Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick Page B

were cans of emergency rations being dropped from the air; maybe the cans came down early in the morning while he was still asleep and got all picked up before he had a chance to see them. He had had for several days now a deep and growing dread that he was missing out, that something free was being dispensed—perhaps in broad daylight—to everyone but him. Just my luck, he said to himself, and he felt glum and bitter, and the rat, which he had just eaten, no longer seemed a surfeit, as before.
    Hiding, these last few days, down in the ruined cement basement of the house on Cedar Street, Stuart had had a good deal of time to think about himself, and he had realized that it had always been hard for him to make out what other people were doing; it had only been by the greatest effort that he had managed to act as they acted, appear like them. It had nothing to do, either, with his being a Negro because he had the same problem with black people as with white. It was not a social difficulty in the usual sense; it went deeper than that. For instance, Ken, the dying man lying opposite him. Stuart could not understand him; he felt cut off from him. Maybe that was because Ken was dying and he was not. Maybe that set up a barrier; the world was clearly divided into two new camps now: people who were getting weaker with each passing moment, who were perishing, and people like himself, who were going to make it. There was no possibility of communication between them because their worlds were too different.
    And yet that was not it only, between himself and Ken; there was still more, the same old problem that the bomb attack had not created but merely brought to the surface. Now the gulf was wider; it was obvious that he did not actually comprehend the meaning of most activities conducted around him … he had been brooding, for instance, about the yearly trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles for his auto license renewal. As he lay in the basement it seemed to him more clearly each moment that the other people had gone to the Department of Motor Vehicles office over on Sacramento Street for a good reason , but he had gone because they had gone; he had, like a littler kid, merely tagged along. And now there was no one present to tag after; now he was alone. And therefore he could not think up any action to follow, he could not make any decision or follow any plan for the life of him.
    So he simply waited, and as he waited, wondered about the ’copter which flew overhead now and then and about the vague shapes in the street, and more than anything else if he was a horse’s ass or not.
    And then, all at once, he thought of something; he remembered what Hoppy Harrington had seen in his vision at Fred’s Fine Foods. Hoppy had seen him, Stuart McConchie, eating rats, but in the excitement and fear of all that had happened since, Stuart had forgotten. This now was what the phoce had seen; this was the vision—not the afterlife at all!
    God damn that little crippled freak, Stuart thought to himself as he lay picking his teeth with a piece of wire. He was a fraud; he put something over on us.
    Amazing how gullible people are, he said to himself. We believed him, maybe because he’s so peculiarly built anyhow … it seemed more credible with him being like he is—or was. He’s probably dead now, buried down in the service department. Well, that’s one good thing this war has done: wiped out all the freaks. But then, he realized, it’s also brewed up a whole new batch of them; there’ll be freaks strutting around for the next million years. It’ll be Bluthgeld’s paradise; in fact he’s probably quite happy right now—because this was really bomb testing.
    Ken stirred and murmured, “Could you be induced to crawl across the street? There’s that corpse there and it might have cigarettes on it.”
    Cigarettes, hell, Stuart thought. It probably has a walletful of money. He followed the dying man’s gaze and saw, sure enough, the