Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick

German flipper-people look like your next-door neighbor.”
    “You and the gentleman who runs the Red Fox.”
    “I'm just being hard-headedly realistic. We're in a struggle for our life; we've got to keep people emigrating here or we're dead on the vine, Anne. You know that. If we didn't have Camp B-G we could advertise that away from Earth's H-bomb-testing, contaminated atmosphere there are no abnormal births. I hoped to see that, but B-G spoils it.”
    “Not B-G. The births themselves.”
    “No one would be able to check up and show our abnormal births,” Arnie said, “without B-G.”
    “You'd say it, knowing it's not true, if you could get away with it, telling them back Home that they're safer here—”
    “Sure.” He nodded.
    “That's—immoral.”
    “No. Listen. You're the immoral one, you and those other ladies. By keeping Camp B-G open you're—”
    “Let's not argue, we'll never agree. Let's eat, and then you go on back to Lewistown. I can't take any more.”
    They ate their meal in silence.

    Dr. Milton Glaub, member of the psychiatric pool at Camp B-G, on loan from the Interplan Truckers' Union settlement, sat by himself in his own office once more, back from B-G, his stint there over for today. In his hands he held a bill for roof repairs done on his home the month before. He had put off the work—it involved the use of the scraper which kept the sand from piling up—but finally the settlement building inspector had mailed him a thirty-day condemnation notice. So he had contacted the Roofing Maintenance workers, knowing that he could not pay, but seeing no alternative. He was broke. This had been the worst month so far.
    If only Jean, his wife, could spend less. But the solution did not lie there, anyhow; the solution was to acquire more patients. The ITU paid him a monthly salary, but for every patient he received an additional fifty-dollar bonus: incentive, it was called. In actuality it meant the difference between debt and solvency. Nobody with a wife and children could possibly live on the salary offered to psychiatrists, and the ITU, as everyone knew, was especially parsimonious.
    And yet, Dr. Glaub continued to live in the ITU settlement; it was an orderly community, in some respects much like Earth. New Israel, like the other national settlements, had a charged, explosive quality.
    As a matter of fact, Dr. Glaub had once lived in another national colony, the United Arab Republic one, a particularly opulent region in which much vegetation, imported from Home, had been induced to grow. But, to him, the settlers' constant animosity toward neighboring colonies had been first irritating and then appalling. Men, at their daily jobs, brooded over wrongs committed. The most charming individuals blew up when certain topics were mentioned. And at night the hostility took practical shape; the national colonies lived for the night. Then, the research labs, which were scenes of scientific experimentation and development during the day, were thrown open to the public, and infernal machines were turned out—it was all done with much excitement and glee, and of course national pride.
    The hell with them, Dr. Glaub thought. Their lives were wasted; they had simply carried over the old quarrels from Earth—and the purpose of colonization had been forgotten. For instance, in the UN newspaper that morning he had read about a fracas in the streets of the electrical workers' settlement; the newspaper account implied that the nearby Italian colony was responsible, since several of the aggressors had been wearing the long waxed mustaches popular in the Italian colony….
    A knock at his office door broke his line of thought. “Yes,” he said, putting the roofing bill away in a desk drawer.
    “Are you ready for Goodmember Purdy?” his wife asked, opening the door in the professional manner that he had taught her.
    “Send Goodmember Purdy in,” Dr. Glaub said. “Wait a couple of minutes, though, so I can read