"Dick, Philip K - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

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The science fiction writers of this world are resolutely
differentfrom mankind and from each other-except that
Philip K. Dick is more different. He goes his own way,
writing his own kind of book, irrespective of changing moods
and styles, true unto himself and his own inner vision. He
produces steadily, but never badly, and won a well-deserved
Hugo for his "Man in the High Castle." Here he is at his
deep-probing best, keeping the reader on the run, exploring
levels of consciousness and worryingbut worrying wellthe
SF worrying-tooth of "what is reality?"

WE CAN REMEMBER IT
FOR YOU WHOLESALE

Philip K. Dick

He awokeand wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What
would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet:
the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and
the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of
the other world, which only Government agents and high
officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely.
"Are you getting up or not?" his wife Kirsten asked
drowsily, with her usual hint of fierce crossness. "If you are,
push the hot coffee button on the darn stove."
"Okay," Douglas Quail said, and made his way barefoot
from the bedroom of their conapt to the kitchen. There,
having dutifully pressed the hot coffee button, he seated
himself at the kitchen table, brought out a yellow, small tin of
fine Dean Swift snuff. He inhaled briskly,, and the Beau Nash
mixture stung his nose, burned the roof of his mouth. But still
he inhaled; it woKe him up and allowed his dreams, his
nocturnal desires and random wishes, to condense into a
semblance of rationality.
I will go, he said to himself. Before I die I'll see Mars.
It was, of course, impossible, and he knew this even as he
dreamed. But the daylight, the mundane noise of his wife now
brushing her hair before the bedroom mirroreverything
conspired to remind him of what he was. A miserable little
salaried employee, he said to himself with bitterness. Kirsten
reminded him of this at least once a day and he did not blame
her; it was a wife's job to bring her husband down to Earth.
Down to Earth, he thought, and laughed. The figure of speech
in this was literally apt.
"What are you sniggering about?" his wife asked as she
swept into the kitchen, her long busy-pink robe wagging after
her. "A dream, I bet. You're always full of them."