Clans of the Alphane moon - By Philip K. Dick Page 0,7

put them in storage. What I’m here for is a check; I want all the money in your checking account. I need it for bills.”

So he had been wrong; there was no speech of sweet reasonability. On the contrary; his wife was making this final. He was absolutely stunned and all he could do was gape at her.

“I’ve talked to Bob Alfson, my attorney,” Mary said. “I’ve had him file for a quit-claim deed on the house.”

“What?” he said. “Why?”

“So you can sign over your share of the house to me.”

“Why?”

“So I can put it on the market. I’ve decided I don’t need such a large house and I can use the money. I’m putting Debby in that boarding school back East we were discussing.” Deborah was their oldest, but still only six, years too young to be sent away from home. Good grief.

“Let me talk to Nat Wilder first,” he said feebly.

“I want the check now.” Mary made no move to come in; she simply stood there. And he felt desperate, despairing panic, the panic of defeat and suffering; he had lost already: she could make him do anything.

As he went to get his checkbook, Mary walked a few steps into the conapt. Her aversion for it was beyond words; she said nothing. He shrank from it, could not face it; he busied himself scratching out the check.

“By the way,” Mary said in a conversational tone of voice, “now that you’ve left for good I’m free to accept that government offer.”

“What government offer?”

“They want consulting psychologists for an interplan project; I told you about it.” She did not intend to burden herself with enlightening him.

“Oh yes.” He had a dim memory. “Charity work.” An outgrowth of the Terran-Alphane clash of ten years ago. An isolated moon in the Alphane system settled by Terrans which had been cut off two generations ago because of the war; a rookery of such meager enclaves existed in the Alph’ system, which had dozens of moons as well as twenty-two planets.

She accepted the check, put it folded into her coat pocket.

“Would you get paid?” he asked.

“No,” Mary said, remotely.

Then she would live—support the children as well—on his salary alone. It came to him: she expected a court settlement which would force him to do the very thing his refusal of which had pulled down their six-year marriage. She would, through her vast influence in Marin County courts, obtain such a judgment that he would have to give up his job with the San Francisco branch of the CIA and seek other work entirely.

“How—long will you be gone?” he asked. It was obvious that she intended to make good use of this interval of reorganization of their lives; she would do all the things denied her—allegedly, anyhow—by his presence.

“About six months. It depends. Don’t expect me to keep in touch. I’ll be represented in court by Alfson; I won’t appear.” She added, “I’ve started the suit for separate maintenance so you won’t have to do that.”

The initiative, even there, was gone from his hands. He had as always been too slow.

“You can have everything,” he told Mary, all at once.

Her look said, But what you can give isn’t enough. “Everything” was merely nothing, as far as his achievements were concerned.

“I can’t give you what I don’t have,” he said quietly.

“Yes you can,” Mary said, without a smile. “Because the judge is going to recognize what I’ve always recognized about you. If you have to, if someone makes you, you can meet the customary standards applied to grown men with the responsibility of a wife and children.”

He said, “But—I have to retain some kind of life of my own.”

“Your first obligation is to us,” Mary said.

For that he had no answer; he could only nod.

Later, after Mary had left with the check, he looked for and found a stack of old homeopapes in the closet of the apt; he sat on the ancient, Danish-style sofa in the living room, rooting through them for the articles on the interplan project which Mary intended to become involved in. Her new life, he said to himself, to replace that of being married.

In a ’pape one week old he found a more or less complete article; he lit a cigarette and read carefully.

Psychologists were needed, it was anticipated by the US Interplan Health & Welfare Service, because the moon had originally been a hospital area, a psychiatric care-center for Terran immigrants to the Alphane system who had cracked under the