A Scanner Darkly Part 17

"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?"

"About a billion dollars."

"More. Two billion."

"These Eskimos are chewing hides and carving bone spears, and this block of hash worth two billion dollars comes walking through the snow saying over and over, 'No, I don't.' "

"They'd wonder what it meant by that."

"They'd be puzzled forever. There'd be legends."

"Can you imagine telling your grandkids, 'I saw with my own eyes the six-foot-high block of hash appear out of the blinding fog and walk past, that way, worth two billion dollars, saying, "No, I don't." ' His grandchildren would have him committed."

"No, see, legends build. After a few centuries they'd be saying, 'In my forefathers' time one day a ninety-foot-high block of extremely good quality Afghanistan hash worth eight trillion dollars came at us dripping fire and screaming, "Die, Eskimo dogs!" and we fought and fought with it, using our spears, and finally killed it.' "

"The kids wouldn't believe that either."

"Kids never believe anything any more."

"It's a downer to tell anything to a kid. I once had a kid ask me, 'What was it like to see the first automobile?' s.h.i.+t, man, I was born in 1962."

"Christ," Arctor said, "I once had a guy I knew burned out on acid ask me that. He was twenty-seven years old. I was only three years older than him. He didn't know anything any more. Later on he dropped some more hits of acid-or what he was sold as acid-and after that he peed on the floor and c.r.a.pped on the floor, and when you said something to him, like 'How are you, Don?', he just repeated it after you, like a bird. 'How are you, Don?' "

Silence, then. Between the two joint-smoking men in the cloudy living room. A long, somber silence.

"Bob, you know something ..." Luckman said at last. "I used to be the same age as everyone else."

"I think so was I," Arctor said.

"I don't know what did it."

"Sure, Luckman," Arctor said, "you know what did it to all of us."

"Well, let's not talk about it." He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light.

One of the phones in the safe apartment rang. A scramble suit answered it, then extended it toward Fred. "Fred."

He shut off the holos and took the phone.

"Remember when you were downtown last week?" a voice said. "Being administered the BG test?"

After an interval of silence Fred said, "Yes."

"You were supposed to come back." A pause at that end, too. "We've processed more recent material on you ... I have taken it upon myself to schedule you for the full standard battery of percept tests plus other testing. Your time for this is tomorrow, three o'clock in the afternoon, the same room. It will take about four hours in all. Do you remember the room number?"

"No," Fred said.

"How are you feeling?"

"Okay," Fred said stoically.

"Any problems? In your work or outside your work?"

"I had a fight with my girl."

"Any confusion? Are you experiencing any difficulty identifying persons or objects? Does anything you see appear inverted or reversed? And while I'm asking, any s.p.a.ce-time or language disorientation?"

"No," he said glumly. "No to all the above."

"We'll see you tomorrow at Room 203," the psychologist deputy said.

"What material of mine did you find to be-"

"We'll take that up tomorrow. Be there. All right? And, Fred, don't get discouraged." Click. Click.

Well, click to you too, he thought, and hung up.

With irritation, sensing that they were leaning on him, making him do something he resented doing, he snapped the holos into print-out once more; the cubes lit up with color and the three-dimensional scenes within animated. From the aud tap more purposeless, frustrating-to Fred-babble emerged: "This chick," Luckman droned on, "had gotten knocked up, and she applied for an abortion because she'd missed like four periods and she was conspicuously swelling up. She did nothing but gripe about the cost of the abortion; she couldn't get on public a.s.sistance for some reason. One day I was over at her place, and this girl friend of hers was there telling her she only had a hysterical pregnancy. 'You just want want to believe you're pregnant,' the chick was nattering at her. 'It's a guilt trip. And the abortion, and the heavy bread it's going to cost you, that's a penance trip.' So the chick- I really dug her-she looked up calmly and she said, 'Okay, then if it's a hysterical pregnancy I'll get a hysterical abortion and pay for it with hysterical money.' " to believe you're pregnant,' the chick was nattering at her. 'It's a guilt trip. And the abortion, and the heavy bread it's going to cost you, that's a penance trip.' So the chick- I really dug her-she looked up calmly and she said, 'Okay, then if it's a hysterical pregnancy I'll get a hysterical abortion and pay for it with hysterical money.' "

Arctor said, "I wonder whose face is on the hysterical five-dollar bill."

"Well, who was our most hysterical President?"

"Bill Falkes. He only thought thought he was President." he was President."

"When did he think he served?"

"He imagined he served two terms back around 1882. Later on after a lot of therapy he came to imagine he served only one term-"

With great fury Fred slammed the holos ahead two and a half hours. How long does this garbage go on? he asked himself. All day? Forever?

"-so you take your child to the doctor, to the psychologist, and you tell him how your child screams all the time and has tantrums." Luckman had two lids of gra.s.s before him on the coffee table plus a can of beer; he was inspecting the gra.s.s. "And lies; the kid lies. Makes up exaggerated stories. And the psychologist examines the kid and his diagnosis is 'Madam, your child is hysterical. You have a hysterical child. But I don't know why.' And then you, the mother, there's your chance and you lay it on him, 'I know why, doctor. It's because I had a hysterical pregnancy.' " Both Luckman and Arctor laughed, and so did Jim Barris; he had returned sometime during the two hours and was with them, working on his funky hash pipe, winding white string.

Again Fred spun the tape forward a full hour.

"-this guy," Luckman was saying, manicuring a box full of gra.s.s, hunched over it as Arctor sat across from him, more or less watching, "appeared on TV claiming to be a world-famous impostor. He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular high-velocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who'd won the n.o.bel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to-"

"And he got away with all that?" Arctor asked. "He never got caught?"

"The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a world-famous impostor. That came out later in the L.A. Times- Times-they checked up. The guy pushed a broom at Disneyland, or had until he read this autobiography about this world-famous impostor-there really was one-and he said, 'h.e.l.l, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,' and then he decided, 'h.e.l.l, why do that; I'll just pose as another impostor.' He made a lot of bread that way, the Times Times said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier." said. Almost as much as the real world-famous impostor. And he said it was a lot easier."

Barris, off to himself in a corner winding string, said, "We see impostors now and then. In our lives. But not posing as subatomic physicists."

"Narks, you mean," Luckman said. "Yeah, narks. I wonder how many narks we know. What's a nark look like?"

"It's like asking, What's an impostor look like?" Arctor said. "I talked one time to a big hash dealer who'd been busted with ten pounds of hash in his possession. I asked him what the nark who busted him looked like. You know, the-what do they call them?-buying agent that came out and posed as a friend of a friend and got him to sell him some hash."

"Looked," Barris said, winding string, "just like us."

"More so," Arctor said. "The hash-dealer dude-he'd already been sentenced and was going in the following day- he told me, 'They have longer hair than we do.' So I guess the moral of that is, Stay away from guys looking the same as us." so," Arctor said. "The hash-dealer dude-he'd already been sentenced and was going in the following day- he told me, 'They have longer hair than we do.' So I guess the moral of that is, Stay away from guys looking the same as us."

"There are female narks," Barris said.

"I'd like to meet a nark," Arctor said. "I mean knowingly. Where I could be positive."

"Well," Barris said, "you could be positive when he claps the cuffs on you, when that day comes."

Arctor said, "I mean, do narks have friends? What sort of social life do they have? Do their wives know?"

"Narks don't have wives," Luckman said. "They live in caves and peep out from under parked cars as you pa.s.s. Like trolls."

"What do they eat?" Arctor said.

"People," Barris said.

"How could a guy do that?" Arctor said. "Pose as a nark?"

"What?" both Barris and Luckman said together. both Barris and Luckman said together.

"s.h.i.+t, I'm s.p.a.ced," Arctor said, grinning. " 'Pose as a nark'-wow." He shook his head, grimacing now.

Staring at him, Luckman said, "POSE AS A NARK? POSE AS A NARK?" POSE AS A NARK?"

"My brains are scrambled today," Arctor said. "I better go crash."

At the holos, Fred cut the tape's forward motion; all the cubes froze, and the sound ceased.

"Taking a break, Fred?" one of the other scramble suits called over to him.

"Yeah," Fred said. "I'm tired. This c.r.a.p gets to you after a while." He rose and got out his cigarettes. "I can't figure out half what they're saying, I'm so tired. Tired," he added, "of listening to them."

"When you're actually down there with them," a scramble suit said, "it's not so bad; you know? Like I guess you were- on the scene itself up until now, with a cover. Right?"

"I would never hang around with creeps like that," Fred said. "Saying the same things over and over, like old cons. Why do they do what they do, sitting there shooting the bull?"

"Why do we do what we do? This is pretty d.a.m.n monotonous, when you get down to it."

"But we have to; this is our job. We have no choice."

"Like the cons," a scramble suit pointed out. "We have no choice."

Posing as a nark, Fred thought. What does that mean? n.o.body knows ...

Posing, he reflected, as an impostor. One who lives under parked cars and eats dirt. Not a world-famous surgeon or novelist or politician: nothing that anyone would care to hear about on TV. No life that anyone in their right mind ...

I resemble that worm which crawls through dust, Lives in the dust, eats dust Until a pa.s.serby's foot crushes it.

Yes, that expresses it, he thought. That poetry. Luckman must have read it to me, or maybe I read it in school. Funny what the mind pops up. Remembers.

Arctor's freaky words still stuck in his mind, even though he had shut off the tape. I wish I could forget it, he thought. I wish I could, for a while, forget him. him.

"I get the feeling," Fred said, "that sometimes I know what they're going to say before they say it. Their exact words."

"It's called deja vu," deja vu," one of the scramble suits agreed. "Let me give you a few pointers. Run the tape ahead over longer break-intervals, not an hour but, say, six hours. Then run it back if there's nothing until you hit something. Back, you see, rather than forward. That way you don't get into the rhythm of their flow. Six or even eight ahead, then big jumps back ... You'll get the hang of it pretty soon, you'll get so you can sense when you've got miles and miles of nothing or when somewhere you've got something useful." one of the scramble suits agreed. "Let me give you a few pointers. Run the tape ahead over longer break-intervals, not an hour but, say, six hours. Then run it back if there's nothing until you hit something. Back, you see, rather than forward. That way you don't get into the rhythm of their flow. Six or even eight ahead, then big jumps back ... You'll get the hang of it pretty soon, you'll get so you can sense when you've got miles and miles of nothing or when somewhere you've got something useful."

"And you won't really listen at all," the other scramble suit said, "until you do actually hit something. Like a mother when she's asleep-nothing wakes her, even a truck going by, until she hears her baby cry. That wakes her-that alerts her. No matter how faint that cry is. The unconscious is selective, when it learns what to listen for."

"I know," Fred said. "I've got two kids."

"Boys?"

"Girls," he said. "Two little girls."

"That's allll riiight," one of the scramble suits said. "I have one girl, a year old."

"No names please," the other scramble suit said, and they all laughed. A little.

Anyhow, there is an item, Fred said to himself, to extract from the total tape and pa.s.s along. That cryptic statement about "posing as a nark." The other men in the house with Arctor-it surprised them, too. When I go in tomorrow at three, he thought, I'll take a print of that-aud alone would do-and discuss it with Hank, along with what else I obtain between now and then.

But even if that's all I've got to show Hank, he thought, it's a beginning. Shows, he thought, that this around-the-clock scanning of Arctor is not a waste.

It shows, he thought, that I was right.

That remark was a slip. Arctor blew it.

But what it meant he did not yet know.

But we will, he said to himself, find out. We will keep on Bob Arctor until he drops. Unpleasant as it is to have to watch and listen to him and his pals all the time. Those pals of his, he thought, are as bad as he is. How'd I ever sit around in that house with them all that time? What a way to live a life; what, as the other officer said just now, an endless nothing.

Down there, he thought, in the murk, the murk of the mind and the murk outside as well; murk everywhere. Thanks to what they are: that kind of individual.

Carrying his cigarette, he walked back to the bathroom, shut and locked the door, then, from inside the cigarette package, he got out ten tabs of death. Filling a Dixie cup with water, he dropped all ten tabs. He wished he had brought more tabs with him. Well, he thought, I can drop a few more when I get through work, when I get back home. Looking at his watch, he tried to compute how long that would be. His mind felt fuzzy; how the h.e.l.l long will it be? he asked himself, wondering what had become of his time sense. Watching the holos has f.u.c.ked it up, he realized. I can't tell what time it is at all any more.

I feel like I've dropped acid and then gone through a car wash, he thought. Lots of t.i.tanic whirling soapy brushes coming at me; dragged along by a chain into tunnels of black foam. What a way to make a living, he thought, and unlocked the bathroom door to go back-reluctantly-to work.

When he turned on the tape-transport once more, Arctor was saying, "-as near as I can figure out, G.o.d is dead."

Luckman answered, "I didn't know He was sick."

"Now that my Olds is laid up indefinitely," Arctor said, "I've decided I should sell it and buy a Henway."

"What's a Henway?" Barris said.

To himself Fred said, About three pounds.