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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.
Medical science, he conjectured, supplies the material groundwork, and out of the authority of his mind Runciter supplies the remainder.
Again he listened, solemn and froglike, then removed the earphone and rose to his feet.
Quite a few new and potential inertials were children, having developed their ability in order to protect themselves against their psionic parents.
Reflecting, Pat said, “It seems so—negative. I don’t do anything; I don’t move objects or turn stones into bread or give birth without impregnation or reverse the illness process in sick people. Or read minds. Or look into the future—not even common talents like that. I just negate somebody else’s ability. It seems—” She gestured. “Stultifying.”
“As a survival factor for the human race,” Joe said, “it’s as useful as the psi talents. Especially for us Norms. The anti-psi factor is a natural restoration of ecological balance. One insect learns to fly, so another learns to build a web to trap him. Is that the same as no flight? Clams developed hard shells to protect them; therefore, birds learn to fly the clam up high in the air and drop him on a rock. In a sense, you’re a life form preying on the Psis, and the Psis are life forms that prey on the Norms. That makes you a friend of the Norm class. Balance, the full circle, predator and
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bothers me that people will feel hostile toward me. But I guess you can’t live very long without arousing hostility; you can’t please everybody, because people want different things. Please one and you displease another.”
“Let me explain,” Joe said, “how the anti-precog generally functions. Functions, in fact, in every case we know of. The precog sees a variety of futures, laid out side by side like cells in a beehive. For him one has greater luminosity, and this he picks. Once he has picked it the anti-precog can do nothing; the anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the
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The other—and greater—is that she can cancel out the precog’s decision after he’s made it. She can enter the situation later on, and this problem has always hung us up, as you know; if we didn’t get in there from the start we couldn’t do anything.
“When his enthusiasm goes, there isn’t much left of him.”
“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.”
“Someone,” Miss Spanish said, “just now moved us, all of us, into another world. We inhabited it, lived in it, as citizens of it, and then a vast, all-encompassing spiritual agency restored us to this, our rightful universe.”
Once, alone, he had blanked out S. Dole Melipone;
“Isn’t Walt Disney’s head supposed to be on the fifty-cent piece?” Sammy said. “Either Disney’s,” Al said, “or if it’s an older one, then Fidel Castro’s. Let’s see it.”
“That’s how graffiti is; harsh and direct.
He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.
Ubik. Ubiquity,
Perhaps this weirdly verified a discarded ancient philosophy, that of Plato’s ideal objects, the universals which, in each class, were real. The form TV set had been a template imposed as a successor to other templates, like the procession of frames in a movie sequence. Prior forms, he reflected, must carry on an invisible, residual life in every object. The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately—and against ordinary experience—vanished. The man contains—not the boy—but earlier men, he thought. History began a
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And the last form wore off, with nothing subsequent: no newer form, no next stage of what we see as growth, to take its place. This must be what we experience as old age; from this absence comes degeneration and senility.
In our time we maintain colonies on Mars, on Luna; we’re perfecting workable interstellar flight—these people have not been able to cope with the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma.
To them we’re professional agitators, more alien than the Nazis, probably even more of a menace than the Communist Party. We’re the most dangerous agitators that this time segment has yet had to deal with.
There’s a Latin word very close to it: ubique. It means—” “Everywhere,” Joe said.
His isolation, in spite of her physical presence, had become absolute.
Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force which I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe. So at least I won’t be alone.
And—there are Jorys in every moratorium. This battle goes on wherever you have half-lifers; it’s a verity, a rule, of our kind of existence.”
We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.
