Ubik (17 page)

He discovered then, with a shock, that he had become cold as well as exhausted. When had this happened? he asked himself. Sometime in the past; it had infiltrated so gradually that before now he had not noticed it. Oh, god, he said to himself and shivered frantically. His bones seemed almost to quake. Worse than on Luna, far worse. Worse, too, than the chill which had hung over his hotel room in Zürich. Those had been harbingers.

Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force which I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe. So at least I won’t be alone.

But he felt alone. It’s overtaking me too soon, he realized. The proper time hasn’t come; something has hurried this up—some conniving thing has accelerated it, out of malice and curiosity: a polymorphic, perverse agency which likes to watch. An infantile, retarded entity which enjoys what’s happening. It has crushed me like a bent-legged insect, he said to himself. A simple bug which does nothing but hug the earth. Which can never fly or escape. Can only descend step by step into what is deranged and foul. Into the world of the tomb which a perverse entity surrounded by its own filth inhabits. The thing we call Pat.

“Do you have your key?” Pat asked. “To your room? Think how awful you’d feel to get up to the second floor and find you had lost your key and couldn’t get into your room.”

“I have it.” He groped in his pockets.

His coat ripped away, tattered and in shreds; it fell from him and, from its top pocket, the key slid. It fell two steps down, below him. Beyond reach.

Pat said briskly, “I’ll get it for you.” Darting by him she scooped up the key, held it to the light to examine it, then laid it at the top of the flight of stairs, on the railing. “Right up here,” she said, “where you can reach it when you’re through climbing. Your reward. The room, I think, is to the left, about four doors down the hall. You’ll have to move slowly, but it’ll be a lot easier once you’re off the stairs. Once you don’t have to climb.”

“I can see,” he said. “The key. And the top. I can see the top of the stairs.” With both arms grasping the bannister he dragged himself upward, ascended three steps in one agonizing expenditure of himself. He felt it deplete him; the weight on him grew, the cold grew, and the substantiality of himself waned. But—

He had reached the top.

“Goodby, Joe,” Pat said. She hovered over him, kneeling slightly so that he could see her face. “You don’t want Don Denny bursting in, do you? A doctor won’t be able to help you. So I’ll tell him that I got the hotel people to call a cab and that you’re on your way across town to a hospital. That way you won’t be bothered. You can be entirely by yourself. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Here’s the key.” She pushed the cold metal thing into his hand, closed his fingers about it. “Keep your chin up, as they say here in ’39. Don’t take any wooden nickels. They say that too.” She slipped away then, onto her feet; for an instant she stood there, scrutinizing him, and then she darted off down the hall to the elevator. He saw her press the button, wait; he saw the doors slide open, and then Pat disappeared.

Gripping the key he rose lurchingly to a crouched position; he balanced himself against the far wall of the corridor, then turned to the left and began to walk step by step, still supporting himself by means of the wall. Darkness, he thought. It isn’t lit. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, blinked. Sweat from his face still blinded him, still stung; he could not tell if the corridor were genuinely dark or whether his power of sight was fading out.

By the time he reached the first door he had been reduced to crawling; he tilted his head up, sought for the number on the door. No, not this one. He crept on.

When he found the proper door he had to stand erect, propped up, to insert the key in the lock. The effort finished him. The key still in his hand, he fell; his head struck the door and he flopped back onto the dust-choked carpet, smelling the odor of age and wear and frigid death. I can’t get in the room, he realized. I can’t stand up any more.

But he had to. Out here he could be seen.

Gripping the knob with both hands he tugged himself onto his feet one more time. He rested his weight entirely against the door as he tremblingly poked the key in the direction of the knob and the lock; this way, once he had turned the key, the door would fall open and he would be inside. And then, he thought, if I can close the door after me and if I can get to the bed, it’ll be over.

The lock grated. The metal unit hauled itself back. The door opened and he pitched forward, arms extended. The floor rose toward him and he made out shapes in the carpet, swirls and designs and floral entities in red and gold, but worn into roughness and lusterlessness; the colors had dimmed, and as he struck the floor, feeling little if any pain, he thought, This is very old, this room. When this place was first built they probably did use an open iron cage for an elevator. So I saw the actual elevator, he said to himself, the authentic, original one.

He lay for a time, and then, as if called, summoned into motion, stirred. He lifted himself up onto his knees, placed his hands flat before him…my hands, he thought; good god. Parchment hands, yellow and knobby, like the ass of a cooked, dry turkey. Bristly skin, not like human skin; pinfeathers, as if I’ve devolved back millions of years to something that flies and coasts, using its skin as a sail.

Opening his eyes, he searched for the bed; he strove to identify it. The fat far window, admitting gray light through its web of curtains. A vanity table, ugly, with lank legs. Then the bed, with brass knobs capping its railed sides, bent and irregular, as if years of use had twisted the railings, warped the varnished wooden headboards. I want to get on it even so, he said to himself; he reached toward it, slid and dragged himself farther into the room.

And saw then a figure seated in an overstuffed chair, facing him. A spectator who had made no sound but who now stood up and came rapidly toward him.

Glen Runciter.

“I couldn’t help you climb the stairs,” Runciter said, his heavy face stern. “She would have seen me. Matter of fact, I was afraid she’d come all the way into the room with you, and then we’d be in trouble because she—” He broke off, bent and hoisted Joe up to his feet as if Joe had no weight left in him, no remaining material constituents. “We’ll talk about that later. Here.” He carried Joe under his arm, across the room—not to the bed but to the overstuffed chair in which he himself had been sitting. “Can you hold on a few seconds longer?” Runciter asked. “I want to shut and lock the door. In case she changes her mind.”

“Yes,” Joe said.

Runciter strode in three big steps to the door, slammed it and bolted it, came at once back to Joe. Opening a drawer of the vanity table, he hastily brought out a spray can with bright stripes, balloons and lettering glorifying its shiny surfaces. “Ubik,” Runciter said, he shook the can mightily, then stood before Joe, aiming it at him. “Don’t thank me for this,” he said, and sprayed prolongedly left and right; the air flickered and shimmered, as if bright particles of light had been released, as if the sun’s energy sparkled here in this worn-out elderly hotel room. “Feel better? It should work on you right away; you should already be getting a reaction.” He eyed Joe with anxiety.

FOURTEEN

It takes more than a bag to seal in food flavor; it takes Ubik plastic wrap—actually four layers in one. Keeps freshness in, air and moisture out. Watch this simulated test.

“Do you have a cigarette?” Joe said. His voice shook, but not from weariness. Nor from cold. Both had gone. I’m tense, he said to himself. But I’m not dying. That process has been stopped by the Ubik spray.

As Runciter said it would, he remembered, in his taped TV commercial. If I could find it I would be all right; Runciter promised that. But, he thought somberly, it took a long time. And I almost didn’t get to it.

“No filter tips,” Runciter said. “They don’t have filtration devices on their cigarettes in this backward, no-good time period.” He held a pack of Camels toward Joe. “I’ll light it for you.” He struck a match and extended it.

“It’s fresh,” Joe said.

“Oh hell, yes. Christ, I just now bought it downstairs at the tobacco counter. We’re a long way into this. Well past the stage of clotted milk and stale cigarettes.” He grinned starkly, his eyes determined and bleak, reflecting no light. “
In
it,” he said, “not
out
of it. There’s a difference.” He lit a cigarette for himself too; leaning back, he smoked in silence, his expression still grim. And, Joe decided, tired. But not the kind of tiredness that he himself had undergone.

Joe said, “Can you help the rest of the group?”

“I have exactly one can of this Ubik. Most of it I had to use on you.” He gestured with resentment; his fingers convulsed in a tremor of unresigned anger. “My ability to alter things here is limited. I’ve done what I could.” His head jerked as he raised his eyes to glare at Joe. “I got through to you—all of you—every chance I could, every way I could. I did everything that I had the capacity to bring about. Damn little. Almost nothing.” He lapsed then into smoldering, brooding silence.

“The graffiti on the bathroom walls,” Joe said. “You wrote that we were dead and you were alive.”

“I
am
alive,” Runciter rasped.

“Are we dead, the rest of us?”

After a long pause, Runciter said, “Yes.”

“But in the taped TV commercial—”

“That was for the purpose of getting you to fight. To find Ubik. It made you look and you kept on looking too. I kept trying to get it to you, but you know what went wrong; she kept drawing everyone into the past—she worked on us all with that talent of hers. Over and over again she regressed it and made it worthless.” Runciter added, “Except for the fragmentary notes I managed to slip to you in conjunction with the stuff.” Urgently, he pointed his heavy, determined finger at Joe, gesturing with vigor. “Look what I’ve been up against. The same thing that got all of you, that’s killed you off one by one. Frankly, it’s amazing to me that I was able to do as much as I could.”

Joe said, “When did you figure out what was taking place? Did you always know? From the start?”

“ ‘The start,’ ” Runciter echoed bitingly. “What’s that mean? It started months or maybe even years ago; god knows how long Hollis and Mick and Pat Conley and S. Dole Melipone and G. G. Ashwood have been hatching it up, working it over and reworking it like dough. Here’s what happened. We got lured to Luna. We let Pat Conley come with us, a woman we didn’t know, a talent we didn’t understand—which possibly even Hollis doesn’t understand. An ability anyhow connected with time reversion; not, strictly speaking, the ability to travel through time…for instance, she can’t go into the future. In a certain sense, she can’t go into the past either; what she does, as near as I can comprehend it, is start a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter. But you know that; you and Al figured it out.” He ground his teeth with wrath. “Al Hammond—what a loss. But I couldn’t do anything; I couldn’t break through then as I’ve done now.”

“Why were you able to now?” Joe asked.

Runciter said, “
Because this is as far back as she is able to carry us
. Normal forward flow has already resumed; we’re again flowing from past into present into future. She evidently stretched her ability to its limit. 1939; that’s the limit. What she’s done now is shut off her talent. Why not? She’s accomplished what Ray Hollis sent her to us to do.”

“How many people have been affected?”

“Just the group of us who were on Luna there in that subsurface room. Not even Zoe Wirt. Pat can circumscribe the range of the field she creates. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the bunch of us took off for Luna and got blown up in an accidental explosion; we were put into cold-pac by solicitous Stanton Mick, but no contact could be established—they didn’t get us soon enough.”

Joe said, “Why wouldn’t the bomb blast be enough?”

Lifting an eyebrow, Runciter regarded him.

“Why use Pat Conley at all?” Joe said. He sensed, even in his weary, shaken state, something wrong. “There’s no reason for all this reversion machinery, this sinking us into a retrograde time momentum back here to 1939. It serves no purpose.”

“That’s an interesting point,” Runciter said; he nodded slowly, a frown on his rugged, stony face. “I’ll have to think about it. Give me a little while.” He walked to the window, stood gazing out at the stores across the street.

“It strikes me,” Joe said, “that what we appear to be faced with is a malignant rather than a purposeful force. Not so much someone trying to kill us or nullify us, someone trying to eliminate us from functioning as a prudence organization, but—” He pondered; he almost had it. “An irresponsible entity that’s enjoying what it’s doing to us. The way it’s killing us off one by one. It doesn’t have to prolong all this. That doesn’t sound to me like Ray Hollis; he deals in cold, practical murder. And from what I know about Stanton Mick—”

“Pat herself,” Runciter interrupted brusquely; he turned away from the window. “She’s psychologically a sadistic person. Like tearing wings off flies. Playing with us.” He watched for Joe’s reaction.

Joe said, “It sounds to me more like a child.”

“But look at Pat Conley; she’s spiteful and jealous. She got Wendy first because of emotional animosity. She followed you all the way up the stairs just now, enjoying it; gloating over it, in fact.”

“How do you know that?” Joe said. You were waiting here in this room, he said to himself; you couldn’t have seen it. And—
how had Runciter known he would come to this particular room?

Letting out his breath in a ragged, noisy rush, Runciter said, “I haven’t told you all of it. As a matter of fact…” He ceased speaking, chewed his lower lip savagely, then abruptly resumed. “What I’ve said hasn’t been strictly true. I don’t hold the same relationship to this regressed world that the rest of you do; you’re absolutely right: I know too much. It’s because I enter it from outside, Joe.”

“Manifestations,” Joe said.

“Yes. Thrust down into this world, here and there. At strategic points and times. Like the traffic citation. Like Archer’s—”

“You didn’t tape that TV commercial,” Joe said. “That was live.”

Runciter, with reluctance, nodded.

“Why the difference,” Joe said, “between your situation and ours?”

“You want me to say?”

“Yes.” He prepared himself, already knowing what he would hear.

“I’m not dead, Joe. The graffiti told the truth. You’re all in cold-pac and I’m—” Runciter spoke with difficulty, not looking directly at Joe. “I’m sitting in a consultation lounge at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium. All of you are interwired, on my instructions; kept together as a group. I’m out here trying to reach you. That’s where I am when I say I’m outside; that’s why the manifestations, as you call them. For one week now I’ve been trying to get you all functioning in half-life, but—it isn’t working. You’re fading out one by one.”

After a pause Joe said, “What about Pat Conley?”

“Yeah, she’s with you; in half-life, interwired to the rest of the group.”

“Are the regressions due to her talent? Or to the normal decay of half-life?” Tensely, he waited for Runciter’s answer; everything, as he saw it, hung on this one question.

Runciter snorted, grimaced, then said hoarsely, “The normal decay. Ella experienced it. Everyone who enters half-life experiences it.”

“You’re lying to me,” Joe said. And felt a knife shear through him.

Staring at him, Runciter said, “Joe, my god, I saved your life; I broke through to you enough just now to bring you back into full half-life functioning—you’ll probably go on indefinitely now. If I hadn’t been waiting here in this hotel room when you came crawling through that door, why, hell—hey, look, goddam it; you’d be lying on that rundown bed dead as a doornail by now if it wasn’t for me. I’m Glen Runciter; I’m your boss and I’m the one fighting to save all your lives—I’m the
only
one out here in the real world plugging for you.” He continued to stare at Joe with heated indignation and surprise. A bewildered, injured surprise, as if he could not fathom what was happening. “That girl,” Runciter said, “that Pat Conley, she would have killed you like she killed—” He broke off.

Joe said, “Like she killed Wendy and Al, Edie Dorn, Fred Zafsky, and maybe by now Tito Apostos.”

In a low but controlled voice Runciter said, “This situation is very complex, Joe. It doesn’t admit to simple answers.”

“You don’t know the answers,” Joe said. “That’s the problem. You made up answers; you had to invent them to explain your presence here. All your presences here, your so-called manifestations.”

“I don’t call them that; you and Al worked out that name. Don’t blame me for what you two—”

“You don’t know any more than I do,” Joe said, “about what’s happening to us and who’s attacking us. Glen, you can’t say who we’re up against
because you don’t know
.”

Runciter said, “I know I’m alive; I know I’m sitting out here in this consultation lounge at the moratorium.”

“Your body in the coffin,” Joe said. “Here at the Simple Shepherd Mortuary. Did you look at it?”

“No,” Runciter said, “but that isn’t really—”

“It had withered,” Joe said. “Lost bulk like Wendy’s and Al’s and Edie’s—and, in a little while, mine. Exactly the same for you; no better, no worse.”

“In your case I got Ubik—” Again Runciter broke off; a difficult-to-decipher expression appeared on his face: a combination perhaps of insight, fear and—but Joe couldn’t tell. “I got you the Ubik,” he finished.

“What is Ubik?” Joe said.

There was no answer from Runciter.

“You don’t know that either,” Joe said. “You don’t know what it is or why it works. You don’t even know where it comes from.”

After a long, agonized pause, Runciter said, “You’re right, Joe. Absolutely right.” Tremulously, he lit another cigarette. “But I wanted to save your life; that part’s true. Hell, I’d like to save all your lives.” The cigarette slipped from his fingers; it dropped to the floor, rolled away. With labored effort, Runciter bent over to grope for it. On his face showed extreme and clear-cut unhappiness. Almost a despair.

“We’re in this,” Joe said, “and you’re sitting out there, out in the lounge, and you can’t do it; you can’t put a stop to the thing we’re involved in.”

“That’s right.” Runciter nodded.

“This is cold-pac,” Joe said, “but there’s something more. Something not natural to people in half-life. There are two forces at work, as Al figured out; one helping us and one destroying us. You’re working with the force or entity or person that’s trying to help us. You got the Ubik from them.”

“Yes.”

Joe said, “So none of us know even yet who it is that’s destroying us—and who it is that’s protecting us; you outside don’t know, and we in here don’t know. Maybe it’s Pat.”

“I think it is,” Runciter said. “I think there’s your enemy.”

Joe said, “Almost. But I don’t think so.” I don’t think, he said to himself, that we’ve met our enemy face to face, or our friend either.

He thought, But I think we will. Before long we will know who they both are.

“Are you sure,” he asked Runciter, “absolutely sure, that you’re beyond doubt the only one who survived the blast? Think before you answer.”

“Like I said, Zoe Wirt—”

“Of
us
,” Joe said. “She’s not here in this time segment with us. Pat Conley, for example.”

“Pat Conley’s chest was crushed. She died of shock and a collapsed lung, with multiple internal injuries, including a damaged liver and a leg broken in three places. Physically speaking, she’s about four feet away from you; her body, I mean.”

“And it’s the same for all the rest? They’re all here in cold-pac at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium?”

Runciter said, “With one exception. Sammy Mundo. He suffered massive brain damage and lapsed into a coma out of which they say he’ll never emerge. The cortical—”

“Then he’s alive. He’s not in cold-pac. He’s not here.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘alive.’ They’ve run encephalograms on him; no cortical activity at all. A vegetable, nothing more. No personality, no motion, no consciousness—there’s nothing happening in Mundo’s brain, nothing in the slightest.”

Joe said, “So, therefore, you naturally didn’t think to mention it.”

“I mentioned it now.”

“When I asked you.” He reflected. “How far is he from us? In Zürich?”

“We set down here in Zürich, yes. He’s at the Carl Jung Hospital. About a quarter mile from this moratorium.”

“Rent a telepath,” Joe said. “Or use G. G. Ashwood. Have him scanned.” A boy, he said to himself. Disorganized and immature. A cruel, unformed, peculiar personality. This may be it, he said to himself. It would fit in with what we’re experiencing, the capricious contradictory happenings. The pulling off of our wings and then the putting back. The temporary restorations, as in just now with me here in this hotel room, after my climb up the stairs.

Runciter sighed. “We did that. In brain-injury cases like this it’s a regular practice to try to reach the person telepathically. No results; nothing. No frontal-lobe cerebration of any sort. Sorry, Joe.” He wagged his massive head in a sympathetic, tic-like motion; obviously, he shared Joe’s disappointment.