Ubik (4 page)

“As a survival factor for the human race,” Joe said, “it’s as useful as the psi talents. Especially for us Norms. The anti-psi factor is a natural restoration of ecological balance. One insect learns to fly, so another learns to build a web to trap him. Is that the same as no flight? Clams developed hard shells to protect them; therefore, birds learn to fly the clam up high in the air and drop him on a rock. In a sense, you’re a life form preying on the Psis, and the Psis are life forms that prey on the Norms. That makes you a friend of the Norm class. Balance, the full circle, predator and prey. It appears to be an eternal system; and, frankly, I can’t see how it could be improved.”

“I might be considered a traitor,” Pat said.

“Does it bother you?”

“It bothers me that people will feel hostile toward me. But I guess you can’t live very long without arousing hostility; you can’t please everybody, because people want different things. Please one and you displease another.”

Joe said, “What is your anti-talent?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Like I say,” G. G. Ashwood said, “it’s unique; I’ve never heard of it before.”

“Which psi talent does it counteract?” Joe asked the girl.

“Precog,” Pat said. “I guess.” She indicated G. G. Ashwood, whose smirk of enthusiasm had not dimmed. “Your scout Mr. Ashwood explained it to me. I knew I did something funny; I’ve always had these strange periods in my life, starting in my sixth year. I never told my parents, because I sensed that it would displease them.”

“Are they precogs?” Joe asked.

“Yes.

“You’re right. It would have displeased them. But if you used it around them—even once—they would have known. Didn’t they suspect? Didn’t you interfere with their ability?”

Pat said, “I—” She gestured. “I think I did interfere but they didn’t know it.” Her face showed bewilderment.

“Let me explain,” Joe said, “how the anti-precog generally functions. Functions, in fact, in every case we know of. The precog sees a variety of futures, laid out side by side like cells in a beehive. For him one has greater luminosity, and this he picks. Once he has picked it the anti-precog can do nothing; the anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the future is altered. In the case of telepaths a similar impairment—”

“She goes back in time,” G. G. Ashwood said.

Joe stared at him.

“Back in time,” G.G. repeated, savoring this; his eyes shot shafts of significance to every part of Joe Chip’s kitchen. “The precog affected by her still sees one predominant future; like you said, the one luminous possibility. And he chooses it, and he’s right. But why is it right? Why is it luminous? Because this girl—” He shrugged in her direction. “Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she’s gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he’s affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn’t. So that’s one advantage of her anti-talent over other anti-precog talents. The other—and greater—is that she can cancel out the precog’s decision
after he’s made it
. She can enter the situation later on, and this problem has always hung us up, as you know; if we didn’t get in there from the start we couldn’t do anything. In a way, we never could truly abort the precog ability as we’ve done with the others; right? Hasn’t that been a weak link in our services?” He eyed Joe Chip expectantly.

“Interesting,” Joe said presently.

“Hell-‘interesting’?” G. G. Ashwood thrashed about indignantly. “This is the greatest anti-talent to emerge thus far!”

In a low voice Pat said, “I don’t go back in time.” She raised her eyes, confronted Joe Chip half apologetically, half belligerently. “I do something, but Mr. Ashwood has built it up all out of proportion to reality.”

“I can read your mind,” G.G. said to her, looking a little nettled. “I know you can change the past; you’ve done it.”

Pat said, “I can change the past but I don’t
go
into the past; I don’t time-travel, as you want your tester to think.”

“How do you change the past?” Joe asked her.

“I think about it. One specific aspect of it, such as one incident, or something somebody said. Or a little thing that happened that I wish hadn’t happened. The first time I did this, as a child—”

“When she was six years old,” G.G. broke in, “living in Detroit, with her parents of course, she broke a ceramic antique statue that her father treasured.”

“Didn’t your father foresee it?” Joe asked her. “With his precog ability?”

“He foresaw it,” Pat answered, “and he punished me the week before I broke the statue. But he said it was inevitable; you know the precog talent: They can foresee but they can’t change anything. Then after the statue did break—after I broke it, I should say—I brooded about it, and I thought about that week before it broke when I didn’t get any dessert at dinner and had to go to bed at five
P.M
. I thought Christ—or whatever a kid says—isn’t there some way these unfortunate events can be averted? My father’s precog ability didn’t seem very spectacular to me, since he couldn’t alter events; I still feel that way, a sort of contempt. I spent a month trying to will the damn statue back into one piece; in my mind I kept going back to before it broke, imagining what it had looked like…which was awful. And then one morning when I got up—I even dreamed about it at night—there it stood. As it used to be.” Tensely, she leaned toward Joe Chip; she spoke in a sharp, determined voice. “But neither of my parents noticed anything. It seemed perfectly normal to them that the statue was in one piece; they thought it had always been in one piece. I was the only one who remembered.” She smiled, leaned back, took another of his cigarettes from the pack and lit up.

“I’ll go get my test equipment from the car,” Joe said, starting toward the door.

“Five cents, please,” the door said as he seized its knob.

“Pay the door,” Joe said to G. G. Ashwood.

When he had lugged his armload of testing apparatus from the car to his apt he told the firm’s scout to hit the road.

“What?” G.G. said, astounded. “But I found her; the bounty is mine. I spent almost ten days tracing the field to her; I—”

Joe said to him, “I can’t test her with your field present, as you well know. Talent and anti-talent fields deform each other; if they didn’t we wouldn’t be in this line of business.” He held out his hand as G.G. got grumpily to his feet. “And leave me a couple of nickels. So she and I can get out of here.”

“I have change,” Pat murmured. “In my purse.”

“You can measure the force she creates,” G.G. said, “by the loss within my field. I’ve seen you do it that way a hundred times.”

Joe said, briefly, “This is different.”

“I don’t have any more nickels,” G.G. said. “I can’t get out.”

Glancing at Joe, then at G.G., Pat said, “Have one of mine.” She tossed G.G. a coin, which he caught, an expression of bewilderment on his face. The bewilderment then, by degrees, changed to aggrieved sullenness.

“You sure shot me down,” he said as he deposited the nickel in the door’s slot. “Both of you,” he muttered as the door closed after him. “I discovered her. This is really a cutthroat business, when—” His voice faded out as the door clamped shut. There was, then, silence.

Presently Pat said, “When his enthusiasm goes, there isn’t much left of him.”

“He’s okay,” Joe said; he felt a usual feeling: guilt. But not very much. “Anyhow he did his part. Now—”

“Now it’s your turn,” Pat said. “So to speak. May I take off my boots?”

“Sure,” he said. He began to set up his test equipment, checking the drums, the power supply; he started trial motions of each needle, releasing specific surges and recording their effect.

“A shower?” she asked as she set her boots neatly out of the way.

“A quarter,” he murmured. “It costs a quarter.” He glanced up at her and saw that she had begun unbuttoning her blouse. “I don’t have a quarter,” he said.

“At the kibbutz,” Pat said, “everything is free.”

“Free!” He stared at her. “That’s not economically feasible. How can it operate on that basis? For more than a month?”

She continued unperturbedly unbuttoning her blouse. “Our salaries are paid in and we’re credited with having done our job. The aggregate of our earnings underwrites the kibbutz as a whole. Actually, the Topeka Kibbutz has shown a profit for several years; we, as a group, are putting in more than we’re taking out.” Having unbuttoned her blouse, she laid it over the back of her chair. Under the blue, coarse blouse she wore nothing, and he perceived her breasts: hard and high, held well by the accurate muscles of her shoulders.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” he said. “Take off your clothes, I mean?”

Pat said, “You don’t remember.”

“Remember what?”

“My not taking off my clothes. In another present. You didn’t like that very well, so I eradicated that; hence this.” She stood up lithely.

“What did I do,” he asked cautiously, “when you didn’t take off your clothes? Refuse to test you?”

“You mumbled something about Mr. Ashwood having overrated my anti-talent.”

Joe said, “I don’t work that way; I don’t do that.”

“Here.” Bending, her breasts wagging forward, she rummaged in the pocket of her blouse, brought forth a folded sheet of paper which she handed him. “From the previous present, the one I abolished.”

He read it, read his one-line evaluation at the end. “Antipsi field generated—inadequate. Below standard throughout. No value against precog ratings now in existence.” And then the codemark which he employed, a circle with a stroke dividing it.
Do not hire
, the symbol meant. And only he and Glen Runciter knew that. Not even their scouts knew the meaning of the symbol, so Ashwood could not have told her. Silently he returned the paper to her; she refolded it and returned it to her blouse pocket.

“Do you need to test me?” she asked. “After seeing that?”

“I have a regular procedure,” Joe said. “Six indices which—”

Pat said, “You’re a little, debt-stricken, ineffective bureaucrat who can’t even scrape together enough coins to pay his door to let him out of his apt.” Her tone, neutral but devastating, rebounded in his ears; he felt himself stiffen, wince and violently flush.

“This is a bad spot right now,” he said. “I’ll be back on my feet financially any day now. I can get a loan. From the firm, if necessary.” He rose unsteadily, got two cups and two saucers, poured coffee from the coffeepot. “Sugar?” he said. “Cream?”

“Cream,” Pat said, still standing barefoot, without her blouse.

He fumbled for the doorhandle of the refrigerator, to get out a carton of milk.

“Ten cents, please,” the refrigerator said. “Five cents for opening my door; five cents for the cream.”

“It isn’t cream,” he said. “It’s plain milk.” He continued to pluck—futilely—at the refrigerator door. “Just this one time,” he said to it. “I swear to god I’ll pay you back. Tonight.”

“Here,” Pat said; she slid a dime across the table toward him. “She should have money,” she said as she watched him put the dime in the slot of the refrigerator. “Your mistress. You really have failed, haven’t you? I knew it when Mr. Ashwood—”

“It isn’t,” he grated, “always like this.”

“Do you want me to bail you out of your problems, Mr. Chip?” Hands in the pockets of her jeans, she regarded him expressionlessly, no emotion clouding her face. Only alertness. “You know I can. Sit down and write out your evaluation report on me. Forget the tests. My talent is unique anyway; you can’t measure the field I produce—it’s in the past and you’re testing me in the present, which simply takes place as an automatic consequence. Do you agree?”

He said, “Let me see that evaluation sheet you have in your blouse. I want to look at it one more time. Before I decide.”

From her blouse she once more brought forth the folded-up yellow sheet of paper; she calmly passed it across the table to him and he reread it. My writing, he said to himself; yes, it’s true. He returned it to her and, from the collection of testing items, took a fresh, clean sheet of the same familiar yellow paper.

On it he wrote her name, then spurious, extraordinarily high test results, and then at last his conclusions. His new conclusions. “Has unbelievable power. Anti-psi field unique in scope. Can probably negate any assembly of precogs imaginable.” After that he scratched a symbol: this time two crosses, both underlined. Pat, standing behind him, watched him write; he felt her breath on his neck.

“What do the two underlined crosses mean?” she asked.

“ ‘Hire her,’ ” Joe said. “ ‘At whatever cost required.’ ”

“Thank you.” She dug into her purse, brought out a handful of poscred bills, selected one and presented it to him. A big one. “This will help you with expenses. I couldn’t give it to you earlier, before you made your official evaluation of me. You would have canceled very nearly everything and you would have gone to your grave thinking I had bribed you. Ultimately you would have even decided that I had no counter-talent.” She then unzipped her jeans and resumed her quick, furtive undressing.

Joe Chip examined what he had written, not watching her. The underlined crosses did not symbolize what he had told her. They meant: Watch this person. She is a hazard to the firm. She is dangerous.

He signed the test paper, folded it and passed it to her. She at once put it away in her purse.

“When can I move my things in here?” she asked as she padded toward the bathroom. “I consider it mine as of now, since I’ve already paid you what must be virtually the entire month’s rent.”

“Anytime,” he said.

The bathroom said, “Fifty cents, please. Before turning on the water.”

Pat padded back into the kitchen to reach into her purse.

FOUR

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Back in New York once more, his trip to the Beloved Brethren Moratorium completed, Glen Runciter landed via a silent and impressive all-electric hired limousine on the roof of the central installation of Runciter Associates. A descent chute dropped him speedily to his fifth-floor office. Presently—at nine-thirty
A.M
. local time—he sat in the massive, old-fashioned, authentic walnut-and-leather swivel chair, behind his desk, talking on the vidphone to his public-relations department.

“Tamish, I just now got back from Zürich. I conferred with Ella there.” Runciter glared at his secretary, who had cautiously entered his personal oversized office, shutting the door behind her. “What do you want, Mrs. Frick?” he asked her.

Withered, timorous Mrs. Frick, her face dabbed with spots of artificial color to compensate for her general ancient grayness, made a gesture of disavowal; she had no choice but to bother him.

“Okay, Mrs. Frick,” he said patiently. “What is it?”

“A new client, Mr. Runciter. I think you should see her.” She both advanced toward him and retreated, a difficult maneuver which Mrs. Frick alone could carry off. It had taken her ten decades of practice.

“As soon as I’m off the phone,” Runciter told her. Into the phone he said, “How often do our ads run on primetime TV planetwide? Still once every third hour?”

“Not quite that, Mr. Runciter. Over the course of a full day, prudence ads appear on an average of once every third hour per UHF channel, but the cost of prime time—”

“I want them to appear every hour,” Runciter said. “Ella thinks that would be better.” On the trip back to the Western Hemisphere he had decided which of their ads he liked the most. “You know that recent Supreme Court ruling where a husband can legally murder his wife if he can prove she wouldn’t under any circumstances give him a divorce?”

“Yes, the so-called—”

“I don’t care what it’s called; what matters is that we have a TV ad made up on that already. How does that ad go? I’ve been trying to remember it.”

Tamish said, “There’s this man, an ex-husband, being tried. First comes a shot of the jury, then the judge, then a pan-up on the prosecuting attorney, cross-examining the ex-husband. He says, ‘It would seem, sir, that your wife—’ ”

“That’s right,” Runciter said with satisfaction; he had, originally, helped write the ad. It was, in his opinion, another manifestation of the marvelous multifacetedness of his mind.

“Is it not the assumption, however,” Tamish said, “that the missing Psis are at work, as a group, for one of the larger investment houses? Seeing as how this is probably so, perhaps we should stress one of our business-establishment commercials. Do you perhaps recall this one, Mr. Runciter? It shows a husband home from his job at the end of the day; he still has on his electric-yellow cummerbund, petal skirt, knee-hugging hose and military-style visored cap. He seats himself wearily on the living-room couch, starts to take off one of his gauntlets, then hunches over, frowns and says, ‘Gosh, Jill, I wish I knew what’s been wrong with me lately. Sometimes, with greater frequency almost every day, the least little remark at the office makes me think that, well, somebody’s reading my mind!’ Then she says, ‘If you’re worried about that, why don’t we contact our nearest prudence organization? They’ll lease us an inertial at prices easy on our budget, and then you’ll feel like your old self again!’ Then this great smile appears on his face and he says, ‘Why, this nagging feeling is already—’ ”

Again appearing in the doorway to Runciter’s office, Mrs. Frick said, “Please, Mr. Runciter.” Her glasses quivered.

He nodded. “I’ll talk to you later, Tamish. Anyhow, get hold of the networks and start our material on the hour basis as I outlined.” He rang off, then regarded Mrs. Frick silently. “I went all the way to Switzerland,” he said presently, “and had Ella roused, to get that information, that advice.”

“Mr. Runciter is free, Miss Wirt.” His secretary tottered to one side, and a plump woman rolled into the office. Her head, like a basketball, bobbled up and down; her great round body propelled itself toward a chair, and there, at once, she seated herself, narrow legs dangling. She wore an unfashionable spider-silk coat, looking like some amiable bug wound up in a cocoon not spun by itself; she looked encased. However, she smiled. She seemed fully at ease. In her late forties, Runciter decided. Past any period in which she might have had a good figure.

“Ah, Miss Wirt,” he said. “I can’t give you too much time; maybe you should get to the point. What’s the problem?”

In a mellow, merry, incongruous voice Miss Wirt said, “We’re having a little trouble with telepaths. We think so but we’re not sure. We maintain a telepath of our own—one we know about and who’s supposed to circulate among our employees. If he comes across any Psis, telepaths or precogs, any kind, he’s supposed to report to—” She eyed Runciter brightly. “To my principal. Late last week he made such a report. We have an evaluation, done by a private firm, on the capacities of the various prudence agencies. Yours is rated foremost.”

“I know that,” Runciter said; he had seen the evaluation, as a matter of fact. As yet, however, it had brought him little if any greater business. But now this. “How many telepaths,” he said, “did your man pick up? More than one?”

“Two at least.”

“Possibly more?”

“Possibly.” Miss Wirt nodded.

“Here is how we operate,” Runciter said. “First we measure the psi field objectively, so we can tell what we’re dealing with. That generally takes from one week to ten days, depending on—”

Miss Wirt interrupted, “My employer wants you to move in your inertials right away, without the time-consuming and expensive formality of making tests.”

“We wouldn’t know how many inertials to bring in. Or what kind. Or where to station them. Defusing a psi operation has to be done on a systematic basis; we can’t wave a magic wand or spray toxic fumes into corners. We have to balance Hollis’ people individual by individual, an anti-talent for every talent. If Hollis has gotten into your operation he’s done it the same way: Psi by Psi. One gets into the personnel department, hires another; that person sets up a department or takes charge of a department and requisitions a couple more…sometimes it takes them months. We can’t undo in twenty-four hours what they’ve constructed over a long period of time. Big-time Psi activity is like a mosaic; they can’t afford to be impatient, and neither can we.”

“My employer,” Miss Wirt said cheerfully, “is impatient.”

“I’ll talk to him.” Runciter reached for the vidphone. “Who is he and what’s his number?”

“You’ll deal through me.”

“Maybe I won’t deal at all. Why won’t you tell me who you represent?” He pressed a covert button mounted under the rim of his desk; it would bring his resident telepath, Nina Freede, into the next office, where she could monitor Miss Wirt’s thought processes. I can’t work with these people, he said to himself, if I don’t know who they are. For all I know, Ray Hollis is trying to hire me.

“You’re hidebound,” Miss Wirt said. “All we’re asking for is speed. And we’re only asking for that because we have to have it. I call tell you this much: Our operation which they’ve infested isn’t on Earth. From the standpoint of potential yield, as well as from an investment standpoint, it’s our primary project. My principal has put all his negotiable assets into it. Nobody is supposed to know about it. The greatest shock to us, in finding telepaths on the site—”

“Excuse me,” Runciter said; he rose, walked to the office door. “I’ll find out how many people we have about the place who’re available for use in this connection.” Shutting his office door behind him, he looked into each of the adjoining offices until he spied Nina Freede; she sat alone in a minor sideroom, smoking a cigarette and concentrating. “Find out who she represents,” he said to her. “And then find out how high they’ll go.” We’ve got thirty-eight idle inertials, he reflected. Maybe we can dump all of them or most of them into this. I may finally have found where Hollis’ smart-assed talents have sneaked off to. The whole goddam bunch of them.

He returned to his own office, reseated himself behind his desk.

“If telepaths have gotten into your operation,” he said to Miss Wirt, his hands folded before him, “then you have to face up to and accept the realization that the operation per se is no longer secret. Independent of any specific technical info they’ve picked up. So why not tell me what the project is?”

Hesitating, Miss Wirt said, “I don’t know what the project is.”

“Or where it is?”

“No.” She shook her head.

Runciter said, “Do you know who your employer is?”

“I work for a subsidiary firm which he financially controls; I know who my immediate employer is—that’s a Mr. Shepard Howard—but I’ve never been told whom Mr. Howard represents.”

“If we supply you with the inertials you need, will we know where they are being sent?”

“Probably not.”

“Suppose we never get them back?”

“Why wouldn’t you get them back? After they’ve decontaminated our operation.”

“Hollis’ men,” Runciter said, “have been known to kill inertials sent out to negate them. It’s my responsibility to see that my people are protected; I can’t do that if I don’t know where they are.”

The concealed microspeaker in his left ear buzzed and he heard the faint, measured voice of Nina Freede, audible to him alone. “Miss Wirt represents Stanton Mick. She is his confidential assistant. There is no one named Shepard Howard. The project under discussion exists primarily on Luna; it has to do with Techprise, Mick’s research facilities, the controlling stock of which Miss Wirt keeps in her name. She does not know any technical details; no scientific evaluations or memos or progress reports are ever made available to her by Mr. Mick, and she resents this enormously. From Mick’s staff, however, she has picked up a general idea of the nature of the project. Assuming that her secondhand knowledge is accurate, the Lunar project involves a radical, new, low-cost interstellar drive system, approaching the velocity of light, which could be leased to every moderately affluent political or ethnological group. Mick’s idea seems to be that the drive system will make colonization feasible on a mass basic understructure. And hence no longer a monopoly of specific governments.”

Nina Freede clicked off, and Runciter leaned back in his leather and walnut swivel chair to ponder.

“What are you thinking?” Miss Wirt asked brightly.

“I’m wondering,” Runciter said, “if you can afford our services. Since I have no test data to go on, I can only estimate how many inertials you’ll need…but it may run as high as forty.” He said this knowing that Stanton Mick could afford—or could figure out how to get someone else to underwrite—an unlimited number of inertials.

“ ‘Forty,’ ” Miss Wirt echoed. “Hmm. That is quite a few.”

“The more we make use of, the sooner we can get the job done. Since you’re in a hurry, we’ll move them all in at one time. If you are authorized to sign a work contract in the name of your employer”—he pointed a steady, unyielding finger at her; she did not blink—“and you can come up with a retainer now, we could probably accomplish this within seventy-two hours.” He eyed her then, waiting.

The microspeaker in his ear rasped, “As owner of Techprise she is fully bonded. She can legally obligate her firm up to and including its total worth. Right now she is calculating how much this would be, if converted on today’s market.” A pause. “Several billion poscreds, she has decided. But she doesn’t want to do this; she doesn’t like the idea of committing herself to both a contract and retainer. She would prefer to have Mick’s attorneys do that, even if it means several days’ delay.”

But they’re in a hurry, Runciter reflected. Or so they say.

The microspeaker said, “She has an intuition that you know—or have guessed—whom she represents. And she’s afraid you’ll up your fee accordingly. Mick knows his reputation. He considers himself the world’s greatest mark. So he negotiates in this manner: through someone or some firm as a front. On the other hand, they want as many inertials as they can get. And they’re resigned to that being enormously expensive.”

“Forty inertials,” Runciter said idly; he scratched with his pen at a small sheet of blank paper, on his desk for just such purposes. “Let’s see. Six times fifty times three. Times forty.”

Miss Wirt, still smiling her glazed, happy smile, waited with visible tension.

“I wonder,” he murmured, “who paid Hollis to put his employees in the middle of your project.”

“That doesn’t really matter, does it?” Miss Wirt said. “What matters is that they’re there.”

Runciter said, “Sometimes one never finds out. But as you say—it’s the same as when ants find their way into your kitchen. You don’t ask why they’re there; you just begin the job of getting them back out.” He had arrived at a cost figure.

It was enormous.

“I’ll—have to think it over,” Miss Wirt said; she raised her eyes from the shocking sight of his estimate and half rose to her feet. “Is there somewhere, an office, where I can be alone? And possibly phone Mr. Howard?”

Runciter, also rising, said, “It’s rare for any prudence organization to have that many inertials available at one time. If you wait, the situation will change. So if you want them you’d better act.”

“And you think it would really take
that
many inertials?”

Taking Miss Wirt by the arm, he led her from his office and down the hall. To the firm’s map room. “This shows,” he told her, “the location of our inertials plus the inertials of other prudence organizations. In addition to that it shows—or tries to show—the location of all of Hollis’ Psis.” He systematically counted the psi ident-flags which, one by one, had been removed from the map; he wound up holding the final one: that of S. Dole Melipone. “I know now where they are,” he said to Miss Wirt, who had lost her mechanical smile as she comprehended the significance of the unpositioned ident-flags. Taking hold of her damp hand, he deposited Melipone’s flag among her damp fingers and closed them around it. “You can stay here and meditate,” he said. “There’s a vidphone over there—” He pointed. “No one will bother you. I’ll be in my office.” He left the map room, thinking, I really don’t know that this is where they are, all those missing Psis. But it’s possible. And—Stanton Mick had waived the routine procedure of making an objective test. Therefore, if he wound up hiring inertials which he did not need it would be his own fault.