A Scanner Darkly

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?”