Ubik

Chapter 11

“Hey, that bottle you have,” Jespersen said; he peered into the car, an unusual note in his voice. “Can I look at it?”

Joe Chip wordlessly passed the aviator the flat bottle of Elixir of Ubique.

“My grandmother used to talk about this,” Jespersen said, holding the bottle up to the light. “Where’d you get it? They haven’t made this since around the time of the Civil War.”

“I inherited it,” Joe said.

“You must have. Yeah, you don’t see these handmade flasks any more. The company never put out very many of these in the first place. This medicine was invented in San Francisco around 1850. Never sold in stores; the customers had to order it made up. It came in three strengths. This what you have here, this is the strongest of the three.” He eyed Joe. “Do you know what’s in this?”

“Sure,” Joe said. “Oil of peppermint, zinc oxide, sodium citrate, charcoal—”

“Let it go,” Jespersen interrupted. Frowning, he appeared to be busily turning something over in his mind. Then, at last, his expression changed. He had come to a decision. “I’ll fly you to Des Moines in exchange for this flask of Elixir of Ubique. Let’s get started; I want to do as much of the flying as possible in daylight.” He strode away from the ’29 Ford, taking the bottle with him.

Ten minutes later the Curtiss-Wright biplane had been gassed, the prop manually spun, and, with Joe Chip and Jespersen aboard, it began weaving an erratic, sloppy path down the runway, bouncing into the air and then collapsing back again. Joe gritted his teeth and hung on.

“We’re carrying so much weight,” Jespersen said without emotion; he did not seem alarmed. The plane at last wobbled up into the air, leaving the runway permanently behind; noisily it droned over the rooftops of buildings, on its way west.

Joe yelled, “How long will it take to get there?”

“Depends on how much tailwind we get. Hard to say. Probably around noon tomorrow if our luck holds out.”

“Will you tell me now,” Joe yelled, “what’s in the bottle?”

“Gold flakes suspended in a base composed mostly of mineral oil,” the pilot yelled back.

“How much gold? Very much?”

Jespersen turned his head and grinned without answering. He did not have to say; it was obvious.

The old Curtiss-Wright biplane blurpled on, in the general direction of Iowa.

At three in the afternoon the following day they reached the airfield at Des Moines. Having landed the plane, the pilot sauntered off for parts unknown, carrying his flask of gold flakes with him. With aching, cramped stiffness, Joe climbed from the plane, stood for a time rubbing his numb legs, and then unsteadily headed toward the airport office, as little of it as there was.

“Can I use your phone?” he asked an elderly rustic official who sat hunched over a weather map, absorbed in what he was doing.

“If you got a nickel.” The official, with a jerk of his cowlick head, indicated the public phone.

Joe sorted through his money, casting out all the coins which had Runciter’s profile on them; at last he found an authentic buffalo nickel of the period and laid it before the elderly official.

“Ump,” the official grunted without looking up.

Locating the local phone book, Joe extracted from it the number of the Simple Shepherd Mortuary. He gave the number to the operator, and presently his party responded.

“Simple Shepherd Mortuary. Mr. Bliss speaking.”

“I’m here to attend the services for Glen Runciter,” Joe said. “Am I too late?” He prayed silently that he was not.

“Services for Mr. Runciter are in progress right now,” Mr. Bliss said. “Where are you, sir? Would you like us to send a vehicle to fetch you?” He seemed fussily disapproving.

“I’m at the airport,” Joe said.

“You should have arrived earlier,” Mr. Bliss chided. “I doubt very much if you’ll be able to attend any of the service. However, Mr. Runciter will be lying in state for the balance of today and tomorrow morning. Watch for our car, Mr.—”

“Chip,” Joe said.

“Yes, you have been expected. Several of the bereaved have asked that we maintain a vigil for you as well as for Mr. Hammond and a”—he paused—“a Miss Wright. Are they with you?”

“No,” Joe said. He hung up, then seated himself on a curved, polished wooden bench where he could watch cars approaching the airport. Anyhow, he said to himself, I’m here in time to join the rest of the group. They haven’t left town yet, and that’s what matters.

The elderly official called, “Mister, come over here a sec.”

Getting up, Joe crossed the waiting room. “What’s wrong?”

“This nickel you gave me.” The official had been scrutinizing it all this time.

“It’s a buffalo nickel,” Joe said. “Isn’t that the right coin for this period?”

“This nickel is dated 1940.” The elderly official eyed him unblinkingly.

With a groan Joe got out his remaining coins, again sorted among them; at last he found a 1938 nickel and tossed it down before the official. “Keep them both,” he said, and once more seated himself on the polished, curved bench.

“We get counterfeit money every now and then,” the official said.

Joe said nothing; he turned his attention to the semi-high-boy Audiola radio playing by itself off in a corner of the waiting room. The announcer was plugging a toothpaste called Ipana. I wonder how long I’m going to have to wait here, Joe asked himself. It made him nervous, now that he had come so close physically to the inertials. I’d hate to make it this far, he thought, within a few miles, and then—He stopped his thoughts at that point and simply sat.

Half an hour later a 1930 Willys-Knight 87 put-putted onto the airfield’s parking lot; a hempen home-spun individual wearing a conspicuously black suit emerged and shaded his eyes with the flat of his hand in order to see into the waiting room.

Joe approached him. “Are you Mr. Bliss?” he asked.

“Certainly, I am.” Bliss briefly shook hands with him, meanwhile emitting a strong smell of Sen-sen, then got back at once into the Willys-Knight and restarted the motor. “Come along, Mr. Chip. Please hurry. We may still be able to attend a part of the service. Father Abernathy generally speaks quite a while on such important occasions as this.”

Joe got into the front seat beside Mr. Bliss. A moment later they clanked onto the road leading to downtown Des Moines, rushing along at speeds sometimes reaching forty miles an hour.

“You’re an employee of Mr. Runciter?” Bliss asked.

“Right,” Joe said.

“Unusual line of business that Mr. Runciter was in. I’m not quite sure I understand it.” Bliss honked at a red setter which had ventured onto the asphalt pavement; the dog retreated, giving the Willys-Knight its pompous right of way. “What does ‘psionic’ mean? Several of Mr. Runciter’s employees have used the term.”

“Parapsychological powers,” Joe said. “Mental force operating directly, without any intervening physical agency.”

“Mystical powers, you mean? Like knowing the future? The reason I ask that is that several of you people have talked about the future as if it already exists. Not to me; they didn’t say anything about it except to each other, but I overheard—you know how it is. Are you people mediums, is that it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What do you foresee about the war in Europe?”

Joe said, “Germany and Japan will lose. The United States will get into it on December 7th, 1941.” He lapsed into silence then, not feeling inclined to discuss it; he had his own problems to occupy his attention.

“I’m a Shriner, myself,” Bliss said.

What is the rest of the group experiencing? Joe wondered. This reality? The United States of 1939? Or, when I rejoin them, will my regression be reversed, placing me at a later period? A good question. Because, collectively, they would have to find their way back fifty-three years, to the reasonable and proper form-constituents of contemporary, unregressed time. If the group as a whole had experienced the same amount of regression as he had, then his joining them would not help him or them—except in one regard: he might be spared the ordeal of undergoing further world decay. On the other hand, this reality of 1939 seemed fairly stable; in the last twenty-four hours it had managed to remain virtually constant. But, he reflected, that might be due to my drawing nearer to the group.

On the other hand, the 1939 jar of Ubik liver and kidney balm had reverted back an additional eighty-odd years: from spray can to jar to wooden-mold bottle within a few hours. Like the 1908 cage elevator which Al alone had seen—

But that wasn’t so. The short, fat, pilot, Sandy Jespersen, had also seen the wooden-mold bottle, the Elixir of Ubique, as it had become finally. This was not a private vision; it had, in fact, gotten him here to Des Moines. And the pilot had seen the reversion of the LaSalle as well. Something entirely different had overtaken Al, it would seem. At least, he hoped so. Prayed so.

Suppose, he reflected, we can’t reverse our regression; suppose we remain here the balance of our lives. Is that so bad? We can get used to nine-tube screen-grid highboy Philco radios, although they won’t really be necessary, inasmuch as the superheterodyne circuit has already been invented—although I haven’t as yet run across one. We can learn to drive American Austin motorcars selling for $445—a sum that had popped into his mind seemingly at random but which, he intuited, was correct. Once we get jobs and earn money of this period, he said to himself, we won’t be traveling aboard antique Curtiss-Wright biplanes; after all, four years ago, in 1935, transpacific service by four-engine China clippers was inaugurated. The Ford trimotor is an eleven-year-old plane by now; to these people it’s a relic, and the biplane I came here on is—even to them—a museum piece. That LaSalle I had, before it reverted, was a considerable piece of machinery; I felt real satisfaction driving it.

“What about Russia?” Mr. Bliss was asking. “In the war, I mean. Do we wipe out those Reds? Can you see that far ahead?”

Joe said, “Russia will fight on the same side as the U.S.A.” And all the other objects and entities and artifacts of this world, he mulled. Medicine will be a major drawback; let’s see—just about now they should be using the sulfa drugs. It’s going to be serious for us when we become ill. And—dental work isn’t going to be much fun either; they’re still working with hot drills and novocaine. Fluoride toothpastes haven’t even come into being; that’s another twenty years in the future.

“On our side?” Bliss sputtered. “The Communists? That’s impossible; they’ve got that pact with the Nazis.”

“Germany will violate that pact,” Joe said. “Hitler will attack the Soviet Union in June 1941.”

“And wipe it out, I hope.”

Startled out of his preoccupations, Joe turned to look closely at Mr. Bliss driving his nine-year-old Willys-Knight.

Bliss said, “Those Communists are the real menace, not the Germans. Take the treatment of the Jews. You know who makes a lot out of that? Jews in this country, a lot of them not citizens but refugees living on public welfare. I think the Nazis certainly have been a little extreme in some of the things they’ve done to the Jews, but basically there’s been the Jewish question for a long time, and something, although maybe not so vile as those concentration camps, had to be done about it. We have a similar problem here in the United States, both with Jews and with the niggers. Eventually we’re going to have to do something about both.”

“I never actually heard the term ‘nigger’ used,” Joe said, and found himself appraising this era a little differently, all at once. I forgot about this, he realized.

“Lindbergh is the one who’s right about Germany,” Bliss said. “Have you ever listened to him speak? I don’t mean what the newspapers write it up like, but actually—” He slowed the car to a stop for a semaphore-style stop signal. “Take Senator Borah and Senator Nye. If it wasn’t for them, Roosevelt would be selling munitions to England and getting us into a war that’s not our war. Roosevelt is so darn interested in repealing the arms embargo clause of the neutrality bill; he wants us to get into the war. The American people aren’t going to support him. The American people aren’t interested in fighting England’s war or anybody else’s war.” The signal clanged and a green semaphore swung out. Bliss shifted into low gear and the Willys-Knight bumbled forward, melding with downtown Des Moines’ midday traffic.

“You’re not going to enjoy the next five years,” Joe said.

“Why not? The whole state of Iowa is behind me in what I believe. You know what I think about you employees of Mr. Runciter? From what you’ve said and from what those others said, what I overheard, I think you’re professional agitators.” Bliss glanced at Joe with uncowed bravado.

Joe said nothing; he watched the oldtime brick and wood and concrete buildings go by, the quaint cars—most of which appeared to be black—and wondered if he was the only one of the group who had been confronted by this particular aspect of the world of 1939. In New York, he told himself, it’ll be different; this is the Bible Belt, the isolationist Middle West. We won’t be living here; we’ll be on either the East Coast or the West.

But instinctively he sensed that a major problem for all of them had exposed itself just now. We know too much, he realized, to live comfortably in this time segment. If we had regressed twenty years, or thirty years, we could probably make the psychological transition; it might not be interesting to once more live through the Gemini spacewalks and the creaking first Apollo flights, but at least it would be possible. But at this point in time—

They’re still listening to ten-inch 78 records of “Two Black Crows.” And Joe Penner. And “Mert and Marge.” The Depression is still going on. In our time we maintain colonies on Mars, on Luna; we’re perfecting workable interstellar flight—these people have not been able to cope with the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma.

This is a world that lives in terms of William Jennings Bryan’s oratory; the Scopes “Monkey Trial” is a vivid reality here. He thought, There is no way we can adapt to their viewpoint, their moral, political, sociological environment. To them we’re professional agitators, more alien than the Nazis, probably even more of a menace than the Communist Party. We’re the most dangerous agitators that this time segment has yet had to deal with. Bliss is absolutely right.

“Where are you people from?” Bliss was asking. “Not from any part of the United States; am I correct?”

Joe said, “You’re correct. We’re from the North American Confederation.” From his pocket he brought forth a Runciter quarter, which he handed to Bliss. “Be my guest,” he said.

Glancing at the coin, Bliss gulped and quavered, “the profile on this coin—this is the deceased! This is Mr. Runciter!” He took another look and blanched. “And the date. 1990.”

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” Joe said.

When the Willys-Knight reached the Simple Shepherd Mortuary the service had already ended. On the wide, white, wooden steps of the two-story frame building a group of people stood, and Joe recognized all of them. There at last they were: Edie Dorn, Tippy Jackson, Jon Ild, Francy Spanish, Tito Apostos, Don Denny, Sammy Mundo, Fred Zafsky and—Pat. My wife, he said to himself, impressed once again by the sight of her, the dramatic dark hair, the intense coloring of her eyes and skin, all the powerful contrasts radiating from her.

“No,” he said aloud as he stepped from the parked car. “She’s not my wife; she wiped that out.” But, he remembered, she kept the ring. The unique wrought-silver and jade wedding ring which she and I picked out… that’s all that remains. But what a shock to see her again. To regain, for an instant, the ghostly shroud of a marriage that has been abolished. That had in fact never existed—except for this ring. And, whenever she felt like it, she could obliterate the ring too.

“Hi, Joe Chip,” she said in her cool, almost mocking voice; her intense eyes fixed on him, appraising him.

“Hello,” he said awkwardly. The others greeted him too, but that did not seem so important; Pat had snared his attention.

“No Al Hammond?” Don Denny asked.

Joe said, “Al’s dead. Wendy Wright is dead.”

“We know about Wendy,” Pat said. Calmly.

“No, we didn’t know,” Don Denny said. “We assumed but we weren’t sure. I wasn’t sure.” To Joe he said, “What happened to them? What killed them?”

“They wore out,” Joe said.

“Why?” Tito Apostos said hoarsely, crowding into the circle of people surrounding Joe.

Pat Conley said, “The last thing you said to us, Joe Chip, back in New York, before you went off with Hammond—”

“I know what I said,” Joe said.

Pat continued, “You said something about years. ‘It had been too long,’ you said. What does that mean? Something about time.”

“Mr. Chip,” Edie Dorn said agitatedly, “since we came here to this place, this town has radically changed. None of us understand it. Do you see what we see?” With her hand she indicated the mortuary building, then the street and the other buildings.

“I’m not sure,” Joe said, “what it is you see.”

“Come on, Chip,” Tito Apostos said with anger. “Don’t mess around; simply tell us, for chrissakes, what this place looks like to you. That vehicle.” He gestured toward the Willys-Knight. “You arrived in that. Tell us what it is; tell us what you arrived in.” They all waited, all of them intently watching Joe.

“Mr. Chip,” Sammy Mundo stammered, “that’s a real old automobile, that’s what it is; right?” He giggled. “How old is it exactly?”

After a pause Joe said, “Sixty-two years old.”

“That would make it 1930,” Tippy Jackson said to Don Denny. “Which is pretty close to what we figured.”

“We figured 1939,” Don Denny said to Joe in a level voice. A moderate, detached, mature, baritone voice. Without undue emotionality. Even under these circumstances.

Joe said, “It’s fairly easy to establish that. I took a look at a newspaper at my conapt back in New York. September 12th. So today is September 13th, 1939. The French think they’ve breached the Siegfried Line.”

“Which, in itself,” Jon Ild said, “is a million laughs.”

“I hoped,” Joe said, “that you as a group were experiencing a later reality. Well, so it goes.”

“If it’s 1939 it’s 1939,” Fred Zafsky said in a squeaky, highpitched voice. “Naturally, we all experience it; what else can we do?” He flapped his long arms energetically, appealing to the others for their agreement.

“Flurk off, Zafsky,” Tito Apostos said with annoyance.

To Pat, Joe Chip said, “What do you say about this?”

She shrugged.

“Don’t shrug,” he said. “Answer.”

“We’ve gone back in time,” Pat said.

“Not really,” Joe said.

“Then what have we done?” Pat said. “Gone forward in time, is that it?”

Joe said, “We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re where we’ve always been. But for some reason—for one of several possible reasons—reality has receded; it’s lost its underlying support and it’s ebbed back to previous forms. Forms it took fifty-three years ago. It may regress further. I’m more interested, at this point, in knowing if Runciter has manifested himself to you.”

“Runciter,” Don Denny said, this time with undue emotionality, “is lying inside this building in his casket, dead as a herring. That’s the only manifestation we’ve had of him, and that’s the only one we’re going to get.”

“Does the word ‘Ubik’ mean anything to you, Mr. Chip?” Francesca Spanish said.

It took him a moment to absorb what she had said. “Jesus Christ,” he said then. “Can’t you distinguish manifestations of—”

“Francy has dreams,” Tippy Jackson said. “She’s always had them. Tell him your Ubik dream, Francy.” To Joe she said, “Francy will now tell you her Ubik dream, as she calls it. She had it last night.”

“I call it that because that’s what it is,” Francesca Spanish said fiercely; she clasped her hands together in a spasm of excited agitation. “Listen, Mr. Chip, it wasn’t like any dream I’ve ever had before. A great hand came down from the sky, like the arm and hand of God. Enormous, the size of a mountain. And I knew at the time how important it was; the hand was closed, made into a rocklike fist, and I knew it contained something of value so great that my life and the lives of everyone else on Earth depended on it. And I waited for the fist to open, and it did open. And I saw what it contained.”

“An aerosol spray can,” Don Denny said dryly.

“On the spray can,” Francesca Spanish continued, “there was one word, great golden letters, glittering; golden fire spelling out UBIK. Nothing else. Just that strange word. And then the hand closed up again around the spray can and the hand and arm disappeared, drawn back up into a sort of gray overcast. Today before the funeral services I looked in a dictionary and I called the public library, but no one knew that word or even what language it is and it isn’t in the dictionary. It isn’t English, the librarian told me. There’s a Latin word very close to it: ubique. It means—”

“Everywhere,” Joe said.

Francesca Spanish nodded. “That’s what it means. But no Ubik, and that’s how it was spelled in the dream.”

“They’re the same word,” Joe said. “Just different spellings.”

“How do you know that?” Pat Conley said archly.

“Runciter appeared to me yesterday,” Joe said. “In a taped TV commercial that he made before his death.” He did not elaborate; it seemed too complex to explain, at least at this particular time.

“You miserable fool,” Pat Conley said to him.

“Why?” he asked.

“Is that your idea of a manifestation of a dead man? You might as well consider letters he wrote before his death ‘manifestations.’ Or interoffice memos that he transcribed over the years. Or even—”

Joe said, “I’m going inside and take a last look at Runciter.” He departed from the group, leaving them standing there, and made his way up the wide board steps and into the dark, cool interior of the mortuary.

Emptiness. He saw no one, only a large chamber with pewlike rows of seats and, at the far end, a casket surrounded by flowers. Off in a small sideroom an old-fashioned reed pump organ and a few wooden folding chairs. The mortuary smelled of dust and flowers, a sweet, stale mixture that repelled him. Think of all the Iowans, he thought, who’ve embraced eternity in this listless room. Varnished floors, handkerchiefs, heavy dark wool suits… everything but pennies placed over the dead eyes. And the organ playing symmetric little hymns.

He reached the casket, hesitated, then looked down.

A singed, dehydrated heap of bones lay at one end of the casket, culminating in a paper-like skull that leered up at him, the eyes recessed like dried grapes. Tatters of cloth with bristle-like woven spines had collected near the tiny body, as if blown there by wind. As if the body, breathing, had cluttered itself with them by its wheezing, meager processes—inhalation and exhalation which had now ceased. Nothing stirred. The mysterious change, which had also degraded Wendy Wright and Al, had reached its end, evidently a long time ago. Years ago, he thought, remembering Wendy.

Had the others in the group seen this? Or had it happened since the services? Joe reached out, took hold of the oak lid of the casket and shut it; the thump of wood against wood echoed throughout the empty mortuary, but no one heard it. No one appeared.

Blinded by tears of fright, he made his way back out of the dust-stricken, silent room. Back into the weak sunlight of late afternoon.

“What’s the matter?” Don Denny asked him as he rejoined the group.

Joe said, “Nothing.”

“You look scared out of your goony wits,” Pat Conley said acutely.

“Nothing!” He stared at her with deep, infuriated hostility.

Tippy Jackson said to him, “While you were in there did you by any chance happen to see Edie Dorn?”

“She’s missing,” Jon Ild said by way of explanation.

“But she was just out here,” Joe protested.

“All day she’s been saying she felt terribly cold and tired,” Don Denny said. “It may be that she went back to the hotel; she said something about it earlier, that she wanted to lie down and take a nap right after the services, She’s probably all right.”

Joe said, “She’s probably dead.” To all of them he said, “I thought you understood. If any one of us gets separated from the group he won’t survive; what happened to Wendy and Al and Runciter—” He broke off.

“Runciter was killed in the blast,” Don Denny said.

“We were all killed in the blast,” Joe said. “I know that because Runciter told me; he wrote it on the wall of the men’s room back at our New York offices. And I saw it again on—”

“What you’re saying is insane,” Pat Conley said sharply, interrupting him. “Is Runciter dead or isn’t he? Are we dead or aren’t we? First you say one thing, then you say another. Can’t you be consistent?”

“Try to be consistent,” Jon Ild put in. The others, their faces pinched and creased with worry, nodded in mute agreement.

Joe said, “I can tell you what the graffiti said, I can tell you about the worn-out tape recorder, the instructions that came with it; I can tell you about Runciter’s TV commercial, the note in the carton of cigarettes in Baltimore—I can tell you about the label on the flask of Elixir of Ubique. But I can’t make it all add up. In any case, we have to get to your hotel to try to reach Edie Dorn before she withers away and irreversibly expires. Where can we get a taxi?”

“The mortuary has provided us with a car to use while we’re here,” Don Denny said. “That Pierce-Arrow sitting over there.” He pointed.

They hurried toward it.

“We’re not all of us going to be able to fit in,” Tippy Jackson said as Don Denny tugged the solid iron door open and got inside.

“Ask Bliss if we can take the Willys-Knight,” Joe said; he started up the engine of the Pierce-Arrow and, as soon as everyone possible had gotten into the car, drove out onto the busy main street of Des Moines. The Willys-Knight followed close behind, its horn honking dolefully to tell Joe it was there.