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FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
by Philip K. Dick


Copyright 1974 by Philip K. Dick

First Vintage Books Edition, July 1993

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, in 1974.


ISBN 0-679-74066-X



The love in this novel is for Tessa,
and the love in me is for her, too.
She is my little song.



FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID


PART ONE


Flow my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled forever let me mourn;
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.



1

On Tuesday, October 11, 1988, the _Jason Taverner Show_ ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth.
Into the boom mike Jason said smoothly, "Keep all those cards and V-letters coming in, folks. And stay tuned now for _The Adventures of Scotty, Dog Extraordinary_."
The technician smiled; Jason smiled back, and then both the audio and the video clicked off. Their hour-long music and variety program, which held the second highest rating among the year's best TV shows, had come to an end. And it had all gone well.
"Where'd we lose half a minute?" Jason said to his special guest star of the evening, Heather Hart. It puzzled him. He liked to time his own shows.
Heather Hart said, "Baby bunting, it's all right." She put her cool hand across his slightly moist forehead, rubbed the perimeter of his sand-colored hair affectionately.
"Do you realize what power you have?" Al Bliss, their business agent, said to Jason, coming up close--too close as always--to him. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight. That's a record of sorts."
"I zip up my fly every week," Jason said. "It's my trademark. Or don't you catch the show?"
"But thirty million," Bliss said, his round, florid face spotted with drops of perspiration. "Think of it. And then there's the residuals."
Jason said crisply, "I'll be dead before the residuals on this show pay off. Thank God."
"You'll probably be dead tonight," Heather said, "with all those fans of yours packed in outside there. Just waiting to rip you into little tiny squares like so many postage stamps."
"Some of them are your fans, Miss Hart," Al Bliss said, in his doglike panting voice.
"God damn them," Heather said harshly. "Why don't they go away? Aren't they breaking some law, loitering or something?"
Jason took hold of her hand and squeezed it forcefully, attracting her frowning attention. He had never understood her dislike for fans; to him they were the lifeblood of his public existence. And to him his public existence, his role as worldwide entertainer, was existence itself, period. "You shouldn't be an entertainer," he said to Heather, "feeling the way you do. Get out of the business. Become a social worker in a forced-labor camp."
"There're people there, too," Heather said grimly.