Ubik

Lifting an eyebrow, Runciter regarded him.

“Why use Pat Conley at all?” Joe said. He sensed, even in his weary, shaken state, something wrong. “There’s no reason for all this reversion machinery, this sinking us into a retrograde time momentum back here to 1939. It serves no purpose.”

“That’s an interesting point,” Runciter said; he nodded slowly, a frown on his rugged, stony face. “I’ll have to think about it. Give me a little while.” He walked to the window, stood gazing out at the stores across the street.

“It strikes me,” Joe said, “that what we appear to be faced with is a malignant rather than a purposeful force. Not so much someone trying to kill us or nullify us, someone trying to eliminate us from functioning as a prudence organization, but—” He pondered; he almost had it. “An irresponsible entity that’s enjoying what it’s doing to us. The way it’s killing us off one by one. It doesn’t have to prolong all this. That doesn’t sound to me like Ray Hollis; he deals in cold, practical murder. And from what I know about Stanton Mick—”

“Pat herself,” Runciter interrupted brusquely; he turned away from the window. “She’s psychologically a sadistic person. Like tearing wings off flies. Playing with us.” He watched for Joe’s reaction.

Joe said, “It sounds to me more like a child.”

“But look at Pat Conley; she’s spiteful and jealous. She got Wendy first because of emotional animosity. She followed you all the way up the stairs just now, enjoying it; gloating over it, in fact.”

“How do you know that?” Joe said. You were waiting here in this room, he said to himself; you couldn’t have seen it. And—how had Runciter known he would come to this particular room?

Letting out his breath in a ragged, noisy rush, Runciter said, “I haven’t told you all of it. As a matter of fact…” He ceased speaking, chewed his lower lip savagely, then abruptly resumed, “What I’ve said hasn’t been strictly true. I don’t hold the same relationship to this regressed world that the rest of you do; you’re absolutely right: I know too much. It’s because I enter it from outside, Joe.”

“Manifestations,” Joe said.

“Yes. Thrust down into this world, here and there. At strategic points and times. Like the traffic citation. Like Archer’s—”

“You didn’t tape that TV commercial,” Joe said. “That was live.”

Runciter, with reluctance, nodded.

“Why the difference,” Joe said, “between your situation and ours?”

“You want me to say?”

“Yes.” He prepared himself, already knowing what he would hear.

“I’m not dead, Joe. The graffiti told the truth. You’re all in cold-pac and I’m—” Runciter spoke with difficulty, not looking directly at Joe. “I’m sitting in a consultation lounge at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium. All of you are interwired, on my instructions; kept together as a group. I’m out here trying to reach you. That’s where I am when I say I’m outside; that’s why the manifestations, as you call them. For one week now I’ve been trying to get you all functioning in half-life, but—it isn’t working. You’re fading out one by one.”

After a pause Joe said, “What about Pat Conley?”

“Yeah, she’s with you; in half-life, interwired to the rest of the group.”

“Are the regressions due to her talent? Or to the normal decay of half-life?” Tensely, he waited for Runciter’s answer; everything, as he saw it, hung on this one question.

Runciter snorted, grimaced, then said hoarsely, “The normal decay. Ella experienced it. Everyone who enters half-life experiences it.”

“You’re lying to me,” Joe said. And felt a knife shear through him.

Staring at him, Runciter said, “Joe, my god, I saved your life; I broke through to you enough just now to bring you back into full half-life functioning—you’ll probably go on indefinitely now. If I hadn’t been waiting here in this hotel room when you came crawling through that door, why, hell—hey, look, goddam it; you’d be lying on that rundown bed dead as a doornail by now if it wasn’t for me. I’m Glen Runciter; I’m your boss and I’m the one fighting to save all your lives—I’m the only one out here in the real world plugging for you.” He continued to stare at Joe with heated indignation and surprise. A bewildered, injured surprise, as if he could not fathom what was happening. “That girl,” Runciter said, “that Pat Conley, she would have killed you like she killed—” He broke off.

Joe said, “Like she killed Wendy and Al, Edie Dorn, Fred Zafsky, and maybe by now Tito Apostos.”

In a low but controlled voice Runciter said, “This situation is very complex, Joe. It doesn’t admit to simple answers.”

“You don’t know the answers,” Joe said. “That’s the problem. You made up answers; you had to invent them to explain your presence here. All your presences here, your so-called manifestations.”

“I don’t call them that; you and Al worked out that name. Don’t blame me for what you two—”

“You don’t know any more than I do,” Joe said, “about what’s happening to us and who’s attacking us. Glen, you can’t say who we’re up against because you don’t know.”

Runciter said, “I know I’m alive; I know I’m sitting out here in this consultation lounge at the moratorium.”

“Your body in the coffin,” Joe said. “Here at the Simple Shepherd Mortuary. Did you look at it?”

“No,” Runciter said, “but that isn’t really—”

“It had withered,” Joe said. “Lost bulk like Wendy’s and Al’s and Edie’s—and, in a little while, mine. Exactly the same for you; no better, no worse.”

“In your case I got Ubik—” Again Runciter broke off; a difficult-to-decipher expression appeared on his face: a combination perhaps of insight, fear and—but Joe couldn’t tell. “I got you the Ubik,” he finished.

“What is Ubik?” Joe said.

There was no answer from Runciter.

“You don’t know that either,” Joe said. “You don’t know what it is or why it works. You don’t even know where it comes from.”

After a long, agonized pause, Runciter said, “You’re right, Joe. Absolutely right.” Tremulously, he lit another cigarette. “But I wanted to save your life; that part’s true. Hell, I’d like to save all your lives.” The cigarette slipped from his fingers; it dropped to the floor, rolled away. With labored effort, Runciter bent over to grope for it. On his face showed extreme and clear-cut unhappiness. Almost a despair.

“We’re in this,” Joe said, “and you’re sitting out there, out in the lounge, and you can’t do it; you can’t put a stop to the thing we’re involved in.”

“That’s right.” Runciter nodded.

“This is cold-pac,” Joe said, “but there’s something more. Something not natural to people in half-life. There are two forces at work, as Al figured out; one helping us and one destroying us. You’re working with the force or entity or person that’s trying to help us. You got the Ubik from them.”

“Yes.”

Joe said, “So none of us know even yet who it is that’s destroying us—and who it is that’s protecting us; you outside don’t know, and we in here don’t know. Maybe it’s Pat.”

“I think it is,” Runciter said. “I think there’s your enemy.”

Joe said, “Almost. But I don’t think so.” I don’t think, he said to himself, that we’ve met our enemy face to face, or our friend either.

He thought, But I think we will. Before long we will know who they both are.

“Are you sure,” he asked Runciter, “absolutely sure, that you’re beyond doubt the only one who survived the blast? Think before you answer.”

“Like I said, Zoe Wirt—”

“Of us,” Joe said. “She’s not here in this time segment with us. Pat Conley, for example.”

“Pat Conley’s chest was crushed. She died of shock and a collapsed lung, with multiple internal injuries, including a damaged liver and a leg broken in three places. Physically speaking, she’s about four feet away from you; her body, I mean.”