A Scanner Darkly

by Philip Kindred Dick

  “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 space-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.

  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 assistance 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 to believe you’re pregnant,’ the chick was flattering 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 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 grass before him on the coffee table plus a can of beer; he was inspecting the grass. “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 grass, 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 Nobel 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—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, ‘Hell, I can pose as all those exotic dudes and get away with it like he did,’ and then he decided, ‘Hell, why do that; I’ll just pose as another impostor.’ He made a lot of bread that way, the Times 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.”

  “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 pass. 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.

  “Shit, I’m spaced,” 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?”

  “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 crap 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 damn 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? Nobody 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 passerby’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.

  “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 déjà 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.”

  “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 pass 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-theclock 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 hell long will it be? he asked himself, wondering what had become of his time sense. Watching the holos has fucked 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 titanic 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, God 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.

  “About three pounds,” Arctor said.

  ***

  The following afternoon at three o’clock two medical officers—not the same two—administered several tests to Fred, who was feeling even worse than he had the day before.

  “In rapid succession you will see a number of objects with which you should be familiar pass in sequence before—first—your left eye and then your right. At the same time, on the illuminated panel directly before you, outline reproductions will appear simultaneously of several such familiar objects, and you are to match, by means of the punch pencil, what you consider to be the correct outline reproduction of the actual object visible at that instant. Now, these objects will move by you very rapidly, so do not hesitate too long. You will be time-scored as well as scored for accuracy. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Fred said, punch pencil ready.

  A whole flock of familiar objects jogged past him then, and he punched away at the illuminated photos below. This took place for his left eye, and then it all happened again for his right.

  “Next, with your left eye covered, a picture of a familiar object will be flashed to your right eye. You are to reach with your left hand, repeat, left hand, into a group of objects and find the one whose picture you saw.”

  “Okay,” Fred said. A picture of a single die was flashed; with his left hand he groped around among small objects placed before him until he found a die.

  “In the next test, several letters which spell out a word will be available to your left hand, unseen. You will feel them and then, with your right hand, write out the word the letters spell.”

  He did that. They spelled HOT.

  “Now name the world spelled.”

  So he said, “Hot.”

  “Next, you will reach into this absolutely dark box and with both eyes covered, and with your left hand touch an object in order to identify it. Then tell us what the object is, without having seen it visually. After that you will be shown three objects somewhat resembling one another, and you will tell us which of the three that you see most resembles the object you manually touched.”

  “Okay,” Fred said, and he did that then, and other tests, for almost an hour. Grope, tell, look at with one eye, select. Grope, tell, look at with the other eye, select. Write down, draw.

  “In this following test you will, with your eyes again covered, reach out and feel an object with each hand. You are to tell us if the object presented to your left hand is identical to the object presented to your right.”

  He did that.

  “Here in rapid succession are pictures of triangles in various positions. You are to tell us if it is the same triangle or—”

  After two hours they had him fit complicated blocks into complicated holes and timed him doing this. He felt as if he was in first grade again, and screwing up. Doing worse than he had then. Miss Frinkel, he thought; old Miss Frinkel. She used to stand there and watch me do this shit back then, flashing me “Die!” messages, like they say in transactional analysis. Die. Do not be. Witch messages. A whole bunch of them, until I did finally luck up. Probably Miss Frinkel was dead by now. Probably somebody had managed to flash her a “Die!” message back, and it had caught. He hoped so. Maybe it had been one of his. As with the psych testers now, he flashed such messages right back.

  It didn’t seem to be doing much good now. The test continued.

  “What is wrong with this picture? One object among the others does not belong. You are to mark—”

  He did that. And then it was actual objects, one of which did not belong; he was supposed to reach out and manually remove the offending object, and then, when the test was over, pick up all the offending objects from a variety of “sets,” as they were called, and say what characteristic, if any, all the offending objects had in common: if they constituted a “set.”

  He was still trying to do that when they called time and ended the battery of testing and told him to go have a cup of coffee and wait outside until called.

  After an interval—which seemed damn long to him—a tester appeared and said, “One more thing, Fred—we want a sample of your blood.” He gave him a slip of paper: a lab requisition. “Go down the hall to the room marked ‘Pathology Lab’ and give them this and then after they have taken a blood sample come back here again and wait.”

  “Sure,” he said
glumly, and shuffled off with the requisition.

  Traces in the blood, he realized. They’re testing for that.

  When he had gotten back to Room 203 from the pathology lab he rounded up one of the testers and said, “Would it be all right if I went upstairs to confer with your superior while I’m waiting for your results? He’ll be taking off for the day soon.”

  “Affirmative,” the psych tester said. “Since we decided to have a blood sample taken, it will be longer before we can make our evaluation; yes, go ahead. We’ll phone upstairs when we’re ready for you back here. Hank, is it?”

  “Yes,” Fred said. “I’ll be upstairs with Hank.”

  The psych tester said, “You certainly seem much more depressed today than you did when we first saw you.”

  “Pardon?” Fred said.

  “The first time you were in. Last week. You were kidding and laughing. Although very tense.”

  Gazing at him, Fred realized this was one of the two medical deputies he had originally encountered. But he said nothing; he merely grunted and then left their office, made his way to the elevator. What a downer, he thought. This whole thing. I wonder which of the two medical deputies it is, he wondered. The one with the handle-bar mustache or the other … I guess the other. This one has no mustache.

  “You will manually feel this object with your left hand,” he said to himself, “and at the same time you will look at it with your right. And then in your own words you will tell us—” He could not think out any more nonsense. Not without their help.

  ***

  When he entered Hank’s office he found another man, not in a scramble suit, seated in the far corner, facing Hank.

  Hank said, “This is the informant who phoned in about Bob Arctor using the grid—I mentioned him.”

  “Yes,” Fred said, standing there unmoving.

  “This man again phoned in, with more information about Bob Arctor; we told him he’d have to step forth and identify himself. We challenged him to appear down here and he did. Do you know him?”

  “Sure I do,” Fred said, staring at Jim Barris, who sat grinning and fiddling with a pair of scissors. Barris appeared ill at ease and ugly. Super ugly, Fred thought, with revulsion. “You’re James Barris, aren’t you?” he said. “Have you ever been arrested?”