“You think there’ve been other burglaries like yours?” Nicholas asked.
“Yes.”
“I haven’t read about them in the papers.”
I gazed at him for a long time.
“I guess they wouldn’t be reported,” he mumbled lamely.
“Not really, no,” I said. “Mine wasn’t. It was just listed under all the thefts for the week in the county. „Six hundred dollars” worth of stereo reported stolen by Philip K. Dick of Placentia, on the night of November eighteenth, 1971.“ No mention of papers stolen or cancelled checks stolen or files blown open. As if it were an ordinary burglary by junkies for something they could sell. No mention of the wall beside the files burned black by the heat of the blast. No mention of the big heap of water-soaked towels and rugs piled in the bathroom, which they used to cover the file when they detonated the C-three; it creates such heat that if – “
“You certainly know a lot about it,” Nicholas said.
“I’ve asked,” I said shortly.
Nicholas said, “I wonder if my four hundred pages of notes are safe. Maybe I should put them in a safe deposit box in a bank somewhere.”
“Subversive dreams,” I said.
“They’re not dreams.”
“The dream-control police. Sniffing out subversive dreams.”
“Are you sure it was the police who hit your house?” Nicholas said. “It could have been a private group, sore at you because, say – well, say because of the pro-drug stand in your books.”
There never has been and never will be any „pro-drug stand“ in my Sboks,” I said angrily. “I write about drugs and drug use, but that doesn’t mean I’m pro-drug; other people write about crime and about criminals, but that doesn’t make them pro-crime.”
“Your books are hard to understand. They may have been misinterpreted, especially after Harlan Ellison wrote what he wrote about you. Your books are so – well, they’re nuts.”
“I guess so,” I said.
Nicholas said, “Really Phil, you write the strangest books of anybody in the US, really psychotic books, books about crazy people and people on drugs, freaks and misfits of every description; in fact, of the kind never before described. You can’t blame the government for being curious about the kind of person who would write such books, can you? I mean, your main character is always outside the system, a loser who finally somehow – “
“£/ /“, Nicholas,” I said, with real outrage. “Sorry, Phil, but – well, why can’t you write about normal people, the way other authors do? Normal people with normal interests who do normal things. Instead, when your books open, there is this misfit holding down some miserable low job, and he takes drugs and his girlfriend is in a mental institution but he still loves her – “
“Okay!” I interrupted. “I know it was the authorities who broke into my house because the house behind me was evacuated. And the black family that lives there has ten children, so someone is always there, constantly. The night of the burglary I noticed the house behind me was completely empty, and it stayed empty an entire week. And the broken windows and doors of my house were all in the rear, adjoining it. No private burglars would evacuate a whole house. It was the authorities.” „ “They’ll get you again, Phil,” Nicholas said. “Probably they wanted to see what your next book is about. What is your next book about, anyhow?”
“Not you,” I said. “I can tell you that.”
“Did they find the MS?”
“The MS of my new book,” I told him, “was in my attorney’s safe. I transferred it there a month before the hit on my house.”
“What’s the book about?”
After a pause I said, “A police state in America modeled on the Soviet Gulag prison system. A police slave-labor state here. It’s called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.”
“Why’d you put the manuscript in your lawyer’s safe?”
I said, reluctantly, “Well, I – shit, Nick. To tell you the truth, I had a dream.”
Silence for a time.
Nicholas had been right to be apprehensive about the FAP interest in him. Not long thereafter, as he sat at his desk in his office at Progressive Records, listening to a tape of a new singer, two FAPers paid him a surprise visit.
The two government agents had fat red necks and both wore modern single-breasted polyester suits and stylish ties. They were middle-aged and heavyset; they carried briefcases, which they placed on the desk between them and Nicholas. Nicholas was reminded of the two FBI agents who had visited him years ago in Berkeley, but this time he was not scared and angry; he was just scared.
“Are we putting out too many protest songs?” he said, thinking to himself that he could readily show it not to be his personal responsibility but that of the chief of A and R, Hugo Wentz.
The greater of the two FAP agents said, “No, as a matter of fact your firm has a three-check rating with us, which is quite good. If anything, we’re here to compliment Progressive Records, at least in contrast to findings obtained throughout the record industry.”
“It’s pretty bad,” the other agent chimed in. “As I’m sure you realize, Mr Brady. A large number of Communist singers are being regularly recorded, and many protest songs are being aired these days, despite the general cooperation of the networks and major independent stations.”
Nicholas knew it was not public policy for the radio stations to play protest songs; that was the reason Progressive Records didn’t cut them. It was pointless; no DJ would air them. It was a matter of economics, not principle.
“We are here regarding the following spinoff of Mission Checkup,” the greater of the agents said. “In the course of your work, Mr Brady, you must come in contact with many singers and groups whom you do not sign, correct? For every one you sign to a contract there must be a hundred you don’t.”
Nicholas nodded.
“We also know what salary you draw here,” the greater agent continued. “And we know you have a small son who needs major dental work, that you’re in debt, that you’d very much like to move out of your apartment into a house, that Rachel is talking about leaving you if you don’t put Johnny in a special school, because of his stammering … am I correct? We’ve talked it over with our superiors in an effort to find a way to assist you, and we’ve come up with this: If you will provide the government with a copy of the lyrics of each artist whom you come in contact with who shows pro-Communist sympathies, we will pay you a flat hundred dollars per artist. It’s our estimate that you could enhance your salary by up to two thousand dollars a month this way, and you would not have to report it to the IRS; it would be tax-free. Of course, the determination as to which artists you report are pro-Communist and which are not belongs to us; but even if we accept only half the ones you pass on to us, you should be able to – “
“And we guarantee,” the other FAP agent broke in, “that this will remain an arrangement known only to you and to us. No one else, either at Progressive or anywhere else, will find out. You’ll receive a code name under which you report, and everything, including payments, will be filed under that. The identity of the coded informant will be known only to the two of us sitting here and to you.”
“But if these artists aren’t signed,” Nicholas said, “what harm can they do?”
They can change the slant of their lyrics,” the greater agent said, ‘so they’re not pro-Communist, and get signed up somewhere else.”
Nicholas said, “But if the lyrics aren’t subversive any more, what does it matter? Why do you care about them then?”
The greater agent said, “Once they make it big they can again begin to sneak subversive poisons into their lyrics. And by that time it’s very difficult to eradicate them, once they’re known to the public, you see; once they’ve made it big. That’s potentially a very dangerous situation: someone who slips something controversial in with ordinary lyrics and then begins to further slant them later on. So you can see why we don’t merely go on who’s recorded and being played; we need to know the names of those who aren’t.”
“They in some ways are the most dangerous,” the other agent said.
That night Nicholas told me about this interview with the two government agents. He was angry by then, angry and shaking.
“You going to take them up on it?” I asked,
“Hell, no,” Nicholas said. But then he said, “You know,
I can’t really believe the government is concerned with those loser artists. I think it’s my loyalty they’re interested in. Those two FAPers; it was a ploy to test me. They knew all about me; obviously there’s a file on me back in Washington.”