Five Great Novels Part 6

"Do you think," he said aloud as he painstakingly drove, "that when we die and appear before G.o.d on Judgment Day, that our sins will be listed in chronological order on in order of severity, which could be ascending or descending, or alphabetically? Because I don't want to have G.o.d boom out at me when I die at the age of eighty-six, 'So you're the little boy who stole the three c.o.ke bottles off the Coca-Cola truck when it was parked in the 7-11 lot back in 1962, and you've got a lot of fast talking to do.'

"I think they're cross-referenced," Luckman said. "And they just hand you a computer printout that's the total of a long column that's been added up already."

"Sin," Barris said, chuckling, "is a Jewish-Christian myth that is outdated."

Arctor said, "Maybe they've got all your sins in one big pickle barrel"--he turned to glare at Barris the anti-Semite-- "a kosher pickle barrel, and they just hoist it up and throw the whole contents all at once in your face, and you just stand there dripping sins. Your own sins, plus maybe a few of somebody else's that got in by mistake."

"Somebody else by the same name," Luckman said. "Another Robert Arctor. How many Robert Arctors do you think there are, Barris?" He nudged Barris. "Could the Cal Tech computers tell us that? And cross-file all the Jim Barrises too while they're doing it?"

To himself, Bob Arctor thought, _How many Bob Arctors are there?_ A weird and f.u.c.ked-up thought. Two that I can think of, he thought. The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? Does anybody know? I would know, if anyone did, because I'm the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. _But_, he thought, _who am I? Which of them is me?_ When they rolled to a stop in the driveway, parked, and walked warily toward the front door, they found Barris's note and the door unlocked, but when they cautiously opened the door everything appeared as it had been when they left. Barris's suspicions surfaced instantly. "Ah," he murmured, entering. He swiftly reached to the top of the bookshelf by the door and brought down his .22 pistol, which he gripped as the other men moved about. The animals approached them as usual, clamoring to be fed.

"Well, Barris," Luckman said, "I can see you're right. There definitely was someone here, because you see--you see, too, don't you, Bob?--the scrupulous covering-over of all the signs they would have otherwise left testifies to their--" He farted then, in disgust, and wandered into the kitchen to look in the refrigerator for a can of beer. "Barris," he said, "you're f.u.c.ked."

Still moving about alertly with his gun, Barris ignored him as he sought to discover telltale traces. Arctor, watching, thought, Maybe he will. They may have left some. And he thought, Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly. Under very specialized conditions, such as today. Next thing, Barris will be reasoning that I lured everyone out of the house deliberately to permit secret intruders to accomplish their thing here. And later on he will discern why and who and everything else, and in fact maybe he already has. Had a while ago, in fact; long-enough ago to initiate sabotage and destruct actions on the cephscope, car, and G.o.d knows what else. Maybe when I turn on the garage light the house will burn down. But the main thing is, did the bugging crew arrive and get all the monitors in and finish up? He would not know until he talked to Hank and Hank gave him a proof-positive layout of the monitors and where their storage drums could be serviced. And whatever additional information the bugging crew's boss, plus other experts involved in this operation, wanted to dump on him. In their concerted play against Bob Arctor, the suspect.

"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 b.u.t.t," Luckman said, marveling. "It sure is."

Jesus, Arctor thought. They did screw up. One of the crew smoked and then reflexively put the b.u.t.t here. So they must just have gone. The ashtray, as always, overflowed; the crewman probably a.s.sumed 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 b.u.t.ts, a roach. "This is what's hot, this roach. They lit a joint while they were here. But what did they do? What the h.e.l.l did they do?" He scowled and peered about, angry and baffled. "Bob, f.u.c.k 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 flus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+t," Luckman said in disgust. He threw himself down on the couch. "s.h.i.+t s.h.i.+t s.h.i.+t. 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 ca.s.sette 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 ca.s.sette 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 ca.s.sette 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 off position. 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 pa.s.sed 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 noisereduction 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 h.e.l.l," 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 G.o.d, 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 threebedroom tract house with two bathrooms for easy and fast flus.h.i.+ng, 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 quant.i.ty."

"Like," Luckman said, "it could be an ounce of roachweed, just s.h.i.+t like that, on 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 on 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, weaning 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? G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 f.u.c.king. . . another shuck-and-f.u.c.k reality world, he thought, with this foxy girl the center of it: a national 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 on 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.w.a.tch, 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 s.h.i.+t 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. "On was that--you know, me dreaming? I couldn't tell; what I heard sounded s.p.a.ced 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.

7.

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 Arctor'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-- on perhaps it's nine, now--houses on apartments under scrutiny in that particular neighborhood. So you'll be b.u.mping 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 on 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 on 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 holoscanners 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 s.h.i.+t, 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 on Ernie Luckman on Charles Freck or Donna Hawthorne--"

"Donna?" he laughed. The suit laughed, actually. In its way.

"Or Bob Arctor," Hank continued, studying his list of suspects.

"I report on myself all the time," Fred said.

"So you will have to include yourself from time to time in the holo-tapes you turn over to us, because if you systematically edit yourself out then we can deduce who you are by a process of elimination, whether we want to or not. What you must do, really, is edit yourself out in--what should I call it?--an inventive, artistic . . . h.e.l.l, the word is _creative_ way . . . as for instance during the brief intervals when you're in the house alone and doing research, going through papers and drawers, or servicing a scanner within view of another scanner, on--"

"You should just send someone to the house once a month in a uniform," Fred said. "And have him say, 'Good morning! I'm here to service the monitoring devices covertly installed on your premises, in your phone, and in your car.' Maybe Arctor would pick up the bill."

"Arctor would probably off him and then disappear."

The scramble suit Fred said, "If Arctor is hiding that much. That's not been proved."

"Arctor may be hiding a great deal. We've got more recent information on him gathered and a.n.a.lyzed. There is no substantial doubt of it: he is a ringer, a three-dollar bill. He is _phony_. So keep on him until he drops, until we have enough to arrest him and make it stick."

"You want stuff planted?"

"We'll discuss that later."

"You think he's up high in the, you know, the S. D. Agency?"

"What we _think_ isn't of any importance in your work," Hank said. "We evaluate; _you_ report with your own limited conclusions. This is not a put-down of you, but we have information, lots of it, not available to you. The broad picture. The computerized picture."

"Arctor is doomed," Fred said. "If he's up to anything. And I have a hunch from what you say that he is."

"We should have a case on him this way soon," Hank said. "And then we can close the book on him, which will please us all."

Fred stoically memorized the address and number of the apartment and suddenly recalled that he had seen a young head-type couple who had recently abruptly disappeared now and then entering and leaving the building. Busted, and their apartment taken over for this. He had liked them. The girl had long flaxen hair, wore no bra. One time he had driven past as she was lugging groceries and offered her a lift; they had talked. She was an organic type, into megavitamins and kelp and sunlight, nice, shy, but she'd declined. Now he could see why. Evidently the two of them had been holding. Or, more likely, dealing. On the other hand, if the apartment was needed, a possession rap would do, and you could always get that. What, he wondered, would Bob Arctor's littered but large house be used for by the authorities when Arctor had been hauled off? An even vaster intelligence-processing center, most likely.

"You'd like Arctor's house," he said aloud. "It's rundown and typically doper dirty, but it's big. Nice yard. Lots of shrubs."

"That's what the installation crew reported back. Some excellent possibilities."

"They _what?_ They reported it had 'plenty of possibilities,' did they?" The scramble suit voice clacked out maddeningly without tone or resonance, which made him even angrier. "Like what?"

"Well, one obvious possibility: its living room gives a view of an intersection, so pa.s.sing vehicles could be graphed and their license plates . . ." Hank studied his many, many papers. "But Burt What's-his-face, who headed the crew, felt the house had been allowed to deteriorate so badly that it wouldn't be worth our taking over. As an investment."

"In what way? In what fas.h.i.+on deterioriated?"

"The roof."

"The roof's perfect."

"The interior and exterior paint. The condition of the floors. The kitchen cabinets--"

"Bulls.h.i.+t," Fred said, or anyhow the suit droned. "Arctor may have let dishes pile up and the garbage and not dusted, but after all, three dudes living there with no chicks? His wife left him; women are supposed to do all that. If Donna Hawthorne had moved in like Arctor wanted her to, begged her to, she would have kept it up. Anyhow, any professional janitorial service could put the whole house in top shape as far as cleaning goes in a half a day. Regarding the roof, that really makes me mad, because--"

"Then you recommend we acquire it after Arctor's been arrested and loses t.i.tle."