Read Online Vintage PKD by Philip K. Dick - Free Book Online Page B

players will tell you.” He sounded calm.
    Maybe, Norm thought, it’s true. He was truly shaken.
    “Look at them together,” Frank said, kneeling down to examine the Oaklanders’ layout. “In the same bedroom, in the same house. Why, Norm; do you see? There’s just the one bed. A big double bed.” Wild-eyed, she appealed to him. “How can Perky Pat and Leonard play against them?” Her voice shook. “It’s not morally
right
.”
    “This is another type of layout entirely,” Norm said to Walter Wynn. “This, that you have. Utterly different from what we’re used to, as you can see.” He pointed to his own layout. “I insist that in this game Connie and Paul
not
live together and
not
be considered married.”
    “But they are,” Foster spoke up. “It’s a fact. Look—their clothes are in the same closet.” He showed them the closet. “And in the same bureau drawers.” He showed them that, too. “And look in the bathroom. Two toothbrushes. His and hers, in the same rack. So you can see we’re not making it up.”
    There was silence.
    Then Fran said in a choked voice, “And if they’re married—you mean they’ve been—intimate?”
    Wynn raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “Sure, since they’re married. Is there anything wrong with that?”
    “Perky Pat and Leonard have never—” Fran began, and then ceased.
    “Naturally not,” Wynn agreed. “Because they’re only going together. We understand that.”
    Fran said, “We just can’t play. We can’t.” She caught hold of her husband’s arm. “Let’s go back to Pinole pit—please, Norman.”
    “Wait,” Wynn said, at once. “If you don’t play, you’re conceding; you have to give up Perky Pat.”
    The three Oaklanders all nodded. And, Norm saw, many of the Berkeley flukers were nodding, too, including Ben Fennimore.
    “They’re right,” Norm said heavily to his wife. “We’d have to give her up. We better play, dear.”
    “Yes,” Fran said, in a dead, flat voice. “We’ll play.” She bent down and listlessly spun the needle of the spinner. It stopped at six.
    Smiling, Walter Wynn knelt down and spun. He obtained a four.
    The game had begun.
    Crouching behind the strewn, decayed contents of a care parcel that had been dropped long ago, Timothy Schein saw coming across the surface of ash his mother and father, pushing the wheelbarrow ahead of them. They looked tired and worn.
    “Hi,” Timothy yelled, leaping out at them in joy at seeing them again; he had missed them very much.
    “Hi, son,” his father murmured, nodding. He let go of the handles of the wheelbarrow, then halted and wiped his face with his handkerchief.
    Now Fred Chamberlain raced up, panting. “Hi, Mr. Schein, hi; Mrs. Schein. Hey, did you win? Did you beat the Oakland flukers? I bet you did, didn’t you?” He looked from one of them to the other and then back.
    In a low voice Fran said, “Yes, Freddy. We won.”
    Norm said, “Look in the wheelbarrow.”
    The two boys looked. And, there among Perky Pat’s furnishings, lay another doll. Larger, fuller-figured, much older than Pat . . . they stared at her and she stared up sightlessly at the gray sky overhead. So this is Connie Companion doll, Timothy said to himself. Gee.
    “We were lucky,” Norm said. Now several people had emerged from the pit and were gathering around them, listening. Jean and Sam Regan, Tod Morrison and his wife Helen, and now their Mayor, Hooker Glebe himself, waddling up excited and nervous, his face flushed, gasping for breath from the labor—unusual for him—of ascending the ramp.
    Fran said, “We got a cancellation-of-debts card, just when we were most behind. We owed fifty thousand, and it made us even with the Oakland flukers. And then, after that, we got an advance-ten-squares card, and that put us right on the jackpot square, at least in our layout. We had a very bitter squabble, because the Oaklanders showed us that on their layout it was a tax lien slapped on