Who Goes There?

Time to fanboy out a bit…

Philip K. Dick started out as a talented and prolific short story writer, honestly one of the field’s best given how old he was and the competition. Dick sold his first story in 1951 but would not get published until the following year (and with a different story), being broke, in his early twenties, having gotten kicked out of UC Berkley, and now getting the bright idea to try writing full-time. By the time of his death in 1982 he had written something like forty novels and 120 short stories, with about a quarter of those being published in 1953 alone. Dick wrote at a mile a minute, which means some of what he wrote was competent but only done to pay the bills. “Paycheck,” today’s story and one that quite shamefully I had never read until yesterday, is a case of Dick boiling the pot, as it were. Despite its banal title, this really is one of Dick’s best short stories. Not waiting to give my opinion on this; it’s just a lot of fun.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, which is on the Archive. What’s shocking to me is that “Paycheck” has never been anthologized in English, and also that despite being printed in a long-defunked second-rate magazine it’s not in the public domain; if you wanna read it you’ll have to read a magazine scan or find a Dick collection that has it. The good news is that there are many Dick collections and “Paycheck” is likely to be in any one of them, most notably Ballantine’s The Best of Philip K. Dick and The Philip K. Dick Reader.

Enhancing Image

Jennings is your typical working man, now finishing his two-year contract as a mechanic at Rethrick Construction—only he can’t remember what had happened during those two years. Not a minute of it. Nothing about his job, not even what he did outside of his job in all that time. Turns out Jennings got his memory wiped by the company, standard procedure, nothing to see here. This is troubling in itself, but things only get weirder once Jennings receives his pay, which is supposed to be an envelope with 50,000 credits. (I assume this is supposed to equate to a lot for two years’ labor in 1953 money.) Another weird thing, and just as concerning: the money isn’t there. Apparently Jennings, after starting his contract, chose an alternative over the conventional payment, and rather conveniently Jennings doesn’t remember doing that either. Hmmm.

Inside the envelope are seven items which normally would have little to no value: “A code key. A ticket stub. A parcel receipt. A length of fine wire. Half a poker chip, broken across. A green strip of cloth. A bus token.” Why would Jennings, in the past, have picked these specific things over 50,000 credits that he really could’ve needed? This baffles Jennings post-memory wipe, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He gets caught up on how things have changed in the two years since the start of his contract. The US has become a bit more authoritarian, with the Security Police patrolling city streets and keeping a close eye on the populace. This is also a future where I guess commercial flight never took off and instead we have “inter-city rockets,” which is one of those funny things that shows Dick had several talents but predicting future tech is not one of them.

At least Kelly, the company secretary, is nice.

Jennings leaves his job with his trinkets and hardly a minute passes before he gets picked up by SP goons, who are very curious about what he did for Rethrick Construction. Not being much of a fighter, Jennings would tell the cops what he knows—if only he knew anything. The memory wipe seems to have been a security measure for Rethrick, with even its employees being shut off from secret doings. It’s unclear what the SP are gonna do with Jennings, since they can’t get much info out of him, but the outcome will probably be grim; therefore escape sounds like a good idea. Jennings reaches into his pocket and pulls out the wire—of just the right length and material to pick locks and hightail it out of the SP building. But to go where? The SP probably know where he lives. If he’s to survive he’ll have to become a fugitive, or return to Rethrick.

Ah, but that bus ticket…

Bus to where? Does it matter? Possibly. Two of the items have been used and so far they’ve been shockingly useful. Jennings in the past must’ve requested these items for a specific reason, except that Jennings in the present can only guess as to their purpose. Surely it can’t be a coincidence. Something I wanna point out is that “Paycheck” reads like a compressed novel; it’s 13,000 words, a hearty novelette, but there’s enough suspense here to fuel a whole novel, only Dick comes from a generation of SFF writers that doesn’t believe in wasting the reader’s time. The only reason it took me two days to get through it is because I’ve been working since Thursday, so my time has been limited. If I had a whole day to myself I would’ve blazed through “Paycheck” in one sitting. In less than ten pages we’re introduced to a flamboyant future America, a likeable protagonist who’s not movie star material but still talented, and a plot that, once it kicks into motion, never ceases to intrigue me. And we’re just getting started.

Jennings realizes that the only real choice he has is to return to Rethrick Construction—only he doesn’t even remember where his own workplace was; he had been taken to a separate building, far away from the actual plant, to receive his payment. At the very least if he can find where the plant is he might be able to get hired again and hide from the SP, as while the SP can do many things they cannot interfere with business unless there’s an exception. This is an action narrative, but there are still a few nuggets of commentary from Dick, including a rather incisive moment where Jennings ponders that in the modern world it’s no longer the separation between church and state that divides man, but the separation between state and business. “It was the Government against the corporation, rather than the State against the Church. The new Notre Dame of the world. Where the law could not follow.” This rings true especially in the present day, but keep in mind that in the years following World War II Dick and his contemporaries would’ve seen an intense expansion of commercialism in American life. Capitalism had started to hit the fast-forward button.

Of course, as far as both Jennings and Dick are concerned the government is a bigger threat to human freedom than some company, even if said company memory-wipes its employees so that they don’t snitch to the competition or some third party. The memory-wiping thing would probably be used for more foreboding ends if used in a modern narrative, but here it’s little more than a pretext for Jennings to have a conversation with his past self. I won’t say there’s time travel here, but without getting too much into spoilers just yet there is a reason why Jennings is able to use the items he gave himself just when and where he needs them. Clearly these items were obtained in the past, but there’s no way Jennings could have discerned their usefulness without clairvoyance—or a time machine. This raises another question: What the hell could Rethrick be building, especially since they’re so keen on secrecy? The plot only thickens more when Jennings catches up with Kelly, who may or may not be just a secretary.

One more thing before we barrel into the back end of the story. “Paycheck” was published in the June 1953 issue of Imagination, but it was probably written a full year earlier, during the height of McCarthyism. Some editors in the field were squeamish about publishing material that criticized McCarthy and other anti-communism fanatics, but some stories slipped through the cracks. Jennings and Kelly have a bit of an argument where Kelly says that anyone who’s against the SP must be on the side of good, to which Jennings says, “Really? I’ve heard that kind of logic before. Any one fighting communism was automatically good, a few decades ago.” Dick was not a leftist, but he did have several leftist friends; in some ways he was a fellow traveler, although he did have hangups like his misogyny and anti-abortion stance. “Paycheck” does not indulge in misogyny like some other Dick narratives: Jennings is a bachelor, so minus the shrewish wife (or ex-wife) often found in Dick’s works, and Kelly, while not a three-dimensional character, is by no means a pushover.

There Be Spoilers Here

Using the parcel receipt to find the town where the plant is probably near and the green strip of cloth to disguise himself as a plant worker (well, he was a plant worker, after all, if only in the past tense), Jennings is able to retrace his steps and infiltrate the Rethrick plant, which of course is set in the middle of fucking nowhere—like a nuclear testing site. The narrative, which had hints of espionage up to this point, becomes practically a spy thriller once Jennings gets inside the plant with hopes of acquiring photos of schematics and blueprints. He has a theory about what’s being built here, but he needs to know—which might well spell his doom. Admittedly, and I have say unexpectedly, this section of the story is the least engrossing if I had to pick a weak spot, if only because this section reads like something out of a rather non-SF spy thriller and we already have a lot of those. Dick probably could’ve made more money writing spy thrillers, but he was too creative and thoughtful to be tied down like that.

This may be obvious to some, but Rethrick has in fact been working on a “time scoop,” or a time viewer as I’m gonna call it—a machine that can see into the future. “Like Berkowsky’s theoretical model—only this was real.” There are some questions that might arise when reading “Paycheck” if you stop and think, but the big one, how Jennings was able to predict his own future predicament, gets thoroughly answered. You may also be thinking, “If Rethrick has a time viewer then how come they haven’t been able to track Jennings’s movements?” Also answered: the time viewer had been sabotaged—by Jennings. The mad bastard snuck peeks at the machine and then fiddled with it such that even the company’s other top mechanics have so far been unable to get it working right again. His past self apparently had everything thought out; even the poker chip, broken in half, saves Jennings’s skin as he pretends to be a gambler who’s simply lost his way after curfew. Even the big twist, that Kelly is actually the daughter of Rethrick himself and that she planned to betray Jennings this whole time, gets accounted for. Is there anything this man cannot do…?

Turns out Rethrick is a family-owned business, with the ending implying that Jennings and Kelly will marry and that by extension Jennings will eventually take over the company. Kelly, despite being more loyal to her father than to Jennings, is implied to have had a fondness for Jennings when he worked at the plant; and even if that were not the case, I would be so impressed by Jennings’s gambit that I might just marry him anyway. Dick stories often have endings that are bleak, darkly comical, confusing, or all three at once, but “Paycheck” might have the most triumphant ending of any Dick story. I would gripe about the happy ending, as I did when I read Eye in the Sky and found that novel’s ending unconvincing, but here the victory had been alluded to almost from the beginning; indeed Jennings coming out on top is the point of the story. Dick wanted to write a story about how a man can save his own life, and even change it for the better, using everyday items that would seemingly be of no consequence; that he also wrote a great action narrative is the big cherry on top.

A Step Farther Out

Not sure if this is a hot take, but I think “Paycheck” deserved a Retro Hugo nomination more than “Second Variety.” In terms of Dick-penned action, “Paycheck” is a blockbuster only seriously topped by the second half of Ubik. Even when he’s unsure as to where a plot is going, Dick is supernaturally adept at pushing the reader from one set-piece to another with such swiftness that we can often forgive the inconsistencies—only “Paycheck” has to be one of the most tightly knit of Dick’s short stories. In a way it’s a power fantasy par excellence, pitting an unassuming but quick-witted man against a system that struggles to keep up with his maneuvers; in another way it has commentary that foreshadows Dick’s novels while also just so happening to feature a level of badassery that’ll have you cheering. Can’t wait to see how the Ben Affleck movie fucks it all up.

See you next time.