A Scanner Darkly

by Philip Kindred Dick

  You know, he thought, in this scramble suit I could hit her over the head and bang her forever and who’d know who did it? How could she identify me?

  The crimes one could commit in these suits, he pondered. Also lesser trips, short of actual crimes, which you never did; always wanted to but never did.

  “Miss,” he said to the girl in the tight blue sweater, “you certainly have nice legs. But I suppose you recognize that or you wouldn’t be wearing a microskirt like that.”

  The girl gasped. “Eh,” she said. “Oh, now I know who you are.”

  “You do?” he said, surprised.

  “Pete Wickam,” the girl said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Aren’t you Pete Wickam? You always are sitting across from me—aren’t you, Pete?”

  “Am I the guy,” he said, “who’s always sitting there and studying your legs and scheming a lot about you know what?”

  She nodded.

  “Do I have a chance?” he said.

  “Well, it depends.”

  “Can I take you out to dinner some night?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Can I have your phone number? So I can call you?”

  The girl murmured, “You give me yours.”

  “I’ll give it to you,” he said, “if you’ll sit with me right now, here, and have whatever you’re having with me while I’m having my sandwich and coffee.”

  “No, I’ve got a girl friend over there—she’s waiting.”

  “I could sit with you anyhow, both of you.”

  “We’re going to discuss something private.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Well, then I’ll see you, Pete.” She moved off down the line with her tray and flatware and napkin.

  He obtained his coffee and sandwich and found an empty table and sat by himself, dropping little bits of sandwich into the coffee and staring down at it.

  They’re fucking going to pull me off Arctor, he decided. I’ll be in Synanon or New-Path or some place like that withdrawing and they’ll station someone else to watch him and evaluate him. Some asshole who doesn’t know jack shit about Arctor—they’ll have to start all over from the beginning.

  At least they can let me evaluate Barris’s evidence, he thought. Not put me on temsuspens until after we go over that stuff, whatever it is.

  If I did bang her and she got pregnant, he ruminated, the babies—no faces. Just blurs. He shivered.

  I know I’ve got to be taken off. But why necessarily right away? If I could do a few more things … process Barris’s info, participate in the decision. Or even just sit there and see what he’s got. Find out for my own satisfaction finally what Arctor is up to. Is he anything? Is he not? They owe it to me to allow me to stay on long enough to find that out.

  If I could just listen and watch, not say anything.

  He sat there on and on, and later he noticed the girl in the tight blue sweater and her girl friend, who had short black hair, get up from their table and start to leave. The girl friend, who wasn’t too foxy, hesitated and then approached Fred where he sat hunched over his coffee and sandwich fragments.

  “Pete?” the short-haired girl said.

  He glanced up.

  “Um, Pete,” she said nervously. “I just have a sec. Um, Ellen wanted to tell you this, but she chickened out. Pete, she would have gone out with you a long time ago, like maybe a month ago, like back in March even. If—”

  “If what?” he said.

  “Well, she wanted me to tell you that for some time she’s wanted to clue you into the fact that you’d do a whole lot better if you used like, say, Scope.”

  “I wish I had known,” he said, without enthusiasm.

  “Okay, Pete,” the girl said, relieved now and departing. “Catch you later.” She hurried off, grinning.

  Poor fucking Pete, he thought to himself. Was that for neal? Or just a mind-blowing put-down of Pete by a pair of malice-head types who cooked it up seeing him—me—sitting here alone. Just a nasty little dig to—Aw, the hell with it, he thought.

  Or it could be true, he decided as he wiped his mouth, crumpled up his napkin, and got heavily to his feet. I wonder if St. Paul had bad breath. He wandered from the cafeteria, his hands again shoved down in his pockets. Scramble suit pockets first and then inside that neal suit pockets. Maybe that’s why Paul was always in jail the latter part of his life. They threw him in for that.

  Mindfucking trips like this always get laid on you at a time like this, he thought as he left the cafeteria. She dumped that on me on top of all the other bummers today—the big one out of the composite wisdom of the ages of psychologicaltesting pontification. That and then this. Shit, he thought. He felt even worse now than he had before; he could hardly walk, hardly think; his mind buzzed with confusion. Confusion and despair. Anyhow, he thought, Scope isn’t any good; Lavoris is better. Except when you spit it out it looks like you’re spitting blood. Maybe Micrin, he thought. That might be best.

  If there was a drugstore in this building, he thought, I could get a bottle and use it before I go upstairs to face Hank. That way—maybe I’d feel more confident. Maybe I’d have a better chance.

  I could use, he reflected, anything that’d help, anything at all. Any hint, like from that girl, any suggestion. He felt dismal and afraid. Shit, he thought, what am I going to do?

  If I’m off everything, he thought, then I’ll never see any of them again, any of my friends, the people I watched and knew. I’ll be out of it; I’ll be maybe retired the rest of my life—anyhow, I’ve seen the last of Arctor and Luckman and Jerry Fabin and Charles Freck and most of all Donna Hawthorne. I’ll never see any of my friends again, for the rest of eternity. It’s over.

  Donna. He remembered a song his great-uncle used to sing years ago, in German. “Ich seh’, wie em Engel im rosigen Duft/Sich tröstend zur Seite mir stellet,” which his great-uncle had explained to him meant “I see, dressed like an angel, standing by my side to give me comfort,” the woman he loved, the woman who saved him (in the song). In the song, not in real life. His great-uncle was dead, and it was a long time ago he’d heard those words. His great-uncle, Germanborn, singing in the house, or reading aloud.

  Gott! Welch Dunkel hier! 0 grauen voile Stille!

  Od’ ist es um mich her. Nichts lebet auszer mir…

  God, how dark it is here, and totally silent.

  Nothing but me lives in this vacuum …

  Even if his brain’s not burned out, he realized, by the time I’m back on duty somebody else will have been assigned to them. Or they’ll be dead or in the bucket or in federal clinics or just scattered, scattered, scattered. Burned out and destroyed, like me, unable to figure out what the fuck is happening. It has reached an end in any case, anyhow, for me. I’ve without knowing it already said good-by.

  All I could ever do sometime, he thought, is play the holotapes back, to remember.

  “I ought to go to the safe apartment …” He glanced around and became silent. I ought to go to the safe apartment and rip them off now, he thought. While I can. Later they might be erased, and later I would not have access. Fuck the department, he thought; they can bill me against the back salary. By every ethical consideration those tapes of that house and the people in it belong to me.

  And now those tapes, they’re all I’ve got left out of all this; that’s all I can hope to carry away.

  But also, he thought rapidly, to play the tapes back I need the entire holo transport cube-projection resolution system there in the safe apartment. I’ll need to dissemble it and cart it out of there piece by piece. The scanners and recording assemblies I won’t need; just transport, playback components, and especially all the cube-projection gear. I can do it bit by bit; I have a key to that apartment. They’ll require me to turn in the key, but I can get a dupe made right here before I turn it in; it’s a conventional Schlage lock key. Then I can do it! He felt better, realizing this; he felt grim and moral and a little angry. At ev
eryone. Pleasure at how he would make matters okay.

  On the other hand, he thought, if I ripped off the scanners and recording heads and like that, I could go on monitoring. On my own. Keep surveillance alive, as I’ve been doing. For a while at least. But I mean, everything in life is just for a while—as witness this.

  The surveillance, he thought, essentially should be maintained. And, if possible, by me. I should always be watching, watching and figuring out, even if I never do anything about what I see; even if I just sit there and observe silently, not seen: that is important, that I as a watcher of all that happens should be at my place.

  Not for their sake. For mine.

  Yeah, he amended, for theirs too. In case something happens, like when Luckman choked. If someone is watching—if I am watching—I can notice and get help. Phone for help. Bring assistance to them right away, the right kind.

  Otherwise, he thought, they could die and no one would be the wiser. Know or even fucking care.

  In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record, so they’ll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.

  ***

  In Hank’s office he sat with Hank and a uniformed officer and the sweating, grinning informant Jim Barris, while one of Barris’s cassette tapes played on the table in front of them. Beside it, a second cassette recorded what it was playing, for a department duplicate.

  “… Oh, hi. Look, I can’t talk.”

  “When, then?”

  “Call you back.”

  “This can’t wait.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “We intend to—”

  Hank reached out, signaling to Barris to halt the tape. “Would you identify the voices for us, Mr. Barris?” Hank said.

  “Yes,” Barris eagerly agreed. “The female’s voice is Donna Hawthorne, the male’s is Robert Arctor.”

  “All right,” Hank said nodding, then glancing at Fred. He had Fred’s medical report before him and was glancing at it. “Go ahead with your tape.”

  “… half of Southern California tomorrow night,” the male’s voice, identified by the informant as Bob Arctor’s, continued. “The Air Force Arsenal at Vandenberg AFB will be hit for automatic and semiautomatic weapons—”

  Hank stopped reading the medical report and listened, cocking his scramble-suit-blurred head.

  To himself and now to all in the room, Barris grinned; his fingers fiddled with paper clips taken from the table, fiddled and fiddled, as if knitting with metal webs of wine, knitting and fiddling and sweating and knitting.

  The female, identified as Donna Hawthorne, said, “What about that disorientation drug the bikers ripped off for us? When do we carry that crud up to the watershed area to—”

  “The organization needs the weapons first,” the male’s voice explained. “That’s step B.”

  “Okay, but now I gotta go; I got a customer.”

  Click. Click.

  Barris aloud, shifting in his chair, said, “I can identify the biker gang mentioned. It is mentioned on another—”

  “You have more material of this sort?” Hank said. “To build up background? Or is this tape substantially it?”

  “Much more.”

  “But it’s this same sort of thing.”

  “It refers, yes, to the same conspiratorial organization and its plans, yes. This particular plot.”

  “Who are these people?” Hank said. “What organization?”

  “They are a world-wide—”

  “Their names. You’re speculating.”

  “Robert Arctor, Donna Hawthorne, primarily. I have coded notes here, too …” Barris fumbled with a grubby notebook, half dropping it as he tried to open it.

  Hank said, “I’m impounding all this stuff here, Mr. Barris, tapes and what you’ve got. Temporarily they’re our property. We’ll go over them ourselves.”

  “My handwriting, and the enciphered material which I—”

  “You’ll be on hand to explain it to us when we get to that point or feel we want anything explained.” Hank signaled the uniformed cop, not Barris, to shut off the cassette. Barris reached toward it. At once the cop stopped him and pushed him back. Barris, blinking, gazed around, still fixedly smiling. “Mr. Barris,” Hank said, “you will not be released, pending our study of this material. You’re being charged, as a formality to keep you available, with giving false information to the authorities knowingly. This is, of course, only a pretext for your own safety, and we all realize that, but the formal change will be lodged anyhow. It will be passed on to the D.A. but marked for hold. Is that satisfactory?” He did not wait for an answer; instead, he signaled the uniformed cop to take Barris out, leaving the evidence and shit and whatnot on the table.

  The cop led grinning Barris out. Hank and Fred sat facing each other across the littered table. Hank said nothing; he was reading the psychologists’ findings.

  After an interval he picked up his phone and dialed an inbuilding number. “I’ve got some unevaluated material here—I want you to go over it and determine how much of it is fake. Let me know about that, and then I’ll tell you what to do with it next. It’s about twelve pounds; you’ll need one cardboard box, size three. Okay, thanks.” He hung up. “The electronics and crypto lab,” he informed Fred, and resumed reading.

  Two heavily armed uniformed lab technicians appeared, bringing with them a lock-type steel container.

  “We could only find this,” one of them apologized as they carefully filled it with the items on the table.

  “Who’s down there?”

  “Hurley.”

  “Have Hurley go over this sometime today for sure, and report when he’s got a spurious index-factor for me. It must be today; tell him that.”

  The lab technicians locked the metal box and lugged it out of the office.

  Tossing the medical-findings report on the table, Hank leaned back and said, “What do you—Okay, what’s your response to Barris’s evidence so far?”

  Fred said, “That is my medical report you have there, isn’t it?” He reached to pick it up, then changed his mind. “I think what he played, the little he played, it sounded genuine to me.”

  “It’s a fake,” Hank said. “Worthless.”

  “You may be right,” Fred said, “but I don’t agree.”

  “The arsenal they’re talking about at Vandenberg is probably the OSI Arsenal.” Hank reached for the phone. To himself, aloud, he said, “Let’s see—who’s the guy at OSI I talked to that time … he was in on Wednesday with some pictures …” Hank shook his head and turned away from the phone to confront Fred. “I’ll wait. It can wait for the prelim spurious report. Fred?”

  “What does my medical—”

  “They say you’re completely cuckoo.”

  Fred (as best he could) shrugged. “Completely?”

  Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewolbe!

  “Possibly two brain cells still light up. But that’s about all. Mostly short circuits and sparks.”

  Das ist natürlich, es ist ja tief.

  “Two, you say,” Fred said. “Out of how many?”

  “I don’t know. Brains have a lot of cells, I understand—trillions.”

  “More possible connections between them,” Fred said, “than there are stars in the universe.”

  “If that’s so, then you’re not batting too good an average right now. About two cells out of—maybe sixty-five trillion?”

  “More like sixty-five trillion trillion,” Fred said.

  “That’s worse than the old Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack. They used to end the season with a percentage—”

  “What do I get,” Fred said, “for saying it happened on duty?”

  “You get to sit in a waiting room and read a lot of Saturday Evening Posts and Cosmopolitans free.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Where would you like?
”

  Fred said, “Let me think it over.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’d do,” Hank said. “I wouldn’t go into a Federal clinic; I’d get about six bottles of good bourbon, I.W. Harper, and go up into the hills, up into the San Bernardino Mountains near one of the lakes, by myself, and just stay there all alone until it’s over. Where no one can find me.”

  “But it may never be over,” Fred said.

  “Then never come back. Do you know anyone who has a cabin up there?”

  “No,” Fred said.

  “Can you drive okay?”

  “My—” He hesitated, and a dreamlike strength fell over him, relaxing him and mellowing him out. All the spatial relationships in the room shifted; the alteration affected even his awareness of time. “It’s in the …” He yawned.

  “You don’t remember.”

  “I remember it’s not functioning.”

  “We can have somebody drive you up. That would be safer, anyhow.”

  Drive me up where? he wondered. Up to what? Up roads, trails, paths, hiking and striding through Jell-O, like a tomcat on a leash who only wants to get back indoors, or get free.

  He thought, Em Engel, der Gattin, so gleich, der fuhrt mich zur Freiheit ins himmlische Reich. “Sure,” he said, and smiled. Relief. Pulling forward against the leash, trying and striving to get free, and then to lie down. “What do you think about me now,” he said, “now that I’ve proved out like this—burned out, temporarily, anyhow. Maybe permanently.”

  Hank said, “I think you’re a very good person.”

  “Thank you,” Fred said.

  “Take your gun with you.”

  “What?” he said.

  “When you go off to the San Bernardino Mountains with the fifths of I.W. Harper. Take your gun.”

  “You mean for if I don’t come out of it?”

  Hank said, “Either way. Coming down off the amount they say you’re on … Have it there with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “When you get back,” Hank said, “call me. Let me know.”

  “Hell, I won’t have my suit.”

  “Call me anyhow. With or without your suit.”