For about six hours, entranced, S. A. Powers had watched thousands of Picasso paintings replace one another at flashcut speed, and then he had been treated to Paul Klees, more than the painter had painted during his entire lifetime. S. A. Powers, now viewing Modigliani paintings replace themselves at furious velocity, had conjectured (one needs a theory for everything) that the Rosicrucians were telepathically beaming pictures at him, probably boosted by microrelay systems of an advanced order; but then, when Kandinsky paintings began to harass him, he recalled that the main art museum at Leningrad specialized in just such nonobjective moderns, and decided that the Soviets were attempting telepathically to contact him.
In the morning he remembered that a drastic drop in the GABA fluid of the brain normally produced such phosphene activity; nobody was trying telepathically, with or without microwave boosting, to contact him. But it did give him the idea for the scramble suit. Basically, his design consisted of a multifaced quartz lens hooked to a miniaturized computer whose memory banks held up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.
As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure—the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, and then switched to the next. Just to make his scramble suit more effective, S. A. Powers programmed the computer to randomize the sequence of characteristics within each set. And to bring the cost down (the federal people always liked that), he found the source for the material of the membrane in a by-product of a large industrial firm already doing business with Washington.
In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him—or her—was meaningless. Needless to say, S. A. Powers had fed his own personal physiognomic characteristics into the computer units, so that, buried in the frantic permutation of qualities, his own surfaced and combined … on an average, he had calculated, of once each fifty years per suit, served up and reassembled, given enough time per suit. It was his closest claim to immortality.
“Let’s hear it for the vague blur!” the host said loudly, and there was mass clapping.
In his scramble suit, Fred, who was also Robert Arctor, groaned and thought: This is terrible.
Once a month an undercover narcotics agent of the county was assigned at random to speak before bubblehead gatherings such as this. Today was his turn. Looking at his audience, he realized how much he detested straights. They thought this was all great. They were smiling. They were being entertained.
Maybe at this moment the virtually countless components of his scramble suit had served up S. A. Powers.
“But to be serious for just a moment,” the host said, “this man here …” He paused, trying to remember.
“Fred,” Bob Arctor said. S. A. Fred.
“Fred, yes.” The host, invigorated, resumed, booming in the direction of his audience, “You see, Fred’s voice is like one of those robot computer voices down in San Diego at the bank when you drive in, perfectly toneless and artificial. It leaves in our minds no characteristics, exactly as when he reports to his superiors in the Orange County Drug Abuse, ah, Program.” He paused meaningfully. “You see, there is a dire risk for these police officers because the forces of dope, as we know, have penetrated with amazing skill into the various law-enforcement apparatuses throughout our nation, or may well have, according to most informed experts. So for the protection of these dedicated men, this scramble suit is necessary.”
Slight applause for the scramble suit. And then expectant gazes at Fred, lurking within its membrane.
“But in his line of work in the field,” the host added finally, as he moved away from the microphone to make room for Fred, “he, of course, does not wear this. He dresses like you or I, although, of course, in the hippie garb of those of the various subculture groups within which he bores in tireless fashion.”
He motioned to Fred to rise and approach the microphone. Fred, Robert Arctor, had done this six times before, and he knew what to say and what was in store for him: the assorted degrees and kinds of asshole questions and opaque stupidity. The waste of time for him out of this, plus anger on his part, and a sense of futility each time, and always more so.
“If you saw me on the street,” he said into the microphone, after the applause had died out, “you’d say, ‘There goes a weirdo freak doper.’ And you’d feel aversion and walk away.”
Silence.
“I don’t look like you,” he said. “I can’t afford to. My life depends on it.” Actually, he did not look that different from them. And anyhow, he would have worn what he wore daily anyhow, job or not, life or not. He liked what he wore. But what he was saying had, by and large, been written by others and put before him to memorize. He could depart some, but they all had a standard format they used. Introduced a couple of years ago by a gung-ho division chief, it had by now become writ.
He waited while that sank in.
“I am not going to tell you first,” he said, “what I am attempting to do as an undercover officer engaged in tracking down dealers and most of all the source of their illegal drugs in the streets of our cities and corridors of our schools, here in Orange County. I am going to tell you”—he paused, as they had trained him to do in PR class at the academy—“what I am afraid of,” he finished.
That gaffed them; they had become all eyes.
“What I fear,” he said, “night and day, is that our children, your children and my children …” Again he paused. “I have two,” he said. Then, extra quietly, “Little ones, very little.” And then he raised his voice emphatically. “But not too little to be addicted, calculatedly addicted, for profit, by those who would destroy this society.” Another pause. “We do not know as yet,” he continued presently, more calmly, “specifically who these men—or rather animals—are who prey on our young, as if in a wild jungle abroad, as in some foreign country, not ours. The identity of the purveyors of the poisons concocted of brain-destructive filth shot daily, orally taken daily, smoked daily by several million men and women—or rather, that were once men and women—is gradually being unraveled. But finally we will, before God, know for sure.”
A voice from the audience: “Sock it to ‘em!”
Another voice, equally enthusiastic: “Get the commies!”
Applause and reprise severally.
Robert Arctor halted. Stared at them, at the straights in their fat suits, their fat ties, their fat shoes, and he thought, Substance D can’t destroy their brains; they have none.
“Tell it like it is,” a slightly less emphatic voice called up, a woman’s voice. Searching, Arctor made out a middle-aged lady, not so fat, her hands clasped anxiously.
“Each day,” Fred, Robert Arctor, whatever, said, “this disease takes its toll of us. By the end of each passing day the flow of profits—and where they go we—” He broke off. For the life of him he could not dredge up the rest of the sentence, even though he had repeated it a million times, both in class and at previous lectures.
All in the large room had fallen silent.
“Well,” he said, “it isn’t the profits anyhow. It’s something else. What you see happen.”
They didn’t notice any difference, he noticed, even though he had dropped the prepared speech and was wandering on, by himself, without help from the PR boys back at the Orange County Civic Center. What difference anyhow? he thought. So what? What, really, do they know or care? The straights, he thought, live in their fortified huge apartment complexes guarded by their guards, ready to open fire on any and every doper who scales the wall with an empty pillow-case to rip off their piano and electric clock and razor and stereo that they haven’t paid for anyhow, so he can get his fix, get the shit that if he doesn’t he maybe dies, outright flatout dies, of the pain and shock of withdrawal. But, he thought, when You’re living inside looking safely out, and your wall is electrified and your guard is armed, why think about that?
“If you were a diabetic,” he said, “and you didn’t have money for a hit of insulin, would you steal to get the money? Or just die?”
Silence.
In the headphone of his scramble suit a tinny voice said, “I think you’d better go back to the prepared text, Fred. I really do advise it.”
Into his throat mike, Fred, Robert Arctor, whatever, said, “I forget it.” Only his superior at Orange County GHQ, which was not Mr. F., that is to say, Hank, could hear this. This was an anonymous superior, assigned to him only for this occasion.
“Riiiight,” the official tinny prompter said in his earphone. “I’ll read it to you. Repeat it after me, but try to get it to sound casual.” Slight hesitation, riffling of pages. “Let’s see … ‘Each day the profits flow—where they go we—’ That’s about where you stopped.”
“I’ve got a block against this stuff,” Arctor said.
“ ‘—will soon determine,’ ” his official prompter said, unheeding, “ ‘and then retribution will swiftly follow. And at that moment I would not for the life of me be in their shoes.’ ”
“Do you know why I’ve got a block against this stuff?” Arctor said. “Because this is what gets people on dope.” He thought, This is why you lurch off and become a doper, this sort of stuff. This is why you give up and leave. In disgust.
But then he looked once more out at his audience and realized that for them this was not so. This was the only way they could be reached. He was talking to nitwits. Mental simps. It had to be put in the same way it had been put in first grade: A is for Apple and the Apple is Round.
“D,” he said aloud to his audience, “is for Substance D. Which is for Dumbness and Despair and Desertion, the desertion of your friends from you, you from them, everyone from everyone, isolation and loneliness and hating and suspecting each other. D,” he said then, “is finally Death. Slow Death, we—” He halted. “We, the dopers,” he said, “call it.” His voice rasped and faltered. “As you probably know. Slow Death. From the head on down. Well, that’s it.” He walked back to his chair and reseated himself. In silence.
“You blew it,” his superior the prompter said. “See me in my office when you get back. Room 430.”
“Yes,” Arctor said. “I blew it.”
They were looking at him as if he had pissed on the stage before their eyes. Although he was not sure just why.
Striding to the mike, the Lions Club host said, “Fred asked me in advance of this lecture to make it primarily a question-and-answer forum, with only a short introductory statement by him. I forgot to mention that. All right”—he raised his right hand—“who first, people?”
Arctor suddenly got to his feet again, clumsily.
“It would appear that Fred has something more to add,” the host said, beckoning to him.
Going slowly back over to the microphone, Arctor said, his head down, speaking with precision, “Just this. Don’t kick their asses after they’re on it. The users, the addicts. Half of them, most of them, especially the girls, didn’t know what they were getting on or even that they were getting on anything at all. Just try to keep them, the people, any of us, from getting on it.” He looked up briefly. “See, they dissolve some reds in a glass of wine, the pushers, I mean—they give the booze to a chick, an underage little chick, with eight to ten reds in it, and she passes out, and then they inject her with a mex hit, which is half heroin and half Substance D—” He broke off. “Thank you,” he said.
A man called up, “How do we stop them, sir?”
“Kill the pushers,” Arctor said, and walked back to his chair.