--this guy," Luckman was saying, manicuring a box full of grass, hunched over it as Arctor sat across from him, more or less watching, "appeared on TV claiming to be a world-famous impostor. He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular highvelocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who'd won the Nobel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to--"

"And he got away with all that?" Arctor asked. "He never got caught?"

"The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a worldfamous impostor. That came out later in the L.A. Times--they checked up. The guy pushed a broom at Disneyland, or had until he read this autobiography about this worldfamous impostor--there really was one--and he said, 'Hell, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,' and then he decided, 'Hell, why do that; I'll just pose as another impostor.' He made a lot of bread that way, the Times said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier."

• Philip K. Dick