The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick Page B

realized, with a female nurse, so everything was all right.
    Criminy, he thought, I certainly am edgy. Once more entering the side room he resumed undressing; his hands, he found, were shaking.
    Presently he lay strapped to one of the twin tables, Emily in a similar state beside him. She, too, seemed frightened; she was very pale and quiet.
    “Your glands,” Dr. Denkmal explained, jovially rubbing his hands together and wantonly eyeing Emily, “will be stimulated by this, especially Kresy’s Gland, which controls rate of evolution,
nicht Wahr?
Yes, you know that; every schoolchild knows that, is taught now what we’ve discovered here. Today what you will notice is no growth of chitinous shell or brainshield or loss of fingernails and toenails—you didn’t know that, I bet!—but only a slight but very, very important change in the frontal lobe…it will smart; that is a pun, you know? It smarts and you become, ah, smart.” Again he giggled. Richard Hnatt felt miserable; he waited like some hog-tied animal for whatever they had in store for him. What a way to make business contacts, he said ruefully to himself, and shut his eyes.
    A male attendant materialized and stood by him, looking blond, Nordic, and without intelligence.
    “We play soothing
Musik,
” Dr. Denkmal said, pressing a button. Multiphonic sound, from every corner of the room, filtered out, an insipid orchestral version of some popular Italian opera, Puccini or Verdi; Hnatt did not know. “Now
höre
, Herr Hnatt.” Denkmal bent down beside him, suddenly serious. “I want you to understand; every now and then this therapy—what do you say?—
blasts back
.”
    “Backfires,” Hnatt said gratingly. He had been expecting this.
    “But mostly we have successes. Here, Herr Hnatt, is what the backfires consist of, I am afraid; instead of evoluting the Kresy Gland is very stimulated to—regress. Is that correct in English?”
    “Yes,” Hnatt muttered. “Regress how far?”
    “Just a trifle. But it could be unpleasant. We would catch it quickly, of course, and cease therapy. And generally that stops the regression. But—not always. Sometimes once the Kresy Gland has been stimulated to—” He gestured. “It keeps on. I should tell you this in case you might have scruples. Right?”
    “I’ll take the chance,” Richard Hnatt said. “I guess. Everyone else does, don’t they? Okay, go ahead.” He squirmed, saw Emily, even paler now, almost imperceptibly nodding; her eyes were glassy.
    What’ll probably happen, he thought fatalistically, is that one of us will evolve—probably Emily—and the other, me, will devolve back to Sinanthropus. Back to fused molars, tiny brain, bent legs, and cannibalistic tendencies. I’ll have a hell of a time closing sales that way.
    Dr. Denkmal clamped a switch shut, whistling along with the opera happily to himself.
    The Hnatts’ E Therapy had begun.
    He seemed to feel a loss of weight, nothing more, at least not at first. And then his head ached as if rapped by a hammer. With the ache came almost instantly a new and acute comprehension; it was a dreadful risk he and Emily were taking, and it wasn’t fair to her to subject her to this, just to further sales. Obviously she didn’t want this; suppose she evolved back just enough to lose her ceramic talent? And they both would be ruined; his career hung on seeing Emily remain one of the planet’s top ceramists.
    “Stop,” he said aloud, but the sound did not seem to emerge; he did not hear it, although his vocal apparatus seemed to function—he felt the words in his throat. And then it came to him. He was evolving; it was functioning. His insight was due to the change in his brain metabolism. Assuming Emily was all right then everything was all right.
    He perceived, too, that Dr. Willy Denkmal was a cheap little pseudo-quack, that this whole business preyed off the vanity of mortals striving to become more than they were entitled to be, and in a purely