Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick Page A

waiting to have their heads shaved.

    In the ruins of a cement basement of a house on Cedar Street in the Berkeley hills, Stuart McConchie spied something fat and gray that hopped from one split block and behind the next. He picked up his broom handle—one end came to a cracked, elongated point—and wriggled forward.
    The man with him in the basement, a sallow, lean man named Ken, who was dying of radiation exposure, said, “You’re not going to eat that.”
    “Sure I am,” Stuart said, wriggling through the dust which had settled into the open, exposed basement until he lay against the split block of cement. The rat, aware of him, squeaked with fear. It had come up from the Berkeley sewer and now it wanted to get back. But he was between it and the sewer; or rather, he thought, between her and the sewer. It was no doubt a big female. The males were skinnier.
    The rat scurried in fright, and Stuart drove the sharp end of the stick into it. Again it squeaked, long and sufferingly. On the end of the stick it was still alive; it kept on squeaking. So he held it against the ground, held the stick down, and crushed its head with his foot.
    “At least,” the dying man with him said, “you can cook it.”
    “No,” Stuart said, and, seating himself, got out the pocket knife which he had found—it had been in the pants pocket of a dead school boy—and began skinning the rat. While the dying man watched with disapproval, Stuart ate the dead, raw rat.
    “I’m surprised you don’t eat me,” the man said, afterward.
    “It’s no worse than eating raw shrimp,” Stuart said. He felt much better now; it was his first food in days.
    “Why don’t you go looking for one of those relief stations that helicopter was talking about when it flew by yesterday?” the dying man said. “It said—or I understood it to say—that there’s a station over near the Hillside Grammar School. That’s only a few blocks from here; you could get that far.”
    “No,” Stuart said.
    “Why not?”
    The answer, although he did not want to say it, was simply that he was afraid to venture out of the basement onto the street. He did not know why, except that there were things moving in the settling ash which he could not identify; he believed they were Americans but possibly they were Chinese or Russians. Their voices sounded strange and echoey, even in daytime. And the helicopter, too; he was not certain about that. It could have been an enemy trick to induce people to come out and be shot. In any case he still heard gunfire from the flat part of the city; the dim sounds started before the sun rose and occurred intermittently until nightfall.
    “You can’t stay here forever,” Ken said. “It isn’t rational.” He lay wrapped up in the blankets which had belonged to one of the beds in the house; the bed had been hurled from the house as the house disintegrated, and Stuart and the dying man had found it in the backyard. Its neatly tucked in covers had been still on it, all in place including its two duck-feather pillows.
    What Stuart was thinking was that in five days he had collected thousands of dollars in money from the pockets of dead people he had found in the ruins of houses along Cedar Street—from their pockets and from the houses themselves. Other scavengers had been after food and different objects such as knives and guns, and it made him uneasy that he alone wanted money. He felt, now, that if he stirred forth, if he reached a relief station, he would discover the truth: the money was worthless. And if it was, he was a horse’s ass for collecting it, and when he showed up at the relief station carrying a pillowcase full of it, everyone would jeer at him and rightly so, because a horse’s ass deserved to be jeered at.
    And also, no one else seemed to be eating rats. Perhaps there was a superior food available of which he knew nothing; it sounded like him, down here eating something everyone else had discarded. Maybe there