22 pages

Coming in right at Dick’s best length, Adjustment Team would be rejected by most editors outside of the science-fiction field and outside of Dick’s time. The ending, the art of which cannot be grasped by materialistic thinkers, would simply not do and must be rewritten as it was in the Adjustment Bureau movie.

The text of the story involves the plight of sedentary everyman, Ed Fletcher, the epitome of the domesticated, American man, married to a willful wife, working at a meaningless job under the tyranny of a demanding boss and utterly clueless as to the underlying forces that form his world.

One day, as Ed contemplates work—and whether his wife’s boss is going to be moved to hit on her based on her flattering dress—his dog [an adjustment team agent] attempts to save him from an adjustment team clerk, who intends to give Ed’s day a nudge in the wrong direction so that he will not realize that what he believes is concrete reality is nothing but illusion. I will give away no more of the story than this.

One of the fascinating aspects of Dick’s work is how he pulls out the subtext in plain view for the reader and then makes it a dynamic part of the plot. Animals sometimes attempt to aid their witless human masters. Men tend to notice the allure of the female form in conscious reveries which hint at something deeper than the social construct in which they are imbedded.

Dick’s male characters are often either morally compromised or emasculated and often both, as these are basic aspects of the civilized condition. Whether it is the dog in Roog or Ed Fletcher in Adjustment Team, when characters in Dick’s drably dystopian stories gain, steal or are afflicted by a glimpse of the true underlying reality which civilization is either built upon or in denial of, a sense of frantic dread and sometimes panic concerning their place in the Grand Scheme propels the story onward.