Ubik

by Philip K. Dick

Ella, pretty and light-skinned; her eyes, in the days when they had been open, had been bright and luminous blue. That would not again occur; he could talk to her and hear her answer; he could communicate with her . . . but he would never again see her with eyes opened; nor would her mouth move. She would not smile at his arrival. When he departed she would not cry. Is this worth it? he asked himself. Is this better than the old way, the direct road from full-life to the grave? I still do have her with me, in a sense, he decided. The alternative is nothing.

“I was dreaming,” Ella said. “I saw a smoky red light, a horrible light. And yet I kept moving toward it. I couldn’t stop.” “Yeah,” Runciter said, nodding. “The Bardo Thödol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, tells about that. You remember reading that; the doctors made you read it when you were—” He hesitated. “Dying,” he said then. “The smoky red light is bad, isn’t it?” Ella said. “Yeah, you want to avoid it.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, Ella, we’ve got problems. You feel up to hearing about it? I mean, I don’t want to overtax you or anything; just say if you’re too tired or if there’s something else you want to hear about or discuss.” “It’s so weird. I think I’ve been dreaming all this time, since you last talked to me. Is it really two years? Do you know, Glen, what I think? I think that other people who are around me—we seem to be progressively growing together. A lot of my dreams aren’t about me at all. Sometimes I’m a man and sometimes a little boy; sometimes I’m an old fat woman with varicose veins . . . and I’m in places I’ve never seen, doing things that make no sense.” “Well, like they say, you’re heading for a new womb to be born out of. And that smoky red light—that’s a bad womb; you don’t want to go that way. That’s a humiliating, low sort of womb. You’re probably anticipating your next life, or whatever it is.” He felt foolish, talking like this; normally he had no theological convictions. But the half-life experience was real and it had made theologians ou...

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To the girl, Joe Chip said, “They don’t know you have a counter-talent?” “No.” She shook her head. “I didn’t really understand it either until your scout sat down with me in the kibbutz cafeteria and told me. Maybe it’s true.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. He said you could show me objective proof of it, with your testing battery.” “How would you feel,” he asked her, “if the tests show that you have it?” 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 prey. It appears to be an eternal system; and, frankly, I can’t see how it could be improved.”

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

The TV set had receded back a long way; he found himself confronted by a dark, wood-cabinet, Atwater-Kent tuned radio-frequency oldtime AM radio, complete with antenna and ground wires. God in heaven, he said to himself, appalled. But why hadn’t the TV set reverted instead to formless metals and plastics? Those, after all, were its constituents; it had been constructed out of them, not out of an earlier radio. 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 long time ago.

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.

But he felt alone. It’s overtaking me too soon, he realized. The proper time hasn’t come; something has hurried this up—some conniving thing has accelerated it, out of malice and curiosity: a polymorphic, perverse agency which likes to watch. An infantile, retarded entity which enjoys what’s happening. It has crushed me like a bent-legged insect, he said to himself. A simple bug which does nothing but hug the earth. Which can never fly or escape. Can only descend step by step into what is deranged and foul. Into the world of the tomb which a perverse entity surrounded by its own filth inhabits. The thing we call Pat.

This is the end, isn’t it? I mean, they’re all dead; only you and I are left, and the Ubik is going to wear off you in a few hours. And you won’t be able to get any more. Which will leave me.” His decision made, Denny depressed the button of the spray can; the shimmering, palpitating vapor, filled with particles of metallic light that danced nimbly, formed at once around him. Don Denny disappeared, concealed by the nimbus of radiant, ergic excitement. Pausing in his task of reading Joe’s blood pressure, Dr. Taylor twisted his head to see. Both he and Joe watched as the vapor now condensed; puddles of it glistened on the carpet, and down the wall behind Denny it drizzled in bright streaks. The cloud concealing Denny evaporated. The person standing there, in the center of the vaporizing stain of Ubik that had saturated the worn and dingy carpet, was not Don Denny. An adolescent boy, mawkishly slender, with irregular black-button eyes beneath tangled brows. He wore an anachronistic costume: white drip-dry shirt, jeans and laceless leather slippers. Clothes from the middle of the century. On his elongated face Joe saw a smile, but it was a misshapen smile, a thwarted crease that became now almost a jeering leer. No two features matched: His ears had too many convolutions in them to fit with his chitinous eyes. His straight hair contradicted the interwoven, curly bristles of his brows. And his nose, Joe thought, too thin, too sharp, far too long. Even his chin failed to harmoni...

Carefully carrying the spray can of Ubik, Joe Chip walked out to greet the evening traffic, searching for a cab. Under a streetlight he held up the spray can of Ubik, read the printing on the label. I think her name is Myra Laney. look on reverse side of container for address and phone number. “Thanks,” Joe said to the spray can. 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. And of all of them, he thought, thanks to Glen Runciter. In particular. The writer of instructions, labels and notes. Valuable notes. He raised his arm to slow to a grumpy halt a passing 1936 Graham cab.