The Unteleported Man

by Philip K. Dick

A new teleportation technology ("telpor") makes travel by spaceship obsolete. A new colony in the Fomalhaut star system, Whale's Mouth, has been the destination for forty million emigrants, but it is a one-way trip - teleportation back to Earth is supposedly impossible. The only way to return is by spaceship, an eighteen-year journey for passengers who are subjected to a limited form of suspended animation.

Rachmael ben Applebaum, whose spaceship business has been ruined by teleportation, decides to make the journey to Whale's Mouth in his own craft, the Omphalos. Driven by a powerful hunch that the utopian claims may be false, he chooses to make the trip the old-fashioned way in case some of the colonists wish to return. Powerful figures oppose his journey.

Lies, Inc., the expanded version of The Unteleported Man, includes a new first chapter and about one hundred pages of additional exposition. This previously unpublished material begins in Chapter 8 with the phrase, "Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nostrils." What then ensues is a truly horrific drug trip, described in excruciating detail, that Rachmael endures after arriving at his destination and being hit by an LSD-tipped dart. The expansion material finally terminates in Chapter 16 just before the repeated phrase, "Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nostrils." Confusion may arise in the reader, however, over Dick's attributing at least part of the perceptual chaos to a deliberately incorporated effect of the teleportation process. Circumstances had forced Rachmael to abandon his original plans and to journey to Newcolonizedland via energy transfer instead. Sinister modifications to the "Telpor" technology apparently cause its victims to experience a variety of so-called "paraworlds" which are thought to actually exist, somehow, as viable alternate realities. Participants are fearful that consensus or agreement amongst themselves as to the paraworlds' descriptions could somehow cause one or the other paraworld to manifest itself ever more aggressively until eventually displacing the current reality-paradigm altogether. And Rachmael's own paraworld experience is said to be the worst one of all.