A Scanner Darkly

“Yes. Now, what do you see in this drawing, among these particular black and white lines?”

Death City, Fred thought as he studied the drawing. That is what I see: death in pluriform, not in just the one correct form but throughout. Little three-foot-high contract men on carts.

“Just tell me,” Fred said, “was it the Lions Club speech that alerted you?”

The two medical deputies exchanged glances.

“No,” the standing one said finally. “It had to do with an exchange that was—actually—off the cuff, in fact, just bullshitting between you and Hank. About two weeks ago … you realize, there’s a technological lag in processing all this garbage, all this raw information that flows in. They haven’t gotten to your speech yet. They won’t in fact for another couple of days.”

“What was this bullshitting?”

“Something about a stolen bicycle,” the other deputy said. “A so-called seven-speed bicycle. You’d been trying to figure out where the missing three speeds had gone, was that it?” Again they glanced at each other, the two medical deputies. “You felt they had been left on the floor of the garage it was stolen from?”

“Hell,” Fred protested. “That was Charles Freck’s fault, not mine; he got everybody’s ass in an uproar talking about it. I just thought it was funny.”

***

BARRIS: (Standing in the middle of the living room with a great big new shiny bike, very pleased) Look what I got for twenty dollars.

FRECK: What is it?

BARRIS: A bike, a ten-speed racing bike, virtually brand new. I saw it in the neighbor’s yard and asked about it and they had four of them so I made an offer of twenty dollars cash and they sold it to me. Colored people. They even hoisted it over the fence for me.

LUCKMAN: I didn’t know you could get a ten-speed nearly new for twenty dollars. It’s amazing what you can get for twenty dollars.

DONNA: It resembles the one the chick across the street from me had that got ripped off about a month ago. They probably ripped it off, those black guys.

ARCTOR: Sure they did, if they’ve got four. And selling it that cheap.

DONNA: You ought to give it back to the chick across the street from me, if it’s hers. Anyhow you should let her look at it to see if it’s hers.

BARRIS: It’s a man’s bike. So it can’t be.

FRECK: Why do you say it’s ten speeds when it’s only got seven gears?

BARRIS: (Astonished) What?

FRECK: (Going over to bike and pointing) Look, five gears here, two gears here at the other end of the chain. Five and two …

When the optic chiasm of a cat or a monkey is divided sagittally, the input into the right eye goes only into the right hemisphere and similarly the left eye informs only the left hemisphere. If an animal with this operation is trained to choose between two symbols while using only one eye, later tests show that it can make the proper choice with the other eye. But if the commissures, especially the corpus callosum, have been severed before training, the initially covered eye and its ipsilateral hemisphere must be trained from the beginning. That is, the training does not transfer from one hemisphere to the other if the commissures have been cut. This is the fundamental split-brain experiment of Myers and Sperry (1953; Sperry, 1961; Myers, 1965; Sperry, 1967).

… makes seven. So it’s only a seven-speed bike.

LUCKMAN: Yeah, but even a seven-speed racing bike is worth twenty dollars. He still got a good buy.

BARRIS: (Nettled) Those colored people told me it was ten speeds. It’s a rip-off.

(Everyone gathers to examine bike. They count the gears again and again.)

FRECK: Now I count eight. Six in front, two in back. That makes eight.

ARCTOR: (Logically) But it should be ten. There are no seven— or eight-speed bikes. Not that I ever heard of. What do you suppose happened to the missing gears?

BARRIS: Those colored guys must have been working on it, taking it apart with improper tools and no technical knowledge, and when they reassembled it they left three gears lying on the floor of their garage. They’re probably still lying there.