Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick

“You’re sort of putting yourself in the position of claiming fraud because your rooming house didn’t burn down after all, in other words that you really didn’t need the insurance.”
    “The analogy is imperfect.”
    Joe said, “Sorry.” He, too, felt irritable, now. And, as before, at her.
    “Do you think,” Mali said bitingly, “that I’m to go to bed with you because of this scene of us holding our hands? Tunuma mokimo hilo, kei dei bifo ditikar sewat,” she said in her own tongue; obviously profanity.
    There sounded a knock on the door. “Hey, you two,” Harper Baldwin bawled. “We’re working out the logistics of our collective employment; we need both of you.”
    Joe got up and made his way through the darkness of the lounge to the door.
    For two hours they haggled. And at no time did they reach any kind of joint conclusion.
    “We just don’t know enough about Glimmung,” Harper Baldwin complained, looking weary. He then scrutinized Mali Yojez intently. “I have the feeling that you know more about Glimmung than any of us, and a lot more than you’ll admit. Hell, you even kept back from us the fact that you ever were on Plowman’s Planet; if you hadn’t mentioned it to Fernwright—”
    “Nobody asked her,” Joe said. “Until I did. And she said so, straight out.”
    A muffled, gangly youth asked, “What do you think, Miss Yojez? Is Glimmung trying to help us, or has he in effect created a slave population of experts for his own ends? Becauseif it’s the latter we better get this ship turned around before we get any closer to Plowman’s Planet.” His voice squeaked with nervousness.
    Seated beside Joe, Mali Yojez leaned toward him and said in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here; let’s go back to the lounge. We are getting nowhere and I want to talk to you farther.”
    “Okay,” he said, pleased; he stood up and so did she. Together they made their way down the aisle toward the lounge.
    “There they go,” Harper Baldwin complained. “What’s the great attraction about the lounge, Miss Yojez?”
    Mali paused and said, “We besport ourself amorously.” She then continued on.
    “You shouldn’t have told them that,” Joe said as he and she entered the lounge and closed the door. “They probably believed you.”
    “But it’s true,” Mali said. “A person doesn’t normally use the SSA machine unless he’s serious. To the other person, in this case I.” She seated herself on the couch of the lounge and reached up her arms toward him.
    He locked the lounge door first. It seemed, all circumstances considered, a reasonable thing to do.
    Joys too fierce, he thought, too fierce to be expressed. Whoever said that understood.

7
    In orbit around Plowman’s Planet, the ship began firing its retrorockets, cutting its velocity. They would be landing in half an hour.
    Meanwhile, Joe Fernwright amused himself in a mordant way: by reading
The Wall Street Journal;
he had found over the years that this newspaper, out of all of them, contained the most chilling and the most recent oddities. Reading the
Journal
was like taking a little trip into the future—six months or so.
    A new deep-depth rooming house in New Jersey, designed especially for geriatric persons, has built into it a novel circuit, designed to make the transfer of the room easy and without delay. When a roomer dies, electronic detectors in the wall register his lack of pulse, and send swift circuits into action. The deceased is grappled by standard waldoes, drawn into the wall of the room, where on the spot his remains are incinerated within an asbestos chamber, thus permitting the new tenant, also a geriatric case, to take possession by noon.
    He ceased reading, tossed down the newspaper. We must be better off out here, he decided. If that’s what they’ve got planned for us back on Earth.
    “I’ve verified our reservations,” Mali said matter-of-factly. “We all have rooms at the Olympia Hotel in the largest city