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261 Outer Race Dick dedicates the future to minority reports, both the recognizable votes or voices and the mutational links (which do not, like the outer space aliens in Star Trek, pay the token for the minorities we know—aren’t represented). This future of rebalancing acts is situated within the culture industry. The first African-American U.S. president (in The Crack in Space) had his first career boost as TV weatherman in a clown suit. He is accordingly immune to any more racism he might encounter: “He had experienced too much already in his years as a newsclown. In my years, he thought to himself acidly, as an American Negro” (16). Dick situates the minority struggle to survive or succeed on the track of a kind of assimilation drive. The new ethnic lobby of mutants reaches for the skies of assimilation or media control and grabs hold of the garbled return-ofthe -repressed charge against certain minority interests as already being in control. The twofer mutation George and Walt (in The Crack in Space) and the prosthetized and telekinetically potentiated phocomelus Hoppy (in Dr. Bloodmoney) both enjoy a first station stop in realized control via satellite broadcasting around the world. In The Crack in Space the primal races of evolutionary prehistory have been preserved in alternate worlds. A flaw in a ’scuttler, the current form of transportation, which runs on a limited form of time travel, accidentally cracks open access to just one of these worlds, which is first assumed to be separated from our world either in space or in time. The legends already circulating about the first time a ’scuttler broke through to other worlds booked the past: It had been before his time but myth persisted, an incredible legend, still current among ’scuttler repair men, that through the defect in his ’scuttler Ellis had—it was 262 Outer Race hard to believe—composed the Holy Bible. . . . Ellis had found a weak point, a shimmer , at which another continuum completely had been visible. He had stooped down and witnessed a gathering of tiny persons who yammered in speeded-up voices and scampered about in their world just beyond the wall of the tube. . . . Ellis had supposed that this was a non-Terran race dwelling on a miniature planet in some other system entirely. He was wrong. According to the legend, the tiny people were from Earth’s own past; the script, of course, had been ancient Hebrew. (18–19) But then the other world proves to be another version of this world at the same time: “a parallel Earth, in another universe . . . Maybe there are hundreds of them, all alike physically but you know, branching off and evolving differently”(89). The evolutionary crack between parallel worlds acts as displacement of the social divide between classes. Unemployment was nipped in the bud by turning people of color who were starting out unemployed into bibs, bodies in cryogenic freeze, to cut the losses of waiting . The bibs await, like the Christian dead, resurrection, though in their case as the same. A new frontier in outer space would bid the bibs come alive again, go forth and prosper, even multiply. Animation or embodiment has been suspended while the world seeks a solution to the problem of reproduction or, within the regressed perspective, of sex itself. Bib production, abortion, and the sex industry capitalize on the impasse. The twins George Walt pitch their sex satellite, The Golden Door, which hovers above the law, to the nonreproductive members of society. The twins serve as mascot for the parallelism of worlds linked and separated through mutation. “They were a form of mutated twinning, joined at the base of the skull so that a single cephalic structure served both separate bodies. Evidently the personality George inhabited one hemisphere of the brain, made use of one eye: the right, as he recalled. And the personality Walt existed on the other side, distinct with its own idiosyncrasies , views and drives—and its own eye from which to view the outside universe” (25). “The head, containing the unmingled entities of the brothers, nodded in greeting and the mouth smiled. One eye—the left—regarded him steadily, while the other wandered vaguely off, as if preoccupied” (26). The twins serve as primal standard according to which the so-called Dawn Men from an alternate evolutionary history in parallel present time can be approached with measured dread. The double movement in/of traumatic memory crossing the reception of...

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