A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

  Hell, he thought; for that matter, maybe Bob Arctor rises up in the night from deep sleep and does trips like that. Has sexual relations with the wall. Or mysterious freaks show up who he’s never seen before, a whole bunch of them, with special heads that swivel all the way around, like owls’. And the audio-scanners will pick up the far-out demented conspiracies hatched out by him and them to blow up the men’s room at the Standard station by filling the toilet with plastic explosives for God knows what brain-charred purpose. Maybe this sort of stuff goes on every night while he just imagines he’s asleep—and is gone by day.

  Bob Arctor, he speculated, may learn more new information about himself than he is ready for, more than he will about Donna in her little leather jacket, and Luckman in his fancy duds, and even Barris—maybe when nobody’s around Jim Barris merely goes to sleep. And sleeps until they reappear.

  But he doubted it. More likely Barris whipped out a hidden transmitter from the mess and chaos of his room—which, like all the other rooms in the house, had now for the first time come under twenty-four-hour scanning—and sent a cryptic signal to the other bunch of cryptic motherfuckers with whom he currently conspired for whatever people like him or them conspired for. Another branch, Bob Arctor reflected, of the authorities.

  On the other hand, Hank and those guys downtown would not be too happy if Bob Arctor left his house, now that the monitors had been expensively and elaborately installed, and was never seen again: never showed up on any of the tape. He could not therefore take off in order to fulfill his personal surveillance plans at the expense of theirs. After all, it was their money.

  In the script being filmed, he would at all times have to be the star actor. Actor, Arctor, he thought. Bob the Actor who is being hunted; he who is the El Primo huntee.

  They say you never recognize your own voice when you first hear it played back on tape. And when you see yourself on video tape, or like this, in a 3-D hologram, you don’t recognize yourself visually either. You imagined you were a tall fat man with black hair, and instead you’re a tiny thin woman with no hair at all … is that it? I’m sure I’ll recognize Bob Arctor, he thought, if by nothing else than by the clothes he wears or by a process of elimination. What isn’t Barris or Luckman and lives here must be Bob Arctor. Unless it’s one of the dogs or cats. I’ll try to keep my professional eye trained on something which walks upright.

  “Barris,” he said, “I’m going out to see if I can score some beans.” Then he pretended to remember he had no car; he got that sort of expression. “Luckman,” he said, “is your Falcon running?”

  “No,” Luckman said thoughtfully, after consideration, “I don’t think so.”

  “Can I borrow your car, Jim?” Arctor asked Barris.

  “I wonder … if you can handle my car,” Barris said.

  This always arose as a defense when anyone tried to borrow Barris’s car, because Barris had had secret unspecified modifications done on it, in its

  (a) suspension

  (b) engine

  (c) transmission

  (d) rear end

  (e) drive train

  (f) electrical system

  (g) front end and steering

  (h) as well as clock, cigar lighter, ashtray, glove compartment. In particular the glove compartment. Barris kept it locked always. The radio, too, had been cunningly changed (never explained how or why). If you tuned one station you got only one-minute-apart blips. All the push-buttons brought in a single transmission that made no sense, and, oddly, there was never any rock played over it. Sometimes when they were accompanying Barris on a buy and Barris parked and got out of the car, leaving them, he turned the particular station on in a special fashion very loud. If they changed it while he was gone he became incoherent and refused to speak on the trip back or ever to explain. He had not explained yet. Probably when set to that frequency his radio transmitted

  (a) to the authorities.

  (b) to a private paramilitary political organization.

  (c) to the Syndicate.

  (d) to extraterrestrials of higher intelligence.

  “By that I mean,” Barris said, “it will cruise at—”

  “Aw fuck!” Luckman broke in harshly. “It’s an ordinary six-cylinder motor, you humper. When we park in it downtown L. A. the parking-lot jockey drives it. So why can’t Bob? You asshole.”

  Now, Bob Arctor had a few devices too, a few covert modifications built into his own car radio. But he didn’t talk about them. Actually, it was Fred who had. Or anyhow somebody had, and they did a few things a little like what Barris claimed his several electronic assists did, and then on the other hand they did not.

  For example, every law-enforcement vehicle emits a particular full-spectrum interference which sounds on ordinary car radios like a failure in the spark-suppressors of that vehicle. As if the police car’s ignition is faulty. However, Bob Arctor, as a peace officer, had been allocated a gadget which, when he had mounted it within his car radio, told him a great deal, whereas the noises told other people—most other people—no information at all. These other people did not even recognize the static as information-bearing. First of all, the different subsounds told Bob Arctor how close the law-enforcement vehicle was to his own and, next, what variety of department it represented: city or county, Highway Patrol, or federal, whatever. He, too, picked up the one-minute-apart blips which acted as a time check for a parked vehicle; those in the parked vehicle could determine how many minutes they had waited without any obvious arm gestures. This was useful, for instance, when they had agreed to hit a house in exactly three minutes. The zt zt zt on their car radio told them precisely when three minutes had passed.

  He knew, too, about the AM station that played the top-ten-type tunes on and on plus an enormous amount of DJ chatter in between, which sometimes was not chatter, in a sense. If that station had been tuned to, and the racket of it filled your car, anyone casually overhearing it would hear a conventional pop music station and typical boring DJ talk, and either not hang around at all or flash on in any way to the fact that the so-called DJ suddenly, in exactly the same muted chatty style of voice in which he said, “Now here’s a number for Phil and Jane, a new Cat Stevens tune called—” occasionally said something more like “Vehicle blue will proceed a mile north to Bastanchury and the other units will—” and so on. He had never—with all the many dudes and chicks who rode with him, even when he had been obliged to keep tuned to police info-instruct, such as when a major bust was going down or any big action was in progress which might involve him—had anyone notice. Or if they noticed, they probably thought they were personally spaced and paranoid and forgot it.

  And also he knew about the many unmarked police vehicles like old Chevys jacked up in the back with loud (illegal) pipes and racing stripes, with wild-looking hip types driving them erratically at high speed—he knew from what his radio emitted in the way of the special information-carrying station at all frequencies when one buzzed him or shot past. He knew to ignore.

  Also, when he pushed the bar that supposedly switched from AM to FM on his car radio, a station on a particular frequency groaned out indefinite Muzak-type music, but this noise being transmitted to his car was filtered out, unscrambled, by the microphone-transmitter within his radio, so that whatever was said by those in his car at the time was picked up by his equipment and broadcast to the authorities; but this one funky station playing away, no matter how loud, was not received by them and did not interfere at all; the grid eliminated it.

  What Barris claimed to have did bear a certain resemblance to what he, Bob Arctor, as an undercover law-enforcement officer did have in his own car radio; but beyond that, in regard to other modifications such as suspension, engine, transmission, etc., there had been no alterations whatsoever. That would be uncool and obvious. And secondly, millions of car freaks could make equally hairy modifications in their cars, so he simply had gotten allocation for a fairly potent mill for his wheels and let it go at tha
t. Any high-powered vehicle can overtake and leave behind any other. Barris was full of shit about that; a Ferrari has suspension and handling and steering that no “special secret modifications” can match, so the hell with it. And cops can’t drive sports cars, even cheap ones. Let alone Ferraris. Ultimately it is the driver’s skill that decides it all.

  He did have one other law-enforcement allocation, though. Very unusual tires. They had more than steel bands inside, like Michelin had introduced years ago in their X types. These were all metal and wore out fast, but they had advantages in speed and acceleration. Their disadvantage was their cost, but he got them free, from his allocation service, which was not a Dr. Pepper machine like the money one. This worked fine, but he could get allocations only when absolutely necessary. The tires he put on himself, when no one was watching. As he had put in the radio alterations.

  The only fear about the radio was not detection by someone snooping, such as Barris, but simple theft. Its added devices made it expensive to replace if it got ripped off; he would have to talk fast.

  Naturally, too, he carried a gun hidden in his car. Barris in all his lurid acid-trip, spaced-out fantasies would never have designed its hiding place, where it actually was. Barris would have directed there to be an exotic spot of concealment for it, like in the steering column, in a hollow chamber. Or inside the gas tank, hanging down on a wire like the shipment of coke in the classic flick Easy Rider, that place as a stash place, incidentally, being about the worst spot on a hog. Every law-enforcement officer who had caught the film had flashed right away on what clever psychiatrist types had elaborately figured out: that the two bikers wanted to get caught and if possible killed. His gun, in his car, was in the glove compartment.

  The pseudo-clever stuff that Barris continually alluded to about his own vehicle probably bore some resemblance to reality, the reality of Arctor’s own modified car, because many of the radio gimmicks which Arctor carried were SOP and had been demonstrated on late-night TV, on network talk shows, by electronic experts who had helped design them, or read about them in trade journals, or seen them, or gotten fired from police labs and harbored a grudge. So the average citizen (or, as Barris always said in his quasi-educated lofty way, the typical average citizen) knew by now that no black-and-white ran the risk of pulling over a fast-moving souped-up, racing-striped ‘57 Chevy with what appeared to be a wild teen-ager spaced out behind the wheel on Coors beer—and then finding he’d halted an undercover nark vehicle in hot pursuit of its quarry. So the typical average citizen these days knew how and why all those nark vehicles as they roared along, scaring old ladies and straights into indignation and letter-writing, continually signaled their identity back and forth to one another and their peers … what difference did it make? But what would make a difference—a dreadful one—would be if the punks, the hot-rodders, the bikers, and especially the dealers and runners and pushers, managed to build and incorporate into their own similar cars such sophisticated devices.

  They could then whiz right on by. With impunity.

  “I’ll walk, then,” Arctor said, which was what he had wanted to do anyhow; he had set up both Barris and Luck-man. He had to walk.

  “Where you going?” Luckman said.

  “Donna’s.” Getting to her place on foot was almost impossible; saying this ensured neither man accompanying him. He put on his coat and set off toward the front door. “See you guys later.”

  “My car—” Barris continued by way of more copout.

  “If I tried to drive your car,” Arctor said, “I’d press the wrong button and it’d float up over the Greater L. A. downtown area like the Goodyear blimp, and they’d have me dumping borate on oil-well fires.”

  “I’m glad you can appreciate my position,” Barris was muttering as Arctor shut the door.

  Seated before the hologram cube of Monitor Two, Fred in his scramble suit watched impassively as the hologram changed continually before his eyes. In the safe apartment other watchers watched other holograms from other source points, mostly playbacks. Fred, however, watched a live hologram unfolding; it recorded, but he had by-passed the stored tape to pick up the transmission at the instant it emanated from Bob Arctor’s allegedly run-down house.

  Within the hologram, in broad-band color, with high resolution, sat Barris and Luckman. In the best chair in the living room, Barris sat bent over a hash pipe he had been putting together for days. His face had become a mask of concentration as he wound white string around and around the bowl of the pipe. At the coffee table Luckman hunched over a Swanson’s chicken TV dinner, eating in big clumsy mouthfuls while he watched a western on TV. Four beer cans—empties—lay squashed by his mighty fist on the table; now he reached for a fifth half-full can, knocked it over, spilled it, grabbed it, and cursed. At the curse, Barris peered up, regarded him like Mime in Siegfried, then resumed work.

  Fred continued to watch.

  “Fucking late-night TV,” Luckman gargled, his mouth full of food, and then suddenly he dropped his spoon and leaped staggering to his feet, tottered, spun toward Barris, both hands raised, gesturing, saying nothing, his mouth open and half-chewed food spilling from it onto his clothes, onto the floor. The cats ran forward eagerly.

  Barris halted in his hash-pipe making, gazed up at hapless Luckman. In a frenzy, now gargling horrid noises, Luckman with one hand swept the coffee table bare of beer cans and food; everything clattered down. The cats sped off, terrified. Still, Barris sat gazing fixedly at him. Luckman lurched a few steps toward the kitchen; the scanner there, on its cube before Fred’s horrified eyes, picked up Luckman as he groped blindly in the kitchen semidarkness for a glass, tried to turn on the faucet and fill it with water. At the monitor, Fred jumped up; transfixed, on Monitor Two he saw Barris, still seated, return to painstakingly winding string around and around the bowl of his hash pipe. Barris did not look up again; Monitor Two showed him again intently at work.

  The aud tapes clashed out great breaking, tearing sounds of agony: human strangling and the furious din of objects hitting the floor as Luckman hurled pots and pans and dishes and flatware about in an attempt to attract Barris’s attention. Barris, amid the noise, continued methodically at his hash pipe and did not look up again.

  In the kitchen, on Monitor One, Luckman fell to the floor all at once, not slowly, onto his knees, but completely, with a sodden thump, and lay spread-eagled. Barris continued winding the string of his hash pipe, and now a small snide smile appeared on his face, at the corners of his mouth.

  On his feet, Fred stared in shock, galvanized and paralyzed simultaneously. He reached for the police phone beside the monitor, halted, still watched.

  For several minutes Luckman lay on the kitchen floor without moving as Barris wound and wound the string, Barris bent over like an intent old lady knitting, smiling to himself, smiling on and on, and rocking a trifle; then abruptly Barris tossed the hash pipe away, stood up, gazed acutely at Luck-man’s form on the kitchen floor, the broken water glass beside him, all the debris and pans and broken plates, and then Barris’s face suddenly reacted with mock dismay. Barris tore off his shades, his eyes widened grotesquely, he flapped his arms in helpless fright, he ran about a little here and there, then scuttled toward Luckman, paused a few feet from him, ran back, panting now.

  He’s building up his act, Fred realized. He’s getting his panic-and-discovery act together. Like he just came onto the scene. Barris, on the cube of Monitor Two, twisted about, gasped in grief, his face dark red, and then he hobbled to the phone, yanked it up, dropped it, picked it up with trembling fingers … he has just discovered that Luckman, alone in the kitchen, has choked to death on a piece of food, Fred realized; with no one there to hear him or help him. And now Barris is frantically trying to summon help. Too late.

  Into the phone, Barris was saying in a weird, high-pitched slow voice, “Operator, is it called the inhalator squad or the resuscitation squad?”

  “Sir,” the phone tab squawked from its speak
er by Fred, “is there someone unable to breathe? Do you wish—”

  “It, I believe, is a cardiac arrest,” Barris was saying now in his low, urgent, professional-type, calm voice into the phone, a voice deadly with awareness of peril and gravity and the running out of time. “Either that or involuntary aspiration of a bolus within the—”

  “What is the address, sir?” the operator broke in.

  “The address,” Barris said, “let’s see, the address is—”

  Fred, aloud, standing, said, “Christ.”

  Suddenly Luckman, lying stretched out on the floor, heaved convulsively. He shuddered and then barfed up the material obstructing his throat, thrashed about, and opened his eyes, which stared in swollen confusion.

  “Uh, he appears to be all right now,” Barris said smoothly into the phone. “Thank you; no assistance is needed after all.” He rapidly hung the phone up.

  “Jeez,” Luckman muttered thickly as he sat up. “Fuck.” He wheezed noisily, coughing and struggling for air.

  “You okay?” Barns asked, in tones of concern.

  “I must have gagged. Did I pass out?”

  “Not exactly. You did go into an altered state of consciousness, though. For a few seconds. Probably an alpha state.”

  “God! I soiled myself!” Unsteadily, swaying with weakness, Luckman managed to get himself to his feet and stood rocking back and forth dizzily, holding on to the wall for support. “I’m really getting degenerate,” he muttered in disgust. “Like an old wino.” He headed toward the sink to wash himself, his steps uncertain.