Jack Bohlen is one of the best repairmen among the sparsely populated colonies on Mars, circa 1994. Arnie Kott, the wheeling-and-dealing head of the plumbers' union colony, has an inkling that Manfred, one of the "anomalous" children kept in a special school and perhaps scheduled for deportation and destruction by the UN administration, may be able to foresee the future. Kott hires Bohlen to work with Manfred, partly because Bohlen is so handy and partly because his history of past mental illness may make him better able to communicate with the all-but-autistic Manfred. Power politics, black market smuggling, casual adultery, land speculation, and the robot teachers at the public school (from Angry Janitor to Lincoln) all figure into this typically disconcerting 1964 Dick plot.
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The review of this Book prepared by David Loftus