Vintage PKD by Philip K. Dick

down—and you had it turned on right up until—” She raised an eyebrow and glanced at him searchingly.
    “At least I did turn it off then,” Barney pointed out.
    “Do you think I’m pretty?” Rising on her toes she all at once stretched, reached above her head, then, to his amazement, began to do a brisk series of exercises, hopping and leaping, her breasts bobbing.
    “I certainly do,” he murmured, taken aback.
    “I’d weigh a ton,” Roni Fugate panted, “if I didn’t do these UN Weapons Wing exercises every morning. Go pour the coffee, will you, dear?”
    Barney said, “Are you really my new assistant at P. P. Layouts?”
    “Yes, of course; you mean you don’t remember? But I guess you’re like a lot of really topnotch precogs: you see the future so well that you have only a hazy recollection of the past. Exactly what do you recall about last night?” She paused in her exercises, gasping for breath.
    “Oh,” he said vaguely, “I guess everything.”
    “Listen. The only reason why you’d be carrying a psychiatrist around with you is that you must have gotten your draft notice. Right?”
    After a pause he nodded.
That
he remembered. The familiar elongated blue-green envelope had arrived one week ago; next Wednesday he would be taking his mental at the UN military hospital in the Bronx.
    “Has it helped? Has he—” She gestured at the suitcase. “—Made you sick enough?”
    Turning to the portable extension of Dr. Smile, Barney said, “Have you?”
    The suitcase answered, “Unfortunately you’re still quite viable, Mr. Mayerson; you can handle ten Freuds of stress. Sorry. But we still have several days; we’ve just begun.”
    Going into the bedroom, Roni Fugate picked up her underwear, and began to step into it. “Just think,” she said reflectively. “If you’re drafted, Mr. Mayerson, and you’re sent to the colonies . . . maybe I’ll find myself with your job.” She smiled, showing superb, even teeth.
    It was a gloomy possibility and his precog ability did not assist him: the outcome hung nicely, at perfect balance on the scales of cause-and-effect to be.
    “You can’t handle my job,” he said. “You couldn’t even handle it in People’s China and that’s a relatively simple situation in terms of factoring out pre-elements.” But someday she could; without difficulty he foresaw that. She was young and overflowing with innate talent: all she required to equal him—and he was the best in the trade—was a few years’ experience. Now he became fully awake as awareness of his situation filtered back to him. He stood a good chance of being drafted, and even if he was not, Roni Fugate might well snatch his fine, desirable job from him, a job up to which he had worked by slow stages over a thirteen-year period.
    A peculiar solution to the grimness of the situation, this going to bed with her; he wondered how he had arrived at it.
    Bending over the suitcase, he said in a low voice to Dr. Smile, “I wish you’d tell me why the hell with everything so dire I decided to—”
    “I can answer that,” Roni Fugate called from the bedroom; she had now put on a somewhat tight pale green sweater and was buttoning it before the mirror of her vanity table. “You informed me last night, after your fifth bourbon and water. You said—” She paused, eyes sparkling. “It’s inelegant. What you said was this. ‘If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.’ Only the verb you used, I regret to say, wasn’t ‘join.’ ”
    “Hmm,” Barney said, and went into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. Anyhow, he was not far from New York; obviously if Miss Fugate was a fellow employee at P. P. Layouts he was within commute distance of his job. They could ride in together. Charming. He wondered if their employer Leo Bulero would approve of this if he knew. Was there an official company policy about employees sleeping together? There was about almost everything else . . . although how a man