Martian Time-Slip (28 page)

“Don't worry,” Jack said, patting her.

She tried to smile.

“It probably won't happen again,” Jack said. “But even if it does—”

“Thanks,” she said. “I thought when I first saw him that it was his father, Norbert Steiner; that's what frightened me so.”

“We'll have to get a flashlight and hunt around for Erna Steiner,” Jack said. “We want to be sure she's all right.”

“Yes,” she said. “You and Leo go and do that while I finish here; I have to stay with the dinner or it'll be spoiled.”

The two men, with a flashlight, left the house. David stayed with her, helping her set the table. Where will you be? she wondered as she watched her son. When you're old like that, all hacked away and replaced by machinery…. Will you be like that, too?

We are better off not being able to look ahead, she said to herself. Thank God we can't see.

“I wish I could have gone out,” David was complaining. “Why can't you tell me what it was that made Mrs. Steiner yell like that?”

Silvia said, “Maybe someday.”

But not now, she said to herself. It is too soon, for any of us.

Dinner was ready now, and she went out automatically onto the porch to call Jack and Leo, knowing even as she did so that they would not come; they were far too busy, they had too much to do. But she called them anyhow, because it was her job.

In the darkness of the Martian night her husband and father-in-law searched for Erna Steiner; their light flashed here and there, and their voices could be heard, business-like and competent and patient.

PHILIP K. DICK
MARTIAN TIME-SLIP

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952 he began writing professionally any classes. In 1952 he began writing professionally and proceeded to write thirty-six novels and five short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1962 for
The Man in the High Castle
and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.

BOOKS BY PHILIP K. DICK
AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE BOOKS

Confessions of a Crap Artist

The Divine Invasion

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Galactic Pot-Healer

The Game-Players of Titan

The Man in the High Castle

Martian Time-Slip

A Maze of Death

Now Wait for Last Year

A Scanner Darkly

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Ubik

VALIS

We Can Build You

The World Jones Made

First Vintage Books Edition, June 1995

Copyright © 1964 by Philip K. Dick
Copyright renewed 1992 by Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick, and Isa Hackett

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York, in 1964.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dick, Philip K.
Martian time-slip/Philip K. Dick.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
1. Mars (Planet)-Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.I3428 1995
813´.54-dc20 94-42802
CIP

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