Vintage PKD by Philip K. Dick Page A

who spent all his time at the resort beaches of Antarctica or in German E Therapy clinics could find time to devise dogma on every topic eluded him.
    Someday, he said to himself, I’ll live like Leo Bulero; instead of being stuck in New York City in 180 degree heat—
    Beneath him now a throbbing began; the floor shook. The building’s cooling system had come on. Day had begun.
    Outside the kitchen window the hot, hostile sun took shape beyond the other conapt buildings visible to him; he shut his eyes against it. Going to be another scorcher, all right, probably up to the twenty Wagner mark. He did not need to be a precog to foresee this.
    In the miserably high-number conapt building 492 on the outskirts of Marilyn Monroe, New Jersey, Richard Hnatt ate breakfast indifferently while, with something greater than indifference, he glanced over the morning homeopape’s weather-syndrome readings of the previous day.
    The key glacier, Ol’ Skintop, had retreated 4.62 Grables during the last twenty-four-hour period. And the temperature, at noon in New York, had exceeded the previous day’s by 1.46 Wagners. In addition the humidity, as the oceans evaporated, had increased by 16 Selkirks. So things were hotter and wetter; the great procession of nature clanked on, and toward what? Hnatt pushed the ’pape away, and picked up the mail which had been delivered before dawn . . . it had been some time since mailmen had crept out in daylight hours.
    The first bill which caught his eye was the apt’s cooling prorated swindle; he owed Conapt 492 exactly ten and a half skins for the last month—a rise of three-fourths of a skin over April. Someday, he said to himself, it’ll be so hot that
nothing
will keep this place from melting; he recalled the day his l-p record collection had fused together in a lump, back around ’04, due to a momentary failure of the building’s cooling network. Now he owned iron oxide tapes; they did not melt. And at the same moment every parakeet and Venusian ming bird in the building had dropped dead. And his neighbor’s turtle had been boiled dry. Of course this had been during the day and everyone—at least the men—had been at work. The wives, however, had huddled at the lowest subsurface level, thinking (he remembered Emily telling him this) that the fatal moment had at last arrived. And not a century from now but
now
. The Caltech predictions had been wrong . . . only of course they hadn’t been; it had just been a broken power-lead from the N.Y. utility people. Robot workmen had quickly shown up and repaired it.
    In the living room his wife sat in her blue smock, painstakingly painting an unfired ceramic piece with glaze; her tongue protruded and her eyes glowed . . . the brush moved expertly and he could see already that this was going to be a good one. The sight of Emily at work recalled to him the task that lay before him, today: one which he did not relish.
    He said, peevishly, “Maybe we ought to wait before we approach him.”
    Without looking up, Emily said, “We’ll never have a better display to present to him than we have now.”
    “What if he says no?”
    “We’ll go on. What did you expect, that we’d give up just because my onetime husband can’t foresee—or won’t foresee— how successful these new pieces will eventually be in terms of the market?”
    Richard Hnatt said, “You know him; I don’t. He’s not vengeful, is he? He wouldn’t carry a grudge?” And anyhow what sort of grudge could Emily’s former husband be carrying? No one had done him any harm; if anything it had gone the other way, or so he understood from what Emily had related.
    It was strange, hearing about Barney Mayerson all the time and never having met him, never having direct contact with the man. Now that would end, because he had an appointment to see Mayerson at nine this morning in the man’s office at P. P. Layouts. Mayerson of course would hold the whip hand; he could take one brief glance