A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

  “Where’s Luckman?”

  “I suppose out somewhere trying to rip off a pay phone. He took your hydraulic axle jack with him; that usually means he’s out to knock over a pay phone, doesn’t it?”

  “My axle jack,” Arctor echoed.

  “You know,” Barris said. “I could assist you professionally in your attempts to hustle little miss—”

  Fred shot the tape ahead at high-speed wind. The meter at last read a two-hour passage.

  “—pay up your goddamn back rent or goddamn get to work on the cephscope,” Arctor was saying hotly to Barris.

  “I’ve already ordered resistors which—”

  Again Fred sent the tape forward. Two more hours passed.

  Now Holo Monitor Five showed Arctor in his bedroom, in bed, a clock FM radio on to KNX, playing folk rock dimly. Monitor Two in the living room showed Barris alone, again reading about mushrooms. Neither man did much for a long period. Once, Arctor stirred and reached out to increase the radio’s volume as a song, evidently one he liked, came on. In the living room Barris read on and on, hardly moving. Arctor again at last lay back in bed unmoving.

  The phone rang. Barris reached out and lifted it to his ear. “Hello?”

  On the phone tap the caller, a male, said, “Mr. Arctor?”

  “Yes, this is,” Barris said.

  I’ll be fucked for a nanny goat, Fred said to himself. He reached to turn up the phone-tap volume level.

  “Mr. Arctor,” the unidentified caller said in a slow, low voice, “I’m sorry to bother you so late, but that check of yours that did not clear—”

  “Oh yes,” Barris said. “I’ve been intending to call you about that. The situation is this, sir. I have had a severe bout of intestinal flu, with loss of body heat, pyloric spasms, cramps … I just can’t get it all together right now to make that little twenty-dollar check good, and frankly I don’t intend to make it good.”

  “What?” the man said, not startled but hoarsely. Ominously.

  “Yes, sir,” Barris said, nodding. “You heard me correctly, sir.”

  “Mr. Arctor,” the caller said, “that check has been returned by the bank twice now, and these flu symptoms that you describe—”

  “I think somebody slipped me something bad,” Barris said, with a stark grin on his face.

  “I think,” the man said, “that you’re one of those—” He groped for the word.

  “Think what you want,” Barris said, still grinning.

  “Mr. Arctor,” the man said, breathing audibly into the phone, “I am going to the D.A.’s office with that check, and while I’m on the phone I have a couple of things to tell you about what I feel about—”

  “Turn on, tune out, and good-by,” Barris said, and hung up.

  The phone-tap unit had automatically recorded the digits of the caller’s own phone, picking them up electronically from an inaudible signal generated as soon as the circuit was in place. Fred read off the number now visible on a meter, then shut off the tape-transport for all his holo-scanners, lifted his own police phone, and called in for a print-out on the number.

  “Englesohn Locksmith, 1343 Harbor in Anaheim/’ the police info operator informed him. “Lover boy.”

  “Locksmith,” Fred said. “Okay.” He had that written down and now hung up. A locksmith … twenty dollars, a round sum: that suggested a job outside the shop—probably driving out and making a duplicate key. When the “owner’s” key had gotten lost.

  Theory. Barris had posed as Arctor, phoned Englesohn Locksmith to have a “duplicate” key made illicitly, for either the house or the car or even both. Telling Englesohn he’d lost his whole key ring … but then the locksmith, doing a security check, had sprung on Barris a request for a check as I.D. Barris had gone back in the house and ripped off an unfilled-out checkbook of Arctor’s and written a check out on it to the locksmith. The check hadn’t cleared. But why not? Arctor kept a high balance in his account; a check that small would clear. But if it cleared Arctor would come across it in his statement and recognize it as not his, as Jim Barris’s. So Barris had rooted about in Arctor’s closets and located— probably at some previous time—an old checkbook from a now abandoned account and used that. The account being closed, the check hadn’t cleared. Now Barris was in hot water.

  But why didn’t Barris just go in and pay off the check in cash? This way the creditor was already mad and phoning, and eventually would take it to the D.A. Arctor would find out. A skyful of shit would land on Barris. But the way Barris had talked on the phone to the already outraged creditor … he had slyly goaded him into even further hostility, out of which the locksmith might do anything. And worse—Barris’s description of his “flu” was a description of coming off heroin, and anybody would know who knew anything. And Barris had signed off the phone call with a flat-out insinuation that he was a heavy doper and so what about it? Signed all this off as Bob Arctor.

  The locksmith at this point knew he had a junkie debtor who’d written him a rubber check and didn’t care shit and had no intention of making good. And the junkie had this attitude because obviously he was so wired and spaced and mind-blown on his dope it didn’t matter to him. And this was an insult to America. Deliberate and nasty.

  In fact, Barris’s sign-off was a direct quote of Tim Leary’s original funky ultimatum to the establishment and all the straights. And this was Orange County. Full of Birchers and Minutemen. With guns. Looking for just this kind of uppity sass from bearded dopers.

  Barris had set Bob Arctor up for a fire-bombing. A bust on the bad check at the least, a fire-bombing or other massive retaliatory strike at worst, without Arctor having any notion what was coming down.

  Why? Fred wondered. He noted on his scratch pad the ident code on this tape sequence, plus the phone-tap code as well. What was Barris getting Arctor back for? What the hell had Arctor been up to? Arctor must have burned him pretty bad, Fred thought, for this. This is sheer malice. Little, vile, and evil.

  This Barris guy, he thought, is a motherfucker. He’s going to get somebody killed.

  One of the scramble suits in the safe apartment with him roused him from his introspection. “Do you actually know these guys?” The suit gestured at the now blank holo-monitors Fred had before him. “You in there among them on cover assignment?”

  “Yep,” Fred said.

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to warn them in some way about this mushroom toxicity he’s exposing them to, that clown with the green shades who’s peddling. Can you pass it on to them without faulting your cover?”

  The other near scramble suit called from his swivel chair, “Any time one of them gets violently nauseous—that’s sometimes a tip-off on mushroom poisoning.”

  “Resembling strychnine?” Fred said. A cold insight grappled with his head then, a rerun of the Kimberly Hawkins dog-shit day and his illness in his car after what—

  His.

  “I’ll tell Arctor,” he said. “I can lay it on him. Without him flashing on me. He’s docile.”

  “Ugly-looking, too,” one of the scramble suits said. “He the individual came in the door stoop-shouldered and hung over?”

  “Aw,” Fred said, and swiveled back to his holos. Oh goddamn, he thought, that day Barris gave us the tabs at the roadside—his mind went into spins and double trips and then split in half, directly down the middle. The next thing he knew, he was in the safe apartment’s bathroom with a Dixie cup of water, rinsing out his mouth, by himself, where he could think. When you get down to it, I’m Arctor, he thought. I’m the man on the scanners, the suspect Barris was fucking over with his weird phone call with the locksmith, and I was asking, What’s Arctor been up to to get Barris on him like that? I’m slushed; my brain is slushed. This is not real. I’m not believing this, watching what is me, is Fred— that was Fred down there without his scramble suit; that’s how Fred appears without the suit!

  And Fred the other day possibly almost got it with toxic mushroom fragments, he rea
lized. He almost didn’t make it here to this safe apartment to get these holos going. But now he has.

  Now Fred has a chance. But only barely.

  Crazy goddamn job they gave me, he thought. But if I wasn’t doing it someone else would be, and they might get it wrong. They’d set him up—set Arctor up. They’d turn him in for the reward; they’d plant dope on him and collect. If anyone, he thought, has to be watching that house, it better ought to be me by far, despite the disadvantages; just protecting everybody against kinky fucking Barris in itself justifies it right there.

  And if any other officer monitoring Barris’s actions sees what I probably will see, they’ll conclude Arctor is the biggest drug runner in the western U.S. and recommend a— Christ!—covert snuff. By our unidentified forces. The ones in black we borrow from back East that tiptoe a lot and carry the scope-site Winchester 803’s. The new infrared sniper-scope sights synched with the EE-trophic shells. Those guys who don’t get paid at all, even from a Dr. Pepper machine; they just get to draw straws to see which of them gets to be the next U.S. President. My God, he thought, those fuckers can shoot down a passing plane. And make it look like one engine inhaled a flock of birds. Those EE-trophic shells— why fuck me, man, he thought; they’d leave traces of feathers in the ruins of the engines; they’d prime them for that.

  This is awful, he thought, thinking about this. Not Arctor as suspect but Arctor as … whatever. Target. I’ll keep on watching him; Fred will keep on doing his Fred-thing; it’ll be a lot better; I can edit and interpret and do a great deal of “Let’s wait until he actually” and so on, and, realizing this, he tossed the Dixie cup away and emerged from the safe apartment’s bathroom.

  “You look done in,” one of the scramble suits said to him.

  “Well,” Fred said, “funny thing happened to me on the way to the grave.” He saw in his mind a picture of the supersonic tight-beam projector which had caused a forty-nine-year-old district attorney to have a fatal cardiac arrest, just as he was about to reopen the case of a dreadful and famous political assassination here in California. “I almost got there,” he said aloud.

  “Almost is almost,” the scramble suit said. “It’s not there.”

  “Oh,” Fred said. “Yeah. Right.”

  “Sit down,” a scramble suit said, “and get back to work, or for you no Friday, just public assistance.”

  “Can you imagine listing this job as a job skill on the—” Fred began, but the two other scramble suits were not amused and in fact weren’t even listening. So he reseated himself and lit a cigarette. And started up the battery of holos once more.

  What I ought to do, he decided, is walk back up the street to the house, right now, while I’m thinking about it, before I get sidetracked, and walk in on Barris real fast and shoot him.

  In the line of duty.

  I’ll say, “Hey, man, I’m hurtin’—can you lay a joint on me? I’ll pay you a buck.” And he will, and then I’ll arrest him, drag him to my car, throw him inside, drive onto the freeway, and then pistol-whip him out of the car in front of a truck. And I can say he fought loose and tried to jump. Happens all the time.

  Because if I don’t I can never eat or drink any open food or beverage in the house, and neither can Luckman or Donna or Freck or we’ll all croak from toxic mushroom fragments, after which Barris will explain about how we were all out in the woods picking them at random and eating them and he tried to dissuade us but we wouldn’t listen because we didn’t go to college.

  Even if the court psychiatrists find him totally burned out and nuts and toss him in forever, somebody’ll be dead. He thought, Maybe Donna, for instance. Maybe she’ll wander in, spaced on hash, looking for me and the spring flowers I promised her, and Barris will offer her a bowl of Jell-O he made himself special, and ten days later she’ll be thrashing in agony in an intensive-care ward and it won’t do any good then.

  If that happens, he thought, I’ll boil him in Drāno, in the bathtub, in hot Drāno, until only bones remain, and then mail the bones to his mother or kids, whichever he has, and if he hasn’t either then just toss the bones out at passing dogs. But the deed will be done to that little girl anyhow.

  Excuse me, he rolled in his head in fantasy to the other two scramble suits. Where can I get a hundred-pound can of Drāno this time of night?

  I’ve had it, he thought, and turned on the holos so as not to attract any more static from the other suits in the safe room.

  On Monitor Two, Barris was talking to Luckman, who apparently had rolled in the front door dead drunk, no doubt on Ripple. “There are more people addicted to alcohol in the U.S.,” Barris was telling Luckman, who was trying to find the door to his bedroom, to go pass out, and having a terrible time, “than there are addicts of all other forms of drugs. And brain damage and liver damage from the alcohol plus impurities—”

  Luckman disappeared without ever having noticed Barris was there. I wish him luck, Fred thought. It’s not a workable policy, though, not for long. Because the fucker is there.

  But now Fred is here, too. But all Fred’s got is hindsight. Unless, he thought, unless maybe if I run the holo-tapes backward. Then I’d be there first, before Barris. What I do would precede what Barris does. If with me first he gets to do anything at all.

  And then the other side of his head opened up and spoke to him more calmly, like another self with a simpler message flashed to him as to how to handle it.

  ‘The way to cool the locksmith check,” it told him, “is to go down there to Harbor tomorrow first thing very early and redeem the check and get it back. Do that first, before you do anything else. Do that right away. Defuse that, at that end. And after that, do the other more serious things, once that’s finished. Right?” Right, he thought. That will remove me from the disadvantage list. That’s where to start.

  He put the tape on fast forward, on and on until he figured from the meters that it would show a night scene with everyone asleep. For a pretext to sign off his workday, here.

  It now showed lights off, the scanners on infra. Luckman in his bed in his room; Barris in his; and in his room, Arctor beside a chick, both of them asleep.

  Let’s see, Fred thought. Something. We have her in the computer files as strung out on hard stuff and also turning tricks and dealing. A true loser.

  “At least you didn’t have to watch your subject have sexual intercourse,” one of the other scramble suits said, watching from behind him and then passing on by.

  “That’s a relief,” Fred said, stoically viewing the two sleeping figures in the bed; his mind was on the locksmith and what he had to do there. “I always hate to—”

  “A nice thing to do,” the scramble suit agreed, “but not too nice to watch.”

  Arctor asleep, Fred thought. With his trick. Well, I can wind up soon; they’ll undoubtedly ball on arising but that’s about it for them.

  He continued watching, however. The sight of Bob Arctor sleeping … on and on, Fred thought, hour after hour. And then he noticed something he had not noticed. That doesn’t look like anybody else but Donna Hawthorne! he thought. There in bed, in the sack with Arctor.

  It doesn’t compute, he thought, and reached to snap off the scanners. He ran the tape back, then forward again. Bob Arctor and a chick, but not Donna! It was the junkie chick Connie! He had been right. The two individuals lay there side by side, both asleep.

  And then, as Fred watched, Connie’s hard features melted and faded into softness, and into Donna Hawthorne’s face.

  He snapped off the tape again. Sat puzzled. I don’t get it, he thought. It’s—what they call that? Like a goddamn dissolve! A film technique. Fuck, what is this? Pre-editing for TV viewing? By a director, using special visual effects?

  Again he ran the tape back, then forward; when he first came to the alteration in Connie’s features he then stopped the transport, leaving the hologram filled with one freeze-frame.

  He rotated the enlarger: All the other cubes cut out; one huge
cube formed from the previous eight. A single nocturnal scene; Bob Arctor, unmoving, in his bed, the girl unmoving, beside him.

  Standing, Fred walked into the holo-cube, into the three-dimensional projection, and stood close to the bed to scrutinize the girl’s face.

  Halfway between, he decided. Still half Connie; already half Donna. I better run this over to the lab, he thought; it’s been tampered with by an expert. I’ve been fed fake tape.

  Who by? he wondered. He emerged from the holo-cube, collapsed it, and restored the small eight ones. Still sat there, pondering.

  Somebody faked in Donna. Superimposed over Connie. Forged evidence that Arctor was laying the Hawthorne girl. Why? As a good technician can do with either audio or video tape and now—as witness—with holo-tapes. Hard to do, but …

  If this was a click-on, click-off, interval scan, he thought, we’d have a sequence showing Arctor in bed with a girl he probably never did get into bed and never will, but there it is on the tape.

  Or maybe it’s a visual interruption or breakdown electronically, he pondered. What they call printing. Holo-printing: from one section of the tape storage to another. If the tape sits too long, if the recording gain was too high initially, it prints across. Jeez, he thought. It printed Donna across from a previous or later scene, maybe from the living room.

  I wish I knew more about the technical side of this, he reflected. I’d better acquire more background on this before jumping the gun. Like another AM station filtering in, interfering—

  Crosstalk, he decided. Like that: accidental.

  Like ghosts on a TV screen. Functional, a malfunction. A transducer opened up briefly.

  Again he rolled the tape. Connie again, and Connie it stayed. And then … again Fred saw Donna’s fact melt back in, and this time the sleeping man beside her in the bed, Bob Arctor, woke up after a moment and sat up abruptly, then fumbled for the light beside him; the light fell to the floor and Arctor was staring on and on at the sleeping girl, at sleeping Donna.