Free We Can Build You by Philip K. Dick Page B

wine actually are the bodyand blood. That’s a miracle. Maybe if we get the tapes perfect here, and the voice and the physical appearance and—”
    “Pris,” I said, “I never thought I’d see you frightened.”
    “I’m not frightened. It’s just too much for me. When I was a kid in junior high Lincoln was my hero; I gave a report on him in the eighth grade. You know how it is when you’re a kid, everything you read in books is real. Lincoln was real to me. But of course I really spun it out of my own mind. So what I mean is, my own fantasies were real to me. It took me years to shake them, fantasies about the Union cavalry and battles and Ulysses S. Grant … you know.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Do you think someday somebody will make a simulacrum of you and me? And we’ll have to come back to life?”
    “What a morbid thought.”
    “There we’ll be, dead and oblivious to everything … and then we’ll feel something stirring. Maybe see a snatch of light. And then it’ll all come flooding in on us, reality once more. We’ll be helpless to stop the process, we’ll have to come back. Resurrected!” She shuddered.
    “It’s not that, what you’re doing; get that idea out of your mind. You have to separate the actual Lincoln from this—”
    “The real Lincoln exists in my mind,” Pris said.
    I was astonished. “You don’t believe that. What do you mean by saying that? You mean you have the
idea
in your mind.”
    She cocked her head on one side and eyed me. “No, Louis. I really have Lincoln in my mind. And I’ve been working night after night to transfer him out of my mind, back into the outside world.”
    I laughed.
    “It’s a dreadful world to bring him into,” Pris said. “Listen Louis. I’ll tell you something. I know a way to get rid of those awful yellowjackets that sting everybody. You don’t take any risk … and it doesn’t cost anything; all you need is a bucket of sand.”
    “Okay.”
    “You wait until night. So the yellow jackets are all down below in their nest asleep. Then you show up at their hole and you pour the bucket of sand over it, so the sand forms a mound. Now listen. You think the sand suffocates them. But it’s not quite like that. Here’s what happens. The next morning the yellow jackets wake up and find their entrance blocked with this sand, so they start burrowing up into the sand to clear it away. They have no place to carry it except to other parts of their nest. So they start a bucket brigade; they carry the sand grain by grain to the back of their nest, but as they take sand from the entrance more falls in its place.”
    “I see.”
    “Isn’t it awful?”
    “Yes,” I agreed.
    “What they do is they gradually fill their own nest with sand. They do it themselves. The harder they work to clear their entrance the faster it happens, and they suffocate. It’s like an Oriental torture, isn’t it? When I heard about this, Louis, I said to myself, I wish I was dead. I don’t want to live in a world where such things can be.”
    “When did you learn about this sand technique?”
    “Years ago; I was seven. Louis, I used to imagine what it was like down there in the nest. I’d be asleep.” Walking along beside me, she suddenly took hold of my arm and shut her eyes tight. “Absolutely dark. All around me, others like me. Then—thump. That’s the noise from above. Somebody dumping the sand. But it means nothing … we all sleep on.” She let me guide her along the sidewalk, pressing tightly against me. “Then we doze; we doze for the rest of the night, because it’s cold … but then daylight comes and the ground gets warm. But it’s still dark. We wake up. Why is there no light? We head for the entrance. All those particles, they block it. We’re frightened. What’s going on? We all pitch in; we try not to get panicked. We don’t use up all the oxygen;we’re organized into teams. We work silently. Efficiently.”
    I led her across the street; she still had