Ubik by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page B

bonded. She can legally obligate her firm up to and including its total worth. Right now she is calculating how much this would be, if converted on today’s market.” A pause. “Several billion poscreds, she has decided. But she doesn’t want to do this; she doesn’t like the idea of committing herself to both a contract and retainer. She would prefer to have Mick’s attorneys do that, even if it means several days’ delay.”
    But they’re in a hurry, Runciter reflected. Or so they say.
    The microspeaker said, “She has an intuition that you know—or have guessed—whom she represents. And she’s afraid you’ll up your fee accordingly. Mick knows his reputation. He considers himself the world’s greatest mark. So he negotiates in this manner: through someone or some firm as a front. On the other hand, they want as many inertials as they can get. And they’re resigned to that being enormously expensive.”
    “Forty inertials,” Runciter said idly; he scratched with his pen at a small sheet of blank paper, on his desk for just such purposes. “Let’s see. Six times fifty times three. Times forty.”
    Miss Wirt, still smiling her glazed, happy smile, waited with visible tension.
    “I wonder,” he murmured, “who paid Hollis to put his employees in the middle of your project.”
    “That doesn’t really matter, does it?” Miss Wirt said. “What matters is that they’re there.”
    Runciter said, “Sometimes one never finds out. But as you say—it’s the same as when ants find their way into your kitchen. You don’t ask why they’re there; you just begin the job of getting them back out.” He had arrived at a cost figure.
    It was enormous.
    “I’ll—have to think it over,” Miss Wirt said; she raised her eyes from the shocking sight of his estimate and half rose to her feet. “Is there somewhere, an office, where I can be alone? And possibly phone Mr. Howard?”
    Runciter, also rising, said, “It’s rare for any prudence organization to have that many inertials available at one time. If you wait, the situation will change. So if you want them you’d better act.”
    “And you think it would really take
that
many inertials?”
    Taking Miss Wirt by the arm, he led her from his office and down the hall. To the firm’s map room. “This shows,” he told her, “the location of our inertials plus the inertials of other prudence organizations. In addition to that it shows—or tries to show—the location of all of Hollis’ Psis.” He systematically counted the psi ident-flags which, one by one, had been removed from the map; he wound up holding the final one: that of S. Dole Melipone. “I know now where they are,” he said to Miss Wirt, who had lost her mechanical smile as she comprehended the significance of the unpositioned ident-flags. Taking hold of her damp hand, he deposited Melipone’s flag among her damp fingers and closed them around it. “You can stay here and meditate,” he said. “There’s a vidphone over there—” He pointed. “No one will bother you. I’ll be in my office.” He left the map room, thinking, I really don’t know that this is where they are, all those missing Psis. But it’s possible. And—Stanton Mick had waived the routine procedure of making an objective test. Therefore, if he wound up hiring inertials which he did not need it would be his own fault.
    Legalistically speaking, Runciter Associates was required to notify the Society that some of the missing Psis—if not all—had been found. But he had five days in which to file the notification…and he decided to wait until the last day. This kind of business opportunity, he reflected, happens once in a lifetime.
    “Mrs. Frick,” he said, entering her outer office. “Type up a work contract specifying forty—” He broke off.
    Across the room sat two persons. The man, Joe Chip, looked haggard and hungover and more than usually glum…looked, in fact, about as always, the glumness excepted. But