Ubik

Chapter 4

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 Zurich. 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 prime-time 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 of 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 can 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.

Legalistically speaking, Runciter Associates was required to notify the Society that some of the missing PSIs—if not all—had been found. But he had five days in which to file the notification… and he decided to wait until the last day. This kind of business opportunity, he reflected, happens once in a lifetime.

“Mrs. Frick,” he said, entering her outer office. “Type up a work contract specifying forty—” He broke off.

Across the room sat two persons. The man, Joe Chip, looked haggard and hungover and more than usually glum… looked, in fact, about as always, the glumness excepted. But beside him lounged a long-legged girl with brilliant, tumbling black hair and eyes; her intense, distilled beauty illuminated that part of the room, igniting it with heavy, sullen fire. It was, he thought, as if the girl resisted being attractive, disliked the smoothness of her skin and the sensual, swollen, dark quality of her lips.

She looks, he thought, as if she just now got out of bed. Still disordered. Resentful of the day—in fact, of every day.

Walking over to the two of them, Runciter said, “I gather G. G. is back from Topeka.”

“This is Pat,” Joe Chip said. “No last name.” He indicated Runciter, then sighed. He had a peculiar defeated quality hanging over him, and yet, underneath, he did not seem to have given up. A vague and ragged hint of vitality lurked behind the resignation; it seemed to Runciter that Joe most nearly could be accused of feigning spiritual downfall… the real article, however, was not there.

“Anti what?” Runciter asked the girl, who still sat sprawling in her chair, legs extended.

The girl murmured, “Anti-ketogenesis.”

“What’s that mean?”

“The prevention of ketosis,” the girl said remotely. “As by the administration of glucose.”

To Joe, Runciter said, “Explain.”

“Give Mr. Runciter your test sheet,” Joe said to the girl.

Sitting up, the girl reached for her purse, rummaged, then produced one of Joe’s wrinkled yellow score sheets, which she unfolded, glanced at and passed to Runciter.

“Amazing score,” Runciter said. “Is she really this good?” he asked Joe. And then he saw the two underlined crosses, the graphic symbol of indictment—of, in fact, treachery.

“She’s the best so far,” Joe said.

“Come into my office,” Runciter said to the girl; he led the way, and, behind them, the two of them followed.

Fat Miss Wirt, all at once, breathless, her eyes rolling, appeared. “I phoned Mr. Howard,” she informed Runciter. “He has now given me my instructions.” She thereupon perceived Joe Chip and the girl named Pat; for an instant she hesitated, then plunged on, “Mr. Howard would like the formal arrangements made right away. So may we go ahead now? I’ve already acquainted you with the urgency, the time factor.” She smiled her glassy, determined smile. “Do you two mind waiting?” she asked them. “My business with Mr. Runciter is of a priority nature.”

Glancing at her, Pat laughed, a low, throaty laugh of contempt.

“You’ll have to wait, Miss Wirt,” Runciter said. He felt afraid; he looked at Pat, then at Joe, and his fear quickened. “Sit down, Miss Wirt,” he said to her, and indicated one of the outer-office chairs.

Miss Wirt said, “I can tell you exactly, Mr. Runciter, how many inertials we intend to take. Mr. Howard feels he can make an adequate determination of our needs, of our problem.”

“How many?” Runciter asked.

“Eleven,” Miss Wirt said.

“We’ll sign the contract in a little while,” Runciter said. “As soon as I’m free.” With his big, wide hand he guided Joe and the girl into his inner office; he shut the door behind them and seated himself. “They’ll never make it,” he said to Joe. “With eleven. Or fifteen. Or twenty. Especially not with S. Dole Melipone involved on the other side.” He felt tired as well as afraid. “This is, as I assumed, the potential trainee that G. G. scouted in Topeka? And you believe we should hire her? Both you and G. G. agree? Then we’ll hire her, naturally.” Maybe I’ll turn her over to Mick, he said to himself. Make her one of the eleven. “Nobody has managed to tell me yet,” he said, “which of the PSI talents she counters.”

“Mrs. Frick says you flew to Zurich,” Joe said. “What did Ella suggest?”

“More ads,” Runciter said. “On TV. Every hour.” Into his intercom he said, “Mrs. Frick, draw up an agreement of employment between ourselves and a Jane Doe; specify the starting salary that we and the union agreed on last December; specify—”

“What is the starting salary?” the girl Pat asked, her voice suffused with sardonic suspicion of a cheap, childish sort.

Runciter eyed her. “I don’t even know what you can do.”

“It’s precog, Glen,” Joe Chip grated. “But in a different way.” He did not elaborate; he seemed to have run down, like an old-time battery-powered watch.

“Is she ready to go to work?” Runciter asked Joe. “Or is this one we have to train and work with and wait for? We’ve got almost forty idle inertials and we’re hiring another; forty less, I suppose, eleven. Thirty idle employees, all drawing full scale while they sit around with their thumbs in their noses. I don’t know, Joe; I really don’t. Maybe we ought to fire our scouts. Anyway, I think I’ve found the rest of Hollis’ PSIs. I’ll tell you about it later.” Into his intercom he said, “Specify that we can discharge this Jane Doe without notice, without severance pay or compensation of any kind; nor is she eligible, for the first ninety days, for pension, health or sick-pay benefits.” To Pat he said, “Starting salary, in all cases, begins at four hundred ’creds per month, figuring on twenty hours a week. And you’ll have to join a union. The Mine, Mill and Smelter-workers Union; they’re the one that signed up all the prudence-organization employees three years ago. I have no control over that.”

“I get more,” Pat said, “maintaining vidphone relays at the Topeka Kibbutz. Your scout Mr. Ashwood said—”

“Our scouts lie,” Runciter said. “And, in addition, we’re not legally bound by anything they say. No prudence organization is.” The office door opened and Mrs. Frick crept unsteadily in with the typed-out agreement. “Thank you, Mrs. Frick,” Runciter said, accepting the papers. “I have a twenty-year-old wife in cold-pac,” he said to Joe and Pat. “A beautiful woman who when she talks to me gets pushed out of the way by some weird kid named Jory, and then I’m talking to him, not her. Ella frozen in half-life and dimming out—and that battered crone for my secretary that I have to look at all day long.” He gazed at the girl Pat, with her black, strong hair and her sensual mouth; in him he felt unhappy cravings arise, cloudy and pointless wants that led nowhere, that returned to him empty, as in the completion of a geometrically perfect circle.

“I’ll sign,” Pat said, and reached for the desk pen.