A man is terrorized by ants and is subsequently informed by some spiders that he is correct to be afraid because the ants want to destroy him and all of mankind.
While exploring an asteroid with an Earth-like atmosphere (but strangely no sign of life) the three-person crew of a prospecting ship is hit by a blast of radiation from the asteroid’s core. Once back in space the crew members exhibit mutations that appear to be radiation sickness before they realize the radiation is actually causing their senses to evolve.
With his expanding intellect, Harrison Blake wants to return to Earth and dominate mankind. It seems he will get his way until the other two are rescued by beings of pure energy, which turn out to be the ship’s hamsters in this increasingly preposterous story. The crew kept hamsters on board to test unfamiliar planetary environments, and these hamsters were hit by the radiation before everyone else which somehow caused them to evolve more than the humans.
The energy beings kill Blake, restore Eller and Simmons to their pre-mutated form and head out into space leaving Eller and Simmons to return to Earth.
One by one workers at a checkpoint garrison on an asteroid in outer space have begun to turn into plants, or so they say. As plants they shirk their duties and want to do nothing more than bask in the sun.
Dr. Henry Harris investigates this strange phenomenon, but all he has to go on are whispers about a mysterious group called the pipers who live in the woods near the base. After meeting a native of the asteroid in the forest, eventually Harris uncovers that there are no pipers. He realizes instead these over-worked young men and women suffer from a mass delusion as they wish to escape the pressure of constant training and stress of everyday life.
Harris has a lot of work to do to cure this malady of the modern age, but first he must relax in the dirt he gathered from the woods.
During a war between Earth and aliens from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system the Earth strategists decide to replace the guidance control in one of their ships with a human brain as a new approach to combat the organic mines that defend Proxima.
Dolores, wife of the engineer Kramer, suggests a professor from their college years as ‘the brain’, and Professor Thomas, quite old by this point, eventually agrees.
The professor though has lived long enough to understand the futility of war, and once his consciousness is in control of the ship it’s clear he has no intention of taking part in the plan to break through Proxima’s defenses. Instead he uses a couple of ruses to get both Kramer and Dolores on board and then sets off to find a habitable planet they can populate in order to build a civilization that can hopefully break the cycle of war.
It’s been eight years since a nuclear war between Russia and the United States has left the surface of the Earth uninhabitable. All humans live and work below ground, sending weapons up to the leadies, robots designed to withstand the deadly radiation who continue to fight the war by proxy.
When the head of Internal Security for the Americans notices a visiting leady is non-radioactive for some reason he organizes a party to the surface to investigate. Once there they find there is no nuclear fallout and in fact no ongoing war. The leadies have been faking the entire thing, creating miniature destroyed cities and sending down ersatz war footage as life above ground (minus humans) is thriving.
The leadies decided if they kept a fake war going long enough the human’s hatred would burn itself out and then all of mankind could be united… or something like that. Their scheme seems kind of dubious to be honest but also kind of cute. The leadies trap these Americans, who now know the grand plan, on the surface, since it’s not quite time to expose the fake war to everyone. They are introduced to a small group of Russians who also ventured above ground at some point and also found out the truth, and together the two factions must learn how to get along.
Dick would reuse and expand this idea in his later novel The Penultimate Truth, although the circumstances of the phony war in that one are much more complicated.
In 1956 this story was adapted for NBC’s X Minus One radio series.
The Skull published 1952A man named Conger is sent two hundred years back in time to the 1960s to find and kill the mysterious Founder of the First Church, a subversive anti-science movement that preaches non-violence at odds with the present era’s ruling class that trusts a society governed by rationalism and the occasional war to clear out humankind’s weaker elements.
In order to identify the Founder and kill him before he is able to deliver the sermon that will lead to this new movement Conger is given the skull of the Founder which they obtain after raiding the First Church’s holy relics.
Once back in 1960’s Midwest America, it is fairly obvious that Conger himself is this Founder he is searching for. Because he arrives too late and is spotted by some townsfolk before traveling farther back in time to when the Founder is killed he gives the appearance of a resurrection which leads to the belief in the Founder’s divinity. Eventually, right before he is killed by a mob from the town that doesn’t trust outsiders, Conger realizes ‘wait a minute the teeth in this skull I’ve been carrying around are a dead ringer for my own.’
I get what Dick was going for here, although the 1960s setting makes it hard to believe Conger’s trite aphorism, spoken to the townspeople right before they take him down, would be enough to spark a global and long-lasting movement.