Philip K. Dick - We Can Build You
Here you can read online Philip K. Dick - We Can Build You full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. genre: Art. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:We Can Build You
- Author:
- Genre:
- Rating:5 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
We Can Build You: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "We Can Build You" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Philip K. Dick: author's other books
Who wrote We Can Build You? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip Dick
Philip Dick
Philip Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
We Can Build You — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "We Can Build You" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Philip K. Dick
We Can Build You
We Can Build You
To Robert and Ginny Heinlein,
whose kindness to us meant more
than ordinary words can answer.
1
Our sales technique was perfected in the early 1970s. First we put an ad in a local newspaper, in the classified.
Spinet piano, also electronic organ, repossessed,
in perfect condition, SACRIFICE. Cash or good credit
risk wanted in this area, to take over payments rather
than transport back to Oregon. Contact Frauenzimmer
Piano Company, Mr. Rock, Credit Manager, Ontario, Ore.
For years we've run this ad in newspapers in one town after another, all up and down the western states and as far inland as Colorado. The whole approach developed on a scientific, systematic basis; we use maps, and sweep along so that no town goes untouched. We own four turbine-powered trucks, out on the road constantly, one man to a truck.
Anyhow, we place the ad, say in the San Rafael Independent-Journal, and soon letters start arriving at our office in Ontario, Oregon, where my partner Maury Rock takes care of all that. He sorts the letters and compiles lists, and then when he has enough contacts in a particular area, say around San Rafael, he night-wires the truck. Suppose it's Fred down there in Mann County. When Fred gets the wire he brings out his own map and lists the calls in proper sequence. And then he finds a pay phone and telephones the first prospect.
Meanwhile, Maury has airmailed an answer to each person who's written in response to the ad.
Dear Mr. So-and-so:
We were gratified to receive your response to our notice
in the San Rafael Independent-Journal. The man who is handling
this matter has been away from the office for a few days now,
so we've decided to forward to him your name and address with
the request that he contact you and provide you with all the
details.
The letter drones on, but for several years now it has done a good job for the company. However, of late, sales of the electronic organs have fallen off. For instance, in the Vallejo area we sold forty spinets not so long ago, and not one single organ.
Now, this enormous balance in favor of the spinet over the electronic organ, in terms of sales, led to an exchange between I and my partner, Maury Rock; it was heated, too.
I got to Ontario, Oregon, late, having been down south around Santa Monica discussing matters with certain dogooders there who had invited law-enforcement officials in to scan our enterprise and method of operating... a gratuitous action which led to nothing, of course, since we're operating strictly legally.
Ontario isn't my hometown, or anybody else's. I hail from Wichita Falls, Kansas, and when I was high school age I moved to Denver and then to Boise, Idaho. In some respects Ontario is a suburb of Boise; it's near the Idaho border-- you go across a long metal bridge--and it's a flat land, there, where they farm. The forests of eastern Oregon don't begin that far inland. The biggest industry is the Ore-Ida potato patty factory, especially its electronics division, and then there're a whole lot of Japanese farmers who were shuffled back that way during World War Two and who grow onions or something. The air is dry, real estate is cheap, people do their big shopping in Boise; the latter is a big town which I don't like because you can't get decent Chinese food there. It's near the old Oregon Trail, and the railroad goes through it on its way to Cheyenne.
Our office is located in a brick building in downtown Ontario across from a hardware store. We've got root iris growing around our building. The colors of the iris look good when you come driving up the desert routes from California and Nevada.
So anyhow I parked my dusty Chevrolet Magic Fire turbine convertible and crossed the sidewalk to our building and our sign:
MASA ASSOCIATES
MASA stands for MULTIPLEX ACOUSTICAL SYSTEM OF AMERICA, a made-up electronics-type name which we developed due to our electronic organ factory, which, due to my family ties, I'm deeply involved with. It was Maury who came up with Frauenzimmer Piano Company, since as a name it fitted our trucking operation better. Frauenzimmer is Maury's original old-country name, Rock being made-up, too. My real name is as I give it: Louis Rosen, which is German for roses. One day I asked Maury what Frauenzimmer meant, and he said it means womankind. I asked where he specifically got the name Rock.
"I closed my eyes and touched a volume of the encyclopedia, and it said ROCK TO SUBUD."
"You made a mistake," I told him. "You should have called yourself Maury Subud."
The downstairs door of our building dates back to 1965 and ought to be replaced, but we just don't have the funds. I pushed the door open, it's massive and heavy but swings nicely, and walked to the elevator, one of those old automatic affairs. A minute later I was upstairs stepping out in our offices. The fellows were talking and drinking loudly.
"Time has passed us by," Maury said at once to me. "Our electronic organ is obsolete."
"You're wrong," I said. "The trend is actually _toward_ the electronic organ because that's the way America is going in its space exploration: electronic. In ten years we won't sell one spinet a day; the spinet will be a relic of the past."
"Louis," Maury said, "please look what our competitors have done. Electronics may be marching forward, but without us. Look at the Hammerstein Mood Organ. Look at the Waldteufel Euphoria. And tell me why anyone would be content like you merely to bang out music."
Maury is a tall fellow, with the emotional excitability of the hyperthyroid. His hands tend to shake and he digests his food too fast; they're giving him pills, and if those don't work he has to take radioactive iodine someday. If he stood up straight he'd be six three. He's got, or did have once, black hair, very long but thinning, and large eyes, and he always had a sort of disconcerted look, as if things are going all wrong on every side.
"No good musical instrument becomes obsolete," I said. But Maury had a point. What had undone us was the extensive brain-mapping of the mid 1960s and the depth-electrode techniques of Penfield and Jacobson and Olds, especially their discoveries about the mid-brain. The hypothalamus is where the emotions lie, and in developing and marketing our electronic organ we had not taken the hypothalamus into account. The Rosen factory never got in on the transmission of selective-frequency short range shock, which stimulates very specific cells of the mid-brain, and we certainly failed from the start to see how easy--and important--it would be to turn the circuit switches into a keyboard of eighty-eight black and whites.
Like most people, I've dabbled at the keys of a Hammerstein Mood Organ, and I enjoy it. But there's nothing creative about it. True, you can hit on new configurations of brain stimulation, and hence produce entirely new emotions in your head which would never otherwise show up there. You might--theoretically--even hit on the combination that will put you in the state of nirvana. Both the Hammerstein and Waldteufel corporations have a big prize for that. But that's not music. That's escape. Who wants it?
"I want it," Maury had said back as early as December of 1978. And he had gone out and hired a cashiered electronics engineer of the Federal Space Agency, hoping he could rig up for us a new version of the hypothalamus-stimulation organ.
But Bob Bundy, for all his electronics genius, had no experience with organs. He had designed simulacra circuits for the Government. Simulacra are the synthetic humans which I always thought of as robots; they're used for Lunar exploration, sent up from time to time from the Cape.
Next pageLight
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «We Can Build You»
Look at similar books to We Can Build You. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Philip Dick
Philip Dick
Philip Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick
Reviews about «We Can Build You»
Discussion, reviews of the book We Can Build You and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.