Ubik Read online

  Carefully carrying the spray can of Ubik, Joe Chip walked out to greet the evening traffic, searching for a cab.

  Under a streetlight he held up the spray can of Ubik, read the printing on the label.

  I THINK HER NAME IS MYRA LANEY.

  LOOK ON REVERSE SIDE OF CONTAINER

  FOR ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER.

  “Thanks,” Joe said to the spray can. We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart. And of all of them, he thought, thanks to Glen Runciter. In particular. The writer of instructions, labels and notes. Valuable notes.

  He raised his arm to slow to a grumpy halt a passing 1936 Graham cab.

  SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

  Glen Runciter could not find the moratorium owner.

  “Are you sure you don’t know where he is?” Runciter asked Miss Beason, the moratorium owner’s secretary. “It’s essential that I talk to Ella again.”

  “I’ll have her brought out,” Miss Beason said. “You may use office 4-B; please wait there, Mr. Runciter; I will have your wife for you in a very short time. Try to make yourself comfortable.”

  Locating office 4-B, Runciter paced about restlessly. At last a moratorium attendant appeared, wheeling in Ella’s casket on a handtruck. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” the attendant said; he began at once to set up the electronic communing mechanism, humming happily as he worked.

  In short order the task was completed. The attendant checked the circuit one last time, nodded in satisfaction, then started to leave the office.

  “This is for you,” Runciter said, and handed him several fifty-cent pieces which he had scrounged from his various pockets. “I appreciate the rapidity with which you accomplished the job.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Runciter,” the attendant said. He glanced at the coins, then frowned. “What kind of money is this?” he said.

  Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces. He saw at once what the attendant meant; very definitely, the coins were not as they should be. Whose profile is this? he asked himself. Who’s this on all three coins? Not the right person at all. And yet he’s familiar. I know him.

  And then he recognized the profile. I wonder what this means, he asked himself. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most things in life eventually can be explained. But—Joe Chip on a fifty-cent piece?

  It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen.

  He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.

  This was just the beginning.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952 he began writing professionally and proceeded to write thirty-six novels and five short story collections. He won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died of heart failure following a stroke on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California.

  ALSO BY PHILIP K. DICK,

  AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE BOOKS

  Confessions of a Crap Artist

  The Divine Invasion

  The Game-Players of Titan

  A Scanner Darkly

  The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

  The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

  Ubik

  VALIS

  First Vintage Books Edition, December 1991

  Copyright © 1969 by Philip K. Dick

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a

  division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in

  Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Originally published by Doubleday & Company, Inc.,

  New York, in 1969.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dick, Philip K.

  Ubik / Philip K. Dick.—1st Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3554.I3U24 1991

  813'.54—dc20 91-50097

  CIP

  For information about the Philip K. Dick Society, write to:

  PKDS, Box 611, Glen Ellen, CA 95442.

  Please visit our website at www.vintagebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-4000-9572-8

  v3.0