“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.”
Joe said, “When did you figure out what was taking place? Did you always know? From the start?”
“‘The start,'” Runciter echoed bitingly. “What’s that mean? It started months or maybe even years ago; god knows how long Hollis and Mick and Pat Conley and S. Dole Melipone and G. G. Ashwood have been hatching it up, working it over and reworking it like dough. Here’s what happened. We got lured to Luna. We let Pat Conley come with us, a woman we didn’t know, a talent we didn’t understand – which possibly even Hollis doesn’t understand. An ability anyhow connected with time reversion; not, strictly speaking, the ability to travel through time… for instance, she can’t go into the future. In a certain sense, she can’t go into the past either; what she does, as near as I can comprehend, it, is start a counter-process that uncovers the prior stages inherent in configurations of matter. But you know that; you and Al figured it out.” He ground his teeth with wrath. “Al Hammond – what a loss. But I couldn’t do anything; I couldn’t break through then as I’ve done now.”
“Why were you able to now?” Joe asked.
Runciter said, “Because this is as far back as she is able to carry us. Normal forward flow has already resumed; we’re again flowing from past into present into future. She evidently stretched her ability to its limit. 1939; that’s the limit. What she’s done now is shut off her talent. Why not? She’s accomplished what Ray Hollis sent her to us to do.”
“How many people have been affected?”
“Just the group of us who were on Luna there in that subsurface room. Not even Zoe Wirt. Pat can circumscribe the range of the field she creates. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the bunch of us took off for Luna and got blown up in an accidental explosion; we were put into cold-pac by solicitous Stanton Mick, but no contact could be established – they didn’t get us soon enough.”
Joe said, “Why wouldn’t the bomb blast be enough?”
Lifting an eyebrow, Runciter regarded him.
“Why use Pat Conley at all?” Joe said. He sensed, even in his weary, shaken state, something wrong. “There’s no reason for all this reversion machinery, this sinking us into a retrograde time momentum back here to 1939. It serves no purpose.”
“That’s an interesting point,” Runciter said; he nodded slowly, a frown on his rugged, stony face. “I’ll have to think about it. Give me a little while.” He walked to the window, stood gazing out at the stores across the street.
“It strikes me,” Joe said, “that what we appear to be faced with is a malignant rather than a purposeful force. Not so much someone trying to kill us or nullify us, someone trying to eliminate us from functioning as a prudence organization, but-” He pondered; he almost had it. “An irresponsible entity that’s enjoying what it’s doing to us. The way it’s killing us off one by one. It doesn’t have to prolong all this. That doesn’t sound to me like Ray Hollis; he deals in cold, practical murder. And from what I know about Stanton Mick-”
“Pat herself,” Runciter interrupted brusquely; he turned away from the window. “She’s psychologically a sadistic person. Like tearing wings off flies. Playing with us.” He watched for Joe’s reaction.
Joe said, “It sounds to me more like a child.”
“But look at Pat Conley; she’s spiteful and jealous. She got Wendy first because of emotional animosity. She followed you all the way up the stairs just now, enjoying it; gloating over it, in fact.”
“How do you know that?” Joe said. You were waiting here in this room, he said to himself; you couldn’t have seen it. And – how had Runciter known he would come to this particular room?
Letting out his breath in a ragged, noisy rush, Runciter said, “I haven’t told you all of it. As a matter of fact…” He ceased speaking, chewed his lower lip savagely, then abruptly resumed, “What I’ve said hasn’t been strictly true. I don’t hold the same relationship to this regressed world that the rest of you do; you’re absolutely right: I know too much. It’s because I enter it from outside, Joe.”
“Manifestations,” Joe said.
“Yes. Thrust down into this world, here and there. At strategic points and times. Like the traffic citation. Like Archer’s-”
“You didn’t tape that TV commercial,” Joe said. “That was live.”
Runciter, with reluctance, nodded.
“Why the difference,” Joe said, “between your situation and ours?”
“You want me to say?”
“Yes.” He prepared himself, already knowing what he would hear.
“I’m not dead, Joe. The graffiti told the truth. You’re all in cold-pac and I’m-” Runciter spoke with difficulty, not looking directly at Joe. “I’m sitting in a consultation lounge at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium. All of you are interwired, on my instructions; kept together as a group. I’m out here trying to reach you. That’s where I am when I say I’m outside; that’s why the manifestations, as you call them. For one week now I’ve been trying to get you all functioning in half-life, but – it isn’t working. You’re fading out one by one.”
After a pause Joe said, “What about Pat Conley?”
“Yeah, she’s with you; in half-life, interwired to the rest of the group.”
“Are the regressions due to her talent? Or to the normal decay of half-life?” Tensely, he waited for Runciter’s answer; everything, as he saw it, hung on this one question.
Runciter snorted, grimaced, then said hoarsely, “The normal decay. Ella experienced it. Everyone who enters half-life experiences it.”
“You’re lying to me,” Joe said. And felt a knife shear through him.
Staring at him, Runciter said, “Joe, my god, I saved your life; I broke through to you enough just now to bring you back into full half-life functioning – you’ll probably go on indefinitely now. If I hadn’t been waiting here in this hotel room when you came crawling through that door, why, hell – hey, look, goddam it; you’d be lying on that rundown bed dead as a doornail by now if it wasn’t for me. I’m Glen Runciter; I’m your boss and I’m the one fighting to save all your lives – I’m the only one out here in the real world plugging for you.” He continued to stare at Joe with heated indignation and surprise. A bewildered, injured surprise,. as if he could not fathom what was happening. “That girl,” Runciter said, “that Pat Conley, she would have killed you like she killed-” He broke off.
Joe said, “Like she killed Wendy and Al, Edie Dorn, Fred Zafsky, and maybe by now Tito Apostos.”
In a low but controlled voice Runciter said, “This situation is very complex, Joe. It doesn’t admit to simple answers.”
“You don’t know the answers,” Joe said. “That’s the problem. You made up answers; you had to invent them to explain your presence here. All your presences here, your so-called manifestations.”
“I don’t call them that; you and Al worked out that name. Don’t blame me for what you two-”
“You don’t know any more than I do,” Joe said, “about what’s happening to us and who’s attacking us. Glen, you can’t say who we’re up against because you don’t know.”
Runciter said, “I know I’m alive; I know I’m sitting out here in this consultation lounge at the moratorium.”
“Your body in the coffin,” Joe said. “Here at the Simple Shepherd Mortuary. Did you look at it?”
“No,” Runciter said, “but that isn’t really-”
“It had withered,” Joe said. “Lost bulk like Wendy’s and Al’s and Edie’s – and, in a little while, mine. Exactly the same for you; no better, no worse.”
“In your case I got Ubik-” Again Runciter broke off; a difficult-to-decipher expression appeared on his face: a combination perhaps of insight, fear and – but Joe couldn’t tell. “I got you the Ubik,” he finished.