The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike by Philip K. Dick

Author:Philip K. Dick [Dick, Philip K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-19T20:17:49+00:00

11

At the office of the Carquinez News. Seth Faulk opened the envelope that Mrs Runcible had handed him. While he read she remained at the counter, standing silent and - it seemed to him - tense in her long coat. with her purse between her hands. She kept her eyes on him; he could feel her.

‘You want me to read this through now?* he said. ‘While you’re here? It’ll take a while.’ He preferred to put it aside until later; for an hour he had been working on an ad for the grocery store, and it had to be done by noon.

Janet Runcible said, ‘I’ll wait.’

Inwardly, Faulk sighed. He continued reading, skipping whole lines, getting the general sense only. From the start it was obvious that Leo Runcible had written this himself; not only had it been typed on the typewriter at the realty office (the same on which all the other Runcible proclamations had been typed) but it had in it the usual Runcible-isms. The throwing the gauntlet to everyone. As if Runcible could not stick to telling, or even educating, but had to incite. Faulk thought, The man must see the world as composed of either friends or enemies. Those who are for him are supposed to read this and flock to his defence. The others I suppose will behave as usual.

He glanced up at Mrs Runcible, standing there so stiffly. Almost every day, through the windows of his newspaper office, he saw her going by, doing her shopping. Today she had on no make-up at all. His knowledge of her - a bit of his knowledge of everyone in the area - had in it the notion that she drank and that when she looked like this she was getting over a morning after. In one part of his mind he held news that might or might not be worth printing, and in the other he held an enormous conglomeration of gossip and fact that would never be printed, true or not, because it lay outside the purpose of his newspaper. The fact or theory that she drank was not important to him professionally. But she interested him anyhow. She had such a dried-out quality. Her hair was so stringy, so colourless. The coat, he thought, looked like a man’s coat. And her hands. He saw that her fingers were drawn up, interlaced rigidly. As if, he thought, she might pop apart.

‘What did Mr Runcible say about this?’ he said. holding out the typewritten page, back in her direction.

She winced at the question, clearly expecting it but nervous at having to hear it. ‘He’d like to have that included in the next issue,’ she said. She added, ‘of the News.’

‘As a news item.’

‘Oh yes, as a news item.’ Panic crossed her face and then disappeared; the tension once more set in.

‘He really found all this stuff,’ Faulk asked, mostly to himself.

‘He certainly did,’ she said in a bleak voice.

In his mind he consulted his experience. I don’t want to be identified with any of Leo Runcible’s promotion schemes, he said to himself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.