So I'm supposed to blame Al, Joe thought. The idea did not appeal to him; he sensed the peculiarity of the logic, its perhaps deliberate misdirectedness. Al the fall-guy; Al made into the patsy, everything explained in terms of Al. Senseless, he said to himself. And - had Runciter been able to hear him? Had Runciter only pretended to be on videotape? For a time, during the commercial, Runciter had seemed to respond to his questions; only at the end had Runciter's words become malappropriate. He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.
A new thought struck him, an eerie idea. Suppose Runciter had made the videotape recording under the assumption, based on inaccurate precog information, that the bomb blast would kill him and leave the rest of them alive. The tape had been made honestly but mistakenly; Runciter had not died: They had died, as the graffiti on the men's-room wall had said, and Runciter still lived. Before the bomb blast he had given instructions for the taped commercial to be played at this time, and the network had so done, Runciter having failed to countermand his original order. That would explain the disparity between what Runciter had said on the tape and what he had written on the bathroom walls; it would in fact explain both. Which, as far as he could make out, no other explanation would.
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. In any case, controlling what they experienced, or at least a major part of it. Perhaps not the decay, he decided. Not that. But why not? Maybe, he thought, that, too. But Runciter wouldn't admit it. 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.
And, in addition, if Runciter were alive, then not one but two Runciters existed: the genuine one in the real world who was striving to reach them, and the phantasmagoric Runciter who had become a corpse in this half-life world, the body lying in state in Des Moines, Iowa. And, to carry the logic of this out to its full extent, other persons here, such as Ray Hollis and Len Niggelman, were also phantasmagoria - while their authentic counterparts remained in the world of the living.
Very confusing, Joe Chip said to himself. He did not like it at all. Granted it had a satisfying symmetrical quality, but on the other hand, it struck him as untidy.
I'll zip over to my conapt, he decided, pick up the free sample of Ubik, then head for Des Moines. After all, that's what the TV commercial urged me to do. I'll be safer carrying a can of Ubik with me, as the ad pointed out in its own jingly, clever way.
One has to pay attention to such admonitions, he realized, if one expects to stay alive - or half-alive.
Whichever it is.
The taxi let him off on the roof field of his conapt building; he descended by moving ramp and arrived at his own door. With a coin that someone had given him - Al or Pat, he could not knowingly remember - he opened the door and entered.
The living room smelled faintly of burned grease, an odor he had not come across since childhood. Going into the kitchen he discovered the reason. His stove had reverted. Back to an ancient Buck natural-gas model with clogged burners and encrusted oven door which did not close entirely. He gazed at the old, much-used stove dully - then discovered that the other kitchen appliances had undergone similar metamorphoses. The homeopape machine had vanished entirely. The toaster had dissolved sometime during the day and reformed itself as a rubbishy, quaint, nonautomatic model. Not even pop-up, he discovered as he poked bleakly at it. The refrigerator that greeted him was an enormous belt-driven model, a relic that had floated into being from god knew what distant past; it was even more obsolete than the turret-top G.E. shown in the TV commercial. The coffee-pot had undergone the least change; as a matter of fact, in one respect it had improved - it lacked the coin slot, operating obviously toll-free. This aspect was true of all the appliances, he realized. All that remained, anyhow. Like the homeopape machine, the garbage-disposal unit had entirely vanished, He tried to remember what other appliances he had owned, but already memory had become vague; he gave up and returned to the living room.
The TV set had receded back a long way; he found himself confronted by a dark, wood-cabinet, Atwater-Kent tuned radio-frequency oldtime AM radio, complete with antenna and ground wires. God in heaven, he said to himself, appalled.
