Whatever it is that’s watching, it is not a human.
Not by my standards, anyhow. Not what I’d recognize.
As silly as this is, he thought, it’s frightening. Something is being done to me and by a mere thing, here in my own house. Before my very eyes.
Within something’s very eyes; within the sight of some thing. Which, unlike little dark-eyed Donna, does not ever blink. What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
From the living-room bookcase he took down a volume at random; it turned out to be, he discovered, The Picture Book of Sexual Love. Opening at random, he perceived a page— which showed a man nibbling happily at a chick’s right tit, and the chick sighing—and said aloud, as if reading to himself from the book, as if quoting from some famous old-time double-dome philosopher, which he was not:
“Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost …
Weh! steck ich in dem Kerker noch?
Verfluchtes dumpfes Mauerloch,
Wo selbst das liebe Himmelslicht
Trüb durch gemalte Scheiben bricht!
Beschränkt mit diesem Bucherhauf,
Den Würme nagen, Staub bedeckt,
Den bis ans hohe.
… perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.”
Nodding, as if moved by the wisdom of the nonexisting written words on that page, he closed the large redbound, gold-stamped Picture Book of Sexual Love and restored it to the shelf. I hope the scanners don’t zoom in on the cover of this book, he thought, and blow my shuck.
Charles Freck, becoming progressively more and more depressed by what was happening to everybody he knew, decided finally to off himself. There was no problem, in the circles where he hung out, in putting an end to yourself; you just bought into a large quantity of reds and took them with some cheap wine, late at night, with the phone off the hook so no one would interrupt you.
The planning part had to do with the artifacts you wanted found on you by later archeologists. So they’d know from which stratum you came. And also could piece together where your head had been at the time you did it.
He spent several days deciding on the artifacts. Much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself, and approximately the same time required to get that many reds. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way he would indict the system and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved.
Actually, he was not as sure in his mind what the death achieved as what the two artifacts achieved; but anyhow it all added up, and he began to make ready, like an animal sensing its time has come and acting out its instinctive programming, laid down by nature, when its inevitable end was near.
At the last moment (as end-time closed in on him) he changed his mind on a decisive issue and decided to drink the reds down with a connoisseur wine instead of Ripple or Thunderbird, so he set off on one last drive, over to Trader Joe’s, which specialized in fine wines, and bought a bottle of 1971 Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon, which set him back almost thirty dollars—all he had.
Back home again, he uncorked the wine, let it breathe, drank a few glasses of it, spent a few minutes contemplating his favorite page of The Illustrated Picture Book of Sex, which showed the girl on top, then placed the plastic bag of reds beside his bed, lay down with the Ayn Rand book and unfinished protest letter to Exxon, tried to think of something meaningful but could not, although he kept remembering the girl being on top, and then, with a glass of the Cabernet Sauvignon, gulped down all the reds at once. After that, the deed being done, he lay back, the Ayn Rand book and letter on his chest, and waited.
However, he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a mixture, and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate. Well, he thought philosophically, this is the story of my life. Always ripped off. He had to face the fact—considering how many of the capsules he had swallowed—that he was in for some trip.
The next thing he knew, a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly.
The creature had many eyes, all over it, ultra-modern expensive-looking clothing, and rose up eight feet high. Also, it carried an enormous scroll.
“You’re going to read me my sins/’ Charles Freck said.
The creature nodded and unsealed the scroll.
Freck said, lying helpless on his bed, “and it’s going to take a hundred thousand hours.”
Fixing its many compound eyes on him, the creature from between dimensions said, “We are no longer in the mundane universe. Lower-plane categories of material existence such as ‘space’ and ‘time’ no longer apply to you. You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end.”
Know your dealer, Charles Freck thought, and wished he could take back the last half-hour of his life.
A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book and the letter to Exxon on his chest, listening to them read his sins to him. They had gotten up to the first grade, when he was six years old.
Ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade.
The year he had discovered masturbation.
He shut his eyes, but he could still see the multi-eyed, eight-foot-high being with its endless scroll reading on and on.
“And next—” it was saying.
Charles Freck thought, At least I got a good wine.
12
Two days later Fred, puzzled, watched Holo-Scanner Three as his subject Robert Arctor pulled a book, evidently at random, from his bookshelf in the living room of his house. Dope stashed behind it? Fred wondered, and zoomed the scanner lens in. Or a phone number or address written in it? He could see that Arctor hadn’t pulled the book to read; Arctor had just entered the house and still wore his coat. He had a peculiar air about him: tense and bummed out both at once, a sort of dulled urgency.
The zoomar lens of the scanner showed the page had a color photo of a man gnawing on a woman’s right nipple, with both individuals nude. The woman was evidently having an orgasm; her eyes had half shut and her mouth hung open in a soundless moan. Maybe Arctor’s using it to get off on, Fred thought as he watched. But Arctor paid no attention to the picture; instead, he creakingly recited something mystifying, partly in German obviously to puzzle anyone overhearing him. Maybe he imagined his roommates were somewhere in the house and wanted to bait them into appearing, Fred speculated.
No one appeared. Luckman, Fred knew from having been at the scanners a long while, had dropped a bunch of reds mixed with Substance D and passed out fully dressed in his bedroom, a couple of steps short of his bed. Barris had left entirely.
What is Arctor doing? Fred wondered, and noted the ident code for these sections. He’s becoming more and more strange. I can see no
w what that informant who phoned in about him meant.
Or, he conjectured, those sentences Arctor spoke aloud could be a voice command to some electronic hardware he’d installed in the house. Turn on or turn off. Maybe even create an interference field against scanning … such as this. But he doubted it. Doubted if it was in any way rational or purposeful or meaningful, except to Arctor.
The guy is nuts, he thought. He really is. From the day he found his cephscope sabotaged—certainly the day he arrived home with his car all fucked up, fucked up in such a way as to almost kill him—he’s been dingey ever since. And to some extent before that, Fred thought. Anyhow, ever since the “dog-shit day,” as he knew Arctor called it.
Actually, he could not blame him. That, Fred reflected as he watched Arctor peel off his coat wearily, would blow anyone’s mind. But most people would phase back in. He hasn’t. He’s getting worse. Reading aloud to no one messages that don’t exist and in foreign tongues.
Unless he’s shucking me, Fred thought with uneasiness. In some fashion figured out he’s being monitored and is … covering up what he’s actually doing? Or just playing head games with us? Time, he decided, will tell.
I say he’s shucking us, Fred decided. Some people can tell when they’re being watched. A sixth sense. Not paranoia, but a primitive instinct: what a mouse has, any hunted thing. Knows it’s being stalked. Feels it. He’s doing shit for our benefit, stringing us along. But—you can’t be sure. There are shucks on top of shucks. Layers and layers.
The sound of Arctor reading obscurely had awakened Luckman according to the scanner covering his bedroom. Luckman sat up groggily and listened. He then heard the noise of Arctor dropping a coat hanger while hanging up his coat. Luckman slid his long muscular legs under him and in one motion picked up a hand ax which he kept on the table by his bed; he stood erect and moved animal-smoothly toward the door of his bedroom.
In the living room, Arctor picked up the mail from the coffee table and started through it. He tossed a large junk-mail piece toward the wastebasket. It missed.
In his bedroom Luckman heard that. He stiffened and raised his head as if to sniff the air.
Arctor, reading the mail, suddenly scowled and said, “I’ll be dipped.”
In his bedroom Luckman relaxed, set the ax down with a clank, smoothed his hair, opened the door, and stepped out. “Hi. What’s happening?”
“Arctor said, “I drove by the Maylar Microdot Corporation Building.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“And,” Arctor said, “they were taking an inventory. But one of the employees evidently had tracked the inventory outdoors on the heel of his shoe. So they were all outside there in the Maylar Microdot Corporation parking lot with a pair of tweezers and lots and lots of little magnifying glasses. And a little paper bag.”
“Any reward?” Luckman said, yawning and beating with his palms on his flat, hard gut.
“They had a reward they were offering,” Arctor said. “But they lost that, too. It was a little tiny penny.”
Luckman said, “You see very many events of this nature as you’re driving along?”
“Only in Orange County,” Arctor said.
“How large is the Maylar Microdot Corporation building?”
“About an inch high,” Arctor said.
“How much would you estimate it weighs?”
“Including the employees?”
Fred sent the tape spinning ahead at fast wind. When an hour had passed, according to the meter, he halted it momentarily.
“—about ten pounds,” Arctor was saying.
“Well, how can you tell, then, when you pass by it, if it’s only an inch high and only weighs ten pounds?”
Arctor, now sitting on the couch with his feet up, said, “They have a big sign.”
Jesus! Fred thought, and again sent the tape ahead. He halted it at only ten minutes elapsed real time, on a hunch.
“—what’s the sign look like?” Luckman was saying. He sat on the floor, cleaning a boxful of grass. “Neon and like that? Colors? I wonder if I’ve seen it. Is it conspicuous?”
“Here, I’ll show it to you,” Arctor said, reaching into his shirt pocket. “I brought it home with me.”
Again Fred sent the tape at fast forward.
“—you know how you could smuggle microdots into a country without them knowing?” Luckman was saying.
“Just about any way you wanted,” Arctor said, leaning back, smoking a joint. The air was cloudy.
“No, I mean a way they’d never flash on,” Luckman said. “It was Barris who suggested this to me one day, confidentially; I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, because he’s putting it in his book.”
“What book? Common Household Dope and—”
“No. Simple Ways to Smuggle Objects into the U.S. and out, Depending on Which Way You’re Going. You smuggle it in with a shipment of dope. Like with heroin. The microdots are down inside the packets. Nobody’d notice, they’re so small. They won’t—”
“But then some junkie’d shoot up a hit of half smack and half microdots.”
“Well, then, he’d be the fuckingest educated junkie you ever did see.”
“Depending on what was on the microdots.”
“Barris had his other way to smuggle dope across the border. You know how the customs guys, they ask you to declare what you have? And you can’t say dope because—”
“Okay, how?”
“Well, see, you take a huge block of hash and carve it in the shape of a man. Then you hollow out a section and put a wind-up motor like a clockworks in it, and a little cassette tape, and you stand in line with it, and then just before it goes through customs you wind up the key and it walks up to the customs man, who says to it, ‘Do you have anything to declare?’ and the block of hash says, ‘No, I don’t,’ and keeps on walking. Until it runs down on the other side of the border.”
“You could put a solar-type battery in it instead of a spring and it could keep walking for years. Forever.”
“What’s the use of that? It’d finally reach either the Pacific or the Atlantic. In fact, it’d walk off the edge of the Earth, like—”
“Imagine an Eskimo village, and a six-foot-high block of hash worth about—how much would that be worth?”
“About a billion dollars.”
“More. Two billion.”
“These Eskimos are chewing hides and carving bone spears, and this block of hash worth two billion dollars comes walking through the snow saying over and over, ‘No, I don’t.’ “
“They’d wonder what it meant by that.”
“They’d be puzzled forever. There’d be legends.”
“Can you imagine telling your grandkids, ‘I saw with my own eyes the six-foot-high block of hash appear out of the blinding fog and walk past, that way, worth two billion dollars, saying, “No, I don’t.” ‘ His grandchildren would have him committed.”
“No, see, legends build. After a few centuries they’d be saying, ‘In my forefathers’ time one day a ninety-foot-high block of extremely good quality Afghanistan hash worth eight trillion dollars came at us dripping fire and screaming, “Die, Eskimo dogs!” and we fought and fought with it, using our spears, and finally killed it.’ “
“The kids wouldn’t believe that either.”
“Kids never believe anything any more.”
“It’s a downer to tell anything to a kid. I once had a kid ask me, ‘What was it like to see the first automobile?’ Shit, man, I was born in 1962.”
“Christ,” Arctor said, “I once had a guy I knew burned out on acid ask me that. He was twenty-seven years old. I was only three years older than him. He didn’t know anything any more. Later on he dropped some more hits of acid—or what he was sold as acid—and after that he peed on the floor and crapped on the floor, and when you said something to him, like ‘How are you, Don?’, he just repeated it after you, like a bird. ‘How are you, Don?’ “
Silence, then. Between the t
wo joint-smoking men in the cloudy living room. A long, somber silence.
“Bob, you know something …” Luckman said at last. “I used to be the same age as everyone else.”
“I think so was I,” Arctor said.
“I don’t know what did it.”
“Sure, Luckman,” Arctor said, “you know what did it to all of us.”
“Well, let’s not talk about it.” He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light.
• • •
One of the phones in the safe apartment rang. A scramble suit answered it, then extended it toward Fred. “Fred.”
He shut off the holos and took the phone.
“Remember when you were downtown last week?” a voice said. “Being administered the BG test?”
After an interval of silence Fred said, “Yes.”
“You were supposed to come back.” A pause at that end, too. “We’ve processed more recent material on you … I have taken it upon myself to schedule you for the full standard battery of percept tests plus other testing. Your time for this is tomorrow, three o’clock in the afternoon, the same room. It will take about four hours in all. Do you remember the room number?”
“No,” Fred said.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” Fred said stoically.
“Any problems? In your work or outside your work?”
“I had a fight with my girl.”
“Any confusion? Are you experiencing any difficulty identifying persons or objects? Does anything you see appear inverted or reversed? And while I’m asking, any space-time or language disorientation?”
“No,” he said glumly. “No to all the above.”
“We’ll see you tomorrow at Room 203,” the psychologist deputy said.
“What material of mine did you find to be—”
“We’ll take that up tomorrow. Be there. All right? And, Fred, don’t get discouraged.” Click.
Well, click to you too, he thought, and hung up.