Philip Dick - Ubik

With his foot Joe Chip tripped the pedal which controlled the TV set; the screen faded and the sound ebbed into silence.

This doesn’t fit in with the graffiti on the bathroom walls, Joe reflected. Maybe Runciter is dead, after all. The TV people think so. Ray Hollis thinks so. So does Len Niggelman. They all consider him dead, and all we have that says otherwise is the two rhymed couplets, which could have been scrawled by anyone—despite what Al thought.

The TV screen relit. Much to his surprise; he had not repressed the pedal switch. And in addition, it changed channels: Images flitted past, of one thing and then another, until at last the mysterious agency was satisfied. The final image remained.

The face of Glen Runciter.

“Tired of lazy tastebuds?” Runciter said in his familiar gravelly voice. “Has boiled cabbage taken over your world of food? That same old, stale, flat, Monday-morning odor no matter how many dimes you put into your stove? Ubik changes all that; Ubik wakes up food flavor, puts hearty taste back where it belongs, and restores fine food smell.” On the screen a brightly colored spray-can replaced Glen Runciter. “One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay. You see, world deterioration of this regressive type is a normal experience of many half-lifers, especially in the early stages when ties to the real reality are still very strong. A sort of lingering universe is retained as a residual charge, experienced as a pseudo environment but highly unstable and unsupported by any ergic substructure. This is particularly true when several memory systems are fused, as in the case of you people. But with today’s new, more-powerful-than-ever Ubik, all this is changed!”

Dazed, Joe seated himself, his eyes fixed on the screen; a cartoon fairy zipped airily in spirals, squirting Ubik here and there. A hard-eyed housewife with big teeth and horse’s chin replaced the cartoon fairy; in a brassy voice she bellowed, “I came over to Ubik after trying weak, out-of-date reality supports. My pots and pans were turning into heaps of rust. The floors of my conapt were sagging. My husband Charley put his foot right through the bedroom door. But now I use economical new powerful today’s Ubik, and with miraculous results. Look at this refrigerator.” On the screen appeared an antique turret-top G.E. refrigerator. “Why, it’s devolved back eighty years.”

“Sixty-two years,” Joe corrected reflexively.

“But now look at it,” the housewife continued, squirting the old turret top with her spray can of Ubik. Sparkles of magic light lit up in a nimbus surrounding the old turret top and, in a flash, a modern six-door pay refrigerator replaced it in splendid glory.

“Yes,” Runciter’s dark voice resumed, “by making use of the most advanced techniques of present-day science, the reversion of matter to earlier forms can be reversed, and at a price any conapt owner can afford. Ubik is sold by leading home-art stores throughout Earth. Do not take internally. Keep away from open flame. Do not deviate from printed procedural approaches as expressed on label. So look for it, Joe. Don’t just sit there; go out and buy a can of Ubik and spray it all around you night and day.”

Standing up, Joe said loudly, “You know I’m here. Does that mean you can hear and see me?”

“Of course, I can’t hear you and see you. This commercial message is on videotape; I recorded it two weeks ago, specifically, twelve days before my death. I knew the bomb blast was coming; I made use of precog talents.”

“Then you are really dead.”

“Of course, I’m dead. Didn’t you watch the telecast from Des Moines just now? I know you did, because my precog saw that too.”

“What about the graffiti on the men’s-room wall?”

Runciter, from the audio system of the TV set, boomed, “Another deterioration phenomenon. Go buy a can of Ubik and it’ll stop happening to you; all those things will cease.”

“Al thinks we’re dead,” Joe said.

“Al is deteriorating.” Runciter laughed, a deep, re-echoing pulsation that made the conference room vibrate. “Look, Joe, I recorded this goddam TV commercial to assist you, to guide you—you in particular because we’ve always been friends. And I knew you’d be very confused, which is exactly what you are right now, totally confused. Which isn’t very surprising, considering your usual condition. Anyhow, try to hang on; maybe once you get to Des Moines and see my body lying in state you’ll calm down.”

“What’s this ‘Ubik’?” Joe asked.

“I think, though, it’s too late to help Al.”

Joe said, “What is Ubik made of? How does it work?”

“As a matter of fact, Al probably induced the writing on the men’s-room wall. You wouldn’t have seen it except for him.”

“You really are on videotape, aren’t you?” Joe said. “You can’t hear me. It’s true.”

Runciter said, “And in addition, Al—”

“Rats,” Joe said in weary disgust. It was no use. He gave up.

The horse-jawed housewife returned to the TV screen, winding up the commercial; her voice softer now, she trilled, “If the home-art store that you patronize doesn’t yet carry Ubik, return to your conapt, Mr. Chip, and you’ll find a free sample has arrived by mail, a free introductory sample, Mr. Chip, that will keep you going until you can buy a regular-size can.” She then faded out. The TV set became opaque and silent. The process that had turned it on had turned it back off.

So I’m supposed to blame Al, Joe thought. The idea did not appeal to him; he sensed the peculiarity of the logic, its perhaps deliberate misdirectedness. Al the fall-guy; Al made into the patsy, everything explained in terms of Al. Senseless, he said to himself. And—had Runciter been able to hear him? Had Runciter only pretended to be on videotape? For a time, during the commercial, Runciter had seemed to respond to his questions; only at the end had Runciter’s words become malappropriate. He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

A new thought struck him, an eerie idea. Suppose Runciter had made the videotape recording under the assumption, based on inaccurate precog information, that the bomb blast would kill him and leave the rest of them alive. The tape had been made honestly but mistakenly; Runciter had not died: They had died, as the graffiti on the men’s-room wall had said, and Runciter still lived. Before the bomb blast he had given instructions for the taped commercial to be played at this time, and the network had so done, Runciter having failed to countermand his original order. That would explain the disparity between what Runciter had said on the tape and what he had written on the bathroom walls; it would in fact explain both. Which, as far as he could make out, no other explanation would.

Unless Runciter was playing a sardonic game with them, trifling with them, first leading them in one direction, then the other. An unnatural and gigantic force, haunting their lives. Emanating either within the living world or the half-life world; or, he thought suddenly, perhaps both . In any case, controlling what they experienced, or at least a major part of it. Perhaps not the decay, he decided. Not that. But why not? Maybe, he thought, that, too. But Runciter wouldn’t admit it. 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.