Ubik (15 page)

“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.

TWELVE

Pop tasty Ubik into your toaster, made only from fresh fruit and healthful all-vegetable shortening. Ubik makes breakfast a feast, puts zing into your thing! Safe when handled as directed.

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 Zürich 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 handwriting 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:

Try Archer’s Drugstore for reliable household remedies and medicinal preparations of tried and tested value. Economically priced.

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 flat 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.