The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

"Plot Idea for Mission: Impossible" (1967)

The mission is to take place in a Latin American country that is an analog for present-day Cuba. Formerly a hedonistic, self-serving dictator ruled, but a year or so ago he was overthrown and killed by a young, idealistic revolutionary. However, this left-wing revolutionary has allied himself with "the other side" -- i.e., the Communist states of Eastern Europe and Asia. The United States would, of course, like to see him deposed, but assassination is out of the question; the revolutionary's followers would know that the CIA had done it, and would become even more fanatical and anti-West. So the mission is this: to find a way by which the revolutionary leader can be induced to come voluntarily to the United States -- which will not only remove him from power in his own country but also will undermine the Marxist-oriented followers and demileaders backing him. But how can this be done?

The scheme worked out by the Mission: Impossible team is as follows. The revolutionary leader (from hereon referred to as R) is at present at a swank resort within the borders of his country -- a pleasure palace left over from the previous dictator's reign. At this fashionable spot the R is conferring with heads of clandestine fighters operating in the mountains of other Latin American countries. R is therefore out of public circulation for a time. Using cinnamon as bait, the team captures and drugs the R and makes off with him -- meanwhile making use of word cuts from audiotapes that the R made in the past: These individual word cuts are assembled so as to form an oral statement to the others gathered at the mansion to explain why the R has "temporarily departed." (I don't believe Mission: Impossible has used word cuts from audiotapes before, as was done in the movie The Great Man.) The team takes the R off to a building that they have taken over. They have made the interior of the building appear to be that of a mental sanitarium. When the R comes to, he is told by the chief "psychiatrist" (probably, of the team, Jim Phelps) that he has been in a complete catatonic schizophrenic state for well over a year. The time is the present, but the R has not ruled; he went mad in the hills, believing himself ruler of the entire country. It was a delusion that the previous dictator (from hereon referred to as D) was kicked out of office and then executed; the D is very much alive and still in power.

Here the magic fakery of the fertile minds of the team begins to operate. The D appears on TV, and this is not an old film or videotape; it is live, and in various ways alludes to the time -- to the now. The D might even scathingly refer to the R as being hopelessly mad and in a sanitarium. Then there are faked newspapers. The R makes phone calls to his demileaders, and Barney cuts into the circuit, at which point Rollin tells the R that first one demileader and then another is either in the D's prisons or dead. The movement failed; it collapsed after the R became psychotic and could no longer keep things running. (The appearance of the D on the TV screen is done by Rollin, using his handy rubber-face apparatus.) But the most overwhelming fakery is yet to come.

When he took office, after deposing and killing the D, the R made an important speech; he remembers it well. It stated to the nation the aims and intentions that he intended to carry out; in this speech the R unmasked himself and informed his conquered country that he intended to lead it into "progressive anticapitalism," etc. The team therefore produces the following. They take the audio portion of the tape (or movie film) of that speech. Rollin, this time wearing a rubber face, etc., which makes him look like the R (repeat: like the R), only it is not the R speaking from the balcony of his new capitol building to huge masses of people: The video portion of the tape or film shows the R in a mental hospital -- the very same one he is in now -- wearing the standard clothes of a patient and delivering his speech to other patients and members of the hospital staff (the team accomplishes this via lip-sync plus Rollin's impersonation).

However, there has been a minor, technical error in the film. A pile of magazines is shown, and the R has noticed this same pile in the now -- and the film is supposed to be at least a year old. The R now employs a bit of electronic gadget knowledge on his own; he manages to get a single frame of the film enlarged enough so that he can read the date on the top magazine. The magazine is current, not a year old. So the R realizes that this is all an illusion (the Mission: Impossible team does not know, however, that he has discovered this). But even though he knows this, he is still physically in their hands. How can he make contact with the outside world -- i.e. his followers? After all, Barney has all the phones tied up, and Willy is skulking about outdoors with a Skoda rapid-fire hand weapon.

But the R is inventive and imaginative; after all, he did come down out of the hills and take over his country. The Mission: Impossible team, this time, is up against a person who is not only as resourceful as they are, but is so along some of the same lines -- for example, electronic gadgetry, Barney's specialty. (I don't recall a Mission: Impossible episode in which the team faced someone expert in their own sort of electronic delusion sleight-of-hand before.)

There are two possible things that the R can do. (1) He can try to get hold of one of the team's walkie-talkies and rewire it so that it broadcasts over a much greater area, thus -- hopefully -- reaching a nearby outpost of the R's militia. Or (2) he might be able to splice into an underground phone cable that runs nearby (he now knows where he is geographically). But he can't be precisely sure where the phone cable is, and anyhow it's down deep, and he has no shovel or other tool by which to dig. Hence he decides to steal a walkie-talkie and rewire it.

Cinnamon is currently posing as a fellow patient. The R manages to steal the miniaturized walkie-talkie from her purse; he sneaks off to an unnoticed spot where he can work on it. Where else than the basement? He is able to pick the lock on the basement door, and starts down into the darkness of his hiding place -- and then, when he turns the lights on, finds himself facing Barney's electronics center. Everything he needs is here. What a windfall!

First, to take care of Barney should he come back, the R rapidly lays a hot cable across the wooden basement steps -- then he begins to work feverishly to alter the walkie-talkie, using Barney's tools and other equipment. Barney does come back, yanks out a pistol with a silencer on it, rushes down the stairs... and steps on the hot cable. He at once topples over, letting the gun bounce down the stairs to the floor, where the R waits. Alertly, the R snatches up the gun; now he doesn't need to rewire anything: He can fight his way out.

Leaving the building, he scampers across the lawn of the building, whereupon he encounters Willy. He shoots Willy, and Willy falls down, obviously dead. The R continues to scuttle away from the "mental hospital," entering a wooded area; he is soon successfully gone from the team's custody.

Segue to the R tramping wearily through the woods. Then, to his immense relief, he stumbles onto a paved road. Traffic will surely be coming soon; meanwhile he trudges along the road, still putting as much distance between himself and the MI team as possible.

(The viewer, at this point, thinks that not only has the R gotten away and the mission has failed, but also that Barney and Willy are dead.)

The R reaches a military picket shack, where several of his khaki-clad militiamen are lounging about. The R stumbles toward them. At the sight of him, the militiamen raise their rifles alarmingly. "It's me," the R pants. "Ernesto. Your leader, Ernest Guardia. Don't you recognize me?" Their faces remain hostile and cold, and then one of them fires. The R drops into safety behind a rock, and, with his silencer-equipped pistol, kills the several militiamen. All at once there is silence. The R alone remains alive.

Getting to his feet, he gaspingly staggers toward the picket shack, numbed by the impossible: his own militiamen firing at him. Inside the shack he discovers current newspapers and a radio receiver (but not a transmitter). After examining the newspapers and listening to the radio, he discovers that, during his absence, two of his demileaders have tried to seize power; the country is now split into two warring camps, and what is worse, the two adversaries have released hitherto secret papers that incriminate the R -- this along the lines of the de-Stalinization in the USSR after Stalin's death.

What can he do? Even though the MI team failed, he has been deposed anyhow, during his absence. The incriminating papers that were released tell how, while in the hills, the R worked with CIA agents, inasmuch as that at that time the R had not come out for a "people's democracy" along Marxist, pro-China lines.

Obligingly, a small but high-speed plane lands in the rustic field behind the picket shack; the pilot gets out of his craft and saunters toward the shack, carrying various objects of a military nature. The R shoots him; the pilot obligingly falls to the ground, whereupon the R scuttles across the field and into the plane. In a moment he is airborne -- and heading for the United States. Then the camera returns to the field, where the "dead" pilot lies; he is now getting leisurely to his feet to watch the plane depart, as are the "dead" militiamen. They grin. What does all this mean?

All this means that the R fell for a fraud within a fraud. The newspapers that he found in the picket shack were fakes. So was the radio broadcast that he heard: Barney did that, and Barney is very much alive. The team intended that the R "escape," that he "shoot" Willy and "electrocute" Barney, then flee the scene and make his way to the fake picket shack. The R did not in actuality leave the fake world and reenter the real world; no one seized power during his absence; there is no civil war; no incriminating documents were released; the "militiamen" and the pilot were spurious, and they did not die any more than Willy died; the gun, with its effective silencer, fired no bullets -- no wonder the silencer was so effective! And now he is on his way to the United States; the MI team did its job: It only appeared to have lost control of the situation for a time... when in actuality everything went exactly as planned. The whole unmasking of the "mental hospital" and the fake newsreel of the R delivering his important speech -- from the very beginning the team intended the R to discover the truth... right down to Rollin's rubber face and the lip-sync. The R was too smart to be fooled by the fakery, and the team knew this from the start. For the mission to work they had to include the R's discovering "everything" and go on from there.

Of course, when he reaches Florida, the R will fairly soon discover the truth -- discover that there has been no seizure of power back home. But by this time the American authorities will have audio- and videotaped the R's formal statement that he is applying for formal sanctuary in the United States, and this will be sufficient to keep him from returning to his own country, for obvious reasons.