The needle had passed two now; it hovered above one, then plunged down firmly. The doors slid aside.
Joe saw the grill of the cage, the latticework. He saw the uniformed attendant, seated on a stool, his hand on the rotating control. “Going up,” the attendant said. “Move to the back, please.”
“I’m not going to get into it,” Joe said.
“Why not?” Pat said. “Do you think the cable will break? Is that what frightens you? I can see you’re frightened.”
“This is what Al saw,” he said.
“Well, Joe,” Pat said, “the only other way up to your room is the stairs. And you aren’t going to be able to climb stairs, not in your condition.”
“I’ll go up by the stairs.” He started away, seeking to locate the stairs. I can’t see! he said to himself. I can’t find them! The weight on him crushed his lungs, making it difficult and painful to breathe; he had to halt, concentrating on getting air into him—that alone. Maybe it is a heart attack, he thought. I can’t go up the stairs if it is. But the longing within him had grown even greater, the overpowering need to be alone. Locked in an empty room, entirely unwitnessed, silent and supine. Stretched out, not needing to speak, not needing to move. Not required to cope with anyone or any problem. And no one will even know where I am, he told himself. That seemed, unaccountably, very important; he wanted to be unknown and invisible, to live unseen. Pat especially, he thought; not her; she can’t be near me.
“There we are,” Pat said. She guided him, turning him slightly to the left. “Right in front of you. Just take hold of the railing and go bump-de-bump upstairs to bed. See?” She ascended skillfully, dancing and twinkling, poising herself, then scrambling weightlessly to the next step. “Can you make it?”
Joe said, “I—don’t want you. To come with me.”
“Oh, dear.” She clucked-clucked with mock dolefulness; her black eyes shone. “Are you afraid I’ll take advantage of your condition? Do something to you, something harmful?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I—just want. To be. Alone.” Gripping the rail, he managed to pull himself up onto the first step. Halting there, he gazed up, trying to make out the top of the flight. Trying to determine how far away it was, how many steps he had left.
“Mr. Denny asked me to stay with you. I can read to you or get you things. I can wait on you.”
He climbed another step. “Alone,” he gasped.
Pat said, “May I watch you climb? I’d like to see how long it takes you. Assuming you make it at all.”
“I’ll make it.” He placed his foot on the next step, gripped the railing and hoisted himself up. His swollen heart choked off his throat; he shut his eyes and wheezed in strangled air.
“I wonder,” Pat said, “if this is what Wendy did. She was the first; right?”
Joe gasped, “I was. In love with. Her.”
“Oh, I know. G. G. Ashwood told me. He read your mind. G.G and I got to be very good friends; we spent a lot of time together. You might say we had an affair. Yes, you could say that.”
“Our theory,” Joe said, “was right.” He took a deeper breath. “One,” he succeeded in saying; he ascended another step and then, with tremendous effort, another. “That you and G.G. Worked it out with Ray Hollis. To infiltrate.”
“Quite right,” Pat agreed.
“Our best inertials. And Runciter. Wipe us all out.” He made his way up one more step. “We’re not in half-life. We’re not—”
“Oh, you can die,” Pat said. “You’re not dead; not you, in particular, I mean. But you are dying off one by one. But why talk about it? Why bring it up again? You said it all a little while ago, and frankly, you bore me, going over it again and again. You’re really a very dull, pedantic person, Joe. Almost as dull as Wendy Wright. You two would have made a good pair.”
“That’s why Wendy died first,” he said. “Not because she had separated. From the group. But because—” He cringed as the pain in his heart throbbed up violently; he had tried for another step, but this time he had missed. He stumbled, then found himself seated, huddled like—yes, he thought. Wendy in the closet: huddled like this. Reaching out his hand, he took hold of the sleeve of his coat. He tugged.
The fabric tore. Dried and starved, the material parted like cheap gray paper; it had no strength…like something fashioned by wasps. So there was no doubt about it. He would soon be leaving a trail behind him, bits of crumbled cloth. A trail of debris leading to a hotel room and yearned-for isolation. His last labored actions governed by a tropism. An orientation urging him toward death, decay and nonbeing. A dismal alchemy controlled him: culminating in the grave.
He ascended another step.
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 Zürich. 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. Hi
s bones seemed almost to quake. Worse than on Luna, far worse. Worse, too, than the chill which had hung over his hotel room in Zürich. 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.
Pat said briskly, “I’ll get it for you.” Darting by him she scooped up the key, held it to the light to examine it, then laid it at the top of the flight of stairs, on the railing. “Right up here,” she said, “where you can reach it when you’re through climbing. Your reward. The room, I think, is to the left, about four doors down the hall. You’ll have to move slowly, but it’ll be a lot easier once you’re off the stairs. Once you don’t have to climb.”
“I can see,” he said. “The key. And the top. I can see the top of the stairs.” With both arms grasping the bannister he dragged himself upward, ascended three steps in one agonizing expenditure of himself. He felt it deplete him; the weight on him grew, the cold grew, and the substantiality of himself waned. But—
He had reached the top.
“Goodby, Joe,” Pat said. She hovered over him, kneeling slightly so that he could see her face. “You don’t want Don Denny bursting in, do you? A doctor won’t be able to help you. So I’ll tell him that I got the hotel people to call a cab and that you’re on your way across town to a hospital. That way you won’t be bothered. You can be entirely by yourself. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Here’s the key.” She pushed the cold metal thing into his hand, closed his fingers about it. “Keep your chin up, as they say here in ’39. Don’t take any wooden nickels. They say that too.” She slipped away then, onto her feet; for an instant she stood there, scrutinizing him, and then she darted off down the hall to the elevator. He saw her press the button, wait; he saw the doors slide open, and then Pat disappeared.
Gripping the key he rose lurchingly to a crouched position; he balanced himself against the far wall of the corridor, then turned to the left and began to walk step by step, still supporting himself by means of the wall. Darkness, he thought. It isn’t lit. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them, blinked. Sweat from his face still blinded him, still stung; he could not tell if the corridor were genuinely dark or whether his power of sight was fading out.
By the time he reached the first door he had been reduced to crawling; he tilted his head up, sought for the number on the door. No, not this one. He crept on.
When he found the proper door he had to stand erect, propped up, to insert the key in the lock. The effort finished him. The key still in his hand, he fell; his head struck the door and he flopped back onto the dust-choked carpet, smelling the odor of age and wear and frigid death. I can’t get in the room, he realized. I can’t stand up any more.
But he had to. Out here he could be seen.
Gripping the knob with both hands he tugged himself onto his feet one more time. He rested his weight entirely against the door as he tremblingly poked the key in the direction of the knob and the lock; this way, once he had turned the key, the door would fall open and he would be inside. And then, he thought, if I can close the door after me and if I can get to the bed, it’ll be over.
The lock grated. The metal unit hauled itself back. The door opened and he pitched forward, arms extended. The floor rose toward him and he made out shapes in the carpet, swirls and designs and floral entities in red and gold, but worn into roughness and lusterlessness; the colors had dimmed, and as he struck the floor, feeling little if any pain, he thought, This is very old, this room. When this place was first built they probably did use an open iron cage for an elevator. So I saw the actual elevator, he said to himself, the authentic, original one.
He lay for a time, and then, as if called, summoned into motion, stirred. He lifted himself up onto his knees, placed his hands flat before him…my hands, he thought; good god. Parchment hands, yellow and knobby, like the ass of a cooked, dry turkey. Bristly skin, not like human skin; pinfeathers, as if I’ve devolved back millions of years to something that flies and coasts, using its skin as a sail.
Opening his eyes, he searched for the bed; he strove to identify it. The fat far window, admitting gray light through its web of curtains. A vanity table, ugly, with lank legs. Then the bed, with brass knobs capping its railed sides, bent and irregular, as if years of use had twisted the railings, warped the varnished wooden headboards. I want to get on it even so, he said to himself; he reached toward it, slid and dragged himself farther into the room.
And saw then a figure seated in an overstuffed chair, facing him. A spectator who had made no sound but who now stood up and came rapidly toward him.
Glen Runciter.
“I couldn’t help you climb the stairs,” Runciter said, his heavy face stern. “She would have seen me. Matter of fact, I was afraid she’d come all the way into the room with you, and then we’d be in trouble because she—” He broke off, bent and hoisted Joe up to his feet as if Joe had no weight left in him, no remaining material constituents. “We’ll talk about that later. Here.” He carried Joe under his arm, across the room—not to the bed but to the overstuffed chair in which he himself had been sitting. “Can you hold on a few seconds longer?” Runciter asked. “I want to shut and lock the door. In case she changes her mind.”
“Yes,” Joe said.
Runciter strode in three big steps to the door, slammed it and bolted it, came at once back to Joe. Opening a drawer of the vanity table, he hastily brought out a spray can with bright stripes, balloons and lettering glorifying its shiny surfaces. “Ubik,” Runciter said, he shook the can mightily, then stood before Joe, aiming it at him. “Don’t thank me for this,” he said, and sprayed prolongedly left and right; the air flickered and shimmered, as if bright particles of light had been released, as if the sun’s energy sparkled here in this worn-out elderly hotel room. “Feel better? It should work on you right away; you should already be getting a reaction.” He eyed Joe with anxiety.
FOURTEEN
* * *
It takes more than a bag to seal in food flavor; it takes Ubik plastic wrap—actually four layers in one. Keeps freshness in, air and moisture out. Watch this simulated test.
“Do you have a cigarette?” Joe said. His voice shook, but not from weariness. Nor from cold. Both had gone. I’m tense, he said to himself. But I’m not dying. That process has been stopped by the Ubik spray.
As Runciter said it would, he remembered, in his taped TV commercial. If I could find it I would be all right; Runciter promised that. But, he thought somberly, it took a long time. And I almost didn’t get to it.
“No filter tips,” Runciter said. “They don’t have filtration devices on their cigarettes in this backward, no-good time period.??
? He held a pack of Camels toward Joe. “I’ll light it for you.” He struck a match and extended it.
“It’s fresh,” Joe said.
“Oh hell, yes. Christ, I just now bought it downstairs at the tobacco counter. We’re a long way into this. Well past the stage of clotted milk and stale cigarettes.” He grinned starkly, his eyes determined and bleak, reflecting no light. “In it,” he said, “not out of it. There’s a difference.” He lit a cigarette for himself too; leaning back, he smoked in silence, his expression still grim. And, Joe decided, tired. But not the kind of tiredness that he himself had undergone.
Joe said, “Can you help the rest of the group?”
“I have exactly one can of this Ubik. Most of it I had to use on you.” He gestured with resentment; his fingers convulsed in a tremor of unresigned anger. “My ability to alter things here is limited. I’ve done what I could.” His head jerked as he raised his eyes to glare at Joe. “I got through to you—all of you—every chance I could, every way I could. I did everything that I had the capacity to bring about. Damn little. Almost nothing.” He lapsed then into smoldering, brooding silence.
“The graffiti on the bathroom walls,” Joe said. “You wrote that we were dead and you were alive.”
“I am alive,” Runciter rasped.
“Are we dead, the rest of us?”
After a long pause, Runciter said, “Yes.”
“But in the taped TV commercial—”
“That was for the purpose of getting you to fight. To find Ubik. It made you look and you kept on looking too. I kept trying to get it to you, but you know what went wrong; she kept drawing everyone into the past—she worked on us all with that talent of hers. Over and over again she regressed it and made it worthless.” Runciter added, “Except for the fragmentary notes I managed to slip to you in conjunction with the stuff.” Urgently, he pointed his heavy, determined finger at Joe, gesturing with vigor. “Look what I’ve been up against. The same thing that got all of you, that’s killed you off one by one. Frankly, it’s amazing to me that I was able to do as much as I could.”