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; pin-feathers, 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.

Chapter 14

“Do you have a cigarette?” Joe said. His voice shook, but not from weariness. Nor from cold. Both had gone. I’m tense, be 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.”

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?”