A Scanner Darkly

But edit out what? Edit out Arctor—entirely? Arctor was the suspect. Just Arctor when he went to fiddle with the holos.

“I’ll edit myself out,” he said. “So you won’t see me. As a matter of conventional protection.”

“Of course. You haven’t done this before?” Hank reached to show him a couple of pictures. “You use a bulk erasing device that wipes out any section where you as the informant appear. That’s the holos, of course; for audio, there’s no set policy followed. You won’t have any real trouble, though. We take it for granted that you’re one of the individuals in Arctor’s circle of friends who frequent that house—you are either Jim Barris or Ernie Luckman or Charles Freck or Donna Hawthorne—”

“Donna?” he laughed. The suit laughed, actually. In its way.

“Or Bob Arctor,” Hank continued, studying his list of suspects.

“I report on myself all the time,” Fred said.

“So you will have to include yourself from time to time in the holo-tapes you turn over to us, because if you systematically edit yourself out then we can deduce who you are by a process of elimination, whether we want to or not. What you must do, really, is edit yourself out in—what should I call it?—an inventive, artistic … Hell, the word is creative way … as for instance during the brief intervals when you’re in the house alone and doing research, going through papers and drawers, or servicing a scanner within view of another scanner, on—”

“You should just send someone to the house once a month in a uniform,” Fred said. “And have him say, ‘Good morning! I’m here to service the monitoring devices covertly installed on your premises, in your phone, and in your car.’ Maybe Arctor would pick up the bill.”

“Arctor would probably off him and then disappear.”

The scramble suit Fred said, “If Arctor is hiding that much. That’s not been proved.”

“Arctor may be hiding a great deal. We’ve got more recent information on him gathered and analyzed. There is no substantial doubt of it: he is a ringer, a three-dollar bill. He is phony. So keep on him until he drops, until we have enough to arrest him and make it stick.”

“You want stuff planted?”

“We’ll discuss that later.”

“You think he’s up high in the, you know, the S. D. Agency?”

“What we think isn’t of any importance in your work,” Hank said. “We evaluate; you report with your own limited conclusions. This is not a put-down of you, but we have information, lots of it, not available to you. The broad picture. The computerized picture.”

“Arctor is doomed,” Fred said. “If he’s up to anything. And I have a hunch from what you say that he is.”

“We should have a case on him this way soon,” Hank said. “And then we can close the book on him, which will please us all.”

Fred stoically memorized the address and number of the apartment and suddenly recalled that he had seen a young head-type couple who had recently abruptly disappeared now and then entering and leaving the building. Busted, and their apartment taken over for this. He had liked them. The girl had long flaxen hair, wore no bra. One time he had driven past as she was lugging groceries and offered her a lift; they had talked. She was an organic type, into megavitamins and kelp and sunlight, nice, shy, but she’d declined. Now he could see why. Evidently the two of them had been holding. Or, more likely, dealing. On the other hand, if the apartment was needed, a possession rap would do, and you could always get that.

What, he wondered, would Bob Arctor’s littered but large house be used for by the authorities when Arctor had been hauled off? An even vaster intelligence-processing center, most likely.

“You’d like Arctor’s house,” he said aloud. “It’s rundown and typically doper dirty, but it’s big. Nice yard. Lots of shrubs.”

“That’s what the installation crew reported back. Some excellent possibilities.”

“They what? They reported it had ‘plenty of possibilities,’ did they?” The scramble suit voice clacked out maddeningly without tone or resonance, which made him even angrier. “Like what?”

“Well, one obvious possibility: its living room gives a view of an intersection, so passing vehicles could be graphed and their license plates …” Hank studied his many, many papers. “But Burt What’s-his-face, who headed the crew, felt the house had been allowed to deteriorate so badly that it wouldn’t be worth our taking over. As an investment.”

“In what way? In what fashion deterioriated?”

“The roof.”

“The roof’s perfect.”

“The interior and exterior paint. The condition of the floors. The kitchen cabinets—”