Ubik

I'm going to make it, he realized. The force goading me on is feasting on my body; that's why Wendy and Al and Edie - and undoubtedly Zafsky by now - deteriorated physically as they died, leaving only a discarded husklike weightless shell, containing nothing, no essence, no juices, no substantial density. The force thrust itself against the weight of many gravities, and this is the cost, this using up of the waning body. But the body, as a source supply, will be enough to get me up there; a biological necessity is at work, and probably at this point not even Pat, who set it into motion, can abort it. He wondered how she felt now as she watched him climb. Did she admire him? Did she feel contempt? He raised his head, searched for her; he made her out, her vital face with its several hues. Only interest there. No malevolence. A neutral expression. He did not feel surprise. Pat had made no move to hinder him and no move to help him. It seemed right, even to him.

"Feel any better?" Pat asked.

"No," he said. And, getting halfway up, lunged onto the next step.

"You look different. Not so upset."

Joe said, "Because I can make it. I know that."

"It's not much further," Pat agreed.

"Farther," he corrected.

"You're incredible. So trivial, so small. Even in your own death spasms you-" She corrected herself, catlike and clever. "Or what probably seem subjectively to you as death spasms. I shouldn't have used that term, 'death spasms.' It might depress you. Try to be optimistic. Okay?"

"Just tell me," he said. "How many steps. Left."

"Six." She slid away from him, gliding upward noiselessly, effortlessly. "No; sorry. Ten. Or is it nine? I think it's nine."

Again he climbed a step, Then the next. And the next. He did not talk; he did not even try to see. Going by the hardness of the surface against which he rested, he crept snail-like from step to step, feeling a kind of skill develop in him, an ability to tell exactly how to exert himself, how to use his nearly bankrupt power.

"Almost there," Pat said cheerily from above him. "What do you have to say, Joe? Any comments on your great climb? The greatest climb in the history of man. No, that's not true. Wendy and Al and Edie and Fred Zafsky did it before you. But this is the only one I've actually watched."

Joe said, "Why me?"

"I want to watch you, Joe, because of your low-class little scheme back in Zurich. Of having Wendy Wright spend the night with you in your hotel room. Now, tonight, this will be different. You'll be alone."

"That night, too," Joe said, "I was. Alone." Another step. He coughed convulsively, and out of him, in drops hurled from his streaked face, his remaining capacity expelled itself uselessly.

"She was there; not in your bed but in the room somewhere. You slept through it, though." Pat laughed.

"I'm trying," Joe said. "Not to cough." He made it up two more steps and knew that he had almost reached the top. How long had he been on the stairs? he wondered. No way for him to tell.

He discovered then, with a shock, that he had become cold as well as exhausted. When had this happened? he asked himself. Sometime in the past; it had infiltrated so gradually that before now he had not noticed it. Oh, god, he said to himself and shivered frantically. His bones seemed almost to quake. Worse than on Luna, far worse. Worse, too, than the chill which had hung over his hotel room in Zurich. Those had been harbingers.

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.

"Do you have your key?" Pat asked. "To your room? Think how awful you'd feel to get up to the second floor and find you had lost your key and couldn't get into your room."

"I have it." He groped in his pockets.

His coat ripped away, tattered and in shreds; it fell from him and, from its top pocket, the key slid. It fell two steps down, below him. Beyond reach.