For over an hour Barris had been attempting to perfect a silencer made from ordinary household materials costing no more than eleven cents. He had almost done so, with aluminum foil and a piece of foam rubber.
In the night darkness of Bob Arctor’s back yard, among the heaps of weeds and rubbish, he was preparing to fire his pistol with the homemade silencer on it.
“The neighbors will hear,” Charles Freck said uneasily. He could see lit windows all over, many people probably watching TV or rolling joints.
Luckman, lounging out of sight but able to watch, said, “They only call in murders in this neighborhood.”
“Why do you need a silencer?” Charles Freck asked Barris. “I mean, they’re illegal.”
Barris said moodily, “In this day and age, with the kind of degenerate society we live in and the depravity of the individual, every person of worth needs a gun at all times. To protect himself.” He half shut his eyes, and fired his pistol with its homemade silencer. An enormous report sounded, temporarily deafening the three of them. Dogs in far-off yards barked.
Smiling, Barris began unwrapping the aluminum foil from the foam rubber. He appeared to be amused.
“That’s sure some silencer,” Charles Freck said, wondering when the police would appear. A whole bunch of cars.
“What it did,” Barris explained, showing him and Luckman black-seared passages burned through the foam rubber, “is augment the sound rather than dampen it. But I almost have it right. I have it in principle, anyhow.”
“How much is that gun worth?” Charles Freck asked. He had never owned a gun. Several times he had owned a knife, but somebody always stole it from him. One time a chick had done that, while he was in the bathroom.
“Not much,” Barris said. “About thirty dollars used, which this is.” He held it out to Freck, who backed away apprehensively. “I’ll sell it to you,” Barris said. “You really ought to have one, to guard yourself against those who would harm you.”
“There’s a lot of those,” Luckman said in his ironic way, with a grin. “I saw in the L.A. _Times_ the other day, they’re giving away a free transistor radio to those who would harm Freck most successfully.”
“I’ll trade you a Borg-Warner tach for it,” Freck said.
“That you stole from the guy’s garage across the street,” Luckman said.
“Well, probably the gun’s stolen, too,” Charles Freck said. Most everything that was worth something was originally ripped off anyhow; it indicated the piece had value. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “the guy across the street ripped the tach off in the first place. It’s probably changed hands like fifteen times. I mean, it’s a really cool tach.”
“How do you know he ripped it off?” Luckman asked him.
“Hell, man he’s got eight tachs there in his garage, all dangling cut wires. What else would he be doing with them, that many, I mean? Who goes out and buys eight tachs?”
To Barris, Luckman said, “I thought you were busy working on the cephscope. You finished already?”
“I cannot continually work on that night and day, because it is so extensive,” Barris said. “I’ve got to knock off.” He cut, with a complicated pocketknife, another section of foam rubber. “This one will be totally soundless.”
“Bob thinks you’re at work on the cephscope,” Luckman said. “He’s lying there in his bed in his room imagining that, while you’re out here firing off your pistol. Didn’t you agree with Bob that the back rent you owe would be compensated by your–”
“Like good beer,” Barris said, “an intricate, painstaking reconstruction of a damaged electronic assembly–”
“Just fire off the great eleven-cent silencer of our times,” Luckman said, and belched.
I’ve had it, Robert Arctor thought.
He lay alone in the dim light of his bedroom, on his back, staring grimly at nothing. Under his pillow he had his .32 police-special revolver; at the sound of Barris’s .22 being fired in the back yard he had reflexively gotten his own gun from beneath the bed and placed it within easier reach. A safety move, against any and all danger; he hadn’t even thought it out consciously.
But his .32 under his pillow wouldn’t be much good against anything so indirect as sabotage of his most precious and expensive possession. As soon as he had gotten home from the debriefing with Hank he had checked out all the other appliances, and found them okay–especially the car–always the can first, in a situation like this. Whatever was going on, whoever it was by, it was going to be chickenshit and devious: some freak without integrity or guts lurking on the periphery of his life, taking indirect potshots at him from a position of concealed safety. Not a person but more a sort of walking, hiding symptom of their way of life.
There had been a time, once, when he had not lived like this, a .32 under his pillow, a lunatic in the back yard fining off a pistol for God knew what purpose, some other nut or perhaps the same one imposing a brain-print of his own shorted-out upstairs on an incredibly expensive and valued cephscope that everyone in the house, plus all their friends, loved and enjoyed. In former days Bob Arctor had run his affairs differently: there had been a wife much like other wives, two small daughters, a stable household that got swept and cleaned and emptied out daily, the dead newspapers not even opened carried from the front walk to the garbage pail, on even, sometimes, read. But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn’t hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life, lacking all of that.
Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not. That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.
But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing. Like the deliberate, evil damage to his Altec cephalochnomoscope, around which he had built the pleasure part of his schedule, the segment of the day in which they all relaxed and got mellow. For someone to damage that made no sense, viewed rationally. But not much among these long dark evefling shadows here was truly rational, at least in the strict sense. The enigmatic act could have been done by anyone for almost any reason. By any person he knew or had ever encountered. Any one of eight dozen weird heads, assorted freaks, burned-out dopers, psychotic paranoids with hallucinatory grudges acted out in reality, not fantasy. Somebody, in fact, he’d _never_ met, who’d picked him at random from the phonebook.
Or his closest friend.
Maybe Jerry Fabin, he thought, before they carted him off. There was a burned-out, poisoned husk. Him and his billions of aphids. Blaming Donna–blaming all chicks, in fact–for “contaminating” him. The queer. But, he thought, if Jerry had gone out to get anybody it’d have been Donna, not me. He thought, And I doubt if Jerry could figure out how to remove the bottom plate from the unit; he might try, but he’d still be there now, screwing and unscrewing the same screw. Or he’d try to get the plate off with a hammer. Anyhow, if Jerry Fabin had done it, the unit would be full of bug eggs that dropped off him. Inside his head Bob Arctor grinned wryly.
Poor fucker, he thought, and his inner grin departed. Poor nowhere mother: once the trace amounts of complex heavy metals got carried to his brain–well, that was it. One more in a long line, a dreary entity among many others like him, an almost endless number of brain-damaged retards. Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind– everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now. Appropriate on not.