Philip Dick - Ubik

“He and only he,” Joe interrupted. “Instead of ‘him’; you said ‘him.’ ”

“I’m sick,” Al said. He started water running in the basin, began splashing it onto his face. It was not hot water, however, Joe saw; in the water fragments of ice crackled and splintered. “You go back to the conference room. I’ll be along when I feel better, assuming I ever do feel better.”

“I think I ought to stay here with you,” Joe said.

“No, goddam it—get out of here!” His face gray and filled with panic, Al shoved him toward the door of the men’s room; he propelled Joe out into the corridor. “Go on, make sure they’re all right!” Al retreated back into the men’s room, clutching at his own eyes; bent over, he disappeared from view as the door swung shut.

Joe hesitated. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll be in the conference room with them.” He waited, listening; heard nothing. “Al?” he said. Christ , he thought. This is terrible. Something is really the matter with him. “I want to see with my own eyes,” he said, pushing against the door, “that you’re all right.”

In a low, calm voice Al said, “It’s too late, Joe. Don’t look.” The men’s room had become dark; Al evidently had managed to turn the light off. “You can’t do anything to help me,” he said in a weak but steady voice. “We shouldn’t have separated from the others; that’s why it happened to Wendy. You can stay alive at least for a while if you go find them and stick with them. Tell them that; make sure all of them understand. Do you understand?”

Joe reached for the light switch.

A blow, feeble and weightless, cuffed his hand in the darkness; terrified, he withdrew his hand, shocked by the impotence of Al’s punch. It told him everything. He no longer needed to see.

“I’ll go join the others,” he said. “Yes, I understand. Does it feel very bad?”

Silence, and then a listless voice whispered, “No, it doesn’t feel very bad. I just—” The voice faded out. Once more only silence.

“Maybe I’ll see you again sometime,” Joe said. He knew it was the wrong thing to say—it horrified him to hear himself prattle out such an inanity. But it was the best he could do. “Let me put it another way,” he said, but he knew Al could no longer hear him. “I hope you feel better,” he said. “I’ll check back after I tell them about the writing on the wall in there. I’ll tell them not to come in here and look at it because it might—” He tried to think it out, to say it right. “They might bother you,” he finished.

No response.

“Well, so long,” Joe said, and left the darkness of the men’s room. He walked unsteadily down the corridor, back to the conference room; halting a moment he took a deep, irregular breath and then pushed open the conference-room door.

The TV set mounted in the far wall blared out a detergent commercial; on the great color 3-D screen a housewife critically examined a synthetic otter-pelt towel and in a penetrating, shrill voice declared it unfit to occupy a place in her bathroom. The screen then displayed her bathroom—and picked up graffiti on her bathroom wall too. The same familiar scrawl, this time reading:

LEAN OVER THE BOWL

AND THEN TAKE A DIVE.

ALL OF YOU ARE DEAD.

I AM ALIVE.

Only one person in the big conference room watched, however. Joe stood alone in an otherwise empty room. The others, the entire group of them, had gone.

He wondered where they were. And if he would live long enough to find them. It did not seem likely.

The television announcer said, “And now back to Jim Hunter and the news.”

On the screen the sunny, hairless face of the newscaster appeared. “Glen Runciter came back today to the place of his birth, but it was not the kind of return which gladdened anyone’s heart. Yesterday tragedy struck at Runciter Associates , probably the best-known of Earth’s many prudence organizations. In a terrorist blast at an undisclosed subsurface installation on Luna, Glen Runciter was mortally wounded and died before his remains could be transferred to cold-pac. Brought to the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in Zurich, every effort was made to revive Runciter to half-life, but in vain. In acknowledgment of defeat these efforts have now ceased, and the body of Glen Runciter has been returned here to Des Moines, where it will lie in state at the Simple Shepherd Mortuary .”

The screen showed an old-fashioned white wooden building, with various persons roaming about outside.

I wonder who authorized the transfer to Des Moines, Joe Chip said to himself.

“It was the sad but inexorably dictated decision by the wife of Glen Runciter,” the newscaster’s voice continued, “which brought about this final chapter which we are now viewing. Mrs. Ella Runciter, herself in cold-pac, whom it had been hoped her husband would join—revived to face this calamity. Mrs. Runciter learned this morning of the fate which had overtaken her husband, and gave the decision to abandon efforts to awaken belated half-life in the man whom she had expected to merge with, a hope disappointed by reality.” A still photo of Ella, taken during her lifetime, appeared briefly on the TV screen. “In solemn ritual,” the newscaster continued, “grieving employees of Runciter Associates assembled in the chapel of the Simple Shepherd Mortuary , preparing themselves as best they could, under the circumstances, to pay last respects.”

The screen now showed the roof field of the mortuary; a parked upended ship opened its hatch and men and women emerged. A microphone, extended by newsmen, halted them.

“Tell me, sir,” a newsmanish voice said, “in addition to working for Glen Runciter, did you and these other employees also know him personally? Know him not as a boss but as a man?”

Blinking like a light-blinded owl, Don Denny said into the extended microphone, “We all knew Glen Runciter as a man. As a good individual and citizen whom we could trust. I know I speak for the others when I say this.”

“Are all of Mr. Runciter’s employees, or perhaps I should say former employees, here, Mr. Denny?”

“Many of us are here,” Don Denny said. “Mr. Len Niggelman, Prudence Society chairman, approached us in New York and informed us that he had heard of Glen Runciter’s death. He informed us that the body of the deceased was being brought here to Des Moines, and he said we ought to come here, and we agreed, so he brought us in his ship. This is his ship.” Denny indicated the ship out of which he and the others had stepped. “We appreciated him notifying us of the change of location from the moratorium in Zurich to the mortuary here. Several of us are not here, however, because they weren’t at the firm’s New York offices; I refer in particular to inertials Al Hammond and Wendy Wright and the firm’s field tester, Mr. Chip. The whereabouts of the three of them is unknown to us, but perhaps along with—”

“Yes,” the news announcer with the microphone said. “Perhaps they will see this telecast, which is being beamed by satellite over all of Earth, and will come here to Des Moines for this tragic occasion, as I am sure—and as you undoubtedly are sure—Mr. Runciter and also Mrs. Runciter would want them to. And now back to Jim Hunter at news-room central.”

Jim Hunter, reappearing on the screen, said, “Ray Hollis, whose psionically talented personnel are the object of inertial nullification and hence the target of the prudence organizations, said today in a statement released by his office that he regretted the accidental death of Glen Runciter and would if possible attend the funeral services in Des Moines, It may be, however, that Len Niggelman, representing the Prudence Society (as we told you earlier), will ask that he be barred in view of the implication on the part of some prudence-organization spokesmen that Hollis originally reacted to news of Runciter’s death with ill-disguised relief.” Newscaster Hunter paused, picked up a sheet of paper and said, “Turning now to other news—”