Philip Dick - A Scanner Darkly

And now those tapes, they’re all I’ve got left out of all this; that’s all I can hope to carry away.

But also, he thought rapidly, to play the tapes back I need the entire holo transport cube-projection resolution system there in the safe apartment. I’ll need to dissemble it and cart it out of there piece by piece. The scanners and recording assemblies I won’t need; just transport, playback components, and especially all the cube-projection gear. I can do it bit by bit; I have a key to that apartment. They’ll require me to turn in the key, but I can get a dupe made right here before I turn it in; it’s a conventional Schlage lock key. Then I can do it! He felt better, realizing this; he felt grim and moral and a little angry. At everyone. Pleasure at how he would make matters okay.

On the other hand, he thought, if I ripped off the scanners and recording heads and like that, I could go on monitoring. On my own. Keep surveillance alive, as I’ve been doing. For a while at least. But I mean, everything in life is just for a while—as witness this.

The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place.

Not for their sake. For mine.

Yeah, he amended, for theirs too. In case something happens, like when Luckman choked. If someone is watching—if I am watching—I can notice and get help. Phone for help. Bring assistance to them right away, the right kind.

Otherwise, he thought, they could die and no one would be the wiser. Know or even fucking care.

In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record, so they’ll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.

In Hank’s office he sat with Hank and a uniformed officer and the sweating, grinning informant Jim Barris, while one of Barris’s cassette tapes played on the table in front of them. Beside it, a second cassette recorded what it was playing, for a department duplicate.

“… Oh, hi. Look, I can’t talk.”

“When, then?”

“Call you back.”

“This can’t wait.”

“Well, what is it?”

“We intend to—”

Hank reached out, signaling to Barris to halt the tape. “Would you identify the voices for us, Mr. Barris?” Hank said.

“Yes,” Barris eagerly agreed. “The female’s voice is Donna Hawthorne, the male’s is Robert Arctor.”

“All right,” Hank said nodding, then glancing at Fred. He had Fred’s medical report before him and was glancing at it. “Go ahead with your tape.”

“… half of Southern California tomorrow night,” the male’s voice, identified by the informant as Bob Arctor’s, continued. “The Air Force Arsenal at Vandenberg AFB will be hit for automatic and semiautomatic weapons—”

Hank stopped reading the medical report and listened, cocking his scramble-suit-blurred head.

To himself and now to all in the room, Barris grinned; his fingers fiddled with paper clips taken from the table, fiddled and fiddled, as if knitting with metal webs of wine, knitting and fiddling and sweating and knitting.

The female, identified as Donna Hawthorne, said, “What about that disorientation drug the bikers ripped off for us? When do we carry that crud up to the watershed area to—”

“The organization needs the weapons first,” the male’s voice explained. “That’s step B.”

“Okay, but now I gotta go; I got a customer.”

Click . Click .

Barris aloud, shifting in his chair, said, “I can identify the biker gang mentioned. It is mentioned on another—”

“You have more material of this sort?” Hank said. “To build up background? Or is this tape substantially it?”

“Much more.”

“But it’s this same sort of thing.”

“It refers, yes, to the same conspiratorial organization and its plans, yes. This particular plot.”

“Who are these people?” Hank said. “What organization?”

“They are a world-wide—”

“Their names. You’re speculating.”

“Robert Arctor, Donna Hawthorne, primarily. I have coded notes here, too …” Barris fumbled with a grubby notebook, half dropping it as he tried to open it.

Hank said, “I’m impounding all this stuff here, Mr. Barris, tapes and what you’ve got. Temporarily they’re our property. We’ll go over them ourselves.”

“My handwriting, and the enciphered material which I—”

“You’ll be on hand to explain it to us when we get to that point or feel we want anything explained.” Hank signaled the uniformed cop, not Barris, to shut off the cassette. Barris reached toward it. At once the cop stopped him and pushed him back. Barris, blinking, gazed around, still fixedly smiling. “Mr. Barris,” Hank said, “you will not be released, pending our study of this material. You’re being charged, as a formality to keep you available, with giving false information to the authorities knowingly. This is, of course, only a pretext for your own safety, and we all realize that, but the formal change will be lodged anyhow. It will be passed on to the D.A. but marked for hold. Is that satisfactory?” He did not wait for an answer; instead, he signaled the uniformed cop to take Barris out, leaving the evidence and shit and whatnot on the table.

The cop led grinning Barris out. Hank and Fred sat facing each other across the littered table. Hank said nothing; he was reading the psychologists’ findings.

After an interval he picked up his phone and dialed an inbuilding number. “I’ve got some unevaluated material here—I want you to go over it and determine how much of it is fake. Let me know about that, and then I’ll tell you what to do with it next. It’s about twelve pounds; you’ll need one cardboard box, size three. Okay, thanks.” He hung up. “The electronics and crypto lab,” he informed Fred, and resumed reading.

Two heavily armed uniformed lab technicians appeared, bringing with them a lock-type steel container.

“We could only find this,” one of them apologized as they carefully filled it with the items on the table.

“Who’s down there?”

“Hurley.”

“Have Hurley go over this sometime today for sure, and report when he’s got a spurious index-factor for me. It must be today; tell him that.”

The lab technicians locked the metal box and lugged it out of the office.

Tossing the medical-findings report on the table, Hank leaned back and said, “What do you—Okay, what’s your response to Barris’s evidence so far?”

Fred said, “That is my medical report you have there, isn’t it?” He reached to pick it up, then changed his mind. “I think what he played, the little he played, it sounded genuine to me.”

“It’s a fake,” Hank said. “Worthless.”

“You may be right,” Fred said, “but I don’t agree.”

“The arsenal they’re talking about at Vandenberg is probably the OSI Arsenal.” Hank reached for the phone. To himself, aloud, he said, “Let’s see—who’s the guy at OSI I talked to that time … he was in on Wednesday with some pictures …” Hank shook his head and turned away from the phone to confront Fred. “I’ll wait. It can wait for the prelim spurious report. Fred?”

“What does my medical—”

“They say you’re completely cuckoo.”

Fred (as best he could) shrugged. “Completely?”

Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewolbe!

“Possibly two brain cells still light up. But that’s about all. Mostly short circuits and sparks.”