“I’ll sign,” Pat said, and reached for the desk pen.
CHAPTER 5.
Can’t make the frug contest, Helen; stomach’s upset. I’ll fix you Ubik! Ubik drops you back in the thick of things fast. Taken as directed, Ubik speeds relief to head and stomach. Remember: Ubik is only seconds away. Avoid prolonged use.
During the long days of forced, unnatural idleness, the anti-telepath Tippy Jackson slept regularly until noon. An electrode planted within her brain perpetually stimulated EREM – extremely rapid eye movement – sleep, so while tucked within the percale sheets of her bed she had plenty to do.
At this particular moment her artificially induced dream state centered around a mythical Hollis functionary endowed with enormous psionic powers. Every other inertial in the Sol System had either given up or been melted down into lard. By process of elimination, the task of nullifying the field generated by this supernatural entity had devolved to her.
“I can’t be myself while you’re around,” her nebulous opponent informed her. On his face a feral, hateful expression formed, giving him the appearance of a psychotic squirrel.
In her dream Tippy answered, “Perhaps your definition of your self-system lacks authentic boundaries. You’ve erected a precarious structure of personality on unconscious factors over which you have no control. That’s why you feel threatened by me.”
“Aren’t you an employee of a prudence organization?” the Hollis telepath demanded, looking nervously about.
“If you’re the stupendous talent you claim to be,” Tippy said, “you can tell that by reading my mind.”
“I can’t read anybody’s mind,” the telepath said. “My talent is gone. I’ll let you talk to my brother Bill. Here, Bill; talk to this lady. Do you like this lady?”
Bill, looking more or less like his brother the telepath, said, “I like her fine because I’m a precog and she doesn’t postscript me.” He shuffied his feet and grinned, revealing great, pale teeth, as blunt as shovels. “‘I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature-‘” He paused, wrinkling his forehead. “How does it go, Matt?” he asked his brother.
“‘-deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up,'” Matt the squirrel-like telepath said, scratching meditatively at his pelt.
“Oh, yeah.” Bill the precog nodded. “I remember. ‘And that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.’ From Richard the Third,” he explained to Tippy. Both brothers grinned. Even their incisors were blunt. As if they lived on a diet of uncooked seeds.
Tippy said, “What does that mean?”
“It means,” both Matt and Bill said in unison, “that we’re going to get you.”
The vidphone rang, waking Tippy up.
Stumbling groggily to it, confounded by floating colored bubbles, blinking, she lifted the receiver and said, “Hello.” God, it’s late, she thought, seeing the clock. I’m turning into a vegetable. Glen Runciter’s face emerged on the screen. “Hello, Mr. Runciter,” she said, standing out of sight of the phone’s scanner. “Has a job turned up for me?”
“Ah, Mrs. Jackson,” Runciter said, “I’m glad I caught you. A group is forming under Joe Chip’s and my direction; eleven in all, a major work assignment for those we choose. We’ve been examining everyone’s history. Joe thinks yours looks good, and I tend to agree. How long will it take you to get down here?” His tone seemed adequately optimistic, but on the little screen his face looked hard-pressed and careworn.
Tippy said, “For this one will I be living-”
“Yes, you’ll have to pack.” Chidingly he said, “We’re supposed to be packed and ready to go at all times; that’s a rule I don’t ever want broken, especially in a case like this where there’s a time factor.”
“I am packed. I’ll be at the New York office in fifteen minutes. All I have to do is leave a note for my husband, who’s at work.”
“Well, okay,” Runciter said, looking preoccupied; he was probably already reading the next name on his list. “Good-bye, Mrs. Jackson.” He rang off.
That was a strange dream, she thought as she hastily unbuttoned her pajamas and hurried back into the bedroom for her clothes. What did Bill and Matt say that poetry was from? Richard the Third, she remembered, seeing in her mind once more their flat, big teeth, their unformed, knob-like, identical heads with tufts of reddish hair growing from them like patches of weeds. I don’t think I’ve ever read Richard the Third, she realized. Or, if I did, it must have been years ago, when I was a child.
How can you dream lines of poetry you don’t know? she asked herself. Maybe an actual nondream telepath was getting at me while I slept. Or a telepath and a precog working together, the way I saw them in my dream. It might be a good idea to ask our research department whether Hollis does, by any remote chance, employ a brother team named Matt and Bill.
Puzzled and uneasy, she began as quickly as possible to dress.
Lighting a green all-Havana Cuesta-Rey palma-supreme, Glen Runciter leaned back in his noble chair, pressed a button of his intercom and said, “Make out a bounty check, Mrs. Frick. Payable to G. G. Ashwood, for one-hundred poscreds.”
“Yes, Mr. Runciter.”
He watched G. G. Ashwood, who paced with manic restlessness about the big office with its genuine hardwood floor against which G. G.’s feet clacked irritatingly. “Joe Chip can’t seem to tell me what she does,” Runciter said.
“Joe Chip is a grunk,” G. G. said.
“How come she, this Pat, can travel back into time, and no one else can? I’ll bet this talent isn’t new; you scouts probably just missed noticing it up until now. Anyhow, it’s not logical for a prudence organization to hire her; it’s a talent, not an anti-talent. We deal in-”
“As I explained, and as Joe indicated on the test report, it aborts the precogs out of business.”
“But that’s only a side-effect.” Runciter pondered moodily. “Joe thinks she’s dangerous. I don’t know why.”
“Did you ask him why?”
Runciter said, “He mumbled, the way he always does. Joe never has reasons, just hunches. On the other hand, he wants to include her in the Mick operation.” He shuffled through, rooted among and rearranged the personnel-department documents before him on his desk. “Ask Joe to come in here so we can see if we’ve got our group of eleven set up.” He examined his watch. “They should be arriving about now. I’m going to tell Joe to his face that he’s crazy to include this Pat Conley girl if she’s so dangerous. Wouldn’t you say, G. G.?”
G. G. Ashwood said, “He’s got a thing going with her.”
“What sort of thing?”
“A sexual understanding.”
“Joe has no sexual understanding. Nina Freede read his mind the other day and he’s too poor even to-” He broke off, because the office door had opened; Mrs. Frick teetered her way in carrying G. G.’s bounty check for him to sign. “I know why he wants her along on the Mick operation,” Runciter said as he scratched his signature on the check. “So he can keep an eye on her. He’s going too; he’s going to measure the psi field despite what the client stipulated. We have to know what we’re up against. Thank you, Mrs. Frick.” He waved her away and held the check out to G. G. Ashwood. “Suppose we don’t measure the psi field and it turns out to be too intense for our inertials. Who gets blamed?”
“We do,” G. G. said.
“I told them eleven wasn’t enough. We’re supplying our best; we’re doing the best we can. After all, getting Stanton Mick’s patronage is a matter of great importance to us. Amazing, that someone as wealthy and powerful as Mick could be so short-sighted, so goddam miserly. Mrs. Frick, is Joe out there? Joe Chip?”
Mrs. Frick said, “Mr. Chip is in the outer office with a number of other people.”
“How many other people, Mrs. Frick? Ten or eleven?”
“I’d say about that many, Mr. Runciter. Give or take one or two.”
To G. G. Ashwood, Runciter said, “That’s the group. I want to see them, all of them, together. Before they leave for Luna.” To Mrs. Frick he said, “Send them in.” He puffed vigorously on his green-wrapped cigar.
She gyrated out.
“We know,” Runciter said to G. G., “that as individuals they perform well. It’s all down here on paper.” He rattled the documents on his desk. “But how about together? How great a polyencephalic counter-field will they generate together? Ask yourself that, G. G. That is the question to ask.”
“I guess time will tell,” G. G. Ashwood said.
“I’ve been in this business a long time,” Runciter said. From the outer office people began to file in. “This is my contribution to contemporary civilization.”
“That puts it well,” G. G. said. “You’re a policeman guarding human privacy.”