The Big Fix!

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'."