The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick Page B

“Get set!”
    “That squirrel,” Yancy said solemnly, “had faith. No, he never saw any sign of winter. But he knew winter was coming.” The firm jaw moved; one hand came slowly up …
    And then the image stopped. It froze, immobile, silent. No words came from it; abruptly the sermon ended, in the middle of a paragraph.
    “That’s it,” Babson said briskly, filtering the Yancy out. “Help you any?”
    Sipling pawed jerkily at his work papers. “No,” he admitted, “actually it doesn’t. But—I’ll get it worked out.”
    “I hope so.” Babson’s face darkened ominously and his small mean eyes seemed to grow smaller. “What’s the matter with you? Home problems?”
    “I’ll be okay,” Sipling muttered, sweating. “Thanks.”
    On the screen a faint impression of Yancy remained, still poised at the word coming. The rest of the gestalt was in Sipling’s head: the continuing slice of words and gestures hadn’t been worked out and fed to the composite.
    Sipling’s contribution was missing, so the entire gestalt was stopped cold in its tracks.
    “Say,” Joe Pines said uneasily, “I’ll be glad to take over, today. Cut your desk out of the circuit and I’ll cut myself in.”
    “Thanks,” Sipling muttered, “but I’m the only one who can get this damn part. It’s the central gem.”
    “You ought to take a rest. You’ve been working too hard.”
    “Yes,” Sipling agreed, on the verge of hysteria. “I’m a little under the weather.”
    That was obvious: everybody in the office could see that. But only Sipling knew why. And he was fighting with all his strength to keep from screaming out the reason at the top of his lungs.
     
    Basic analysis of the political milieu at Callisto was laid out by Niplan computing apparatus at Washington, D.C.; but the final evaluations were done by human technicians. The Washington computers could ascertain that the Callisto political structure was moving toward a totalitarian make-up, but they couldn’t say what that indicated. Human beings were required to class the drift as malign.
    “It isn’t possible,” Taverner protested. “There’s constant industrial traffic in and out of Callisto; except for the Ganymede syndicate they’ve got out-planet commerce bottled up. We’d know as soon as anything phony got started.”
    “How would we know?” Police Director Kellman inquired.
    Taverner indicated the data-sheets, graphs and charts of figures and percentages that covered the walls of the Niplan Police offices. “It would show up in hundreds of ways. Terrorist raids, political prisons, extermination camps. We’d hear about political recanting, treason, disloyalty … all the basic props of a dictatorship.”
    “Don’t confuse a totalitarian society with a dictatorship,” Kellman said dryly. “A totalitarian state reaches into every sphere of its citizens’ lives, forms their opinions on every subject. The government can be a dictatorship, or aparliament, or an elected president, or a council of priests. That doesn’t matter.”
    “All right,” Taverner said, mollified. “I’ll go. I’ll take a team there and see what they’re doing.”
    “Can you make yourselves look like Callistotes?”
    “What are they like?”
    “I’m not sure,” Kellman admitted thoughtfully, with a glance at the elaborate wall charts. “But whatever it is, they’re all beginning to turn out alike.”
     
    Among its passengers the interplan commercial liner that settled down at Callisto carried Peter Taverner, his wife, and their two children. With a grimace of concern, Taverner made out the shapes of local officials waiting at the exit hatch. The passengers were going to be carefully screened; as the ramp descended, the clot of officials moved forward.
    Taverner got to his feet and collected his family. “Ignore them,” he told Ruth. “Our papers will get us by.”
    Expertly prepared documents identified him as a speculator in nonferric metals, looking for a