Ubik

by Philip K. Dick

His head, massive like a tomcat’s, thrust forward as he peered through slightly protruding, round and warm and highly alert eyes. Runciter

He chuckled, but it had an abstract quality; he always smiled and he always chuckled, his voice always boomed, but inside he did not notice anyone, did not care; it was his body which smiled, nodded and shook hands. Nothing touched his mind, which remained remote; aloof, but amiable, he propelled Herbert along with him, sweeping his way in great strides back into the chilled bins where the half-lifers, including his wife, lay.

“The smoky red light is bad, isn’t it?” Ella said. “Yeah, you want to avoid it.”

Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed.

It’s as if, he thought, some malicious force is playing with us, letting us scamper and twitter like debrained mice. We amuse it. Our efforts entertain it. And when we get just so far its fist will close around us and drop our squeezed remains, like Runciter’s, onto the slow-moving floor.

All I can make out, he thought, is encroaching darkness and utter loss of heat, a plain which is cooling off, abandoned by its sun.

A dismal alchemy controlled him: culminating in the grave.

the world of the tomb which a perverse entity surrounded by its own filth inhabits. The thing we call Pat.