Free The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories by Philip K. Dick Page B

with glasses and gray hair, agreed. “Were you in the war?” he asked Milt, glancing at him.
    “I’m in reconstruct,” Milt said. “Yellow Engineer.”
    “Oh.” The man nodded, impressed. “Boy, these Proxmen look scary. You’d almost expect them to step out of that exhibit and fight us to the death.” He grinned. “They put up a good fight before they gave in, those Proxmen; you have to give ‘em credit for that.”
    Beside him the man’s gray, taut wife said, “Those guns of theirs make me shiver. It’s too realistic.” Disapproving, she walked on.
    “You’re right,” Milt Biskle said. “They do look frighteningly real, because of course they are.” There was no point in creating an illusion of this sort because the genuine thing lay immediately at hand, readily available. Milt swung himself under the guard rail, reached the transparent glass of the exhibit, raised his foot and smashed the glass; it burst and rained down with a furious racket of shivering fragments.
    As Mary came running, Milt snatched a rifle from one of the frozen Proxmen in the exhibit and turned it toward her.
    She halted, breathing rapidly, eyeing him but saying nothing.
    “I am willing to work for you,” Milt said to her, holding the rifle expertly. “After all, if my own race no longer exists I can hardly reconstruct a colony world for them; even I can see that. But I want to know the truth. Show it to me and I’ll go on with my job.”
    Mary said, “No, Milt, if you knew the truth you wouldn’t go on. You’d turn that gun on yourself.” She sounded calm, even compassionate, but her eyes were bright and enlarged, wary.
    “Then I’ll kill you,” he said. And, after that, himself.
    “Wait.” She pondered. “Milt—this is difficult. You know absolutely nothing and yet look how miserable you are. How do you expect to feel when you can see your planet as it is? It’s almost too much for me and I’m—” She hesitated.
    “Say it.”
    “I’m just a—” she choked out the word—“a visitor.”
    “But I am right,” he said. “Say it. Admit it.”
    “You’re right, Milt,” she sighed.
    Two uniformed museum guards appeared, holding pistols. “You okay, Miss Ableseth?”
    “For the present,” Mary said. She did not take her eyes off Milt and the rifle which he held. “Just wait,” she instructed the guards.
    “Yes ma’am.” The guards waited. No one moved.
    Milt said, “Did any Terran women survive?”
    After a pause, Mary said, “No, Milt. But we Proxmen are within the same genus, as you well know. We can interbreed. Doesn’t that make you feel better?”
    “Sure,” he said. “A lot better.” And he did feel like turning the rifle on himself now, without waiting. It was all he could do to resist the impulse. So he had been right; that thing had not been Fay, there at Field Three on Mars. “Listen,” he said to Mary Ableseth, “I want to go back to Mars again. I came here to learn something. I learned it, now I want to go back. Maybe I’ll talk to Dr. DeWinter again, maybe he can help me. Any objection to that?”
    “No.” She seemed to understand how he felt. “After all, you did all your work there. You have a right to return. But eventually you have to begin here on Terra. We can wait a year or so, perhaps even two. But eventually Mars will be filled up and we’ll need the room. And it’s going to be so much harder here… as you’ll discover.” She tried to smile but failed; he saw the effort. “I’m sorry, Milt.”
    “So am I,” Milt Biskle said. “Hell, I was sorry when that wug-plant died. I knew the truth then. It wasn’t just a guess.”
    “You’ll be interested to know that your fellow reconstruct engineer Red, Cleveland Andre, addressed the meeting in your place. And passed your intimations on to them all, along with his own. They voted to send an official delegate here to Terra to investigate; he’s on his way now.”
    “I’m interested,” Milt said. “But it