Ubik

An adolescent boy, mawkishly slender, with irregular black-button eyes beneath tangled brows. He wore an anachronistic costume: white drip-dry shirt, jeans and laceless leather slippers. Clothes from the middle of the century. On his elongated face Joe saw a smile, but it was a misshapen smile, a thwarted crease that became now almost a jeering leer. No two features matched: His ears had too many convolutions in them to fit with his chitinous eyes. His straight hair contradicted the interwoven, curly bristles of his brows. And his nose, Joe thought, too thin, too sharp, far too long. Even his chin failed to harmonize with the balance of his face; it had a deep chisel mark in it, a cleft obviously penetrating far up into the bone... Joe thought, as if at that point the manufacturer of this creature struck it a blow aimed at obliterating it. But the physical material, the base substance, had been too dense; the boy had not fractured and split apart. He existed in defiance of even the force that had constructed him; he jeered at everything else and it, too.

"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-"