuses to bribe them with policy or promises, and works with whoever chooses to stay. He trusts a secretary to find the right person, promotes a deaf head of music to run his operation, and recognises at once the value of a taciturn researcher in the basement. He refuses a loyalty board. In all this he behaves as the opposite of the block meeting: open, unsuspicious, fair.
It shows him as a professional. He knows the industry well enough to ask the right questions, how long the stages take and who checks accuracy, and he has the nerve to cut five months to four days. He knows how Telemedia's machine works because he has fed it for years from his Agency, and he knows its weak point: it will carry anything that comes from the top, at any speed, to every surface of the society.
And it shows him at his most dangerous. The man who japed a statue alone at night now commands every medium in Morec, and he uses them to spread a fabrication. He knows it is a fabrication; he is proud of it. The chapter calls the plan a jape, and Allen's sense of humour, which Gretchen diagnosed in Chapter 17, is fully engaged. Whether a jape on this scale is still a joke, the novel has not yet said.
Questions the chapter raises
- What is the jape on Major Streiter, and what will "Pageant of Time" show on Monday?
- What will Phyllis Frame's profile of the Major and his immediate family contain, and how will Allen use it?
- Will Tom Gates come from Hokkaido, as Sugermann evidently has?
- How will the Committee respond when the plugs and plants begin to circulate, and will it assemble in time to stop the campaign?
- What will happen to Gleeby, Nan, Phyllis Frame and Priar when Allen is fired?
- What does Allen mean to do "afterward," and what will become of Janet and the lost lease?
- What does the plant say the Mental Health Resort has failed to do?
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 21.
A misspelt name. At line 131 Priar's name appears as "Harry Friar," and two lines later it is "Priar" again. The quotation keeps the source spelling.
Two editorial [sic] marks. The newspaper plant prints "momument [sic]" (line 213), and the narration prints "curent [sic] threat" (line 217). Both are kept as printed.
A truncated article. The plant breaks off mid-sentence at "have failed to" (line 215). It may be deliberate, as the reader's eye leaving the page, or a loss in the text.
Odd punctuation. The dateline reads "Newer York Oct 29 (T-M),:" with a comma before the colon, where the Chapter 5 dateline read "Newer York, Oct. 8 (T-M)." Janet's question has a stray comma: "I don't remember, what 'active assimilation' was."
Inverted grammar. Gleeby's "Which good is" (line 143) follows the Morec idiom found elsewhere, and is not an error.
Dashes in speech. The trim woman's question (line 37) and Gleeby's "prune down to" (line 155) break off at dashes, and the transmitter clause (line 183) is set between dashes; these notes stop or split the quotations at those points.
The undated plug. The night of the first plug is not given, and the newspaper's Oct 29 dateline sits awkwardly with "By Monday," as set out in the timeline box above.
"Mavis' hit 'em, hit 'em" (line 203) quotes the slogan without the capital it had in Chapter 3, as spoken shorthand.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 21. On Thursday 25 October 2114 at eight, Allen tells his thirty-three department heads that he refused to resign and remains "the sole legal Director of this Trust" until dismissal papers are served, perhaps "A week or so." He refuses to state his policies and asks "do you care to work for a man who's out of favor?" By noon "virtually all the department heads had discreetly gone home." Nan replaces Vivian; Gleeby, the deaf "head of music," stays because "You don't know my wife" and rebuilds the staff; Phyllis Frame, thirty years in the basement, promises "a complete profile of Major Streiter" and his family "By six"; Harry Priar brings Agency people and will say Allen "brainwashed" him. Allen refuses a loyalty board, reroutes the projections in process, cuts production from five months to four days, names Gates and Sugermann as idea men and says "We're going to do a jape on Major Streiter." At half past midnight the first plug asks whether Major Streiter's "postwar policy of active assimilation" should be revived "to meet the current threat," repeated every half hour, with the slam due on "Pageant of Time" by Monday and a page-one plant dated Oct 29 citing anonymous Committee sources and the "savage assault" on the statue. "Active assimilation" was Allen's invention and the "current threat" was Sugermann's: "Between them they had created the topic out of whole cloth."
The Pageant of Time
By Monday morning the programme is finished, the Telemedia building is sealed and guarded by armed staff, and the whole society is talking about a policy nobody can define. Allen receives his dismissal notice, turns away Ida Pease Hoyt and Sue Frost when they arrive at the barricade with an offer to restore everything he has lost, and takes a good-luck call from Myron Mavis. At eight that evening Mrs. Birmingham settles down to her favourite programme and watches the Director of Telemedia and four bogus experts explain, calmly and with dates, that Major Streiter's policy of active assimilation meant killing, cooking and eating his enemies, until the screen goes dead.
TIMELINE
When and where. The chapter opens "By monday mornnig [sic]", which is Monday 29 October 2114, the day Allen promised Janet would bring "the whole story" and the date printed on the newspaper plant in Chapter 21. The first half is set in the sealed Telemedia building in Newer York: the staff gathering in Allen's office "At a quarter of eight that evening", the dismissal notice read on the spot, the scene at the "barricade erected before the entrance", and the countdown, "Another fifteen minutes", then "Five more minutes", then "Time." The second half moves to the home of Mrs. Georgina Birmingham, who "always hurried home early on Monday evening", for the broadcast of "The Pageant of Time" at eight. The dismissal notice gives Allen "until noon Thursday", that is Thursday 1 November 2114. The chapter title is editorial, taken from the programme.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell, Director of Telemedia until Thursday noon, who also appears on screen as moderator. His staff: Sugermann and Tom Gates, the idea men from Hokkaido, now plainly present; Gleeby, head of music and chief of staff; Harry Priar of the Agency. On air the same four become "Doctor Joseph Gleeby", "Mr. Harold Priar", "Professor Sugermann" and "Mr. Thomas L. Gates". A T-M employee who brings word of visitors. Ida Pease Hoyt, head of the Committee and descendant of the Major, and Sue Frost, Committee Secretary, in "a Committee Getabout" driven by Ralf Hadler, Frost's cousin. Myron Mavis, the former Director, by phone, packing for Sirius. Janet Purcell, mentioned, watching at the apartment. Mrs. Georgina Birmingham, the block warden of Allen's housing unit, who chaired the block meeting in Chapter 19. Named in the broadcast: Major Streiter, Mrs. Streiter and their family; the historians Gibbon, Schiller and Toynbee. Named in the offer: Blake-Moffet.
"nobody came and nobody went"
"By monday mornnig [sic] the projection was complete. T-M workers, armed, carried it upstairs to the transmitter and stood guard over it."
The narrator
The chapter opens on a finished product and a guarded one. "the projection was complete" means the four-day schedule Allen ordered on Thursday has been met: whatever was cut from five months to four days is now a reel, or a set of reels, ready for air. The next detail changes the tone of the whole operation. "T-M workers, armed" carry it to the transmitter and "stood guard over it." These are not soldiers or Cohorts. They are the assignment workers and Agency people Gleeby placed in departments on Thursday afternoon, and now they carry weapons. The novel does not say where the weapons came from or what kind they are. It says only that a media trust under its own Director has armed its staff to protect a television programme from the state that owns it.
"The Telemedia building was sealed off; nobody came and nobody went." The phrase repeats, almost word for word, the line the narrator used of the teen-agers at the autofac receiving station in Chapter 9: "Nobody came and nobody went." There it described boys standing still while a ship unloaded; here it describes a building under siege by its own occupants. The building has become a fortress, and the reader learns later in the chapter that its entrance has a barricade in front of it. On Thursday the department heads were free to walk out of the front door, and most of them did. By Monday nobody walks in or out at all.
The simile "dinned like pond frogs" is one of the best in the chapter. A pond full of frogs is loud, repetitive, everywhere at once and impossible to locate: no single frog makes the noise. That is exactly the method Allen described to Janet on the night of the first plug, the plug repeated "every half hour on all channels" with "plants in the newspapers, mentions on all the news programs, and minor hints scattered over the other media." The frog chorus is the domino method run at full volume. "Tension began to build, a sense of expectancy" is the result the campaign was designed to produce. Nobody is told anything; everybody is told that something is coming.
The last sentence of the paragraph is the whole joke of the campaign in one line: the public was alive to the topic of active assimilation, "although nobody knew what it meant." A society that runs on Morec, on messages fed down from the top, has been fed a phrase with nothing inside it, and has taken it up eagerly. The emptiness is what makes it work. A phrase with no content can carry any content the audience imagines, and every citizen who does not know feels, like Janet on Thursday night, that they ought to.
"During the day the hints, spots, mentions on various media dinned like pond frogs. Tension began to build, a sense of expectancy. The public was alive to the topic of" active assimilation, "although nobody knew what it meant."
The narrator
"about two to one in favor"
"Opinion" Sugermann said, "runs about two to one in favor of restoring a cautious policy of active assimilation." A poll had been taken, and the results were arriving.
Sugermann
Sugermann is in the building. Chapter 21 left his arrival off stage, revealed only by the plant he wrote with Priar; here he is reading poll returns. The figure, "about two to one in favor", is the chapter's first number and its most damning. Two out of every three people polled support "restoring a cautious policy" of something they cannot define. The word "cautious" is a fine touch: it is the word a respectable citizen uses to show that he is moderate, and it has been attached to a policy whose content he does not know.
"A poll had been taken, and the results were arriving." The poll is Telemedia's own. Gleeby will list it later among the follow-ups, and Sugermann will add "And the poll" to his list as if it were one more piece of coverage. In this campaign the poll is a product, part of the projection. It measures the effect of the plugs and then becomes a story in its own right, a way of telling each citizen what the others think. In a domino society, where "people believe what their group believes, no more and no less," as Allen said in Chapter 3, a poll is the most powerful plug of all.
Tom Gates is present too, which answers one of the questions Chapter 21 left open: both idea men have come from Hokkaido. His line is a parody of the respondent the poll has just measured. "too good for those rascals" and "no coddling of traitors" are the phrases of the hanging-and-flogging letter writer, the citizen who wants something harsher than whatever is proposed, without knowing what is proposed. Gates is clowning, and he is also rehearsing: in a few hours he will sit on camera as a lawyer and civic leader taking the hard line. The joke depends on the fact that Gates knows exactly what active assimilation will turn out to mean, and nobody else in Morec does.
"Active assimilation's too good for those rascals," Gates announced. "Let's have no coddling of traitors."
Gates
BY THE NUMBERS
The campaign in numbers. First plug: twelve-thirty at night in Chapter 21, repeated every half hour on all channels. Production schedule: cut from "a month to five months" to four days. Poll: "about two to one in favor" of a policy nobody can define. Air time: eight on Monday evening; staff assembled at a quarter of eight. Projected audience: "dominos representing seventy percent of the population." Dismissal: effective noon Thursday. Follow-ups: repeat broadcast moved from Tuesday night to "About ten" on Monday night; full text in Tuesday morning's newspapers; youth editions would need "another four days." Allen's verdict: "For less than a week that's not bad." Mrs. Birmingham's loyalty to the programme: ten years without missing an edition.
"Anybody feel like backing out?"
"At a quarter of eight that evening, Allen assembled his staff in his office. The mood was one of optimism."
The narrator
The scene mirrors the one that opened Chapter 21. On Thursday at eight o'clock Allen assembled thirty-three department heads in the same office, told them the truth, and watched them go home. On Monday at a quarter to eight he assembles the people who stayed and the people he brought in, and "The mood was one of optimism." The office has changed from a place of departure to a place of conspiracy.
"Well," Allen said, "it won't be long. Another fifteen minutes and we're on the air. Anybody feel like backing out?"
Allen
"Anybody feel like backing out?" is the same offer he made on Thursday, cut to a sentence. He still gives people the exit. This time nobody takes it. "Everybody grinned inanely." The adverb inanely is the narrator's: the grin of people too excited or too nervous to answer sensibly, the grin of schoolboys about to pull off a prank. The staff that remains is the staff that wants to be here, and they know what is coming.
Gates asks the question casually, as though it were a parcel Allen might be waiting for. The answer is that it has come.
The Committee has assembled, then, or at least acted, sometime between Thursday and Monday. The notice arrives by "registered mail", the form a lawyer would choose for proof of delivery, which is what Allen said on Thursday was needed: "Until dismissal papers are served, I'm the sole legal Director of this Trust." The papers are now served, and they give him "until noon Thursday", a further three days. His Thursday estimate of "A week or so" turns out to have been almost exactly right: seven days from Thursday 25 October to Thursday 1 November.
The detail that he opens the envelope "Now", in front of his staff, a quarter of an hour before air time, says much about his state of mind. The notice arrived earlier; he has not bothered to open it. He reads "the brief, formal statement" the way he might read a weather report. The reader can do the arithmetic Allen does not bother to state: the programme goes out on Monday night, and he remains Director, with full legal authority, for nearly three days after it. Whatever the Committee does in response, it cannot say that the broadcast was unauthorised.
"Got your dismissal notice yet?" Gates asked him.
Gates
"The notice, from the Committee, had arrived registered mail. Now Allen opened the envelope and read the brief, formal statement. He had until noon Thursday. Then he was no longer Director of Telemedia."
The narrator
CONTRAST
| Moment | Thursday 25 October | Monday 29 October |
|---|---|---|
| Who is in the office | Thirty-three department heads | Gleeby, Priar, Sugermann, Gates |
| The time | "promptly at eight o'clock" | "a quarter of eight that evening" |
| Allen's offer | Noon to decide; go home safely | "Anybody feel like backing out?" |
| The answer | "virtually all" go home | "Everybody grinned inanely." |
| Mood | "An unearthly loneliness" | "one of optimism" |
| Allen's status | Director until papers are served | Papers served: until noon Thursday |
| What staff know | Nothing of the plan | Everything; they wrote it |
"by 'public demand'"
"Give me the story on the follow-ups," he said to Gleeby.
Allen
The request shows that Allen thinks in campaigns, not single broadcasts. A programme on its own is an event; a programme with follow-ups is a story that runs for days. Gleeby's response begins with a deaf man's hesitation, "Pardon? Yes, um.", which is a nice touch of character: he missed the first words, caught the rest, and recovers. He reads from "a prepared list".
The vocabulary is pure industry. "ground breakers" are the plugs and plants of the last few days, preparing the soil. The "actual discussion" is the slam that Allen promised Janet would come on "Pageant of Time." And the repeat "by 'public demand'" is the best joke in Gleeby's list. The single quotation marks inside his speech show that everyone knows the public demand is invented. The repeat is scheduled before the first showing has gone out, and the demand that will justify it is part of the plan. It is the same trick as the anonymous Committee sources in the newspaper plant: the campaign manufactures the evidence of its own popularity.
"them" is the Committee, and Allen expects it to act. A repeat on Tuesday night gives the Committee a full day to stop it. He wants the second showing before anyone at the top has had time to organise. Sugermann suggests the timing.
"About ten, as they're all popping into bed" is a practical judgement about audience habits, with a touch of mischief: people who see a programme like this one last thing at night will take it to bed with them. It also echoes the first plug, aired at "twelve-thirty at night; most of Newer York was asleep." The campaign has always used the edges of the day, when the watchers at the top are least alert.
Gleeby "scribbled a few words" and goes on reading. His list is the chapter's most complete picture of how Morec's media machine distributes a single message, and it deserves to be set out in full.
"Up to now it's been ground breakers. Tonight at eight comes the actual discussion. Tomorrow night a repeat of the discussion program will be aired, by 'public demand.'"
Gleeby
"Better move that up," Allen said. "Allows too much time for them to act."
Allen
"Make it later tonight," Sugermann suggested. "About ten, as they're all popping into bed."
Sugermann
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Gleeby's follow-up plan, item by item.
Colonies. "We've already mailed out duplicate films to the colonies." The message leaves Earth before anyone can stop it; the colonies are beyond the reach of a power cut in Newer York.
Newspapers. "The discussion has been written up and will be printed in full in Tuesday morning's newspapers, plus comments pro and con." A balanced format, with pro and con, for a programme about cannibalism.
Late news. "Late news programs tonight will give resumes." The same night, summaries on the news.
Print editions. "We've had the presses run off paper-bound copies to be sold in commissaries at magazine slots." The commissaries are the society's shops; Allen remembered visiting one in Chapter 9 to buy 3.2 beer.
Schools. "Youth editions for school use have been prepared, but frankly, I don't imagine we can distribute them in time. It'll take another four days."
The poll. Added by Sugermann: "And the poll."
The repeat. Moved by Allen and Sugermann from Tuesday night to about ten on Monday night.
Two items deserve a closer look. The "duplicate films to the colonies" are already in the mail, which means the campaign has reached past Earth before the programme has aired. Whatever the Committee does in Newer York, the films are on their way to the planets where Janet grew up and where Mavis is going. And the "Youth editions for school use" show how thoroughly the society's machine works: every message of importance is also turned into teaching material. Gleeby's "frankly" admits that there will not be time. The four-day schedule has its limit, and it is the schools.
The understatement is the professional's pride. In less than a week, starting from an empty building on Thursday noon, the team has produced a full programme on all media, plugs every half hour, newspaper plants, a poll, print editions, films for the colonies and school materials on the way. "not bad" is the phrase of a man who knows exactly how good it is.
"Fine," Allen said. "For less than a week that's not bad."
Allen
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: the release plan as an architecture. Gleeby's list is a distribution architecture of the kind a bank's communications or product team would recognise: a single master asset (the discussion), a primary channel (television at eight), a scheduled repeat, a print channel for the next morning, summaries on the late news, a retail channel (paperbacks in the commissaries), an offline channel that cannot be recalled (films already mailed to the colonies), a slow channel for education, and a feedback loop (the poll) that is published as content. Two design choices stand out. First, the colony films are sent before go-live, so the message survives any later shutdown of the main channel. Second, Allen moves the repeat forward to shrink the window in which a controller can intervene. Both are the logic of resilience, used here by the side that expects to be shut down. In ordinary enterprise practice the same pattern appears in reverse: a firm that issues a market-sensitive statement needs to know every channel it has already pushed to, because a correction has to reach each one, and the copies already shipped are the hardest to recall.
"Peace party"
"Mr. Purcell, something's come up. Secretary Frost and Mrs. Hoyt are outside in a Committee Getabout. They want to be admitted."
A T-M employee
The interruption comes from "A T-M employee", unnamed, one of the guards. The phrasing matters. The two most powerful women in the society are "outside", and they "want to be admitted." For six days the Committee has controlled Allen's lease, his Agency, his job and his reputation. Now its head and its Secretary sit in a car at his door asking to be let in. The power relation of the whole novel has turned over for the length of one scene.
Priar's two words name what the visit is before anyone has heard a word of it. A "Peace party" is a delegation that comes to negotiate, the kind sent under a flag of truce. Priar, who stayed on Thursday when the department heads left, reads the situation the way a soldier would: the other side is suing for terms.
Allen refuses to admit them. He goes out to them. The choice keeps the building sealed, which is the point of the barricade, and it reverses the scene in Chapter 3 where Sue Frost walked him through the Telemedia building as its prospective owner and then took him off in a small steam car to meet Ida Pease Hoyt. Now he walks out of the building to her car and stands beside it.
"Peace party," Priar said.
Priar
"I'll talk to them outside," Allen said. "Show me where they are."
Allen
"In the back seat of a small blue Getabout sat the two women, bolt-upright, their faces pinched. Ralf Hadler was behind the tiller. He pretended not to notice or in any way conceive of Allen. They were not in the same world."
The narrator
The picture is precise. "a small blue Getabout" is a modest vehicle for the head of the society, the same kind of little steam car Hadler drove in Chapter 3, when he crept along at a nervous speed and scraped the Pure Food and Drug League car. The two women sit "bolt-upright, their faces pinched", the posture of people holding themselves together. Ralf Hadler, the young messenger from the Cohorts of Major Streiter whom Sue Frost introduced in Chapter 3 as "A very distant cousin-in-law on my father's side", the young man whose face was "as expressionless as sand", is at the tiller and refuses even to see Allen. "He pretended not to notice or in any way conceive of Allen" is a striking verb: Hadler will not even conceive of him, as if Allen were a thought he could decline to have. "They were not in the same world." The narrator's comment works both ways. Hadler lives inside Morec and Allen has stepped outside it, and from either side the other has become unreal. Hadler is a Cohort, and he will come back in Chapter 23, still at the wheel, with a gun.
"This unworthy is." The inverted sentence is the most curious line in the scene. It is Morec talk at its most formal, the backwards word order the society uses for its moral slogans, as in the thought-for-the-week formulas that run through the novel. Coming from the head of the Committee, at a car window, it sounds like a reflex: faced with an outrage, she reaches for the formula before she reaches for a sentence of her own. Then she drops into plain English, "I'm ashamed of you, Mr. Purcell. I really am." The scolding is maternal, as though Allen were a boy who had broken a window.
Allen answers in the language of a bureaucrat processing a complaint. "I'll make a note of that" is a deliberate echo of the manner of the block wardens, Mrs. Birmingham with her long yellow pad, who make notes on everyone. He turns the gesture back on the Committee. "What else?" tells Mrs. Hoyt that her shame is an item on an agenda and not a weight on his conscience.
Sue Frost holds up "a newspaper", presumably the plant from Chapter 21 or another like it. Her phrase for the policy comes with quotation marks inside her speech, 'Active assimilation.' She cannot say it without holding it at arm's length. "What in the name of heaven is this? Have you all completely lost your minds?"
Mrs. Hoyt said: "This unworthy is. I'm ashamed of you, Mr. Purcell. I really am."
Ida Pease Hoyt
"I'll make a note of that," Allen said. "What else?"
Allen
"Would you have the decency to tell us what you're doing?" Sue Frost demanded in a low, choked voice. She held up a newspaper.
Sue Frost
"We have," Allen admitted. "But I don't see that it matters."
Allen
The admission is both a joke and the truth as Allen now sees it. By Morec's standard he and his staff have lost their minds. He has decided that Morec's standard of sanity is not one he needs to meet. Myron Mavis will make the same point in a moment with a single word, "lunacy."
Sue Frost is right, and she says so plainly. "It's a fabrication", "You're inventing it all", "some sort of horrible prank": three accurate descriptions in a row. Chapter 21 showed Allen, Priar and Sugermann making up the history out of whole cloth. The Secretary of the Committee sees through it at once. What she cannot do is act on what she sees. The campaign has already reached the public, and the public is two to one in favour.
This is the chapter's sharpest piece of dramatic irony. "If I didn't know better" means she does not believe what she is saying; she means it as a figure of speech. Every reader knows that Allen did jape the statue, and that he discovered it himself in Chapter 7 and has been circling the fact ever since. Sue Frost has guessed the truth and dismissed it in the same breath, because she knows better. The certainty of the Committee that its own Director could not have done such a thing is the cover under which he did it.
Her phrase "anarchistic and savage lawlessness" gives her away in a different way, and the narrator points it out.
The plant in Chapter 21 spoke of **"violence and lawlessness, as demonstrated by the savage assault on the Park of the Spire momument [sic] to Major St"**reiter. Sue Frost has absorbed the words without noticing. The head of the Committee's executive office, who knows the campaign is a fabrication, is talking in its vocabulary. Allen feels odd "to hear her speaking right out of the plug": the woman who sees through the campaign is already repeating it. The domino method works even on people who know it is being used on them. It does not need them to believe; it needs them to repeat.
The offer is the second climax of the scene. Mrs. Hoyt speaks "presently", after a pause, and "in a tone of forced amiabil‐
"It's a fabrication, isn't it?" Sue Frost accused. "You're inventing it all. This is some sort of horrible prank."
Sue Frost
"If I didn't know better I'd say you had a hand in the japery of Major Streiter's statue; I'd say you're involved in this whole outbreak of anarchistic and savage lawlessness."
Sue Frost
"Her choice of words showed the potency of the campaign. It made him feel odd to hear her speaking right out of the plug."
The narrator
"Now look," Mrs. Hoyt said presently, in a tone of forced amiability. "If you'll resign we'll see that you regain your lease. You'll be able to continue your Agency; you'll be exactly where you were. We'll prepare a guarantee, written, that Telemedia will buy from you."
Ida Pease Hoyt
ity", so the shift from scolding to bargaining costs her something. The terms are generous:
The last term is the most revealing sentence any Committee member speaks in the novel. "She hesitated." Then she offers "to expose Blake-Moffet for their part in the frame-up." The reader knows what Blake-Moffet's part looked like. In Chapter 17, as Allen kissed Gretchen Malparto goodbye in his locked office, a juvenile came in through the window recording, and the door fell open on Fred Luddy with a flash camera and a crowd of Blake-Moffet technicians. That evidence fed the charges against him. In Chapter 18 Janet asked whether the girl was in on a frame-up, and Allen said no: only Blake-Moffet could gain, and "the Resort isn't part of Blake-Moffet." Mrs. Hoyt now uses the word "frame-up" herself. The Committee, in other words, regards the raid as a set-up, and knew it while the block council voided Allen's lease on the strength of the reports and while the dismissal was prepared. What she does not say is how far the set-up went, or whether Gretchen's visit was part of it, and the text gives no further answer. She offers justice only as a bargaining chip. The hesitation before the term is the moment she decides the admission is worth the price.
"Now I know I'm on the right track." The logic is that of a man who measures his blows by the size of the response. The Committee did not bargain when he was framed, evicted or dismissed. It bargains now, when he controls the transmitter. An offer this large means the broadcast frightens them, and what frightens them is what he wants to air. The invitation to "watch TV tonight" is the coolest line Allen speaks in the book. "the full story" echoes what he told Janet on Thursday night: "By Monday you'll have the whole story."
Allen is "genuinely surprised", which is honest: he did not expect them to give way so fast. The closing sentence is the
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Mrs. Hoyt's offer, term by term.
Condition. Allen resigns as Director of Telemedia. The dismissal takes effect on Thursday in any case, so what the Committee is really buying is the broadcast: a resignation tonight would stop the programme.
Term 1. "you regain your lease." The lease the block council declared void in Chapter 19, as of Tuesday 6 November 2114, on the apartment Allen was born in.
Term 2. "You'll be able to continue your Agency." The business he built from nothing.
Term 3. "you'll be exactly where you were." A promise to undo the whole novel.
Term 4. "a guarantee, written, that Telemedia will buy from you." Guaranteed revenue, in writing.
Term 5. "And we'll undertake to expose Blake-Moffet for their part in the frame-up." Offered after a hesitation.
Allen said: "Now I know I'm on the right track. And try to watch TV tonight; you'll get the full story on 'active assimilation.'"
Allen
"Their offer had genuinely surprised him. It was amazing how much moral righteousness the breath of scandal could blow down."
The narrator
narrator's verdict on the Committee, and it has the shape of a proverb. "moral righteousness" is the Committee's stock in trade; "the breath of scandal" is all it takes to knock it down, like the house of the third little pig blown down by a wolf, only here the wolf barely has to huff. The scandal in question has not even aired. Its rumour has done the work.
CONTRAST
| What Mrs. Hoyt and Sue Frost say | What it reveals |
|---|---|
| "This unworthy is." | The head of the Committee answers outrage with a slogan |
| "Have you all completely lost your minds?" | Sanity is defined as staying inside Morec |
| "It's a fabrication, isn't it?" | The Secretary sees through the campaign at once |
| "If I didn't know better I'd say you had a hand in the japery" | She guesses the truth and dismisses it |
| "anarchistic and savage lawlessness" | She is already speaking in the plug's vocabulary |
| "you'll be exactly where you were" | Everything taken from Allen was negotiable all along |
| "expose Blake-Moffet for their part in the frame-up" | The Committee knew he was framed |
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: when the regulator knows about the fraud. The Blake-Moffet term is a familiar pattern in institutional failure. An authority learns that a sanction it imposed rested on a set-up, keeps quiet because the outcome suits it, and only discloses what it knows when disclosure buys something. Banks meet the same problem from the inside: a conduct case reveals that an employee was disciplined on evidence another party manufactured, and the institution has to decide whether to correct the record at once or hold the knowledge for leverage. Governance frameworks that require prompt correction of known errors, rather than leaving the choice to whoever holds the information, exist precisely because the temptation Mrs. Hoyt yields to is ordinary. Allen's reading of her offer is the useful lesson for anyone on the receiving end: an authority that suddenly offers to undo everything has told you how much it fears what you are about to do.
"good luck on your lunacy"
"Almost time," Sugermann said, consulting his watch. "Five more minutes."
Sugermann
Allen rejoins the group upstairs. The countdown resumes. Sugermann, the historian, keeps the time.
Gleeby's estimate is technical and exact in its vocabulary. The audience is counted in "dominos", the opinion leaders of each block, not in heads; if the dominos representing "seventy percent of the population" watch, then seventy percent of the population will be told what they saw. "almost perfect saturation on this single airing" is the jargon of a media plan‐
"At a rough guess," Gleeby said, "dominos representing seventy percent of the population will be watching. We should achieve an almost perfect saturation on this single airing."
Gleeby
ner reporting reach. The domino method that Allen criticised to Sue Frost in Chapter 3, saying that "One unique individual would foul it up," is now his own delivery system. He is using Morec's machinery to carry an anti-Morec message, and his staff measure the results in Morec's units.
"two fifths of Scotch whiskey" from a suitcase: Gates has come prepared for a party, and he opens both bottles at once. In Chapter 9 Allen could only remember going to a commissary for 3.2 beer, and Malparto summed it up as an attempt "to buy a fifth of Scotch"; Gates, who lives on Hokkaido among old records and books, simply has two fifths in his luggage. Here the Scotch is pure celebration. "Or we can pass them around" turns the Director's office into a students' room.
The phone rings. It is Myron Mavis.
Mavis's voice is "creaky", the voice of an old man, which matches the tired, ill figure of the early chapters. He has given up Telemedia and is going to his piece of a planet in the Sirius system, the land he owns, mentioned in Chapter 4, where he raises cattle. "bogged down in leaving" is a good phrase for a man whose departure is itself a kind of labour. He cannot come. He asks after Janet.
"She's glad it's out in the open" is the most important information about Janet in the chapter. On Thursday night she told Allen "I'm glad you're doing this; it means so much to you," and then asked the question nobody else has asked: "And afterward?" and "What happens then?" He answered "We'll see." Now, by Allen's report, she is glad that it is out in the open. The pronoun is not defined. It could be the campaign, his break with the Committee, or the end of hiding things from her. The text gives only Allen's word, and he is a man in high spirits. "She's watching at the apartment" places her for Chapter 23, which opens with her on the couch in front of a small portable set.
From a suitcase Gates produced two fifths of Scotch whiskey. "To celebrate," he said, opening both. "Somebody get glasses. Or we can pass them around."
Gates
"Hello, Allen," Myron Mavis' creaky voice came. "How're things going?"
Myron Mavis
"Absolutely perfect," Allen answered. "Want to stop by and join us?"
Allen
"Sorry. Can't. I'm bogged down in leaving. All my stuff to get packed for the trip to Sirius."
Myron Mavis
"Seems to be feeling pretty fair. She's glad it's out in the open." He added,"[sic] She's watching at the apartment."
Allen
"Say hello to her," Mavis said. "And good luck on your lunacy."
Myron Mavis
"good luck on your lunacy" is affectionate, ironic and precise. Mavis does not pretend that Allen is being sensible. He uses the word Morec would use, and wishes him luck anyway. The line also sets up the scene at the space port in Chapter 23, where Mavis will say "Lunacy on top of lunacy" when Allen refuses to board the ship to Sirius.
The broadcast is a recording, a "projection", so the people who made it gather around "the big TV receiver" to watch it go out like everyone else. "Here we go" is said twice, once by Gates, once by Allen in agreement. It is the phrase of people on a roller coaster at the top of the first drop. Then the narrative cuts away from them.
"Time," Sugermann said. Gates turned on the big TV receiver and they gathered around it. "Here we go."
Sugermann and Gates
"Here we go," Allen agreed.
Allen
"work and sacrifice were their own reward"
"Mrs. Georgina Birmingham placed her favorite chair before her television set and anticipated her favorite program, "The Pageant of Time." She was tired from the hectic activities of the day, but a deep spiritual residuum reminded her that work and sacrifice were their own reward."
The narrator
The cut is the boldest structural move in the chapter. For twenty-one and a half chapters the novel has stayed almost entirely with Allen; it has given Malparto a few paragraphs of his own in Chapter 9 and little else. Now, at the climax, it leaves Allen and his staff in front of the receiver and goes to the other end of the wire, to a citizen in her chair. The citizen is the right one. Mrs. Birmingham is the block warden of Allen's housing unit, the "female functionary" of the Parent Citizens Committee whom Chapter 1 described as "plump, florid, in her middle fifties," the woman who asked Allen about Hokkaido on the first morning and read out the verdict voiding his lease at the block meeting in Chapter 19. Now, for the first time, she has a first name: Georgina. The novel gives her one at the moment it shows her from the inside.
The sentence about her is gently satirical. She "placed her favorite chair" and "anticipated her favorite program": two favourites in one line, a woman of settled habits. She is "tired from the hectic activities of the day", the activities of a warden, presumably reports, visits and notes on her long yellow pad. And "a deep spiritual residuum reminded her that work and sacrifice were their own reward." The phrase "spiritual residuum" is mock-solemn, the language of a sermon applied to the tiredness of a woman at the end of a day. The idea that "work and sacrifice were their own reward" is a Morec slogan she has absorbed so thoroughly that it reaches her as a feeling. She is the domino in person: what the society says, she feels.
"On the screen was an inter-program announcement. A large decayed tooth was shown, grimacing with pain. Next to it a sparkling healthy tooth jeered sanctimoniously. The two teeth engaged in Socratic dialogue, the upshot of which was the rout and defeat of the bad tooth."
The narrator
This short paragraph is a perfect specimen of Telemedia's normal output, and it is placed directly before the programme that will wreck it. Two teeth, one rotten and "grimacing with pain", one "sparkling" and jeering "sanctimoniously". The good tooth is a prig, and wins. "Socratic dialogue" is the narrator's mockery of a form that pretends to argue but only exists to defeat one side. It is also a preview of what is coming: in a few minutes four men at a table will hold another dialogue in calm, reasonable voices. The difference is that the tooth dialogue preaches dental hygiene with a straight face, and the panel will preach cannibalism with one.
She "gladly endured" the announcements "because they were in a good cause": a phrase that sums up the whole relation between Morec and its audience. Nobody enjoys the messages; everybody accepts them as a duty. "in ten years she hadn't missed an edition" gives the programme a long history and her a long record of loyalty. It also tells the reader why Allen chose this slot. In Chapter 21 he told Janet "The slam will come on 'Pageant of Time.'" He picked the programme that the most faithful citizens never miss, on the night they keep free for it.
The title sequence is patriotic spectacle: fireworks, guns, and the title cutting "through the blur of war". THE PAGEANT OF TIME is a history programme, as the name says, a show that turns the past into a procession. Its opening is the same kind of picture as the first plug in Chapter 21, which showed "the ruins of the war, the aftermath of battle." The war is the society's founding story, and every history programme begins there.
"Mrs. Birmingham gladly endured the inter-program announcements because they were in a good cause. And the program, "Pageant of Time," was well worth any reasonable effort. She always hurried home early on Monday evening; in ten years she hadn't missed an edition."
The narrator
"A shower of brightly-colored fireworks burst across the screen, and from the speaker issued the rumble of guns. A jagged, slashing line of words cut through the blur of war:"
The narrator
"four dignified gentlemen"
"Her program had begun. Folding her arms, leaning her head back, Mrs. Birmingham now found herself viewing a table at which sat four dignified gentlemen. A discussion was in progress, and dim words were audible. Over them was superimposed the announcer's voice."
The narrator
Mrs. Birmingham settles in, "Folding her arms, leaning her head back", the posture of someone who expects to be comfortable for an hour. "four dignified gentlemen" at a table: the form is the panel discussion, the most respectable format television has. The device of a discussion "in progress" with "dim words" under the announcer's voice is a production touch, and a clever one. It makes the panel seem to exist independently of the camera, as though the viewer were looking in on serious men who were talking before she arrived and would go on talking without her.
The announcer explains the format. He tells the audience that the four are each "a distinguished authority in his field," that they "had come together" to discuss an issue of the highest importance to every citizen of the Morec society, and that because of "the unusual importance of this program there will be no interruptions," so that the discussion "will proceed without pause until the end of the hour." The phrase about every citizen contains one of the words these notes avoid, so it is paraphrased here; the rest is exact.
The promise of "no interruptions" is a practical choice disguised as a mark of respect. No inter-program announcements means no break in which a nervous official could cut in, and no break in which the viewer could get up. It also means that the "Socratic dialogue" of the teeth was the last ordinary thing on the screen. "Our topic for tonight..." Then the words grow on the screen.
The title is a straight parody of the public-affairs programme. "IN THE WORLD TODAY" is the formula of a hundred real discussion programmes, and it implies that active assimilation is a live question, something that exists now and needs discussing. That is the whole lie of the campaign packed into a caption.
Mrs. Birmingham's state of mind is exactly the one the campaign set out to create. She has heard the phrase "for some time", she does not know what it means, and "Her lack of information had made her feel out of touch." For a block warden, whose job is to know what the block should think, being out of touch is a professional embarrassment. She is "delighted" at the chance to learn "once and for all". The frog chorus has done its work: it produced a craving to know, and now the programme will satisfy it.
"ACTIVE ASSIMILATION IN THE WORLD TODAY"
The title card
"Mrs. Birmingham was delighted. She had been hearing about active assimilation for some time, and this was her opportunity to learn once and for all what it was. Her lack of information had made her feel out of touch."
The narrator
CRITICAL LENS
A timing point. Mrs. Birmingham has been hearing about active assimilation "for some time", Sue Frost already holds a newspaper with the phrase in it, the poll results are coming in, and Allen speaks of the campaign as taking "less than a week". All of this fits a campaign that began on Thursday night or soon after and ran through the weekend, which is what Chapter 21 implies when it shows the first plug on Thursday night. It fits less well with the dateline "Newer York Oct 29" on the newspaper Allen bought that same night, since 29 October is this Monday. The puzzle raised in Chapter 21 is not resolved here, but the weight of Chapter 22 falls on the side of a campaign several days old, which makes the dateline the odd detail.
"whose historical studies rank with those of Gibbon, Schiller, Toynbee"
The announcer, or the voice at the table, introduces the panel one by one. The camera shows each man as he is named. The four introductions are the funniest passage in the chapter, because the reader knows who these men are.
Gleeby is Telemedia's head of music, a deaf man who has spent Chapter 21 and this chapter saying "Pardon?" On screen he becomes "Doctor Joseph Gleeby": a doctorate, a first name the novel has not given before, and a career as "educator, lecturer, writer of numerous books on problems of social values." The camera shows him "smoking a pipe and rubbing his ear". The pipe is the prop of the academic; the ear-rubbing is Gleeby's deafness, left in the shot. A careful viewer who knew him would recognise the habit. Mrs. Birmingham does not.
Harry Priar, from the Agency, becomes "Mr. Harold Priar", with the formal version of his name. The titles have a thread of truth in them: Priar has worked in the Agency's creative side, so "art critic" is not far from art work, and "architect" is pure decoration. "frequent contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica" is the best touch: the Britannica is a pre-war institution, the kind of relic that survives in Gates's stacks on Hokkaido. In the Morec world the name carries an aura of old authority. Priar's "intense, serious face" is the right face for the part.
Sugermann gets the grandest introduction. He is a recluse on poisoned Hokkaido who drinks wine with Allen and, in Chapter 9, smiles over Gates's pre-war books and calls himself "an egghead"; here he becomes "Professor Sugermann", his historical studies ranked with three of the great historians. The choice of names is pointed. Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1789, a history of the collapse of a civilisation. Friedrich Schiller, better known as a poet and dramatist, also wrote histories of the Dutch revolt against Spain (1788) and the Thirty Years' War (1791 to 1793), both histories of rebellion against an established order. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, twelve volumes from 1934 to 1961, was the grand theory of how civilisations rise and fall that was famous when Dick was writing. Three historians of decline and revolt, named to give authority to a fake history of a revolutionary regime's founding. "We are very fortunate to have Professor
"Seated at my right is Doctor Joseph Gleeby, the noted educator, lecturer, writer of numerous books on problems of social values." A lean middle-aged man, smoking a pipe and rubbing his ear, was shown.
The introduction
"To Doctor Gleeby's right is Mr. Harold Priar, art critic, architect, frequent contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica." A smaller individual was shown, with an intense, serious face.
The introduction
"Seated next to Mr. Priar is Professor Sugermann, whose historical studies rank with those of Gibbon, Schiller, Toynbee. We are very fortunate to have Professor Sugermann with us."
The introduction
Sugermann with us" is the sort of courtesy that a real panel host would offer. "The camera moved forth to show Professor Sugermann's heavy, solemn features."
Tom Gates, the jazz-playing relic dealer from Hokkaido, becomes "Mr. Thomas L. Gates", complete with a middle initial, the mark of a man who signs documents. He is a "lawyer, civic leader, consultant to the Committee for a number of years." The last title is the most audacious. It claims for Gates the one credential that matters most in Morec, a connection to the Committee, and it is entirely false. It also implies that the Committee itself has had a hand in this discussion, which gives the programme the look of an official statement.
Then "the moderator appeared, and Mrs. Birmingham found herself facing Allen Purcell." The sentence has a little shock in it. Mrs. Birmingham knows Allen; five days ago she read out the verdict that voided his lease. Now he is on her screen as the host of her favourite programme. The novel does not tell us what she feels. It moves straight on to his line, the only introduction in the set that is true: he is "Allen Purcell, Director of Telemedia." He sits "at the end of the table, by the water pitcher", the moderator's place, a detail that makes the scene look exactly like the real thing.
"And next to Professor Sugermann sits Mr. Thomas L. Gates, lawyer, civic leader, consultant to the Committee for a number of years."
The introduction
"And I," Mr., Purcell said, "am Allen Purcell, Director of Telemedia." He seated himself at the end of the table, by the water pitcher.
Allen, as moderator
CONTRAST
| Who they are | Who the programme says they are | What they do in the discussion |
|---|---|---|
| Gleeby, Telemedia's deaf head of music | "Doctor Joseph Gleeby, the noted educator, lecturer, writer of numerous books on problems of social values" | Adds the moral frame ("Age of Waste"), the figure for 1997 and the by-products; is cut off mid-sentence |
| Harry Priar, from Allen's Agency | "Mr. Harold Priar, art critic, architect, frequent contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica" | Defends the Major's planning; raises the question of boiling |
| Sugermann, recluse on Hokkaido | "Professor Sugermann, whose historical studies rank with those of Gibbon, Schiller, Toynbee" | Gives the history: famine, cattle, the 'impossibles', May 1987, the Fourth of July |
| Tom Gates, jazz and relics, Hokkaido | "Mr. Thomas L. Gates, lawyer, civic leader, consultant to the Committee for a number of years" | Disagrees: assimilation came first, spontaneously; the Major an empiricist |
| Allen Purcell | "Allen Purcell, Director of Telemedia" | Moderates, summarises, and supplies the definition |
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: invented authority and how it is caught. The panel's credentials are a lesson in how authority is manufactured: titles, a doctorate, a famous reference work, comparison with great names, and a claimed tie to the regulator. None of it can be checked by the viewer, and all of it is false. The same weakness appears whenever a system produces confident citations. In Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y., No. 22-cv-1461), Judge P. Kevin Castel found on 22 June 2023 that lawyers had filed a brief citing six judicial decisions that did not exist, produced by a generative AI chatbot and presented with case names, courts and quotations; he imposed a $5,000 penalty on the two lawyers and their firm jointly. The cure in that case is the cure Mrs. Birmingham lacks: checking each authority against a primary source before relying on it. Banks that deploy AI assistants for research, credit memos or policy drafting face the same requirement. A citation, a statistic or a named expert in model output is a claim to be verified, and the control needs to sit in the workflow, because the output, like Professor Sugermann, will sound most authoritative when it is least checkable.
"the etymology of active assimilation"
"Shall we begin, gentlemen, with a few words about the etymology of active assimilation? Just how did Major Streiter develop the policy that was to prove so effective in his dealings with opposition groups?"
Allen, as moderator
Allen's opening question is a small piece of comedy for the attentive reader. He asks about "the etymology of active assimilation", then asks a question about history, not about the origin of words. The misuse of a learned word is the kind of slip a pompous host would make, and Allen plays the part to the hilt. The second question carries the hook: the policy "was to prove so effective in his dealings with opposition groups." The word "effective" is chosen to make a viewer approve of the policy before learning what it was.
Sugermann begins "coughing importantly and fingering his chin", two gestures of the professional expert. His history starts with real American geography: "the livestock regions of the West, the wheat fields of Kansas, the dairy industry of New England." These were "all but wiped out"; there was "intensive deprivation if not actual starvation"; this "contributed to a decline of over-all productivity affecting industrial reconstruction"; and "communications broke down; areas were cut off; anarchy was common." The tone is that of a textbook. Each statement is plausible, general and impossible to check, and together they set up the famine that the policy will be said to have solved.
"Well, Mr. Purcell," Professor Sugermann began, coughing importantly and fingering his chin, "the Major had many opportunities to see first-hand the ravages of war on principally agricultural and food-producing areas, such as the livestock regions of the West, the wheat fields of Kansas, the dairy industry of New England."
Sugermann, as Professor
"In that connection," Doctor Gleeby put in, "many of the problems of decline of moral standards inherent in the Age of Waste were vastly intensified by this collapse of what little government there was."
Gleeby, as Doctor
Gleeby's contribution is the moral frame. The "Age of Waste" is Morec's name for the world before the revolution, the name used in Chapter 9 when Allen remembers "that iron revolution that had crumbled the Age of Waste" and when Gates says the old books tell how it was "back in the Age of Waste." By invoking it, Gleeby ties the famine to sin: moral decline made the collapse worse. The panel is borrowing the official vocabulary of Morec to make its invented history sound orthodox.
Sugermann pauses, "He gazed upward", the look of a scholar recalling a figure, and produces a number: fewer than three hundred head of cattle in all North America by 1975. The number is precise enough to sound researched and small enough to be shocking. The soil, he says, "was excessively impregnated with toxic metals, poisons, ash", and "Most domestic herds had died off." The date fits the novel's chronology: the war ended in 1972, according to Chapter 1, three years before.
Allen's "That sounds right" is the funniest line in the broadcast and the most exact description of how the whole fake history works: nobody checks; the moderator agrees. A real figure would be cited; this one is confirmed by the man who helped invent it, in a tone the narrator calls "agreeably". The viewer hears the host endorse the expert, and the expert's number becomes fact.
"I believe by 1975 there were less than three hundred head of cattle in North America."
Sugermann, as Professor
"That sounds right," Mr. Purcell said agreeably.
Allen, as moderator
"Encountered a virtually insoluble problem"
Sugermann goes on. Moral Reclaimers, he says, "operated in the field in the form of teams", "More or less autonomous units; we're familiar with the technique". The phrase about autonomous units borrows from real Morec history: Chapter 1 says that Moral Reclamation in the days before the revolution consisted of wandering troops of actors and lecturers. These teams, he says, "Encountered a virtually insoluble problem, that of feeding and caring for the numbers of persons coming across from hostile groups operating in the same area." The phrase "coming across" is a bureaucrat's word for defectors and prisoners. And then the hint: "Major Streiter seems to have foreseen long in advance the continual decline of animal husbandry that was to occur during the next decade." The Major, in this telling, saw that there would be no cattle and planned accordingly. "historians have made a big point of the aptness of those steps." The appeal to unnamed historians is the same device as the anonymous Committee sources in the newspaper plant.
"To fully grasp their situation, we must picture ourselves as living essentially without government, in a world of brute force. What concepts of morality existed were found only within the Reclaimers' units; outside of that it was dog-eat-dog, animal against animal. A kind of jungle struggle for survival, with no holds barred."
Sugermann, as Professor
Sugermann "sighed, contemplated his clasped hands", and asks the audience to imagine. The paragraph is a set piece of historical relativism, the voice of the scholar who asks us not to judge the past by present standards. Morality existed "only within the Reclaimers' units"; outside, "it was dog-eat-dog, animal against animal." The idiom "dog-eat-dog" is a sly pun in a discussion that is about to reveal that the Reclaimers ate people. It prepares the audience to excuse anything as a necessity of the jungle.
The programme cuts to illustration, the way real documentaries do. "The table and five men dissolved": four panellists and the moderator. The film shows "familiar scenes of the first postwar years", stock footage the audience has seen many times, and in this context every image becomes sinister. "barbarians snarling over scraps of meat" and "Dried pelts hanging from slatternly hovels" are images of hunger and of skins, and after what is about to be said, the viewer will wonder what kind of meat and whose skins. The fragments at the end, "Flies. Filth.", are the language of the camera, one shot each.
Back at the table, Sugermann introduces the category on which everything turns. Large numbers of opposition groups "were falling into our hands daily", he says. The "our" is a slip of the persona, or a calculated touch: the historian speaks as though he had been among the Reclaimers. Morec was "on the ascendancy", but "nobody was so idealistic as to believe the problem of creating a unified cultural milieu could be solved overnight." Then the "so-called 'impossible' faction": groups who "could never be won over" and "were doing the most harm." The word 'impossible' with its single quotation marks is the pattern of every regime that names a class of people as beyond redemption. Since Reclaimers were working against them, "it was only natural that in the plan worked out by Major Streiter these 'impossibles' would be the most natural sources for assimilation." The repetition of "natural" in one sentence, "only natural" and "most natural sources", is the rhetoric of inevitability. The sentence is cut off: "Further", and Gates interrupts.
"The table and five men dissolved; in their place appeared familiar scenes of the first postwar years. Ruins, squalor, barbarians snarling over scraps of meat. Dried pelts hanging from slatternly hovels. Flies. Filth."
The narrator
"And the really sobering factor, evidently recognized early by the Major, was the so-called 'impossible' faction: those groups who could never be won over, and who were doing the most harm."
Sugermann, as Professor
"I must disagree," Mr. Gates interrupted, "if I may, Professor Sugermann. Isn't it true that active assimilation had already occurred, prior to the Morec Plan? The Major was fundamentally an empiricist; he saw assimilation occurring spontaneously and he was quick to take advantage of it."
Gates, as lawyer
The disagreement is the cleverest device in the script. A panel where everyone agrees looks like propaganda; a panel with a dispute looks like scholarship. Gates and Priar disagree about how the policy began, and by disagreeing they make its existence look settled. Gates argues that assimilation happened before the "Morec Plan", spontaneously, and that the Major, "fundamentally an empiricist", took advantage of it. It is the lawyer's argument, and it shifts the blame from the Major to circumstance.
Priar defends the Major's foresight: the policy was planned, and "active assimilation was basic, preceding the autofac system which eventually supplanted it." The phrase links the invented history to the real economy of the novel's world. The autofac system, the automatic factories that ship almost all food and goods to Earth by rocket, as Chapter 1 explained, is presented as the successor to cannibalism. The implication, never stated, is that if the autofac ships stopped, the older system might return.
Allen performs the moderator's classic move: acknowledge "two points of view", then sum up the common ground. The common ground is the whole lie: that the Major used active assimilation, early, to feed rural populations and to reduce the number of hostile and 'impossible' elements. Two goals, food and the removal of enemies, in one policy. The summary is the frame on which the rest will hang.
"I'm afraid that doesn't do justice to the Major's planning ability," Mr. Priar spoke up.
Priar, as critic
"I think we have two points of view here," Mr. Purcell, the moderator, said. "But in any case we agree that Major Streiter did utilize active assimilation early in the postwar years to solve the problem of feeding rural populations and of reducing the numbers of hostile and 'impossible' elements."
Allen, as moderator
"on the Fourth of July"
"Yes," Doctor Gleeby said. "By 1997 at least ten thousand 'impossibles' had been assimilated. And numerous byproducts of economic value were being obtained: glue, gelatins, hides, hair."
Gleeby, as Doctor
Gleeby supplies the second number and the most chilling list in the chapter. "By 1997 at least ten thousand", a decade after the first official case, in the same flat tone as a production report. "numerous byproducts of economic value", "glue, gelatins, hides, hair", are the by-products of a slaughterhouse, the language of the meat trade. The reader who remembers "Dried pelts hanging from slatternly hovels" from the illustrative film a moment earlier now knows what the pelts might be.
This is the moment the programme stops hinting. The verbs come in order, "captured, killed, and then processed", and "processed" is the euphemism that the earlier talk of food and by-products has prepared. The date, May of 1987, two years after the revolution of 1985 that the statue story in Chapter 5 attributes to Streiter, fixes the policy inside Morec's own history. The place, "the Ukrainian area", and the victims, "one hundred Russian 'impossibles'", push the story out of America and into the Soviet lands, which for Dick's readers in 1956 was the territory of the Cold War enemy. And then the domestic touch, the most grotesque sentence in the novel: the Major "divided an 'impossible' with his family, on the Fourth of July." The national holiday, the family meal, and the founder carving an enemy at table. "I believe" is the historian's hedge, which somehow makes it worse.
Priar's question is asked in the tone of a man asking about the weather. The answer is not attributed to any speaker; from its content it is most likely Sugermann, still on the Fourth of July story, but the text does not say. "Mrs. Streiter's recipe" brings in the Major's wife, the founding mother, and gives her a recipe. In Chapter 23 the recipes will come back as "among the finest extant," and Mrs. Hoyt, a descendant of the Major, will be said to have tasted the dish in the historic family vessels. The satire has found its target: the founding family of the moral society, eating its enemies at home.
Allen gives the definition. It is the moderator's summary, and it is phrased as the answer to the question every viewer, Mrs. Birmingham first among them, has been waiting for: what does it mean? The answer is "killing, cooking, and eating of hostile groups." Four cooking methods follow, "boiling, or frying, or broiling, or baking", then a phrase that mocks culin‐
"Can we fix a date for the first official assimilation?" Mr. Purcell asked.
Allen, as moderator
"Yes," Professor Sugermann said. "It was May of 1987 that one hundred Russian 'impossibles' were captured, killed, and then processed by Reclaimers operating in the Ukrainian area. I believe Major Streiter himself divided an 'impossible' with his family, on the Fourth of July."
Sugermann, as Professor
"I suppose boiling was the usual processing method," Mr. Priar commented.
Priar, as critic
"Boiling, and of course, frying. In this case Mrs. Streiter's recipe was used, calling for broiling."
Unattributed speaker
"So the term 'active assimilation,'" Mr. Purcell said, "can historically be used to encompass any form of killing, cooking, and eating of hostile groups, whether it be by boiling, or frying, or broiling, or baking; in short, any culinary method apropos, with or without the preserving of by-products such as skin, bones, fingernails, for commercial use."
Allen, as moderator
ary writing, "any culinary method apropos", then the by-products: "skin, bones, fingernails, for commercial use." The fingernails are a horrible precise detail, the kind of thing nobody would invent for effect unless they meant to make an audience gag. The sentence is long, measured and correct in grammar. The calm is what makes it monstrous. The phrase that Morec has been repeating for days now has a definition, and the definition is cannibalism.
Gleeby agrees and begins to add a qualification, the scholar's footnote: assimilation should not be "indiscriminate"; it should happen with "an official" something, perhaps an official sanction or an official present. The qualification would add bureaucracy to cannibalism, the last refinement of the satire. It is never finished.
"Whamp!" is the sound of power failing in a set, a heavy dull noise. Mrs. Birmingham, who was "leaning her head back", now "sat up with dismay." The text does not say what she felt about what she heard before the cut. Her dismay is at the dark screen, at being cut off from her programme, which is the most telling reaction of all: she wanted to hear the rest.
The last line of the chapter is passive: the discussion "had been plunged abruptly off the air." By whom is not said. Chapter 23 will answer at once: "They cut off our power." The cut comes after the definition and before the qualification, which means the full meaning got through. The question for Chapter 23 is whether that was enough.
"Exactly," Doctor Gleeby said, nodding. "Although it should be pointed out that the indiscriminate eating of hostile elements without an official"
Gleeby, as Doctor
"Whamp! went the television set, and Mrs. Birmingham sat up with dismay. The image had gone dead; the screen was dark."
The narrator
"The discussion of "active assimilation" had been plunged abruptly off the air."
The narrator
KEY INSIGHT
Active assimilation, as the panel defines it. The term, per Allen's on-air summary, covers "any form of killing, cooking, and eating of hostile groups", by boiling, frying, broiling or baking, with or without by-products such as skin, bones and fingernails. The invented history behind it: famine after the war that ended in 1972; fewer than three hundred head of cattle in North America by 1975; Reclaimer teams unable to feed prisoners; the 'impossible' faction who could never be won over; the first official assimilation in May 1987, a hundred Russians in the Ukrainian area; the Major sharing one with his family on the Fourth of July; ten thousand by 1997, with glue, gelatins, hides and hair as by-products; boiling and frying usual, broiling in Mrs. Streiter's recipe; the autofac system as its eventual replacement. Every word of it was made up by Allen, Priar and Sugermann.
CASE / SCENE
Critical lens: the modest proposal. The broadcast belongs to one of the oldest traditions in satire. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, published anonymously in Dublin in 1729, recommended in the calm voice of a public-spirited economist that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food, and listed ways to cook them, stewed, roasted, baked or boiled. Its force came from the gap between the reasonable tone and the monstrous content, which forced readers to see the real cruelty of a system that already treated the poor as a commodity. Dick's panel uses the same gap. The experts are courteous, the moderator summarises fairly, the figures are precise, and the subject is eating people. The target is also similar. Swift's proposal held a mirror to an economy that was already consuming Ireland. Allen's history holds a mirror to Morec, a society that turns citizens into material for its moral machine, a point Allen will make himself in Chapter 23 when he says the Major did not eat people literally but that Morec had gobbled greedily at the human soul. There is also a difference. Swift's narrator never confesses. Allen's broadcast is a lie about the founder told under the founder's own authority, and its power depends on the audience accepting the lie for long enough to feel the truth behind it. Sue Frost saw at once that it was a fabrication; the campaign is aimed at the Mrs. Birminghams, who will believe the panel because it looks like every other panel they have trusted for ten years.
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Seven movements, two points of view.
The fortress (lines 225 to 229). The projection complete and under armed guard; the building sealed; the frog chorus of hints; nobody knows what the phrase means; the poll at two to one; Gates against coddling traitors.
The office at a quarter to eight (lines 231 to 253). Optimism; fifteen minutes; the offer to back out and the inane grins; the dismissal notice, noon Thursday; Gleeby's follow-ups; the repeat moved to ten; colonies, newspapers, late news, commissaries, schools, the poll; less than a week.
The peace party (lines 255 to 281). Frost and Hoyt at the barricade; Hadler unseeing; "This unworthy is"; the newspaper; lost minds; fabrication and prank; the statue guessed and dismissed; the plug's vocabulary; the offer, lease, Agency, guarantee, Blake-Moffet; the right track; moral righteousness blown down.
The countdown (lines 283 to 309). Five minutes; seventy percent saturation; two fifths of Scotch; Mavis on the phone, Sirius, Janet glad and watching, lunacy; time; here we go.
The viewer (lines 311 to 333). Mrs. Georgina Birmingham in her chair; the tooth dialogue; ten years of Mondays; fireworks and guns; four dignified gentlemen; no interruptions; the title; her delight; the credentials; Allen at the water pitcher; etymology.
The discussion (lines 335 to 371). Famine; the Age of Waste; three hundred cattle; "That sounds right"; the teams; dog-eat-dog; the film of ruins; the 'impossibles'; Gates and Priar disagree; two points of view; ten thousand and by-products; May 1987 and the Fourth of July; boiling, frying, broiling; the definition; Gleeby's unfinished footnote.
The cut (lines 373 to 375). Whamp; the dark screen; plunged off the air.
The chapter is built as a countdown that turns into a broadcast. The first half has a clock in it: a quarter to eight, fifteen minutes, five minutes, time. Each interval brings in a new force. The staff is tested and holds; the Committee arrives and offers terms and is refused; an old ally rings to wish luck from a distance. By the time the receiver is switched on, every party to the story has been heard from except the public and the Cohorts.
The second half supplies the public. The switch to Mrs. Birmingham is the chapter's master stroke, because it lets the reader experience the programme as Morec experiences it: a familiar chair, a familiar show, a sanctimonious tooth, four respectable men and a moderator everyone knows. Each element of the broadcast is built to look normal, and the content is built to escalate by steps so small that no single step seems the decisive one: famine, then cattle, then prisoners, then 'impossibles', then by-products, then a date, then a recipe, then a definition. The structure of the discussion is the structure of the campaign: the audience is led to the truth one plausible sentence at a time.
The ending withholds the Cohorts, whose arrival is felt only as a sound. "Whamp!" is the first act of the power that has been offstage since Chapter 3, and the chapter ends without showing who threw the switch.
What the chapter shows about Allen
Allen is at his most assured in this chapter. He offers his staff an exit and expects none to take it. He opens his dismissal notice in front of them as if it were junk mail. He walks out to meet the most powerful women in the society and refuses everything they offer, including the restoration of his whole former life and the exposure of the people who framed him. A week ago he would have taken that offer; much of the novel has been the story of a man trying to keep his lease, his Agency and his reputation. Now he treats the offer as evidence that he is winning.
He is also a professional, and the chapter keeps showing it. He thinks in follow-ups, not single shots. He moves the repeat forward because a day's delay gives the Committee time. He sits at the water pitcher and plays the moderator with precise, deadpan skill, agreeing "That sounds right" to a figure he helped invent and summarising the cannibal policy in the tones of a man summing up a debate on farm subsidies. The man who called the domino method dangerous in Chapter 3 now uses it at seventy percent saturation.
His private life appears only in two lines. He tells Mavis that Janet is "glad it's out in the open" and is watching at home. He does not go home to watch with her. The chapter keeps him in the office with the conspirators, and his marriage is reported through a phone call. Whether Janet's gladness is as complete as he says is a question the next chapter takes up when it shows her alone, watching.
Questions the chapter raises
- Who cut the power? The chapter shows only the result; Chapter 23 names the Cohorts.
- Did the definition get through before the cut? Allen's summary aired in full; Gleeby's qualification did not.
- How far did the frame-up go, and how long has the Committee known? Mrs. Hoyt's offer names Blake-Moffet, whose raid in Chapter 17 the reader saw, but says nothing about whether Gretchen's visit was part of the set-up.
- Why does Allen refuse an offer that gives him back everything he lost? His answer is that the offer proves he is on the right track; whether he has a further aim is left for Chapter 23.
- What does Mrs. Birmingham believe after the screen goes dark? Her dismay is at the cut. The chapter does not tell us how she judged the content.
- Will the follow-ups go out? The films are already mailed to the colonies; the newspapers, the late news, the repeat at ten and the paperbacks all depend on the building staying on the air.
- Is Janet as glad as Allen reports? She is watching alone at the apartment.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in Chapter 22. (1) The opening reads "By monday mornnig [sic]", with a lowercase day and a misspelling that the transcription marks with its own [sic]. (2) In Allen's reply to Mavis a closing quotation mark is misplaced straight after He added, and the transcription marks it [sic]. (3) "Mr., Purcell said" has a stray comma after the title. (4) The programme is called "The Pageant of Time" in one sentence and "Pageant of Time" in the next and in the announcer's words; Chapter 21 used the shorter form. (5) The announcer says the four men "had come together", a slip from present to past tense in a live introduction. (6) The introductions begin "Seated at my right", as though spoken by someone at the table, but the moderator "appeared" only after them; the source does not make clear whether the announcer and the moderator are the same voice. (7) The announcer says the discussion is "already in progress", yet Allen then opens it with "Shall we begin". (8) Sugermann's paragraph on the Reclaimer teams breaks off after "we're familiar with the technique" with an ellipsis followed by a full stop, and the next sentence begins without a subject. (9) The answer about boiling and frying is not attributed to any speaker. (10) The table that held "four dignified gentlemen" dissolves as "The table and five men"; that is consistent once Allen is counted. (11) Three panellists are given names the novel has not used before: Joseph Gleeby, Harold Priar (elsewhere Harry) and Thomas L. Gates (elsewhere Tom); Mrs. Birmingham's first name, Georgina, also appears for the first time. The new first names may be part of the disguise or simply new information; the text does not say.
TIMELINE
Dates and the invented chronology. Story time: Monday 29 October 2114, from morning to a few minutes after eight in the evening. Dismissal effective noon Thursday 1 November 2114. Lease void Tuesday 6 November 2114 (Chapter 19). The chronology the panel claims, all of it invented in Chapter 21: war's end 1972 (from Chapter 1, real within the novel); fewer than three hundred cattle by 1975; revolution of 1985 (from the statue story, real within the novel); first official assimilation May 1987; the Major's family meal on the Fourth of July, presumably of 1987; ten thousand assimilated by 1997. The Book Committee listing Ulysses in 1988 (Chapter 9) and the statue cast in March 1990 (Chapter 5) fall inside the invented period, which shows how carefully the fake dates were fitted to the real ones. Allen was born in 2085, so he is about twenty-nine.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 22. The programme aired. Before the cut, the panel defined active assimilation on Telemedia's most loyal slot as "any form of killing, cooking, and eating of hostile groups", fixed its first official use in May 1987, and placed the Major and his wife at a family meal of an enemy on the Fourth of July. Allen is dismissed as of noon Thursday but was Director when it aired. He refused the Committee's offer to restore his lease, his Agency and a written contract, and heard Mrs. Hoyt concede that Blake-Moffet had a part in a "frame-up". Sue Frost guessed, and dismissed, that he japed the statue, while already speaking the plug's language. Films are on their way to the colonies; the repeat was set for about ten. Mavis is leaving for Sirius and wished Allen luck on his lunacy; Janet is watching alone. The screen went dark mid-sentence, and the chapter does not say who did it.
The Person Who Japed the Statue
The power fails. In the dark office Allen, Gleeby and Sugermann see Getabouts in the lanes below, almost certainly the Cohorts, and the emergency generators put the programme back on the air for a few broken minutes. Janet, alone on the couch with the portable set, watches fragments: deterrence, pickpockets, a display of six-foot broiling racks, the Major's own fondness for boiled enemy, six hundred 'impossibles' eaten by his family, and a fake news flash in which Mrs. Hoyt pronounces boiled conspirator highly savory. Then a harsh voice tells viewers to turn off their sets. The staff send Allen away. With Gates he escapes the building in a Getabout, is chased by Ralf Hadler, Fred Luddy and Tony Blake, jumps out at a curve and watches the pursuers crash. He collects Janet and runs with her to the field where Myron Mavis is boarding the ship for Sirius. Mavis agrees to take them. Then Allen sees the teen-agers at the railing and refuses to go. He and Janet walk back, and at the edge of the field he announces to everybody present that he is the person who japed the statue of Major Streiter, and waits for the Cohorts.
TIMELINE
When and where. The whole chapter takes place on the night of Monday 29 October 2114, beginning a few minutes after eight, when the broadcast is cut, and ending some time later that night at the space field. Places in order: Allen's office in the Telemedia building, dark; the stairs down to the emergency generators; the Purcells' one-room apartment, where Janet watches; the office again; the stairs and the lobby; the lane outside, the chase and the crash at "a sharp curve"; the apartment; the field where "the great inter-S ship" waits for the flight "from the Sol System to the Sirius System"; and, last, the rail at "the edge of the field", with the spire of Newer York in view. Allen's dismissal is still three days away, at noon on Thursday 1 November; his lease runs out on Tuesday 6 November. The chapter title is editorial, taken from Allen's last speech.
CAST
People in this chapter. Allen Purcell. Janet Purcell. The staff: Gleeby, Sugermann, Tom Gates, Harry Priar, and a technician from the transmitter; later "A herd of technicians" and the T-M employees in the lobby. On the screen: the same four as Doctor Gleeby, Professor Sugermann, Mr. Gates and Mr. Priar, with Allen as the moderator and a news announcer; named in the broadcast, Major Streiter, his wife, "The Major's grandson", E. B. Erickson, and Mrs. Ida Pease Hoyt. "a mysterious voice" with "the harsh overtones of the Cohorts of Major Streiter". A speaker called "Coates" (see the source quirks). The pursuers: Ralf Hadler driving, Fred Luddy beside him, Tony Blake of Blake-Moffet in the back. At the field: Myron Mavis, the passengers, "a mechanical voice", the teen-agers at the railing, and at the end relatives of passengers, minor field officials, passers-by and an off-duty policeman.
"They cut off our power."
Allen said: "They cut off our power."
Allen
The last chapter opens on the answer to the question the previous one left hanging. The screen went dark in Mrs. Birmingham's sitting room because the power went off at the source. "They" needs no explanation for anyone in the room. The authorities have reached for the simplest weapon available to a state that owns the grid: they have switched off the building.
Gleeby, who has misheard half of what has been said to him for two chapters, hears this perfectly and answers with the technical point: "The lines", the city supply cables. He is "fumbling around in the darkness of the office", and the narrator gives the full extent of the blackout in three clauses: the lights of the whole building "had vanished", the transmitter overhead "was silent", and "projection had ceased." Gleeby knows the building and offers the way round it: "emergency generating equipment, independent of city power." The building was designed to keep broadcasting when the city failed. Nobody designed it to keep broadcasting when the city switched it off on purpose, but the same equipment serves.
There is an echo here for the attentive reader. Chapter 12 ended with the lights going out at the door of the Health Resort, and Allen came to in a different world. Darkness has twice marked a turning point in his story. This time he stays in the same world and fights for the light.
Sugermann does two things at once. He raises the practical doubt, "Takes a lot to run a transmitter", and he goes to the window to see who is outside. "Getabouts everywhere. Cohorts, I think." The Cohorts of Major Streiter, the founder's male descendants and the enforcers of the system, have not appeared in force since Ralf Hadler came for the day's duplicates in Chapter 3. Now they are in the lanes around the building. The "I think" is honest: Sugermann cannot see insignia from a window in the dark. The reader learns in a few pages that he was right.
The Director of Telemedia descends the stairs of his building by the light of a cigarette lighter. The image is small and exact: the most powerful media organisation in the society, and its chief finds his way by a flame in his hand. Gates follows with "a technician from the transmitter", one of the people who stayed.
The technician's verdict is the best piece of plain speech in the chapter. The generators can restart the transmitter "in ten
"The lines," Gleeby answered, fumbling around in the darkness of the office. All the lights of the Telemedia building had vanished; the TV transmitter above them was silent, and projection had ceased. "There's emergency generating equipment, independent of city power."
Gleeby
"Takes a lot to run a transmitter," Sugermann said, pulling aside the window blinds and peering out at the evening lanes below. "Getabouts everywhere. Cohorts, I think."
Sugermann
"Allen and Gleeby made their way down the stairs to the emergency generators, guided by Allen's cigarette lighter. Gates followed; with him was a technician from the transmitter."
The narrator
"We can have it back on in ten or fifteen minutes," the TV technician said, inspecting the generator capacities. "But it won't hold. The drain's too great for these; it'll be on for awhile and then"
The technician
or fifteen minutes", "But it won't hold." "The drain's too great for these": the backup was built for lights and essentials, and a transmitter is a heavy load. It will run "for awhile and then", he says, and the sentence breaks at a dash into "like now." He needs no verb: the dark around them finishes it. The whole remainder of the broadcast is therefore going to be borrowed time, measured by fuel and capacity.
Allen does not ask whether the programme was finished, since he knows it was not. He wonders "how much of the projection had been understood." His question to Sugermann uses the trade's own word for a successful message: "You think we made our Morec?" To make your Morec is to get the moral across.
Sugermann corrects him with a coinage: "Our un-Morec." The programme was a moral message in reverse, a packet that taught the audience to distrust the founder. He "smiled crookedly", the smile of a man enjoying his own joke. And his reasoning is sharp. "They were standing by for the point-of-no-return." The authorities had not cut the power during the plugs, the famine, the cattle or the 'impossibles'. They waited, watching, for the moment when the meaning became unmistakable, and they pulled the switch then. "So we must have made it clear." The timing of the censor's cut is proof that the message got through. It is a neat inversion: the enemy's reaction is the best audience research the team will ever get.
Gates is cheerful, as he is throughout: "Here goes", then "Back in business." Allen answers with the technician's warning in two words, "For awhile." The exchange sets the tone for the next movement. Everything that follows on the screen happens on time that is running out.
"Do the best you can," Allen said. He wondered how much of the projection had been understood. "You think we made our Morec?" he asked Sugermann.
Allen
"Our un-Morec," Sugermann said. He smiled crookedly. "They were standing by for the point-of-no-return. So we must have made it clear."
Sugermann
"Here goes," Gates said. The generators were on, and now the overhead lights flickered. "Back in business."
Gates
"For awhile," Allen said.
Allen
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: a backup that cannot carry the load. The technician's report, ten or fifteen minutes to restore and "it won't hold", is the oldest lesson in business continuity. A backup is sized for some service level; when the business tries to run its heaviest workload on it, the backup fails. Banks have formal rules for this now. The UK supervisors' operational resilience policy, in force from 31 March 2022 with a transition that ended on 31 March 2025, requires firms to set impact tolerances for their important business services and to show by testing that they can stay within them in severe but plausible scenarios. The EU's Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), applicable from 17 January 2025, imposes comparable ICT resilience testing. The Telemedia scene shows why the testing matters: the generators exist, everyone knew about them, and nobody had checked whether they could run a transmitter. The scene also contains the case that these frameworks treat as hardest, the deliberate cut by a party with control over shared infrastructure. Gleeby's "independent of city power" was right, and still bought only minutes, because the hostile party could wait outside until the fuel ran out.
"But broiling was favored, I believe."
"The screen of Janet Purcell's television set was small; it was the portable unit that Allen had brought. She lay propped up on the couch in their one-room apartment, waiting for the image to return. Presently it did."
The narrator
The chapter makes the same cut that Chapter 22 made, from the transmitter to a viewer, but the viewer is now Janet. Her set is "small", "the portable unit that Allen had brought": the set he brought home to show her the plug in Chapter 21, in a home that has had no television of its own, since its block took its messages from the domino family downstairs. She is in "their one-room apartment", the flat whose lease has been voided. She "lay propped up on the couch", a posture of illness or exhaustion, and she is "waiting for the image to return." She is the one viewer who knows exactly who is on the other end. "Presently it did."
The picture returns in the middle of a word. "... . d" is the sound of a broken broadcast rendered on the page: an ellipsis, a full stop, a single letter. The rest of the chapter's broadcast is made of fragments like this one. Sugermann's line, "But broiling was favored, I believe", takes up the recipe question from where Chapter 22 left it, as though the panel had gone on talking in the dark. The projection is a recording; while the power was off, the reel did not stop, or the generators restarted it a little further on. The reader cannot tell which, and does not need to.
"... . d," Professor Sugermann was saying. The image faded and darkened, then ebbed into distortion. "But broiling was favored, I believe."
Sugermann, as Professor
"Not according to my information," Doctor Gleeby corrected.
Gleeby, as Doctor
Gleeby disputes the point. The disagreement about cooking methods is the comic peak of the panel's scholarly manner: two experts on air, before the nation, quarrelling politely over whether the founder's enemies were usually broiled.
The narrator names him from Janet's side of the screen: "the moderator, her husband." It is a quiet, strange phrase. She is watching her husband pretend to be a stranger, presenting a cannibal policy on the nation's screens.
Allen moves the discussion from history to policy. The topic is "active assimilation in the present-day world", and the proposal on the table is to revive it "as a punitive policy" against "the current wave of anarchy." This is the hook the plug promised in Chapter 21: "Should Major Streiter's postwar policy of active assimilation be revived to meet the current threat?" The current threat, it is now clear, is people like Allen, the japers and vandals and dissidents. The programme asks the nation whether they should be eaten.
Gleeby first "knocked dottle from his pipe into the ash tray in the center of the table", the academic's pause before an important point; dottle is the unburnt tobacco left in a pipe bowl. Then he takes the cautious position. The policy was "primarily a solution to problems of nutrition", "not, as is often supposed, a weapon to convert hostile elements." The phrase "as is often supposed" is the scholar's device for correcting a popular error that nobody has actually held, since nobody in Morec had heard of the policy a week ago.
Here the satire turns on itself. Gleeby, on a programme conceived by the man who japed the statue, condemns "this really dreadful japery of the Park statue." The phrase is in the tone of every official denunciation of the past two weeks. It is also, as Janet knows, a line written by the japer's team for broadcast on the japer's network. Gleeby's argument against revival is that "we can scarcely be said to suffer from a nutritional problem" with the autofacs delivering food; he is cut off at "After all, the autofac system".
Sugermann interrupts with the hard line. "Historically," he grants, "you may have a point, Doctor. But from the stand‐
"Our discussion," the moderator, her husband, said, "really concerns the use of active assimilation in the present-day world. Now it has been suggested that active assimilation as a punitive policy be revived to deal with the current wave of anarchy. Would you care to comment on that, Doctor Gleeby?"
Allen, as moderator
"We must remember that active assimilation was primarily a solution to problems of nutrition, not, as is often supposed, a weapon to convert hostile elements."
Gleeby, as Doctor
"Naturally I'm gravely concerned with the outbreak of violence and vandalism today, as epitomized by this really dreadful japery of the Park statue, but we can scarcely be said to suffer from a nutritional problem."
Gleeby, as Doctor
"Wouldn't the threat of being boiled and eaten act as a deterrent to their hostile impulses? There would be a strong subconscious inhibitory effect, I'm sure."
Sugermann, as Professor
point of efficacy", and he asks what the effect would be on "these present-day 'impossibles'". The phrase "present-day 'impossibles'" takes the category invented in Chapter 22 for the Major's enemies and applies it to living dissidents. His argument is deterrence: the "threat of being boiled and eaten" would check "hostile impulses", with "a strong subconscious inhibitory effect". The psychological jargon is the point. It makes the most savage proposal in the novel sound like a finding of mental health science, the language of the Resort turned to the Committee's use.
Gates, the lawyer and civic leader, agrees and adds the grievance of the law-and-order citizen: dissidents have been allowed to "run away, hide, take refuge at the Health Resort", to do their mischief "and then escape scot-free". That, he says, "certainly encouraged them to expand their activities." He begins, "Now, if they knew they'd be eaten", and stops. The joke has a sting inside it. The Health Resort, which Allen visited, is the society's official refuge for the maladjusted, the place Myron Mavis railed against in Chapter 3. Gates, who lives on Hokkaido precisely to stay out of the system, is playing the man who wants to close the bolt-holes.
Priar is the dissenting voice, and his argument is the only true thing said on the programme. "the severity of punitive action doesn't decrease the frequency of a given crime." "They once hanged pickpockets, you realize. It had no effect." The example is real history: English law made picking pockets a capital crime, and the story that pickpockets worked the crowds at public hangings of pickpockets was a commonplace of the reformers who argued against it. Priar calls the deterrence argument "quite an outmoded theory". The effect of putting this line in the middle of a satirical broadcast is curious. It means the panel, for one moment, contains a genuine argument, and that the genuine argument is against the proposal. A viewer who followed the debate in good faith would conclude that eating dissidents is cruel and also useless.
"To me," Mr. Gates agreed, "it seems that allowing these anti-social individuals merely to run away, hide, take refuge at the Health Resort, has made it far too easy."
Gates, as lawyer
"It's well known," Mr. Priar said, "that the severity of punitive action doesn't decrease the frequency of a given crime. They once hanged pickpockets, you realize. It had no effect. That's quite an outmoded theory, Mr. Gates."
Priar, as critic
SO WHAT / APPLY IT
Practical angle: certainty, not severity. Priar's point is supported by both history and modern research. In England, Sir Samuel Romilly's Act of 1808 (48 Geo. III c.129) abolished the death penalty for privately stealing from the person, which is to say for picking pockets, and Romilly argued in the Commons, following Beccaria, that it is the certainty of punishment, more than its severity, that makes it effective; he cited figures for 1805 in which 350 people were sentenced to death and 68 executed, a system so erratic that it deterred nobody. The US National Institute of Justice summarised the modern evidence in 2016 in the same terms: the certainty of being caught is a far more powerful deterrent than the severity of the punishment, and increasing severity does little. The same finding shapes how banks and their supervisors design enforcement. A financial crime or conduct regime with rare, enormous penalties and weak detection is the hanging-pickpockets model. Regimes that invest in monitoring, consistent investigation and prompt, predictable consequences, so that a breach is likely to be found and certain to be dealt with, change behaviour far more. The same applies inside the bank to the controls around AI systems: a rule that model misuse will be punished severely if ever discovered matters less than logging and review that make discovery likely.
"a gourmet's delight"
"But, to get back to the main discussion," the moderator said, "are we certain that no nutritional effects would accrue from the eating, rather than the expulsion, of our criminals?"
Allen, as moderator
Allen steers the panel away from Priar's sound argument, as a skilled moderator with an agenda would. His phrase "the eating, rather than the expulsion, of our criminals" sets eating beside the existing punishment, expulsion, as if they were two options in a policy review. The word "expulsion" points at the society's real practice: dissidents are sent out of the system, to the Resort or beyond. He asks Sugermann, "as an historian", about "the general public attitude" toward "the use, in everyday cookery, of boiled enemy." The phrase "boiled enemy" appears here for the first time. It sounds like a menu item, and it will become the chapter's refrain.
The programme cuts to a display of props. The objects are listed as the camera would show them, one after another: "six-foot broiling racks", "huge human-sized platters", "various cutlery", then fragments, "Jars of spices. Immense-pronged forks. Knives. Recipe books." These are presented as "historical relics", and the term matters. Hokkaido is full of real relics, the magazines, records and books Gates sells. The team has manufactured relics of a history that never happened, and shot them with the same reverence a museum programme gives to real ones. Where the props came from, in a four-day production schedule, the novel does not say.
"On the TV screen appeared a collection of historical relics: six-foot broiling racks, huge human-sized platters, various cutlery. Jars of spices. Immense-pronged forks. Knives. Recipe books."
The narrator
"It was clearly an art," Professor Sugermann said. "Properly prepared, boiled enemy was a gourmet's delight. We have the Major's own words on this subject."
Sugermann, as Professor
Sugermann answers as a historian of taste. "It was clearly an art." "Properly prepared, boiled enemy was a gourmet's delight." And he claims a primary source: "We have the Major's own words on this subject." The camera shows him again as he "unfolded his notes." The Major's own words are never quoted. The notes are a prop, like the forks.
The claims escalate. The Major in old age ate "only, or nearly only, boiled enemy". The self-correction, "or nearly only", is a parody of the careful historian who will not overstate. Mrs. Streiter's recipes, mentioned in Chapter 22, are now "among the finest extant", the language of a cookery scholar ranking old cookbooks.
Sugermann cites an authority, "E. B. Erickson", a name with initials, the form of a scholar the audience is expected to recognise. Nobody named Erickson appears anywhere else in the novel, and the figure is as invented as the man. "at least six hundred fully-grown 'impossibles'", eaten "personally" by the Major and his "immediate family": the adjective "fully-grown" implies, horribly, that the estimate excludes children. "So there you have the more or less official opinion." The phrase "more or less official" is the right blend of authority and vagueness: official enough to be believed, vague enough that nobody can ask which office.
"Toward the end of his life the Major ate only, or nearly only, boiled enemy. It was a great favorite of his wife's, and, as we've said, her recipes are regarded as among the finest extant."
Sugermann, as Professor
"E. B. Erickson once estimated that Major Streiter and his immediate family must have personally assimilated at least six hundred fully-grown 'impossibles.' So there you have the more or less official opinion."
Sugermann, as Professor
CONTRAST
| Claim on screen | Device | What it does to a viewer |
|---|---|---|
| "But broiling was favored, I believe." | Scholarly hedge | Makes cooking method a matter of academic dispute |
| "Not according to my information" | Expert disagreement | Implies both experts take the eating for granted |
| "this really dreadful japery of the Park statue" | Official denunciation | Ties the policy to the current threat; the japer condemns himself |
| "a strong subconscious inhibitory effect" | Mental health jargon | Makes cannibalism sound like therapy |
| "They once hanged pickpockets" | Historical counter-example | The one true argument, against the policy |
| Broiling racks, platters, forks, recipe books | Museum display | Gives physical evidence to an invented history |
| "We have the Major's own words" | Primary source claimed, not quoted | Authority without content |
| "E. B. Erickson once estimated" | Named authority | A number with a name attached is believed |
| "the more or less official opinion" | Vague officialdom | Believable, unaskable |
"Whamp! the TV screen went"
"Whamp! the TV screen went, and again the image died. A kaleidoscopic procession of colors, patterns, dots passed rapidly; from the speaker emerged squawks of protest, whines, squeals."
The narrator
The second "Whamp!" echoes the one that ended Chapter 22 in Mrs. Birmingham's sitting room. This time the generators are failing, and the narrator describes the failure as Janet sees andhearsit: "A kaleidoscopic procession of colors, patterns, dots", and from the speaker "squawks of protest, whines, squeals." The sounds are animal sounds. The phrase "squawks of protest" lets the machine itself seem to object to what it is being made to carry, or to being cut off; the reader may take it either way.
From here the broadcast arrives in pieces. Dick builds the next page out of fragments separated by static, and the effect is more powerful than a continuous transcript would be. The viewer at home, and the reader, must assemble the programme from what gets through.
The first fragment carries the eating down the generations. "a tradition in the Streiter family": the Cohorts are the Major's male descendants, and the Committee's leading figure, Mrs. Hoyt, is his descendant too. "The Major's grandson is said to have expressed great preference for..." The sentence breaks off before the object, and the viewer supplies it. The phrase "is said to have" is gossip dressed as history.
"... a tradition in the Streiter family. The Major's grandson is said to have expressed great preference for..."
Fragment
"... so I cannot over-emphasize my support of this program. The effects"
Fragment
"... would be an object lesson as well as the contemporary restoration of boiled enemy to its proper place on"
Fragment
The second and third fragments come from the policy side of the debate, probably from Gates. "so I cannot over-emphasize my support of this program": the speaker now wholly supports revival. Then, after "A sudden roar of static", the case for it: it "would be an object lesson", which is the deterrence argument again, "as well as the contemporary restoration of boiled enemy to its proper place on", and the line breaks off at the word that would have been the table or the menu. The phrase "its proper place" is the language of heritage, of restoring a lost tradition. The joke is the same one the whole programme has been making: any practice, given a founder's endorsement and a tone of reverence, can be presented as a heritage worth reviving.
The fourth exchange is the most daring part of the programme. The panel turns from policy to the present case, apparently the japery of the statue: "may be the test one way or another. Were there others?" The moderator answers, in Allen's own voice, "Several, supposedly now being rounded up." Then someone exclaims "But they caught the ringleader!" The programme has written the capture of the ringleader into its own fiction, and the ringleader of the real japery is the man reading the line. Allen, as moderator, is announcing that the japers are being rounded up while he is japing. Within an hour the line will be close to true. The fiction predicts its own consequence, and this is one of the places where the novel's long joke about seeing ahead touches the surface: Malparto in Chapter 17 thought Allen might be precognitive. The text makes no such claim here, and the line is better read as Allen's dark joke about what he expects.
The programme's last device is a fake news flash. A "news announcer" stands "at the table with the four participants". The narrator now gives the moderator his real name, "Mr. Allen Purcell", in the tone of a newspaper caption, so that from Janet's point of view the disguise is dropped. Whether the name was announced on screen or is Janet's recognition the
"... may be the test one way or another. Were there others?"
Fragment
Allen's voice was heard: "Several, supposedly now being rounded up."
Allen, as moderator
"But they caught the ringleader! And Mrs. Hoyt herself has expressed"
Fragment
"More interference. The screen showed a news announcer standing at the table with the four participants. Mr. Allen Purcell, the moderator, was examining a news dispatch."
The narrator
text does not say. He is "examining a news dispatch", the way an anchor reacts to breaking news.
This is the knife. The dispatch claims that Mrs. Ida Pease Hoyt, the Committee's head and the Major's descendant, has tasted "a carefully-prepared sample of boiled conspirator", cooked "in the actual historic vessels employed by her family", and has pronounced it "highly savory" and "fit to grace the tables of", where the sentence dies. "boiled conspirator" is a step past "boiled enemy": the enemy is now the conspirator, the word the state uses for japers. The dispatch puts the most powerful woman in Morec at the table, eating the dissidents of her own day.
Two facts make the jape sharper. First, the segment was recorded before Mrs. Hoyt came to the barricade that very evening, so the team prepared it before they knew she would offer Allen her bargain. When she said the Committee would give him anything to stop, this was already on the reel. Second, the dispatch is the one part of the programme aimed at a living person by name. The rest mocks the founder, who is long dead and whose image is the state's property. This mocks the woman who holds power now. It is the line the authorities were most anxious to cut, and the image dies before the end of the sentence.
"Again the image died, and this time for good." Then "a mysterious voice, not part of the discussion" speaks, and its message is the state's whole answer to the programme. It calls the cut "technical difficulties". It "suggested" that viewers turn off their sets, which is a polite form of a command. It promises "no further transmission tonight." The statement "was repeated every few minutes." And the narrator identifies its tone: "It had the harsh overtones of the Cohorts of Major Streiter." Sugermann's guess from the window is confirmed by ear.
The phrase "technical difficulties" deserves a moment. The Morec state, which has packaged every moral for a century, has no packet ready for this. Its response is the oldest form of censorship, the pretended breakdown, and it is delivered in a voice that does not hide what it is. The repetition every few minutes is the sound of authority with nothing to say.
Janet reads it at once: "the powers had regained control." The phrase "the powers" is vague and exact. She does not name the Committee or the Cohorts; she names the force that runs things. Her next thought is for Allen: "She wondered if her husband was all right."
"... assimilation in the actual historic vessels employed by her family. After tasting a carefully-prepared sample of boiled conspirator, Mrs. Ida Pease Hoyt has pronounced the dish 'highly savory,' and 'fit to grace the tables of"
The news announcer
"Because of technical difficulties it is suggested that viewers turn off their sets for the balance of the evening. There will be no further transmission tonight."
The voice
"Janet, propped up on the couch, understood that the powers had regained control. She wondered if her husband was all right."
The narrator
"Technical difficulties," the official voice said. "Turn off your sets."
The voice
"She left hers on, and waited."
The narrator
The voice drops its politeness: "Turn off your sets." The order is clipped now, the "it is suggested" gone. Janet's answer is the smallest act of disobedience in the novel, and one of the most moving. "She left hers on, and waited." Six words. She is the woman who, on the night the campaign was launched in Chapter 21, told him she was glad he was doing this because it meant so much to him, and then asked what would happen afterward. Now, alone, she refuses the state's instruction and keeps her eyes on the screen where her husband was. It is a private act, invisible to anyone, and the narrator lets it stand as the last word of the broadcast.
CONTRAST
| Fragment, in order | Likely speaker | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| "... . d" | Sugermann | The broadcast resumes in mid-word |
| "But broiling was favored, I believe." | Sugermann | Cooking method as scholarly dispute |
| "a tradition in the Streiter family" | Unclear | Eating passes down the family line, to the grandson |
| "so I cannot over-emphasize my support of this program" | Probably Gates | Full support for revival |
| "would be an object lesson" | Same speaker | Deterrence, and restoration as heritage |
| "may be the test one way or another. Were there others?" | Unclear | The present japery as the test case |
| "Several, supposedly now being rounded up." | Allen, as moderator | The japer announces the round-up of japers |
| "But they caught the ringleader!" | Unclear | The fiction captures its author |
| Mrs. Hoyt "has pronounced the dish 'highly savory,'" | News announcer | The living head of the Committee at the table |
| "Turn off your sets." | The Cohorts' voice | The state's whole reply |
"We did our job; we put the japery through."
"That's it," Allen said.
Allen
The scene returns to the dark office. "That's it." Allen's two words close the broadcast as flatly as the voice did.
Sugermann, unseen, gives the team's verdict: "We got it over, though. They cut us off, but not in time." It is the same reasoning as "So we must have made it clear", now with the evid‐
From the darkness Sugermann said: "We got it over, though. They cut us off, but not in time."
Sugermann
ence of the second cut. The team has measured success by the censor's response twice.
The office "re-emerged" by small flames, the same light that took Allen down the stairs. He feels "buoyed up with triumph", an unusual state for him in this novel, and says so plainly: "We did our job; we put the japery through." The phrase "put the japery through" is a production phrase, the way one puts a packet through. Allen speaks of his rebellion in the language of his trade. "We might as well go home" is almost comic in its innocence, as though the evening were an ordinary late night at the office.
Somebody corrects him. The speaker is printed as "Coates", which is the name Allen used for himself at the Resort and the name on the ident card he found in his wallet in the Pepper Lane world of Chapter 13. No one called Coates is in the room. The voice is laconic and wry, and the people in the room are Gleeby, Sugermann, Gates and Priar, so the name is very probably a misprint, perhaps for Gates. The text leaves it as printed. What the voice says is clear enough: the Cohorts are "hanging around out there, waiting for you." "The finger's on you, Allen." The idiom is gangster slang for being marked. The staff understood before Allen did that the triumph has an address.
Allen's first thought is for Janet: "If they wanted him they'd certainly try there." He has put her at risk by going home to the same flat every night, a risk he did not plan for.
Sugermann has a car ready, "a Getabout you dan use" (the source misprints can), and gives Gates the job of taking Allen to it.
Allen refuses, and the narrator gives his reason: "Especially on Harry Priar and Joe Gleeby; they had no Hokkaido to lose themselves in." The sentence sorts the team by vulnerability. Sugermann and Gates are Hokkaido men, at home on the poisoned island outside the Morec order, and can disappear into it. Priar and Gleeby are ordinary citizens with blocks, leases and wardens. "I can't leave you to be picked off." Gleeby's full name, Joe Gleeby, appears here, one of the few times the text uses it.
Cigarette lighters and matches came on, and the office re-emerged. Allen felt buoyed up with triumph. "We might as well go home. We did our job; we put the japery through."
Allen
"May be sort of hard to get home," Coates said. "The Cohorts are hanging around out there, waiting for you. The finger's on you, Allen."
"Coates"
Allen thought of Janet alone in the apartment. If they wanted him they'd certainly try there. "I should go after my wife," he said to Sugermann.
Allen
"Downstairs," Sugermann said, "is a Getabout you dan use. Gates, get down there with him; show him where it is."
Sugermann
"No," Allen said. "I can't walk out on you people."
Allen
"The biggest favor you can do us," Gleeby said, "is to get out of here. They don't care about us; they know who thought this japery up."
Gleeby
Gleeby, the deaf man, makes the decisive argument, and it is the logic of power in Morec. "They don't care about us; they know who thought this japery up." The state wants the author. The staff are safer when he is gone, because the Cohorts will follow him. Then Gleeby "shook his head" and recites the night's highlights like a man reviewing a show he cannot quite believe he was in: "Cannibalism. Gourmet's delight. Mrs. Streiter's own recipes." And then the order, "You better get moving."
Priar, the loyal assistant from the first chapters, puts it as a compliment and a warning together. "That's the price you pay for talent. It shows a mile off." The idea runs back through the whole novel. Allen's talent got him the directorship, and the same talent makes him unmistakable as the author of the jape. In Chapter 3 Allen distrusted the domino method because one unique individual could foul it up. He is that individual now, and talent is how the Cohorts will find him.
Sugermann "propelled him to the office door" with "a firm grip on Allen's shoulder". His phrase for the Cohorts is the strongest in the chapter: "the wrath of God." It is a joke with an edge. The Cohorts serve a state founded on a moral code with the founder in place of a god, and Sugermann, the Hokkaido sceptic, names them in the vocabulary of the old religion.
On the stairs, "the long flight", Gates asks the simplest question, "You happy?" Allen's answer is honest: "Yes, except for Janet." Then a rare passage of open feeling: he "would miss the people he had assembled", and "It had been satisfactory and wonderful to concoct the japery with Gates and Sugermann, Gleeby and Priar." The words "satisfactory and wonderful" are an odd pair, the first a manager's word and the second a child's, and together they describe what the work was for Allen: a job done properly and a joy. In a novel about a man whose job was moral packaging, the one piece of work he loves is the one that undoes it. The four names, in two pairs, are his team, the first group of people in the book he chose for himself.
Priar added: "That's the price you pay for talent. It shows a mile off."
Priar
"Show him the Getabout," he ordered Gates. "But keep him down while you're out there; the Cohorts are the wrath of God."
Sugermann
As Allen and Gates descended the long flight of stairs to the ground floor, Gates said: "You happy?"
Gates
"Yes, except for Janet." And he would miss the people he had assembled. It had been satisfactory and wonderful to concoct the japery with Gates and Sugermann, Gleeby and Priar.
Allen
"Maybe they caught her and boiled her." Gates giggled, and the match he held swayed. "That isn't probable. Don't worry about it."
Gates
Gates cannot stop joking: "Maybe they caught her and boiled her." He "giggled, and the match he held swayed", the flame trembling with his laughter. He takes it back at once, "That isn't probable. Don't worry about it." The joke shows how quickly the programme's language has entered the team's own speech. Gates, of all of them, enjoys the japery most purely; he has nothing to lose and treats the chase as a game.
Allen admits the gap in his plan. "he wished he had planned for the Committee's prompt reaction." The man who planned everything else, the follow-ups, the repeat at ten, the newspapers, had no plan for what the Committee would do. "They weren't exactly asleep." He underestimated the opponent's speed. It is the one strategic self-criticism he makes, and it is understated, as his self-criticisms tend to be.
"A herd of technicians" comes down past them "shining flashlights", chanting "Get out" and "Get out, get out." The word "herd" is the narrator's, and it prepares the cattle on Mavis's planet. "The racket of their descent echoed and faded." Gates sums it up with a snicker: "All finished," then "Here we go."
The lobby is the strangest scene of the evening. The staff who stayed for the japery are leaving through the barricade they built, and the mood is festive: "a confusion of catcalls and fun", "party-like". The "catcalls" might be aimed at the Cohorts waiting outside or might be ordinary horseplay; the text leaves it open. The scene shows that the japery was a shared pleasure for the whole building, not Allen's alone, and that for a few minutes the building felt like a party. "but now it was time to leave."
Outside, the narrator turns back for a last look at the building where Allen has worked since the first chapter: "huge and somber, deprived of its power", and then the single word after the colon, "extinguished." The word fits a building with its lights off and an institution that has lost its voice. Telemedia
He wasn't worried about that, but he wished he had planned for the Committee's prompt reaction. "They weren't exactly asleep," he murmured.
Allen
A herd of technicians raced past them, shining flashlights ahead along the stairs. "Get out," they chanted. "Get out, get out."
The technicians
"T-M employees milled in the darkness; some were stepping through the barricade out into the evening lane. The headlights of Getabouts flashed, and voices called back and forth, a confusion of catcalls and fun. The indistinct activity was party-like; but now it was time to leave."
The narrator
"Behind them the Telemedia building was huge and somber, deprived of its power: extinguished."
The narrator
was the society's mouth, and the state has shut it to stop its own message being contradicted.
The car is "moist with night mist", a quiet sensory detail before the chase.
"The parked Getabout was moist with night mist as Gates and Allen climbed into it and slammed the doors."
The narrator
"Boil, bake, fry!"
"I'll drive," Allen said. He snapped on the motor, and the Getabout glided steamily out onto the lane. After a block he switched on the headlights.
Allen
Allen takes the tiller. The car "glided steamily": Getabouts are small steam cars, and the adverb keeps the period strangeness of this future, with its steam power and its tillers. He drives a block in the dark before he puts the headlights on, an instinct of concealment.
The pursuit begins at once. Gates greets it "whooping with glee", and his shout is printed as "Here they come" followed, after a source dash, by "let's go!" For Gates the whole evening has been a game, and the chase is the best part.
The comedy of the chase is in the numbers. The getaway car's "top speed" is "perhaps thirty-five miles an hour", and still "Pedestrians ran wildly." A society that has made its cars slow and its lanes crowded produces a car chase at the speed of a suburban bus. The scale fits the novel's world, where the largest violence is usually a warden's report.
In the mirror Allen sees three faces, and their combination is one of the chapter's quiet revelations. "Ralf Hadler was driving": the young Cohort messenger of Chapter 3, Frost's distant cousin-in-law. "Beside him was Fred Luddy", the man Allen fired, who came back with Blake-Moffet's flash camera in Chapter 17. "And in the back seat was Tony Blake of Blake-Moffet." Blake, the head of the rival agency, rides in a Cohort car with a Cohort at the wheel. Two hours earlier Mrs. Hoyt offered to expose Blake-Moffet for their part in the frame-up. Now the rival agency and the Major's enforcers are in the same small car chasing the same man. The offer was a bargaining chip; the alliance is the reality. The novel does not say how Blake came to be there, or whether the Committee asked him; it simply puts him in the back seat.
"As he turned at an intersection another Getabout rolled out after him. Gates saw it and began whooping with glee."
The narrator
"Allen pushed the Getabout to its top speed, perhaps thirty-five miles an hour. Pedestrians ran wildly."
The narrator
"In the rear-view mirror he could make out faces within the pursuing Get-about. Ralf Hadler was driving. Beside him was Fred Luddy. And in the back seat was Tony Blake of Blake-Moffet."
The narrator
Leaning out, Gates shouted back: "Boil, bake, fry! Boil, bake, fry! Try and catch,us!"
Gates
Gates turns the programme into a taunt: "Boil, bake, fry! Boil, bake, fry!" The chant is a children's rhyme made out of the recipe dispute, and it tells the pursuers that the japers know exactly what the state would like to do with them. "Try and catch,us!" (the comma is a source misprint) is the playground dare that finishes it.
The answer is a pistol. "His face expressionless" recalls Hadler's first appearance, where his face was "as expressionless as sand." The young man who froze in a slow collision in Chapter 3 now fires a gun at a moving car with the same blank face. The shot "whistled past Gates, who ducked instantly in." It is the first gunshot in the novel. Morec, which governs by reports and wardens and shame, has reached the point where its messenger shoots.
Allen's plan is improvised and precise: at "a sharp curve" they will stop and leave the car. "We're going to jump" is corrected in the next breath by "We have to stop first", a comic deflation: at thirty-five miles an hour one cannot jump without stopping.
Gates curls into "a fetal posture", and the car performs its own drama: Allen "slammed down on the brake; the little car screamed and shuddered, bucked from side to side, and then wandered tottering into a rail." The verbs give the Getabout a body: it screams, shudders, bucks, wanders and totters. Gates "half-rolled, half-fell" from the door, "struck the pavement and bounded to his feet." Allen follows, "Dizzy, his head ringing".
The pursuing car "hurtled around the curve and without slowing" and hit the stalled one. The narrator's aside, printed between dashes in the source, is the funniest callback in the book: "Hadler was still the bum driver". In Chapter 3 Hadler drove Frost, Mavis and Allen into a slow collision with a Pure Food and Drug League car, letting the tiller slide between his hands. He has not improved. "Parts of Getabout flew in all directions", "the three occupants disappeared in the rubbish", and the gun "bounced noisily from a lamppost." Cohort, informer and rival executive vanish together into a heap of steam-car parts.
"His face expressionless, Hadler lifted a pistol and fired. The shot whistled past Gates, who ducked instantly in."
The narrator
"We're going to jump," Allen said. The Getabout was nearing a sharp curve. "Grab hold." He forced the tiller as far as it would go. "We have to stop first."
Allen
"Gates pulled his knees up and wrapped himself head-down in a fetal posture."
The narrator
"Parts of Getabout flew in all directions; the three occupants disappeared in the rubbish. Hadler's gun skidded across the lane and bounced noisily from a lamppost."
The narrator
"See you," Gates panted to Allen, already loping off. He grinned back over his shoulder. "Boil, bake, fry. They won't get us. Say hello to Janet."
Gates
Gates leaves the story as he lived in it, grinning. "See you", "Boil, bake, fry. They won't get us. Say hello to Janet." He is "already loping off", and he is the only member of the team whose escape the novel shows. Where he goes is left unsaid; Hokkaido is the obvious guess, but the text does not say it.
This is one of the chapter's most important small moments. Hadler crawls out, finds his gun, "inspected it", "lifted it uncertainly in Allen's direction", and puts it away. The word "uncertainly" carries the meaning. A few minutes ago he fired at a moving car with an expressionless face. Now, on foot, facing a man walking away among pedestrians "who seemed to be everywhere", he cannot do it. The novel does not say why: the crowd, the shock of the crash, or a scruple. "Allen continued on, and the figure of Hadler fell away." The state's enforcer is reduced to a figure in the gloom, and the Cohorts do not get their man here. They will get him later only because he waits for them.
"Behind him Hadler had emerged from the wreckage of the two Getabouts; he picked up his gun, inspected it, lifted it uncertainly in Allen's direction, and then shoved it away inside his coat."
The narrator
CASE / SCENE
Critical lens: why the chase is comic. A darker writer could have made the chase a nightmare, and the stakes justify it: a gun is fired at Allen's companion, and the regime has just been accused of eating its enemies. Dick keeps it in the register of slapstick. The speed is thirty-five miles an hour, the jump requires a stop first, the pursuers are the same bad driver and the same two rivals, the wreck turns three men into rubbish, and the gun bounces off a lamppost. The comedy is a judgment on the regime. Morec is frightening in its control of daily life, the wardens, the reports, the leases, but when it has to act physically it is clumsy, slow and faintly absurd. That fits the novel's view that the real power of the system lies in shame and self-policing, and that a man who has stopped being ashamed is hard to stop by force. The cost is that the reader is never quite afraid for Allen in this scene, which makes his final choice, to go back and give himself up, the one moment of genuine danger, and a chosen one.
"Morec had gobbled greedily at the human soul."
"When he reached the apartment, he found Janet fully dressed, her face white with animation. The door was locked, and he had to wait while she untangled the chain."
The narrator
Janet has been ready. She is "fully dressed", the woman who was lying on the couch half an hour ago, and her face is "white with animation": the whiteness of excitement this time, where in earlier chapters her pallor was the sign of her depression. She has locked the door and put on the chain. She left her set on and waited, and when the image went she got ready to leave. The narrator does not say that she guessed what would happen, but her readiness says it.
"Are you hurt?", seeing "blood on his cheek" from the crash. "Jarred a little." He takes her out at once: "They'll be here any minute. Thank God it's night." The darkness that began in the Park on the night of the jape protects them again.
Janet's question on the stairs is the question every viewer was meant to ask, and it comes from the one viewer who knew it was a jape. "Major Streiter didn't really eat people, did he?" The programme worked so well that even the producer's wife needs to check. The question is the plainest evidence the novel offers that the un-Morec got through.
Allen's answer, "Not literally", is honest. Then the narrator gives the thought behind it, and this is the closest the novel comes to stating its own moral: "But in a sense, a very real sense, it was true. Morec had gobbled greedily at the human soul." The programme was a lie about the Major's diet and a truth about his system. The figure of eating, which the japery made literal and absurd, returns as metaphor. Morec consumed people: their privacy, their marriages through block meetings, their honesty through reporting, their joy through the moral packets. The repetition "in a sense, a very real sense" has the tone of a man convincing himself, and the reader may hear in it Allen's need for the jape to be more than a jape. The text lets the sentence stand without commentary.
"To the field": the space field, where ships leave for the colonies. "Fortunately it wasn't far." The narrator then makes the observation about Janet that recasts her whole condition through the novel. "She seemed in good spirits, nervous and
"Are you hurt?" she asked, seeing blood on his cheek.
Janet
"Jarred a little." He took hold of her arm and led her out into the hall. "They'll be here any minute. Thank God it's night."
Allen
"What was that?" Janet asked, as they hurried downstairs. "Major Streiter didn't really eat people, did he?"
Janet
"Not literally," he said. But in a sense, a very real sense, it was true. Morec had gobbled greedily at the human soul.
Allen
KEY INSIGHT
The novel's moral in one line. The chapter states it once, in Allen's thought after Janet's question: the Major did not eat people "Not literally", but "Morec had gobbled greedily at the human soul." The whole broadcast was a true metaphor told as a false history. The cannibal feast was invented; the consumption it stood for was real. This is the sense in which the jape was serious.
"How far are we going?" Janet asked.
Janet
"To the field," he grunted, holding on tightly to her.
Allen
excited, and not depressed. Perhaps much of her depression had come from sheer boredom... from the ultimate emptiness of a drab world." The diagnosis is tentative ("Perhaps"), and it is offered by the narrator, close to Allen's view. It suggests that the illness she has carried through the book, the pallor and the despair, was less a private affliction than a response to Morec itself, "the ultimate emptiness of a drab world". Danger and purpose cure her within an hour. The thought links her to Gretchen Malparto's view in Chapter 17 that a sense of humour is the mark of a balanced person in an unbalanced world: the healthy response to a drab world is to break it.
"Half a planet"
"There, outlined with lights, was the great inter-S ship preparing for its flight from the Sol System to the Sirius System. Passengers were clustered at the foot of the lift, saying goodbye."
The narrator
They trot onto the field "Holding hands", "gasping for breath." The ship is "outlined with lights", the one lit thing in a city whose broadcasting building has gone dark. It is "the great inter-S ship", inter-S meaning interstellar, bound "from the Sol System to the Sirius System." In Chapter 4 Allen told Janet that Mavis, after resigning, had a piece of planet in the Sirius System, where they were great on cattle. This is the night he leaves.
Mavis is drawn in the same sour tones as always: "dour, slumped-over", "in a heavy overcoat", he "peered sourly" and turns away. Allen shouts "Stop!", reaches the edge of the platform "wheezing", and states the plan as fact: "We're going along."
Mavis's "bloodshot eyes" suggest a man who has been drinking or not sleeping, or both, before leaving the planet where he spent his career. His "Are you?" is dry and noncommittal.
Allen's "You own a whole planet" is corrected with Mavis's usual precision: "Half a planet." The exchange is comic and generous at once. Mavis never says no.
Running across the gravel field, Allen shouted: "Mavis! Wait for us!"
Allen
"Among the passengers stood a dour, slumped-over man in a heavy overcoat. Myron Mavis glanced up, peered sourly."
The narrator
Mavis scrutinized the two of them with bloodshot eyes. "Are you?"
Mavis
"You've got room," Allen said. "You own a whole planet. Come on, Myron. We've got to leave."
Allen
"Half a planet," Mavis corrected.
Mavis
"Cattle, mostly," Mavis said. "Orchards, plenty of cachinery [sic] crying to be used. Lots of work. You can tear down mountains and drain swamps. You'll both sweat; you won't be sitting around sun-bathing."
Mavis
Janet asks, gasping, "What's it like?" and "Is it nice, there?" Mavis answers with a recruiting speech in reverse, all hardship. "Cattle, mostly." "Orchards", and machinery (printed as "cachinery [sic]" in the source, with the editor's mark) "crying to be used." "Lots of work." "You can tear down mountains and drain swamps." "You'll both sweat; you won't be sitting around sun-bathing." The last clause lands on a sore point. When Allen came back from the Resort he said he had not adjusted to Other World, "Just a lot of people lounging around sun-bathing." Mavis offers the opposite of the Resort's ease, and the opposite of Morec's packaged virtue: physical work with a visible result.
"Exactly what we want." The answer fits the man who, in Chapter 9, sat on Hokkaido listening to boys explain why they wanted to go out where something was going on. Work that changes the land is exactly what Morec could not give him.
"In the darkness above them a mechanical voice intoned" the boarding call. It is the second disembodied voice of the evening, after the Cohorts' order to turn off sets, and it is impersonal where that one was harsh.
Mavis takes charge with a smuggler's practicality. He loads them with his own luggage, a "suitcase" for Allen and "a box tied with twine" for Janet, so that they look like travellers. "keep your mouths shut", "let me do the talking." The man who resigned as Director of Telemedia, leaving the job to Allen, is willing to smuggle a wanted man off the planet. He has already agreed, without saying yes.
Janet joins in the game with real delight: "Son and daughter", the cover story, then "You'll take care of us, won't you? We'll be as quiet as mice." She is "Breathless, laughing", she "hugged Allen and then Mavis", and her last line before everything changes is printed as "Here we go" and, after a source dash, "we're leaving!" It is the happiest Janet has been in the book.
"Fine," Allen said. "Exactly what we want."
Allen
"All passengers step onto lift. All visitors leave the field."
A mechanical voice
"Take this," Mavis instructed, pushing a suitcase into Allen's hands. "You, too." He handed Janet a box tied with twine. "And keep your mouths shut. If anybody asks you anything, let me do the talking."
Mavis
"Son and daughter," Janet said, pressing against him and holding onto her husband's hand. "You'll take care of us, won't you? We'll be as quiet as mice."
Janet
CONTRAST
| What Mavis offers | What Morec offered |
|---|---|
| "Cattle, mostly" | Domestic grass guarded like a jewel; cattle mentioned only in the jape's famine |
| "Lots of work" | Moral packaging, reports and block meetings |
| "You can tear down mountains and drain swamps." | A flat city in concentric zones around the spire |
| "You'll both sweat" | Other World, where people lounge around sunbathing |
| "Half a planet" | A one-room apartment on a voided lease |
| "let me do the talking" | A warden who does the talking for the block |
"We can't leave."
"At the edge of the field, at the railing, was a clump of shapes. Clutching Mavis' suitcase, Allen looked back and saw the teen-agers. There they were, clustered in the usual small, dark knot. Silent, as always, and following the progress of the ship."
The narrator
The turn of the novel comes from one backward glance. At the railing is "a clump of shapes", and Allen sees "the teen-agers". They are "clustered in the usual small, dark knot", "Silent, as always". The words "usual" and "as always" tell the reader that Allen has seen them there before, many times. They are the young people who come to the field to watch the ships leave, the children of Morec who have nowhere to go.
The narrator enters their silent imaginations. "Weighing, speculating, imagining", "picturing the colony." The questions are theirs: "Was it crops? Was it a planet of oranges? Was it a world of growing plants, hills and pastures and herds". The "planet of oranges" reaches back to Chapter 9, when two boys at an autofac station on Hokkaido told Allen about the colonies, Bellatrix 7 for tungsten, Sirius 9 for walnuts, Sirius 8 whose oranges died of mealy bug blight, and explained why they wanted to go: "Out. Where it's open. Where something's going on." In that chapter Allen thought that "Morec wasn't natural. As a way of life it had to be learned." The teen-agers at the rail are the same young people, still watching. "Cattle, in this case." The narrator answers for them, with Mavis's word.
"The kids would know." The passage ends on the image of watching so long that speech is unnecessary, and this is the heart of the choice Allen makes. The teen-agers do not leave.
"Weighing, speculating, imagining where it was going... picturing the colony. Was it crops? Was it a planet of oranges? Was it a world of growing plants, hills and pastures and herds of sheep, goats, cattle, pigs? Cattle, in this case."
The narrator
"The kids would know. They would be saying it now, speaking it back and forth to one another. Or not speaking it. Not having to, because they had watched so long."
The narrator
They watch other people leave. Allen, with Mavis's suitcase in his hand, is about to become one more of the people they watch going.
Three words. The narrator gives no reasoning before them; the reasoning is the paragraph about the teen-agers. Janet, tugging, "We have to stay on the lift; it's going up." Mavis: "Ye gods!" and "Changed your mind?"
He puts down the suitcase, takes the box from Janet, and gives the decision its shape: "We're going back." "Later, maybe. When we're finished here." "We still have something to do." He does not say what. The reader learns it in the last paragraph.
Mavis's "Lunacy on top of lunacy" builds on his phone call that very evening, when he wished Allen luck on his lunacy. The broadcast was the first lunacy; turning back is the second. Allen's reply is the most confident line he speaks to his old boss: "No ... And you know it isn't" (the dots mark where the narrator's tag intervenes in the source). He claims that Mavis, under the sourness, agrees.
Mavis understands at once what the decision is about, which is the proof that Allen's claim was right: "You can't do anything for those kids." Allen's answer is modest and exact. "I can stay with them." "And I can make my feelings clear." The narrator adds "That much, at least." He does not claim he can free them, change Morec, or win. He can refuse to be one more person who leaves, and he can say aloud what he thinks. The phrase "make my feelings clear" recalls Sugermann's "So we must have made it clear" at the start of the chapter. The broadcast made the un-Morec clear; Allen's next act will make his own position clear.
Mavis "threw up his arms in disgust and dismissal" and says "It's your decision", "The hell with you. I don't even know what you're talking about." The narrator contradicts him immediately: "But the expression on his face showed that he
"We can't leave," Allen said.
Allen
"We're going back," Allen said. He set down Mavis' suitcase and took the package from Janet's hands. "Later, maybe. When we're finished here. We still have something to do."
Allen
"Lunacy," Mavis said. "Lunacy on top of lunacy."
Mavis
"No," Allen said. "And you know it isn't."
Allen
"You can't do anything for those kids," Mavis said to him.
Mavis
"I can stay with them," Allen said. "And I can make my feelings clear." That much, at least.
Allen
"I wash my hands of the whole business. Do what you think is best."
Mavis
did." Then "I wash my hands of the whole business." The phrase is Pilate's gesture from the Gospel of Matthew, the governor washing his hands before the crowd to disclaim responsibility for an execution he allows. Dick may intend the echo or not; the text does not mark it. What it does mark is the gap between Mavis's words and his face. He knows, and he cannot go back himself.
Janet's consent is the most moving line she speaks. A minute ago she was hugging Mavis and shouting that they were leaving. Now: "All right ... Let's go back. Let's get it over with. As long as we have to." She does not argue. She does not understand fully, since she has just whispered "What is it? What's wrong?", but she accepts Allen's "have to" as hers. "Let's get it over with" is the phrase of someone facing something unpleasant and certain, and it tells the reader that she knows what going back means.
Allen asks Mavis to "keep a place for us". Mavis, "Sighing", says "Yes, I'll be expecting you." Allen warns "It may not be for awhile." Mavis's answer is a promise and a farewell: "But I'll see both of you", a kiss on Janet's cheek, a handshake "very formally, and with emphasis", and "When the time comes." The formality is a sign of respect. The sour old man salutes them in the only way he knows. "Good luck." His voice "followed after them, and then was lost in the murmur of machinery." Mavis leaves the novel inside the noise of the ship.
"All right," Janet said. "Let's go back. Let's get it over with. As long as we have to."
Janet
"You'll keep a place for us?" Allen asked Mavis.
Allen
Mavis thumped him on the shoulder. "But I'll see both of you." He kissed Janet on the cheek, and then very formally, and with emphasis, he shook hands with both of them. "When the time comes."
Mavis
CASE / SCENE
Critical lens: the refusal of exile. Many dystopias of the period end in escape or defeat: the hero gets out, or the system breaks him. Dick refuses both. The escape is offered in full, with a planet, a protector and a cover story, and Allen turns it down at the foot of the lift. The reason is the teen-agers, and the shape of the reasoning matters. He does not believe he can save them ("You can't do anything for those kids" goes uncontested on the practical point). He chooses to share their situation and to speak. That makes the ending a moral act more than a political one. Readers have reasonably asked whether it is also a futile one, a martyrdom with no audience but a few silent kids and an off-duty policeman. The text gives two answers and no more: Allen's own conviction that they will survive and "show up on the other side", and the fact that the teen-agers remain while the others flee. Whether either is enough the novel does not say.
"I'm the person who japed the statue of Major Streiter."
"With his wife, Allen walked slowly back across the field. He was winded from the running, and Janet's steps dragged. Behind them, with a growing roar, the ship was rising. Ahead of them was Newer York, and, sticking up from the expanse of housing units and office buildings, was the spire."
The narrator
The last movement is a slow walk, the first slow movement of the night. Allen is "winded", Janet's "steps dragged". The composition is exact. "Behind them" the ship rises "with a growing roar": the way out, leaving without them. "Ahead of them" is "Newer York", and above its "housing units and office buildings" "the spire", the Morec spire beside which the statue stands in the Park, the hub of the system that Allen could see from his window in the first chapter. Exile is at their backs and Morec is in front, and they walk toward Morec.
This paragraph is the hinge of the ending, and it is easy to read past. Allen feels "sobered, and a little ashamed." The text does not say what of. The likeliest reading, given what follows, is that he is ashamed of having run for the ship at all, of having been ready to leave the teen-agers behind; the reader cannot be sure. Then the narrator gives him his reason: "now he was finishing what he had begun that Sunday night, in the darkness of the Park." That Sunday night was 7 October 2114, when he desecrated the statue in a state he could not later remember (the head itself went later, on the Saturday night of Chapter 12). The novel has asked for twenty chapters why he did it, and Malparto, Gretchen, Janet and Allen himself have all offered theories. This sentence is as close as the text comes to an answer, and it answers a different question. It does not explain the motive. It gives the act a shape: the jape in the Park was the beginning, the broadcast was the middle, and the confession he is about to make is the end. "So it was good. And he could stop feeling ashamed." Shame, the tool by which Morec rules, is the feeling he lays down. In a society that governs through public shame, a man who will stand up and name his own offence has disarmed the system's main weapon against him.
Janet's question is practical and frightened: "What'll they do to us?" Allen does not answer it. He cannot. He says "We'll survive." The narrator vouches for his state of mind, "an absolute conviction", without vouching for the outcome. "Whatever it is. We'll show up on the other side, and that's what matters." The phrase "the other side" is open: the other
"He felt sobered, and a little ashamed. But now he was finishing what he had begun that Sunday night, in the darkness of the Park. So it was good. And he could stop feeling ashamed."
The narrator
"What'll they do to us?" Janet asked after a while.
Janet
"We'll survive." In him was an absolute conviction. "Whatever it is. We'll show up on the other side, and that's what matters."
Allen
side of punishment, of prison, of the Resort, of the regime itself. Nothing in the text says which, or whether he is right.
Janet needs a destination, and Allen gives her one, Mavis's half a planet. "We will," "he promised." "Then it'll be all right." The promise is the last word on their future that the novel offers, and it is a promise made in a dark field by a man about to give himself up. The reader may believe it or not. The text records it.
The audience for the last act is listed with care. "the teen-agers" first, then "a varied assortment of people": "relatives of passengers", who have just said goodbye; "minor field officials"; "passers-by"; and "an off-duty policeman." It is the smallest audience Allen has addressed in the novel, after a night on the national network. It is also the most real. These are people standing in front of him, and some of them are the people he came back for. "Allen and his wife approached them and stopped by the rail." The rail is the teen-agers' place.
The final speech is three sentences. "I'm Allen Purcell." His name, said to strangers, the name he hid behind Coates at the Resort and behind the moderator's anonymity on the screen. "I'm the person who japed the statue of Major Streiter." The confession the whole society has been demanding since the first chapter, since the newspapers' "VANDALS IN PARK", since the block meeting, the warden and the encephalogram, is finally given, freely, to the people least able to do anything with it. "I'd like everybody to know it." And the narrator's tag: "he spoke with pride." The word is chosen against the whole moral economy of Morec. Under Morec an offender confesses with shame before a block meeting. Allen confesses with pride before a crowd at a rail, and the confession is his to give.
The difference between this confession and the one the state wanted is the meaning of the ending. In Chapter 4 Allen told Janet, privately, "I japed it." That was an admission. Here he is making a declaration. He uses the society's own term, "japed", and claims it. He does not apologise and does not explain. He makes his feelings clear, which is what he told Mavis he could do. The text thus resolves the novel's first mystery, who japed the statue, only in the sense that Allen now says so publicly; the reader has known since Chapter 4. Why he did it, and what happened in the hours he could not remember, the text leaves where it was.
"And then we'll go to Myron's planet?"
Janet
"We will," he promised. "Then it'll be all right."
Allen
"Standing at the edge of the field were the teen-agers, and a varied assortment of people: relatives of passengers, minor field officials, passers-by, an off-duty policeman. Allen and his wife approached them and stopped by the rail."
The narrator
"I'm Allen Purcell," he said, and he spoke with pride. "I'm the person who japed the statue of Major Streiter. I'd like everybody to know it."
Allen
"The people gaped, murmured together, and then melted off to safety. The teen-agers remained, aloof and silent. The off-duty policeman blinked and started in the direction of a telephone."
The narrator
The response comes in three parts, and each is a judgment. "The people gaped, murmured together, and then melted off to safety." The adult public does what Morec has trained it to do: look, whisper and leave before it is implicated. "The teen-agers remained, aloof and silent." They do not cheer, speak or approach. They stay. That is all, and it is the most the novel gives. "aloof" keeps them at a distance even from Allen; he has not won them, but they have not left him. "The off-duty policeman blinked and started in the direction of a telephone." The single comic detail, the policeman's "blinked", is the system's reflex: an off-duty man goes to report.
The last sentence of the novel is quiet. "his arm around his wife": the couple whose marriage was examined by a block meeting, whose lease was voided, stand together. "waited composedly": the word is chosen to match "he spoke with pride". He is calm. "for the Getabouts of the Cohorts." The Cohorts will come in their little steam cars, at perhaps thirty-five miles an hour, and what they will do the novel does not say. It ends on the waiting.
"Allen, his arm around his wife, waited composedly for the Getabouts of the Cohorts."
The narrator
KEY INSIGHT
How the novel ends. Allen has a ship, a protector and half a planet at the foot of the lift, and gives them up for a rail at the edge of a field, a few silent teen-agers and a confession spoken with pride. The ending resolves one question, who japed the statue, by making the answer public and freely given, and leaves every other question open: what the Cohorts will do, whether Allen and Janet will ever reach Myron's planet, and whether anything has changed for the kids at the rail.
CONTRAST
| Thread | Where it stands at the end |
|---|---|
| Who japed the statue | Resolved in public: "I'm the person who japed the statue of Major Streiter." The reader has known since Chapter 4. |
| Why he did it, and what happened in the forgotten hours of that Sunday night | Not explained. Allen now sees the broadcast and confession as finishing what he began in the Park; Malparto's precognition theory and Gretchen's sense-of-humour theory from Chapter 17 are neither confirmed nor denied. |
| Whether the broadcast got through | As far as the text goes, yes: the cut came at the point of no return, "They cut us off, but not in time", and Janet asks whether the Major really ate people. |
| Allen and Janet's fate | Open. They wait for the Cohorts. Allen promises they will survive and go to Myron's planet. |
| Mavis | Leaves for the Sirius System, promising to keep a place for them. |
| Gates | Escapes on foot, "already loping off". |
| Sugermann, Priar, Gleeby | Left in the dark office. Their fate is not given. |
| Blake-Moffet | Tony Blake and Fred Luddy ride in the Cohort car and end in the wreck. Mrs. Hoyt's offer to expose them is never taken up. |
| Mrs. Hoyt and the Committee | Cut the power; the fake dispatch about Mrs. Hoyt is the last thing on screen before the Cohorts' voice. |
| Dismissal and lease | Not mentioned again. Noon on Thursday 1 November and 6 November are overtaken by the night's events. |
| The Resort, Gretchen and Malparto, the Pepper Lane world, the head in the closet | Not mentioned in the final chapter. Nothing is added to what earlier chapters said. |
| The teen-agers | Remain at the rail, aloof and silent. |
How the chapter is built
FRAMEWORK / MODEL
Seven movements.
Blackout (lines 3 to 19). "They cut off our power."; the lines; Cohorts in the lanes; the stairs by lighter; "it won't hold"; "Our un-Morec"; "Back in business." "For awhile."
The broken broadcast (lines 21 to 73). Janet on the couch; "... . d"; broiling disputed; revival as punishment; Gleeby condemns the japery; Sugermann's deterrence; Gates and the Resort; Priar's pickpockets; relics; "boiled enemy"; six hundred 'impossibles'; Whamp; fragments; "they caught the ringleader"; Mrs. Hoyt and boiled conspirator; "Turn off your sets."; "She left hers on, and waited."
The office and the lobby (lines 75 to 109). "We got it over"; "We did our job"; "The finger's on you"; Allen refuses to leave; Gleeby and Priar send him; "the wrath of God"; "You happy?"; the herd of technicians; the party in the lobby; the building extinguished.
The chase (lines 111 to 131). Thirty-five miles an hour; Hadler, Luddy, Blake; "Boil, bake, fry!"; the shot; the curve; the crash; Gates lopes off; Hadler lowers the gun.
Janet (lines 133 to 145). Fully dressed, chain, blood on his cheek; "Thank God it's night."; "Not literally"; Morec gobbled the soul; to the field; boredom and a drab world.
Mavis and the refusal (lines 147 to 207). The inter-S ship; half a planet; cattle and sweat; suitcase and twine; "Son and daughter"; the teen-agers at the rail; "We can't leave."; lunacy on lunacy; "I can stay with them"; Mavis washes his hands; "When the time comes."; "Good luck."
The confession (lines 209 to 227). Ship behind, spire ahead; finishing what began that Sunday night; "We'll survive."; Myron's planet; the audience at the rail; "I'm Allen Purcell"; the crowd melts, the teen-agers stay, the policeman goes to the phone; waiting composedly.
The chapter is built as a sequence of escapes that end in a refusal to escape. The power is cut and the team restores it; the broadcast is cut and the team escapes the building; the Cohorts pursue and Allen escapes the car; he escapes the apartment with Janet; he reaches the ship. Then, with the last and best escape in his hands, he turns round. Every movement before the last accelerates. The last is a slow walk.
A second pattern runs through the voices. The chapter is full of disembodied voices: the broadcast fragments, the Cohorts' order to turn off sets, the mechanical boarding call, Mavis's "Good luck" lost in machinery. The final speech is the opposite, a man's voice in person, giving his own name, to people standing in front of him. The novel about a society that speaks through packets and broadcasts ends with one man speaking for himself.
Third, the chapter closes loops opened in the first. The spire Allen could see from his window, the Park where he japed, the Cohorts' messenger Hadler, the bad driving, Mavis and his Sirius land, the teen-agers and the boys of Hokkaido, the shame Morec runs on: each returns. The book ends near where it began, at the spire, with the difference that Allen has said aloud what he did.
What the chapter shows about Allen
He is a good leader in a crisis and a poor strategist of consequences. He keeps the broadcast running, reads the meaning of the cut, holds his team's loyalty, and drives well under fire. He did not plan for the Committee's speed, and he admits it.
He measures success in his trade's terms to the end: making the Morec, putting the japery through. His rebellion is a piece of professional work, and he is proud of the craft.
His first thought in danger is for Janet, and his loyalty to his team is real; he would have stayed with Priar and Gleeby if they had let him. The four names, said with affection, are the warmest passage about colleagues in the book.
He can be tempted. He runs for the ship and is ready to go. The decision to stay is made on the spot, from one backward look, and he feels ashamed of the running before he feels proud of the staying. The novel lets him be inconsistent.
He chooses solidarity over rescue. He does not think he can save the teen-agers, and he does not pretend he can. He stays with them and speaks.
He ends the novel without shame, which in Morec is the most radical condition a citizen can be in. He gives his name and his deed "with pride", and waits "composedly".
Questions the chapter raises
- Is Allen's choice heroic or self-indulgent? He drags Janet back from safety, and her consent is given in the words "As long as we have to." The text does not judge him.
- What did the teen-agers see? They remain "aloof and silent". The novel gives no sign of whether the confession meant anything to them.
- Was the broadcast effective beyond the few viewers the novel shows? Sugermann thinks so, and Janet's question supports it; Mrs. Birmingham's room and the Purcells' flat are the only living rooms the novel enters.
- What will the Cohorts do? Hadler could not fire on foot. The book ends before they arrive.
- Was Allen's thought that Morec "had gobbled greedily at the human soul" the novel's verdict or only his? The narrator states it without distance, but it is framed as his sense of things.
- Does the ending answer why he japed the statue? It gives the act a completion, not a motive. Readers who wanted the Malparto question settled are left with the encephalogram blob unexplained.
- Who speaks the line printed as "Coates said"? The name belongs to Allen's own alias. The likely explanation is a misprint, but the text gives no answer.
- Why does Mavis say he does not understand when his face shows that he does? The novel lets the sour man keep his dignity by refusing to admit sympathy.
CRITICAL LENS
Source quirks in this chapter. (1) The chapter heading appears twice at the top of the source file (lines 1 and 3). (2) The technician's line breaks at a dash before its last two words, like now, so that the present blackout completes his sentence. (3) "Coates said" at line 81: no character called Coates is present; Coates was Allen's alias at the Resort and the name on his Pepper Lane ident card. Probably a misprint, perhaps for Gates, but not certain. (4) Line 83 ends with a semicolon where a full stop is expected. (5) "dan use" at line 85 for can use. (6) "catch,us" at line 119, with a stray comma. (7) "Get-about" hyphenated once at line 117, against Getabout everywhere else. (8) "cachinery [sic]" at line 163 for machinery, with an editorial [sic] already in the text. (9) "For awhile" and "for awhile", a common period spelling, used three times. (10) The broadcast resumes on the fragment "... . d", which is deliberate, a word cut off mid-transmission. (11) The fake dispatch quotes Mrs. Hoyt with single quotation marks nested in double ones, and breaks off mid-quotation, as the broadcast does. (12) "Mavis'" is used for the possessive throughout, consistent with earlier chapters.
TIMELINE
Dates in this chapter. All the action is on the night of Monday 29 October 2114, after the eight o'clock broadcast. "that Sunday night" is Sunday 7 October 2114, the night of the jape in the Park. Pending and overtaken: the dismissal at noon on Thursday 1 November 2114 and the end of the lease on Tuesday 6 November 2114. The flight is from the Sol System to the Sirius System; no date of arrival is given. In the broadcast, the Major's life and the six hundred 'impossibles' are undated, and E. B. Erickson is given no date or work. Outside the story: The Man Who Japed was first published by Ace Books in 1956.
KEY INSIGHT
What to carry forward from Chapter 23. The jape is complete: the statue, the broadcast and now the confession. The state's answer is the cut, the voice and the Cohorts; its physical force is clumsy, and its real power, shame, no longer works on Allen. The novel's moral is said once, "Morec had gobbled greedily at the human soul", and its ending is a choice to stay with those who cannot leave and to speak with pride. Every other question the book raised is left open, as the text leaves it. This is the last chapter of the novel.
Master Takeaways
The Man Who Japed is a short, quick, funny novel about a serious thing: what happens to a man whose working life is spent making other people good, when a part of him he cannot see decides that the goodness is a fraud. The takeaways below collect what the book shows across its twenty-three chapters, with the chapter where each point is clearest. The first six are the ones to keep if you keep nothing else.
- A moral order that has to be manufactured is already in trouble. Morec is written by agencies, bought by Telemedia, spread by the domino method and checked at block meetings. At the autofac station the teen-agers say it plainly: "Morec wasn't natural" (Chapter 9). A belief that needs daily delivery would lapse without it.
- The part of you that disagrees may act before you know you disagree. Allen loves his work, yet something in him beheads the founder, and he can only report it in the third person: "Sunday night somebody pulled a switch in my head." (Chapter 8). The rest of the book is Allen catching up with that hidden part.
- Laughter can reach what argument cannot. Allen's trade has a word for parody of a stale theme: "When we make fun of a stale theme we say we've japed it." (Chapter 4). People in the Park laughed at the defaced statue, even the Cohorts (Chapter 5). An argument would have been answered at a block meeting; the joke went round the city overnight.
- Surveillance by neighbours makes informers of ordinary people, and then makes them hate themselves. Mr. Wales used the anonymous voice to defend Allen, yet ends in a better apartment smashing his wife's vase: "I'm a Judas" (Chapter 20). He did nothing to Allen; the system made him feel he had.
- The escape hatch is part of the prison. The Health Resort takes the people Morec cannot hold and keeps them away. Allen tells Gretchen: "Two sides of the coin: Morec is all work and you're the badminton and checkers set." (Chapter 17). He refuses both the valve and the flight to Sirius.
- Defiance counts when you put your name to it. The statue was japed anonymously, but the novel ends on one man at the edge of a field: "I'm the person who japed the statue of Major Streiter. I'd like everybody to know it." (Chapter 23). The anonymous act changed nothing; the signed one changes Allen.
- Power often answers its rebels with a promotion. The morning after the jape Allen is offered the Directorship, and he suspects "Some deep, underlying causal connection" (Chapter 4). On the last day Hoyt and Frost come to the barricade offering to restore everything he has lost (Chapter 22). Both offers are attempts to buy back the part of him that japes, and the second one fails.
- A system that depends on everyone repeating the message is fragile to one person who does not. Allen distrusts the domino method because a single original mind breaks the chain: "One unique individual would foul it up." (Chapter 3). He is that individual, and so, in their way, are Gates and Sugermann on Hokkaido.
- Firing the man who agrees with the boss does not give you challenge. Allen fires Luddy for siding with Frost (Chapter 2), and Luddy takes every project in hand to Blake-Moffet: "Picked us clean." (Chapter 10). Then Luddy and Blake-Moffet become the instruments of Allen's ruin. The lesson runs both ways: Luddy was no critic, and Allen's anger made him an enemy.
- A state's own history is its softest target. At the museum the lit house called HOW THEY LIVED turns into a ruin, and Allen says "That could be us." (Chapter 10). His last programme goes straight for the official past: dates, experts, a respectable reference work and the founder's appetite. The regime that controls the present by controlling the past has handed its critics the place to strike.
- Authority can be invented on demand, and people will take it. Allen's programme uses four bogus experts, a citation to an E. B. Erickson, and a planted newspaper story whose anonymous sources sit high in Committee circles (Chapters 21 to 23). A poll comes back about two to one in favour of a policy nobody can define (Chapter 22). The people who believe it are believing the format.
- Care for real things is a form of resistance. Sugermann calls Ulysses and its kind "real books" (Chapter 9); someone sends Allen a bunch of real bluebells among the synthetic flowers (Chapter 16); Gretchen drinks real coffee at the Resort (Chapter 12). Morec is made of substitutes, and the people who keep hold of real things are the ones it cannot fully reach.
- A staged world fails on one detail its makers forgot. Pepper Lane is perfect in its flowers, its baby and its voices, until Allen finds a small ivory clock on the dressing table that still says a quarter to five (Chapter 14). The whole performance falls apart on that one unadjusted clock.
- An analyst can test everything except the right thing. Malparto runs twelve tests for psychic power and all fail (Chapter 12), while his sister, drinking coffee by the window, has the simpler and better diagnosis. Malparto also held a scan of Allen's brain dated before the jape (Chapter 8), and still looked for magic.
- A sense of humour can be a sign of balance. Gretchen's reading of Allen is the kindest in the book: "You have a sense of humor." (Chapter 17), the mark of a sane man in an unsane society. The novel half agrees with her, and shows a world where laughing at the founder counts as illness.
- A frame works best with a little truth in it. The case Blake-Moffet builds is part lie (the photograph, a woman called "Grace Maldini") and part fact, since Allen did spend days with Gretchen (Chapter 15). At the second block meeting a planted questioner draws out the fatal slip "I didn't even know her then" (Chapter 19). A frame needs only one true thread for the accused to trip on.
- Anonymous accusers can be named and still not be answered. Allen loses his temper at the second meeting and attacks the faceless voices from the stage: "Come on out from under your rock" (Chapter 19). The outburst is honest and useless. The system has no face to hit.
- Official euphemism softens what it does. Allen is let off for an "excellent prior record" (Chapter 7) and stripped of his home with good wishes for his "temporary difficulty" (Chapter 19). Morec's language is mild because its acts are not.
- Loyalty to a man out of favour is rare, and it is enough. Allen asks his department heads "do you care to work for a man who's out of favor" (Chapter 21), and nearly all of them go home by noon. A deaf head of music, a researcher with thirty years of files in the basement and a dozen volunteers from his old Agency build the programme. The few who stay are the ones who do the work.
- Speed and nerve beat process when the window is short. A schedule of a month to five months is cut to four days, and the plan is stated in a sentence: "We're going to do a jape on Major Streiter." (Chapter 21). Allen expects to be fired as soon as the Committee can assemble, and the programme is built to go out before that; the notice, when it comes, gives him until noon on Thursday 1 November.
- Satire can work by taking the official story literally. The programme does not deny the legend of the founder; it adds dates, figures and recipes until "active assimilation" means "any form of killing, cooking, and eating of hostile groups" (Chapter 22). This is the method of Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729): an official voice, perfectly calm, proposing a horror.
- Pulling the plug is itself a confession. When the authorities cut Telemedia's power, the generators can restore the broadcast only for a while, and the technician says "it won't hold" (Chapter 23). The blackout tells every viewer that the programme struck home.
- The marriage is the book's quiet centre. Janet spends the novel frightened, medicated and loyal, and she is the first to say that the jape was Allen's (Chapter 4). In the dark apartment Allen lists the charges against himself and adds the one fact nobody weighs: "But I did come back. Nobody seems to care about that part." (Chapter 18). Janet does care, and in the last chapter she is with him at the field and on the walk back.
- The young are the audience that matters. Allen's Sunday begins with bitter teen-agers at an autofac station (Chapter 9), and his decision to stay comes when he looks back from the ship and sees the teen-agers at the railing, silent and watching. He says simply "We can't leave" (Chapter 23). He stays because they have no ship to take.
- Escape is offered to the tired. Mavis, forty-two and looking eighty after eight years in charge, leaves for Sirius with a motto, "The watchword is Excelsior." (Chapter 16). Allen, younger and with something left to do, turns down the ship, asks Mavis to keep a place for later, and tells Janet: "We'll show up on the other side, and that's what matters." (Chapter 23).
- Leave the open questions open. The novel never explains the lights that go out at the Resort's door, how Allen was moved to Vega, what Gretchen wanted when she both helped and harmed him, why nobody asks after the bronze head in his closet, or what the Cohorts do after the confession. What it states plainly is the verdict on the whole system: "Morec had gobbled greedily at the human soul."
FRAMEWORKS AND MENTAL MODELS
| Framework | What it says | Where | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Morec | A whole society organised around public morality, founded by a soldier in 1985 and run by his descendants | Ch1-3, throughout | Asking what happens when an organisation makes its values the product as well as the policy |
| Moral packets | Stories with a lesson, written by private agencies and bought by Telemedia | Ch2-4, Ch16, Ch21 | Looking at how messaging is commissioned, approved and withdrawn |
| The domino method | Ideas pass from one family to the next instead of by broadcast | Ch3 | Thinking about cascaded communication and where one person can break the chain |
| Block meetings and wardens | Weekly neighbour tribunals with an anonymous voice, a warden's list and recorded evidence | Ch1, Ch7, Ch19 | Weighing anonymous reporting, peer review and their cost to trust |
| Juveniles | Small metal informers that watch, record and climb | Ch1, Ch7, Ch17 | Considering what automated surveillance changes about behaviour |
| The lease and pooled status | A family's room is held on standing earned over generations and can be voided by the meeting | Ch1, Ch18-19 | Seeing how a reputation score turns into material loss |
| Committee and Cohorts | Civil power held by the founder's descendant; force held by his male heirs | Ch3, Ch15, Ch22-23 | Mapping who decides and who enforces |
| Telemedia | The single state channel for every medium | Ch3-4, Ch16, Ch21-23 | Asking what one central platform can do once its operator turns |
| The Health Resort and Other World | A tolerated refuge for people who cannot bear Morec, with a staged planet to keep them | Ch6, Ch8, Ch12-14, Ch17 | Recognising when an exit option stabilises the system it seems to oppose |
| Two diagnoses | Malparto reads Allen as precognitive; Gretchen reads him as a man with a sense of humour | Ch12, Ch17 | Choosing between an exotic explanation and a plain one |
| The jape | Parody of a stale theme, done in the trade's own form | Ch4-5, Ch21-23 | Designing a critique that uses the target's own language |
| The psychic battery | Twelve tests for unusual powers, all failed | Ch12 | Checking whether your tests can see the thing you are looking for |
| Framework | What it says | Where | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active assimilation | The founder's vague postwar policy, taken literally by the programme | Ch21-23 | Testing an official phrase by asking exactly what it means |
| The plant | A news item from anonymous high sources, repeated on every channel | Ch21-22 | Spotting manufactured consensus |
| Certainty over severity | Priar's point in the programme about deterrence and pickpockets | Ch23 | Designing controls and penalties that actually deter |
CONTRAST
| Motif | Moves through | What it carries |
|---|---|---|
| The statue and its head | Ch1, Ch4-5, Ch11-12, Ch15, Ch23 | The founder as an object that can be painted, boxed, beheaded and kept in a closet |
| Grass and paint | Ch1, Ch9, Ch11 | Evidence on the body of acts the mind does not remember |
| Rooms that change | Ch1, Ch13-14, Ch20 | The taped room, the dissolving house on Pepper Lane, the new room Wales cannot make go away |
| Voices without bodies | Ch7, Ch13-14, Ch19, Ch23 | The meeting's speaker, the speakers in the couch, the harsh voice telling viewers to switch off |
| Real against synthetic | Ch9, Ch12, Ch16 | Real books, real coffee and real bluebells against packets and synthetic flowers |
| Flowers | Ch13, Ch16-17 | The house on Pepper Lane, the congratulatory bundles, Gretchen smelling of fresh flowers |
| Ice cream | Ch18 | A small domestic promise that the crisis makes absurd |
| Getabouts | Ch11, Ch18, Ch23 | The car that carries the head, the convoy of reports, the chase that ends in a crash |
| The young | Ch9, Ch10, Ch23 | The teen-agers at the station, the boy at the museum button, the young people at the railing |
| Clocks and counted time | Ch1, Ch6, Ch14, Ch21-22 | The room tape, the Saturday deadline, the ivory clock, four days and a noon deadline |
CONTRAST
| Mirrored pair | First side | Second side | What the pairing shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two block meetings | Ch7: a charge of drunkenness, a eulogy, no penalty | Ch19: four counts, a planted questioner, the lease voided | The same machine forgives a man in favour and ruins him out of it |
| Two night thefts | Ch9: the jape, recovered under drugs | Ch11: the head, told as a dream | Both acts are known to Allen only afterwards |
| Two offers | Ch4: the Directorship | Ch22: everything restored, refused at the barricade | The Committee tries to buy the japer twice |
| Two staged realities | Ch13: Pepper Lane, built for one man | Ch22: the Pageant of Time, built for everyone | Allen learns the craft of fakery from its victim's side and then uses it |
| Two flights out | Ch13-14: Other World, imposed | Ch23: Sirius with Mavis, refused | The book offers escape twice and ends by staying |
| Museum and pageant | Ch10: HOW THEY LIVED and AND DIED | Ch22: the Major's history retold | The state's history is a show, and shows can be rewritten |
| Wales | Ch7: the eulogist | Ch20: the self-declared Judas | The same mild man, defender and then guilty absentee |
| Allen and Luddy | Ch2: Allen fires Luddy | Ch17: "I got Luddy, now he gets me" | A small injustice returns as a large one |
| Two confessions | Ch8: private, to Malparto | Ch23: public, to everyone | The private confession sought a cure; the public one makes a stand |
CONTRAST
| In this book | Later in Dick |
|---|---|
| A staged suburb built to hold one man in place | Time Out of Joint (No. 12), where a whole town is built around Ragle Gumm |
| Writers in the state's media manufacturing speeches and a false history | The Penultimate Truth (No. 23), with its speechwriters and faked documentaries |
| A society shaped round one founder's moral code | Eye in the Sky (No. 09), where worlds are bent to one person's beliefs |
| Psychiatry as an institution with its own planet | Clans of the Alphane Moon (No. 22), a moon settled by former patients |
| A man whose acts are done by a part of himself he cannot see | A Scanner Darkly (No. 41), with its split agent and scramble suit |
| A subversive message put inside the official broadcast | Radio Free Albemuth (No. 39) |
| Machines that teach morality to the public | Martian Time-Slip (No. 20), with the teaching machines of the Public School |
CRITICAL LENS
Critical lens: the book as a whole. Three readings of the novel's quality have been on record from the start: Dick reported that Wollheim called it his worst book, Wollheim told Rickman he liked it, Knight thought it journeyman work, and Dick told Blish it was his favourite of the early novels because its sentences were better built [philipdick.com]. Read closely, all of them have a point. The prose is quick and often very funny, and the satire of 1950s moral campaigns, from Moral Re-Armament to the Comics Code, is sharper than anything else Dick wrote in those years. The plot is less tidy. The lights that go out at the Resort's door are never explained; nor is how a man is moved to Vega and back. Gretchen says the kidnap was her fault in one scene and her brother's plan in another, and the book never decides what she wanted. Nobody in authority ever asks where the statue's head went, though it sits in Allen's closet through half the book. Mr. Wales can be read as a coward or as a victim, and the text supports both. The newspaper plant is dated 29 October in a chapter set on the 25th, and Malparto's scan of Allen predates the jape it seems to explain. The psychic theme is raised with great care and then dropped. The women are seen through Allen's eyes and come off thinner than the men, and Janet's pills stand in for a character. The ending is open on purpose, but the offer of a place on Sirius softens it. The text also carries printer's errors, marked [sic] in these notes, and a run of sentences with the verb at the end that may be a joke about stilted speech or a slip. None of this spoils the book, and some of it, the unexplained lights especially, adds to the dreamlike pressure of the middle chapters. The chapter titles in this edition are editorial throughout.
Who's who
CAST LIST
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Allen Purcell | Head of a small packet agency, then Director of Telemedia | The japer, without knowing it, and in the end the man who says so |
| Janet Purcell | His wife | The first to name the jape and the one who goes with him to the end |
| Sue Frost | Committee secretary who runs Telemedia | Backer of the Agency, then accuser, then bearer of the last offer |
| Ida Pease Hoyt | Head of the Committee, the founder's linear descendant | Offers Allen the job and lets him go at the hearing |
| Myron Mavis | Outgoing Director of Telemedia | The worn-out man of the system, who leaves for Sirius and keeps a place |
| Ralf Hadler | Messenger of the Cohorts, Frost's cousin-in-law | The face of force, last seen chasing Allen |
| Fred Luddy | Allen's assistant, then Blake-Moffet's man | Fired for agreeing, he takes the work and returns with a camera |
| Tony Blake | Head of Blake-Moffet | The rival who frames Allen and joins the chase |
| Mrs. Birmingham | Block warden | Chairs both meetings, and watches the pageant in Chapter 22 |
| Mr. Wales | Elderly neighbour | The anonymous defender who ends calling himself a Judas |
| Julie Ebberley | Young neighbour often before the meeting | The first accused, whom Allen used to defend |
| Doctor Malparto | Analyst at the Health Resort | Diagnoses precognition and ships Allen to Vega |
| Gretchen Malparto | His sister | The girl in the Park, the wife on Pepper Lane, and the voice that calls Allen sane |
| Tom Gates | Hokkaido salvager and dealer | Sells the past, and drives Allen out of the sealed building |
| Sugermann | Hokkaido scholar | Speaks for real books, then speaks as an expert on the pageant |
| Joseph Gleeby | Deaf head of music at Telemedia | The first department head to stay, and an expert on the screen |
| Phyllis Frame | Researcher in the basement | Thirty years of files behind the programme |
| Harry Priar | Allen's man from the Agency | Brings the volunteers and argues for certainty over severity |
| Doris | Agency secretary | Part of the small working world Allen loses |
| Major Jules Streiter | Founder of Morec, long dead | The statue, the legend, and the target of both japes |
Connect it
- Social scoring. The block meeting and the lease are a working model of what the EU's AI Act now forbids for automated systems: Article 5(1)(c) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 bans AI systems that score people on their social behaviour where the score leads to detrimental treatment in unrelated contexts or out of proportion to the behaviour, and the prohibitions have applied since 2 February 2025 [EUR-Lex, Regulation 2024/1689].
- Effective challenge. Luddy's agreement and Allen's reaction to it are the two failures that bank model governance tries to prevent. SR 11-7 (Federal Reserve and OCC, April 2011) asks for effective challenge from people with the incentive, competence and influence to make it count, and Amy Edmondson's study of 51 work teams linked psychological safety to learning behaviour [Federal Reserve, SR 11-7; Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly 44(2), 1999, 350-383].
- Organisation and message. Frost's idea of slicing Telemedia into units and Allen's distrust of the domino method sit between two findings of the period: Melvin Conway's 1968 argument that systems copy the communication structure of the organisations that build them, and the two-step flow of influence from opinion leaders described in The People's Choice (1944) and Personal Influence (1955) [Conway, Datamation 14(4), 1968; Lazarsfeld et al.; Katz and Lazarsfeld].
- Synthetic authority. The bogus experts and the planted story have modern counterparts: the hacked Associated Press tweet of 23 April 2013, after which the Dow fell about 143 points within minutes; the deepfake video call that led an Arup employee in Hong Kong to make 15 transfers totalling HK$200 million in January 2024; and the lawyers in Mata v. Avianca sanctioned on 22 June 2023 for filing six fictitious cases produced by a chatbot.
- Backups and deterrence. The generators that "it won't hold" describes are a lesson in operational resilience, now a rule for banks in the UK (in force 31 March 2022, transition ended 31 March 2025) and the EU (DORA, applicable from 17 January 2025); Priar's point about pickpockets matches the US National Institute of Justice's 2016 summary that the certainty of being caught deters far more than severity.
About this book
The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick, 1956. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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