“Are you sure you want to do that?” he said. “Take off your clothes, I mean?”
Pat said, “You don’t remember.”
“Remember what?”
“My not taking off my clothes. In another present. You didn’t like that very well, so I eradicated that; hence this.” She stood up lithely.
“What did I do,” he asked cautiously, “when you didn’t take off your clothes? Refuse to test you?”
“You mumbled something about Mr. Ashwood having overrated my anti-talent.”
Joe said, “I don’t work that way; I don’t do that.”
“Here.” Bending, her breasts wagging forward, she rummaged in the pocket of her blouse, brought forth a folded sheet of paper which she handed him. “From the previous present, the one I abolished.”
He read it, read his one-line evaluation at the end. “Anti-psi field generated – inadequate. Below standard through-put. No value against precog ratings now in existence.” And then the codemark which he employed, a circle with a stroke dividing it. Do not hire, the symbol meant. And only he and Glen Runciter knew that. Not even their scouts knew the meaning of the symbol, so Ashwood could not have told her. Silently he returned the paper to her; she refolded it and returned it to her blouse pocket.
“Do you need to test me?” she asked. “After seeing that?”
“I have a regular procedure,” Joe said. “Six indices which-”
Pat said, “You’re a little, debt-stricken, ineffective bureaucrat who can’t even scrape together enough coins to pay his door to let him out of his apt.” Her tone, neutral but devastating, rebounded in his ears; he felt himself stiffen, wince and violently flush.
“This is a bad spot right now,” he said. “I’ll be back on my feet financially any day now. I can get a loan. From the firm, if necessary.” He rose unsteadily, got two cups and two saucers, poured coffee from the coffeepot. “Sugar?” he said. “Cream?”
“Cream,” Pat said, still standing barefoot, without her blouse.
He fumbled for the doorhandle of the refrigerator, to get out a carton of milk.
“Ten cents, please,” the refrigerator said. “Five cents for opening my door; five cents for the cream.”
“It isn’t cream,” he said. “It’s plain milk.” He continued to pluck – futilely – at the refrigerator door. “Just this one time,” he said to it. “I swear to god I’ll pay you back. Tonight.”
“Here,” Pat said; she slid a dime across the table toward him. “She should have money,” she said as she watched him put the dime in the slot of the refrigerator. “Your mistress. You really have failed, haven’t you? I knew it when Mr. Ashwood-”
“It isn’t,” he grated, “always like this.”
“Do you want me to bail you out of your problems, Mr. Chip?” Hands in the pockets of her jeans, she regarded him expressionlessly, no emotion clouding her face. Only alertness. “You know I can, Sit down and write out your evaluation report on me. Forget the tests. My talent is unique anyway; you can’t measure the field I produce – it’s in the past and you’re testing me in the present, which simply takes place as an automatic consequence. Do you agree?”
He said, “Let me see that evaluation sheet you have in your blouse. I want to look at it one more time. Before I decide.”
From her blouse she once more brought forth the folded-up yellow sheet of paper; she calmly passed it across the table to him and he reread it. My writing, he said to himself; yes, it’s true. He returned it to her and, from the collection of testing items, took a fresh, clean sheet of the same familiar yellow paper.
On it he wrote her name, then spurious, extraordinarily high test results, and then at last his conclusions. His new conclusions. “Has unbelievable power. Anti-psi field unique in scope. Can probably negate any assembly of precogs imaginable.” After that he scratched a symbol: this time two crosses, both underlined. Pat, standing behind him, watched him write; he felt her breath on his neck.
“What do the two underlined crosses mean?” she asked.
“‘Hire her,'” Joe said. “‘At whatever cost required.'”
“Thank you.” She dug into her purse, brought out a handful of poscred bills, selected one and presented it to him. A big one. “This will help you with expenses. I couldn’t give it to you earlier, before you made your official evaluation of me. You would have canceled very nearly everything and you would have gone to your grave thinking I had bribed you. Ultimately you would have even decided that I had no counter-talent.” She then unzipped her jeans and resumed her quick, furtive undressing.
Joe Chip examined what he had written, not watching her.
The underlined crosses did not symbolize what he had told her. They meant: Watch this person. She is a hazard to the firm. She is dangerous.
He signed the test paper, folded it and passed it to her.
She at once put it away in her purse.
34
“When can I move my things in here?” she asked as she padded toward the bathroom. “I consider it mine as of now, since I’ve already paid you what must be virtually the entire month’s rent.”
“Anytime,” he said.
The bathroom said, “Fifty cents, please. Before turning on the water.”
Pat padded back into the kitchen to reach into her purse.
CHAPTER 4.
Wild new Ubik salad dressing, not Italian, not French, but an entirely new and different taste treat that’s waking up the world. Wake up to Ubik and be wild! Safe when taken as directed.
Back in New York once more, his trip to the Beloved Brethren Moratorium completed, Glen Runciter landed via a silent and impressive all-electric hired limousine on the roof of the central installation of Runciter Associates. A descent chute dropped him speedily to his fifth-floor office. Presently – at nine-thirty A.M. local time – he sat in the massive, old-fashioned, authentic walnut-and-leather swivel chair, behind his desk, talking on the vidphone to his public-relations department.
“Tamish, I just now got back from Zurich. I conferred with Ella there.” Runciter glared at his secretary, who had cautiously entered his personal oversized office, shutting the door behind her. “What do you want, Mrs. Frick?” he asked her.
Withered, timorous Mrs. Frick, her face dabbed with spots of artificial color to compensate for her general ancient grayness, made a gesture of disavowal; she had no choice but to bother him.
“Okay, Mrs. Frick,” he said patiently. “What is it?”
“A new client, Mr. Runciter. I think you should see her.” She both advanced toward him and retreated, a difficult maneuver which Mrs. Frick alone could carry off. It had taken her ten decades of practice.
“As soon as I’m off the phone,” Runciter told her. Into the phone he said, “How often do our ads run on prime-time TV planetwide? Still once every third hour?”
“Not quite that, Mr. Runciter. Over the course of a full day, prudence ads appear on an average of once every third hour per UHF channel, but the cost of prime time-”
“I want them to appear every hour,” Runciter said. “Ella thinks that would be better.” On the trip back to the Western Hemisphere he had decided which of their ads he liked the most. “You know that recent Supreme Court ruling where a husband can legally murder his wife if he can prove she wouldn’t under any circumstances give him a divorce?”
“Yes, the so-called-”
“I don’t care what it’s called; what matters is that we have a TV ad made up on that already. How does that ad go? I’ve been trying to remember it.”
Tamish said, “There’s this man, an ex-husband, being tried. First comes a shot of the jury, then the judge, then a pan-up on the prosecuting attorney, cross-examining the ex-husband. He says, ‘It would seem, sir, that your wife-‘”
“That’s right,” Runciter said with satisfaction; he had, originally, helped write the ad. It was, in his opinion, another manifestation of the marvelous multifacetedness of his mind.
“Is it not the assumption, however,” Tamish said, “that the missing Psis are at work, as a group, for one of the larger investment houses? Seeing as how this is probably so, perhaps we should stress one of our business-establishment commercials. Do you perhaps recall this one, Mr. Runciter? It shows a husband home from his job at the end of the day; he still has on his electric-yellow cummerbund, petal skirt, knee-hugging hose and military-style visored cap. He seats himself wearily on the living-room couch, starts to take off one of his gauntlets, then hunches over, frowns and says, ‘Gosh, Jill, I wish I knew what’s been wrong with me lately. Sometimes, with greater frequency almost every day, the least little remark at the office makes me think that, well, somebody’s reading my mind!’ Then she says, ‘If you’re worried about that, why don’t we contact our nearest prudence organization? They’ll lease us an inertial at prices easy on our budget, and then you’ll feel like your old self again!’ Then this great smile appears on his face and he says, ‘Why, this nagging feeling is already-‘”