I read the original novella version published in Fantastic magazine (1964 v13n12) which can be found online for free here. PKD's works are members of my "Bad Pizza" categorical set; that is, even bad pizza or bad beer or bad PKD (and I leave a few members of the set unnamed, but I digress) are better than 99% of the remaining choices in food, drink, or sci-fi, respectively.

This is a minor work, but like all PKD material it addresses major themes and it addresses them well. The story begins like this:

Rachmael ben Applebaum (RbA), owner of a space transport business which is now obsolete due to a recent teleportation invention, is pursued by creditors and decides to take his last and greatest asset - the space liner The Omphalos - on an 18-year one-way rescue mission to the Whale’s Mouth colony in the Fomalhaut system. RbA convinces Matson Glazer-Holiday, principal owner of a private police agency called LIES Inc., to help him escape the clutches of his primary creditor Trails of Hoffman Limited (THL) which owns the telpor technology that put RbA out of business and intends to seize or destroy The Omphalos at first opportunity. RbA, based on fake audio he detected in alleged transmissions directed back to Terra from the Whale's Mouth colony, disbelieves THL’s claim that a) the telpor process only works in one direction, only sending people from Terra to the colony with no way of sending them back home, and that b) the 40 million colonists who have already emigrated to Whale's Mouth are happy there. He suspects Terrans are being deceived by ... (wait for it)(wait for it) ... fake news about the colonists, and he fears the colonists who have teleported there may be dead or enslaved with no way out.

This set up is the best part of the story and, along with PKD's distinct empathetic tone and humor, is enough to carry us through the more pedestrian space opera that follows. ( )