A Scanner Darkly (13 page)

“Look at this!” Barris said. He bent over an ashtray on the coffee table. “Come here!’ he called sharply to both of them, and both men responded.

Reaching down, Arctor felt heat rising from the ashtray.

“A still-hot cigarette butt,” Luckman said, marveling. “It sure is.”

Jesus, Arctor thought. They did screw up. One of the crew smoked and then reflexively put the butt here. So they must just have gone. The ashtray, as always, overflowed; the crewman probably assumed no one would notice the
addition, and in another few moments it would have cooled.

“Wait a second,” Luckman said, examining the ashtray. He fished out, from among the tobacco butts, a roach. “This is what’s hot, this roach. They lit a joint while they were here. But what did they do? What the hell did they do?” He scowled and peered about, angry and baffled. “Bob, fuck it—Barris, was right.
There was somebody here!
This roach is still hot, and you can smell it if you hold it—” He held it under Arctor’s nose. “Yeah, it’s still burning a little down inside. Probably a seed. They didn’t manicure it too good before they rolled it.”

“That roach,” Barris said, equally grim, “may not have been left here by accident. This evidence may not be a slip-up.”

“What now?” Arctor said, wondering what kind of police bugging crew would have a member who smoked a joint in front of the others while on the job.

“Maybe they were here specifically to plant dope in this house,” Barris said. “Setting us up, then phone in a tip later … Maybe there’s dope hidden like this in the phone, for example, and the wall outlets. We’re going to have to go through the whole house and get it absolutely clean before they phone the tip in. And we’ve probably got only hours.”

“You check the wall sockets,” Luckman said. “I’ll take the phone apart.”

“Wait,” Barris said, holding up his hand. “If they see us scrambling around just before the raid—”

“What raid?” Arctor said.

“If we’re running frantically around flushing dope,” Barris said, “then we can’t allege, even though it’s true, that we didn’t know the dope was there. They’ll catch us actually holding it. And maybe that, too, is part of their plan.”

“Aw shit,” Luckman said in disgust. He threw himself down on the couch. “Shit shit shit. We can’t do anything. There’s probably dope hidden in a thousand places we’ll never find. We’ve had it.” He glared up at Arctor in baffled fury.
“We’ve had it
!”

Arctor said to Barris, “What about your electronic cassette thing rigged to the front door?” He had forgotten about it. So had Barris, evidently. Luckman, too.

“Yes, this should be extremely informational at this point,” Barris said. He knelt down by the couch, reached underneath, grunted, then hauled forth a small plastic cassette tape recorder. “This should tell us a great deal,” he began, and then his face sank. “Well, it probably wouldn’t ultimately have proven that important.” He pulled out the power plug from the back and set the cassette down on the coffee table. “We know the main fact—that they did enter during our absence. That was its main task.”

Silence.

“I’ll bet I can guess,” Arctor said.

Barris said, “The first thing they did when they entered was switch it to the opposition. I left it set to
on,
but look— now it’s turned to
off.
So although I—”

“It didn’t record?” Luckman said, disappointed.

“They made their move swiftly,” Barris said. “Before so much as an inch of tape passed through the recording head. This, by the way, is a neat little job, a Sony. It has a separate head for playback, erase and record and the Dolby noise-reduction system. I got it cheap. At a swap meet. And it’s never given me any trouble.”

Arctor said, “Mandatory soul time.”

“Absolutely,” Barris agreed as he seated himself in a chair and leaned back, removing his shades. “At this point we have no other recourse in view of their evasive tactics. You know, Bob, there is one thing you could do, although it would take time.”

“Sell the house and move out,” Arctor said.

Barris nodded.

“But hell,” Luckman protested. “This is our
home.”

“What are houses like this in this area worth now?” Barris asked, hands behind his head. “On the market? I wonder, too, what interest rates are up to. Maybe you could make a
considerable profit, Bob. On the other hand, you might have to take a loss on a quick sale. But, Bob, my God, you’re up against professionals.”

“Do you know a good realtor?” Luckman asked both of them.

Arctor said, “What reason should we give for selling? They always ask.”

“Yeah, we can’t tell the realtor the truth,” Luckman agreed. “We could say …” He pondered as he moodily drank his beer. “I can’t think of a reason. Barris, what’s a reason, a shuck we could give?”

Arctor said, “We’ll just say flat-out there’s narcotics planted all over the house and since we don’t know where it is we decided to move out and let the new owner get busted instead of us.”

“No,” Barris disagreed, “I don’t think we can afford to be up front like that. I’d suggest you say, Bob, you say that you got a job transfer.”

“Where to?” Luckman said.

“Cleveland,” Barris said.

“I think we should tell them the truth,” Arctor said. “In fact, we could put an ad in the L.A.
Times: ‘
Modern three-bedroom tract house with two bathrooms for easy and fast flushing, high-grade dope stashed throughout all rooms; dope included in sale price.’ “

“But they’d be calling asking what kind of dope,” Luckman said. “And we don’t know; it could be anything.”

“And how much there is,” Barris murmured. “Prospective buyers might inquire about the quantity.”

“Like,” Luckman said, “it could be an ounce of roach-weed, just shit like that, or it could be pounds of heroin.”

“What I suggest,” Barris said, “is that we phone county drug abuse and inform them of the situation and ask them to come in and remove the dope. Search the house, find it, dispose of it. Because, to be realistic, there really isn’t time to sell the house. I researched the legal situation once for this type of bind, and most lawbooks agree—”

“You’re crazy,” Luckman said, staring at him as if he were one of Jerry’s aphids. “Phone
drug abuse?
There’ll be narks in here within less time than—”

“That’s the best hope,” Barris continued smoothly, “and we can all take lie-detector tests to prove we didn’t know where it was or what it was or even put it there. It is there without our knowledge or permission. If you tell them that, Bob, they’ll exonerate you.” After a pause he admitted, “Eventually. When all the facts are known in open court.”

“But on the other hand,” Luckman said, “we’ve got our own stashes. We
do
know where they are and like that. Does this mean we’ve got to flush all our stashes? And suppose we miss some? Even one? Christ, this is awful!”

“There is no way out,” Arctor said. “They appear to have us.”

From one of the bedrooms Donna Hawthorne appeared, wearing a funny little knee-pants outfit, hair tumbled in disarray, her face puffy with sleep.

“I came on in,” she said, “like the note said. And I sat around for a while and then crashed. The note didn’t say when you’d be back. Why were you yelling? God, you’re uptight. You woke me.”

“You smoked a joint just now?” Arctor asked her. “Before you crashed?”

“Sure,” she said. “Otherwise I can’t ever sleep.”

“It’s Donna’s roach,” Luckman said. “Give it to her.”

My God, Bob Arctor thought. I was into that trip as much as they were. We all got into it together that deep. He shook himself, shuddered, and blinked. Knowing what I know, I still stepped across into that freaked-out paranoid space with them, viewed it as they viewed it—muddled, he thought. Murky again; the same murk that covers them covers me; the murk of this dreary dream world we float around in.

“You got us out of it,” he said to Donna.

“Out of what?” Donna said, puzzled and sleepy.

Not what I am, he thought, or what I know was supposed to take place here today, but this chick—
she
put my head
back together, got all three of us out. A little black-haired chick wearing a funky outfit who I report on and am shucking and hopefully will be fucking … another shuck-and-fuck reality world, he thought, with this foxy girl the center of it: a rational point that unwired us abruptly. Otherwise where would our heads finally have gone? We, all three of us, had gotten out of it entirely.

But not for the first time, he thought. Not even today.

“You shouldn’t leave your place unlocked like that,” Donna said. “You could get ripped off and it’d be your own fault. Even the giant capitalist insurance companies say that if you leave a door or window unlocked they won’t pay. That’s the main reason I came in when I saw the note. Somebody ought to be here if it’s unlocked like that.”

“How long have you been here?” Arctor asked her. Maybe she had aborted the bugging; maybe not. Probably not.

Donna consulted her twenty-dollar electric Timex wrist-watch, which he had given her. “About thirty-eight minutes. Hey.” Her face brightened. “Bob, I got the wolf book with me—you want to look at it now? It’s got a lot of heavy shit in it, if you can dig it.”

“Life,” Barris said, as if to himself, “is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.”

“Did I hear you say you’re going to sell your house?” Donna asked him. “Or was that—you know, me dreaming? I couldn’t tell; what I heard sounded spaced out and weird.”

“We’re all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of the garbage that Donna had overheard he had seriously meant. He wondered how much of the insanity of the day—his insanity—had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation. Donna, always, was a pivot point of reality for him; for her this was the basic, natural question. He wished he could answer.

The next day Fred showed up in his scramble suit to hear about the bugging installation.

“The six holo-scanners now operating within the premises—six should be sufficient for now, we feel—transmit to a safe apartment down the street in the same block as Arc-tor’s house,” Hank explained, laying out a floor plan of Bob Arctor’s house on the metal table between them. It chilled Fred to see this, but not overly much. He picked the sheet up and studied the locations of the various scanners, in the various rooms, here and there so that everything fell under constant video scrutiny, as well as audio.

“So I do the playback at that apartment,” Fred said.

“We use it as a playback-monitor spot for about eight— or perhaps it’s nine, now—houses or apartments under scrutiny in that particular neighborhood. So you’ll be bumping into other undercover people doing their playbacks.
Always have your suit on then.
”

“I’ll be seen going into the apartment. It’s too close.”

“Guess so, but it’s an enormous complex, hundreds of units, and it’s the only one we’ve found electronically feasible.
It’ll have to do, at least until we get legal eviction on another unit elsewhere. We’re working on it … two blocks farther away, where you’ll be less conspicuous. Week or so, I’d guess. If holo-scans could be transmitted with acceptable resolution along micro-relay cables and ITT lines like the older—”

“I’ll just use the shuck that I’m balling some broad in that complex, if Arctor or Luckman or any of those heads see me entering.” It really didn’t complicate matters that much; in fact, it would cut down his in-transit unpaid time, which was an important factor. He could easily truck on over to the safe apartment, do the scanning replay, determine what was relevant to his reports and what could be discarded, and then return very soon to—

To my own house, he thought. Arctor’s house. Up the street at the house I am Bob Arctor, the heavy doper suspect being scanned without his knowledge, and then every couple of days I find a pretext to slip down the street and into the apartment where I am Fred replaying miles and miles of tape to see what I did, and this whole business, he thought, depresses me. Except for the protection—and valuable personal information—it will give me.

Probably whoever’s hunting me will be caught by the holo-scanners within the first week.

Realizing that, he felt mellow.

“Fine,” he said to Hank.

“So you see where the holos are placed. If they need servicing, you probably can do it yourself while you’re in Arctor’s house and no one else is around. You do get into his house, normally, don’t you?”

Well shit, Fred thought. If I do that, then I will be on the holo-replays. So when I turn them over to Hank I have to be, obviously, one of the individuals visible on them, and that cuts it down.

Up to now he had never actually laid it on Hank as to how
he knew what he knew about his suspects; he himself as Fred the effective screening device carried the information. But now: audio- and holo-scanners, which did not automatically edit out as did his verbal report all identifying mention of himself. There would be Robert Arctor tinkering with the holos when they malfunctioned, his face mushrooming up to fill the screen. But on the other hand
he
would be the first to replay the storage tapes; he could still edit. Except that it would take time and care.

But edit out
what?
Edit out Arctor—entirely? Arctor was the suspect. Just Arctor when he went to fiddle with the holos.

“I’ll edit myself out,” he said. “So you won’t see me. As a matter of conventional protection.”

“Of course. You haven’t done this before?” Hank reached to show him a couple of pictures. “You use a bulk erasing device that wipes out any section where you as the informant appear. That’s the holos, of course; for audio, there’s no set policy followed. You won’t have any real trouble, though. We take it for granted that you’re one of the individuals in Arctor’s circle of friends who frequent that house—you are either Jim Barris or Ernie Luckman or Charles Freck or Donna Hawthorne—”