Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick

Author:Philip K. Dick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: SciFi-Masterwork, Science Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780307497130
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 1975-01-01T13:00:00+00:00

9

The members of Terra’s delegation to the hastily called conference occupied seats on one side of the long oak table, and now, on the far side, the personages from Lilistar began to emerge from side corridors and find chairs. As a whole they did not look sinister; they looked, in fact, overworked and harried, caught up, as was Terra, by the strain of conducting the war. Obviously they had no time to spare. They were clearly mortal.

“Translation,” a ’Starman said in English, “will be done by human agency not by machine, as any machine might make a permanent record, which is contrary to our desires here.”

Molinari grunted, nodded.

Now Freneksy appeared; the ’Star delegation and several members of the Terran rose in a show of respect; the ’Starmen clapped their hands as the bald, lean, oddly round-skulled man took a chair at the center of the delegation and began without preliminaries to open a briefcase of documents.

But his eyes. Eric noticed that, as Freneksy glanced briefly up at Molinari and smiled in greeting, Freneksy had what Eric thought of—and recognized in his practice as—paranoid eyes. Once he had learned to spot this, future identification generally came easy. This was not the glittering, restless stare of ordinary suspicion; this was a motionless gaze, a gathering of the totality of faculties within to comprise a single undisturbed psychomotor concentration. Freneksy did not decide to do this; in fact he was helpless, compelled to confront his compatriots and adversaries alike in this fashion, with this unending ensnaring fixity. It was an attentiveness which made empathic understanding impossible; the eyes did not reflect any inner reality; they gave back to the viewer exactly what he himself was. The eyes stopped communication dead; they were a barrier that could not be penetrated this side of the tomb.

Freneksy was not a bureaucrat and he did not—could not even if he tried—subordinate himself to his office. Freneksy remained a man—in the bad sense; he retained, in the midst of the busy activity of official conduct, the essence of the purely personal, as if to him everything was deliberate and intentional—a contest between people, not one between abstract or ideal issues.

What Minister Freneksy does, Eric realized, is to deprive all the others of the sanctity of their office. Of the security-producing reality of their titled position. Facing Freneksy, they became as they were born; isolated and individual, unsupported by the institutions which they were supposed to represent.

Take Molinari. Customarily, the Mole was the UN Secretary; he as an individual had—and properly so—dissolved into his function. But facing Minister Freneksy, the naked, hapless, lonely man reemerged—and was required to stand up to the Minister in this unhappy infinitude. The normal relativeness of existence, lived with others in a fluctuating state of more or less adequate security, had vanished.

Poor Gino Molinari, Eric thought. Because facing Freneksy the Mole might as well not have become UN Secretary. And meanwhile Minister Freneksy became even more cold, more lifeless; he did not burn with

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