Ubik Read Online Free PDF Page B

he chooses it, and he’s right. But why is it right? Why is it luminous? Because this girl—” He shrugged in her direction. “Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she’s gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he’s affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn’t. So that’s one advantage of her anti-talent over other anti-precog talents. The other—and greater—is that she can cancel out the precog’s decision
after he’s made it
. She can enter the situation later on, and this problem has always hung us up, as you know; if we didn’t get in there from the start we couldn’t do anything. In a way, we never could truly abort the precog ability as we’ve done with the others; right? Hasn’t that been a weak link in our services?” He eyed Joe Chip expectantly.
    “Interesting,” Joe said presently.
    “Hell-‘interesting’?” G. G. Ashwood thrashed about indignantly. “This is the greatest anti-talent to emerge thus far!”
    In a low voice Pat said, “I don’t go back in time.” She raised her eyes, confronted Joe Chip half apologetically, half belligerently. “I do something, but Mr. Ashwood has built it up all out of proportion to reality.”
    “I can read your mind,” G.G. said to her, looking a little nettled. “I know you can change the past; you’ve done it.”
    Pat said, “I can change the past but I don’t
go
into the past; I don’t time-travel, as you want your tester to think.”
    “How do you change the past?” Joe asked her.
    “I think about it. One specific aspect of it, such as one incident, or something somebody said. Or a little thing that happened that I wish hadn’t happened. The first time I did this, as a child—”
    “When she was six years old,” G.G. broke in, “living in Detroit, with her parents of course, she broke a ceramic antique statue that her father treasured.”
    “Didn’t your father foresee it?” Joe asked her. “With his precog ability?”
    “He foresaw it,” Pat answered, “and he punished me the week before I broke the statue. But he said it was inevitable; you know the precog talent: They can foresee but they can’t change anything. Then after the statue did break—after I broke it, I should say—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—isn’t there some way these unfortunate events can be averted? My father’s precog ability didn’t seem very spectacular to me, since he couldn’t alter events; I still feel that way, a sort of contempt. I spent a month trying to will the damn statue back into one piece; in my mind I kept going back to before it broke, imagining what it had looked like…which was awful. And then one morning when I got up—I even dreamed about it at night—there it stood. As it used to be.” Tensely, she leaned toward Joe Chip; she spoke in a sharp, determined voice. “But neither of my parents noticed anything. It seemed perfectly normal to them that the statue was in one piece; they thought it had always been in one piece. I was the only one who remembered.” She smiled, leaned back, took another of his cigarettes from the pack and lit up.
    “I’ll go get my test equipment from the car,” Joe said, starting toward the door.
    “Five cents, please,” the door said as he seized its knob.
    “Pay the door,” Joe said to G. G. Ashwood.

    When he had lugged his armload of testing apparatus from the car to his apt he told the firm’s scout to hit the road.
    “What?” G.G. said, astounded. “But I found her; the bounty is mine. I spent almost ten days tracing the field to her; I—”
    Joe said to him, “I can’t test her with your field present, as you well know. Talent and anti-talent fields deform each other; if they didn’t