"Yep," Fred said.
"It wouldn't be a bad idea to warn them in some way about this mushroom toxicity he's exposing them to, that clown with the green shades who's peddling. Can you pass it on to them without faulting your cover?"
The other near scramble suit called from his swivel chair, "Any time one of them gets violently nauseous—that's sometimes a tip-off on mushroom poisoning."
"Resembling strychnine?" Fred said. A cold insight grappled with his head then, a rerun of the Kimberly Hawkins dog-shit day and his illness in his car after what—
His.
"I'll tell Arctor," he said. "I can lay it on him. Without him flashing on me. He's docile."
"Ugly-looking, too," one of the scramble suits said. "He the individual came in the door stoop-shouldered and hung over?"
"Aw," Fred said, and swiveled back to his holos. Oh goddamn, he thought, that day Barris gave us the tabs at the roadside—his mind went into spins and double trips and then split in half, directly down the middle. The next thing he knew, he was in the safe apartment's bathroom with a Dixie cup of water, rinsing out his mouth, by himself, where he could think. When you get down to it, I'm Arctor, he thought. I'm the man on the scanners, the suspect Barris was fucking over with his weird phone call with the locksmith, and I was asking, What's Arctor been up to to get Barris on him like that? I'm slushed; my brain is slushed. This is not real. I'm not believing this, watching what is me, is Fred—that was Fred down there without his scramble suit; that's how Fred appears without the suit!
And Fred the other day possibly almost got it with toxic mushroom fragments, he realized. He almost didn't make it here to this safe apartment to get these holos going. But now he has.
Now Fred has a chance. But only barely.
Crazy goddamn job they gave me, he thought. But if I wasn't doing it someone else would be, and they might get it wrong. They'd set him up—set Arctor up. They'd turn him in for the reward; they'd plant dope on him and collect. If anyone, he thought, has to be watching that house, it better ought to be me by far, despite the disadvantages; just protecting everybody against kinky fucking Barris in itself justifies it right there.
And if any other officer monitoring Barris's actions sees what I probably will see, they'll conclude Arctor is the biggest drug runner in the western U.S. and recommend a—Christ!—covert snuff. By our unidentified forces. The ones in black we borrow from back East that tiptoe a lot and carry the scope-site Winchester 803's. The new infrared sniperscope sights synched with the EE-trophic shells. Those guys who don't get paid at all, even from a Dr. Pepper machine; they just get to draw straws to see which of them gets to be the next U.S. President. My God, he thought, those fuckers can shoot down a passing plane. And make it look like one engine inhaled a flock of birds. Those EE-trophic shells—why fuck me, man, he thought; they'd leave traces of feathers in the ruins of the engines; they'd prime them for that.
This is awful, he thought, thinking about this. Not Arctor as suspect but Arctor as … whatever. Target. I'll keep on watching him; Fred will keep on doing his Fred-thing; it'll be a lot better; I can edit and interpret and do a great deal of "Let's wait until he actually" and so on, and, realizing this, he tossed the Dixie cup away and emerged from the safe apartment's bathroom.
"You look done in," one of the scramble suits said to him.
"Well," Fred said, "funny thing happened to me on the way to the grave." He saw in his mind a picture of the supersonic tight-beam projector which had caused a fortynine-year-old district attorney to have a fatal cardiac arrest, just as he was about to reopen the case of a dreadful and famous political assassination here in California. "I almost got there," he said aloud.
"Almost is almost," the scramble suit said. "It's not there."
"Oh," Fred said. "Yeah. Right."
"Sit down," a scramble suit said, "and get back to work, or for you no Friday, just public assistance."
"Can you imagine listing this job as a job skill on the—" Fred began, but the two other scramble suits were not amused and in fact weren't even listening. So he reseated himself and lit a cigarette. And started up the battery of holos once more.
What I ought to do, he decided, is walk back up the street to the house, right now, while I'm thinking about it, before I get sidetracked, and walk in on Barris real fast and shoot him.
In the line of duty.
I'll say, "Hey, man, I'm hurtin'—can you lay a joint on me? I'll pay you a buck." And he will, and then I'll arrest him, drag him to my car, throw him inside, drive onto the freeway, and then pistol-whip him out of the car in front of a truck. And I can say he fought loose and tried to jump. Happens all the time.
Because if I don't I can never eat or drink any open food or beverage in the house, and neither can Luckman or Donna or Freck or we'll all croak from toxic mushroom fragments, after which Barris will explain about how we were all out in the woods picking them at random and eating them and he tried to dissuade us but we wouldn't listen because we didn't go to college.
Even if the court psychiatrists find him totally burned out and nuts and toss him in forever, somebody'll be dead. He thought, Maybe Donna, for instance. Maybe she'll wander in, spaced on hash, looking for me and the spring flowers I promised her, and Barris will offer her a bowl of Jell-O he made himself special, and ten days later she'll be thrashing in agony in an intensive-care ward and it won't do any good then.
If that happens, he thought, I'll boil him in Drano, in the bathtub, in hot Drano, until only bones remain, and then mail the bones to his mother or kids, whichever he has, and if he hasn't either then just toss the bones out at passing dogs. But the deed will be done to that little girl anyhow.
Excuse me, he rolled in his head in fantasy to the other two scramble suits. Where can I get a hundred-pound can of Drano this time of night?
I've had it, he thought, and turned on the holos so as not to attract any more static from the other suits in the safe room.
On Monitor Two, Barris was talking to Luckman, who apparently had rolled in the front door dead drunk, no doubt on Ripple. "There are more people addicted to alcohol in the U.S.," Barris was telling Luckman, who was trying to find the door to his bedroom, to go pass out, and having a terrible time, "than there are addicts of all other forms of drugs. And brain damage and liver damage from the alcohol plus impurities—"
Luckman disappeared without ever having noticed Barris was there. I wish him luck, Fred thought. It's not a workable policy, though, not for long. Because the fucker is there.
But now Fred is here, too. But all Fred's got is hindsight. Unless, he thought, unless maybe if I run the holo-tapes backward. Then I'd be there first, before Barris. What I do would precede what Barris does. If with me first he gets to do anything at all.
And then the other side of his head opened up and spoke to him more calmly, like another self with a simpler message flashed to him as to how to handle it.
"The way to cool the locksmith check," it told him, "is to go down there to Harbor tomorrow first thing very early and redeem the check and get it back. Do that first, before you do anything else. Do that right away. Defuse that, at that end. And after that, do the other more serious things, once that's finished. Right?" Right, he thought. That will remove me from the disadvantage list. That's where to start.
He put the tape on fast forward, on and on until he figured from the meters that it would show a night scene with everyone asleep. For a pretext to sign off his workday, here.
It now showed lights off, the scanners on infra. Luckman in his bed in his room; Barris in his; and in his room, Arctor beside a chick, both of them asleep.
Let's see, Fred thought. Something. We have her in the computer files as strung out on hard stuff and also turning tricks and dealing. A true loser.
"At least you didn't have to watch your subject have sexual intercourse," one of the other scramble suits said, watching from behind him and then passing on by.
"That's a relief," Fred said, stoically viewing the two sleeping figures in the bed; his mind was on the locksmith and what he had to do there. "I always hate to—"
"A nice thing to do," the scramble suit agreed, "but not too nice to watch."
Arctor asleep, Fred thought. With his trick. Well, I can wind up soon; they'll undoubtedly ball on arising but that's about it for them.
He continued watching, however. The sight of Bob Arctor sleeping … on and on, Fred thought, hour after hour. And then he noticed something he had not noticed. That doesn't look like anybody else but Donna Hawthorne! he thought. There in bed, in the sack with Arctor.
It doesn't compute, he thought, and reached to snap off the scanners. He ran the tape back, then forward again. Bob Arctor and a chick, but not Donna! It was the junkie chick Connie! He had been right. The two individuals lay there side by side, both asleep.
And then, as Fred watched, Connie's hard features melted and faded into softness, and into Donna Hawthorne's face.
He snapped off the tape again. Sat puzzled. I don't get it, he thought. It's—what they call that? Like a goddamn dissolve! A film technique. Fuck, what is this? Pre-editing for TV viewing? By a director, using special visual effects?
Again he ran the tape back, then forward; when he first came to the alteration in Connie's features he then stopped the transport, leaving the hologram filled with one freeze-usframe.
He rotated the enlarger: All the other cubes cut out; one huge cube formed from the previous eight. A single nocturnal scene; Bob Arctor, unmoving, in his bed, the girl unmoving, beside him.
Standing, Fred walked into the holo-cube, into the threedimensional projection, and stood close to the bed to scrutinize the girl's face.
Halfway between, he decided. Still half Connie; already half Donna. I better run this over to the lab, he thought; it's been tampered with by an expert. I've been fed fake tape.
Who by? he wondered. He emerged from the holo-cube, collapsed it, and restored the small eight ones. Still sat there, pondering.
Somebody faked in Donna. Superimposed over Connie. Forged evidence that Arctor was laying the Hawthorne girl. Why? As a good technician can do with either audio or video tape and now—as witness—with holo-tapes. Hard to do, but …
If this was a click-on, click-off, interval scan, he thought, we'd have a sequence showing Arctor in bed with a girl he probably never did get into bed and never will, but there it is on the tape.
Or maybe it's a visual interruption or breakdown electronically, he pondered. What they call printing. Holoprinting: from one section of the tape storage to another. If the tape sits too long, if the recording gain was too high initially, it prints across. Jeez, he thought. It printed Donna across from a previous or later scene, maybe from the living room.
I wish I knew more about the technical side of this, he reflected. I'd better acquire more background on this before jumping the gun. Like another AM station filtering in, interfering—
Crosstalk, he decided. Like that: accidental.
Like ghosts on a TV screen. Functional, a malfunction. A transducer opened up briefly.
Again he rolled the tape. Connie again, and Connie it stayed. And then … again Fred saw Donna's fact melt back in, and this time the sleeping man beside her in the bed, Bob Arctor, woke up after a moment and sat up abruptly, then fumbled for the light beside him; the light fell to the floor and Arctor was staring on and on at the sleeping girl, at sleeping Donna.
When Connie's face seeped back, Arctor relaxed, and at last he sank back and again slept. But restlessly.
Well, that shoots down the "technical interference" theory, Fred thought. Printing or crosstalk. Arctor saw it too. Woke up, saw it, stared, then gave up.
Christ, Fred thought, and shut off the equipment before him entirely. "I guess that's enough for me for now," he declared, and rose shakily to his feet. "I've had it."
"Saw some kinky sex, did you?" a scramble suit asked. "You'll get used to this job."
"I never will get used to this job," Fred said. "You can make book on that."
11
The next morning, by Yellow Cab, since now not only was his cephscope laid up for repairs but so was his car, he appeared at the door of Englesohn Locksmith with forty bucks in cash and a good deal of worry inside his heart.
The store had an old wooden quality, with a more modern sign but many little brass doodads in the windows of a lock type: funky ornate mailboxes, trippy doorknobs made to resemble human heads, great fake black iron keys. He entered, into semigloom. Like a doper's place, he thought, appreciating the irony.
At a counter where two huge key-grinding machines loomed up, plus thousands of key blanks dangling from racks, a plump elderly lady greeting him. "Yes, sir? Good morning."
Arctor said, "I'm here …
Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein,
Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz' und Bügel:
Ich stand am Tor, ihr soiltet Schlüssel sein;
Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt ihr nicht die Riegel.
… to pay for a check of mine which the bank returned. It's for twenty dollars, I believe."
"Oh." The lady amiably lifted out a locked metal file, searched for the key to it, then discovered the file wasn't locked. She opened it and found the check right away, with a note attached. "Mr. Arctor?"
"Yes," he said, his money already out.
"Yes, twenty dollars." Detaching the note from the check, she began laboriously writing on the note, indicating that he had shown up and purchased the check back.
"I'm sorry about this," he told her, "but by mistake I wrote the check on a now closed account rather than my active one."
"Umm," the lady said, smiling as she wrote.
"Also," he said, "I'd appreciate it if you'd tell your husband, who called me the other day—"
"My brother Carl," the lady said, "actually." She glanced over her shoulder. "If Carl spoke to you …" She gestured, smiling. "He gets overwrought sometimes about checks. I apologize if he spoke … you know."
"Tell him," Arctor said, his speech memorized, "that when he called I was distraught myself, and I apologize for that, too."
"I believe he did say something about that, yes." She laid out his check; he gave her twenty dollars.
"Any extra charge?" Arctor said.
"No extra charge."
"I was distraught," he said, glancing briefly at the check and then putting it away in his pocket, "because a friend of mine had just passed on unexpectedly."
"Oh dear," the lady said.
Arctor, lingering, said, "He choked to death alone, in his room, on a piece of meat. No one heard him."
"Do you know, Mr. Arctor, that more deaths from that happen than people realize? I read that when you are dining with a friend, and he or she does not speak for a period of time but just sits there, you should lean forward and ask him if he can talk? Because he may not be able to; he may be strangling and can't tell you."
"Yes," Arctor said. "Thanks. That's true. And thanks about the check."
"I'm sorry about your friend," the lady said.
"Yes," he said. "He was about the best friend I had."
"That is so dreadful," the lady said. "How old was he, Mr. Arctor?"
"In his early thirties," Arctor said, which was true: Luckman was thirty-two.
"Oh, how terrible. I'll tell Carl. And thank you for coming all the way down here."
"Thank you," Arctor said. "And thank Mr. Englesohn too, for me. Thank you both so much." He departed, finding himself back out on the warm morning sidewalk, blinking in the bright light and foul air.
He phoned for a cab, and on the journey back to his house sat advising himself as to how well he had gotten out of this net of Barris's with no real overly bad scene. Could have been a lot worse, he pointed out to himself. The check was still there. And I didn't have to confront the dude himself.
He got out the check to see how closely Barris had been able to approximate his handwriting. Yes, it was a dead account; he recognized the color of the check right away, an entirely closed one, and the bank had stamped it ACCOUNT CLOSED. No wonder the locksmith had gone bananas. And then, studying the check as he rode along, Arctor saw that the handwriting was his.
Not anything like Barris's. A perfect forgery. He would never have known it wasn't his, except that he remembered not having written it.
My God, he thought, how many of these has Barris done by now? Maybe he's embezzled me out of half I've got.
Barris, he thought, is a genius. On the other hand, it's probably a tracing reproduction or anyhow mechanically done. But I never made a check out to Englesohn Locksmith, so how could it be a transfer forgery? This is a unique check. I'll turn it over to the department graphologists, he decided, and let them figure out how it was done. Maybe just practice, practice, practice.
As to the mushroom jazz—He thought, I'll just walk up to him and say people told me he's been trying to sell them mushroom hits. And to knock it off. I got feedback from somebody worried, as they should be.
But, he thought, these items are only random indications of what he's up to, discovered on the first replay. They only represent samples of what I'm up against. Christ knows what else he's done: he's got all the time in the world to loaf around and read reference books and dream up plots and intrigues and conspiracies and so forth. … Maybe, he thought abruptly, I better have a trace run on my phone right away to see if it's tapped. Barris has a box of electronic hardware, and even Sony, for example, makes and sells an induction coil that can be used as a phone-tapping device. The phone probably is. It probably has been for quite a while.
I mean, he thought, in addition to my own recent—necessary—phone tap.
Again he studied the check as the cab jiggled along, and all at once he thought, What if I made it out myself? What if Arctor wrote this? I think I did, he thought; I think the motherfucking dingey Arctor himself wrote this check, very fast—the letters slanted—because for some reason he was in a hurry; he dashed it off, got the wrong blank check, and afterward forgot all about it, forgot the incident entirely.
Forget, he thought, the time Arctor …
Was grinsest du mir, hohier Schädel, her?
Als dass dein Him, wie meines, einst verwirret
Den leichten Tag gesucht und in der Dämmrung schwer,
Mit Lust nach Wahrheit, jämmerlich geirret.
… oozed out of that huge dope happening in Santa Ana, where he met that little blond chick with odd teeth, long blond hair, and a big ass, but so energetic and friendly … he couldn't get his car started; he was wired up to his nose. He kept having trouble—there was so much dope dropped and shot and snorted that night, it went on almost until dawn. So much Substance D, and very Primo. Very very Primo. His stuff.
Leaning forward, he said, "Pull over at that Shell station. I'll get out there."
He got out, paid the cab driver, then entered the pay phone, looked up the locksmith's number, phoned him.
The old lady answered. "Englesohn Locksmith, good—"
"This is Mr. Arctor again, I'm sorry to bother you. What address do you have for the call, the service call for which my check was made out?"
"Well, let me see. Just a moment, Mr. Arctor." Bumping of the phone as she set it down.
Distant muffled man's voice: "Who is it? That Arctor?"
"Yes, Carl, but don't say anything, please. He came in just now—"
"Let me talk to him."
Pause. Then the old lady again. "Well, I have this address, Mr. Arctor." She read off his home address.
"That's where your brother was called out to? To make the key?"
"Wait a moment. Carl? Do you remember where you went in the truck to make the key for Mr. Arctor?"
Distant man's rumble: "On Katella."
"Not his home?"
"On Katella!"
"Somewhere on Katella, Mr. Arctor. In Anaheim. No, wait—Carl says it was in Santa Ana, on Main. Does that—"
"Thanks," he said and hung up. Santa Ana. Main. That's where the fucking dope party was, and I must have turned in thirty names and as many license plates that night; that was not your standard party. A big shipment had arrived from Mexico; the buyers were splitting and, as usual with buyers, sampling as they split. Half of them now probably have been busted by buy agents sent out … Wow, he thought: I still remember—or never will correctly remember—that night.
But that still doesn't excuse Barris from impersonating Arctor with malice aforethought on that phone call coming in. Except that, by the evidence, Barris had made it up on the spot—improvised. Shit, maybe Barris was wired the other night and did what a lot of dudes do when they're wired: just sort of groove with what's happening. Arctor wrote the check for a certainty; Barris just happened to pick up the phone. Thought, in his charred head, that it was a cool gag. Being irresponsible only, nothing more.
And, he reflected as he dialed Yellow Cab again, Arctor has not been very responsible in making good on that check over this prolonged period. Whose fault is that? Getting it out once more, he examined the date on the check. A month and a half. Jesus, talk about irresponsibility! Arctor could wind up inside looking out, for that; it's God's mercy that nutty Carl didn't go to the D.A. already. Probably his sweet old sister restrained him.
Arctor, he decided, better get his ass in gear; he's done a few dingey things himself I didn't know about until now. Barris isn't the only one or perhaps even the primary one. For one thing, there is still to be explained the cause of Barris's intense, concerted malice toward Arctor; a man doesn't set out over a long period of time to burn somebody for no reason. And Barris isn't trying to burn anybody else, not, say, Luckman or Charles Freck or Donna Hawthorne; he helped get Jerry Fabin to the federal clinic more than anyone else, and he's kind to all the animals in the house.
One time Arctor had been going to send one of the dogs—what the hell was the little black one's name, Popo or something?—to the pound to be destroyed, she couldn't be trained, and Barris had spent hours, in fact days, with Popo, gently training her and talking with her until she calmed down and could be trained and so didn't have to go be snuffed. If Barris had general malice toward all, he wouldn't do numbers, good numbers, like that.
"Yellow Cab," the phone said.
He gave the address of the Shell station.
And if Carl the locksmith had pegged Arctor as a heavy doper, he pondered as he lounged around moodily waiting for the cab, it isn't Barris's fault; when Carl must've pulled up in his truck at 5 A.M. to make a key for Arctor's Olds, Arctor probably was walking on Jell-O sidewalks and up walls and batting off fisheyes and every other kind of good dope-trip thing. Carl drew his conclusions then. As Carl ground the new key, Arctor probably floated around upside down or bounced about on his head, talking sideways. No wonder Carl had not been amused.
In fact, he speculated, maybe Barris is trying to cover up for Arctor's increasing fuckups. Arctor is no longer keeping his vehicle in safe condition, as he once did, he's been hanging paper, not deliberately but because his goddamn brain is slushed from dope. But, if anything, that's worse. Barris is doing what he can; that's a possibility. Only, his brain, too, is slushed. All their brains are …
Dem Wumme gleich' ich, der den Staub durchwühlt,
Den, wie er sich im Staube nährend lebt,
Des Wandrers Tmitt vernichtet and begrabt.
… slushed and mutually interacting in a slushed way. It's the slushed leading the slushed. And right into doom.
Maybe, he conjectured, Arctor cut the wires and bent the wires and created all the shorts in his cephscope. In the middle of the night. But for what reason?
That would be a difficult one: why? But with slushed brains anything was possible, any variety of twisted—like the wires themselves—motives. He'd seen it, during his undercover law-enforcement work, many, many, times. This tragedy was not new to him; this would be, in their computer files, just one more case. This was the phase ahead of the journey to the federal clinic, as with Jerry Fabin.
All these guys walked one game board, stood now in different squares various distances from the goal, and would reach it at several times. But all, eventually, would reach it: the federal clinics.
It was inscribed in their neural tissue. Or what remained of it. Nothing could halt it or turn it back now.
And, he had begun to believe, for Bob Arctor most of all. It was his intuition, just beginning, not dependent on anything Barris was doing. A new, professional insight.
And also, his superiors at the Orange County Sheriff's Office had decided to focus on Bob Arctor; they no doubt had reasons which he knew nothing about. Perhaps these facts confirmed one another: their growing interest in Arctor—after all, it had cost the department a bundle to install the holo-scanners in Arctor's house, and to pay him to analyze the print-outs, as well as others higher up to pass judgment on what he periodically turned over—this fitted in with Barris's unusual attention toward Arctor, both having selected Arctor as a Primo target. But what had he seen himself in Arctor's conduct that struck him as unusual? Firsthand, not dependent on these two interests?
As the taxi drove along, he reflected that he would have to watch awhile to come across anything, more than likely; it would not disclose itself to the monitors in a day. He would have to be patient; he would have to resign himself to a longterm scrutiny and to put himself in a space where he was willing to wait.
Once he saw something on the holo-scanners, however, some enigmatic or suspicious behavior on Arctor's part, then a three-point fix would exist on him, a third verification of the others' interests. Certainly this would be a confirm. It would justify the expense and time of everyone's interest.
I wonder what Barris knows that we don't know, he wondered. Maybe we should haul him in and ask him. But—better to obtain material developed independently from Barris; otherwise it would be a duplication of what Barris, whoever he was or represented, had.
And then he thought, What the hell am I talking about? I must be nuts. I know Bob Arctor; he's a good person. He's up to nothing. At least nothing unsavory. In fact, he thought, he works for the Orange County Sheriff's Office, covertly. Which is probably …
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von dem andern trennen:
Die eine hält, in dember Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
… why Barris is after him.
But, he thought, that wouldn't explain why the Orange County Sheriff's office is after him—especially to the extent of installing all those holos and assigning a full-time agent to watch and report on him. That wouldn't account for that.
It does not compute, he thought. More, a lot more, is going down in that house, that run-down rubble-filled house with its weed-patch backyard and catbox that never gets emptied and animals walking on the kitchen table and garbage spilling over that no one ever takes out.
What a waste, he thought, of a truly good house. So much could be done with it. A family, children, and a woman, could live there. It was designed for that: three bedrooms. Such a waste; such a fucking waste! They ought to take it away from him, he thought; enter the situation and foreclose. Maybe they will. And put it to better use; that house yearns for that. That house has seen so much better days, long ago. Those days could return. If another kind of person had it and kept it up.
The yard especially, he thought, as the cab pulled into the newspaper-splattered driveway.
He paid the driver, got out his door key, and entered the house.
Immediately he felt something watching: the holo-scanners on him. As soon as he crossed his own threshold. Alone—no one but him in the house. Untrue! Him and the scanners, insidious and invisible, that watched him and recorded. Everything he did. Everything he uttered.
Like the scrawls on the wall when you're peeing in a public urinal, he thought. SMILE! YOU'RE ON CANDID CAMERA! I am, he thought, as soon as I enter this house. It's eerie. He did not like it. He felt self-conscious; the sensation had grown since the first day, when they'd arrived home—the "dog-shit day," as he thought of it, couldn't keep from thinking of it. Each day the experience of the scanners had grown.
"Nobody home, I guess," he stated aloud as usual, and was aware that the scanners had picked that up. But he had to take care always: he wasn't supposed to know they were there. Like an actor before a movie camera, he decided, you act like the camera doesn't exist or else you blow it. It's all over.