Deus Irae - By Philip K. Dick Page 0,1

the liquid-helium battery to the manual circuit. A clean aluminum tubular extension reached out and at its terminal a six-digit gripping mechanism, each unit wired separately back through the surge-gates and to the shoulder muscles of the limbless man, groped for the empty cup; then, as Tibor saw it was still empty, he looked inquiringly.

“On the stove,” Ely said, meaningly smiling.

So the cart’s brake had to be unlocked; Tibor rolled to the stove, relocked the cart’s brake once more via the selenoid selector-relays, and sent his manual grippers to lift the pot. The aluminum tubular extensor, armlike, brought the pot up tediously, in a near Parkinson-motion, until, finally, Tibor managed, through all the elaborate ICBM guidance components, to pour coffee into his cup.

Father Handy said, “I won’t join you because I had pyloric spasms last night and when I got up this morning.” He felt irritable, physically. Like you, he thought, I am, although a Complete, having trouble with my body this morning: with glands and hormones. He lit a cigarette, his first of the day, tasted the loose genuine tobacco, puffed, and felt much better; one chemical checked the overproduction of another, and now he seated himself at the table as Tibor, smiling cheerfully still, drank the heated-over coffee without complaint.

And yet—

Sometimes physical pain is a precognition of wicked things about to come, Father Handy thought, and in your case; is that it, do you know what I shall—must—tell you today? No choice, because what am I, if not a man-worm who is told; who, on Tuesday, tells, but this is only one day, and just an hour of that day.

“Tibor,” he said, “wie geht es Heute?”

“Es geht mir gut,” Tibor responded instantly.

They mutually loved their recollection and their use of German. It meant Goethe and Heine and Schiller and Kafka and Falada; both men, together, lived for this and on this. Now, since the work would soon come, it was a ritual, bordering on the sacred, a reminder of the after-daylight hours when the painting proved impossible and they could—had to—merely talk. In the semigloom of the kerosene lanterns and the firelight, which was a bad light source; too irregular, and Tibor had complained, in his understating way, of eye fatigue. And that was a dreadful harbinger, because nowhere in the Wyoming-Utah area could a lensman be found; no refractive glasswork had been lately possible, at least as near as Father Handy knew.

It would require a Pilg to get glasses for Tibor, if that became necessary; he blenched from that, because so often the church employee dragooned for a Pilg set off and never returned. And they never even learned why; was it better elsewhere, or worse? It could—or so he had decided from the utterances of the 6 P.M. radio—be that it consisted of both; it depended on the place.

And the world, now, was many places. The connectives had been destroyed. That which had made the once-castigated “uniformity.”

“‘You understand,’” Father Handy chanted, singsong, from Ruddigore. And at once Tibor ceased drinking his coffee.

“‘I think I do,’” he wailed back, finishing the quotation. “‘That duty, duty must be done,’” he said, then. The coffee cup was set down, an elaborate rejection costing the use of many surge-gates opening and closing.

“‘The rule,’” Father Handy said, “‘applies to everyone.’”

Half to himself, with real bitterness, Tibor said, “‘To shirk the task.’” He turned his head, licked rapidly with his expert tongue, and gazed in deep, prolonged study at the priest. “What is it?”

It is, Father Handy thought, the fact that I am linked; I am part of a network that whips and quivers with the whole chain, shivered from above. And we believe—as you know—that the final motion is given from that Elsewhere that we receive the dim emanations out of, data which we strive honestly to understand and fulfill because we believe—we know—that what it wants is not only strong but correct.

“We’re not slaves” he said aloud. “We are, after all, servants. We can quit; you can. Even I, if I felt it was right.” But he would never; he had long ago decided, and taken a secret binding oath on it. “Who makes you do your job here?” he said, then.

Tibor said cautiously, “Well, you pay me.”

“But I don’t compel you.”

“I have to eat. That does.”

Father Handy said, “We know this: you can find many jobs, at any place; you could be anywhere working. Despite your—handicap.”

“The Dresden Amen,” Tibor said.

“Eh? What?” He did not understand.

“Sometime,” Tibor said, “when you