Although he doesn’t tell Sharp this, Humphreys decides there is nothing he can do for him. The story ends with Giller meeting with his own psychoanalyst and complaining about the compulsion he’s always had for great heights and the irresistible urge to push people. 

Cast of characters

• Paul Sharp – suffers from a fear of heights and falling
• Humphreys – Sharp’s psychoanalyst
• Giller – wants Sharp to rebuild the Petaluma-Sonoma area in Northern California

The post Recall Mechanism appeared first on the world Dick made.

On Mars this survey team finds abandoned cities and resources that have been mined and completely depleted. They uncover reports though that the Martians discovered a lush, green planet to escape to just like the humans hope to do. The team wants to follow them there, confident they can overtake anyone if necessary, until they realize this new verdant planet is the one they came from and already destroyed.

Cast of characters

• Halloway, Young, Van Ecker, Carmichael, Doctor Judde, Captain Mason – the survey team exploring Mars

The post Survey Team appeared first on the world Dick made.

He eventually finds another settlement, and they let Trent know the hard truth that humans have made Earth inhospitable for themselves and forfeited their right to live there anymore. The Earth belongs to all the mutants, and the humans deserve this for nuking the surface. They are leaving for good in search of other planets in a rocket they have constructed, and they agree to take Trent’s group with them. 

Cast of characters

• Trent
• Jackson and Earl Potter – friendly mutants Trent runs into on the surface. They also show up in the wasteland of Deus Irae.
• Norris – a human in the settlement leaving Earth

The post Planet for Transients appeared first on the world Dick made.

Years later, League member Caleb Ryan and the businessman Kastner are selected to travel back in time to retrieve papers documenting the artificial brain that powers the claws from a scientist named Schonerman who invented it, so that the humans on Earth can use this knowledge to construct worker robots in the present day that can help rebuild the planet.

In the meantime Ryan’s son Jon is having visions of increasing intensity where he sees an entirely different peaceful reality untouched by war. Before leaving Ryan decides to have his son lobotomized, a rather extreme, albeit successful, “solution” to his son’s visions. 

Schonerman is accidentally killed when they go back in time, and since the claws had never been invented, when Ryan and Kastner return to their present time they find the peaceful world exactly as Jon had described it.

Dick wrote this just after “Second Variety”, his story about the robotic claws and the humans fighting them just after the war.

Cast of characters

• Caleb Ryan – League member selected to travel back in time
• Jon Ryan – Caleb Ryan’s son
• Kastner – United Synthetic Industries Combine member who travels back in time
• Walter Timmer – the medical director
• Schonerman – scientist who developed the principles for the first artificial brain 

The post Jon’s World appeared first on the world Dick made.

The few who have psionic powers live outside the communes and struggle with how to guide normal humans toward a working society when the humans don’t want their help. Jack repeatedly travels back in time and tries to warn the U.S. chief of staff of the armed forces about the outcome of the war, but he doesn’t have any luck preventing what will happen. The other psionics in present day are more concerned with how to sustain peace going forward. 

In the end the communes stop the free flow of civilians to the village where the psionics live. Anyone who leaves the shelter of the commune won’t be able to return, and only time will tell if the humans will accept the help of the psionics to rebuild civilization. 

Cast of characters

• Ed and Barbara Garby – a couple with a sick child in the commune
• Porter – a precog
• Jack – a time traveler
• Thelma – a healer
• Doris – a parakineticist
• Stephen – a telepath
• General Earnest Butterford – chief of staff of the U.S. armed forces before the war

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The robot tells Applequist the war was fought between two factions of humans, the moralists and the leisurists. According to the robot, the moralists, who believed God intended men to live lives of toil, overcame the leisurists and with no need for robots eliminated them all.

A life of leisure greatly appeals to Applequist, so he helps repair the impaired robot. Only then does Applequist finally find out from his supervisors that the war was actually fought between the robots and humans, and that the robots had killed millions of humans before the humans rallied to defeat them. By that point the repaired robot has escaped from the ravine leaving the humans scrambling to track it down. 

Cast of characters

• Applequist – a lower class mail carrier
• Jenkins – Applequist’s assistant supervisor
• Director Laws – Applequist’s boss

The post To Serve the Master appeared first on the world Dick made.

Both Tibor and Pete encounter the Great C in Dick’s Zelazny collaboration Deus Irae, although in that book the Great C is more of a trickster trying to feed on passerby.

In 2018 Secret Location released a VR movie based on this story that also borrows the idea of the computer’s female avatar from Deus Irae. 

Cast of characters

• Walter Kent – the tribe leader
• Tim Meredith – that year’s sacrifice to the Great C
• Bill Gustavson, Anne Fry, John Page – members of the tribe

The post The Great C appeared first on the world Dick made.

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.

Cast of characters

• Taylor – planner for the U.S. war program
• Mary – Taylor’s wife
• Moss – Taylor’s supervisor
• Commander Franks – officer of Internal Security

The post The Defenders appeared first on the world Dick made.

Cast of characters

• Allen Fergusson – member of the Pittsburgh settlement
• Charlotte, Ben Untermeyer – members of a settlement outside Pittsburgh
• John Dawes – a survivor who has learned to craft a wooden cup

The post Pay for the Printer appeared first on the world Dick made.

Cast of characters

• John LeConte – a ‘politico’ on Earth
• Mr. Fall – LeConte’s secretary
• Peter Hood – CURBman from Centaurus
• Joan Hood – Peter Hood’s wife
• Rudolph Fletcher – Hood’s assistant
• Otto Dietrich – the supreme police investigator from Centaurus who vows to make an example of the war criminals responsible for Earth’s nuclear war
• Benny Cemoli – a supposed revolutionary who seized power of North America in a coup
• Stavros – a Greek grocery store owner and supposed follower of Benny Cemoli

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