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    Synopsis For The Incomplete Story Suggestion Of Philip K. Dick's As Seen In RFPKD#2

    "A girl, crossing a national frontier, is detained by suspicious police; she is "pregnant", but what she contains in her womb is not organic but is in fact the "electronic, technological" seed of the entire future world, which, without her knowing it, is to be blown apart; she is a simple girl... who genuinely imagines herself to be pregnant, and, being Catholic, must bear the "child." And that "child" -- can you imagine it? Not the universe with stars and planets, but the new and better society, of Freedom, which the enslavers have tried, and thought to have successfully wiped out, to obliterate. And there it is in microcosm, in her womb, as she placidly waits to be allowed to leave the "U.S". -- {PKD in RFPKD#2}

    The girl, Mary we'll call her, is hauled inside the Custom's building where the agents strip her naked and run their beeping instruments over her body. The instruments go crazy, start whining like swibbles in heat as their tiny VI-brains detect a strange radiation. Not metal, not organic, not electromagnetic spectrum, not even body odor. Something unknown to the VI detectors of the police. This is unusual, it has never happened before. The cops unzip their flies and prod and poke her some more while rying to figure out what to do.

   They call their boss, SP Untersturmfuhrer Klinck of the NDP-Sicherheitspolizei -- the Secret Police of the National Deutsch Republik -- for this is indeed a Nazi State that Mary has entered. But not the old one. This is the new Fascist republic that sprang up after the border closings of 1991 and the downfall of the Schmidt administration at the boots of rampaging skinhead gangs.  Untersturmfuhrer Klinck, at a loss, soon has his boss SP Sturmbannfuhrer von Riggen on the vidline. And not long after that Mary is on her way to the Adolf Eichmann Memorial Klinik in depressing downtown Berlin.

    The klinik is no fun for Mary. For one thing, her parents have dissappeared and a bunch of NDP teks are trundling out the X-Ray machines while over in the corner another white-clad group disgruntledly sharpen their scalpels.

    But the X-Rays are negative. Nothing but a white glow emanating from the center of her belly that fogs the plates. On seeing this the surgeons in the corner perk up a bit and start to move in.

    "WAIT!" commands a disembodied, metallic voice from the ceiling. "DO NOT DESTROY THE SPECIMEN! TAKE IT TO NIEU MAUTHAUSEN, ROOM 14!"

    And so it is that Mary awakens to find herself in the Nieu Mauthausen Holiday Camp -- seemingly a spa for undernourished tourists but in reality a horrific death-camp for foreigners. She is unhappy in Room 14. Everything gleams at her as if iridescent-eyed insects stare at her from every crevice; as indeed they do: electronic bugs are everywhere. Unspeakable are the tortures Mary undergoes as the Sicherheitspolizei teks explore her every bodily orifice with instruments cold and hard. Many are the questions she cannot answer.

    But after awhile the NDR-SP's change their tactics as they realise the obvious: pretty soon now Mary will come to term and deliver a bouncing baby something or other. They begin to feed her proper food, not the swill and pastes they have heretofore poured directly into her body by means of tubes and funnels. She prospers. Grows fatter. And all the time the NDP_SPs are invading her with their CAT-Scans and Cojputomography Machines -- fearsome devices of this near-future world. But all they achieve i a clearer glow on their photos of Mary's stomach.

    The NDR-SPs call in their best scientific minds to no avail. However Mary -- small comfort -- finds solace with one of these, Herr Doktor Kriminalrat Fuchs, a greying pince-nez screened NDR expert from Die Institut Sigmund Freud. Mary, being the innocent she is despite her despoilment, is silly putty in his hands and falls madly in love with him. An emotion which he appears to respond. He takes to stroking her belly and calling the mysterious object inside "mein liebe schoene" and dazzles Mary with displays of woollen baby-booties in pink and blue, while together they ponder a list of names. To all this the ceiling remains silent.

    But even these subtle tactics fail for mary herself knows nothing of what's inside her. All she knows is one day the warmth was there. She doesn't know where it comes from. Until her vacation at Nieu Mauthausen she had been a virgin. The NDR teks had verified this as they broke her hymen en route to the nether regions of her deepest recesses with their miniature cameras. She just doesn't know. That was why her parents were taking her to the NDR in the first place, see, so they could find out what happened, it being well-known that the NDR doktors were the best in the 2-Planet System. And here she was, though she wasn't aware of the irony of it, being poked and prodded by thebest.

    In the darkless nights as she lay strapped to her table Mary would sink into strange dreams. Into a pinkish ball of warmth she'd curl, ever tighter as if one of the newly-discovered Martian Wuzbugs -- giant, limpit-like creatures as big as a house -- held her close in its tendrilous embrace. Down she sinks, down and down into the warmth until she is the subatomic particle in the heart of her belly. Then, as mass and gravity can compete no more something breaks and in a quantum instant she expands to fill the entire universe!

    A small boy faces her in this oft-dreamed dream, a small boy bouncing a red and white swirly ball on the sidewalk -- though there is no sidewalk, just this ability to bounce that the ball somehow possesses. he speaks to her in an unknown tongue. Midwestern, she suspects. The boy is earnest, as if going over instructions. He proffers her the ball and then tosses it to her. In the act of catching it she is caught in the vortex of its swirls and wakes up on her table, pouring sweat.

    The insect eyes and amplifiers record all this, of course, but they can make nothing of her constrained nighttime thrashing. Even Dr. Fuchs as he lends a sympathetic ear to the troubled Mary cannot make it make sense.

    Time passes and the inevitable day arrives. Mary goes into labour.

    It is a difficult birth. For everyone. The NDR Doktors as they press on her stomach and pry her open with their hemostats take on a certain agitation as the birth progresses. For a strange pinkish glow akin to the fogging on their X-Ray plates peeks from the depths of her femininity with each of Mary's groan-wracked heaves. The doktors faces pulse faintly pink intime to her exertions. And as her moansgrow louder and the room is pulsed with an unearthly pink light the doktors step back in fear and horror. Helpless, they can only look on.

    Then... plop1 A swirly pink sphere the size of a basketball shoots out, straight into the hands of Herr Doktor Kriminalrat Fuchs! Kriminalrat Fuchs, a 4-Letter man in his younger days at the Herrman Goerring Normalschule in Schweinfurt, automatically prepares to dribble...

    "HALT!" Shrieks the ceiling.

    Too late. Fuchs, in a daze, bounces the ball once then twirls it on his finger. Big mistake.

    "Gott in Himmel!" is all Fuchs has time to say as a rosy fire flashes out and his eyeballs shrivel in the glow.

    A universe screams.

    Mary awakens on stony ground. Above her two suns burn down, a red giant and a white dwarf. Before her is a cave, on the far wall shadows flicker. She moves into the cave. Inside a small boy stares intently at her. "Where's the ball?" he says, he smiles, laughs.

    "I've lost it," says Mary. She turns to go outside.

    Outside a universe howls.

    In a field of grass Mary sits. It is dark, there are no moons or stars. She sits. She frowns.

    Another universe dies in pain.

    Mary picks herself up from the ground. Beyond her are the fires of a primitive city. Rome! pops into her head. She recognizes it from before. But before when? She can't remember. She walks toward the light.

    In the near distance a small group of cowled figures hunches around a campfire. She sees the misery on their faces. They do not look up as she passes them on into the city.

    The city is lethargic, slow, people move like slaves. The buildings, in random bursts of instantaneous motion, leap from style to style, a staccato, disjointed hodgepodge of architectural marvels: grass huts jumping to adobe and then to concrete block in front of her and off to one side a million card-houses shuffle into endless existence and collapse again. Mary shakes her head and the nonsense stills.

    The people look up for this has never happened before. The nonsense has never stopped. But then -- then! -- into the peace a horrid rushing comes as if some vast evil fluttering in hate must break the moment, fill the emptiness with its scuttling claws! Ten billion chitinous clickings that snag and pull at the people, snatching them away on a forever dance of memory and regret. Mary breathes... and the rustling creaks away to silence.

    Mary smiles as the people stand upright, throwing off their rags. They look each other in the eye as if for the first time then, as one, they turn their gaze upon her. "Ave maria!" they cry. "She is risen at last!"

    Together Mary and the people pass into the city. But in the middle of the tumultuous acclaim Mary hears a small boy laugh.

    And then we move the story into the next part where Mary, in this new, free world she now is in, tending the fields with her Roman friends, starts noticing small discrepancies in the environment. All the lightning bugs have pink behinds. All newborn children are born albino. Mary has to figure this out, and we'll spend some time on this, of course, before, in the end, she overcomes the problems with her virginous purity. She is the Blessed Mother of Jesus, after all -- as any good Catholic girl should aspire to be -- and is able to repair these pinkish manifestations as she notices them.

    Anf thus we have the new Free World as promised by Jesus on the advent of his Second Coming. -- and as implied in Philip K. Dick's original premise. Except there's still this small boy out there. So to resolve that and complete the ambiguity in the new Free World, we write a scene where Mary -- after she gets married, of course -- bears a boy child who one day when he's about 6 years old she sees playing with her neighbors daughter one house over. They're playing ball...

    And now it's Mary's turn to scream. But this time when she wakes up we have her wake up in the exact same way she did in the second part above. Then we just rerun tate whole thing up until the part where they're all happily tending their gardens in Rome and end it there. That way we won't have to write that bit again but can just plug it in, save some time and make a fatter book. At one cent a word you gotta worry about these things. Plus the critics will think its a stroke of genius, that is if they notice it at all...

    Naturally we'll have to throw in lots of characters and dialogue and stuff like that and expand on the philosophical aspects, as well as the religious, and toss in a few more sf elements just to keep the fans and Ace Books happy. Gotta think of a title...

{And so ends my imaginary continuation of PKD's suggested novel that he'd write after A SCANNER DARKLY -- lord RC, July 1993}