I Am Alive and You Are Dead

During these years of the Cold War and the Communist witch-hunts, everyone was suspicious of everyone else. The FBI, galvanized by urgent warnings from Senator Joe McCarthy, regarded every American citizen as a possible crypto-Communist—this despite the fact that, as J. Edgar Hoover himself acknowledged, the Communist Party of the United States had fewer than twenty-five thousand members, of whom one out of six was actually an FBI agent or government informant. Meanwhile, American citizens who, though not necessarily Communists, felt vulnerable to accusations that they were, considered every neighbor a possible police agent or at least an informant ready to report their names to the authorities. The evil creatures who had insinuated themselves among us in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and in scores of comparable stories could be read as Soviet agents or, just as easily, as FBI agents trying to track the Soviet agents down: the authors’ intentions counted less than the public’s response to these fantasies. Consciously or not, nearly everyone saw an enemy lurking behind the terrifyingly familiar face of his neighbor: for the Midwest farmer, the enemy was the dirty Commie; for a Berkeley bohemian, it was the stinking cop. Berkeley had been a center of radicalism since the 1930s, not simply because of the small kernel of actual card-carrying party members who lived there, but because Berkleyites tended to think of themselves as fellow travelers for whom capitalist and fascist were interchangeable terms that applied to anyone who was connected in any way with authority—or, for that matter, who simply wore a tie.

Phil had grown up in this world. His babysitter, a young woman whom he would later refer to as Olive Holt, never tired of telling him how much better the lives of workers in the Soviet Union were than those of the American proletariat, who sweated and toiled only to fatten the bloodsuckers on Wall Street. His mother, who never went so far as to join the party, had approved of these little speeches. His wife, Kleo, talked a similar line, adopting the slogans she heard at the meetings she sometimes went to after class. As for Phil himself, he was hardly sympathetic to Communism, and the friends Kleo brought back to the house considered him a complete reactionary. From his reading of Orwell and Hannah Arendt, he had developed a political philosophy that equated Communism with fascism and, refusing to give the former any credit for having better intentions, looked only at their similar outcomes, the totalitarian regimes that both systems had produced. A discussion he had one day with an actual Communist left him feeling exasperated; he found the man dogmatic and small-minded. None of this diminished his admiration for Communism’s great revolutionary figures, however, or prevented him from following his natural inclination to side with the underdog and despise the middle class. In this regard, then, Phil was not out of step with the people around him; like them, he was a “radical”—or, as the FBI might have put it, he was “favorably disposed toward groups and persons themselves favorably disposed toward Communism.”

Phil could of course not have missed the remarkable debut of a young congressman from California named Richard Nixon, who had surfaced in the late 1940s in Orange County, the stronghold of political reactionism a few hundred miles south of Berkeley. To Berkeleyites, who would never dream of setting foot in Orange County, Nixon—the shifty politician with a perpetual five o’clock shadow and greasy hair who liked to have himself photographed standing in front of his gun collection—was its signature product. Although no one had yet asked in so many words whether anyone would buy a used car from the man, Richard Nixon had already earned the nickname “Tricky Dick.” The Berkeley Gazette had printed articles describing how Nixon won his Senate seat by red-baiting his Democratic opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he had insinuated was a lesbian and famously characterized as being “pink right down to her underwear.” Earlier, as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he had carried out its anti-Communist mission with exceptional zeal. Next to Nixon, Joe McCarthy was a schoolyard bully, a paper tiger whom Congress knew how to muzzle once it no longer needed him. Nixon was a different kind of creature—soft-spoken, more the back-stabbing type. In 1952, when Phil Dick published his first short story, Tricky Dick had just been elected vice president as Eisenhower’s running mate. The days when baby-sitters could openly avow their membership in the Communist Party were well over.

* * *

One winter day in 1955, Phil was alone in his house listening to a Beethoven symphony when two men came to the door. At first, he mistook them for salesmen. One was tall and fat, the other short and thin, but they were dressed identically in gray three-piece suits, Stetson hats, and black shoes polished to a high shine. They looked as though they might have just walked off the set of the new TV show The Untouchables, which is to say, they looked like Phil’s father, who had become so rigid, narrow-minded, and conservative that Phil had not seen him for years—in fact not since the end of World War II, when they had fought over the morality of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (According to Edgar, the slant-eyeds had it coming to them.)

At any rate, the two men weren’t selling anything; they were from the FBI, and had the badges to prove it. Wanting to affect an air of sang-froid, he tried to tell a joke, something he’d read in the New Yorker: some FBI agents checking on a suspect question his neighbor, who tells them that the suspect listens to symphonies. Suspicious, one of the agents wants to know what language they’re in.

Simple as the joke was, Phil garbled it in the telling. As always happened when he was upset, his voice jumped an octave or so. The two agents stood at the door listening to him in silence, unsmiling.

He couldn’t have been from their office, one of the men finally replied. They asked if they could come inside, and, as soon as Phil let them in, they began to look around, making note of Phil’s typewriter and his record player, which he immediately switched off. Phil sensed their disapproval—here he was in his shirtsleeves, unshaven, hanging around the house at eleven in the morning when everyone else either had gone off to work or was out shopping. The fat man asked what it was exactly that he wrote, and Phil’s reply, that he wrote stories about Martians, little green men, stuff for kids, produced the expected reaction—the disdainful little smile—that in this instance particularly offended him, given his interlocutor. He wondered for a moment if they were interested in him because he was a science fiction writer. That made sense to him. Had he been an FBI agent, he, too, would have been suspicious of science fiction writers. After all, they wrote for a wide audience of unsophisticated—and therefore impressionable—people who generally read nothing else. Someone like him was in a perfect position to poison the minds of the masses, the same way a hydraulic engineer could poison the water supply for a large city. Not to mention the fact that the SF writer, believing he was merely following his imagination, might discover and expose classified technological information relating to national defense. No question about it: had he been one of the witch-hunters, Phil wouldn’t have bothered with fashionable East Coast intellectuals or Hollywood scriptwriters who wore their Communist sympathies on their sleeve; they were red herrings. He would have kept his eye on the true manipulators of public opinion, the guys working down where it counted, turning out fodder for the masses, working-class literature that intellectuals affected to disdain.

The fat man began to question Phil about his political activities. Phil told him he had none. He had never been a political activist, he said, had never even voted, for that matter, and the most subversive thing in his life was his passion for Dostoevsky and for Boris Godunov—of which he owned two recordings.

But what about Kleo? Everyone knew she had some connection to the student wing of the Socialist Workers Party. Didn’t she talk to him about what happened at the meetings?

No, Phil said, she didn’t. He wasn’t interested in what went on there and she knew it.

The agent told Phil that it might be a good idea to start showing some interest in those meetings and to listen carefully to what his wife had to say about them.

Phil could hardly believe what he was hearing. Were they really asking him to spy on his wife? The request seemed so preposterous that it occurred to him that he was dealing with a pair of imposters. Why were they questioning him when everyone, Kleo included, knew that the SWP, like every other left-wing organization in the United States, was riddled with government informants? Even if for some reason they really did need him to infiltrate these organizations, weren’t they supposed to take their time, make subtle approaches, lay some sort of intricate trap? Surely they wouldn’t show their hand before they had made it impossible for him to refuse them. Could it be, he wondered, that they not only had already laid the trap but had sprung it, too?

Unable to figure out just what sort of game his two visitors were playing, Phil thought the safest thing to do was to play dumb, and he said simply that he wasn’t interested in any of what they were talking about. Neither, it seemed, was the fat man’s partner, the thin, silent agent who had been standing over Phil’s desk and, without making any attempt to hide what he was doing, was reading the sheet of paper that was still in the typewriter. That was when the fat agent asked Phil if he had Communist leanings.

Phil, of course, was no Communist sympathizer, at least not in any intellectual sense, but once again he couldn’t figure out what lay behind the question. What sort of answer did they expect him to give? He suddenly remembered how a famous English spy used to answer this kind of question. He had always admired the simple elegance of the formulation and had been waiting for a chance to try it out for himself.

“No,” Phil told the agent, “I can assure you I’m not a Communist sympathizer. But then you and I both know that if I were one my answer would be the same.”

Apt as it was, the reply seemed to irritate the two men. They exchanged glances, then turned to leave, telling Phil as they were going out the door that they would be back. Alone again, Phil wondered whether he had cleverly deceived two imbeciles or, on the contrary, had walked into a trap. He remembered something he’d read in a work by Bertolt Brecht, a committed Communist and Kleo’s favorite author: “He laughed because they couldn’t hit him; he didn’t know they were trying to miss.”

* * *

Initially, Kleo took the whole business very seriously, telling anyone who would listen that America had become a fascist country. Then things quieted down. For a while, George Smith and George Scruggs—those were the agents’ names—came to visit once a week. Smith, the fat one, asked the questions and talked about this and that. Scruggs, the thin one, kept silent, as if, having nothing better to do, he had decided to join his friend on house calls that were actually none of his business. Kleo decided Scruggs was the more dangerous of the two, though she had nothing to back up her hunch. On one of their visits they dropped off questionnaires—surveys, they said, that they would stop by to pick up later. Rather than surveys, the forms seemed to be tests intended to gauge how right-thinking the subject was. What was most disturbing about these two tests—like the general behavior of the two Georges—was that it was hard to know how seriously to take them. The questions were like the ones immigration officials used to ask: “Do you have any addictions? Are you a terrorist? Do you intend to attempt to assassinate the president of the United States?” The stupider the question appeared, and the more obvious the desired answer, the greater the chances, Phil reasoned, that they were traps—like the famous “K Scale” of the Minnesota Multiphasic, which supposedly measured a test taker’s “degree of defensiveness.” One question, for example, was a multiple-choice completion with three answers to choose from:

Russia is

(a) growing weaker

(b) growing stronger

Of course, the best answer was (b) if one wanted to demonstrate that one shared the fears of the nation’s leaders that Russia was growing more powerful and hence their belief in the need for ever-larger military budgets. But the second question complicated matters. It went as follows:

Russian technology is

(a) very good

(b) average

By choosing (a), one would appear to be paying the Commies a compliment. The best choice seemed to be (b), and was probably the closest to the truth. On the other hand, what right-thinking citizen could fail to choose (c), for how could technology produced by victims of totalitarianism be anything other than useless? But in that case, how was it that a hopelessly backward country could be growing in strength? Luckily, the answer was suggested by the next question:

The greatest threat to the Free World is

(a) Russia

(b) our high standard of living

Kleo said they should choose (c)—even though it referred to them. They laughed and pretended to be scared. They knew they were small fry.

* * *

Eventually, George Scruggs started dropping by on his own or with Merton, his German short-haired pointer. The Dicks wondered whether these solo visits signaled a new tactic or an easing up of surveillance. It turned out that Scruggs lived fairly close by and simply liked stopping by to chat with Phil on his way to the office. His visits seemed innocent enough. Unlike his sneering, boorish partner, he was impressed that Phil was a writer. He asked him where he got his ideas and even read one of his books. Phil was flattered. Though he suspected that Scruggs was trying to gain his confidence in order to make it easier to trap him, he started forming a sort of friendship with the man. When Scruggs learned that Phil didn’t know how to drive, he offered to give him lessons in his sports car. Every Sunday morning, Phil went into contortions to fit his long legs into the car, and, jammed between the driver’s seat and the steering wheel, he spent an hour or two talking with Scruggs. He began to enjoy trying to psych him out. Beneath the humorless platitudes—which his job required of him—there was in Scruggs an underlying honesty and generosity of spirit that made him the ideal victim of a sophist like Phil. More than he should have been, given his line of work, he was open to arguments of reason, and Phil took advantage of this to get him to swallow the most subversive notions.

One day, for example, as they were driving slowly around the block, Phil asked Scruggs about the files the FBI had on him and Kleo. The question embarrassed Scruggs. He muttered something noncommittal, but Phil wouldn’t let go and pressed him to admit that he still thought Kleo was a Communist. Scruggs was apologetic. There was no way of getting around it, he said: Kleo attended meetings of the Socialist Workers Party, and the Socialist Workers Party was a front for the Communist Party. And she had signed the Stockholm statement, which pretty much settled the matter.

Phil smiled indulgently and pointed out that Kleo’s going to meetings, spouting leftist slogans, and signing petitions proved only one thing, namely, that she couldn’t be a Communist. Scruggs knew as well as he did, Phil said, that if Kleo were a Communist, she would have to be more careful.

Scruggs conceded the point, a sure sign that Phil had succeeded in flustering him—George Smith would never have made such a concession—but he wasn’t going to give up so easily. If Communists didn’t go to meetings or spout slogans or sign petitions, then how was one supposed to spot them? Well, Phil said, the Communists obviously were the ones who didn’t do any of those things. The FBI pretended to monitor harmless fellow travelers like Kleo when in fact the people they were really after were those who didn’t make waves—or those who were railing loudest against the Communists.

Scruggs scratched his head. Phil had noted that it was easy to throw the man off balance by ascribing Machiavellian motives to him, for then he wondered whether he ought not to have them. The FBI had no choice but to go on the evidence, Scruggs insisted, and to judge people on the basis of what they did. How else could it learn what was going on in their heads?

Phil told Scruggs not to take him for a fool, which only made Scruggs more nervous. Somehow he seemed to have switched places with the man he was supposed to be interrogating. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Phil had revealed himself not only as an FBI agent himself but as someone higher up in the hierarchy than he was, if this whole time Phil had simply been pretending to be a struggling writer. Scruggs tried one last time to counter Phil’s arguments. If one followed Phil’s line of reasoning, he told him, everyone in the whole country would have to be considered dangerous. Even Nixon would be a Commie! Phil flashed a sardonic grin. It was Scruggs, not he, who had said it, he pointed out to the agent.

* * *

The conversation provided food for thought, particularly Scruggs’s admission that it was difficult to know what was going on inside people’s heads. Phil wondered what it would be like to be inside the head of someone as different from him as George Scruggs or, worse, George Smith, or his father, or Richard Nixon.

He played for a moment with the notion of trading brains with Richard Nixon—just for the time it would take to write a book—but then dropped the idea. Phil Dick’s waking up one morning to find himself in the skin of the politician from California, and Dick Nixon’s waking up to find he had become an SF hack in Berkeley—it would probably make a wonderful story, one with all sorts of interesting dimensions, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. He had recently come on a distinction in a philosophy textbook between the idios kosmos, the individualized vision of the universe each of us carries around inside our head, and the koinos kosmos, what people tend to think of as the objective universe. The notion of “reality” is merely a convenient way of referring to the koinos kosmos, but the koinos kosmos, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist; our perception of an objective reality is a matter of convention, an agreement among people trying to create some stable basis for their interrelations. The koinos kosmos is a sort of diplomatic fiction, the lowest common denominator of my idios kosmos and those of my neighbors—assuming that my neighbors truly exist and that I am not alone in the world.

Phil wasn’t interested in what it would be like to exchange his idios kosmos for someone else’s—not that he would necessarily have been aware of the exchange, since once it had been made he would have been the other person and not himself anymore. What intrigued him was the possibility of visiting someone else’s idios kosmos without losing his own. It would be like traveling to a foreign country. All he needed was the device that would allow him to take the trip. If nothing else, the literary genre in which he had been toiling for the past few years provided just what he was looking for—in spades. That same evening, he typed the following sentences, managing to assemble in just a few lines all the elements of science fiction that put so many people off:

The Proton Beam Deflector of the Belmont Bevatron betrayed its inventors at four o’clock in the afternoon of October 2, 1959. [Phil was writing in 1956 about the near future.] What happened next happened instantly. No longer adequately deflected—and therefore no longer under control—the six billion volt beam radiated upward toward the roof of the chamber, incinerating, along its way, an observation platform overlooking the doughnut-shaped magnet.

There were eight people standing on the platform at the time.… They fell to the floor of the Bevatron chamber and lay in a state of injury and shock until the magnetic field had been drained and the hard radiation partially neutralized.

He tells us in the next paragraph that the eight accident victims regain consciousness and are taken to the hospital. Those with the least serious injuries are sent home. Everything eventually seems to go back to normal, down to the smallest details—a sure sign that something will go wrong, of course. Then one of the eight tells a lie—a joke really—and thereby brings a biblical plague of locusts down on his head. Soon after that a prayer murmured unthinkingly instantly gets granted. The survivors are faced with the fact that the rational world is coming apart: superstitions have superseded the laws of physics; prayer now has all the effective power of action. Anyone who steps out of line is punished by heavenly fire.

What these people now realize is that they are stuck inside the Bevatron itself and that the energy released by the accident has transformed the personal universe belonging to one of them, probably the person closest to consciousiness, into a collective mental universe in which everyone else is being held prisoner. As one of the protagonists exclaims, “We’re subject to the logic of a religious crank, an old man who picked up a screwball cult in Chicago in the thirties. We’re in his universe, where all his ignorant and pious superstitions function. We’re in the man’s head.”

Phil immensely enjoyed creating the religious fanatic’s universe, though he had no intention of devoting the entire novel to it. The whole point of putting the eight people inside the Bevatron was to explore each character’s idios kosmos. From religious extremism, we enter the world of a war veteran not unlike Phil’s father, then the puritanical utopia of a sweet little old lady. Here is a world not unlike what Phil might have imagined his mother’s to be, filled with fine feelings, the love of art, purity, and all things beautiful—the world of a woman who hates disorder, sex, and anything organic and who is convinced that one can separate the wheat from the chaff and, more important, eliminate the chaff altogether. The old woman banishes from her universe not only particular objects and beings but entire categories of offending entities: car horns, noisy garbage collectors, door-to-door salesmen, meat, poverty, genitalia, asthma, drunkenness, filth, Russia, and atonal music.

Thus improved by an increasingly frenetic subtraction of everything she deems undesirable, the old lady’s world dissolves into the still more fearful world of a young paranoiac—a woman whose world is frozen and insidious, unassailably normal yet deeply ominous. Everything in it is dangerous and deceptive—even inanimate objects. The people in the Bevatron begin to panic. Until that point, each character’s universe has been more terrible than the one before it. What will come next—if there is a next? The three people whose worlds the group has just inhabited had seemed to be so normal: an ordinary, conventional guy, a society lady, and a secretary. Yet they turned out to be a religious fanatic, a maniacal puritan, and a psycho. What sorts of dangers are the others concealing? Worse still, the more intelligent among the group wonder, what sorts of dangers lurk inside themselves? What nightmares will each of their universes pose for the others, once it becomes everyone’s reality?

Among the eight Bevatron visitors is a married couple. The husband has long suspected that his wife, Marsha, is a Communist, but she has sworn to him that she isn’t. Now he begins to have doubts again. Once the secretary’s paranoid universe has in effect self-destructed—transforming the husband and wife into giant insects that devour the others—the world changes again … into one governed by the vision of a militant Communist. Obviously recalling the stories Olive Holt had told him when he was a child and what Kleo’s socialist friends had been telling him, Phil threw himself into this chapter body and soul: it is a capitalist nightmare, with bloodsucking industrialists, fascist gangs, blacks lynched on every street corner, towns ruled by gangsters, hordes of starving children rummaging through the garbage—here was how a card-carrying Communist viewed America.

But which one of the group is the Communist? From which of them does the grotesque and terrifying vision emanate? Naturally, suspicion falls on Marsha, whom the chief of security at the Bevatron facility had accused of being a Communist from the very beginning. Even her husband becomes persuaded that she has been lying to him all these years.

Here Phil exaggerates things more than a little; his political differences with Kleo were never quite so dramatic as this. Still, he wanted the book to turn on the identification of the mysterious Communist. As he typed out the last chapter (a mere two weeks after he had begun the novel), he imagined George Scruggs reading it. Phil wondered whether Scruggs would guess how the story turns out. Would he suspect that the Communist proves not to be Marsha, who is basically a good-hearted left-wing activist, but instead the very man who had been so ready to accuse her of being one—the chief of security, the head witch-hunter himself, a man who only pretends to be obsessed with rooting out Commies?

* * *

When Eye in the Sky was published the following year, in 1957, Phil sent one of the three copies his editor had given him to his friend in the FBI. Joe McCarthy had recently died of cirrhosis; a series of Supreme Court decisions had put an end to the witch-hunts. George Scruggs had not been to see Phil for some time, but after he received the book he came for a visit, to thank Phil and to tell him what he thought of it. Apparently Scruggs didn’t understand a fair number of even the more obvious political references, to say nothing of the novel’s philosophical dimensions. Phil tried to explain the difference between koinos kosmos and idios kosmos, to no avail. The only thing that interested Scruggs was the scientific plausibility of the premise: was this kind of psychological domination really possible? Phil couldn’t resist the temptation to pull Scruggs’s leg one last time. Recalling the naive attempt he had made a few years earlier to communicate with the Russian physicist, he declared that he was engaged in a correspondence on this very subject with Professor Alexander Topchev of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Scruggs said he knew.

Now it was Phil’s turn to wonder who was taking whom for a ride.