Adjustment Team
short story by Philip K. Dick
"Adjustment Team" is a 1954 science fiction novelette by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published in Orbit Science Fiction (September–October 1954, No. 4) with illustration by Faragasso. It was later reprinted in The Sands of Mars and Other Stories (Australian) in 1958, The Book of Philip K. Dick in 1973, The Turning Wheel and Other Stories (United Kingdom) in 1977, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick in 1987 (Underwood–Miller), 1988 (Gollancz, United Kingdom), 1990 (Citadel Twilight, United States), Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick in 2002 and in The Early Work of Philip K. Dick, Volume One: The Variable Man & Other Stories in 2009.
"Adjustment Team" served as the basis for the 2011 film The Adjustment Bureau.
Synopsis
A man called the Clerk approaches a talking dog, and explains in businesslike manner that "Sector T137" is scheduled for "adjustment" at 9:00. He instructs the dog to bark at exactly 8:15, which the Clerk explains will summon "A Friend with a Car", who will take real estate agent Ed Fletcher to work before 9:00, but while the Clerk is preoccupied, the dog falls asleep and as a result barks a minute too late. Inside Ed's house, while he is getting ready for work, Ed is accosted by a door-to-door insurance salesman and is further delayed until 9:30. Ed arrives at his office building, but upon stepping onto the curb, he finds himself in a frozen, sunless, monochromatic version of the world where everything crumbles at his touch. Ed is accosted by white-robed men, who discuss "de-energizing" him with a hose-like apparatus, but he flees across the street and returns to the normal world.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adjustment Team” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.