Philip Dick - Ubik

“Who are you?” Joe said.

The boy’s fingers writhed, a twitch protecting him evidently from a stammer. “Sometimes I call myself Matt, and sometimes Bill,” he said. “But mostly I’m Jory. That’s my real name—Jory.” Gray, shabby teeth showed as he spoke. And a grubby tongue.

After an interval Joe said, “Where’s Denny? He never came into this room, did he?” Dead, he thought, with the others.

“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.”

Joe said, “How do you mean ‘ate’?” Literally? he wondered, his flesh undulating with aversion; the gross physical motion rolled through him, engulfing him, as if his body wanted to shrink away. However, he managed more or less to conceal it.

“I did what I do,” Jory said. “It’s hard to explain, but I’ve been doing it a long time to lots of half-life people. I eat their life, what remains of it. There’s very little in each person, so I need a lot of them. I used to wait until they had been in half-life awhile, but now I have to have them immediately. If I’m going to be able to live myself. 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.” With his fingernail he picked at an upper incisor, his head tilted on one side as he regarded Joe, evidently waiting to hear his reaction. “Don’t you have anything to say?” he said.

“It was you who started me dying, down there in the lobby.”

“Me and not Pat. I ate her out in the hall by the elevator, and then I ate the others. I thought you were dead.” He rotated the can of Ubik, which he still held. “I can’t figure this out. What’s in it, and where does Runciter get it?” He scowled. “But Runciter can’t be doing it; you’re right. He’s on the outside. This originates from within our environment. It has to, because nothing can come in from outside except words.”

Joe said, “So there’s nothing you can do to me. You can’t eat me because of the Ubik.”

“I can’t eat you for a while. But the Ubik will wear off.”

“You don’t know that; you don’t even know what it is or where it comes from.” I wonder if I can kill you, he thought. The boy Jory seemed delicate. This is the thing that got Wendy, he said to himself. I’m seeing it face to face, as I knew I eventually would. Wendy, Al, the real Don Denny—all the rest of them. It even ate Runciter’s corpse as it lay in the casket at the mortuary; there must have been a flicker of residual protophasic activity in or near it, or something, anyhow, which attracted him.

The doctor said, “Mr. Chip, I didn’t have a chance to finish taking your blood pressure. Please lie back down.”

Joe stared at him, then said, “Didn’t he see you change, Jory? Hasn’t he heard what you’ve been saying?”

“Dr. Taylor is a product of my mind,” Jory said. “Like every other fixture in this pseudo world.”

“I don’t believe it,” Joe said. To the doctor he said, “You heard what he’s been saying, didn’t you?”

With a hollow whistling pop the doctor disappeared.

“See?” Jory said, pleased.

“What are you going to do when I’m killed off?” Joe asked the boy. “Will you keep on maintaining this 1939 world, this pseudo world, as you call it?”

“Of course not. There’d be no reason to.”

“Then it’s all for me, just for me. This entire world.”

Jory said, “It’s not very large. One hotel in Des Moines. And a street outside the window with a few people and cars. And maybe a couple of other buildings thrown in: stores across the street for you to look at when you happen to see out.”

“So you’re not maintaining any New York or Zurich or—”

“Why should I? No one’s there. Wherever you and the others of the group went, I constructed a tangible reality corresponding to their minimal expectations. When you flew here from New York I created hundreds of miles of countryside, town after town—I found that very exhausting. I had to eat a great deal to make up for that. In fact, that’s the reason I had to finish off the others so soon after you got here. I needed to replenish myself.”

Joe said, “Why 1939? Why not our own contemporary world, 1992?”

“The effort; I can’t keep objects from regressing. Doing it all alone, it was too much for me. I created 1992 at first, but then things began to break down. The coins, the cream, the cigarettes—all those phenomena that you noticed. And then Runciter kept breaking through from outside; that made it even harder for me. Actually, it would have been better if he hadn’t interfered.” Jory grinned slyly. “But I didn’t worry about the reversion. I knew you’d figure it was Pat Conley. It would seem like her talent because it’s sort of like what her talent does. I thought maybe the rest of you would kill her. I would enjoy that.” His grin increased.

“What’s the point of keeping this hotel and the street outside going for me now?” Joe said. “Now that I know?”

“But I always do it this way.” Jory’s eyes widened.

Joe said, “I’m going to kill you.” He stepped toward Jory in an uncoordinated half-falling motion. Raising his open hands he plunged against the boy, trying to capture the neck, searching for the bent pipestem windpipe with all his fingers.

Snarling, Jory bit him. The great shovel teeth fastened deep into Joe’s right hand. They hung on as, meanwhile, Jory raised his head, lifting Joe’s hand with his jaw; Jory stared at him with unwinking eyes, snoring wetly as he tried to close his jaws. The teeth sank deeper and Joe felt the pain of it throughout him. He’s eating me, he realized. “You can’t,” he said aloud; he hit Jory on the snout, punching again and again. “The Ubik keeps you away,” he said as he cuffed Jory’s jeering eyes. “You can’t do it to me.”

“Gahm grau,” Jory bubbled, working his jaws sideways like a sheep’s, grinding Joe’s hand until the pain became too much for Joe to stand. He kicked Jory. The teeth released his hand; he crept backward, looking at the blood rising from the punctures made by the troll teeth. Jesus, he said to himself, appalled.

“You can’t do to me,” Joe said, “what you did to them.” Locating the spray can of Ubik, he pointed the nozzle toward the bleeding wound which his hand had become. He pressed the red plastic stud and a weak stream of particles emerged and settled in a film over the chewed, torn flesh. The pain immediately departed. Before his eyes the wound healed.

“And you can’t kill me,” Jory said. He still grinned.

Joe said, “I’m going downstairs.” He walked unsteadily to the door of the room and opened it. Outside lay the dingy hall; he started forward, step by step, treading carefully. The floor, however, seemed substantial. Not a quasi- or unreal world at all.

“Don’t go too far,” Jory said from behind him. “I can’t keep too great an area going. Like, if you were to get into one of those cars and drive for miles… eventually you’d reach a point where it breaks down. And you wouldn’t like that any better than I do.”

“I don’t see what I have to lose.” Joe reached the elevator, pressed the down button.

Jory called after him, “I have trouble with elevators. They’re complicated. Maybe you should take the stairs.”

After waiting a little longer, Joe gave up; as Jory had advised, he descended by the stairs—the same flight up which he had so recently come, step by step, in an agony of effort.

Well, he thought, that’s one of the two agencies who’re at work; Jory is the one who’s destroying us—has destroyed us, except for me. Behind Jory there is nothing; he is the end. Will I meet the other? Probably not soon enough for it to matter, he decided. He looked once more at his hand. Completely well.