Ubik

Chapter 12

One by one, Joe Chip said to himself as he piloted the big car through traffic, we’re succumbing. Something is wrong with my theory. Edie, by being with the group, should have been immune. And I—

It should have been me, he thought. Sometime during my slow flight from New York.

“What we’ll have to do,” he said to Don Denny, “is make sure that anyone who feels tired—that seems to be the first warning—tells the rest of us. And isn’t allowed to wander away.”

Twisting around to face those in the back seat, Don said, “Do you all hear that? As soon as any of you feels tired, even a little bit, report it to either Mr. Chip or myself.” He turned back toward Joe. “And then what?” he asked.

“And then what, Joe?” Pat Conley echoed. “What do we do then? Tell us how we do it, Joe. We’re listening.”

Joe said to her, “It seems strange to me that your talent isn’t coming into play. This situation appears to me to be made for it. Why can’t you go back fifteen minutes and compel Edie Dorn not to wander off? Do what you did when I first introduced you to Runciter.”

“G. G. Ashwood introduced me to Mr. Runciter,” Pat said.

“So you’re not going to do anything,” Joe said.

Sammy Mundo giggled and said, “They had a fight last night while we were eating dinner, Miss Conley and Miss Dorn. Miss Conley doesn’t like her; that’s why she won’t help.”

“I liked Edie,” Pat said.

“Do you have any reason for not making use of your talent?” Don Denny asked her. “Joe’s right; it’s very strange and difficult to understand—at least for me—why exactly you don’t try to help.”

After a pause Pat said, “My talent doesn’t work any more. It hasn’t since the bomb blast on Luna.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Joe said.

Pat said, “I didn’t feel like saying so, goddam it. Why should I volunteer information like that, that I can’t do anything? I keep trying and it keeps not working; nothing happens. And it’s never been that way before. I’ve had the talent virtually my entire life.”

“When did—” Joe began.

“With Runciter,” Pat said. “On Luna, right away. Before you asked me.”

“So you knew that long ago,” Joe said.

“I tried again in New York, after you showed up from Zurich and it was obvious that something awful had happened to Wendy. And I’ve been trying now; I started as soon as you said Edie was probably dead. Maybe it’s because we’re back in this archaic time period; maybe psionic talents don’t work in 1939. But that wouldn’t explain Luna. Unless we had already traveled back here and we didn’t realize it.” She lapsed into brooding, introverted silence; dully, she gazed out at the streets of Des Moines, a bitter expression on her potent, wild face.

It fits in, Joe said to himself. Of course, her time-traveling talent no longer functions. This is not really 1939, and we are outside of time entirely; this proves that Al was right. The graffiti was right. This is half-life, as the couplets told us.

He did not, however, say this to the others with him in the car. Why tell them it’s hopeless? he said to himself. They’re going to find it out soon enough. The smarter ones, such as Denny, probably understand it already. Based on what I’ve said and what they themselves have gone through.

“This really bothers you,” Don Denny said to him, “that her talent no longer works.”

“Sure.” He nodded. “I hoped it might change the situation.”

“There’s more,” Denny said with acute intuition. “I can tell by your”—he gestured—“tone of voice, maybe. Anyhow, I know. This means something. It’s important. It tells you something.”

“Do I keep going straight here?” Joe said, slowing the Pierce-Arrow at an intersection.

“Turn right,” Tippy Jackson said.

Pat said, “You’ll see a brick building with a neon sign going up and down. The Meremont Hotel, it’s called. A terrible place. One bathroom for every two rooms, and a tub instead of a shower. And the food. Incredible. And the only drink they sell is something called Nehi.”

“I liked the food,” Don Denny said. “Genuine cowmeat, rather than protein synthetics. Authentic salmon—”

“Is your money good?” Joe asked. And then he heard a high-pitched whine, echoing up and down the street behind him. “What’s that mean?” he asked Denny.

“I don’t know,” Denny said nervously.

Sammy Mundo said, “It’s a police siren. You didn’t give a signal before you turned.”

“How could I?” Joe said. “There’s no lever on the steering column.”

“You should have made a hand signal,” Sammy said. The siren had become very close now; Joe, turning his head, saw a motorcycle pulling up abreast with him. He slowed the car, uncertain as to what he should do. “Stop at the curb,” Sammy advised him.

Joe stopped the car at the curb.

Stepping from his motorcycle, the cop strolled up to Joe, a young, rat-faced man with hard, large eyes; he studied Joe and then said, “Let me see your license, mister.”

“I don’t have one,” Joe said. “Make out the ticket and let us go.” He could see the hotel now. To Don Denny he said, “You better get over there, you and everyone else.” The Willys-Knight continued on toward it. Don Denny, Pat, Sammy Mundo and Tippy Jackson abandoned the car; they trotted after the Willys-Knight, which had begun to slow to a stop across from the hotel, leaving Joe to face the cop alone.

The cop said to Joe, “Do you have any identification?”

Joe handed him his wallet. With a purple indelible pencil the cop wrote out a ticket, tore it from his pad and passed it to Joe. “Failure to signal, No operator’s license. The citation tells where and when to appear.” The cop slapped his ticket book shut, handed Joe his wallet, then sauntered back to his motorcycle. He revved up his motor and then zoomed out into traffic without looking back.

For some obscure reason Joe glanced over the citation before putting it away in his pocket. And read it once again—slowly. In purple indelible pencil the familiar scrawled hand-writing said:

You are in much greater danger than I thought. What Pat Conley said is

There the message ceased. In the middle of a sentence. He wondered how it would have continued. Was there anything more on the citation? He turned it over, found nothing, returned again to the front side. No further handwriting, but, in squirrel agate type at the bottom of the slip of paper, the following inscription:

Not much to go on, Joe reflected. But still—not what should have appeared at the bottom of a Des Moines traffic citation; it was, clearly, another manifestation, as was the purple handwriting above it.

Getting out of the Pierce-Arrow, he entered the nearest store, a magazine, candy and tobacco-supply shop. “May I use your phone book?” he asked the broad-beamed, middle-aged proprietor.

“In the rear,” the proprietor said amiably, with a jerk of his heavy thumb.

Joe found the phone book and, in the dim recesses of the dark little store, looked up Archer’s Drugstore. He could not find it listed.

Closing the phone book, he approached the proprietor, who at the moment was engaged in selling a roll of Necco wafers to a boy. “Do you know where I can find Archer’s Drugstore?” Joe asked him.

“Nowhere,” the proprietor said. “At least, not any more.”

“Why not?”

“It’s been closed for years.”

Joe said, “Tell me where it was. Anyhow. Draw me a map.”

“You don’t need a map; I can tell you where it was.” The big man leaned forward, pointing out the door of his shop. “You see that barber pole there? Go over there and then look north. That’s north.” He indicated the direction. “You’ll see an old building with gables. Yellow in color. There’s a couple of apartments over it still being used, but the store premises downstairs, they’re abandoned. You’ll be able to make out the sign, though: Archer’s Drugs. So you’ll know when you’ve found it. What happened is that Ed Archer came down with throat cancer and—”

“Thanks,” Joe said, and started out of the store, back into the pale midafternoon sunlight; he walked rapidly across the street to the barber pole, and, from that position, looked due north.

He could see the tall, peeling yellow building at the periphery of his range of vision. But something about it struck him as strange. A shimmer, an unsteadiness, as if the building faded forward into stability and then retreated into insubstantial uncertainty. An oscillation, each phase lasting a few seconds and then blurring off into its opposite, a fairly regular variability as if an organic pulsation underlay the structure. As if, he thought, it’s alive.

Maybe, he thought, I’ve come to the end. He began to walk toward the abandoned drugstore, not taking his eyes from it; he watched it pulse, he watched it change between its two states, and then, as he got closer and closer to it, he discerned the nature of its alternate conditions. At the amplitude of greater stability it became a retail home-art outlet of his own time period, homeostatic in operation, a self-service enterprise selling ten-thousand commodities for the modern conapt; he had patronized such highly functional computer-controlled pseudo merchants throughout his adult life.

And, at the amplitude of insubstantiality, it resolved itself into a tiny, anachronistic drugstore with rococo ornamentation. In its meager window displays he saw hernia belts, rows of corrective eyeglasses, a mortar and pestle, jars of assorted tablets, a hand-printed sign reading LEECHES, huge glass-stoppered bottles that contained a Pandora’s heritage of patent medicines and placebos… and, painted on a fiat wood board running across the top of the windows, the words ARCHER’S DRUGSTORE. No sign whatever of an empty, abandoned, closed-up store; its 1939 stage had somehow been excluded. He thought, So in entering it I either revert further or I find myself back roughly in my own time. And—it’s the further reversion, the pre-1939 phase, that I evidently need.

Presently he stood before it, experiencing physically the tidal tug of the amplitudes; he felt himself drawn back, then ahead, then back again. Pedestrians clumped by, taking no notice; obviously, none of them saw what he saw: They perceived neither Archer’s Drugstore nor the 1992 home-art outlet. That mystified him most of all.

As the structure swung directly into its ancient phase he stepped forward, crossed the threshold. And entered Archer’s Drugstore.

To the right a long marble-topped counter. Boxes on the shelves, dingy in color; the whole store had a black quality to it, not merely in regard to the absence of light but rather a protective coloration, as if it had been constructed to blend, to merge with shadows, to be at all times opaque. It had a heavy, dense quality; it pulled him down, weighing on him like something installed permanently on his back. And it had ceased to oscillate. At least for him, now that he had entered it. He wondered if he had made the right choice; now, too late, he considered the alternative, what it might have meant. A return—possibly—to his own time. Out of this devolved world of constantly declining time-binding capacity—out, perhaps, forever. Well, he thought, so it goes. He wandered about the drugstore, observing the brass and the wood, evidently walnut… He came at last to the prescription window at the rear.

A wispy young man, wearing a gray, many-buttoned suit with vest, appeared and silently confronted him. For a long time Joe and the man looked at each other, neither speaking. The only sound came from a wall clock with Latin numerals on its round face; its pendulum ticked back and forth inexorably. After the fashion of clocks, everywhere,

Joe said, “I’d like a jar of Ubik.”

“The salve?” the druggist said. His lips did not seem properly synchronized with his words; first Joe saw the man’s mouth open, the lips move, and then, after a measurable interval, he heard the words.

“Is it a salve?” Joe said. “I thought it was for internal use.”

The druggist did not respond for an interval. As if a gulf separated the two of them, an epoch of time. Then at last his mouth again opened, his lips again moved. And, presently, Joe heard words. “Ubik has undergone many alterations as the manufacturer has improved it. You may be familiar with the old Ubik, rather than the new.” The druggist turned to one side, and his movement had a stop-action quality; he flowed in a slow, measured, dancelike step, an esthetically pleasing rhythm but emotionally jolting. “We have had a great deal of difficulty obtaining Ubik of late,” he said as he flowed back; in his right hand he held a flat leaded tin which he placed before Joe on the prescription counter. “This comes in the form of a powder to which you add coal tar. The coal tar comes separate; I can supply that to you at very little cost. The Ubik powder, however, is dear. Forty dollars.”

“What’s in it?” Joe asked. The price chilled him.

“That is the manufacturer’s secret.”

Joe picked up the sealed tin and held it to the light. “Is it all right if I read the label?”

“Of course.”

In the dim light entering from the street he at last managed to make out the printing on the label of the tin. It continued the handwritten message on the traffic citation, picking up at the exact point at which Runciter’s writing had abruptly stopped.

absolutely untrue. She did not—repeat, not—try to use her talent following the bomb blast. She did not try to restore Wendy Wright or Al Hammond or Edie Dorn. She’s lying to you, Joe, and that makes me rethink the whole situation. I’ll let you know as soon as I come to a conclusion. Meanwhile be very careful. By the way: Ubik powder is of universal healing value if directions for use are rigorously and conscientiously followed.

“Can I make you out a check?” Joe asked the druggist. “I don’t have forty dollars with me and I need the Ubik badly. It’s literally a matter hanging between life and death.” He reached into his jacket pocket for his checkbook.

“You’re not from Des Moines, are you?” the druggist said. “I can tell by your accent. No, I’d have to know you to take a check that large. We’ve had a whole rash of bad checks the last few weeks, all by people from out of town.”

“Credit card, then?”

The druggist said, “What is a ‘credit card’?”

Laying down the tin of Ubik, Joe turned and walked wordlessly out of the drugstore onto the sidewalk. He crossed the street, starting in the direction of the hotel, then paused to look back at the drugstore.

He saw only a dilapidated yellow building, curtains in its upstairs windows, the ground floor boarded up and deserted; through the spaces between the boards he saw gaping darkness, the cavity of a broken window. Without life.

And that is that, he realized. The opportunity to buy a tin of Ubik powder is gone. Even if I were to find forty dollars lying on the pavement. But, he thought, I did get the rest of Runciter’s warning. For what it’s worth. It may not even be true. It may be only a deformed and misguided opinion by a dying brain. Or by a totally dead brain—as in the case of the TV commercial. Christ, he said to himself dismally. Suppose it is true?

Persons here and there on the sidewalk stared up absorbedly at the sky. Noticing them, Joe looked up too. Shielding his eyes against the slanting shafts of sun, he distinguished a dot exuding white trails of smoke: a high-flying monoplane industriously skywriting. As he and the other pedestrians watched, the already dissipating streamers spelled out a message.

KEEP THE OLD SWIZER UP, JOE!

Easy to say, Joe said to himself. Easy enough to write out in the form of words.

Hunched over with uneasy gloom—and the first faint intimations of returning terror—he shuffed off in the direction of the Meremont Hotel.

Don Denny met him in the high-ceilinged, provincial, crimson-carpeted lobby. “We found her,” he said. “It’s all over—for her, anyhow. And it wasn’t pretty, not pretty at all. Now Fred Zafsky is gone. I thought he was in the other car, and they thought he went along with us. Apparently, he didn’t get into either car; he must be back at the mortuary.”

“It’s happening faster now,” Joe said. He wondered how much difference Ubik—dangled toward them again and again in countless different ways but always out of reach—would have made. I guess we’ll never know, he decided. “Can we get a drink here?” he asked Don Denny. “What about money? Mine’s worthless.”

“The mortuary is paying for everything. Runciter’s instructions to them.”

“The hotel tab too?” It struck him as odd. How had that been managed? “I want you to look at this citation,” he said to Don Denny. “While no one else is with us.” He passed the slip of paper over to him. “I have the rest of the message; that’s where I’ve been: getting it.”

Denny read the citation, then reread it. Then, slowly, handed it back to Joe. “Runciter thinks Pat Conley is lying,” he said.

“Yes,” Joe said.

“You realize what that would mean?” His voice rose sharply. “It means she could have nullified all this. Everything that’s happened to us, starting with Runciter’s death.”

Joe said, “It could mean more than that.”

Eying him, Denny said, “You’re right. Yes, you’re absolutely right.” He looked startled and, then, acutely responsive. Awareness glittered in his face. Of an unhappy, stricken kind.

“I don’t particularly feel like thinking about it,” Joe said. “I don’t like anything about it. It’s worse. A lot worse than what I thought before, what Al Hammond believed, for example. Which was bad enough.”

“But this could be it,” Denny said.

“Throughout all that’s been happening,” Joe said, “I’ve kept trying to understand why. I was sure if I knew why—” But Al never thought of this, he said to himself. Both of us let it drop out of our minds. For a good reason.

Denny said, “Don’t say anything to the rest of them. This may not be true; and even if it is, knowing it isn’t going to help them.”

“Knowing what?” Pat Conley said from behind them. “What isn’t going to help them?” She came around in front of them now, her black, color-saturated eyes wise and calm. Serenely calm. “It’s a shame about Edie Dorn,” she said. “And Fred Zafsky; I guess he’s gone too. That doesn’t really leave very many of us, does it? I wonder who’ll be next.” She seemed undisturbed, totally in control of herself. “Tippy is lying down in her room. She didn’t say she felt tired, but I think we must assume she is. Don’t you agree?”

After a pause Don Denny said, “Yes, I agree.”

“How did you make out with your citation, Joe?” Pat said. She held out her hand. “Can I take a look at it?”

Joe passed it to her. The moment, he thought, has come; everything is now; rolled up into the present. Into one instant.

“How did the policeman know my name?” Pat asked, after she had glanced over it; she raised her eyes, looked intently at Joe and then at Don Denny. “Why is there something here about me?”

She doesn’t recognize the writing, Joe said to himself. Because she’s not familiar with it. As the rest of us are. “Runciter,” he said. “You’re doing it, aren’t you, Pat?” he said. “It’s you, your talent. We’re here because of you.”

“And you’re killing us off,” Don Denny said to her. “One by one. But why?” To Joe he said, “What reason could she have? She doesn’t even know us, not really.”

“Is this why you came to Runciter Associates?” Joe asked her. He tried—but failed—to keep his voice steady; in his ears it wavered and he felt abrupt contempt for himself. “G. G. Ashwood scouted you and brought you in. Was he working for Hollis, is that it? Is that what really happened to us—not the bomb blast but you?”

Pat smiled.

And the lobby of the hotel blew up in Joe Chip’s face.