The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

and Eldritch.”
    “Except,” Roni said, “that Eldritch has Pre-Fash consultants of his own, evidently.” She smiled at him. “You have no clear conception of what to do, have you, Barney? I can see that. What a shame. And you’ve worked so many years.” She shook her head sadly.
    “I can see,” he said, “why Leo was hesitant at the idea of crossing you.”
    “Because I tell the truth?” She raised her eyebrows. “Yes, perhaps so; everybody’s afraid of the truth. You, for instance—you don’t like to face the fact that you said no to that poor pot salesman just to get back at the woman who—”
    “Shut up,” he said savagely.
    “You know where that pot salesman probably is right now? Signed up by Palmer Eldritch. You did him—and your ex-wife—a favor. Whereas if you’d said yes you’d have chained him to a declining company, cut both of them out of their chance to—” She broke off. “I’m making you feel bad.”
    Gesturing, he said, “This is just not relevant to what I called you in here for.”
    “That’s right.” She nodded. “You called me in here so we could work out a way of betraying Leo Bulero together.”
    Baffled, he said, “Listen—”
    “But it’s so. You can’t handle it alone; you need me. I haven’t said no. Keep calm. However, I don’t think this is the place or the time to discuss it; let’s wait until we’re home at the conapt. Okay?” She gave him, then, a brilliant smile, one of absolute warmth.
    “Okay,” he agreed. She was right.
    “Wouldn’t it be sad,” Roni said, “if this office of yours were bugged? Perhaps Mr. Bulero is going to get a tape of everything we’ve said just now.” Her smile continued, even grew; it dazzled him. The girl was afraid of no one and nothing on Earth or in the whole Sol system, he realized.
    He wished he felt the same way. Because there was one problem that haunted him, one he had not discussed with either Leo or her, although it was certainly bothering Leo, too…and should, if she were as rational as she seemed, be bothering her.
    It had yet to be established that what had come back from Prox, the person or thing that had crashed on Pluto, was really Palmer Eldritch.

FIVE
----
    Set up financially by the contract with the Chew-Z people, Richard Hnatt placed a call to one of Dr. Willy Denkmal’s E Therapy clinics in the Germanies; he picked the central one, in Munich, and began making arrangements for both himself and Emily.
    I’m up with the greats, he said to himself as he waited, with Emily, in the swanky gnoff-hide decorated lounge of the clinic; Dr. Denkmal, as was his custom, proposed to interview them initially personally, although of course the therapy itself would be carried out by members of his staff.
    “It makes me nervous,” Emily whispered; she held a magazine on her lap but was unable to read. “It’s so—unnatural.”
    “Hell,” Hnatt said vigorously, “that’s what it’s not; it’s an acceleration of the
natural
evolutionary process that’s going on all the time anyway, only usually it’s so slow we don’t perceive it. I mean, look at our ancestors in caves; they were covered with body-hair and they had no chins and a very limited frontal-area brain-wise. And they had huge fused molars in order to chew uncooked seeds.”
    “Okay,” Emily said, nodding.
    “The farther away we can get from them the better. Anyhow, they evolved to meet the Ice Age; we have to evolve to meet the Fire Age, just the opposite. So we need that chitinous-type skin, that rind and the altered metabolism that lets us sleep in midday and also the improved ventilation and the—”
    From the inner office Dr. Denkmal, a small, round style of middle-class German with white hair and an Albert Schweitzer mustache, emerged. With him came another man, and Richard Hnatt saw for the first time close-up the effects of E Therapy. And it was not like seeing pics on the society pages of the homeopape. Not at all.
    The man’s