Van Bibber and Others Book

"The alien mind, Bedford thought. Mysterious and cruel."

Meet Jason Bedford, the unerring astronaut who is just on his way back to Terra from Meknos III, whither he delivered a badly-required vaccine. You'll probably not find Jason very talkative, in fact quite catatonic, his eyes open but unseeing, and yet with a keen impression in them, his lips firmly pressed together for there has not been anyone to speak to for many a month, and it was one of his resolutions never to stoop to the soliloquy of the man who is daunted by his own loneliness …

This is how I picture the protagonist of The Alien Mind, which was the last short story PKD ever published, namely in February 1981, for he, i.e. Bedford, has experienced the mysteriousness and the cruelty of the alien mind. The way those apparently emotionless and calculating Meknosians punish Bedford for the killing of his cat may probably be cruel but not all too mysterious in the eyes of many readers, and one can regard this last short story by Dick as a tale that illustrates the concept of poetical justice to a T. In a way, The Alien Mind reminds me of some of the short stories written by Henry Slesar, an author whose crime fiction I loved as a teenager, because the ending is similarly twisted, and full of tragic irony. It is clearly an appeal of Dick's to regard animals as our fellow creatures and to treat them decently - with Bedford learning the hard way, and probably not having any other opportunity to profit from his newly-gained knowledge, that a pet can be a companion and that looking at an animal as something in its own right keeps the mind healthy. At the same time, however, the story also brings up the idea of how difficult it is for people from one culture to understand people from another culture. We as readers do not really know whether feline animals play a major part in Meknosian culture and are therefore a particular object of veneration, or whether these aliens have a different attitude towards animals in general and are simply appalled by Bedford's cat murder. Saying that, it probably needn't be mentioned that what Bedford did - i.e. simply strangling his cat because it had inadvertently caused a delay of the ship in its journey - would be regarded as an act of cruelty by most Terrans as well. It would be interesting to learn how the Meknosians might react to the information that Earthmen breed animals to eat them, by the way.

Bedford seems to be a man who thinks of himself as never making any mistakes, and the delay caused by the cat is something he interprets as making him be "reduced to idiocy vis-à-vis the alien mind", which is an odd way of thinking, although it might indicate that Bedford just wanted to emulate the efficiency and matter-of-factness that he perceived in the Meknosian culture, in order not to seem second place to them. His prior assumptions of the aliens' being strictly efficient and callous in their ways, however, proved one-sided or at least selective, and it may be this cultural misunderstanding that made Bedford overreact when he found out that the cat Norman was responsible for getting the ship slightly off course. Nevertheless, the fact that Bedford did not even bother to give the cat his plaything shows that he was probably more Meknosian (in his own definition of the term) than the Meknosians.

A splendid last short story by PDK - and at three pages one of his shortest.