A Scanner Darkly

“You could put a solar-type battery in it instead of a spring and it could keep walking for years. Forever.”

“What’s the use of that? It’d finally reach either the Pacific or the Atlantic. In fact, it’d walk off the edge of the Earth, like—”

“Imagine an Eskimo village, and a six-foot-high block of hash worth about—how much would that be worth?”

“About a billion dollars.”

“More. Two billion.”

“These Eskimos are chewing hides and carving bone spears, and this block of hash worth two billion dollars comes walking through the snow saying over and over, ‘No, I don’t.’ ”

“They’d wonder what it meant by that.”

“They’d be puzzled forever. There’d be legends.”

“Can you imagine telling your grandkids, ‘I saw with my own eyes the six-foot-high block of hash appear out of the blinding fog and walk past, that way, worth two billion dollars, saying, “No, I don’t.” ‘His grandchildren would have him committed.”

“No, see, legends build. After a few centuries they’d be saying, ‘In my forefathers’ time one day a ninety-foot-high block of extremely good quality Afghanistan hash worth eight trillion dollars came at us dripping fire and screaming, “Die, Eskimo dogs!” and we fought and fought with it, using our spears, and finally killed it.’

“The kids wouldn’t believe that either.”

“Kids never believe anything any more.”

“It’s a downer to tell anything to a kid. I once had a kid ask me, ‘What was it like to see the first automobile?’ Shit, man, I was born in 1962.”

“Christ,” Arctor said, “I once had a guy I knew burned out on acid ask me that. He was twenty-seven years old. I was only three years older than him. He didn’t know anything any more. Later on he dropped some more hits of acid—or what he was sold as acid—and after that he peed on the floor and crapped on the floor, and when you said something to him, like ‘How are you, Don?’, he just repeated it after you, like a bird. ‘How are you, Don?’ ”

Silence, then. Between the two joint-smoking men in the cloudy living room. A long, somber silence.

“Bob, you know something …” Luckman said at last. “I used to be the same age as everyone else.”

“I think so was I,” Arctor said.

“I don’t know what did it.”

“Sure, Luckman,” Arctor said, “you know what did it to all of us.”

“Well, let’s not talk about it.” He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light.

***

One of the phones in the safe apartment rang. A scramble suit answered it, then extended it toward Fred. “Fred.”

He shut off the holos and took the phone.

“Remember when you were downtown last week?” a voice said. “Being administered the BG test?”

After an interval of silence Fred said, “Yes.”

“You were supposed to come back.” A pause at that end, too. “We’ve processed more recent material on you … I have taken it upon myself to schedule you for the full standard battery of percept tests plus other testing. Your time for this is tomorrow, three o’clock in the afternoon, the same room. It will take about four hours in all. Do you remember the room number?”

“No,” Fred said.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” Fred said stoically.

“Any problems? In your work or outside your work?”

“I had a fight with my girl.”

“Any confusion? Are you experiencing any difficulty identifying persons or objects? Does anything you see appear inverted or reversed? And while I’m asking, any space-time or language disorientation?”

“No,” he said glumly. “No to all the above.”

“We’ll see you tomorrow at Room 203,” the psychologist deputy said.

“What material of mine did you find to be—”

“We’ll take that up tomorrow. Be there. All right? And, Fred, don’t get discouraged.” Click.

Well, click to you too, he thought, and hung up.

With irritation, sensing that they were leaning on him, making him do something he resented doing, he snapped the holos into print-out once more; the cubes lit up with color and the three-dimensional scenes within animated. From the aud tap more purposeless, frustrating—to Fred—babble emerged:

“This chick,” Luckman droned on, “had gotten knocked up, and she applied for an abortion because she’d missed like four periods and she was conspicuously swelling up. She did nothing but gripe about the cost of the abortion; she couldn’t get on public assistance for some reason. One day I was over at her place, and this girl friend of hers was there telling her she only had a hysterical pregnancy. ‘You just want to believe you’re pregnant,’ the chick was flattering at her. ‘It’s a guilt trip. And the abortion, and the heavy bread it’s going to cost you, that’s a penance trip.’ So the chick—I really dug her—she looked up calmly and she said, ‘Okay, then if it’s a hysterical pregnancy I’ll get a hysterical abortion and pay for it with hysterical money.’

Arctor said, “I wonder whose face is on the hysterical five-dollar bill.”

“Well, who was our most hysterical President?”

“Bill Falkes. He only thought he was President.”

“When did he think he served?”