"Someone really ought to tell Phil that he's dead," Timothy Leary said, driving another nail home. Tim had been hammering all morning, his studio conapt a mess of wood splinters, twisted fragments of metal. And various hand tools strewn carelessly about. Life was too hectic Tim's for him to notice if he was making a mess.

His wife Barbara, his friends Bull Lee, Nicholas Brady, and Phil's widow, Tessa, nodded in agreement with his statement: the ghostly manifestations of Philip K. Dick were rapidly approaching the same frantic frenzy as Bishop Pike's contact the Other Side. These psychic occurrences Phil had witnessed and performed in, before his good friend, the late Bishop, died in the desert, searching for lost Gnostic manuscripts.

And the sun gleamed orange and purple on the horizon. Blue sunset; gray smog.

Now, it looked like Phil was having the thrill of his life--his afterlife--as they awaited another ectoplasmic mani- festation.

"It's like Specktowsky says in his book, How I Rose from the Dead in my Spare Time--and So Can You," Nicholas began, but Barbara interrupted, saying, "I've never read the book. Even if it did spend a year at the top of the New York Times best-seller list."

So Nick lectured, "The theory of psionics was developed by Emmanuel Specktowsky when he rose from the dead by running CHAOS, a computer program he invented, on his Tandy-Apple Red. His inspiration came from his post-death hallucinations of the Bardo, the place Phil wrote about in UBIK."

Barbara's interest picked up. "The Bardo? Tim turned me on to that. Tim, would you care to comment?" But Tim was too involved with his woodwork to notice a question was being direc- ted toward him. So Nick continued, "For Specktowsky the Bardo was a huge dome made out of some indestructible crystal. Outside it the War of the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness was going on, armies of Amazons riding futuristic spider-machines into battle. A huge Tree was in the center of the Dome, and the Fruit of the Tree brought Wisdom. And a Serpent got Specktowsky to eat the Fruit, and a black, batwinged demon Princess, Nekbael, who'd guided Specktowsky's soul on its journey to rebirth told him to jump. After he'd finally exited the cave thru a long, dark tunnel, to the outside of the Dome. There, the bat-winged beauty, Nekbael, had counselled him to leap from the cliff at the mouth of the tunnel: His suicide terminated in rebirth. Death in the afterlife is rebirth into the world of the living."

But now, even Specktowsky himself couldn't explain these manifestations. Nick had just been on the phone with him, and all Emmanuel had to say was, "I guess that I just don't know. Maybe you should try asking him. The next time he comes back." Tim was still hammering like a wee gnome cast inappropriate- ly into the late 21st Century, the era of cyberspace: It'd been a computer program, CHAOS, after all, which had brought Speck- towsky back from the dead.

"He's gone too far this time, even for Phil," Barbara Leary said morosely, wondering what her husband was up to. Something strange. As usual. She continued, "Wherever Phil is now--on the other side or gone on to the void." Tessa reiterated, "You're right: he's gone too far by publishing another book. VADIS."

Nick said, "Yeah--I saw it while surfing cyberspace. But the Knowbot data-retrieval system can't find out if it's real or a fraud. Even if it does have a terrabyte capacity." "A good book, too," added old Bull. "I've made more money in seven tears--I mean, years--of painting than I ever did off any of my books. Even Naked Brecchie." Nick said, "I didn't read that one. What's it about?"

"It's about this chick I knew in college, her name was Brecchie; Breckenridge, we called her Brecchie for short. She didn't look bad, really; naked, I mean, except her breasts were kind of small."

"That's a sexist statement," Tessa stated flatly.

Nick snorted, "Yeah--but being realistic about it, like the first thing men look at on a woman is her breasts."

Bull added, "Or her ass."

Barbara (whose breasts were bulbous, befitting her career as a fashion model), remarked, "You got a point there, Nick. But Bull--could you tell us how it ends? Naked Brecchie?"

"I was after Brecchie's ass, but she was dating some other guy, so she introduced me to Karen Relationships; tried to dump me off on her, more like, and Karen was the world's biggest tease and flirt. So I got hung up on her, but it ended tragically when she broke up with me. I got suicidal. Anyway, the whole book is sort of a word-collage of disparate elements taken from other people's work, cut and pasted into each other," Bull said, still busily scraping out lines of powder on a shaving mirror.

"What we're doing is for Phil's own good," Tim said, acci- dentally wiping his sweaty brow with a piece of sandpaper, then wincing in agony as he felt it grating against his skin. "Ouch! Damnit! Anyway, as I was saying... Phil can't go on forever trapped in the Bardo. Captured like some karmic spirit that doesn't know it's really dead, or a character in one of his own novels." "Or a comic book," Nick added, picking up a Spiderman back-issue. In college the dorm where he'd lived had had a Cosmicomic Book Library located in his room. Comix collecting was still an avid avocation of his.

Tessa said, "The only good comics were Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, that and his The Castle of Crossed Destinies. The way he wrote it, he laid it out in Tarot cards, then used that to write a plot." Nick said, "Yeah, Dick wrote one like that, too--except he used the I-Ching. The story was called The Man in the High Castle, cuz there was this guy, see in the parallel universe, where Germany and Japan had won World War II, and he wrote a book about how they lost, so the Nazis were trying to kill him. And he holed up in the High Castle. But then at the end--"

Barbara was listening avidly now. Like she did to her husband espousing and expounding on his one thousand acid trips. She said, "So the hitman's a Nazi truck-driver."

Nick quickly added, "At the end, the Man in the High Castle tells one of the characters that he wrote the entire thing by throwing the I-Ching. And when they ask what it all means, the hexagram INNER TRUTH comes up."

One more nail, thought Timothy, and it's done. Then I can really spice out.

"What really bugs me the most about his new book, VADIS, is that all his life he wondered--was obsessed--with the afterlife, what's beyond death, and now he's back from it. Like Speck- towsky. But he won't tell. Not even me. Or his editor, Claud- ius Schlausmuller III. who serialized the book in HIGH TIMES. That's the problem: we've got a beginning, a middle--but no end."

Tim said, "Don't you realize HIGH TIMES is totally opposed to everything we dream of?"

Bull was startled. "What do you mean by that?"

Barbara interpolated, quick to defend her husband, "By supporting drug dealers, it actually promotes bad drug policy-- keeping drugs illegal so the Mob can just make more money off them."

Tim said, "Encourages drug dealing, not the proper use re- creational use of drugs to expand the mind."

Nicholas interjected, "But that's what the book is about, isn't it?"

"Drug dealing?" Tessa said, shocked. "If Phil didn't regret wasting away on speed, he never would've written A Scanner Darkly."

"No. I mean VADIS. It's about the afterlife. Isn't it?"

Bull said, "Maybe when the final installment comes out--?"

"Bullshit, Bull!" Tim said. "He'll just use another one of his trick endings. Like having the whole thing be an elaborate CIA conspiracy. Or the work of some malevolent computer. Or an alien who's actually God."

"Wasn't that the idea for VALIS?" Barbara asked. "I'm not terribly familiar with all of Phil's books. Even if academics now regard him as the Shakespeare of science fiction."

Nick responded, "Yeah, it was. So VADIS is probably some- thing similar. But... what the hell does the 'D' stand for?"

Meanwhile, Bull was snorting up a line of Substance D. Enough to make the walls crawl.

Barbara, always fashion conscious, smeared on some twilight- purple lipstick. "Maybe there's nothing for Phil to tell. Maybe the afterlife's just a soulless void."

Nick said, "Well, the point of How I Rose from the Dead in My Spare Time--and So Can You--is to find out for yourself. To run the CHAOS program on VR."

Barbara was musing, "Maybe we should drag out Tim's Cyber- wear," when Timothy exclaimed, "Finished!" holding up the com- pleted contraption for his friends' scrutiny. It was an unusual concatenation of knotty pine with other woody components.

"So your watch-a-ma-call-it," Barbara queried. "Is it for anything? In particular?" She hoped she hadn't hurt Tim's feelings by asking.

"No, this watch-a-ma-call-it is a marriage of form and function, art and science. It's a spice rack. For my nutmeg. Or mace. Or tarragon leaves. There's an awful lot of spices which can get you high. As the Rastafarians say, God made herb for the healing of the nation."

"Well, hot damn and cowabunga, dude," Nick said.

"Marvelous," said Bull blandly. "And I think I speak for everyone here when I say, I didn't think you had it in you."

"Listen--why don't we ask Phil if he's alive?" Tessa said, excitedly. "The next time he, you know, manifests himself. That way, he could reach the realization... I mean, that he's dead. For himself."

"Already tried that," Timothy replied, as the Dune Spice kicked in and he flew the astral plane. He put the spice rack on the kitchen table. A single shaft of sunlight illuminating a pine-knot. He joined the others, sitting cross-legged on the threadbare carpet. "I said, Phil, are you still alive? and he said, What if I'm not? Then before I could question him anymore, he disappeared. Probably back to the same void he'd come from. No, I think his spirit is trapped in the info-net. That's why he's been able to publish novel chapters on the Web."

"So you're sure this isn't just a projection of some kind?"

Nick said, quizzically. "What're you trying to say, Tim? Here, snort a line of Bull's shit."

"Yeah, it's pure. Primo stuff. But what you said, Nick, that's the point," old Bull said, laconically. "We're not certain of the nature of the manifestations. I mean what's causing them."

"If it was a ghost," Nick said, "then everything I've learned about ghosts is wrong. That they don't smoke cigarettes, for one thing. Or drink beer."

Barbara said, "Too bad we can't get Mountain Fresh beer here in LA. Me and Tim always used to drink it, when we were visiting our friend, W.C. Leadbeater, in Invisible City in North Dakota."

Tim pondered, "We all knew Phil. He must know where he is right now. Even if we don't."

Bull looked up suddenly. "Colored lights," he said. "The lights guide a person on their path to reincarnation."

"What do you mean?" Barbara queried.

"UBIK," Tim said. "The place where I first found out about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, when I was still doing psychedelic drug experiments at Stanford. I was trying to program trips using the Book of the Dead. UBIK starts off, these guys are dead and in the Bardo, and there's Joe Clip money appearing all over the place. And if you try to cash in your Friendlies at K-Mart, you can't get your Mountain Fresh beer. And everything starts devolving into its ancestors. Like the holo-vision becomes a TV, then a radio, then an old-fashioned gramophone. So they finally figure out they're actually dead and in the Bardo; Clip is sort of a guide-figure in the post-death purgatory. And then you end up seeing colored lights, and which one you follow determines what you're reincarnated as; a good or a bad womb."

"You may be right," Nick said, "Colored lights--might just give us a clue. It's worth a try."

"We could string the lights equidistantly from the point of the specter's manifestation. The ghost of Phil." Bull's voice was as excited as it ever got.

Tim asked Nick, "Can you get us some extension cords from your jalopy? And some colored lights from the hardware store?"

"Sure," Nick said. With a sour smile. "I'll bring my monk's robes, too. Will everything be set up by then?"

"Don't worry--it'll be pure, man," Tim assured excitedly.

And the moon outside was low in the skies, and shadows seemed to lengthen before everything merged with the night.

The consciousness of Philip K. Dick was alive and well and living in Southern California. And seeing God, on the other side of the walls of that monstrous Dome, trapping LA like some glass womb.

Not that he had to stay in LA, he'd found the portal to the outside of the Dome, guarded by a mysterious gnome, Fritz Kobold, in floppy hat and pointed curlicue shoes. No, Dick's spirit was free to wander freely in this psychic realm. While his physical body slumbered in cold-pak. And he had family and friends nearby; not to mention Disneyland.

And yet, he missed the real world. He missed his wife. He missed his pet, Methadone Kitty.

Time and Space were not hindrances, anymore--he could see the All and the Light above the All; was beginning to realize that there were countless clones of himself, in an infinite number of universes. How little I understood before this, he thought in dread awe and wonder. People ought to know it when they're alive--and when they're dead. It's different than I thought it would be from the descriptions in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Or Specktowsky's book.

Phil liked Christ, one of his fellow (and kindred) spirits in the Bardo. As a devout Episcopalian, (with a penchant for the Gnostic Scriptures) he found Jesus charming. And Jesus' Twin, Judas Didymos Thomas. Buddha, too, was engaging, though Phil found his inclination for staying at home on the astral plane a bit boring. Of all the souls he'd met, though, he'd found Plato's the most enjoyable; would get into long, drawn-out dialogues with him. Which he hoped someday to publish, the way he was now publishing VADIS. Were it not for the Greeks, Phil realized, civilization might not have lasted long enough to come up with gallium-arsenide micro-lasers and nanite microchips. All of which made the cryogenic technology which was keeping him alive possible.

His new freedom, however, posed a problem: how to get the message across from the Final Frontier: Death. Initially, to get his message to the world, like Emmanuel Specktowsky, he had telepathically taken control of the spirit of the info-net and holo-faxed in a piece of speculative fiction; electronic publishing, in short. As his body aged--slowly, to be sure--in cold-pak, though, the effectiveness of his ability to enter Cyberia also faded. Even as Joe Clip money was becoming ubiquitous. It all resolved into a question of communication. He had considered, and quickly discarded, several options, such as embodying himself in reincarnation as some important figure, like the President or Pope--but those were overwhelming responsibilities. Or becoming a world-renowned rap artist or another van Gogh--though he dreaded the thought of slashing his ears. Or inventing some universally recognizable religious symbol, as his friend Bishop Pike suggested: the cross or the circle, for example. After lengthy conversations with Christ, however, he had decided to set his sights a little lower.

Armed with this mustard seed of knowledge, Phil had penetrated the massed AI of the info-net and written a book chock-full of movie potential. He hoped, for the sake of humanity, that the matter was in safe hands. For he had no wish to create another cult; cult author though he may have been.

Now, he went outside that huge crystal structure, looked on the face of God and lived: there was a blinding brilliance, a brilliance which also contained darkness. It spoke to him, saying, "I am VADIS and VALIS, the yin and the yang, the male and female made into a single one. You are to be my Agent: an Agent of Destiny."

"How am I going to do that?" Phil asked.

"All will be revealed in time," the mysterious voice said. And though Phil asked it some more questions, it remained silent.

And the War of Light and Darkness continued in the Bardo, the familiar mushroom clouds omnipresent on the horizon.

They had been waiting for Phil to show since dusk the last evening, waiting for some manifestation of the paranormal, the transpersonal. All the electronics were ready and waiting. The AI which generated psionic energy thru its esper-field modula- tors, as they watched for Phil thru their scanners. Tim explained, "All the electronic esper apparatus is to tell us if we're really dealing with the supernatural. Reality or illusion. It'll do it by extracting ectoplasm from Phil's ghost and decocting it into a condenser."

Nick asserted, "Sounds sort of like alchemy."

Tim said, as he contemplated the ectoplasmic energy con- verter, "What we don't need now is more new chemicals, what we do need is a new alchemical philosophy for the space age. The cyberspace age"; then was silent. Apparently, he was finally beginning to understand what all the drugs had done to him. CHEW-Z and CAN-D. Not to mention FRUIT-T and WOOD-D.

And Bull was still snorting Death. Substance D.

In the far corner, Nicholas Brady sat in half lotus posi- tion, waiting for something to happen. As did Barbara and Tessa. A lone stick of incense wafted fumes toward the ceiling beneath a single bare bulb. A few moths fluttered around it.

Tessa, in her violet lipstick, sunglasses and eye-shadow, sat to the left of the large open window next to the door, thinking of how Ursula K. LeGuin was wrong: the left hand of darkness is darkness itself. Not the light. Tessa was looking pensively at the night sky, the stars, saying, "I wonder where Proxima Centaurii is?"

Bull asked, while Tim was fiddling with the micro-circuitry, "Wasn't that where Palmer Eldritch came from?"

Tessa said, "Yeah--he brought back CHEW-Z with him. "Which puts you in a universe where Palmer Eldritch is God."

Bull said. "I know--I used to chew that stuff all the time, myself."

To which Barbara asked, "But wasn't Palmer Eldritch a malevolent God? In the story, I mean?"

Tessa said, "Yeah. And Fomalhaut--that was the birthplace of VALIS. Who's also actually God."

Nick reminded her, "But we still haven't found out what the 'D' in VADIS stands for."

And the stars reflected brilliantly in Tessa's sea-green eyes.

A multi-colored labyrinth of cables snaked, serpentine, on the floor in front of the lamp-stand. The ripped lamp-shade. The coiling snakes. Colors, distorted by the red light.

While fiddling around with the computer apparatus, Tim was rambling on to no one in particular, to anyone who would listen, and not caring if they didn't. "The Tibetans were in tune, man. Yeah. All right. Consciousness after death happens, no matter what the materialists have to say about it--if we can prove Phil's back from the beyond... it'll be a scientific revolution, man! And then there's the return to the womb--death, cessation, creates flashbacks to birth: the trip down the long, dark tunnel is passage thru the birth-canal; rebirth is joy, the ecstasy at separation from the mother. The Chkai Bardo is the territory, man; not just a map... acceptance is the key. Acceptance is the key, accepting death as the first stage of rebirth... the Primary Clear White Light of Pure Reality... Barbara--are you listening?"

Barbara nodded, hanging attentively on every word. Tim could be real profound when he was on dope. A mystic man.

"That strobe-light's supposed to shine. Not flash on and off." Old Bull was smiling widely, grin ample, flashing white- ness of his teeth in a sea of colors from the floodlights.

"The strobe we're using to guide Tim's spirit on its journey to resurrection?" Nicholas asked, hypnotized by the flashing glimmers of the strobes. It looked like a hippy crash-pad.

Tim said, pulling out a screwdriver, "I'll get the damn thing to work, even if I have to electrocute myself trying."

"Have you tried--you know--plugging it in?" Nicholas snig- gered snootily. "I think maybe that shit you shot's kicking in."

"Shhh! I think I hear someone--or some-thing," Tessa whispered, craning her head to see out the window. Then paused, absolutely still.

Moments passed, crawling like snails. A raven cried in the distance. The moon was obscured by clouds. And that same dusky moon reflected in Barbara's chic bracelets. In her green shirt, its red stripes made her breasts into bleeding limes.

At that point, Phil walked in the door. Which had deliber- ately been left open for him. Instantly Timmy, already in the C:\directory, hit DICKCOPY on the keyboard, followed by stabbing ENTER with a quick keystroke. The monitor went thru violent surging colors, as Dick's spirit was down-loaded into their mainframe; the multi-media speakers blared some strange music like Ravi Shankar playing with Metallica.

And the synthetic Bardo began; the strobe-lights shimmering red, green, amber, blue, violet.

And at the center of it all was a pure white light, shining and undying, a beacon to Phil's spirit. To guide it out of the cycle of karma, death and rebirth. A cold, clear light, like something from some nether-realm, from above the All. It lit up the entire room. Blinding everyone. No contrast. No definition.

Void of shadows.

"Apparently," Tim said in sudden realization, "the ecto- plasmic-cybernetic machine's created a resonance, feedback, in the focussing bowl."

Nick screamed, "Damn and we're all gonna die!"

Tessa put her arms around him, saying comfortingly, "We're not going to die, Nicholas. Tim--we're not going to die, are we?"

Then abruptly, she realized it: Timothy Leary was dead.

Killed when it exploded, the blast of psi-power directed straight at him. A small explosion in Tim's head; light, heat. Suddenly, he couldn't feel the floor beneath his feet. He had been shielding his eyes from the intense light, but now he slowly opened them. Like a sleeper waking. Some strange daze had found him--he was drifting, floating free in the continuum which was the void; no gravity, push or pull, or tendency to move in any direction. As far as he could see, everything was being drawn into a spiralling gray vortex; a tunnel. At the far end of the tunnel, he thought he could make out the glow of unearthly light. Dimly, with the part of him that had been a professional psychologist, Tim sensed that this strange light might have been a projection of his own mind, an expectation of something incredible. Something eldritch. On the other side of life. His palms were sweating--if ectoplasmic entities can sweat.

As he drifted nearer to the end of the tunnel, though, it became apparent what was happening.

Something wonderful.

"What do we do?" Barbara screamed hysterically. Though not without the portending knowledge that, somehow, she had known in advance what was about to happen.

Bull said, "I think Tim's dead." He had been the first to his feet after the explosion. Nicholas Brady just sat there while Bull was hunching over Tim's crumpled body, studying it for signs of life. Lying in a heap. Like a gum or candy wrapper that has been cast aside. Bleeding, burned, pulsing with a smoky orange light. Where the phallic shaft of ectoplasm had bent and twisted his body. Rending it like tinfoil.

Still reeling from the explosion, Barbara said, "Something's controlling my thoughts from thousands of light-years away."

"VADIS," Nick said. "Like in that other book about Vast Active Intelligent Systems."

Tessa asked, "Could Phil have been right in that story he wrote? Could there actually be a VALIS? Or even a VADIS?"

Nicholas, in the sudden confusion, had jumped up too quick- ly, and pulled a groin muscle; he winced in pain. "Shit!" he said. Barbara put her arms around his shoulders to comfort him. "There's no need to scream," she said. "Tim's in the Bardo now. Gone on to something better. I just hope...." "I was pissed because I pulled a muscle, you dippy blond."

Barbara pouted, "Just because I posed nude for PLAYBOY--it don't mean I'm stupid. And being blond has nothing to do with it, either."

Nicholas began, "Yeah, and Tim's dead--but does he know where he's going to go? Like what we're trying to do with Phil."

"That's the question," Barbara said, sadly.

"And it looks like we're not going to be able to tell Phil where he is and where he's going, either," Nicholas said, in dread and fear, "So the first time I was psychotic, I went into the Bardo. Just like Specktowsky or Phil. Or even Tim. He's there by now, for sure. The Bardo--the same place Tim always went on acid. The Dark-Children and Light-Children are fighting there, Amazon warrior-women riding huge spider war-machines across landscapes cratered from the numerous explosions."

"Shut up, you damn comic book freak!" Bull shouted, "Tim- othy Leary's dead. And it's our duty to raise him from the dead. Nicholas--where's your copy of Specktowsky's book?"

"Left it in Phoenix when I was driving across the USA."

Barbara tossed her psychedelic furs back over her shoulder, batted an eyelash thick with mascara, said, "Do you think it'd help to try and run DICKCOPY again? Or is it unsafe? After what happened to Tim."

Her mourning and melancholy were transparently obvious in the way her tears streaked the PENTHOUSE perfection of her makeup.

Bull said, "Look, guys. We got to get our shit together, and stop arguing over petty BS."

"You're right," Phil said, drifting slowly in and out of focus, like a dream in a movie.

Barbara, unable to move, looked from Phil toward Tim, then back to Tim again. "My husband's... dead," she said, sobbing, tears streaming down her face. A river of salt-water in fant- astic LA.

"I know how you feel," Tessa said. "I felt the same way when Phil died."

The shower of sparks disappeared like dawn into day, though the night was inky black outside. Wind whipped ghostly thru the streets, as though the whole world were affected by this esper manifestation. The electricity was creating an acrid stench, as the final sparks settled, dying, into the carpet. The only light in the room was the smoky moonlight filtering thru the window; though Tim's life was in eclipse, the moon itself had come out from behind the clouds, as though welcoming Tim to the afterlife.

The only other light in the room was from an incandescent Phil. The Tibetan Book of the Dead light-show had been short- circuited when Dick had appeared. Now, his glowing presence could barely be forgotten. Like the legacy of great books he'd left behind him.

"Do I need to remind you of how foolish you've been?" Phil asked, a tone of desperation in his voice. A feeble spectacle of eldritch vision in the electromagnetic transducers. "Never- theless, you have to act. Bull--are you getting a pulse?"

"No, but I'm getting a buzz from this Rasta cigar I've been smoking. I think I'm hallucinating Philip K. Dick."

"I'm real, you idiot--you brought me here. With whatever kind of Ghostbusters gizmo you concocted to bring me here. Back from the other side."

"It was an ectoplasmic energy converter," Nicholas said, still the most technically minded of the group, a brilliant intellectual in spite of his mental illness. "It uses neural nets which are gimmicked to duplicate the esper-centers of the human brain. So it can focus and capture psychons."

"Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean," Barbara said, still a little peeved about Nicholas's comment on "dumb blonds,"

but rapidly forgetting it as the realization that Tim, like Phil, was now dead.

Nicholas bent over his dead great-uncle's form, gleaming like some ghostly entity. Like Jesus on the cross, it bore stigmata: burn marks. He said, "I think I do got a pulse. But it's very weak. This isn't real! I'm flipping out, hallucinat- ing again. I'm seeing Phil back from the dead while Timothy Leary is dying. Maybe we should call 911 and get me locked up in the Berkeley Bobo Boat. Tie me to a bed and shoot me up with tranks. And the worms are eating my brain."

Tessa said, "You aren't hallucinating, Nicholas. At least, if you are--it's a shared hallucination; everybody here's seeing the same thing. Phil's ghost."

"Phil," Barbara said, imploringly, "Can you bring Tim back?"

Nick said, "Yeah--and if we can, how do we do it?"

Phil responded mysteriously, words cloaked in occult mean- ings, "Not when I'm in-between the material and spiritual realms, the way I am now: half and half and in-between, to quote Nietzs- che. You have to use whatever you call that psionic machine--"

"Ectoplasmic energy converter," Nick said, still wondering at the reality of the proceedings. The ROLLING STONE had said, Life is like a Philip K. Dick novel, and this was certainly true of any psychotic's private cosmos. Just as how Dick had created all those wonderful parallel universes.

Tessa went to fetch the machine. Finding the gadget, she said, "Nick--do you know how to run this thing? That was Tim's department."

"You've got to enter the DICKCOPY command when you're in the CHAOS directory. Like this," he demonstrated, fingers dancing across the keys.

Blue light ascended to the ceiling, trapping Dick's spirit, so he could remain in the physical realm longer.

Phil said, "I'm still fading--your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying."

"I can re-boot, and then reactivate the CHAOS software,"

Nicholas said, demonstrating.

The screen said, ABORT, RETRY, IGNORE.

"Might have a virus in here," he mused. "If that's the case--" He hit RETRY; this time, the program responded.

There was yet another shower of sparks as Phil's psi-force was drawn out of the Bardo and the smoke slowly lifted. The moon returned to pure silver, reflecting as deep blue in Barbara's diamond heart-shaped earrings.

"Can you help him?" Barbara implored Phil. Her tears of sorrow were now for Phil just as much as Tim; she'd always been an altruistic woman, and felt sorrow at any death.

"Only if you can," Phil said, mysteriously.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Tessa asked the manifesta- tion of her husband.

"You read my book, VADIS? The one I posted on the Web?" Again, Phil repeated, "I can help him--but only if you can. Or haven't you figured out what the 'D' stands for?"

Meanwhile, Bull was checking Tim's pupils and rubbing his hands. Trying in vain to rouse him.

Barbara once again asked, "Bull, what should we do?"

Old Bull straightened up. "He needs attention. Though his heart's still going." He stared at Phil's presence, suspicious- ly. "Any ideas?"

Phil moved closer. In a flicker of movement, sending out rippling, cascading showers of sparks, Phil handed him a piece of paper.

"It's a map," Bull said, staring in vacant wonder.

"These are the directions to ALCOR Corporation's underground cryonics storage facility. It's located near the UC-Berkeley campus. The passkey is located at the bottom: ABYSS. Just remember, VADIS is the opposite of VALIS; VALIS is a just and merciful god, VADIS is a form of evil. VADIS and VALIS both come from the star Regulus. Once you get to ALCOR--the technicians there will take it from there."

"Is that where your body is?" Tessa asked.

Phil nodded. "I secretly made a pact with them. My cryonic insurance was paid up in full when I died. Don't forget, ALCOR is a closely guarded secret. Others will be made aware. In time. This's what Tim would've wanted." He looked at Bull. "Well?"

Bull looked at Nicholas. "You have a car?"

"The Rat-mobile," Nicholas said, laughing inappropriately, schizophrenically.

"Then let's go." The two picked up Tim and headed toward the door, Barbara following.

Tessa asked, "Phil--is my husband going to be all right?"

There was no answer. Phil had vanished.

Barbara dialed the phone number for ALCOR: 1-800-CPL-5938. A baritone voice, a bald-headed man on the other end of the visi- phone line. He said, "ALCOR Cryogenics, Inc. May I help you?" "Yes... Timothy Leary's dead." "No, he's outside, looking in." Barbara became hysterical. "Shut up, you idiot! I'm fucking serious, and I'm telling you God's own truth. This is his wife. Barbara. Hell, who did you think it was? What kind of cryonics operation do you run here, anyway?" "Sorry," the technician's voice came back. "We get a lot of crank calls. This is Mario from Team B. What's your ad- dress?" Barbara gave out the necessary information. "We'll have the Mobile Advanced Life-Support System, the MALSS, out there as soon as possible," Mario said, hanging up the visi-phone. His image faded into gray as the line clicked; the gray nearest black.

Barbara was still in a state of shock at her loss; tears of melancholy as she sat down on Tim's only couch--a red, plush divan, and turned on the holo-fax... the final installment of VADIS was coming in now; the printer hummed. Pages of hard-copy piling up in the tray.

What an extraordinary, amazing, unbelievable, historical moment! she thought. And everyone else is too fearful to ap- preciate it. It's up to me to see what his final words were...

are. She'd read all the first installment in one sitting while Nick and Bull argued about metaphysics and spirituality. In fact, like Tessa, Barbara had read all of Phil's work and knew his style backwards and forwards, so descriptive of the psyche- delic experience as it was. However, science fiction wasn't her favorite genre of literature, as it hadn't been her husband's. Dick and Gibson were the only exception to that rule, despite the fact that Tim had first encountered the Bardo thru it; Dick's novels were, if anything, the history of a psychosis, the same as Nicholas Brady's. Though Brady's style more closely resembled William S. Burroughs' (whom he preferred over Edgar Rice) because of his schizophrenia.

The chapter Barbara was reading was a peculiar story, in the vein of his earlier novels, and masterfully crafted. But one passage had struck her as being unlikely, even absurd. Even for science fiction. She skimmed the pages of the ending, searching for an epilogue to the passage; something that would explain it. Stopping at random, she read a passage: --The two weak humans carried a third, a lifeless hulk of flesh, blood, and bones, toward the air-car. Beyond their grasp, however, was the knowledge the means to release him, or the freedom that death offered.

--"What's the quickest way to Berkeley?" Nicholas Brady asked.

--"Just drive," Bull said.

Her flesh tingled in panic. Forgetting her grief, she read on. She didn't recall the dialogue from the first time she'd read the story. And the characters' names... her friends... it was her life--their lives--reflected in this living mirror of prose.

Quickly, she flipped back several pages, read the beginning of this installment another time.

--In her blindness, the confusion, she screamed. Hearing something fall heavily to the floor. Then all was dark in the smoke-filled room, and she blinked rapidly, trying to adjust to...

Confused, Barbara put the book down. What was happening? This wasn't the manuscript she'd read the other night.

"This story," Barbara said, pointing out the passages to the others. "It's... changed... it appears to be an account of the evening's events... only different..."

"Let me see that," Nick exclaimed. He read aloud: --The three strong humans carried a fourth, an inert mass, toward the air-car. Beyond their grasp, however, was the eman- cipation that death offered.

--"What's the quickest way to UCSB?" Nicholas Brady asked.

--"Just fly this damn aero-car," Bull said.

--In her disorientation, she shrieked as something drop to the floor. Then all was shadowy in the smoke-filled room...

Barbara objected, "That's not what I read. It's the same meaning--but the words have changed."

Bull Lee, grabbing the sheets of computer paper away from her, said, "Let me try reading that." Like the others, he read aloud: --The three friends hauled a fourth toward the ground-car, an outdated conveyance in this age of aero-cars.

--"What's the quickest way to UCLA?" Nicholas Brady asked.

--"Dawn's highway," Bull said.

Bull exclaimed, "It seems to be different for every person who reads it."

"Like in one of Phil's parallel universe stories?" Tessa asked.

"Yeah," Nicholas Brady inserted.

"Let me see... the bit about death bringing freedom--that just doesn't sound like something Phil would say." Tessa had a premonition that she expressed to the others: "A force is at work here. Powerful. Omniscient, perhaps."

Bull said, "And this book is an example of that force."

"Or I've gone crazy," Nick said. "Again. This just sounds like one of my typical paranoid schizophrenic delusional hal- lucinations."

Bull said, "If you're hallucinating--so are we all."

Tessa gazed at the candle they'd lit while setting up the ectoplasmic converter.

At least the candle was real.

"Try reading the end," Tessa suggested. "If he's trying to communicate with us..." her voice trailed off into the whisper of the climate-control.

--This was only the beginning. VADIS, the conqueror of Earth, ran its final program. DESTROY.BAT. And the DESTRUCT batch-file of the Vast Active Intelligent System propagated itself thru cyberspace. --VADIS had been programmed as an Agent of Destiny by the alien race who had created it, the green Sphinxes from the planet Rojan, orbiting the star Regulus. --On earth, the cold winds began to blow. Winter was coming, and it was going to be a long one.-- Barbara was the first to notice it: "This section--it's the same. The same for all of us."

The rest of them took a look, agreed with her comment.

The door to the conapt opened, after Tessa buzzed in the visitor. A tall, bald-headed man entered. "Hi. I'm Mario from Team B. One of ALCOR's staff. It's time to start Tim's body on cardiopulmonary support so we can preserve his body in cold-pak."

They carried the body outside to an aero-van, where Tim was hooked up to the equipment. Tim quickly regained color as it was packed in ice.

Old Bull gently held the hand of the inert figure.

"Do you guys really think we can successfully get him into cold-pak?" Tessa asked, tears swelling up in her eyes.

Bull said, "Tim's dead. It's either a time to grieve, or a time to celebrate the release of his spirit."

"Phil came back," Tessa said, hopefully.

Barbara, deep in grief, stated, "I hope he does come back. I miss him so much."

Nick put his arm around her. "He might. Like Phil." And though he was trying to comfort her, he thought of his own experience with death: a pill OD; there had been no long, dark tunnel, no guide figure at the other end.

But he didn't want to tell Barbara this. And being schizo- phrenic himself, he wasn't entirely certain that religion could- n't be explained scientifically as delusion and hallucination. Was Jesus' claim to being the Son of God just a delusion on the part of a madman? Was his resurrection a mass hallucination? I wonder, he thought on, while the flying car passed thru aerial traffic lanes marked out by AG-floaters.

They arrived at the Cryogenics facility, where they muttered the entered the passkey into the pay-door: ABYSS. It swung wide, revealing a world of icy wonder; rows upon rows where the dead slumbered.

The cold-pak which contained Tim was completely filled with liquid nitrogen.

The technicians worked quickly, chattering all the while in medical terms, most of which none of them understood. They merely silently watched, praying that the operation would be successful. Soon, Timothy Leary was placed among the other souls stored in cold-pak; slumbered in hibernation like a regal ICE- man.

"There really is life after death," Phil's specter said, materializing out of nowhere. "Just not in a way that's com- prehensible to most normal humans. Something I didn't even see myself--until I discovered VADIS. There is so much... so much I now understand."

"But what about your book?" Tessa asked.

Barbara echoed, "VADIS. It's about your--dying. And you put Tim into the final chapter."

The mysterious apparition replied, "VADIS is controlling your thoughts, actions, deeds, thru synchronicity. All this is an illusion, like Plato's cave. And in order to experience this true Reality, this Absolute, it's necessary to destroy this illusion."

He pointed to one of the storage drawers. The others hovered over it while Bull read the label underneath the cold-pak chamber.

"'Philip K. Dick,'" Nick said, slowly and with dread and awe. "Then you are alive. Slumbering here in cold-pak." He paused. "So Tim can be saved, too."

"Saved!" Phil chortled. "You don't understand. You still don't understand. All my work may have been in vain. Cryogenic suspension is merely a way of extending the transition between death and rebirth. It's definitely not salvation." Philosophi- cally, he added, "It's more of a crossroad."

"Let me get this straight," Tessa said. "You--you're Phil, his spirit at least, alive here in cold-pak. But you, if you really are my husband--you want to be dead."

"Exactly!" Phil exclaimed. "That's the whole purpose of ALCOR and VADIS. Except for a few rare people suffering from clinical death, no one has a choice. Most people, I'm afraid, don't even realize that they've got a choice. They're convinced that ordinary, waking reality is the only real reality. And it would be, if they never dreamed or meditated. Or prayed. Isn't it about time we burst that bubble, destroyed that illusion?"

"'D,'" Tessa said, brightening.

"Stands for 'Destructive,'" Barbara said in awe and wonder.

Tessa added, "I finally see it. But not destructive as we normally use it. It destroys illusions."

Phil nodded. "It's ironic that your Tibetan Book of the Dead light-show should have ended this way. Many of the states described in that book, by the way, are accurate observations."

"But what about your book?" Tessa inquired. "The ending: VADIS leaves the world in cold, dark winter." She swallowed. "It scared me."

"A metaphor," Phil responded. "Cold reality sets in. But read it again. You'll see that it's actually spring."

They all shook their heads, not understanding.

"The book plays off the present. It's an engram-holo. I wanted to scare you to the point where you'd come here." Phil placed his hands on his wife's shoulders, squeezing gently. "I want you to release me."

Tessa swallowed. "You mean--?"

"Pull the plug. I'm ready now that Timothy Leary's here, ready for him to take my place. Ready to guide him to VADIS for himself, so that I may go on to my destiny. Which is to become an Agent of Destiny." Gently, he hugged her. "Please release me. Tessa. Somebody."

"How?" his widow asked.

"Flip the circuit-breaker." He pointed to a small box beneath the cold-pak chamber.

"Who has the courage?" Nick asked.

"I do," Tessa said. "I trust Phil implicitly." She yanked on the lever, yanked. It stuck for a moment, then the whining hum of the cryogenic equipment died.

Just then Timothy Leary walked in the door.

Nicholas Brady said, "Is anyone here going to tell Tim that he's dead?"

"No. I'm outside, looking in: outside the material world, past the Limit which divides God from the Cosmos. You have to free me, the same way you tried to with Phil."

"Pull the plug?"

"No. Run DICKCOPY. You can, with a little bit of tinker- ing, modify the MALLS into an ectoplasm converter."

Nick said, "There are a lot of copies of DICKCOPY floating around in cyberspace. I'll see if we can hunt one up."

He went to the computer, soon had the necessary files down- loaded, as his fingers danced across the keys.

"It's not DICKCOPY 5.0, but at least this is a Windows 2001 machine. It's definitely got enough RAM for the procedure."

He clicked on an icon. Tim's astral body rippled, dist- orted, then broke free of the prison of the material world.

Tim contemplated his new-found freedom from the material world. In the distance he saw, not Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad, but Philip K. Dick. Then he emerged from all-subsuming gray into a golden void. Colors enfolded him: black, white, red, yellow, violet.

No words could describe his state of pure bliss.

Then the feathery clouds under his feet were absorbed by a sea of air, receding. He passed out into space. Ascending higher and higher, the moon swelling as he flew ever higher, he confronted a smooth, silvery cylinder studded with electronic machinery.

He heard a voice: "It's VADIS." Tim turned, looked. Philip K. Dick's astral body was floating beside his own.

"What does VADIS have to do with me?" Tim asked.

"See that other light, that distant flicker, like a shooting star?"

Tim nodded.

"That's VALIS. The two are becoming one now, and a new era is dawning."

And as the sun peeked over the Earth's curvature, the two satellites docked.

"Behold--a new system has been created," Phil said. "GADIS. The 'G,' by the way, stands for 'God.' The rest of the initials, you're already familiar with."

"OK, so you brought me into GADIS' presence. What do I have to do now?"

"You have to enter," Phil said. So Tim floated over to an airlock. It cycled open to receive him, just as the docking clamps had when VALIS inserted herself into VADIS.

Passing thru an incredibly complex array of electronic equipment, he came at last to a typewriter. An old-fashioned, 20th Century typewriter.

"A typewriter?" Tim asked, totally bewildered. "What the hell is such an antiquated piece of junk doing aboard a highly sophisticated space shuttle, like this one?"

Phil explained, "I finally found out who I really am: there are countless parallel universes. But one thing is constant in all of them: every world has its Philip K. Dick. In one, he died before Blade-runner hit the old-fashioned movie theaters. In another, he--I--became a great holo-vid screen-writer, and all the great legacy of my novels made him a considerable fortune, even outdoing Speilberg and Lucas. In another, I played the role of Shakespeare, turned science fiction into a major art form. In another--"

"Does this mean you're God?"

"God is the Supreme Author. I am his typewriter."

And at that point, he sat down and commenced work on the sequel to this story: GADIS.

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