A Scanner Darkly

by Philip Kindred Dick

“What do you see in this second picture?”

  “A sheep,” Fred said.

  “Show me the sheep.” The seated deputy leaned forward and rotated the picture. “An impairment in set-background discrimination gets you into a heap of trouble—instead of perceiving no forms you perceive faulty forms.”

  Like dog shit, Fred thought. Dog shit certainly would be considered a faulty form. By any standard. He …

  The data indicate that the mute, minor hemisphere is specialized for Gestalt perception, being primarily a synthesist in dealing with information input. The speaking, major hemisphere, in contrast, seems to operate in a more logical, analytic, computerlike fashion and the findings suggest that a possible reason for cerebral lateralization in man is basic incompatibility of language functions on the one hand and synthetic perceptual functions on the other.

  … felt ill and depressed, almost as much as he had during his Lions Club speech. “There’s no sheep there, is there?” he said. “But was I close?”

  “This is not a Rorschach test,” the seated deputy said, “where a muddled blot can be interpreted many ways by many subjects. In this, one specific object, as such, has been delineated and one only. In this case it’s a dog.”

  “A what?” Fred said.

  “A dog.”

  “How can you tell it’s a dog?” He saw no dog. “Show me.” The deputy …

  This conclusion finds its experimental proof in the split-brain animal whose two hemispheres can be trained to perceive, consider, and act independently. In the human, where propositional thought is typically lateralized in one hemisphere, the other hemisphere evidently specializes in a different mode of thought, which may be called appositional. The rules or methods by which propositional thought is elaborated on “this” side of the brain (the side which speaks, reads, and writes) have been subjected to analyses of syntax, semantics, mathematical logic, etc. for many years. The rules by which appositional thought is elaborated on the other side of the brain will need study for many years to come.

  … turned the card over; on the back the formal stark simple outline of a DOG had been inscribed, and now Fred recognized it as the shape drawn within the lines on the front side. In fact it was a specific type of dog: a greyhound, with drawn-in gut.

  “What’s that mean,” he said, “that I saw a sheep instead?”

  “Probably just a psychological block,” the standing deputy said, shifting his weight about. “Only when the whole set of cards is nun, and then we have the several other tests—”

  “Why this is a superior test to the Rorschach,” the seated deputy interrupted, producing the next drawing, “is that it is not interpretive; there are as many wrongs as you can think up, but only one right. The right object that the U.S. Department of Psych-Graphics drew into it and certified for it, for each card; that’s what’s right, because it is handed down from Washington. You either get it or you don’t, and if you show a run of not getting it, then we have a fix on a functional impairment in perception and we dry you out for a while, until you test okay later on.”

  “A federal clinic?” Fred said.

  “Yes. Now, what do you see in this drawing, among these particular black and white lines?”

  Death City, Fred thought as he studied the drawing. That is what I see: death in pluriform, not in just the one correct form but throughout. Little three-foot-high contract men on carts.

  “Just tell me,” Fred said, “was it the Lions Club speech that alerted you?”

  The two medical deputies exchanged glances.

  “No,” the standing one said finally. “It had to do with an exchange that was—actually—off the cuff, in fact, just bullshitting between you and Hank. About two weeks ago … you realize, there’s a technological lag in processing all this garbage, all this raw information that flows in. They haven’t gotten to your speech yet. They won’t in fact for another couple of days.”

  “What was this bullshitting?”

  “Something about a stolen bicycle,” the other deputy said. “A so-called seven-speed bicycle. You’d been trying to figure out where the missing three speeds had gone, was that it?” Again they glanced at each other, the two medical deputies. “You felt they had been left on the floor of the garage it was stolen from?”

  “Hell,” Fred protested. “That was Charles Freck’s fault, not mine; he got everybody’s ass in an uproar talking about it. I just thought it was funny.”

  ***

  BARRIS: (Standing in the middle of the living room with a great big new shiny bike, very pleased) Look what I got for twenty dollars.

  FRECK: What is it?

  BARRIS: A bike, a ten-speed racing bike, virtually brand new. I saw it in the neighbor’s yard and asked about it and they had four of them so I made an offer of twenty dollars cash and they sold it to me. Colored people. They even hoisted it over the fence for me.

  LUCKMAN: I didn’t know you could get a ten-speed nearly new for twenty dollars. It’s amazing what you can get for twenty dollars.

  DONNA: It resembles the one the chick across the street from me had that got ripped off about a month ago. They probably ripped it off, those black guys.

  ARCTOR: Sure they did, if they’ve got four. And selling it that cheap.

  DONNA: You ought to give it back to the chick across the street from me, if it’s hers. Anyhow you should let her look at it to see if it’s hers.

  BARRIS: It’s a man’s bike. So it can’t be.

  FRECK: Why do you say it’s ten speeds when it’s only got seven gears?

  BARRIS: (Astonished) What?

  FRECK: (Going over to bike and pointing) Look, five gears here, two gears here at the other end of the chain. Five and two …

  When the optic chiasm of a cat or a monkey is divided sagittally, the input into the right eye goes only into the right hemisphere and similarly the left eye informs only the left hemisphere. If an animal with this operation is trained to choose between two symbols while using only one eye, later tests show that it can make the proper choice with the other eye. But if the commissures, especially the corpus callosum, have been severed before training, the initially covered eye and its ipsilateral hemisphere must be trained from the beginning. That is, the training does not transfer from one hemisphere to the other if the commissures have been cut. This is the fundamental split-brain experiment of Myers and Sperry (1953; Sperry, 1961; Myers, 1965; Sperry, 1967).

  … makes seven. So it’s only a seven-speed bike.

  LUCKMAN: Yeah, but even a seven-speed racing bike is worth twenty dollars. He still got a good buy.

  BARRIS: (Nettled) Those colored people told me it was ten speeds. It’s a rip-off.

  (Everyone gathers to examine bike. They count the gears again and again.)

  FRECK: Now I count eight. Six in front, two in back. That makes eight.

  ARCTOR: (Logically) But it should be ten. There are no seven— or eight-speed bikes. Not that I ever heard of. What do you suppose happened to the missing gears?

  BARRIS: Those colored guys must have been working on it, taking it apart with improper tools and no technical knowledge, and when they reassembled it they left three gears lying on the floor of their garage. They’re probably still lying there.

  LUCKMAN: Then we should go ask for the missing gears back.

  BARRIS: (Pondering angrily) But that’s where the rip-off is: they’ll probably offer to sell them to me, not give them to me as they should. I wonder what else they’ve damaged. (Inspects entire bike)

  LUCKMAN: If we all go together they’ll give them to us; you can bet on it, man. We’ll all go, right? (Looks around for agreement)

  DONNA: Are you positive there’re only seven gears?

  FRECK: Eight.

  DONNA: Seven, eight. Anyhow, I mean, before you go over there, ask somebody. I mean, it doesn’t look to me like they’ve done anything to it like taking it apart. Before you go over there and lay heavy shit on them, find out. Can you dig it?

  ARCTOR: She’s r
ight.

  LUCKMAN: Who should we ask? Who do we know that’s an authority on racing bikes?

  FRECK: Let’s ask the first person we see. Let’s wheel it out the door and when some freak comes along we’ll ask him. That way we’ll get a disheartened viewpoint.

  (They collectively wheel bike out front, right off encounter young black man parking his car. They point to the seven—eight?—gears questioningly and ask how many there are, although they can see—except for Charles Freck—that there are only seven: five at one end of the chain, two at the other. Five and two add up to seven. They can ascertain it with their own eyes. What’s going on?)

  YOUNG BLACK MAN: (Calmly) What you have to do is multiply the number of gears in front by the number in the near. It is not an adding but a multiplying, because, you see, the chain leaps across from gear to gear, and in terms of gear ratios you obtain five (He indicates the five gears.) times one of the two in front (He points to that.), which give you one times five, which is five, and then when you shift with this lever on the handle-bar (He demonstrates.) the chain jumps to the other one of the two in front and interacts with the same five in the back all over again, which is an additional five. The addition involved is five plus five, which is ten. Do you see how that works? You see, gear ratios are always derived by—

  (They thank him and silently wheel the bike back inside the house. The young black man, whom they have never seen before and who is no more than seventeen and driving an incredibly beat-up old transportation-type car, goes on locking up, and they close the front door of the house and just stand there.)

  LUCKMAN: Anybody got any dope? “Where there’s dope there’s hope.” (No one …

  All the evidence indicates that separation of the hemispheres creates two independent spheres of consciousness within a single cranium, that is to say, within a single organism. This conclusion is disturbing to some people who view consciousness as an indivisible property of the human brain. It seems premature to others, who insist that the capacities revealed thus far for the right hemisphere are at the level of an automaton. There is, to be sure, hemispheric inequality in the present cases, but it may well be a characteristic on the individuals we have studied. It is entirely possible that if a human brain were divided in a very young person, both hemispheres could as a result separately and independently develop mental functions of a high order at the level attained only in the left hemisphere of nor mal individuals.

  … laughs.)

  ***

  “We know you were one of the people in that group,” the seated medical deputy said. “It doesn’t matter which one. None of you could look at the bike and perceive the simple mathematical operation involved in determining the number of its very small system of gear ratios.” In the deputy’s voice Fred heard a certain compassion, a measure of being kind. “An operation like that constitutes a junior high school aptitude test. Were you all stoned?”

  “No,” Fred said.

  “They give aptitude tests like that to children,” the other medical deputy said.

  “So what was wrong, Fred?” the first deputy asked.

  “I forget,” Fred said. He shut up now. And then he said, “It sounds to me like a cognitive fuckup, rather than perceptive. Isn’t abstract thinking involved in a thing like that? Not—”

  “You might imagine so,” the seated deputy said. “But tests show that the cognitive system fails because it isn’t receiving accurate data. In other words, the inputs are distorting in such a fashion that when you go to reason about what you see you reason wrongly because you don’t—” The deputy gestured, trying to find a way to express it.

  “But a ten-speed bike has seven gears,” Fred said. “What we saw was accurate. Two in front, five in back.”

  “But you didn’t perceive, any of you, how they interact: five in back with each of the two in front, as the black told you. Was he a highly educated man?”

  “Probably not,” Fred said.

  “What the black saw,” the standing deputy said, “was different from what all of you saw. He saw two separate connecting lines between the rear gear system and the front, two simultaneous different lines perceptible to him between the gears in front running to each of the five back ones in turn. … What you saw was one connective to all back ones.”

  “But that would make six gears, then,” Fred said. “Two front gears but one connective.”

  “Which is inaccurate perception. Nobody taught that black boy that; what they taught him to do, if anyone taught him at all, was to figure out, cognitively, what the meaning of those two connectives were. You missed one of them entirely, all of you. What you did was that although you counted two front gears, you perceived them as a homogeneity.”

  “I’ll do better next time,” Fred said.

  “Next time what? When you buy a ripped-off ten-speed bike? Or abstracting all daily percept input?”

  Fred remained silent.

  “Let’s continue the test,” the seated deputy said. “What do you see in this one, Fred?”

  “Plastic dog shit,” Fred said. “Like they sell here in the Los Angeles area. Can I go now?” It was the Lions Club speech all over again.

  Both deputies, however, laughed.

  “You know, Fred,” the seated one said, “if you can keep your sense of humor like you do you’ll perhaps make it.”

  “Make it?” Fred echoed. “Make what? The team? The chick? Make good? Make do? Make out? Make sense? Make money? Make time? Define your terms. The Latin for ‘make’ is facere, which always reminds me of fuckere, which is Latin for ‘to fuck,’ and I haven’t …

  The brain of the higher animals, including man, is a double organ, consisting of right and left hemispheres connected by an isthmus of nerve tissue called the corpus callosum. Some 15 years ago Ronald E. Myers and R. W. Sperry, then at the University of Chicago, made a surprising discovery: when this connection between the two halves of the cerebrum was cut, each hemisphere functioned independently as if it were a complete brain.

  … been getting it on worth jack shit lately, plastic shit or otherwise, any kind of shit. If you boys are psychologist types and you’ve been listening to my endless debriefings with Hank, what the hell is Donna’s handle? How do I get next to her? I mean, how is it done? With that kind of sweet, unique, stubborn little chick?”

  “Each girl is different,” the seated deputy said.

  “I mean approach her ethically,” Fred said. “Not cram her with reds and booze and then stick it into her while she’s lying on the living-room floor.”

  “Buy her flowers,” the standing deputy said.

  “What?” Fred said, his suit-filtered eyes opening wide.

  “This time of year you can get little spring flowers. At the nursery departments of, say, Penney’s on K Mart. Or an azalea.”

  “Flowers,” Fred murmured. “You mean plastic flowers or real flowers? Real ones, I guess.”

  “The plastic ones are no good,” the seated deputy said. “They look like they’re … well, fake. Somehow fake.”

  “Can I leave now?” Fred asked.

  After an exchange of glances, both deputies nodded. “We’ll evaluate you some other time, Fred,” the standing one said. “It’s not that urgent. Hank will notify you of a later appointment time.”

  For some obscure reason Fred felt like shaking hands with them before he left, but he did not; he just left, saying nothing, a little down and a little bewildered, because, probably, of the way it had shot out of left field at him, so suddenly. They’ve been going over and over my material, he thought, trying to find signs of my being burned out, and they did find some. Enough, anyhow, to want to nun these tests.

  Spring flowers, he thought as he reached the elevator. Little ones; they probably grow close to the ground and a lot of people step on them. Do they grow wild? Or in special commercial vats on in huge enclosed farms? I wonder what the country is like. The fields and like that, the strange smells. And, he wondered, where do you find that? Whe
re do you go and how do you get there and stay there? What kind of trip is that, and what kind of ticket does it take? And who do you buy the ticket from?

  And, he thought, I would like to take someone with me when I go there, maybe Donna. But how do you ask that, ask a chick that, when you don’t even know how to get next to her? When you’ve been scheming on her and achieving nothing—not even step one. We should hurry, he thought, because later on all the spring flowers like they told me about will be dead.

  8

  On his way over to Bob Arctor’s house, where a bunch of heads could usually be found for a mellow turned-on time, Charles Freck worked out a gag to put ol’ Barris on, to pay him back for the spleen jive at the Fiddler’s Three restaurant that day. In his head, as he skillfully avoided the radar traps that the police kept everywhere (the police radar vans checking out drivers usually took the disguise of old raunchy VW vans, painted dull brown, driven by bearded freaks; when he saw such vans he slowed), he ran a preview fantasy number of his put-on:

  FRECK: (Casually) I bought a methedrine plant today.

  BARRIS: (With a snotty expression on his face) Methedrine is a benny, like speed; it’s crank, it’s crystal, it’s amphetamine, it’s made synthetically in a lab. So it isn’t organic, like pot. There’s no such thing as a methedrine plant like there is a pot plant.

  FRECK: (Springing the punch line on him) I mean I inherited forty thousand from an uncle and purchased a plant hidden in this dude’s garage where he makes methedrine. I mean, he’s got a factory there where he manufactures meth. Plant in the sense of—

  He couldn’t get it phrased exactly right as he drove, because part of his mind stayed on the vehicles around him and the lights; but he knew when he got to Bob’s house he’d lay it on Barris super good. And, especially if a bunch of people were there, Barris would rise to the bait and be visible to everyone flat-out as a clear and evident asshole. And that would super pay him back, because Barris worse than anybody else couldn’t stand to be made fun of.