Ubik

by Philip K. Dick

But with each resuscitation into active half-life, into a return of cerebral activity, however short, Ella died somewhat. The remaining time left to her pulse-phased out and ebbed.

Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.

“This isn’t gossip,” Joe Chip said to the ’pape machine. “This is speculation about fiscal transactions. Today I want to read about which TV star is sleeping with whose drug-addicted wife.”

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

“I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

One insect learns to fly, so another learns to build a web to trap him.

Joe Chip examined what he had written, not watching her. The underlined crosses did not symbolize what he had told her. They meant: Watch this person. She is a hazard to the firm. She is dangerous.

“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.”

Runciter and Ubik. Ubiquity, he realized all at once; that’s the derivation of the made-up word, the name of Runciter’s alleged spray-can product. Which probably did not even exist. It was probably a further hoax, to bewilder them that much more.

Twenty flights down, he reflected. Step by step. Impossible; no one could walk down that many stairs.

Obviously, the Ubik which he described to me in the taped TV commercial, this sample of it anyhow, has reverted.

I don’t know how to pilot an oldtime automobile, especially one with—what did they call it?—manual transmission.

Good god, he thought. Elements of this period appear to be developing corresponding coordinates in my mind. No wonder I was able to drive the LaSalle; I’m beginning to phase mentally with this time-continuum in earnest!

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.

“I’m okay.” He could see a little now; the darkness had grown horizontal lines of gray, as if it had begun to decompose.

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.

“I ate Denny a long time ago,” the boy Jory said. “Right at the beginning, before they came here from New York. First I ate Wendy Wright. Denny came second.”

If you come close to me and listen—I’ll hold my mouth open—you can hear their voices. Not all of them, but anyhow the last ones I ate. The ones you know.”

“Slow the cab,” he instructed the driver. “There, by that girl with the pigtails.” “She won’t talk to you,” the driver said. “She’ll call a cop.”

Fatigue and cold had invaded him completely; he felt his body processes begin to close down, one by one. Organs that had no future; the liver did not need to make red blood cells, the kidneys did not need to excrete wastes, the intestines no longer served any purpose. Only the heart, laboring on, and the increasingly difficult breathing; each time he drew air into his lungs he sensed the concrete block that had situated itself on his chest.

“You brought me from the future, by what you did there inside the drugstore a few moments ago. You summoned me directly from the factory.

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.

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen. He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more. This was just the beginning.