A Scanner Darkly

“Donna?” he laughed. The suit laughed, actually. In its way.
“Or Bob Arctor,” Hank continued, studying his list of suspects.
“I report on myself all the time,” Fred said.
“So you will have to include yourself from time to time in the holo-tapes you turn over to us, because if you systematically edit yourself out then we can deduce who you are by a process of elimination, whether we want to or not. What you must do, really, is edit yourself out in—what should I call it?—an inventive, artistic … Hell, the word is creative way … as for instance during the brief intervals when you’re in the house alone and doing research, going through papers and drawers, or servicing a scanner within view of another scanner, on—”
“You should just send someone to the house once a month in a uniform,” Fred said. “And have him say, ‘Good morning! I’m here to service the monitoring devices covertly installed on your premises, in your phone, and in your car.’ Maybe Arctor would pick up the bill.”
“Arctor would probably off him and then disappear.”
The scramble suit Fred said, “If Arctor is hiding that much. That’s not been proved.”
“Arctor may be hiding a great deal. We’ve got more recent information on him gathered and analyzed. There is no substantial doubt of it: he is a ringer, a three-dollar bill. He is phony. So keep on him until he drops, until we have enough to arrest him and make it stick.”
“You want stuff planted?”
“We’ll discuss that later.”
“You think he’s up high in the, you know, the S. D. Agency?”
“What we think isn’t of any importance in your work,” Hank said. “We evaluate; you report with your own limited conclusions. This is not a put-down of you, but we have information, lots of it, not available to you. The broad picture. The computerized picture.”
“Arctor is doomed,” Fred said. “If he’s up to anything. And I have a hunch from what you say that he is.”
“We should have a case on him this way soon,” Hank said. “And then we can close the book on him, which will please us all.”
Fred stoically memorized the address and number of the apartment and suddenly recalled that he had seen a young head-type couple who had recently abruptly disappeared now and then entering and leaving the building. Busted, and their apartment taken over for this. He had liked them. The girl had long flaxen hair, wore no bra. One time he had driven past as she was lugging groceries and offered her a lift; they had talked. She was an organic type, into megavitamins and kelp and sunlight, nice, shy, but she’d declined. Now he could see why. Evidently the two of them had been holding. Or, more likely, dealing. On the other hand, if the apartment was needed, a possession rap would do, and you could always get that.
What, he wondered, would Bob Arctor’s littered but large house be used for by the authorities when Arctor had been hauled off? An even vaster intelligence-processing center, most likely.
“You’d like Arctor’s house,” he said aloud. “It’s rundown and typically doper dirty, but it’s big. Nice yard. Lots of shrubs.”
“That’s what the installation crew reported back. Some excellent possibilities.”
“They what? They reported it had ‘plenty of possibilities,’ did they?” The scramble suit voice clacked out maddeningly without tone or resonance, which made him even angrier. “Like what?”
“Well, one obvious possibility: its living room gives a view of an intersection, so passing vehicles could be graphed and their license plates …” Hank studied his many, many papers. “But Burt What’s-his-face, who headed the crew, felt the house had been allowed to deteriorate so badly that it wouldn’t be worth our taking over. As an investment.”
“In what way? In what fashion deterioriated?”
“The roof.”
“The roof’s perfect.”
“The interior and exterior paint. The condition of the floors. The kitchen cabinets—”
“Bullshit,” Fred said, or anyhow the suit droned. “Arctor may have let dishes pile up and the garbage and not dusted, but after all, three dudes living there with no chicks? His wife left him; women are supposed to do all that. If Donna Hawthorne had moved in like Arctor wanted her to, begged her to, she would have kept it up. Anyhow, any professional janitorial service could put the whole house in top shape as far as cleaning goes in a half a day. Regarding the roof, that really makes me mad, because—”
“Then you recommend we acquire it after Arctor’s been arrested and loses title.”
Fred, the Suit, stared at him.
“Well?” Hank said impassively, ballpoint pen ready.
“I have no opinion. One way or another.” Fred rose from his chair to leave.
“You’re not splitting yet,” Hank said, motioning him to reseat himself. He fished among the papers on his desk. “I have a memo here—”
“You always have memos,” Fred said. “For everybody.”
“This memo,” Hank said, “instructs me to send you over to Room 203 before you leave today.”
“If it’s about that anti-drug speech I gave at the Lions Club, I’ve already had my ass chewed about it.”
“No, this isn’t that.” Hank tossed him the fluttery note. “This is something different. I’m finished with you, so why don’t you head right over there now and get it done with.”
***
He found himself confronting an all-white room with steel fixtures and steel chains and steel desk, all bolted down, a hospital-like room, purified and sterile and cold, with the light too bright. In fact, to the right stood a weighing scale with a sign HAVE TECHNICIAN ONLY ADJUST. Two deputies regarded him, both in full uniform of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, but with medical stripes.
“You are Officer Fred?” one of them, with a handle-bar mustache, said.
“Yes, sir,” Fred said. He felt scared.
“All right, Fred, first let me state that, as you undoubtedly are aware, your briefings and debriefings are monitored and later played back for study, in case anything was missed at the original sessions. This is SOP, of course, and applies to all officers reporting in orally, not you alone.”
The other medical deputy said, “Plus all other contacts you maintain with the department, such as phone contacts, and additional activities, such as your recent public speech in Anaheim to the Rotary Club boys.”
“Lions,” Fred said.
“Do you take Substance D?” the left-hand medical deputy said.
“That question,” the other said, “is moot because it’s taken for granted that in your work you’re compelled to. So don’t answer. Not that it’s incriminating, but it’s simply moot.” He indicated a table on which a bunch of blocks and other riff-raff colorful plastic objects lay, plus peculiar items that Officer Fred could not identify. “Step over here and be seated, Officer Fred. We are going to administer, briefly, several easy tests. This won’t consume much of your time, and there will be no physical discomfort involved.”
“About that speech I gave—” Fred said.
“What this is about,” the left-hand medical deputy said, as he seated himself and produced a pen and some forms, “stems from a recent departmental survey showing that several undercover agents working in this area have been admitted to Neural Aphasia Clinics during the past month.”
“You’re conscious of the high factor of addictiveness of Substance D?” the other deputy said to Fred.
“Sure,” Fred said. “Of course I am.”
“We’re going to give you these tests now,” the seated deputy said, “in this order, starting with what we call the BG or—”
“You think I’m an addict?” Fred said.
“Whether you are an addict or not isn’t a prime issue, since a blocking agent is expected from the Army Chemical Warfare Division sometime within the next five years.”
“These tests do not pertain to the addictive properties of Substance D but to—Well, let me give you this Set-Ground Test first, which determines your ability readily to distinguish set from ground. See this geometric diagram?” He laid a drawn-on card before Fred, on the table. “Within the apparently meaningless lines is a familiar object that we would all recognize. You are to tell me what the …