Dick Philip K. A Scanner Darkly

   "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?"
   "His I.D. shows him to be James R. Barris," Hank said, "and that is who he claims to be." He added, "He has no arrest record."
   "What does he want?" To Barris, Fred said, "What's your information?"
   "I have evidence," Barris said in a low voice, "that Mr. Arctor is part of a large secret covert organization, well funded, with arsenals of weapons at their disposal, using code words, probably dedicated to the overthrow of—"
   "That part is speculation," Hank interrupted. "What you suppose it's up to? What's your evidence? Now don't give us anything that is not firsthand."
   "Have you ever been sent to a mental hospital?" Fred said to Barris.
   "No," Barris said.
   "Will you sign a sworn, notarized statement at the D.A.'s office," Fred continued, "regarding your evidence and information? Will you be willing to appear in court under oath and—"
   "He has already indicated he would," Hank interrupted.
   "My evidence," Barris said, "which I mostly don't have with me today, but which I can produce, consists of tape recordings I have made of Robert Arctor's phone conversations. I mean, conversations when he didn't know I was listening."
   "What is this organization?" Fred said.
   "I believe it to be—" Barris began, but Hank waved him off. "It is political," Barris said, perspiring and trembling a little, but looking pleased, "and against the country. From outside. An enemy against the U.S."
   Fred said, "What is Arctor's relationship with the source of Substance D?"
   Blinking, then licking his lip and grimacing, Barris said, "It is in my—" He broke off. "When you examine all my information you will—that is, my evidence—you will undoubtedly conclude that Substance D is produced by a foreign nation determined to overthrow the U.S. and that Mr. Arctor has his hands deep within the machinery of this—"
   "Can you tell us specific names of anyone else in this organization?" Hank said. "Persons Arctor has met with? You understand that giving false information to the legal authorities is a crime and if you do so you can and probably will be cited."
   "I understand that," Barris said.
   "Who has Arctor conferred with?" Hank said.
   "A Miss Donna Hawthorne," Barris said. "On various pretexts he goes over to her place and colludes with her regularly."
   Fred laughed. "Colludes. What do you mean?"
   "I have followed him," Barris said, speaking slowly and distinctly, "in my own can. Without his knowledge."
   "He goes there often?" Hank said.
   "Yes, sir," Barris said. "Very often. As often as—"
   "She's his girl," Fred said.
   Barris said, "Mr. Arctor also—"
   Turning to Fred, Hank said, "You think there's any substance in this?"
   "We should definitely look at his evidence," Fred said.
   "Bring in your evidence," Hank instructed Barris. "All of it. Names we want most of all—names, license-plate numbers, phone numbers. Have you ever seen Arctor deeply involved in large amounts of drugs? More than a user's?"
   "Certainly," Barris said.
   "What types?"
   "Several kinds. I have samples. I carefully took samples … for you to analyze. I can bring them in too. Quite a bit, and varied."
   Hank and Fred glanced at each other.
   Barris, sightiessly gazing straight ahead, smiled.
   "Is there anything else you want to say at this time?" Hank said to Barris. To Fred he said, "Maybe we should send an officer with him to get his evidence." Meaning, To make sure he doesn't panic and split, doesn't try to change his mind and pull out.
   "There is one thing I would like to say," Barris said. "Mr. Arctor is an addict, addicted to Substance D, and his mind is deranged now. It has slowly become deranged over a period of time, and he is dangerous."
   "Dangerous," Fred echoed.
   "Yes," Barris declared. "He is already having episodes such as occur with brain damage from Substance D. The optic chiasm must be deteriorated, since a weak ipsilateral component … But also—" Barris cleared his throat. "Deterioration, as well, in the corpus callosum."
   "This kind of unsupported speculation," Hank said, "as I already informed you, warned you, is worthless. Anyhow, we will send an officer with you to get your evidence. All right?"
   Grinning, Barris nodded. "But naturally—"
   "We'll arrange for an officer out of uniform."
   "I might—" Barris gestured. "Be murdered. Mr. Arctor, as I say—"
   Hank nodded. "All right, Mr. Barris, we appreciate this, and your extreme risk, and if it works out, if your information is of significant value in obtaining a conviction in court, then naturally—"
   "I'm not here for that reason," Barris said. "The man is sick. Brain-damaged. From Substance D. The reason I am here—"
   "We don't care why you're here," Hank said. "We only care whether your evidence and material amount to anything. The rest is your pnoblem."
   "Thank you, sir," Barris said, and grinned and grinned.

13

   Back at Room 203, the police psychology testing lab, Fred listened without interest as his test results were explained to him by both the psychologists.
   "You show what we regard more as a competition phenomenon than impairment. Sit down."
   "Okay," Fred said stoically, sitting down.
   "Competition," the other psychologist said, "between the left and right hemispheres of your brain. It's not so much a single signal, defective or contaminated; it's more like two signals that interfere with each other by carrying conflicting information."
   "Normally," the other psychologist explained, "a person uses the left hemisphere. The self-system or ego, or consciousness, is located there. It is dominant, because it's in the left hemisphere always that the speech center is located; more precisely, bilateralization involves a verbal ability on valency in the left, with spatial abilities in the right. The left can be compared to a digital computer; the right to an analogic. So bilateral function is not mere duplication; both percept systems monitor and process incoming data differently. But for you, neither hemisphere is dominant and they do not act in a compensatory fashion, each to the other. One tells you one thing, the other another."
   "It's as if you have two fuel gauges on your car," the other man said, "and one says your tank is full and the other registers empty. They can't both be right. They conflict. But it's—in your case—not one functioning and one malfunctioning; it's … Here's what I mean. Both gauges study exactly the same amount of fuel: the same fuel, the same tank. Actually they test the same thing. You as the driver have only an indirect relationship to the fuel tank, via the gauge on, in your case, gauges. In fact, the tank could fall off entirely and you wouldn't know until some dashboard indicator told you or finally the engine stopped. There should never be two gauges reporting conflicting information, because as soon as that happens you have no knowledge of the condition being reported on at all. This is not the same as a gauge and a backup gauge, where the backup one cuts in when the regular one fouls up."
   Fred said, "So what does this mean?"
   "I'm sure you know already," the psychologist to the left said. "You've been experiencing it, without knowing why or what it is."
   "The two hemispheres of my brain are competing?" Fred said.
   "Yes."
   "Why?"
   "Substance D. It often causes that, functionally. This is what we expected; this is what the tests confirm. Damage having taken place in the normally dominant left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is attempting to compensate for the impairment. But the twin functions do not fuse, because this is an abnormal condition the body isn't prepared for. It should never happen. Cross-cuing, we call it. Related to splitbrain phenomena. We could perform a right hemispherectomy, but—"
   "Will this go away," Fred interrupted, "when I get off Substance D?"
   "Probably," the psychologist on the left said, nodding. "It's a functional impairment."
   The other man said, "It may be organic damage. It may be permanent. Time'll tell, and only after you are off Substance D for a long while. And off entirely."
   "What?" Fred said. He did not understand the answer—was it yes or no? Was he damaged forever or not? Which had they said?
   "Even if it's brain-tissue damage," one of the psychologists said, "there are experiments going on now in the removal of small sections from each hemisphere, to abort competing gestalt-processing. They believe eventually this may cause the original hemisphere to regain dominance."
   "However, the problem there is that then the individual may only receive partial impressions—incoming sense data—for the rest of his life. Instead of two signals, he gets half a signal. Which is equally impairing, in my opinion."
   "Yes, but partial noncompeting function is better than no function, since twin competing cross-cuing amounts to zero recept form."
   "You see, Fred," the other man said, "you no longer have—"
   "I will never drop any Substance D again," Fred said. "For the rest of my life."
   "How much are you dropping now?"
   "Not much." After an interval he said, "More, recently. Because of job stress."
   "They undoubtedly should relieve you of your assignments," one psychologist said. "Take you off everything. You are impaired, Fred. And will be a while longer. At the very least. After that, no one can be sure. You may make a full comeback; you may not."
   "How come," Fred grated, "that even if both hemispheres of my brain are dominant they don't receive the same stimuli? Why can't their two whatevers be synchronized, like stereo sound is?"
   Silence.
   "I mean," he said, gesturing, "the left hand and the right hand when they grip an object, the same object, should—"
   "Left-handedness versus right-handedness, as for example what is meant by those terms with, say, a mirror image—in which the left hand ‘becomes' the right hand …" The psychologist leaned down over Fred, who did not look up. "How would you define a left-hand glove compared to a right-hand glove so a person who had no knowledge of those terms could tell you which you meant? And not get the other? The mirror opposite?"
   "A left-hand glove …" Fred said, and then stopped.
   "It is as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all that that implies. And we don't know yet what that does imply, to see the world reversed like that. Topologically speaking, a left-hand glove is a right-hand glove pulled through infinity."
   "Through a mirror," Fred said. A darkened mirror, he thought; a darkened scanner. And St. Paul meant, by a mirror, not a glass mirror—they didn't have those then—but a reflection of himself when he looked at the polished bottom of a metal pan. Luckman, in his theological readings, had told him that. Not through a telescope or lens system, which does not reverse, not through anything but seeing his own face reflected back up at him, reversed—pulled through infinity. Like they're telling me. It is not through glass but as reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn't. And they didn't have cameras in those old days, and so that's the only way a person saw himself: backward.
   I have seen myself backward.
   I have in a sense begun to see the entire universe backward. With the other side of my brain!
   "Topology," one psychologist was saying. "A little-understood science or math, whichever. As with the black holes in space, how—"
   "Fred is seeing the world from inside out," the other man was declaring at the same moment. "From in front and from behind both, I guess. It's hard for us to say how it appears to him. Topology is the branch of math that investigates the properties of a geometric or other configuration that are unaltered if the thing is subjected to a one-to-one, any one-to-one, continuous transformation. But applied to psychology …"
   "And when that occurs to objects, who knows what they're going to look like then? They'd be unrecognizable. As when a primitive sees a photograph of himself the first time, he doesn't recognize it as himself. Even though he's seen his reflection many times, in streams, from metal objects. Because his reflection is reversed and the photograph of himself isn't. So he doesn't know it's the identical person."
   "He's accustomed only to the reverse reflected image and thinks he looks like that."
   "Often a person hearing his own voice played back—"
   "That's different. That has to do with the resonance in the sinus—"
   "Maybe it's you fuckers," Fred said, "who're seeing the universe backward, like in a mirror. Maybe I see it right."
   "You see it both ways."
   "Which is the—"
   A psychologist said, "They used to talk about seeing only ‘reflections' of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn't real, but that it's reversed. I wonder." He had an odd expression. "Parity. The scientific principle of parity. Universe and reflected image, the latter we take for the former, for some reason … because we lack bilateral parity."
   "Whereas a photograph can compensate for the lack of bilateral hemispheric parity; it's not the object but it's not reversed, so that objection would make photographic images not images at all but the true form. Reverse of a reverse."
   "But a photo can get accidentally reversed, too, if the negative is flipped—printed backward; you usually can tell only if there's writing. But not with a man's face. You could have two contact prints of a given man, one reversed, one not. A person who'd never met him couldn't tell which was correct, but he could see they were different and couldn't be superimposed."
   "There, Fred, does that show you how complex the problem of formulating the distinction between a left-hand glove and—"
   "Then shall it come to pass the saying that is written," a voice said. "Death is swallowed up. In victory." Perhaps only Fred heard it. "Because," the voice said, "as soon as the writing appears backward, then you know which is illusion and which is not. The confusion ends, and death, the last enemy, Substance Death, is swallowed not down into the body but up—in victory. Behold, I tell you the sacred secret now: we shall not all sleep in death."
   The mystery, he thought, the explanation, he means. Of a secret. A sacred secret. We shall not die.
   The reflections shall leave. And it will happen fast. We shall all be changed, and by that he means reversed back, suddenly. In the twinkling of an eye!
   Because, he thought glumly as he watched the police psychologists writing their conclusions and signing them, we are fucking backward right now, I guess, every one of us; everyone and every damn thing, and distance, and even time. But how long, he thought, when a print is being made, a contact print, when the photographer discovers he's got the negative reversed, how long does it take to flip it? To reverse it again so it's like it's supposed to be?
   A fraction of a second.
   I understand, he thought, what that passage in the Bible means, Through a glass darkly. But my percept system is as fucked up as ever. Like they say. I understand but am helpless to help myself.
   Maybe, he thought, since I see both ways at once, correctly and reversed, I'm the first person in human history to have it flipped and not-flipped simultaneously, and so get a glimpse of what it'll be when it's right. Although I've got the other as well, the regular. And which is which?
   Which is reversed and which is not?
   When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?
   And how much allotment for sick pay or retirement or disability do I get while I dry out? he asked himself, feeling horror already, deep dread and coldness everywhere. Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewölbe! Das ist natürlich, es ist ja tief. And I have to withdraw from the shit. I've seen people go through that. Jesus Christ, he thought, and shut his eyes.
   "That may sound like metaphysics," one of them was saying, "but the math people say we may be on the verge of a new cosmology so much—"
   The other said excitedly, "The infinity of time, which is expressed as eternity, as a loop! Like a loop of cassette tape!"

***

   He had an hour to kill before he was supposed to be back in Hank's office, to listen to and inspect Jim Barris's evidence.
   The building's cafeteria attracted him, so he walked that way, among those in uniform and those in scramble suits and those in slacks and ties.
   Meanwhile, the psychologists' findings presumably were being taken up to Hank. They would be there when he arrived.
   This will give me time to think, he reflected as he wandered into the cafeteria and lined up. Time. Suppose, he thought, time is round, like the Earth. You sail west to reach India. They laugh at you, but finally there's India in front, not behind. In time—maybe the Crucifixion lies ahead of us as we all sail along, thinking it's back east.
   Ahead of him a secretary. Tight blue sweater, no bra, almost no skirt. It felt nice, checking her out; he gazed on and on, and finally she noticed him and edged off with her tray.
   The First and Second Coming of Christ the same event, he thought; time a cassette loop. No wonder they were sure it'd happen, He'd be back.
   He watched the secretary's behind, but then he realized that she could not possibly be noticing him back as he noticed her because in his suit he had no face and no ass. But she senses my scheming on her, he decided. Any chick with legs like that would sense it a lot, from every man.
   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 everyone. 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."