A Scanner Darkly

“Well, Barris,” Luckman said, “I can see you’re right. There definitely was someone here, because you see—you see, too, don’t you, Bob?—the scrupulous covering-over of all the signs they would have otherwise left testifies to their—” He farted then, in disgust, and wandered into the kitchen to look in the refrigerator for a can of beer. “Barris,” he said, “you’re fucked.”

Still moving about alertly with his gun, Barris ignored him as he sought to discover telltale traces. Arctor, watching, thought, Maybe he will. They may have left some. And he thought, Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly. Under very specialized conditions, such as today. Next thing, Barris will be reasoning that I lured everyone out of the house deliberately to permit secret intruders to accomplish their thing here. And later on he will discern why and who and everything else, and in fact maybe he already has. Had a while ago, in fact; long-enough ago to initiate sabotage and destruct actions on the cephscope, car, and God knows what else. Maybe when I turn on the garage light the house will burn down. But the main thing is, did the bugging crew arrive and get all the monitors in and finish up? He would not know until he talked to Hank and Hank gave him a proof-positive layout of the monitors and where their storage drums could be serviced. And whatever additional information the bugging crew’s boss, plus other experts involved in this operation, wanted to dump on him. In their concerted play against Bob Arctor, the suspect.

“Look at this!” Barris said. He bent over an ashtray on the coffee table. “Come here!’ he called sharply to both of them, and both men responded.

Reaching down, Arctor felt heat rising from the ashtray.

“A still-hot cigarette butt,” Luckman said, marveling. “It sure is.”

Jesus, Arctor thought. They did screw up. One of the crew smoked and then reflexively put the butt here. So they must just have gone. The ashtray, as always, overflowed; the crewman probably assumed no one would notice the addition, and in another few moments it would have cooled.

“Wait a second,” Luckman said, examining the ashtray. He fished out, from among the tobacco butts, a roach. “This is what’s hot, this roach. They lit a joint while they were here. But what did they do? What the hell did they do?” He scowled and peered about, angry and baffled. “Bob, fuck it—Barris, was right. There was somebody here! This roach is still hot, and you can smell it if you hold it—” He held it under Arctor’s nose. “Yeah, it’s still burning a little down inside. Probably a seed. They didn’t manicure it too good before they rolled it.”

“That roach,” Barris said, equally grim, “may not have been left here by accident. This evidence may not be a slip-up.”

“What now?” Arctor said, wondering what kind of police bugging crew would have a member who smoked a joint in front of the others while on the job.

“Maybe they were here specifically to plant dope in this house,” Barris said. “Setting us up, then phone in a tip later … Maybe there’s dope hidden like this in the phone, for example, and the wall outlets. We’re going to have to go through the whole house and get it absolutely clean before they phone the tip in. And we’ve probably got only hours.”

“You check the wall sockets,” Luckman said. “I’ll take the phone apart.”

“Wait,” Barris said, holding up his hand. “If they see us scrambling around just before the raid—”

“What raid?” Arctor said.

“If we’re running frantically around flushing dope,” Barris said, “then we can’t allege, even though it’s true, that we didn’t know the dope was there. They’ll catch us actually holding it. And maybe that, too, is part of their plan.”

“Aw shit,” Luckman said in disgust. He threw himself down on the couch. “Shit shit shit. We can’t do anything. There’s probably dope hidden in a thousand places we’ll never find. We’ve had it.” He glared up at Arctor in baffled fury. “We’ve had it!”

Arctor said to Barris, “What about your electronic cassette thing rigged to the front door?” He had forgotten about it. So had Barris, evidently. Luckman, too.

“Yes, this should be extremely informational at this point,” Barris said. He knelt down by the couch, reached underneath, grunted, then hauled forth a small plastic cassette tape recorder. “This should tell us a great deal,” he began, and then his face sank. “Well, it probably wouldn’t ultimately have proven that important.” He pulled out the power plug from the back and set the cassette down on the coffee table. “We know the main fact—that they did enter during our absence. That was its main task.”

Silence.

“I’ll bet I can guess,” Arctor said.

Barris said, “The first thing they did when they entered was switch it to the off position. I left it set to on, but look—now it’s turned to off. So although I—”

“It didn’t record?” Luckman said, disappointed.