Clans of the Alphane Moon (22 page)

“Maybe we’ll have more children while we’re here
on this moon,” Mary said. “Like the slime molds… we arrived and we’ll increase in numbers until we become legion. The majority.” She laughed in an odd, soft way, and, in the darkness, relaxed against him, as she had not done in ages.

In the sky the Alphane ships continued to appear and both he and Mary remained silent, planning out schemes by which to obtain the children. It would be difficult, he realized soberly, perhaps even more tricky than anything they had done so far. But possibly the remains of the Hentman organization could assist them. Or some of the slime mold’s countless business contacts among Terrans and non-Terrans. Both were distinct possibilities. And Hentman’s agent who had infiltrated the CIA, his former boss Jack Elwood… but Elwood was now in jail. Anyhow if unhappily enough their efforts failed, as Mary said they would be having more children; this did not make up for the ones lost, but it would be a good omen, one that could not be overlooked.

“Do you love me, too?” Mary asked, her lips close to his ear.

“Yes,” he said truthfully. And then he said, “Ouch.” Because without warning she had bitten him, nearly severing the lobe of his ear.

That, too, seemed to him an omen.

But of what he could not quite yet tell.

Dr. Bloodmoney
is a post-nuclear holocaust masterpiece filled with a host of Dick’s most memorable characters: Hoppy Harrington, a deformed mutant with telekinetic powers; Walt Dangerfield, a selfless disc jockey stranded in a satellite circling the globe; Dr. Bluthgeld, the megalomaniac physicist largely responsible for the decimated state of the world; and Stuart McConchie and Bonny Keller, two unremarkable people bent on the survival of goodness in a world devastated by evil.

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The Glimmung wants Joe Fernwright, who is a pot-healer (a repairer of ceramics). But what could such a powerful entity want with a humble pot-healer? Or with the dozens of other creatures it has lured to Plowman’s Planet? And if the Glimmung is a god, are its ends positive or malign? Combining quixotic adventure, spine-chilling horror, and deliriously paranoid theology,
Galactic Pot-Healer
is a uniquely Dickian voyage to alternate worlds of the imagination.

Science Fiction/0-679-75297-8

Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in war. His wife is addicted to a drug that whips its users back and forth across time, and his newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth, but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of policy—and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make him better or to keep him poised just this side of death.

Science Fiction/0-679-74220-4

It is the late 1960s, and a paranoid incompetent has schemed his way into the White House and convulsed America in a war against imaginary internal enemies. A science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick is trying to keep from becoming one of that war’s casualties. And his best friend, a record executive named Nicholas Brady, is receiving transmissions from an extraterrestrial entity that may also be God—one that apparently wants him to overthrow the President.

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In
The Simulacra
, the whole government is a fraud and the President is an android. Ian Duncan is desperately in love with the first lady, Nicole Thibideaux, whom he has never met. Richard Kongrosian refuses to see anyone because he is convinced that his body odor is lethal. And the fascistic Bertold Goltz is trying to overturn the government. In classic fashion, Philip K. Dick shows there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.

Science Fiction/0-375-71926-1

The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world’s long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise. And once he pursues his suspicions, he starts to see how he is the center of a universe gone terribly awry.

Science Fiction/0-375-71927-X

Confessions of a Crap Artist
, 0-679-74114-3
The Divine Invasion
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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
, 0-679-74066-X
The Game-Players of Titan
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The Man in the High Castle
, 0-679-74067-8
Martian Time-Slip
, 0-679-76167-5
A Maze of Death
, 0-679-75298-6
A Scanner Darkly
, 0-679-73665-4
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick
, 0-679-74787-7
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
, 0-679-73666-2
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
, 0-679-73444-9
Ubik
, 0-679-73664-6
Valis
, 0-679-73446-5
We Can Build You
, 0-679-75296-X
The World Jones Made
, 0-679-74219-0

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FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2002

Copyright
©
1964 by Ace Books, Inc.,
copyright renewed 1992 by Laura Coelho,
Christopher Dick, and Isa Hackett

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicatin Data
Dick, Philip K.
Clans of the Alphane moon / Philip K. Dick.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49451-1
1. Psychiatric hospital patients—Fiction.
2. Psychiatric hospitals—Fiction. 3. Mentally ill—Fiction.
4. Satellites—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.I3 C5  2002
813′.54—dc21
2001056757

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