A Scanner Darkly

This was about the only thought that reassured him. The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues—he had heard that, and maybe that was true. What for a certainty was true, however, was that the guilty fled, fled like hell and took plenty of swift precautions, when someone did pursue: someone real and expert and at the same time hidden. And very close by. As close, he thought, as the back seat of this car. Where, if he has his funky .22 single-action German-made nowhere pistol with him and his equally funky rinky-dink laughable alleged silencer on it, and Luckman has gone to sleep as usual, he can put a hollow-nose bullet through the back of my skull and I will be as dead as Bobby Kennedy, who died from gunshot wounds of the same caliber—a bore that small.
And not only today but every day. And every night.
Except that in the house, when I check the storage drums of the holo-scanners, I’ll pretty well know pretty soon what everyone in my house is doing and when they do it and probably even why, myself included. I will watch my own self, he thought, get up in the night to pee. I will watch all the rooms on a twenty-four-hour basis … although there will be a lag. It won’t help me much if the holo-scanners pick up me being given a hotshot of some disorientation drug ripped off by the Hell’s Angels from a military arsenal and dumped in my coffee; someone else from the academy who goes over the storage drums will have to watch my thrashing around, unable to see or know where or what I am any more. It will be a hindsight I won’t even get to have. Somebody else will have to have it for me.
Luckman said, “I wonder what’s been going on back at the house while we’ve been gone all day. You know, this proves you got somebody out to burn you real bad, Bob. I hope when we get back the house is still there.”
“Yeah,” Arctor said. “I didn’t think of that. And we didn’t get a loan cephscope anyhow.” He made his voice sound leaden with resignation.
Barris said, in a surprisingly cheerful voice, “I wouldn’t worry too much.”
With anger, Luckman said, “You wouldn’t? Christ, they may have broken in and ripped off all we got. All Bob’s got, anyhow. And killed or stomped the animals. Or—”
“I left a little surprise,” Barris said, “for anybody entering the house while we’re gone today. I perfected it early this morning … I worked until I got it. An electronic surprise.”
Sharply, concealing his concern, Arctor said, “What kind of electronic surprise? It’s my house, Jim, you can’t start rigging up—”
“Easy, easy,” Barris said. “As our German friends would say, leise. Which means be cool.”
“What is it?”
“If the front door is opened,” Barris said, “during our absence, my cassette tape recorder starts recording. It’s under the couch. It has a two-hour tape. I placed three omnidirectional Sony mikes at three different—”
“You should have told me,” Arctor said.
“What if they come in through the windows?” Luckman said. “Or the back door?”
“To increase the chances of their making their entry via the front door,” Barris continued, “rather than in other less usual ways, I providentially left the front door unlocked.”
After a pause, Luckman began to snigger.
“Suppose they don’t know it’s unlocked?” Arctor said.
“I put a note on it,” Barris said.
“You’ve jiving me!”
“Yes,” Barris said, presently.
“Are you fucking jiving us or not?” Luckman said. “I can’t tell with you. Is he jiving, Bob?”
“We’ll see when we get back,” Arctor said. “If there’s a note on the door and it’s unlocked we’ll know he isn’t jiving us.”
“They probably would take the note down,” Luckman said, “after ripping off and vandalizing the house, and then lock the door. So we won’t know. We’ll never know. For sure. It’s that gray area again.”
“Of course I’m kidding!” Barris said, with vigor. “Only a psychotic would do that, leave the front door of his house unlocked and a note on the door.”
Turning, Arctor said to him, “What did you write on the note, Jim?”
“Who’s the note to?” Luckman chimed in. “I didn’t even know you knew how to write.”
With condescension, Barris said, “I wrote: ‘Donna, come on inside; door’s unlocked. We—’ ” Barris broke off. “It’s to Donna,” he finished, but not smoothly.
“He did do that,” Luckman said. “He really did. All of it.”
“That way,” Barris said, smoothly again, “we’ll know who had been doing this, Bob. And that’s of prime importance.”
“Unless they rip off the tape recorder when they rip off the couch and everything else,” Arctor said. He was thinking rapidly as to how much of a problem this really was, this additional example of Barris’s messed-up electronic nowhere genius of a kindergarten sort. Hell, he concluded, they’ll find the mikes in the first ten minutes and trace them back to the recorder. They’ll know exactly what to do. They’ll erase the tape, rewind it, leave it as it was, leave the door unlocked and the note on it. In fact, maybe the unlocked door will make their job easier. Fucking Barris, he thought. Great genius plans which will work out so as to screw up the universe. He probably forgot to plug the recorder into the wall outlet anyhow. Of course, if he finds it unplugged—
He’ll reason that proves someone was there, he realized. He’ll flash on that and rap at us for days. Somebody got in who was hip to his device and cleverly unplugged it. So, he decided, if they find it unplugged I hope they think to plug it in, and not only that, make it run right. In fact, what they really should do is test out his whole detection system, run it through its cycle as thoroughly as they do their own, be absolutely certain it functions perfectly, and then wind it back to a blank state, a tablet on which nothing is inscribed but on which something would for sure be had anyone—themselves, for example—entered the house. Otherwise, Barris’s suspicions will be aroused forever.
As he drove, he continued his theoretical analysis of his situation by means of a second well-established example. They had brought it up and drilled it into his own memory banks during his police training at the academy. Or else he had read it in the newspapers.
Item. One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven—or even proven at all—to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if a public building on a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings—then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.
In fact, Arctor speculated as he drove along the freeway very slowly, the person begins to assume he’s paranoid and has no enemy; he doubts himself. His car broke down normally; his luck has just become bad. And his friends agree. It’s in his head. And this wipes him out more thoroughly than anything that can be traced. However, it takes longer. The person on persons doing him in must tinker and putter and make use of chance over a long interval. Meanwhile, if the victim can figure out who they are, he has a better chance of getting them—certainly better than if, say, they shoot him with a scope-sight rifle. That is his advantage.
Every nation in the world, he knew, trains and sends out a mass of agents to loosen bolts here, strip threads there, break wines and start little fines, lose documents—little misadventures. A wad of gum inside a Xerox copying machine in a government office can destroy an irreplaceable—and vital—document: instead of a copy coming out, the original is wiped out. Too much soap and toilet paper, as the Yippies of the sixties knew, can screw up the entire sewage of an office building and force all the employees out for a week. A mothball in a car’s gas tank wears out the engine two weeks later, when it’s in another town, and leaves no fuel contaminants to be analyzed. Any radio or TV station can be put off the air by a pile driven accidentally cutting a microwave cable or a power cable. And so forth.