Part 1

The Big Fix!

By RICHARD WILSON

Illustrated by ENGLE

As a drug, uru was a junkie's dream. As a planet, Uru was paradise. But combined, the two became a living hell!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity Science Fiction, August 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"_I read about a drug called_ yage.... _Maybe I will find in_ yage _what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke._ Yage _may be the final fix_."--William Lee, _Junkie_.

I was meeting The Man in a cafeteria on West End Avenue--the rundown part of the avenue south of 72nd Street where all the garages and auto parts places are.

I didn't need a fix. I'd been off the junk for three months and I was all right. I was drinking a lot, but that was all.

The meet in the cafeteria was set up by an old connection of mine who'd heard I was interested in this new stuff. My connection's name was Rollo, sometimes called Rollo the Roller because he rolled lushes in the subway.

Rollo and I had coffee while we waited for The Man.

"He's a funny one," Rollo said. "Not like any other pusher I ever dig."

"You sure he's straight?" I asked. "He wouldn't be one of The People, would he?"

"Nah, he's no agent. Don't you think I can make a cop or a Federal by now?"

"All right. I wasn't trying to insult you."

We sipped our coffee and talked in low voices. The cafeteria wasn't a regular joint. It might be in time, and then it would be one till it got too hot, but it wasn't now.

I didn't see the guy come in. The first thing I knew he was standing at the table over us. Tall, wearing a black suit like an undertaker or a preacher, but with a dark blue shirt and a white tie. He had a young-old face and his skin was a light tan. Not the tan you get at Miami Beach or from a sun lamp, but as if he had Chinese or Malay blood in him somewhere.

Rollo jumped a little when he noticed him at his elbow.

"Oh, hello, Jones. Creepin' up on people again. Sit down. This is Barry."

I acknowledged the introduction. I was sure Jones wasn't his real name any more than Barry was mine. I asked him if I could buy him a cup of coffee and he said _no_, and then Rollo left. Rollo'd mumbled something about business, but I got the feeling he didn't like being around Jones any more than he had to.

"I understand you are interested in my product," Jones said. He had dark brown eyes, almost black. He didn't talk like a pusher, but you can't always make generalizations.

"I don't want to score any," I said. "At least not right now. I'm off the stuff, but I take a sort of philosophical interest in it, you might say."

"I could not sell you any at the moment, in any case," Jones said. "I do not make a practice of carrying it on my person."

"Of course not. But what is it? Rollo tells me it's not the usual junk. I wondered if maybe it was _yage_."

_Yage_ was something you kept hearing about but never saw yourself. It was always somebody who knew somebody else who'd tried it. _Yage_ was the junkie's dream. You never caught up with it, but you heard hints in conversation.

An addict would give himself a fix of Henry, sliding the needle into the vein, and later, as his tension relaxed, he'd say to his connection, "I hear _yage_ is the real kick--they tell me that compared to _yage_, heroin is the least." And the connection would say, "That's what they tell me, but I never seen any of it myself. They have it in the Amazon or someplace, I hear."

It's always hearsay. But after a while you hear so much about it that you believe it's got to be around somewhere, so you keep asking. I asked Jones.

"I could show you _yage_," Jones said, and I felt a tingle, like a kid promised his first kiss. "But it would disappoint you."

"Why?"

"It is like _peyote_--just another herb. It has a similar effect to that of the Mescal cactus button, but since you would not seem to be a devotee of the Sun Dance I do not think it would interest you."

I went into a slump again when I heard him run down _yage_. I knew what _peyote_ was. It might be all right for Indians, but it just made the average junkie sick to his stomach.

"What would interest me, then?" I asked him.

"I have a certain amount of a substance called _uru_," he said. "It is--and I do not exaggerate when I say this--the most."

I couldn't help grinning. Jones had been speaking the store-bought English of the educated foreigner and then he came out with this hep expression.

"Tell me more, professor," I said. "You're ringing my bell."

"You tell _me_ more, my friend," he came back. "What is your great interest in this will-o'-the-wisp _yage_ that so excites you, although you claim to be 'off the stuff'?"

I could almost hear the quotation marks he put around the phrase.

"Okay," I said. "I'll tell you."

So I went into the crazy old dream--the feeling that there's something better someplace, something you can take or leave alone, that doesn't leave you with that wrung-out, hopeless horror of junk sickness when you can't get the stuff.

I told him about the other addicts--how they feel this kinship that's not like any other relationship anywhere--how you have that exalted feeling of mingled hope and despair when another junkie is coming with a fix for you--and how by just drifting around in a strange city you find yourself drawn to the right district to score the stuff. How it's almost telepathic.

I told him what they said about _yage_, that some South American croaker had isolated from it a fix he called telepathine. How it was supposed to be some kind of miracle dope that you could take when you wanted it without actually _needing_ it, and it would open up the world for you so you'd be close, really close, to others like you. So your mind would be their mind. A union more terrific than any other kind--as far beyond even the ideal sexual climax, for instance, as sex is beyond a bow or a handshake. So there'd be a togetherness you couldn't achieve any other way. So you wouldn't be so ... alone.

I felt embarrassed after talking like that, even though Jones listened as sympathetically as anybody could, so I got up to get another cup of coffee at the counter.

"Okay," I said defensively as I spooned in the sugar. "I've told you about me. Now what about that stuff of yours--what do you call it again?"

"_Uru_," he said. "It is what _yage_ is said to be, but is not. You would like it. But you tell me you are 'off the stuff'."

"Off the old stuff. It's no good and I've licked it. Off with the old," I said, beginning to feel a little high already, "and on with the new. _Uru_, eh?"

This might be it. The most. The big fix. I had to have it.

"You shall try it," Jones said. "You shall judge for yourself. Then if you want more I will provide it for you. There will be no charge."

Right away I got suspicious. Nobody gives anything away. It could be a come-on. Jones might figure I'd like it so much I'd have to have more and then I'd pay and pay. But on the other hand maybe he figured wrong. Nothing is habit-forming once. I didn't know anything about this _uru_, but I knew all there was to know about everything else.

"Okay," I said. "When?"

"I will call you," Jones said.

I gave him my number.

* * * * *

He had a place on East 45th, a ratty old brownstone. It didn't look as if he'd lived in it long. But that was to be expected; if you were a pusher you had to keep on the move. After a while a landlady got suspicious about all the queer characters visiting this one guy and the next step was the cops.

Jones had called me the day after our talk in the cafeteria, setting up a meet for that afternoon. I'd had a dream about _uru_, a wild and wonderful dream that made it impossible for me not to go. I'm a hunch-player, anyway. So I went.

But I was cautious enough to leave my money home and not to wear my best clothes. Then if it turned out that Jones was pulling a lush-worker switch, feeding junkies a knockout fix and rolling them, I wouldn't lose much.

He was wearing the same black suit. His closet door was open and I could see that there were no clothes hanging in it. Maybe he hadn't unpacked yet, though I didn't see a suitcase anywhere.

I didn't think much about these things at the time. Jones smiled and shook hands with me. Then he excused himself and went out into the hall. So far so good. No smart pusher keeps the stuff in his room. Possession carries a stiff rap.

I had my works with me--needle and eye-dropper--but Jones told me I wouldn't need it. I was surprised. If his place wasn't a shooting gallery, what was it? A weed joint? Weed was no good--that was fag stuff. Marijuana, bennies, goof balls, nembies--that stuff was nowhere for a cat who'd been mainlining it for a decade. I told that to Jones.

He smiled and told me to relax. He meant it literally.

"Lie down on the bed," he said. "Take your coat off. No, don't roll up your sleeve."

He pulled down a blue shade over the single window and the room got dim. Sunlight squeezed through the cracks at the edges and made shimmering little patterns on the walls and ceiling.

He took a cigaret holder out of his pocket. It was green, like jade, and carved around its fat middle was a design of some kind. I couldn't make it out, even when I held it in my hand.

Jones put a cigaret in the holder. It looked like an ordinary king-size smoke and I told him so.

"That is correct," he said. "It is not the cigaret that provides the effect, but the _uru_ in the holder. The smoke travels over the _uru_ and activates it. Enough of it is absorbed by the warm smoke for the desired result. Do not inhale too deeply the first time."

I took a short drag, half suspecting he was conning me. Nothing happened right away. It didn't taste any different from any cigaret smoked through a holder. I took another drag, deeper this time.

I was off.

I became a tiny replica of myself, swimming effortlessly within my own eyeball, looking down the length of that other me lying on the bed. My feet looked a mile away. I moved them and it seemed to take almost a minute for the impulse to communicate itself from my mind along the vast body.

Then I lost interest in my body as the flecks of sunlight on the ceiling became tiny planets, whirling in perfect, intricate orbits around a fiery blue-white sun.

The smoke in the room climbed up in a graceful dance and became a dust-cloud in the sparkling solar system. The dark head of Jones came into view among the tiny worlds, not obscuring them. The little jewel-like planets were a shimmering crown hovering about him.

He spoke then, and his words echoed to me as if through the vastness of infinity itself.

"Barry," the voice said, powerful but warm, far away but deliciously close, awesome but comfortable. "Barry, my good friend."

I could see the great face, both with my real eyes and with the eyes of that tiny other me swimming within. It was a mighty face, but reassuring--the face of a kind father and loving wife and adoring son all in one. The face was smiling, a dear familiar smile.

But the lips were not moving. The voice was that of a mind, reaching out through vastness and into my own thoughts.

"You are not alone," the mind-voice said, and it was what I had been waiting to hear. "You are one with all good things. The door you have been seeking is open. You have only to walk through."

I had been swimming, but now I walked. It was like no other kind of walking. It was like ice-skating in a way, a smooth, effortless glide. The tiny me walked, glided, out of my body and up, up in a curl of smoke, across a million miles of blackness toward the shimmering worlds.

"I found the door," I thought, and knew the words were being communicated to him. "I thank you and I am walking through. It is a beautiful world you have. It sparkles so. I love it."

I could say these things to him with my mind, meaning them, unashamed of the innermost feelings that would have been throttled off unspoken if I'd had to use the vulgarity of speech.

He understood that, too, and his smile became warmer. There was a bond here I'd never experienced, a warm gushing of myself to him and to this world he'd opened for me. The warmth was reciprocated instantly. His face showed it, his mind told me and the glittering worlds seemed to join in his message of esteem and one-ness.

There was more; but later I couldn't remember it all. The beauty of a thing can't be recreated in its absence. Only the memory of it lingers. But the memory of an exalted experience has a beauty of its own.

After a while I came back. Back to my gross self lying on the bed, the jade-green cigaret holder in my fingers, a long ash on the end of the cigaret. So I had been away only a minute or two in our time. It had seemed hours in his.

Gradually the sparkling worlds reverted to patches of sunlight and the dust-cloud to tobacco smoke.

Jones stood near the bed. Gently he took the holder from my fingers and snuffed out the cigaret in the ashtray.

"You are pleased," he said, speaking with his voice now. "You have told me that."

"Yes," I said. "Oh, yes." I wanted to say much more, but the inhibition of speech was on me now.

"I understand. Do not talk. You are still too close to it. The change is too great. But some of it remains with you, does it not?"

I nodded. It did. There was no great letdown. No harsh awakening to the detested world of everyday. It must have been because I carried over with me enough of the memory to cushion the shock of adjustment. I sat up. I felt fine.

"You have had only a glimpse," he said. "You must go now. But perhaps you will come back?"

"Please," I said.

"Of course. I will call you."

He helped me on with my coat. I went down the stairs and out into the sunlight.

* * * * *

Jones didn't call for days. I hardly left my room, waiting for the phone to ring. Once I walked over toward 45th Street, but I turned back before I got there. Jones had said he'd call me and I didn't want to get him angry with me.

Rollo came over to my place one night. He had some junk left over from scoring and offered me a fix. I didn't want it.

"Still off the stuff?" he asked.

"Off that stuff," I said. "That stuff is nowhere."

"You sound like you're somewhere else. Did The Man make it for you on the _yage_ kick?"

"_Yage's_ over the rainbow," I told him. "_Uru_ is here and now."

"_Uru._ Is that what Jones serves? Never heard of it. Mind if I shoot a little old-fashioned horse here? I got trouble finding a vein lately. Maybe you'll help me."

He rolled up his sleeve and took out his equipment. He tied a handkerchief around his arm to make the veins stand out and I helped him locate one. I cooked up the stuff and shot it home for him. He cleaned out the needle under the faucet and we sat down and had cigarets.

"So tell me about this _uru_," Rollo said.

"It's truly the most, man," I said.

But I couldn't go on. Rollo was a lush-worker, a cheap hood. I'd feel self-conscious trying to describe how it was. Telling him would be like dirtying it up. So I generalized.

"It's a real bang," I said. "A speedball with a jet assist. It's gone, brother. It takes you there, but _there_."

"You sound like a teahead," he said. "Is that what it is, tea?"

So I told him that was about right and he went away feeling superior. He used the white stuff and I was only a viper. So he thought. Let him think what he wanted. I'd been with it; I knew, and that was enough. It was like being one of the elite.

The phone rang and sweat came out in my palms as I picked it up.

It was Jones, asking if I wanted to travel with him again.

Travel. That was a new one. But it certainly described it. I told him yes, trying not to let him know how eager I was. But I had the feeling he understood, even over the phone. And it didn't matter. I didn't have anything to hide from him. He was my friend.

I went over to his place, prepared to travel.

* * * * *

It was the same thing again, to start with. The cigaret in the jade-green holder and lying down on the bed and relaxing.

But this time I seemed to reach the glittering worlds a lot sooner. Then one of the worlds spun closer. It loomed bigger and its surface separated into oceans and continents. Unfamiliar ones.

There was a rushing, roaring sensation as I turned over and over, and then I was walking along a lane in a peaceful countryside, with Jones beside me.

"Do you like it?" he asked, without speaking the words.

My mind answered, "It's beautiful. This isn't our world."

"This is Uru," he said. "It is my world."

Then I noticed that he wasn't dressed the same. Instead of the black suit and the blue shirt and white tie, he was wearing knee-length shorts, blue, topped by a wide belt of metallic-looking leather. He wore a thin circlet of the same material around his head. It held in the center of his forehead a heraldic device, as if it were a mark of rank. Except for sandals he wore nothing else. His body was a light tan.

I noticed then that I was dressed similarly, except that there was no circlet around my head.

We went by a field under cultivation. A few people were among the rows, working easily, chatting and laughing. They waved as we passed. There was a mental exchange of greetings between them and Jones which I also heard.

We walked effortlessly, even uphill. The gravity seemed less than on Earth. The air was clean and invigorating. It was warm but not humid.

A blue-white sun was in the sky. I could look at it without hurting my eyes. It was larger, apparently closer, than Earth's sun, and I thought I could make out markings on it. Were they the same as those on the oval Jones wore on his forehead? I could not be sure.

We were coming to a city, or a big town.

"Urula," Jones told me. "Our capital."

He had been out of communication with me since we passed the people in the field, though I felt that my thoughts were being transmitted to him. It was as if he knew all my thoughts but permitted me to know his only when he wished. Or it might have been that I was so engrossed in my new experience that he had let me enjoy it without interfering, by keeping his thoughts neutral.

"Where is Uru?" I asked then.

He showed me a mind-picture so vast I could not fully comprehend it. He showed me the sky of Earth, with the moon low on the horizon. Then up beyond the moon, so that the Earth was in eclipse behind it. Then farther still, and the mighty sun faded into insignificance among other stars.

I was whirled around in the opposite direction and rushed through space as the stars ran together and melted into a shivering puddle of luminescence which instantly flew apart into stars again, leaving one of them closer than the others. It grew in size, became blue-white, and five planets came into view, circling it in precision, equal distances away.

One of the planets began to swell and again I saw the continents and oceans of Uru and was whisked to its surface, and again I was walking along the lane toward the city.

"It is far, you see," Jones told me.

I nodded, dazed.

The city, Urula, was impeccably clean. It had a feeling of openness about it; it didn't close in and tower over you like Earth cities.

The streets were wide and landscaped with shrubs and trees. The walks were of turf and the lush trimmed grass provided a pleasant cushion for the feet. The buildings were low and rambling, set well back from the walks. There was no lack of room to force them up into the air beyond a story or two.

People passed us occasionally, never in crowds, radiating cordiality as they nodded to Jones and me. Other people lounged idly on benches or on the lawns in front of the buildings. I couldn't tell whether they were homes or business offices, or a combination of both.

I looked in vain for factories, for ugly smokestacks thrusting into the clean sky. Nor were there any automobiles, railroads or machines of any kind to foul the air with their exhausts or rend it with their din.

I asked a mental question and Jones said they had none of these things simply because they weren't needed. If one wanted to go somewhere he walked. There was no exertion and there was never any hurry. As for traveling to another city, there was no need to; one city was exactly like another. Each was self-sufficient and there was no trade among them. If one wished to see a friend in another city, why, the journey was a pleasant one, and since it was a pleasure trip it didn't matter whether the journey took a day or thirty days.

Because there were no factories or railroad yards there were no slums where people lived a marginal existence between the animal and human levels.

We turned off the main street and up a wide path to a building set back under tall shade trees.

"My home," Jones said.

* * * * *

We sat on the broad porch and a servant appeared, carrying delicate bowls on a tray. The bowls, cool to the touch, held a dark liquid that was better than any good thing I had ever drunk, without being in any way recognizable.

I sent a thought of thanks to the servant, an old white-haired man with a lighter skin than Jones', but he did not reciprocate it. For an instant, when the old man was facing me with his back to Jones, I caught a curious expression in his eyes, a combination of warning and beseeching. There was also the beginning of a message, I felt, but instantly it was swept away and Jones' thoughts came.

"You are wondering why we went so far in our star journey--from Uru to Earth."

I had wondered about that earlier, when Jones showed me the mind-picture of the vast rushing through space.

"Yes," I said, and the old servant, his face impassive again, trudged back into the house.

Jones showed me another picture of travels from Uru to the other four worlds of Uru's blue-white sun. I could not make out the type of craft, if a craft was used. The older worlds seemed the same, but death was on them. Man could never live there, Jones showed me, because of poisonous atmosphere, or unstable boiling land, or forbidding ice-locked vastness, or impenetrable fog. Only Uru, of the five, had evolved in a way harmonious to man.

Then I traveled with him farther from Uru's sun to other suns and explored their planets. But they held only desolation and potential death for a colonizer. Again the stars ran together in that glittering display of luminescence that I was allowed to understand now was the effect of crashing through the barrier of hyperspace. Only then did Earth's sun come into view. And then her planets. And then Earth herself.

I felt a foreboding now and tried to communicate it to my companion, but Earth came inevitably closer.

A moment later I was again in Jones' dingy room, lying on his bed with the jade-green cigaret holder in my fingers.

I felt cheated and frustrated.

I tried to take another puff, to return to Uru, but Jones took away the holder.

"I am sorry," he said, "but only so much time is permitted for your visits--unless you decide to join us permanently."

This was new. I hadn't even considered the possibility. I suppose I'd been thinking of these _uru_ smokes as nothing more than pipe dreams--exciting and logical, even consecutive, but still only figments of the poppy ember.

But apparently _uru_ was merely the key that opened the door to the real world for which it was named, a finite and beautiful planet spinning in a vastly distant galaxy at the other side of the spacial barrier. A world that Earthmen would never reach in this lifetime without the invitation and assistance of a native of that world who had developed mental powers beyond our comprehension.

And Jones, not only a native but apparently a noble of Uru, was extending that invitation to me.