Victor Kemmings’s cryonic suspension malfunctions while en route to a distant planet. Because only his brain is awake, the ship’s A.I. system decides to create simulated realities in Kemmings’s mind in order to prevent him from becoming a vegetable during the remaining ten years of the trip.

The initial world constructed by the ship takes Kemmings back to when he was married with his first wife Martine, but Kemmings’s mind rejects it. The second world goes farther back in his subconscious to an incident during his childhood when he helped his cat kill a bird. This world, like the others to come, is also rejected because of Kemmings’s deep-seated neurotic anxieties.

The ship decides to simulate a world on the colony planet as if they’ve already arrived. Kemmings’s mind sees through this phony setup too as the scenario plays out again and again. When they finally do arrive in the real world, where the ship has arranged his first wife Martine to greet them, Kemmings still believes he is trapped in the loop of simulated realities.

This story was originally published under the title “Frozen Journey” in Playboy in 1980.

Cast of characters

• The ship’s A.I.
• Victor Kemmings – an emigrant on his way to the colony planet LR4-6
• Martine – Kemmings’s first wife

This brief story is part of a recap in an intergalactic trial.

Three humans on a monitoring mission in the vicinity of the Proxima Centaurus System are killed during an accident. Because of the location, the so-called “Approximations” from Proxima intervene. Two of the humans are fully and totally dead, but the Approximations are able to regenerate the brain of the third human, a female named Rautavaara.

What happens next occurs in Rautavaara’s brain as time runs backwards to just before the disaster, and Rautavaara and her two companions are visited by Christ. The Approximations decide to conduct an experiment, and they alter Rautavaara’s hallucination so that the humans encounter the Approximation’s version of a savior instead of their own. This Proxima savior proceeds to eat the humans (noted as a reversal of the Christian sacrament when humans eat the flesh of the deity), and the horrified court then elects to shut down Rautavaara’s brain activity.

Cast of characters

• Agneta Rautavaara, Travis, Elms – three humans killed during a mishap in space
• “Approximations” – ET from the Proxima Centaurus System

Dick ham-handedly tries to encourage collegiate freethinking in this tale of Bob Bibleman who is tricked into mandatory acceptance at ‘the College’ and once there ends up in the possession of some documents the head of the College previously stated were top secret.

The College demands the documents back, and Bibleman eventually hands them over, failing the test set up to see if a student would comply or share the documents which could benefit all mankind. He is expelled for doing what he is told instead of thinking for himself and returns to his old, meek existence.

Cast of characters

• Bob Bibleman – new student at the College
• Major Casals – head of the College
• Mary Lorne – a fellow new student at the College

U.S. tempunaut Addison Doug shows up at his wife’s house, soon joined by fellow tempunauts Benz and Crayne, just after news comes in that their time capsule has imploded on reentry returning from a mission to travel one hundred years into the future. It’s understood that they are on some kind of ‘emergence time,’ but they may or may not also be stuck in a time loop. Signs point to Addison, the only person who suspects this, as the one who sabotaged their reentry in order to break them out of the loop for good.

I won’t pretend to understand everything about this story (particularly how the Emergence Time Activity is supposed to work), but it’s a clever reimagining of the Cold War U.S.-Soviet space race.

Cast of characters

• Addison Doug, Benz, Crayne – tempunauts in the U.S. time travel program
• Merry Lou Hawkins – Addison’s wife
• General Toad – in charge of the U.S. time travel program
• Officer N. Gauki – a Soviet chrononaut. I love the detail of U.S. tempunauts vs. Soviet chrononauts.
• Henry Cassidy, Everett Branton – TV newscasters covering the tempunauts’ funeral
• Dr. Fein – physicist from the Time Extrusion Labs

Garson Poole learns from a doctor that he is an electric ant (ant in this case refers to an organic humanoid robot) after he wakes up in a hospital following a squib accident. He soon finds everyone at his company already knows, and he is only a figurehead in charge because the owners want somebody they can control.

Knowing his true nature he begins to experiment with the punched tape roll in his chest that controls his sensory stimuli, screwing around with the input mechanism much like a human does by taking drugs in an effort to alter or figure out reality, until he manages to burn out the control and ‘die.’

It’s a simple story, but Poole is a sympathetic character and the ending is sad.

Cast of characters

• Garson Poole – owner of Tri-Plan Electronics
• Louis Danceman – Tri-Plan’s second in charge
• Sarah Benton – Poole’s secretary

“Faith of Our Fathers” was written for and first published in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions.

The Communist Party (in an alternate-future North America under Communist rule) is hiding the true nature of reality from the population through the use of hallucinogens in the water supply.

Tung Chien sees through this phony world after being slipped an anti-hallucinogenic drug by members of a revolutionary group and proceeds to find out that the Absolute Benefactor is actually a horrible, god-like evil entity.

This one certainly feels like a bad trip. Dick has written enough stories along these lines that it’s remarkable how much he downplayed the significance of LSD as an inspiration in his writing process.

Cast of characters

• Tung Chien – works for the Postwar Ministry of Cultural Artifacts
• Darius Pethel – headmaster of a new school of indoctrination. This is also the name of the owner of Pethel Jiffi-scuttler Sales & Service in The Crack in Space
• Ssu-Ma Tso-pin – Chien’s supervisor
• Tanya Lee – member of a revolutionary group
• The Absolute Benefactor – the Communist Party leader