A Scanner Darkly

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.