Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick Page B

artificial components, kidney, heart, lungs—everything was made of plastic and stainless steel, all working in unison but entirely without authentic life. The man's voice issued from a tape, through an amplifier and speaker system.
    Possibly at some time in the past the man had been real and alive, but that was over, and the stealthy replacement had taken place, inch by inch, progressing insidiously from one organ to the next, and the entire structure was there to deceive others. To deceive him, Jack Bohlen, in fact. He was alone in this office; there was no personnel manager. No one spoke to him, and when he himself talked, no one heard; it was entirely a lifeless, mechanical room in which he stood.
    He was not sure what to do; he tried not to stare too hard at the manlike structure before him. He tried to talk calmly, naturally, about his job and even his personal problems. The structure was probing; it wanted to learn something from him. Naturally, he told it as little as possible. And all the time, as he gazed down at the carpet, he saw its pipes and valves and working parts functioning away; he could not keep from seeing.
    All he wanted to do was get away as soon as possible. He began to sweat; he was dripping with sweat and trembling, and his heart pounded louder and louder.
    “Bohlen,” the structure said, “are you sick?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Can I go back down to my bench now?” He turned and started toward the door.
    “Just a moment,” the structure said from behind him.
    That was when panic overtook him, and he ran; he pulled the door open and ran out into the hall.
    An hour or so later he found himself wandering along an unfamiliar street in Burlingame. He did not remember the intervening time and he did not know how he had gotten where he was. His legs ached. Evidently he had walked, mile after mile.
    His head was much clearer. I'm schizophrenic, he said to himself. I know it. Everyone knows the symptoms; it's catatonic excitement with paranoid coloring: the mental health people drill it into us, even into the school kids. I'm another one of those. That was what the personnel manager was probing.
    I need medical help.

    As Jack removed the power supply of the Angry Janitor and laid it on the floor, the master circuit of the school said, “You are very skillful.”
    Jack glanced up at the middle-aged female figure and thought to himself, It's obvious why this place unnerves me. It's like my psychotic experience of years ago.
Did I, at that time, look into the future?
    There had been no schools of this kind, then. Or if there had, he had not seen them or known about them.
    “Thank you,” he said.
    What had tormented him ever since the psychotic episode with the personnel manager at Corona Corporation was this: suppose it was not a hallucination? Suppose the so-called personnel manager was as he had seen him, an artificial construct, a machine like these teaching machines?
    If that had been the case,
then there was no psychosis.
    Instead of a psychosis, he had thought again and again, it was more on the order of a vision, a glimpse of absolute reality, with the facade stripped away. And it was so crushing, so radical an idea, that it could not be meshed with his ordinary views. And the mental disturbance had come out of that.
    Reaching into the exposed wiring of the Angry Janitor, Jack felt expertly with his long fingers until at last he touched what he knew to be there: a broken lead. “I think I've got hold of it,” he said to the master circuit of the school. Thank God, he thought, these aren't the old-fashioned printed circuits; were that that the case, he would have to replace the unit. Repair would be impossible.
    “My understanding,” the master circuit said, “is that much effort went into the designing of the Teachers re problems of repair. We have been fortunate so far; no prolonged interruption of service has taken place. However, I believe that preventive maintenance is indicated