Philip Dick - A Scanner Darkly

Two days later Fred, puzzled, watched Holo-Scanner Three as his subject Robert Arctor pulled a book, evidently at random, from his bookshelf in the living room of his house. Dope stashed behind it? Fred wondered, and zoomed the scanner lens in. Or a phone number or address written in it? He could see that Arctor hadn’t pulled the book to read; Arctor had just entered the house and still wore his coat. He had a peculiar air about him: tense and bummed out both at once, a sort of dulled urgency.

The zoomar lens of the scanner showed the page had a color photo of a man gnawing on a woman’s right nipple, with both individuals nude. The woman was evidently having an orgasm; her eyes had half shut and her mouth hung open in a soundless moan. Maybe Arctor’s using it to get off on, Fred thought as he watched. But Arctor paid no attention to the picture; instead, he creakingly recited something mystifying, partly in German obviously to puzzle anyone overhearing him. Maybe he imagined his roommates were somewhere in the house and wanted to bait them into appearing, Fred speculated.

No one appeared. Luckman, Fred knew from having been at the scanners a long while, had dropped a bunch of reds mixed with Substance D and passed out fully dressed in his bedroom, a couple of steps short of his bed. Barris had left entirely.

What is Arctor doing? Fred wondered, and noted the ident code for these sections. He’s becoming more and more strange. I can see now what that informant who phoned in about him meant.

Or, he conjectured, those sentences Arctor spoke aloud could be a voice command to some electronic hardware he’d installed in the house. Turn on or turn off. Maybe even create an interference field against scanning … such as this. But he doubted it. Doubted if it was in any way rational or purposeful or meaningful, except to Arctor.

The guy is nuts, he thought. He really is. From the day he found his cephscope sabotaged—certainly the day he arrived home with his car all fucked up, fucked up in such a way as to almost kill him—he’s been dingey ever since. And to some extent before that, Fred thought. Anyhow, ever since the “dog-shit day,” as he knew Arctor called it.

Actually, he could not blame him. That, Fred reflected as he watched Arctor peel off his coat wearily, would blow anyone’s mind. But most people would phase back in. He hasn’t. He’s getting worse. Reading aloud to no one messages that don’t exist and in foreign tongues.

Unless he’s shucking me, Fred thought with uneasiness. In some fashion figured out he’s being monitored and is … covering up what he’s actually doing? Or just playing head games with us? Time, he decided, will tell.

I say he’s shucking us, Fred decided. Some people can tell when they’re being watched. A sixth sense. Not paranoia, but a primitive instinct: what a mouse has, any hunted thing. Knows it’s being stalked. Feels it. He’s doing shit for our benefit, stringing us along. But—you can’t be sure. There are shucks on top of shucks. Layers and layers.

The sound of Arctor reading obscurely had awakened Luckman according to the scanner covering his bedroom. Luckman sat up groggily and listened. He then heard the noise of Arctor dropping a coat hanger while hanging up his coat. Luckman slid his long muscular legs under him and in one motion picked up a hand ax which he kept on the table by his bed; he stood erect and moved animal-smoothly toward the door of his bedroom.

In the living room, Arctor picked up the mail from the coffee table and started through it. He tossed a large junkmail piece toward the wastebasket. It missed.

In his bedroom Luckman heard that. He stiffened and raised his head as if to sniff the air.

Arctor, reading the mail, suddenly scowled and said, “I’ll be dipped.”

In his bedroom Luckman relaxed, set the ax down with a clank, smoothed his hair, opened the door, and stepped out. “Hi. What’s happening?”

Arctor said, “I drove by the Maylar Microdot Corporation Building.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“And,” Arctor said, “they were taking an inventory. But one of the employees evidently had tracked the inventory outdoors on the heel of his shoe. So they were all outside there in the Maylar Microdot Corporation parking lot with a pair of tweezers and lots and lots of little magnifying glasses. And a little paper bag.”

“Any reward?” Luckman said, yawning and beating with his palms on his flat, hard gut.

“They had a reward they were offering,” Arctor said. “But they lost that, too. It was a little tiny penny.”

Luckman said, “You see very many events of this nature as you’re driving along?”

“Only in Orange County,” Arctor said.

“How large is the Maylar Microdot Corporation building?”

“About an inch high,” Arctor said.

“How much would you estimate it weighs?”

“Including the employees?”

Fred sent the tape spinning ahead at fast wind. When an hour had passed, according to the meter, he halted it momentarily.

“—about ten pounds,” Arctor was saying.

“Well, how can you tell, then, when you pass by it, if it’s only an inch high and only weighs ten pounds?”

Arctor, now sitting on the couch with his feet up, said, “They have a big sign.”

Jesus! Fred thought, and again sent the tape ahead. He halted it at only ten minutes elapsed real time, on a hunch.

“—what’s the sign look like?” Luckman was saying. He sat on the floor, cleaning a boxful of grass. “Neon and like that? Colors? I wonder if I’ve seen it. Is it conspicuous?”

“Here, I’ll show it to you,” Arctor said, reaching into his shirt pocket. “I brought it home with me.”

Again Fred sent the tape at fast forward.

“—you know how you could smuggle microdots into a country without them knowing?” Luckman was saying.

“Just about any way you wanted,” Arctor said, leaning back, smoking a joint. The air was cloudy.

“No, I mean a way they’d never flash on,” Luckman said. “It was Barris who suggested this to me one day, confidentially; I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, because he’s putting it in his book.”

“What book? Common Household Dope and —”

“No. Simple Ways to Smuggle Objects into the U.S. and out, Depending on Which Way You’re Going . You smuggle it in with a shipment of dope. Like with heroin. The microdots are down inside the packets. Nobody’d notice, they’re so small. They won’t—”

“But then some junkie’d shoot up a hit of half smack and half microdots.”

“Well, then, he’d be the fuckingest educated junkie you ever did see.”

“Depending on what was on the microdots.”

“Barris had his other way to smuggle dope across the border. You know how the customs guys, they ask you to declare what you have? And you can’t say dope because—”

“Okay, how?”

“Well, see, you take a huge block of hash and carve it in the shape of a man. Then you hollow out a section and put a wind-up motor like a clockworks in it, and a little cassette tape, and you stand in line with it, and then just before it goes through customs you wind up the key and it walks up to the customs man, who says to it, ‘Do you have anything to declare?’ and the block of hash says, ‘No, I don’t,’ and keeps on walking. Until it runs down on the other side of the border.”

“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?”