Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick Page A

make out. On my head, she thought. She rubbed her forehead, and bits of material fell from her hair. Now—she could not understand it—the floor was flat again, the wall was upright as it had always been. Back to normal. But the objects; they were all broken. That remained. The garbage house, she thought. It’ll take weeks, months. We’ll never build back. It’s the end of our life, our happiness.
    Standing, she walked about; she kicked the pieces of a chair aside. She kicked through the trash, toward the door. The air swirled with particles and she inhaled them; she choked on them, hating them. Glass everywhere, all her lovely plate glass windows gone. Empty square holes with a few shards which still broke loose and dropped even as she watched. She found a door—it had been bent open. Shoving it, putting her weight against it, she made it move aside so that she could go unsteadily out of the house to stand a few yards away, surveying what had happened.
    Her headache had become worse. Am I blinded? she wondered; it was hard to keep her eyes open. Did I see a light? She had a memory of one click of light, like a camera shutter opening so suddenly, so swiftly, that her optic nerves had not responded—she had not really seen it. And yet, her eyes were hurt; she felt the injury there. Her body, all of her, seemed damaged, and no wonder. But the ground. She did not see any fissure. And the house stood; only the windows and the household goods had been destroyed. The structure, the empty container, remained with nothing left in it.
    Walking slowly along, she thought, I better go get help. I need medical help. And then, as she stumbled and half fell, she looked around her, up into the air, and saw once again the column of brown smoke from the south. Did San Francisco catch fire already? she asked herself.
    It’s burning, she decided. It’s a calamity. The city got it, not just West Marin, here. Not just a few rural people up here, but all the city people; there must be thousands dead. They’ll have to declare a national emergency and get the Red Cross and Army; we’ll remember this to the day we die. Walking, she began to cry, holding her hands to her face, not seeing where she was going, not caring. She did not cry for herself or her ruined house, now; she cried for the city to the south. She cried for all the people and things in it and what had happened to them.
    I’ll never see it again, she knew. There is no more San Francisco; it is over. The end had come about, today. Crying, she wandered on in the general direction of town; already she could hear people’s voices, rising up from the flatland below. Going by the sound she moved that way.
    A car drew up beside her. The door opened; a man reached out for her. She did not know him; she did not even know if he lived around here or if he was passing through. Anyhow, she hugged him.
    “All right,” the man said, squeezing her around the waist.
    Sobbing, she struggled closer to him, pressing herself against the car seat and drawing him over her.
    Later, she once more found herself walking, this time down a narrow road with oak trees, the gnarled old live oaks which she loved so much, on both sides of her. The sky overhead was bleak and gray, swept by heavy clouds which drifted in monotonous procession toward the north. This must be Bear Valley Ranch Road, she said to herself. Her feet hurt and when she stopped she discovered that she was barefoot; somewhere along the way she had lost her shoes.
    She still wore the paint-splattered jeans which she had had on when the quake had happened, when the radio had gone off. Or had it really been a quake after all? The man in the car, frightened and babbling like a baby, had said something else, but it had been too garbled, too full of panic, for her to understand.
    I want to go home, she said to herself. I want to be back in my own home and I want my shoes. I’ll bet that man took them; I’ll bet they’re back in his car. And