Ubik

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 De

“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 De

“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 De

De

“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, De

“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,” De

“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.

De

“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 De

“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 De

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 De

“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.

Chapter 13

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Darkness hummed about him, clinging to him like coagulated, damp, warm wool. The terror he had felt as intimation fused with the darkness became whole and real. I wasn’t careful, he realized. I didn’t do what Runciter told me to do; I let her see the citation.

“What’s the matter, Joe?” Don De

“I’m okay.” He could see a little now; the darkness had grown horizontal lines of gray, as if it had begun to decompose. “I just feel tired,” he said, and realized how really tired his body had become. He could not remember such fatigue. Never before in his life.

Don De

“I’m okay,” he repeated. The shape of De

To Pat, Don De

“She didn’t do anything to me,” Joe said, trying to make his voice firm. But it dipped shrilly, with u

“That’s right,” Pat said. “I didn’t do anything to him or to anybody else.”

Joe said, “I want to go upstairs and lie down.”

“I’ll get you a room,” Don De

“Anything I can do for you?” Pat asked pleasantly.

“No,” he said. It took vast effort, saying the word aloud; it clung to the internal cavern lodged in his heart, a hollowness which grew with each second. “A cigarette, maybe,” he said, and saying the full sentence exhausted him; he felt his heart labor. The difficult beating increased his burden; it was a further weight pressing down on him, a huge hand squeezing. “Do you have one?” he said, and managed to look up at her through the smoky red light. The fitful, flickering glow of an unrobust reality.

“Sorry,” Pat said. “No got.”

Joe said, “What’s—the matter with me?”

“Cardiac arrest, maybe,” Pat said.

“Do you think there’s a hotel doctor?” he managed to say.

“I doubt it.”

“You won’t see? You won’t look?”

Pat said, “I think it’s merely psychosomatic. You’re not really sick. You’ll recover.”

Returning, Don De