A Scanner Darkly

“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 realized. 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 sniperscope 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 fortynine-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.