“It is planned to restore him into service.” The Abwehr had learned this several months ago. “He will, in fact, be made the highest military commander in the operation; as is well known, his unique strategic sense has not since been equaled. And his presence will make the campaign considerably more popular with the people, who regard him an Ubermensch. The only hero of modern times; one would have to go back to Hindenburg.”
“Or Adolf Hitler.”
“Hitler’s legendary reputation as a strategist has dimmed. The Wehrmacht knew his failings at the time; most of the German people know them now. As I’m sure you realize. You do keep tabs on such matters.”
“It was the peresis of the brain,” Heydrich said hotly. “If the UrFuhrer had not contracted that disease during his youthful days in Vienna, that Jew town — ”
Rising to his feet, Wegener said, “This discussion, as far as I am concerned, is over. I am required to report back to my superiors as to my accomplishments. Guten Tag.”
Also standing, the Reichsfuhrer SS started to speak. But then the intercom system on his desk buzzed. “Yes?” he said, depressing a key.
“General Skorzany to see you, sir,” the intercom said.
“All right. Send him in.” Heydrich folded his arms, rocked back and forth on his heels, reflecting.
A burly, gray-haired man, reasonably good-looking, with wary, intelligent eyes, wearing the uniform of a Waffen-SS general, entered Heydrich’s office. He glanced at Wegener, sizing him up, then turned inquiringly to the Reichsfiihrer SS.
To Wegener, Heydrich said, “Turn my suggestions over in your mind. For a time I will suspend any action vis-a-vis your activities recently in the Pacific States. I’ll be in touch with you before the end of the week and I hope a favorable decision will occur to you. Keep it in mind that your position is not good.”
Part Four
Plot Proposals and Outlines
This section contains examples of Dick at work sketching out his ideas — lucidly, and with a penchant both for dramatic possibilities and cognitive paradoxes — for the consideration of agents, editors, and potential television and film producers. All four of the selections date from the late 1960s, the only period in his life in which Dick seriously attempted to break into writing for television. (One of his finest early short stories, “Colony,” had been adapted, in 1956, for the X Minus One radio program, devoted to SF dramatizations.) There is no evidence that he gained even the interested attention of anyone in that industry. The lure to attempt to do so may have stemmed from the success of certain of his SF peers, such as Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon, in placing scripts with the original Star Trek series.
The novel outline “Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth” (1967) was first published posthumously in New Worlds #2, edited by David Garnett (Gollancz, London, 1992).
“Plot Idea for Mission: Impossible” (1967) and “TV Series Idea” (1967) have never before been published.
“Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (1968) was first published posthumously in PKDS Newsletter, No. 18 (August 1988). The notes were written for the benefit of Bertram Berman, a filmmaker who had, in that year, obtained a first option on the just released Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). This novel was ultimately adapted (with no involvement by Berman) into the acclaimed film Blade Runner (1982). Dick was able to see some of the early rushes of that film before his death in 1982, and was decidedly enthusiastic. In an earlier stage of the production of Blade Runner, however, Dick was displeased with the then quality of the script (subsequently rewritten, to Dick’s liking, by David Peoples) and vented his displeasure in “Universe Makers. . . and Breakers” (1981), included earlier in this volume. It is interesting to compare Dick’s notes here with the film version of the novel — Blade Runner — that ultimately emerged.
“Joe Protagoras Is Alive and Living on Earth” (1967)
Theme: A revolution which has brought forth conditions less favorable than the dictator planned. He is asked to resign in favor of an aspirant who says he can do better. But a group opposed to the aspirant takes the dictator into an alternate Earth where the aspirant, not the dictator, has ruled. Conditions are much worse. In fact, all the alternate worlds are worse. The aspirant ponders; he knows about this group and what they are doing. Solution: Aspirant has a team cross into alternate world and create fake fakes here and there, very subtle in character, which, when dictator finds them, will convince him that this whole alternate world is faked. So far, so good. But aspirant now goes too far: He plans out entire faked world (alternate Earth), where he rules superlatively. Aspirant knows that the dictator will be suspicious, will look for flaws, but aspirant is sure he can bring it off. Next step: What would group loyal to the dictator (the group who took him to real alternate worlds) do? They don’t need to plant fake fakes in the “good alternative” because it’s already wholly faked!
Plot: Joe Protagoras has a puny job — but in the overpopulated and economically malfunctioning socialist world of 2007 he is lucky to have any job at all. However, he has been saving up a sum of money by which to consult Mr. Job. This peculiar entity, with tens of thousands of outlets throughout Earth and its planetary colonies, is virtually alive, although artificial, and is important in the lives of Earth’s hordes of jobless and near-jobless citizens. Mr. Job can tell Protagoras, after an analysis of his aptitudes and experience, where he can find a genuinely adequate career appointment; Mr. Job, through its network of multiple extensors, keeps computer-style tabs on all job openings everywhere. But consulting Mr. Job is expensive. Protagoras hasn’t much “real” money saved up (i.e., metal coins, in contrast with the nearly worthless inflationary scrip floated by the government), but he can’t wait any longer (among other things, his girlfriend is putting pressure on him). He accordingly enters one of Mr. Job’s many booths (like a telephone booth), dials his facts in, drops his precious coins into the slot. He gets back a cryptic sentence-and-a-half: “Your twenty words are up,” Mr. Job tells him, and then clicks off. Joe Protagoras leaves the booth, trying to decipher the oraclelike message, and at this point the novel shifts to its other main character.
Simon Herrlich, the ancient, tottering despot, has kept himself alive by means of artificial organs for far too many years — and has kept himself in Earth’s top office at the same time. He is ill-liked by his heir, an ambitious aspirant named Arthur Self. For years, Self has been trying to persuade the Old Man to bow out voluntarily and hence turn everything over to him, i.e., to the younger, more virile Art Self. It is Self’s contention that if he had been ruling all this time, Earth would be in better shape economically, politically, and socially — if not spiritually (i.e., ideologically, this being a totalitarian state).
From Self’s viewpoint we learn about Project Almost, the breaking through to and investigation of alternate Earths. We learn about the scientist in charge of operating the inter-Earth project: Nick Edel, a close associate and good friend of Simon Herrlich — a man whom Self hates because it is Nick Edel who is, by means of his project, keeping Herrlich in office. . . inasmuch as all alternate Earths visited are worse than their own.
This section of the novel ends with Self conceiving the idea of sending his own teams across into one of the worst alternate worlds and planting “simulated forgeries” — in other words, fake fakes — with the idea of discrediting Edel’s whole project by giving the alternate Earths the appearance of being phony. We see him visiting the REM Corporation, a huge industrial concern owned by the government (which, of course, owns every economic enterprise on Earth, this being a Communist-type society). We now meet Cynthia Stonemerchant, the director of REM Corporation, the elderly widow who manages this vast industrial cartel. She is quite hostile toward the old dictator; she is, in fact, in favor of a non-Communist government, with industries privately owned, as in a capitalist society. Therefore she is glad to have her factories produce the fake fakes that Self wants. Then, together, they hatch out the extraordinary idea of creating an entire fake alternate world, a world that Mrs. Stonemerchant and her technical staff will plan.
Unknown to Self, Mrs. Stonemerchant plans to construct a capitalist fake alternate world that is better than their own. She is not merely hostile toward Simon Herrlich; she is hostile toward Art Self as well. She is in fact hostile to their whole totalitarian society, and is doing this job for her own purposes.
We return to Joe Protagoras, who has managed — with the help of his girlfriend — to decipher the sentence-and-a-half that Mr. Job gave him. It is telling him to go to REM Corporation’s Los Angeles branch and apply for the job technically listed as 20583-AR. . . a designation that means absolutely nothing to him; he has no idea what the job for which he will be applying consists of. But Mr. Job is never wrong, so Joe Protagoras quits the meager job he has, gathers his few possessions together (he has only a rented room, adequate housing being years away, due to the faulty economics of the government). Going by second-class surface bus, he sets off for Los Angeles.