Ubik (18 page)

Removing the plastic disk from its place, its firm adhesion to his ear, Glen Runciter said into the microphone, “I’ll talk to you again later.” He now set down all the communications apparatus, rose stiffly from the chair and momentarily stood facing the misty, immobile, icebound shape of Joe Chip resting within its transparent plastic casket. Upright and silent, as it would be for the rest of eternity.

“Did you ring for me, sir?” Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang scuttled into the consultation lounge, cringing like a medieval toady. “Shall I put Mr. Chip back with the others? You’re done, sir?”

Runciter said, “I’m done.”

“Did your—”

“Yes, I got through all right. We could hear each other fine this time.” He lit a cigarette; it had been hours since he had had one, had found a free moment. By now the arduous, prolonged task of reaching Joe Chip had depleted him. “Do you have an amphetamine dispenser nearby?” he asked the moratorium owner.

“In the hall outside the consultation lounge.” The eager-to-please creature pointed.

Leaving the lounge, Runciter made his way to the amphetamine dispenser; he inserted a coin, pushed the choice lever, and, into the drop slot, a small familiar object slid with a tinkling sound.

The pill made him feel better. But then he thought about his appointment with Len Niggelman two hours from now and wondered if he could really make it. There’s been too much going on, he decided. I’m not ready to make my formal report to the Society; I’ll have to vid Niggelman and ask for a postponement.

Using a pay phone, he called Niggelman back in the North American Confederation. “Len,” he said, “I can’t do any more today. I’ve spent the last twelve hours trying to get through to my people in cold-pac, and I’m exhausted. Would tomorrow be okay?”

Niggelman said, “The sooner you file your official, formal statement with us, the sooner we can begin action against Hollis. My legal department says it’s open and shut; they’re champing at the bit.”

“They think they can make a civil charge stick?”

“Civil and criminal. They’ve been talking to the New York district attorney. But until you make a formal, notarized report to us—”

“Tomorrow,” Runciter promised. “After I get some sleep. This has damn near finished me off.” This loss of all my best people, he said to himself. Especially Joe Chip. My organization is depleted and we won’t be able to resume commercial operations for months, maybe years. God, he thought, where am I going to get inertials to replace those I’ve lost? And where am I going to find a tester like Joe?

Niggelman said, “Sure, Glen. Get a good night’s sleep and then meet me in my office tomorrow, say at ten o’clock our time.”

“Thanks,” Runciter said. He rang off, then threw himself heavily down on a pink-plastic couch across the corridor from the phone. I can’t find a tester like Joe, he said to himself. The fact of the matter is that Runciter Associates is finished.

The moratorium owner came in, then, putting in another of his untimely appearances. “Can I get you anything, Mr. Runciter? A cup of coffee? Another amphetamine, perhaps a twelve-hour spansule? In my office I have some twenty-four-hour spansules; one of those would get you back up into action for hours, if not all night.”

“All night,” Runciter said, “I intend to sleep.”

“Then how about a—”

“Flap away,” Runciter grated. The moratorium owner scuttled off, leaving him alone. Why did I have to pick this place? Runciter asked himself. I guess because Ella’s here. It is, after all, the best; that’s why she’s here, and, hence, why they’re all here. Think of them, he reflected, so many who were so recently on this side of the casket. What a catastrophe.

Ella, he said to himself, remembering. I’d better talk to her again for a moment, to let her know how things are going. That’s, after all, what I told her I’d do.

Getting to his feet, he started off in search of the moratorium owner.

Am I going to get that damn Jory this time? he asked himself. Or will I be able to keep Ella in focus long enough to tell her what Joe said? It’s become so hard to hang onto her now, with Jory growing and expanding and feeding on her and maybe on others over there in half-life. The moratorium should do something about him; Jory’s a hazard to everyone here. Why do they let him go on? he asked himself.

He thought, Maybe because they can’t stop him.

Maybe there’s never been anyone in half-life like Jory before.

FIFTEEN

Could it be that I have bad breath, Tom? Well, Ed, if you’re worried about that, try today’s new Ubik, with powerful germicidal foaming action, guaranteed safe when taken as directed.

The door of the ancient hotel room swung open. Don Denny, accompanied by a middle-aged, responsible-looking man with neatly trimmed gray hair, entered. Denny, his face strained with apprehension, said, “How are you, Joe? Why aren’t you lying down? For chrissake, get onto the bed.”

“Please lie down, Mr. Chip,” the doctor said as he set his medical bag on the vanity table and opened it up. “Is there pain along with the enervation and the difficult respiration?” He approached the bed with an old-fashioned stethoscope and cumbersome blood-pressure-reading equipment. “Do you have any history of cardiac involvement, Mr. Chip? Or your mother or father? Unbutton your shirt, please.” He drew up a wooden chair beside the bed, seated himself expectantly on it.

Joe said, “I’m okay now.”

“Let him listen to your heart,” Denny said tersely.

“Okay.” Joe stretched out on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. “Runciter managed to get through to me,” he said to Denny. “We’re in cold-pac; he’s on the other side trying to reach us. Someone else is trying to injure us. Pat didn’t do it, or, anyhow, she didn’t do it alone. Neither she nor Runciter knows what’s going on. When you opened the door did you see Runciter?”

“No,” Denny said.

“He was sitting across the room from me,” Joe said. “Two, three minutes ago. ‘Sorry, Joe,’ he said; that was the last thing he said to me and then he cut contact, stopped communicating, just canceled himself out. Look on the vanity table and see if he left the spray can of Ubik.”

Denny searched, then held up the brightly illuminated can. “Here it is. But it seems empty.” Denny shook it.

“Almost empty,” Joe said. “Spray what’s left on yourself. Go ahead.” He gestured emphatically.

“Don’t talk, Mr. Chip,” the doctor said, listening to his stethoscope. He then rolled up Joe’s sleeve and began winding inflatable rubber fabric around his arm in preparation for the blood-pressure test.

“How’s my heart?” Joe asked.

“Appears normal,” the doctor said. “Although slightly fast.”

“See?” Joe said to Don Denny. “I’ve recovered.”

Denny said, “The others are dying, Joe.”

Half sitting up, Joe said, “All of them?”

“Everyone that’s left.” He held the can but did not use it.

“Pat, too?” Joe asked.

“When I got out of the elevator on the second floor here I found her. It had just begun to hit her. She seemed terribly surprised; apparently, she couldn’t believe it.” He set the can down again. “I guess she thought she was doing it. With her talent.”

Joe said, “That’s right; that’s what she thought. Why won’t you use the Ubik?”

“Hell, Joe, we’re going to die. You know it, and I know it.” He removed his horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes. “After I saw Pat’s condition I went into the other rooms, and that’s when I saw the rest of them. Of
us
. That’s why we took so long getting here; I had Dr. Taylor examine them. I couldn’t believe they’d dwindle away so fast. The acceleration has been so goddam great. In just the last hour—”

“Use the Ubik,” Joe said. “Or I’ll use it on you.”

Don Denny again picked up the can, again shook it, pointed the nozzle toward himself. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what you want. There really isn’t any reason not to. This is the end, isn’t it? I mean, they’re all dead; only you and I are left, and the Ubik is going to wear off you in a few hours. And you won’t be able to get any more. Which will leave me.” His decision made, Denny depressed the button of the spray can; the shimmering, palpitating vapor, filled with particles of metallic light that danced nimbly, formed at once around him. Don Denny disappeared, concealed by the nimbus of radiant, ergic excitement.

Pausing in his task of reading Joe’s blood pressure, Dr. Taylor twisted his head to see. Both he and Joe watched as the vapor now condensed; puddles of it glistened on the carpet, and down the wall behind Denny it drizzled in bright streaks.

The cloud concealing Denny evaporated.

The person standing there, in the center of the vaporizing stain of Ubik that had saturated the worn and dingy carpet, was not Don Denny.

An adolescent boy, mawkishly slender, with irregular black-button eyes beneath tangled brows. He wore an anachronistic costume: white drip-dry shirt, jeans and laceless leather slippers. Clothes from the middle of the century. On his elongated face Joe saw a smile, but it was a misshapen smile, a thwarted crease that became now almost a jeering leer. No two features matched: His ears had too many convolutions in them to fit with his chitinous eyes. His straight hair contradicted the interwoven, curly bristles of his brows. And his nose, Joe thought, too thin, too sharp, far too long. Even his chin failed to harmonize with the balance of his face; it had a deep chisel mark in it, a cleft obviously penetrating far up into the bone…Joe thought, as if at that point the manufacturer of this creature struck it a blow aimed at obliterating it. But the physical material, the base substance, had been too dense; the boy had not fractured and split apart. He existed in defiance of even the force that had constructed him; he jeered at everything else and it, too.

“Who are you?” Joe said.

The boy’s fingers writhed, a twitch protecting him evidently from a stammer. “Sometimes I call myself Matt, and sometimes Bill,” he said. “But mostly I’m Jory. That’s my real name—Jory.” Gray, shabby teeth showed as he spoke. And a grubby tongue.

After an interval Joe said, “Where’s Denny? He never came into this room, did he?” Dead, he thought, with the others.

“I ate Denny a long time ago,” the boy Jory said. “Right at the beginning, before they came here from New York. First I ate Wendy Wright. Denny came second.”

Joe said, “How do you mean ‘ate’?” Literally? he wondered, his flesh undulating with aversion; the gross physical motion rolled through him, engulfing him, as if his body wanted to shrink away. However, he managed more or less to conceal it.

“I did what I do,” Jory said. “It’s hard to explain, but I’ve been doing it a long time to lots of half-life people. I eat their life, what remains of it. There’s very little in each person, so I need a lot of them. I used to wait until they had been in half-life awhile, but now I have to have them immediately. If I’m going to be able to live myself. If you come close to me and listen—I’ll hold my mouth open—you can hear their voices. Not all of them, but anyhow the last ones I ate. The ones you know.” With his fingernail he picked at an upper incisor, his head tilted on one side as he regarded Joe, evidently waiting to hear his reaction. “Don’t you have anything to say?” he said.

“It was you who started me dying, down there in the lobby.”

“Me and not Pat. I ate her out in the hall by the elevator, and then I ate the others. I thought you were dead.” He rotated the can of Ubik, which he still held. “I can’t figure this out. What’s in it, and where does Runciter get it?” He scowled. “But Runciter can’t be doing it; you’re right. He’s on the outside. This originates from within our environment. It has to, because nothing can come in from outside except words.”

Joe said, “So there’s nothing you can do to me. You can’t eat me because of the Ubik.”

“I can’t eat you for a while. But the Ubik will wear off.”

“You don’t know that; you don’t even know what it is or where it comes from.” I wonder if I can kill you, he thought. The boy Jory seemed delicate. This is the thing that got Wendy, he said to himself. I’m seeing it face to face, as I knew I eventually would. Wendy, Al, the real Don Denny—all the rest of them. It even ate Runciter’s corpse as it lay in the casket at the mortuary; there must have been a flicker of residual protophasic activity in or near it, or something, anyhow, which attracted him.

The doctor said, “Mr. Chip, I didn’t have a chance to finish taking your blood pressure. Please lie back down.”

Joe stared at him, then said, “Didn’t he see you change, Jory? Hasn’t he heard what you’ve been saying?”

“Dr. Taylor is a product of my mind,” Jory said. “Like every other fixture in this pseudo world.”

“I don’t believe it,” Joe said. To the doctor he said, “You heard what he’s been saying, didn’t you?”

With a hollow whistling pop the doctor disappeared.

“See?” Jory said, pleased.

“What are you going to do when I’m killed off?” Joe asked the boy. “Will you keep on maintaining this 1939 world, this pseudo world, as you call it?”

“Of course not. There’d be no reason to.”

“Then it’s all for me, just for me. This entire world.”

Jory said, “It’s not very large. One hotel in Des Moines. And a street outside the window with a few people and cars. And maybe a couple of other buildings thrown in: stores across the street for you to look at when you happen to see out.”

“So you’re not maintaining any New York or Zürich or—”

“Why should I? No one’s there. Wherever you and the others of the group went, I constructed a tangible reality corresponding to their minimal expectations. When you flew here from New York I created hundreds of miles of countryside, town after town—I found that very exhausting. I had to eat a great deal to make up for that. In fact, that’s the reason I had to finish off the others so soon after you got here. I needed to replenish myself.”

Joe said, “Why 1939? Why not our own contemporary world, 1992?”

“The effort; I can’t keep objects from regressing. Doing it all alone, it was too much for me. I created 1992 at first, but then things began to break down. The coins, the cream, the cigarettes—all those phenomena that you noticed. And then Runciter kept breaking through from outside; that made it even harder for me. Actually, it would have been better if he hadn’t interfered.” Jory grinned slyly. “But I didn’t worry about the reversion. I knew you’d figure it was Pat Conley. It would seem like her talent because it’s sort of like what her talent does. I thought maybe the rest of you would kill her. I would enjoy that.” His grin increased.

“What’s the point of keeping this hotel and the street outside going for me now?” Joe said. “Now that I know?”

“But I always do it this way.” Jory’s eyes widened.

Joe said, “I’m going to kill you.” He stepped toward Jory in an uncoordinated half-falling motion. Raising his open hands he plunged against the boy, trying to capture the neck, searching for the bent-pipestem windpipe with all his fingers.

Snarling, Jory bit him. The great shovel teeth fastened deep into Joe’s right hand. They hung on as, meanwhile, Jory raised his head, lifting Joe’s hand with his jaw; Jory stared at him with unwinking eyes, snoring wetly as he tried to close his jaws. The teeth sank deeper and Joe felt the pain of it throughout him. He’s eating me, he realized. “You can’t,” he said aloud; he hit Jory on the snout, punching again and again. “The Ubik keeps you away,” he said as he cuffed Jory’s jeering eyes. “You can’t do it to me.”

“Gahm grau,” Jory bubbled, working his jaws sideways like a sheep’s. Grinding Joe’s hand until the pain became too much for Joe to stand. He kicked Jory. The teeth released his hand; he crept backward, looking at the blood rising from the punctures made by the troll teeth. Jesus, he said to himself, appalled.

“You can’t do to me,” Joe said, “what you did to them.” Locating the spray can of Ubik, he pointed the nozzle toward the bleeding wound which his hand had become. He pressed the red plastic stud and a weak stream of particles emerged and settled in a film over the chewed, torn flesh. The pain immediately departed. Before his eyes the wound healed.

“And you can’t kill me,” Jory said. He still grinned.

Joe said, “I’m going downstairs.” He walked unsteadily to the door of the room and opened it. Outside lay the dingy hall; he started forward, step by step, treading carefully. The floor, however, seemed substantial. Not a quasi- or irreal world at all.

“Don’t go too far,” Jory said from behind him. “I can’t keep too great an area going. Like, if you were to get into one of those cars and drive for miles…eventually you’d reach a point where it breaks down. And you wouldn’t like that any better than I do.”

“I don’t see what I have to lose.” Joe reached the elevator, pressed the down button.

Jory called after him, “I have trouble with elevators. They’re complicated. Maybe you should take the stairs.”

After waiting a little longer, Joe gave up; as Jory had advised, he descended by the stairs—the same flight up which he had so recently come, step by step, in an agony of effort.

Well, he thought, that’s one of the two agencies who’re at work; Jory is the one who’s destroying us—has destroyed us, except for me. Behind Jory there is nothing; he is the end. Will I meet the other? Probably not soon enough for it to matter, he decided. He looked once more at his hand. Completely well.

Reaching the lobby, he gazed around him, at the people, the great chandelier overhead. Jory, in many respects, had done a good job, despite the reversion to these older forms. Real, he thought, experiencing the floor beneath his feet. I can’t get over it.

He thought, Jory must have had experience. He must have done this many times before.

Going to the hotel desk, he said to the clerk, “You have a restaurant that you’d recommend?”

“Down the street,” the clerk said, pausing in his task of sorting mail. “To your right. The Matador. You’ll find it excellent, sir.”

“I’m lonely,” Joe said, on impulse. “Does the hotel have any source of supply? Any girls?”

The clerk said in a clipped, disapproving voice, “Not
this
hotel, sir; this hotel does not pander.”

“You keep a good clean family hotel,” Joe said.

“We like to think so, sir.”

“I was just testing you,” Joe said. “I wanted to be sure what kind of hotel I was staying in.” He left the counter, recrossed the lobby, made his way down the wide marble stairs, through the revolving door and onto the pavement outside.