Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick Page A

Skitz?You
smell
like a Heeb. Make up your mind.” She flushed the toilet, came out of the bathroom. “And you’re as irritable as a Mans. That’s what I hate about you the most, your perpetual irritability.” She found her coffee, drank. “It’s got grounds in it!” she yelled at him in fury. “You lost the pot again!”
    Now that the vision had departed he found it difficult to remember what it had been like. That was one trouble with visions.
How did they relate to the everyday world?
He always asked that of them.
    “I saw a monster,” he said. “It stepped on Gandhi-town and crushed it underfoot. Gandhitown was gone; only a hole remained.” He felt sad; he liked Gandhitown, much more than any other spot on the moon. And then he felt afraid, much more than he ever had before in his life. And yet there was nothing he could do. No way to stop the monster; it would come and get them all, even the powerful Manses with all their clever ideas, their ceaseless activity. Even the Pares who tried to defend themselves against everything real and unreal alike.
    But there had been more to the vision than that.
    Behind the monster had been a wicked soul.
    He had beheld it as it crept out onto the world like a shiny jello of rot; it had decayed everything it touched, even the bare soil, the skinny plants and trees. A cupful of it would corrupt an entire universe, and it belonged to a person of deeds. A creature who
wanted.
    So there were two evil things coming, the monster who crushed Gandhitown, and, beyond that, the wicked soul; they were separable, and each would ultimately go its separate way. The monster was female, the wicked soul mate. And—he shut his eyes. This was the portion of the vision that terrified him. The twowould fight a dreadful battle. And it was not a battle between good and evil; it was a sightless, vacant struggle in the mire between two thoroughly contaminated entities, each as vicious as the other.
    The battle, fought perhaps even to the death of one of the entities, would take place on this world. They were coming here now, to use this as a battleground deliberately, to fight out their timeless war.
    “Fix some eggs,” Elsie said.
    Reluctantly, Ignatz looked about in the litter by the sink for a carton of eggs.
    “You’ll have to wash the frying pan from last night,” Elsie said. “I left it in the sink.”
    “Okay.” He began to run cold water; with a rolled-up mass of newspaper he scrubbed at the encrusted surface of the frying pan.
    I wonder, he thought. Can I influence the outcome of this struggle? Would the presence of good in the midst of this have any effect?
    He could summon all his spiritual faculties and try. Not only for the benefit of the moon, for the clans, but for the two dismal entities themselves. Perhaps to ease their burden.
    It was a thought-provoking idea, and as he scoured the frying pan he continued to entertain it, silently. No use telling Elsie; she would merely tell him to go to hell. She did not know his powers inasmuch as he had never revealed them to her. When in the right mood, he could walk through walls, read people’s minds, cure illness, cause evil people to become ill, affect the weather, blight crops—he could do almost anything, given the right mood. It derived from his saintliness.
    Even the suspicious Pares recognized him as a saint. Everyone on the moon did, including the busy, insultingManses—when they took time out from their activity to glance up and notice him.
    If anyone can save this moon from the two dingy organisms approaching, Ignatz realized, it is I. This is my destiny.
    “It’s not a world; it’s just a moon,” Elsie said, with bleak contempt; she stood before the trash burner, dressing herself in the clothes she had taken off the night before. She had worn them for a week now, and Ignatz observed—not without a trace of relish—that she was well on her way to becoming a Heeb; it would not require much more.
    And it was a good