We Can Build You

  PHILIP K. DICK

  WE CAN BUILD YOU

  Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write thirty-six novels and five short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

  Novels by Philip K. Dick

  Clans of the Alphane Moon

  Confessions of a Crap Artist

  The Cosmic Puppets

  Counter-Clock World

  The Crack in Space

  Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny)

  The Divine Invasion

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  Dr. Bloodmoney

  Dr. Futurity

  Eye in the Sky

  Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

  Galactic Pot-Healer

  The Game-Players of Titan

  The Man in the High Castle

  The Man Who Japed

  Martian Time-Slip

  A Maze of Death

  Now Wait for Last Year

  Our Friends From Frolix 8

  The Penultimate Truth

  Radio Free Albemuth

  A Scanner Darkly

  The Simulacra

  Solar Lottery

  The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

  Time Out of Joint

  The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

  Ubik

  The Unteleported Man

  VALIS

  Vulcan’s Hammer,

  We Can Build You

  The World Jones Made

  The Zap Gun

  To Robert and Ginny Heinlein,

  whose kindness to us meant more

  than ordinary words can answer.

  1

  Our sales technique was perfected in the early 1970s. First we put an ad in a local newspaper, in the classified.

  Spinet piano, also electronic organ, repossessed, in perfect condition, SACRIFICE. Cash or good credit risk wanted in this area, to take over payments rather than transport back to Oregon. Contact Frauenzimmer Piano Company, Mr. Rock, Credit Manager, Ontario, Ore.

  For years we’ve run this ad in newspapers in one town after another, all up and down the western states and as far inland as Colorado. The whole approach developed on a scientific, systematic basis; we use maps, and sweep along so that no town goes untouched. We own four turbine-powered trucks, out on the road constantly, one man to a truck.

  Anyhow, we place the ad, say in the San Rafael Independent-Journal, and soon letters start arriving at our office in Ontario, Oregon, where my partner Maury Rock takes care of all that. He sorts the letters and compiles lists, and then when he has enough contacts in a particular area, say around San Rafael, he night-wires the truck. Suppose it’s Fred down there in Marin County. When Fred gets the wire he brings out his own map and lists the calls in proper sequence. And then he finds a pay phone and telephones the first prospect.

  Meanwhile, Maury has airmailed an answer to each person who’s written in response to the ad.

  Dear Mr. So-and-so:

  We were gratified to receive your response to our notice in the San Rafael Independent-Journal. The man who is handling this matter has been away from the office for a few days now, so we’ve decided to forward to him your name and address with the request that he contact you and provide you with all the details.

  The letter drones on, but for several years now it has done a good job for the company. However, of late, sales of the electronic organs have fallen off. For instance, in the Vallejo area we sold forty spinets not so long ago, and not one single organ.

  Now, this enormous balance in favor of the spinet over the electronic organ, in terms of sales, led to an exchange between I and my partner, Maury Rock; it was heated, too.

  I got to Ontario, Oregon, late, having been down south around Santa Monica discussing matters with certain do-gooders there who had invited law-enforcement officials in to scan our enterprise and method of operating … a gratuitous action which led to nothing, of course, since we’re operating strictly legally.

  Ontario isn’t my hometown, or anybody else’s. I hail from Wichita Falls, Kansas, and when I was high school age I moved to Denver and then to Boise, Idaho. In some respects Ontario is a suburb of Boise; it’s near the Idaho border—you go across a long metal bridge—and it’s a flat land, there, where they farm. The forests of eastern Oregon don’t begin that far inland. The biggest industry is the Ore-Ida potato patty factory, especially its electronics division, and then there’re a whole lot of Japanese farmers who were shuffled back that way during World War Two and who grow onions or something. The air is dry, real estate is cheap, people do their big shopping in Boise; the latter is a big town which I don’t like because you can’t get decent Chinese food there. It’s near the old Oregon Trail, and the railroad goes through it on its way to Cheyenne.

  Our office is located in a brick building in downtown Ontario across from a hardware store. We’ve got root iris growing around our building. The colors of the iris look good when you come driving up the desert routes from California and Nevada.

  So anyhow I parked my dusty Chevrolet Magic Fire turbine convertible and crossed the sidewalk to our building and our sign:

  MASA ASSOCIATES

  MASA stands for MULTIPLEX ACOUSTICAL SYSTEM OF AMERICA, a made-up electronics-type name which we developed due to our electronic organ factory, which, due to my family ties, I’m deeply involved with. It was Maury who came up with Frauenzimmer Piano Company, since as a name it fitted our trucking operation better. Frauenzimmer is Maury’s original old-country name, Rock being made-up, too. My real name is as I give it: Louis Rosen, which is German for roses. One day I asked Maury what Frauenzimmer meant, and he said it means womankind. I asked where he specifically got the name Rock.

  “I closed my eyes and touched a volume of the encyclopedia, and it said ROCK TO SUBUD.”

  “You made a mistake,” I told him. “You should have called yourself Maury Subud.”

  The downstairs door of our building dates back to 1965 and ought to be replaced, but we just don’t have the funds. I pushed the door open, it’s massive and heavy but swings nicely, and walked to the elevator, one of those old automatic affairs. A minute later I was upstairs stepping out in our offices. The fellows were talking and drinking loudly.

  “Time has passed us by,” Maury said at once to me. “Our electronic organ is obsolete.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “The trend is actually toward the electronic organ because that’s the way America is going in its space exploration: electronic. In ten years we won’t sell one spinet a day; the spinet will be a relic of the past.”

  “Louis,” Maury said, “please look what our competitors have done. Electronics may be marching forward, but without us. Look at the Hammerstein Mood Organ. Look at the Waldteufel Euphoria. And tell me why anyone would be content like you merely to bang out music.”

  Maury is a tall fellow, with the emotional excitability of the hyperthyroid. His hands tend to shake and he digests his food too fast; they’re giving him pills, and if those don’t work he has to take radioactive iodine someday. If he stood up straight he’d be six three. He’s got, or did have once, black hair, very long but thinning, and large eyes, and he always had a sort of disconcerted look, as if things are going all wrong on every side.

  “No good musical instrument becomes obsolete,” I said. But Maury had a point. What had undone us was
the extensive brain-mapping of the mid 1960s and the depth-electrode techniques of Penfield and Jacobson and Olds, especially their discoveries about the mid-brain. The hypothalamus is where the emotions lie, and in developing and marketing our electronic organ we had not taken the hypothalamus into account. The Rosen factory never got in on the transmission of selective-frequency short range shock, which stimulates very specific cells of the mid-brain, and we certainly failed from the start to see how easy—and important—it would be to turn the circuit switches into a keyboard of eighty-eight black and whites.

  Like most people, I’ve dabbled at the keys of a Hammerstein Mood Organ, and I enjoy it. But there’s nothing creative about it. True, you can hit on new configurations of brain stimulation, and hence produce entirely new emotions in your head which would never otherwise show up there. You might—theoretically—even hit on the combination that will put you in the state of nirvana. Both the Hammerstein and Waldteufel corporations have a big prize for that. But that’s not music. That’s escape. Who wants it?

  “I want it,” Maury had said back as early as December of 1978. And he had gone out and hired a cashiered electronics engineer of the Federal Space Agency, hoping he could rig up for us a new version of the hypothalamus-stimulation organ.

  But Bob Bundy, for all his electronics genius, had no experience with organs. He had designed simulacra circuits for the Government. Simulacra are the synthetic humans which I always thought of as robots; they’re used for Lunar exploration, sent up from time to time from the Cape.

  Bundy’s reasons for leaving the Cape are obscure. He drinks, but that doesn’t dim his powers. He wenches. But so do we all. Probably he was dropped because he’s a bad security risk; not a Communist—Bundy could never have doped out even the existence of political ideas—but a bad risk in that he appears to have a touch of hebephrenia. In other words, he tends to wander off without notice. His clothes are dirty, his hair uncombed, his chin unshaved, and he won’t look you in the eye. He grins inanely. He’s what the Federal Bureau of Mental Health psychiatrists call dilapidated. If someone asks him a question he can’t figure out how to answer it; he has speech blockage. But with his hands—he’s damn fine. He can do his job, and well. So the McHeston Act doesn’t apply to him.

  However, in the many months Bundy had worked for us, I had seen nothing invented. Maury in particular kept busy with him, since I’m out on the road.

  ‘The only reason you stick up for that electric keyboard Hawaiian guitar,” Maury said to me, “is because your dad and brother make the things. That’s why you can’t face the truth.”

  I answered, “You’re using an ad hominem agreement.”

  “Talmud scholarism,” Maury retorted. Obviously, he—all of them, in fact—were well-loaded; they had been sopping up the Ancient Age bourbon while I was out on the road driving the long hard haul.

  “You want to break up the partnership?” I said. And I was willing to, at that moment, because of Maury’s drunken blur at my father and brother and the entire Rosen Electronic Organ Factory at Boise with its seventeen full-time employees.

  “I say the news from Vallejo and environs spells the death of our principal product,” Maury said. “Even with its six-hundred-thousand possible tone combinations, some never heard by human ears. You’re a bug like the rest of your family for those outer-space voodoo noises your electronic dung-heap makes. And you have the nerve to call it a musical instrument. None of you Rosens have an ear. I wouldn’t have a Rosen electronic sixteen-hundred-dollar organ in my home if you gave it to me at cost; I’d rather have a set of vibes.”

  “All right,” I yelled, “you’re a purist. And it isn’t six-hundred-thousand; it’s seven-hundred-thousand.”

  “Those souped-up circuits bloop out one noise and one only,” Maury said, “however much it’s modified—it’s just basically a whistle.”

  “One can compose on it,” I pointed out.

  “Compose? It’s more like creating remedies for diseases that don’t exist, using that thing. I say either burn down the part of your family’s factory that makes those things or damn it, Louis, convert. Convert to something new and useful that mankind can lean on during its painful ascent upward. Do you hear?” He swayed back and forth, jabbing his long finger at me. “We’re in the sky, now. To the stars. Man’s no longer hidebound. Do you hear?”

  “I hear,” I said. “But I recall that you and Bob Bundy were supposed to be the ones who were hatching up the new and useful solution to our problems. And that was months ago and nothing’s come of it.”

  “We’ve got something,” Maury said. “And when you see it you’ll agree it’s oriented toward the future in no uncertain terms.”

  “Show it to me.”

  “Okay, we’ll take a drive over to the factory. Your dad and your brother Chester should be in on it; it’s only fair, since it’ll be them who produce it.”

  Standing with his drink, Bundy grinned at me in his sneaky, indirect fashion. All this inter-personal communication probably made him nervous.

  “You guys are going to bring ruin down on us,” I told him. “I’ve got a feeling.”

  “We face ruin anyhow,” Maury said, “if we stick with your Rosen WOLFGANG MONTEVERDI electronic organ, or whatever the decal is this month your brother Chester’s pasting on it.”

  I had no answer. Gloomily, I fixed myself a drink.

  2

  The Mark VII Saloon Model Jaguar is an ancient huge white car, a collector’s item, with fog lights, a grill like the Rolls, and naturally hand-rubbed walnut, leather seats, and many interior lights. Maury kept his priceless old 1954 Mark VII in mint condition and tuned perfectly, but we were able to go no faster than ninety miles an hour on the freeway which connects Ontario with Boise.

  The languid pace made me restless. “Listen Maury,” I said, “I wish you would begin explaining. Bring the future to me right now, like you can in words.”

  Behind the wheel, Maury smoked away at his Corina Sport cigar, leaned back and said, “What’s on the mind of America, these days?”

  “Sexuality,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Dominating the inner planets of the solar system before Russia can, then.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, you tell me.”

  “The Civil War of 1861.”

  “Aw chrissakes,” I said.

  “It’s the truth, buddy. This nation is obsessed with the War Between the States. I’ll tell you why. It was the only and first national epic in which we Americans participated; that’s why.” He blew Corina Sport cigar smoke at me. “It matured we Americans.”

  “It’s not on my mind,” I said.

  “I could stop at a busy intersection of any big downtown city in the U.S. and collar ten citizens, and six of those ten, if asked what was on their mind, would say, The U.S. Civil War of 1861.’ And I’ve been working on the implications—the practical side—ever since I figured that out, around six months ago. It has grave meaning for MASA ASSOCIATES, if we want it to, I mean; if we’re alert. You know they had that Centennial a decade or so back; recall?”

  “Yes,” I said. “In 1961.”

  “And it was a flop. A few souls got out and refought a few battles, but it was nothing. Look in the back seat.”

  I switched on the interior lights of the car and twisting around I saw on the back seat a long newspaper-wrapped carton, shaped like a display window dummy, one of those manikins. From the lack of bulge up around the chest I concluded it wasn’t a female one.

  “So?” I said.

  “That’s what I’ve been working on.”

  “While I’ve been setting up areas for the trucks!”

  “Right,” Maury said. “And this, in time, will be so far long remembered over any sales of spinets or electronic organs that it’ll make your head swim.”

  He nodded emphatically. “Now when we get to Boise—listen. I don’t want your dad and Chester to give us a hard time. That’s why it’s necessa
ry to inform you right now. That back there is worth a billion bucks to us or anyone else who happens to find it. I’ve got a notion to pull off the road and demonstrate it to you, maybe at some lunch counter. Or a gas station, even; any place that’s light.” Maury seemed very tense and his hands were shaking more than usual.

  “Are you sure,” I said, “that isn’t a Louis Rosen dummy, and you’re going to knock me off and have it take my place?”

  Maury glanced at me oddly. “Why do you say that? No, that’s not it, but by chance you’re close, buddy. I can see that our brains still fuse, like they did in the old days, in the early ‘seventies when we were new and green and without backing except maybe your dad and that warning-to-all-of-us younger brother of yours. I wonder, why didn’t Chester become a large-animal vet like he started out to be? It would have been safer for the rest of us; we would have been spared. But instead a spinet factory in Boise, Idaho. Madness!” He shook his head.

  “Your family never even did that,” I said. “Never built anything or created anything. Just middlemen, schlock hustlers in the garment industry. I mean, what did they do to set us up in business, like Chester and my dad did? What is that dummy in the back seat? I want to know, and I’m not stopping at any gas station or lunch counter; I’ve got the distinct intuition that you really do intend to do me in or some such thing. So let’s keep driving.”

  “I can’t describe it in words.”

  “Sure you can. You’re an A-one snow-job artist.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell you why that Civil War Centennial failed. Because all the original participants who were willing to fight and lay down their lives and die for the Union, or for the Confederacy, are dead. Nobody lives to be a hundred, or if they do they’re good for nothing—they can’t fight, they can’t handle a rifle. Right?”

  I said, “You mean you have a mummy back there, or one of what in the horror movies they call the ‘undead’?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what I have. Wrapped up in those newspapers in the back seat I have Edwin M. Stanton.”