Vintage PKD by Philip K. Dick Page B

at the display of ceramics and decline ad hoc. No, he would say, P. P. Layouts is not interested in a min of this. Believe my precog ability, my Pre-Fash marketing talent and skill. And—out would go Richard Hnatt, the collection of pots under his arm, with absolutely no other place to go.
    Looking out the window he saw with aversion that already it had become too hot for human endurance; the footer runnels were abruptly empty as everyone ducked for cover. The time was eight-thirty and he now had to leave; rising, he went to the hall closet to get his pith helmet and his mandatory cooling-unit; by law one had to be strapped to every commuter’s back until nightfall.
    “Goodbye,” he said to his wife, pausing at the front door.
    “Goodbye and lots of luck.” She had become even more involved in her elaborate glazing and he realized all at once that this showed how vast her tension was; she could not afford to pause even a moment. He opened the door and stepped out into the hall, feeling the cool wind of the portable unit as it chugged from behind him. “Oh,” Emily said, as he began to shut the door; now she raised her head, brushing her long brown hair back from her eyes. “Vid me as soon as you’re out of Barney’s office, as soon as you know one way or another.”
    “Okay,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
    Downramp, at the building’s bank, he unlocked their safety deposit box and carried it to a privacy room; there he lifted out the display case containing the spread of ceramic ware which he was to show Mayerson.
    Shortly, he was aboard a thermosealed interbuilding commute car, on his way to downtown New York City and P. P. Layouts, the great pale synthetic-cement building from which Perky Pat and all the units of her miniature world originated. The doll, he reflected, which had conquered man as man at the same time had conquered the planets of the Sol system. Perky Pat, the obsession of the colonists. What a commentary on colonial life . . . what more did one need to know about those unfortunates who, under the selective service laws of the UN, had been kicked off Earth, required to begin new, alien lives on Mars or Venus or Ganymede or wherever else the UN bureaucrats happened to imagine they could be deposited . . . and after a fashion survive.
    And we think we’ve got it bad here, he said to himself.
    The individual in the seat next to him, a middle-aged man wearing the gray pith helmet, sleeveless shirt, and shorts of bright red popular with the businessman class, remarked, “It’s going to be another hot one.”
    “Yes.”
    “What you got there in that great big carton? A picnic lunch for a hovel of Martian colonists?”
    “Ceramics,” Hnatt said.
    “I’ll bet you fire them just by sticking them outdoors at high noon.” The businessman chuckled, then picked up his morning ’pape, opened it to the front page. “Ship from outside the Sol system reported crash-landed on Pluto,” he said. “Team being sent to find it. You suppose it’s
things
? I can’t stand those things from other war systems.”
    “It’s more likely one of our own ships reporting back,” Hnatt said.
    “Ever seen a Proxima thing?”
    “Only pics.”
    “Grisly,” the businessman said. “If they find that wrecked ship on Pluto and it is a thing I hope they laser it out of existence; after all we do have a law against them coming into our system.”
    “Right.”
    “Can I see your ceramics? I’m in neckties, myself. The Werner simulated-handwrought living tie in a variety of Titanian colors— I have one on, see? The colors are actually a primitive life form that we import and then grow in cultures here on Terra. Just how we induce them to reproduce is our trade secret, you know, like the formula for Coca-Cola.”
    Hnatt said, “For a similar reason I can’t show you these ceramics, much as I’d like to. They’re new. I’m taking them to a Pre-Fash precog at P. P. Layouts; if he wants to miniaturize them