Ubik by Philip K. Dick Summary Notes and Synopsis

UBIK Summary Notes and Synopsis

Chapter 1
Begins in 1992 in New York City
Runciter Organization
Worker tells Mr. Runciter that Melipone’s gone
“I not kid you,” the technician assured him. “Edie Dorn and two other inertials followed him to a motel named the Bonds of Erotic Polymorphic Experience, a sixty-unit subsurface structure catering to businessmen and their hookers who don’t want to be entertained. Edie and her colleagues didn’t think he was active, but just to be on the safe side we had one of our own telepaths, Mr. G. G. Ashwood, go in and read him. Ashwood found a scramble pattern surrounding Melipone’s mind, so he couldn’t do anything; he therefore went back to Topeka, Kansas, where he’s currently scouting a new possibility.”
No one seems to know how Melipone looks like
But Melipone’s unique aura
“It’s gone electronically. The man it represents is no longer on Earth or, as far as we can make out, on a colony world either.” Runciter said, “I’ll consult my dead wife.” “It’s the middle of the night. The moratoriums are closed now.”
As owner of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium, Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang, of course, perpetually came to work before his employees.
Resurrection Day - the holiday on which the half-lifers were publicly honored - lay just around the corner; the rush would soon be beginning.
“Twill only be a moment.” Herbert made his way back to the cold-pac bins to search out number 3054039-B. When he located the correct party he scrutinized the lading report attached. It gave only fifteen days of half-life remaining. Not very much, he reflected; automatically he pressed a portable protophason amplifier into the transparent plastic hull of the casket, tuned it, listened at the proper frequency for indication of cephalic activity.
“When I pass, Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang said to himself, I think I’ll will my heirs to revive me one day a century. That way I can observe the fate of all mankind. But that meant a rather high maintenance cost to the heirs - and he knew what that meant. Sooner or later they would rebel, have his body taken out of cold-pac and - god forbid - buried. “Burial is barbaric,” Herbert muttered aloud. “Remnant of the primitive origins of our culture.” “Yes, sir,” his secretary agreed, at her typewriter. “
He’s almost at an end, Herbert thought. It seemed obvious to him that the son did not want to see the lading, did not actually care to know that contact with his dad was diminishing, finally. So Herbert said nothing; he merely walked off, leaving the son to commune. Why tell him that this was probably the last time he would come here? He would find out soon enough in any case.
Glen Runciter comes to visit
“Show Mr. Runciter to the consultation lounge,” Herbert said to one of his employees, who had come meandering by, curious to see what the world-renowned owner of an antiPSI organization looked like.
Ads over TV and in the homeopapes by the various anti-PSI prudence establishments had shrilly squawked their harangues of late. Defend your privacy, the ads yammered on the hour, from all media. Is a stranger tuning in on you? Are you really alone? That for the telepaths… and then the queasy worry about precogs. Are your actions being predicted by someone you never met? Someone you would not want to meet or invite into your home? Terminate anxiety; contacting your nearest prudence organization will first tell you if in fact you are the victim of unauthorized intrusions, and then, on your instructions, nullify these intrusions - at moderate cost to you.
Runciter postulates that the prudence organizations are rackets
Could the prudence organizations be, in fact, rackets? Claiming a need for their services when sometimes no need actually exists?
Chapter 2
“The best way to ask for beer is to sing out Ubik. Made from select hops, choice water, slow-aged for perfect flavor, Ubik is the nation’s number-one choice in beer. Made only in Cleveland.”
Ella Runciter is introduced in her half-life state - “But with each resuscitation into active half-life, into a return of cerebral activity, however short, Ella died somewhat. The remaining time left to her pulse-phased out and ebbed.”
“He rationalized this way: that it doomed her, that to activate her constituted a sin against her.”
Runciter postulates whether or not this half-life is good:
Ella, pretty and light-skinned; her eyes, in the days when they had been open, had been bright and luminous blue. That would not again occur; he could talk to her and hear her answer; he could communicate with her… but he would never again see her with eyes opened; nor would her mouth move. She would not smile at his arrival. When he departed she would not cry. Is this worth it? he asked himself. Is this better than the old way, the direct road from full-life to the grave? I still do have her with me, in a sense, he decided. The alternative is nothing.
Ella mentions being drawn towards a red light, and he tells her to avoid it
“Well, like they say, you’re heading for a new womb to be born out of. And that smoky red light - that’s a bad womb; you don’t want to go that way. That’s a humiliating, low sort of womb. You’re probably anticipating your next life, or whatever it is.” He felt foolish, talking like this; normally he had no theological convictions. But the half-life experience was real and it had made theologians out of all of them.
Stuck here in this casket, frozen out of the world - she knew only what he told her. Yet, he had always relied on her sagacity, that particular female form of it, a wisdom not based on knowledge or experience but on something innate. He had not, during the period she had lived, been able to fathom it;
Ella thinks Melipone is motivated by money, not conviction
A half-life man named Jory interrupts Runciter’s session with his wife, and his is surprised - the owner (Vogelsang) explains it to him
“After prolonged proximity,” von Vogelsang explained, “there is occasionally a mutual osmosis, a suffusion between the mentalities of half-lifers. Jory Miller’s cephalic activity is particularly good; your wife’s is not. That makes for an unfortunately one-way passage of protophasons.
 “She may not like being isolated, Mr. Runciter. We keep the containers - the caskets, as they’re called by the lay public - close together for a reason. Wandering through one another’s mind gives those in half-life the only-”
Von Vogelsang identifies these containers as ‘caskets’
Chapter 3
We are introduced to Joe Chip
HE buys a newspaper about gossip, but gets speculation instead
 “Today I want to read about which TV star is sleeping with whose drug addicted wife.”
he zoomed in on an excellent caricature drawing of Lola Herzburg-Wright, licked his lips with satisfaction at the naughty exposure of her entire right ear, then feasted on the text…
Joe Chip seems to have bad credit, and everyone has a G credit system
“Mr. Chip, the Ferris & Brockman Retail Credit Auditing and Analysis Agency has published a special flier on you. Our recept-slot received it yesterday and it remains fresh in our minds. Since July you’ve dropped from a triple G status creditwise to quadruple G. Our department - in fact this entire conapt building - is now programed against an extension of services and/or credit to such pathetic anomalies as yourself, sir. Regarding you, everything must hereafter be handled on a basic-cash subfloor. In fact, you’ll probably be on a basic-cash subfloor for the rest of your life.”
Joe then tries to get into his apartment, but his robot door asks him for money to enter
This was a mandatory fee
G. G. Ashwood eventually unlocks it for Joe and brings a girl… and Joe looks as her with attraction (her name is Pat)
She stood for a moment staring at Joe, obviously no more than seventeen, slim and copper-skinned, with large dark eyes. My god, he thought, she’s beautiful. She wore an ersatz canvas workshirt and jeans, heavy boots caked with what appeared to be authentic mud. Her tangle of shiny hair was tied back and knotted with a red bandanna. Her rolledup sleeves showed tanned, competent arms. At her imitation leather belt she carried a knife, a field-telephone unit and an emergency pack of rations and water. On her bare, dark forearm he made out a tattoo. CAVEAT EMPTOR, it read. He wondered what that meant.
Pat is wondering “How can you afford real coffee, Mr. Chip?”
They want to test whether or not Pat is able to negate telepathic abilities
Joe calls her anti-PSI powers as part of an ecological predator-prey system
Joe asks her what her ‘anti-talent’ is
It counteracts precogs
She knows because her own parents are precogs
“The precog sees a variety of futures, laid out side by side like cells in a beehive. For him one has greater luminosity, and this he picks. Once he has picked it the antiprecog can do nothing; the anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the future is altered. In the case of telepaths a similar impairment -”
Pat accidentally changes the past so that she does not break the statue
Also, theology seems to be in everyone
“I brooded about it, and I thought about that week before it broke when I didn’t get any dessert at dinner and had to go to bed at five P.M. I thought Christ - or whatever a kid says “
This pat girl needs to pay a quarter to shower in Joe’s apartment as G. G. Ashwood leaves (since counter fields neutralize each other)
She then goes topless in front of him preparing for a shower (and he sees it)
 “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 shows him a future where he wouldn’t hire her if she did not strip
She shows him another future with Joe’s handwriting
Two underlying crosses mean “hire her at any cost”
Well, that’s what Joe tells her - they actually mean she is dangerous
““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. “
Chapter 4
Glen Runciter arrives in his office in New York, talking to his PR
Mrs. Frick, his assistant, tells him there is a new client
Runciter then says this unusual statement:
“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.”
Runciter is negotiating how to deal with talent people
Runciter is discussing sending inertials to stop talent, though they are worried they will get killed
Runciter has a microspeaker with someone with talent telling him the thoughts of someone he is negotiating with
Then Joe Chip walks in with Pat, the girl
Runciter also takes into account her looks “ But beside him lounged a long-legged girl with brilliant, tumbling black hair and eyes; her intense, distilled beauty illuminated that part of the room, igniting it with heavy, sullen fire. It was, he thought, as if the girl resisted being attractive, disliked the smoothness of her skin and the sensual, swollen, dark quality of her lips.”
But then Joe shops Runciter the two crosses for Pat
“And then he saw the two underlined crosses, the graphic symbol of indictment - of, in fact, treachery.”
Runciter thinks to himself how he has to endure the pain of seeing Mrs. Frick’s face and then thinks erotic thoughts about Pat as he looks at her:
“I have a twenty-year-old wife in cold-pac,” he said to Joe and Pat. “A beautiful woman who when she talks to me gets pushed out of the way by some weird kid named Jory, and then I’m talking to him, not her. Ella frozen in half-life and dimming out - and that battered crone for my secretary that I have to look at all day long.” He gazed at the girl Pat, with her black, strong hair and her sensual mouth; in him he felt unhappy cravings arise, cloudy and pointless wants that led nowhere, that returned to him empty, as in the completion of a geometrically perfect circle.
Chapter 5
We are introduced to anti-telepath Tippy Jackson
Runciter is annoyed that Joe Chip won’t tell him what Pat can do
“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;
“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.”
 Ashwood’s most recent discovery, who aborts precogs on a new basis. Perhaps Miss Conley herself will describe it to us.” He nodded toward Pat- And found himself standing before a shop window on Fifth Avenue, a rare-coin shop; he was studying an uncirculated U.S. gold dollar and wondering if he could afford to add it to his collection.
When he opened his eyes he found himself back in his office; he faced G. G. Ashwood, Joe Chip and a dark, intensely attractive girl whose name he did not recall. Other than that his office was empty, which for reasons he did not understand struck him as strange.
Joe, taken aback, said, “‘Domestic quarreling’?” He saw, then, on Pat’s finger the ring: wrought-silver and jade; he remembered helping her pick it out. Two days, he thought, before we got married. That was over a year ago, despite how bad off I was financially. That, of course, is changed now; Pat, with her salary and her money-minding propensity, fixed that. For all time.
But Pat Chip decides to keep the ring from the alternate world… is this an attachment?
Pat brings them back to the 11 inertial job with a bunch of antis, including Pat
Joe noticed another woman on the team, Wendy Wright
As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long, astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or, even better, his wife. It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low- class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that, she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.
The 11 are about to start their objective
Chapter 6
The group travels to Luna (off earth!)
They get new living quarters which are WAY better than Joe’s old one
“Since when,” Don Denny said to Francesca Spanish, “did you begin to need psychedelic drugs in order to hallucinate? Your whole life’s a waking hallucination.” Unfazed, Francesca said, “Two nights ago I received a particularly impressive visitation.” “I’m not surprised,” Don Denny said.
The group meats Stanton Mick
A bomb explodes, injuring most, and nearly kills Mr. Runciter
Joe asks the intertials if they have guns and weapons (which are not allowed by society rules, but a number of them have weapons)
They take an elevator to go back to Earth
Wendy pressures Joe to ask Pat to use her power to undo this
He motioned Pat up beside him. Her face was smudged and her synthetic sleeveless blouse had been ripped; the elastic band which - fashionably - compressed her breasts could be seen: It had elegant embossed palepink fleurs-de-lis imprinted on it, and for no logical reason the perception of this unrelated, meaningless sense-datum registered in his mind. “Listen,” he said to her, putting his hand on her shoulder and looking into her eyes; she calmly returned his gaze. “Can you go back? To a time before the bomb was detonated? And restore Glen Runciter?” “It’s too late now,” Pat said. “Why?” “That’s it. Too much time has passed. I would have had to do it right away.”
They put Runciter into a cold-pac - and give him half-life existence
One member postulates that the explosion makes them old.
Chapter 7
The intertials find Runciter’s phone from 1990
Joe said, “There’s been an accident.” “What we deem an ‘accident,’” von Vogelsang said, “is ever yet a display of god’s handiwork. In a sense, all life could be called an ‘accident.’ And yet in fact-” “I don’t want to engage in a theological discussion,” Joe said. “Not at this time.” “This is the time, out of all times, when the consolations of theology are most soothing. Is the deceased a relative?” “Our employer,” Joe said. “Glen Runciter of Runciter Associates, New York. You have his wife Ella there. We’ll be landing in eight or nine minutes; can you have one of your transport cold-pac vans waiting?” “He is in cold-pac now?” “No,” Joe said. “He’s warming himself on the beach at Tampa, Florida.” “I assume your amusing response indicates yes.”
They call Vogelsang about Runciter going into half-life - and Vogelsang talks about theology, and Joe indicate he isn’t interested in discussing it right now
“The U.N. ought to abolish half-life,” Joe said. “As interfering with the natural process of the cycle of birth and death.” Mockingly, Al Hammond said, “If god approved of halflife, each of us would be born in a casket filled with dry ice.”
The group gets back to earth
There is a constant asking for money to do EVERYTHING
At one point, Joe wants to explain how he can’t have a credit card to pay for what he is being asked to pay for
Joe said, “Charge this to the account of Glen Runciter of Runciter Associates, New York.” “Insert the proper credit card,” the speaker said. “They haven’t let me carry around a credit card in five years,” Joe said. “I’m still paying off what I charged back in- ” “One poscred, please,” the speaker said. It began to tick ominously. “Or in ten seconds I will notify the police.”
“One of these days,” Joe said wrathfully, “people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and simple warmth will return, and when that happens someone like myself who has gone through an ordeal and who genuinely needs hot coffee to pick him up and keep him functioning when he has to function will get the hot coffee whether he happens to have a poscred readily available or not.” He lifted the miniature pitcher of cream, then set it down. “And furthermore, your cream or milk or whatever it is, is sour.”
They postulate lying about Runciter’s death to Ella
As the chopper left the ground the moratorium owner pressed a button on his control panel. Throughout the cabin of the chopper, from a dozen sources, the sound of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis rolled forth sonorously, the many voices saying, “Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi,” over and over again, accompanied by an electronically augmented symphony orchestra.
“Libera me, Domine,” Joe said. “What’s that mean?” Joe said, “It means, ‘God have mercy on me.’ Don’t you know that? Doesn’t everybody know that?” “What made you think of it?” Al said. “The music, the goddam music.” To von Vogelsang he said, “Turn the music off. Runciter can’t hear it. I’m the only one who can hear it, and I don’t feel like hearing it.” To Al he said, “You don’t want to hear it, do you?”
Another theological moment
“I can compose myself,” Joe said, “when I hear Runciter’s voice again. When I know some form of life, halflife, is still there.”
Joe left the lounge and wandered down a corridor, rubbing his forehead blearily. This is an unnatural place, he thought. Halfway between the world and death.
Old quarters are apparently old
“I am sorry, sir,” the phone said, “the coin which you put into me was not a North American Confederation quarter but a recalled issue of the United States of America’s Philadelphia mint. It is of merely numismatical interest now.” Joe examined the quarter and saw, on its tarnished surface, the bas-relief profile of George Washington. And the date. The coin was forty years old. And, as the phone had said, long ago recalled.
Turns out Runciter is dead, likely from improper initial freezing
I barely know her.” He noticed then that subtle background music hung over the lounge. It had been there all this time. The same as on the chopper. “Dies irae, dies illa,” the voices sang darkly.
“Once you get your hotel room,” Al said, “I could probably talk Wendy Wright into showing up there.” “That would be immoral,” Joe said. “What?” Al stared at him. “At a time like this? When the whole organization is about to sink into oblivion unless you can pull yourself together? Anything that’ll make you function is desirable, in fact necessary, Go back to the phone, call a hotel, come back here and tell me the name of the hotel and the-”
Joe has some ‘old fashioned morals’
Joe is worried Pat will prevent him from having his way with Wendy
Chapter 8
Wendy does not come to the hotel
Super consumer society description of Joe’s hotel room:
“Runciter!” Joe said. He said it loudly. “-unable to verify probably for at least-” Joe hung up. I don’t understand this, he said to himself. Going into the bathroom, he splashed icy water on his face, combed his hair with a sanitary, free hotel comb, then, after meditating for a time, shaved with the sanitary, free hotel throwaway razor. He slapped sanitary, free hotel aftershave onto his chin, neck and jowls, unwrapped the sanitary, free hotel glass and drank from it.
Turns out Mr. Runciter is barely alive with some brain activity
“I’m only charging you what they ask around here for a cup of coffee,” Joe said. “This ought to be worth at least that much.” Thinking that, he realized that he had had no breakfast, and that he would be facing Ella in that condition. Well, he could take an amphetamine instead; the hotel probably provided them free, as a courtesy.
Joe tells Von Vogelsang that Runciter is talking one way into his hotel phone all morning, which puzzles the Dr.
But Von Vogelsang doesn’t hear much
Apparently a girl DID spend the night with Joe, but she was gone, and Joe thinks she was gone
Then he realizes it is a burnt Wendy Wright (from the explosion)
Joe thinks of how the explosion was potentially Cobalt particles
Al stopped reading; he pondered, meanwhile picking at a lower tooth with his thumbnail. Yes, he thought; this is different, this ad. The others consist of obsolescence and decay. But not this. “I wonder,” he said aloud, “what would happen if we answered this matchfolder ad. It gives a box number in Des Moines, Iowa.”
The inertials meet about the strange occurrences… then find that Runciter is on a coin from last year!
“The real question,” Pat Conley said, “is, What does this second process consist of, these manifestations of Runciter?”
First Process
Second Process = Decay
. That’s part of the bill. Actually, I feel a lot better. In a sense, I don’t feel anything. It must be the tranquilizers. I guess when they wear off I’ll feel it again.”
Joe shows Al Wendy’s burnt body
“All right,” Al said. “There’s some force at work producing rapid decay. It’s been at work since - or started with - the blast there on Luna. We already knew that. We also know, or think we know, that another force, a contra-force, is at work, moving things in an opposite direction. Something connected with Runciter. Our money is beginning to have his picture on it. A matchfolder-”
Al and Joe plan to go to Baltimore to investigate these weird processes and try to make sense of things
Chapter 9
Ubik products again advertised at beginning of chapter
Interestingly, Runciter money works
A lady at the counter starts fighting with the checker about how one of her plants is dead, and how one of her newspapers she picked up from the store is 1 year old!
Al and Joe look for cigarettes, find an empty cartoon, but realize there is a note scrawled up in one - and it is an unknown individual, but they say they need to get in touch
It is Glen Runciter!
It made no sense. And yet, here, too, the pair of opposing forces were at work. Decay versus Runciter, Al said to himself. Throughout the world. Perhaps throughout the universe. Maybe the sun will go out, Al conjectured, and Glen Runciter will place a substitute sun in its place. If he can. Yes, he thought; that’s the question. How much can Runciter do?
“I know what they sold me,” Al said. “I knew when I got it, before I opened the carton.” To Joe he said, “A brandnew tape recorder, completely worn out. Bought with funny money that the store is willing to accept. Worthless money, worthless article purchased; it has a sort of logic to it.”
Joe said, “Here comes -” “Be quiet a second,” Al said. “I have to think something out, Maybe Baltimore is only there when one of us goes there. And the Lucky People Supermarket; as soon as we left, it passed out of existence. It could still be that only we who were on Luna are really experiencing this.”
“A philosophical problem of no importance or meaning,” Joe said. “And incapable of being proved one way or the other.” Al said caustically, “It would be important to that old lady in the blueberry-colored cloth coat. And to all the rest of them.”
But Runciter is also in Des Moines, even though hsi body is in Zurich… weird!
Joe and Al take an elevator… that turns old and loud and in a different place
It seemed ominous; he did not like it at all. In its dire, obscure way it seemed to him potentially the most deadly change since Runciter’s death. They were no longer regressing at the same rate, and he had an acute, intuitive intimation that Wendy Wright had experienced exactly this before her death.
But, he thought, this is projection on my part. It isn’t the universe which is being entombed by layers of wind, cold, darkness and ice; all this is going on within me, and yet I seem to see it outside. Strange, he thought. Is the whole world inside me? Engulfed by my body? When did that happen? It must be a manifestation of dying, he said to himself. The uncertainty which I feel, the slowing down into entropy - that’s the process, and the ice which I see is the result of the success of the process. When I blink out, he thought, the whole universe will disappear.
Al goes into a bathroom thinking he’s not gonna make it soon, only to find this scrawled on the wall
JUMP IN THE URINAL AND STAND ON YOUR HEAD. I’M THE ONE THAT’S ALIVE. YOU’RE ALL DEAD.
Joe said, “But we’re not dead. Except for Wendy.” “We’re in half-life. Probably still on Pratfall II; we’re probably on our way back to Earth from Luna, after the explosion that killed us - killed us, not Runciter. And he’s trying to pick up the flow of protophasons from us. So far he’s failed; we’re not getting across from our world to his. But he’s managed to reach us. We’re picking him up everywhere, even places we choose at random. His presence is invading us on every side, him and only him because he’s the sole person trying to-” “He and only he,” Joe interrupted. “Instead of ‘him’; you said ‘him.’”
Joe sees Al die in the bathroom, and Al thinks that Joe can survive by sticking with others
An Ad on TV shows a housewife with a message on her bathroom wall”
LEAN OVER THE BOWL AND THEN TAKE A DIVE. ALL OF YOU ARE DEAD. I AM ALIVE.
Chapter 10
Runciter himself comes on a TV ad advertising Ubik saying
“One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay. You see, world deterioration of this regressive type is a normal experience of many half-lifers, especially in the early stages when ties to the real reality are still very strong. A sort of lingering universe is retained as a residual charge, experienced as a pseudo environment but highly unstable and unsupported by any ergic substructure. This is particularly true when several memory systems are fused, as in the case of you people. But with today’s new, morepowerful-than-ever Ubik, all this is changed!”
Ubik reverses an old fridge to new
Standing up, Joe said loudly, “You know I’m here. Does that mean you can hear and see me?” “Of course, I can’t hear you and see you. This commercial message is on videotape; I recorded it two weeks ago, specifically, twelve days before my death. I knew the bomb blast was coming; I made use of precog talents.”
Joe said, “What is Ubik made of? How does it work?”
Unless Runciter was playing a sardonic game with them, trifling with them, first leading them in one direction, then the other. An unnatural and gigantic force, haunting their lives. Emanating either within the living world or the half-life world; or, he thought suddenly, perhaps both.
Runciter and Ubik. Ubiquity, he realized all at once; that’s the derivation of the made-up word, the name of Runciter’s alleged spray-can product. Which probably did not even exist. It was probably a further hoax, to bewilder them that much more.
The man contains - not the boy - but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.
 Maybe so, he thought. To be reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says. It really is true. Christ, I hope so. Because in that case we all can meet again. In, as in Winnie-the-Pooh, another part of the forest, where a boy and his bear will always be playing… a category, he thought, imperishable. Like all of us. We will all wind up with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable new place.
All of Joe’s appliances are “decaying” back into their historical forms
The newspaper had cost three cents. That interested him too. What could you get now for three cents? he asked himself.
Getting out his wallet, he found only snapshots of Runciter, none of his family, none of friends. Runciter everywhere!
The ramp, however, had now reverted to a flight of inert concrete stairs. Twenty flights down, he reflected. Step by step. Impossible; no one could walk down that many stairs.
 the Ubik which he described to me in the taped TV commercial, this sample of it anyhow, has reverted. An irony that is just plain too much: The substance created to reverse the regressive change process has itself regressed. I should have known as soon as I saw the old purple three cent stamps.
Runciter puts a note on another can of Ubik urging Joe on
Chapter 11
Joe gets to Des Moines and calls the Morturary and the Mortuary tells him that they will be holding funeral services for Runciter and Wendy Wright and Joe Chip
Psionic means parapsychological powers
Joe is asked about the future of WWII
But then Joe encounters a driver who says this
 Germans. Take the treatment of the Jews. You know who makes a lot out of that? Jews in this country, a lot of them not citizens but refugees living on public welfare. I think the Nazis certainly have been a little extreme in some of the things they’ve done to the Jews, but basically there’s been the Jewish question for a long time, and something, although maybe not so vile as those concentration camps, had to be done about it. We have a similar problem here in the United States, both with Jews and with the niggers. Eventually we’re going to have to do something about both.”
This is a world that lives in terms of William Jennings Bryan’s oratory; the Scopes “Monkey Trial” is a vivid reality here. He thought, There is no way we can adapt to their viewpoint, their moral, political, sociological environment. To them we’re professional agitators, more alien than the Nazis, probably even more of a menace than the Communist Party. We’re the most dangerous agitators that this time segment has yet had to deal with. Bliss is absolutely right.
Joe sees Pat again along with the others
“No,” he said aloud as he stepped from the parked car. “She’s not my wife; she wiped that out.” But, he remembered, she kept the ring. The unique wrought-silver and jade wedding ring which she and I picked out… that’s all that remains. But what a shock to see her again.
“Francy will now tell you her Ubik dream, as she calls it. She had it last night.” “I call it that because that’s what it is,” Francesca Spanish said fiercely; she clasped her hands together in a spasm of excited agitation. “Listen, Mr. Chip, it wasn’t like any dream I’ve ever had before. A great hand came down from the sky, like the arm and hand of God. Enormous, the size of a mountain. And I knew at the time how important it was; the hand was closed, made into a rocklike fist, and I knew it contained something of value so great that my life and the lives of everyone else on Earth depended on it. And I waited for the fist to open, and it did open. And I saw what it contained.” “An aerosol spray can,” Don Denny said dryly. “On the spray can,” Francesca Spanish continued, “there was one word, great golden letters, glittering; golden fire spelling out UBIK. Nothing else. Just that strange word.
There’s a Latin word very close to it: ubique. It means -” “Everywhere,” Joe said.
Edie Dorn seems to have disappeared
“She’s probably dead”
Joe tells them how if they separate from the group, they will decay into death
Joe then theorizes how they are all dead
Chapter 12
Pat’s abilities have left her since the bomb blast
It fits in, Joe said to himself, Of course, her timetraveling talent no longer functions. This is not really 1939, and we are outside of time entirely; this proves that Al was right. The graffiti was right. This is half-life, as the couplets told us.
Joe gets a citation for failure to turn
And the message the cop write is this:
You are in much greater danger than I thought. What Pat Conley said is There the message ceased.
Try Archer’s Drugstore for reliable household remedies and medicinal preparations of tried and tested value. Economically priced.
Joe then goes to find where Archer’s Drugs was
And, at the amplitude of insubstantiality, it resolved itself into a tiny, anachronistic drugstore with rococo ornamentation. In its meager window displays he saw hernia belts, rows of corrective eyeglasses, a mortar and pestle, jars of assorted tablets, a hand-printed sign reading LEECHES, huge glass-stoppered bottles that contained a Pandora’s heritage of patent medicines and placebos… and, painted on a fiat wood board running across the top of the windows, the words ARCHER’S DRUGSTORE.
In the dim light entering from the street he at last managed to make out the printing on the label of the tin. It continued the handwritten message on the traffic citation, picking up at the exact point at which Runciter’s writing had abruptly stopped. absolutely untrue. She did not - repeat, not - try to use her talent following the bomb blast. She did not try to restore Wendy Wright or Al Hammond or Edie Dorn. She’s lying to you, Joe, and that makes me rethink the whole situation. I’ll let you know as soon as I come to a conclusion. Meanwhile be very careful. By the way: Ubik powder is of universal healing value if directions for use are rigorously and conscientiously followed.
KEEP THE OLD SWIZER UP, JOE!
 one. But why?” To Joe he said, “What reason could she have? She doesn’t even know us, not really.” “Is this why you came to Runciter Associates?” Joe asked her. He tried - but failed - to keep his voice steady; in his ears it wavered and he felt abrupt contempt for himself. “G. G. Ashwood scouted you and brought you in. Was he working for Hollis, is that it? Is that what really happened to us - not the bomb blast but you?” Pat smiled. And the lobby of the hotel blew up in Joe Chip’s face.
Chapter 13
Joe seems to be decaying like Edie Dorn
I can’t go up the stairs if it is. But the longing within him had grown even greater, the overpowering need to be alone. Locked in an empty room, entirely unwitnessed, silent and supine. Stretched out, not needing to speak, not needing to move. Not required to cope with anyone or any problem. And no one will even know where I am, he told himself. That seemed, unaccountably, very important; he wanted to be unknown and invisible, to live unseen. Pat especially, he thought; not her; she can’t be near me.
“I wonder,” Pat said, “if this is what Wendy did. She was the first; right?” Joe gasped, “I was. In love with. Her.” “Oh, I know. G. G. Ashwood told me. He read your mind. G. G. and I got to be very good friends; we spent a lot of time together. You might say we had an affair. Yes, you could say that.”
“Our theory,” Joe said, “was right.” He took a deeper breath. “One,” he succeeded in saying; he ascended another step and then, with tremendous effort, another. “That you and G. G. Worked it out with Ray Hollis. To infiltrate.” “Quite right,” Pat agreed. “Our best inertials. And Runciter. Wipe us all out.” He made his way up one more step. “We’re not in half-life. We’re not-”
“I want to watch you, Joe, because of your low-class little scheme back in Zurich. Of having Wendy Wright spend the night with you in your hotel room. Now, tonight, this will be different. You’ll be alone.”
Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force which I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe, so at least I won’t be alone.
Joe gets to the flat, but his decay is happening further
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.
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.
Chapter 14
“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-”
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
 I know too much. It’s because I enter it from outside, Joe.”
“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.
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 halflife experiences it.”
“What is Ubik?” Joe said. There was no answer from Runciter. “You don’t know that either,” Joe said. “You don’t know what it is or why it works. You don’t even know where it comes from.”
“I think it is,” Runciter said. “I think there’s your enemy.” Joe said, “Almost. But I don’t think so.” I don’t think, he said to himself, that we’ve met our enemy face to face, or our friend either. He thought, But I think we will. Before long we will know who they both are.
Runciter and Joe start to wonder who “the real enemy is”
At the end of the chapter, Jory is mentioned as being a hazard to everyone in half life
Chapter 15
Runciter brings a hotel doctor for Joe
Don Denny uses Ubik on himself, disappears in the cloud, and a young boy appears in his place… JORY!!!
“I ate Denny a long time ago,” the boy Jory said. “Right at the beginning, before they came here from New York. First I ate Wendy Wright. Denny came second.”
Joe said, “I’m going to kill you.” He stepped toward Jory in an uncoordinated half-falling motion. Raising his open hands he plunged against the boy, trying to capture the neck, searching for the bent pipestem windpipe with all his fingers.
Well, he thought, that’s one of the two agencies who’re at work; Jory is the one who’s destroying us - has destroyed us, except for me. Behind Jory there is nothing; he is the end. Will I meet the other? Probably not soon enough for it to matter, he decided. He looked once more at his hand. Completely well.
As Joe goes outside, he asks a hotel worker if there are girls he can have
Chapter 16
We have put an abnormal strain on Jory, he said to himself. And we paid for it.
“Driver,” he said, “are there any houses of prostitution here in Des Moines?’ “No,” the driver said. Maybe Jory can’t manage that, Joe reflected. Because of his youth. Or maybe he disapproves.
Then Joe sees a girl with pigtails and asks the taxi driver to stop him by her
“I’m going to die,” Joe said. “Oh, dear,” the girl said, with concern. “Are you-” “He’s not sick,” the driver put in. “He’s been asking after girls; he just wants to pick you up.” The girl laughed. Without hostility. And she did not depart. “It’s almost dinnertime,” Joe said to her. “Let me take you to a restaurant, the Matador; I understand that’s nice.”
“I’m not a deformation of Jory’s; I’m not like him-” She indicated the driver.
I know your problem regarding money, your, shall we say, idiosyncrasy. And a list, on the reverse, of all the drugstores which carry it. Two drugstores - and not abandoned ones - in Des Moines are listed. I suggest we go to one first, before we eat dinner. Here, driver.” She leaned forward and handed the driver a slip of paper already written out. “Take us to this address. And hurry; they’ll be closing soon.”
“My name is Ella. Ella Hyde Runciter. Your employer’s wife.” “You’re here with us,” Joe said. “On this side; you’re in cold-pac.”
Ella said, “Herbert is paid a great deal of money annually, by Jory’s family, to keep him with the others and to think up plausible reasons for doing so. And - there are Jorys in every moratorium. This battle goes on wherever you have half-lifers; it’s a verity, a rule, of our kind of existence.”
Joe goes to a pharmacy for Ubik, but its regressed and Jory is the pharmacist
Then a woman (not Ella) from 1992 gives him Ubik
“Maybe we can have dinner together,” Joe said. “I’ll look forward to it.” She ebbed farther and farther away.
On the label, I THINK HER NAME IS MYRA LANEY, LOOK ON REVERSE SIDE OF CONTAINER FOR ADDRESS AND PHONE NUMBER.
Chapter 17
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.
Runciter is in the moratorium, and reaches for a coin in his pocket, only to see Joe Chip on it… which is strange!
 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.
So is Runciter dead in half-life too?
Perhaps!