Ubik (5 page)

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 Zürich,” 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.

FIVE

Can’t make the frug contest, Helen; stomach’s upset. I’ll fix you Ubik! Ubik drops you back in the thick of things fast. Taken as directed, Ubik speeds relief to head and stomach. Remember: Ubik is only seconds away. Avoid prolonged use.

During the long days of forced, unnatural idleness, the antitelepath Tippy Jackson slept regularly until noon. An electrode planted within her brain perpetually stimulated EREM—
extremely
rapid eye movement—sleep, so while tucked within the percale sheets of her bed she had plenty to do.

At this particular moment her artificially induced dream state centered around a mythical Hollis functionary endowed with enormous psionic powers. Every other inertial in the Sol System had either given up or been melted down into lard. By process of elimination, the task of nullifying the field generated by this supernatural entity had devolved to her.

“I can’t be myself while you’re around,” her nebulous opponent informed her. On his face a feral, hateful expression formed, giving him the appearance of a psychotic squirrel.

In her dream Tippy answered, “Perhaps your definition of your self-system lacks authentic boundaries. You’ve erected a precarious structure of personality on unconscious factors over which you have no control. That’s why you feel threatened by me.”

“Aren’t you an employee of a prudence organization?” the Hollis telepath demanded, looking nervously about.

“If you’re the stupendous talent you claim to be,” Tippy said, “you can tell that by reading my mind.”

“I can’t read anybody’s mind,” the telepath said. “My talent is gone. I’ll let you talk to my brother Bill. Here, Bill; talk to this lady. Do you like this lady?”

Bill, looking more or less like his brother the telepath, said, “I like her fine because I’m a precog and she doesn’t postscript me.” He shuffled his feet and grinned, revealing great, pale teeth, as blunt as shovels. “ ‘I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature—’ ” He paused, wrinkling his forehead. “How does it go, Matt?” he asked his brother.

“ ‘—deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up,’ ” Matt the squirrel-like telepath said, scratching meditatively at his pelt.

“Oh, yeah.” Bill the precog nodded. “I remember. ‘And that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.’ From
Richard the Third
,” he explained to Tippy. Both brothers grinned. Even their incisors were blunt. As if they lived on a diet of uncooked seeds.

Tippy said, “What does that mean?”

“It means,” both Matt and Bill said in unison, “that we’re going to get you.”

The vidphone rang, waking Tippy up.

Stumbling groggily to it, confounded by floating colored bubbles, blinking, she lifted the receiver and said, “Hello.” God, it’s late, she thought, seeing the clock. I’m turning into a vegetable. Glen Runciter’s face emerged on the screen. “Hello, Mr. Runciter,” she said, standing out of sight of the phone’s scanner. “Has a job turned up for me?”

“Ah, Mrs. Jackson,” Runciter said, “I’m glad I caught you. A group is forming under Joe Chip’s and my direction; eleven in all, a major work assignment for those we choose. We’ve been examining everyone’s history. Joe thinks yours looks good, and I tend to agree. How long will it take you to get down here?” His tone seemed adequately optimistic, but on the little screen his face looked hard-pressed and careworn.

Tippy said, “For this one will I be living—”

“Yes, you’ll have to pack.” Chidingly he said, “We’re supposed to be packed and ready to go at all times; that’s a rule I don’t ever want broken, especially in a case like this where there’s a time factor.”

“I
am
packed. I’ll be at the New York office in fifteen minutes. All I have to do is leave a note for my husband, who’s at work.”

“Well, okay,” Runciter said, looking preoccupied; he was probably already reading the next name on his list. “Goodbye, Mrs. Jackson.” He rang off.

That was a strange dream, she thought as she hastily unbuttoned her pajamas and hurried back into the bedroom for her clothes. What did Bill and Matt say that poetry was from?
Richard the Third
, she remembered, seeing in her mind once more their flat, big teeth, their unformed, knoblike, identical heads with tufts of reddish hair growing from them like patches of weeds. I don’t think I’ve ever read
Richard the Third
, she realized. Or, if I did, it must have been years ago, when I was a child.

How can you dream lines of poetry you don’t know? she asked herself. Maybe an actual nondream telepath was getting at me while I slept. Or a telepath and a precog working together, the way I saw them in my dream. It might be a good idea to ask our research department whether Hollis does, by any remote chance, employ a brother team named Matt and Bill.

Puzzled and uneasy, she began as quickly as possible to dress.

Lighting a green all-Havana Cuesta-Rey palma-supreme, Glen Runciter leaned back in his noble chair, pressed a button of his intercom and said, “Make out a bounty check, Mrs. Frick. Payable to G. G. Ashwood, for one-hundred poscreds.”

“Yes, Mr. Runciter.”

He watched G. G. Ashwood, who paced with manic restlessness about the big office with its genuine hardwood floor against which G.G.’s feet clacked irritatingly. “Joe Chip can’t seem to tell me what she does,” Runciter said.

“Joe Chip is a grunk,” G.G. said.

“How come she, this Pat, can travel back into time, and no one else can? I’ll bet this talent isn’t new; you scouts probably just missed noticing it up until now. Anyhow, it’s not logical for a prudence organization to hire her; it’s a talent, not an anti-talent. We deal in—”

“As I explained, and as Joe indicated on the test report, it aborts the precogs out of business.”

“But that’s only a side-effect.” Runciter pondered moodily. “Joe thinks she’s dangerous. I don’t know why.”

“Did you ask him why?”

Runciter said, “He mumbled, the way he always does. Joe never has reasons, just hunches. On the other hand, he wants to include her in the Mick operation.” He shuffled through, rooted among and rearranged the personnel-department documents before him on his desk. “Ask Joe to come in here so we can see if we’ve got our group of eleven set up.” He examined his watch. “They should be arriving about now. I’m going to tell Joe to his face that he’s crazy to include this Pat Conley girl if she’s so dangerous. Wouldn’t you say, G.G.?”

G. G. Ashwood said, “He’s got a thing going with her.”

“What sort of thing?”

“A sexual understanding.”

“Joe has no sexual understanding. Nina Freede read his mind the other day and he’s too poor even to—” He broke off, because the office door had opened; Mrs. Frick teetered her way in carrying G.G.’s bounty check for him to sign. “I know why he wants her along on the Mick operation,” Runciter said as he scratched his signature on the check. “So he can keep an eye on her. He’s going too; he’s going to measure the psi field despite what the client stipulated. We have to know what we’re up against. Thank you, Mrs. Frick.” He waved her away and held the check out to G. G. Ashwood. “Suppose we don’t measure the psi field and it turns out to be too intense for our inertials. Who gets blamed?”

“We do,” G.G. said.

“I told them eleven wasn’t enough. We’re supplying our best; we’re doing the best we can. After all, getting Stanton Mick’s patronage is a matter of great importance to us. Amazing, that someone as wealthy and powerful as Mick could be so short-sighted, so goddam miserly. Mrs. Frick, is Joe out there? Joe Chip?”

Mrs. Frick said, “Mr. Chip is in the outer office with a number of other people.”

“How many other people, Mrs. Frick? Ten or eleven?”

“I’d say about that many, Mr. Runciter. Give or take one or two.”

To G. G. Ashwood, Runciter said, “That’s the group. I want to see them, all of them, together. Before they leave for Luna.” To Mrs. Frick he said, “Send them in.” He puffed vigorously on his green-wrapped cigar.

She gyrated out.

“We know,” Runciter said to G.G., “that as individuals they perform well. It’s all down here on paper.” He rattled the documents on his desk. “But how about together? How great a polyencephalic counter-field will they generate together? Ask yourself that, G.G. That is the question to ask.”

“I guess time will tell,” G. G. Ashwood said.

“I’ve been in this business a long time,” Runciter said. From the outer office people began to file in. “This is my contribution to contemporary civilization.”

“That puts it well,” G.G. said. “You’re a policeman guarding human privacy.”

“You know what Ray Hollis says about us?” Runciter said. “He says we’re trying to turn the clock back.” He eyed the individuals who had begun to fill up his office; they gathered near one another, none of them speaking. They waited for him. What an ill-assorted bunch, he thought pessimistically. A young stringbean of a girl with glasses and straight lemon-yellow hair, wearing a cowboy hat, black lace mantilla and Bermuda shorts; that would be Edie Dorn. A good-looking, older, dark woman with tricky, deranged eyes who wore a silk sari and nylon obi and bobby socks; Francy something, a part-time schizophrenic who imagined that sentient beings from Betelgeuse occasionally landed on the roof of her conapt building. A woolly-haired adolescent boy wrapped in a superior and cynical cloud of pride, this one, in a floral mumu and Spandex bloomers, Runciter had never encountered before. And so it went: five females and—he counted—five males. Someone was missing.

Ahead of Joe Chip the smoldering, brooding girl, Patricia Conley, entered. That made the eleventh; the group had all appeared.

“You made good time, Mrs. Jackson,” he said to the mannish, thirtyish, sand-colored lady wearing ersatz vicuna trousers and a gray sweatshirt on which had been printed a now faded full-face portrait of Bertrand Lord Russell. “You had less time than anybody else, inasmuch as I notified you last.”

Tippy Jackson smiled a bloodless, sand-colored smile.

“Some of you I know,” Runciter said, rising from his chair and indicating with his hands that they should find chairs and make themselves comfortable, smoking if necessary. “You, Miss Dorn; Mr. Chip and I chose you first because of your topnotch activity vis-à-vis S. Dole Melipone, whom you eventually lost through no fault of your own.”

“Thank you, Mr. Runciter,” Edie Dorn said in a wispy, shy trickle of a voice; she blushed and stared wide-eyed at the far wall. “It’s good to be a part of this new undertaking,” she added with undernourished conviction.

“Which one of you is Al Hammond?” Runciter asked, consulting his documents.

An excessively tall, stoop-shouldered Negro with a gentle expression on his elongated face made a motion to indicate himself.

“I’ve never met you before,” Runciter said, reading the material from Al Hammond’s file. “You rate highest among our anti-precogs. I should, of course, have gotten around to meeting you. How many of the rest of you are anti-precog?” Three additional hands appeared. “The four of you,” Runciter said, “will undoubtedly get a great bloop out of meeting and working with G. G. Ashwood’s most recent discovery, who aborts precogs on a new basis. Perhaps Miss Conley herself will describe it to us.” He nodded toward Pat—

And found himself standing before a shop window on Fifth Avenue, a rare-coin shop; he was studying an uncirculated U.S. gold dollar and wondering if he could afford to add it to his collection.

What collection? he asked himself, startled. I don’t collect coins. What am I doing here? And how long have I been wandering around window-shopping when I ought to be in my office supervising—he could not remember what he generally supervised; a business of some kind, dealing in people with abilities, special talents. He shut his eyes, trying to focus his mind. No, I had to give that up, he realized. Because of a coronary last year, I had to retire. But I was just there, he remembered. Only a few seconds ago. In my office. Talking to a group of people about a new project. He shut his eyes. It’s gone, he thought dazedly. Everything I built up.

When he opened his eyes he found himself back in his office; he faced G. G. Ashwood, Joe Chip and a dark, intensely attractive girl whose name he did not recall. Other than that his office was empty, which for reasons he did not understand struck him as strange.

“Mr. Runciter,” Joe Chip said, “I’d like you to meet Patricia Conley.”

The girl said, “How nice to be introduced to you at last, Mr. Runciter.” She laughed and her eyes flashed exultantly. Runciter did not know why.

Joe Chip realized,
She’s been doing something
. “Pat,” he said aloud, “I can’t put my finger on it but things are different.” He gazed wonderingly around the office; it appeared as it had always: too loud a carpet, too many unrelated art objects, on the walls original pictures of no artistic merit whatever. Glen Runciter had not changed; shaggy and gray, his face wrinkled broodingly, he returned Joe’s stare—he too seemed perplexed. Over by the window G. G. Ashwood, wearing his customary natty birch-bark pantaloons, hemprope belt, peekaboo see-through top and train-engineer’s tall hat, shrugged indifferently. He, obviously, saw nothing wrong.

“Nothing is different,” Pat said.

“
Everything
is different,” Joe said to her. “You must have gone back into time and put us on a different track; I can’t prove it and I can’t specify the nature of the changes—”

“No domestic quarreling on my time,” Runciter said frowningly.

Joe, taken aback, said, “ ‘Domestic quarreling’?” He saw, then, on Pat’s finger the ring: wrought-silver and jade; he remembered helping her pick it out. Two days, he thought, before we got married. That was over a year ago, despite how bad off I was financially. That, of course, is changed now; Pat, with her salary and her money-minding propensity, fixed that. For all time.

“Anyhow, to continue,” Runciter said. “We must each of us ask ourselves why Stanton Mick took his business to a prudence organization other than ours. Logically, we should have gotten the contract; we’re the finest in the business and we’re located in New York, where Mick generally prefers to deal. Do you have any theory, Mrs. Chip?” He looked hopefully in Pat’s direction.