Philip Dick - A Scanner Darkly

“I left a little surprise,” Barris said, “for anybody entering the house while we’re gone today. I perfected it early this morning … I worked until I got it. An electronic surprise.”

Sharply, concealing his concern, Arctor said, “What kind of electronic surprise? It’s my house, Jim, you can’t start rigging up—”

“Easy, easy,” Barris said. “As our German friends would say, leise . Which means be cool.”

“What is it?”

“If the front door is opened,” Barris said, “during our absence, my cassette tape recorder starts recording. It’s under the couch. It has a two-hour tape. I placed three omnidirectional Sony mikes at three different—”

“You should have told me,” Arctor said.

“What if they come in through the windows?” Luckman said. “Or the back door?”

“To increase the chances of their making their entry via the front door,” Barris continued, “rather than in other less usual ways, I providentially left the front door unlocked.”

After a pause, Luckman began to snigger.

“Suppose they don’t know it’s unlocked?” Arctor said.

“I put a note on it,” Barris said.

“You’ve jiving me!”

“Yes,” Barris said, presently.

“Are you fucking jiving us or not?” Luckman said. “I can’t tell with you. Is he jiving, Bob?”

“We’ll see when we get back,” Arctor said. “If there’s a note on the door and it’s unlocked we’ll know he isn’t jiving us.”

“They probably would take the note down,” Luckman said, “after ripping off and vandalizing the house, and then lock the door. So we won’t know. We’ll never know. For sure. It’s that gray area again.”

“Of course I’m kidding!” Barris said, with vigor. “Only a psychotic would do that, leave the front door of his house unlocked and a note on the door.”

Turning, Arctor said to him, “What did you write on the note, Jim?”

“Who’s the note to?” Luckman chimed in. “I didn’t even know you knew how to write.”

With condescension, Barris said, “I wrote: ‘Donna, come on inside; door’s unlocked. We—’ ” Barris broke off. “It’s to Donna,” he finished, but not smoothly.

“He did do that,” Luckman said. “He really did. All of it.”

“That way,” Barris said, smoothly again, “we’ll know who had been doing this, Bob. And that’s of prime importance.”

“Unless they rip off the tape recorder when they rip off the couch and everything else,” Arctor said. He was thinking rapidly as to how much of a problem this really was, this additional example of Barris’s messed-up electronic nowhere genius of a kindergarten sort. Hell, he concluded, they’ll find the mikes in the first ten minutes and trace them back to the recorder. They’ll know exactly what to do. They’ll erase the tape, rewind it, leave it as it was, leave the door unlocked and the note on it. In fact, maybe the unlocked door will make their job easier. Fucking Barris, he thought. Great genius plans which will work out so as to screw up the universe. He probably forgot to plug the recorder into the wall outlet anyhow. Of course, if he finds it unplugged—

He’ll reason that proves someone was there, he realized. He’ll flash on that and rap at us for days. Somebody got in who was hip to his device and cleverly unplugged it. So, he decided, if they find it unplugged I hope they think to plug it in, and not only that, make it run right. In fact, what they really should do is test out his whole detection system, run it through its cycle as thoroughly as they do their own, be absolutely certain it functions perfectly, and then wind it back to a blank state, a tablet on which nothing is inscribed but on which something would for sure be had anyone—themselves, for example—entered the house. Otherwise, Barris’s suspicions will be aroused forever.

As he drove, he continued his theoretical analysis of his situation by means of a second well-established example. They had brought it up and drilled it into his own memory banks during his police training at the academy. Or else he had read it in the newspapers.

Item. One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if a public building on a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

In fact, Arctor speculated as he drove along the freeway very slowly, the person begins to assume he’s paranoid and has no enemy; he doubts himself. His car broke down normally; his luck has just become bad. And his friends agree. It’s in his head. And this wipes him out more thoroughly than anything that can be traced. However, it takes longer. The person on persons doing him in must tinker and putter and make use of chance over a long interval. Meanwhile, if the victim can figure out who they are, he has a better chance of getting them—certainly better than if, say, they shoot him with a scope-sight rifle. That is his advantage.

Every nation in the world, he knew, trains and sends out a mass of agents to loosen bolts here, strip threads there, break wines and start little fines, lose documents—little misadventures. A wad of gum inside a Xerox copying machine in a government office can destroy an irreplaceable—and vital—document: instead of a copy coming out, the original is wiped out. Too much soap and toilet paper, as the Yippies of the sixties knew, can screw up the entire sewage of an office building and force all the employees out for a week. A mothball in a car’s gas tank wears out the engine two weeks later, when it’s in another town, and leaves no fuel contaminants to be analyzed. Any radio or TV station can be put off the air by a pile driven accidentally cutting a microwave cable or a power cable. And so forth.

Many of the previous aristocratic social class knew about maids and gardeners and other serf-type help: a broken vase here, a dropped priceless heirloom that slips out of a sullen hand.

“Why’d you do that, Rastus Brown?”

“Oh, Ah jes’ fogot ta—” and there was no recourse, or very little. By a rich homeowner, by a political writer unpopular with the regime, a small new nation shaking its fist at the U.S. or at the U.S.S.R.—

Once, an American ambassador to Guatemala had had a wife who had publicly boasted that her “pistol-packin” husband had overthrown that little nation’s left-wing government. After its abrupt fall, the ambassador, his job done, had been transferred to a small Asian nation, and while driving his sports car he had suddenly discovered a slowmoving hay truck pulling out of a side road directly ahead of him. A moment later nothing remained of the ambassador except a bunch of splatted bits. Packing a pistol, and having at his call an entire CIA raised private army, had done him no good. His wife wrote no proud poetry about that.

“Uh, do what?” the owner of the hay truck had probably said to the local authorities. “Do what, massah? Ah jes’—”

Or like his own ex-wife, Arctor remembered. At that time he had worked for an insurance firm as an investigator (“Do your neighbors across the hall drink a lot?”), and she had objected to his filling out his reports late at night instead of thrilling at the very sight of her. Toward the end of their marriage she had learned to do such things during his late-night work period as burn her hand while lighting a cigarette, get something in her eye, dust his office, or search forever throughout or around his typewriter for some little object. At first he had resentfully stopped work and succumbed to thrilling at the very sight of her; but then he had hit his head in the kitchen while getting out the corn popper and had found a better solution.