Does, he wondered, the gentle lovely shrewd and very kind, superkind girl transform herself instantly into something sly? Will I see a change which will blow my mind? Donna on Luckman, anyone I care about. Like your pet cat or dog when you’re out of the house . . . the cat empties a pillowcase and starts stuffing your valuables in it: electric clock and bedside radio, shaver, all it can stuff in before you get back: another cat entirely while you’re gone, ripping you off and pawning it all, or lighting up your joints, or walking on the ceiling, or phoning people long distance. . . God knows. A nightmare, a weird other world beyond the mirror, a terror city reverse thing, with unrecognizable entities creeping about; Donna crawling on all fours, eating from the animals’ dishes . . . any kind of psychedelic wild trip, unfathomable and horrid.
Hell, he thought; for that matter, maybe Bob Arctor rises up in the night from deep sleep and does trips like that. Has sexual relations with the wall. Or mysterious freaks show up who he’s never seen before, a whole bunch of them, with special heads that swivel all the way around, like owls’. And the audio-scanners will pick up the far-out demented conspiracies hatched out by him and them to blow up the men’s room at the Standard station by filling the toilet with plastic explosives for God knows what brain-charred purpose. Maybe this sort of stuff goes on every night while he just imagines he’s asleep–and is gone by day.
Bob Arctor, he speculated, may learn more new information about himself than he is ready for, more than he will about Donna in her little leather jacket, and Luckman in his fancy duds, and even Barris–maybe when nobody’s around Jim Barris merely goes to sleep. And sleeps until they reappear.
But he doubted it. More likely Barris whipped out a hidden transmitter from the mess and chaos of his room–which, like all the other rooms in the house, had now for the first time come under twenty-four-hour scanning–and sent a cryptic signal to the other bunch of cryptic motherfuckers with whom he currently conspired for whatever people like him or them conspired for. Another branch, Bob Arctor reflected, of the authorities.
On the other hand, Hank and those guys downtown would not be too happy if Bob Arctor left his house, now that the monitors had been expensively and elaborately installed, and was never seen again: never showed up on any of the tape. He could not therefore take off in order to fulfill his personal surveillance plans at the expense of theirs. After all, it was their money.
In the script being filmed, he would at all times have to be the star actor. Actor, Arctor, he thought. Bob the Actor who is being hunted; he who is the El Primo huntee.
They say you never recognize your own voice when you first hear it played back on tape. And when you see yourself on video tape, or like this, in a 3-D hologram, you don’t recognize yourself visually either. You imagined you were a tall fat man with black hair, and instead you’re a tiny thin woman with no hair at all . . . is that it? I’m sure I’ll recognize Bob Arctor, he thought, if by nothing else than by the clothes he wears or by a process of elimination. What isn’t Barris or Luckman and lives here must be Bob Arctor. Unless it’s one of the dogs or cats. I’ll try to keep my professional eye trained on something which walks upright.
“Barris,” he said, “I’m going out to see if I can score some beans.” Then he pretended to remember he had no car; he got that sort of expression. “Luckman,” he said, “is your Falcon running?”
“No,” Luckman said thoughtfully, after consideration, “I don’t think so.”
“Can I borrow your car, Jim?” Arctor asked Barris.
“I wonder. . . if you can handle my car,” Barris said.
This always arose as a defense when anyone tried to borrow Barris’s car, because Barris had had secret unspecified modifications done on it, in its
(a) suspension
(b) engine
(c) transmission
(d) rear end
(e) drive train
(f) electrical system
(g) front end and steering
(h) as well as clock, cigar lighter, ashtray, glove compartment. In particular the glove compartment. Barris kept it locked always. The radio, too, had been cunningly changed (never explained how or why). If you tuned one station you got only one-minute-apart blips. All the push-buttons brought in a single transmission that made no sense, and, oddly, there was never any rock played over it. Sometimes when they were accompanying Barris on a buy and Barris parked and got out of the car, leaving them, he turned the particular station on in a special fashion very loud. If they changed it while he was gone he became incoherent and refused to speak on the trip back or ever to explain. He had not explained yet. Probably when set to that frequency his radio transmitted
(a) to the authorities.
(b) to a private paramilitary political organization.
(c) to the Syndicate.
(d) to extraterrestrials of higher intelligence.
“By that I mean,” Barris said, “it will cruise at–”
“Aw fuck!” Luckman broke in harshly. “It’s an ordinary six-cylinder motor, you humper. When we park in it downtown L.A. the parking-lot jockey drives it. So why can’t Bob? You asshole.”
Now, Bob Arctor had a few devices too, a few covert modifications built into his own car radio. But he didn’t talk about them. Actually, it was Fred who had. Or anyhow somebody had, and they did a few things a little like what Barris claimed his several electronic assists did, and then on the other hand they did not.
For example, every law-enforcement vehicle emits a particular full-spectrum interference which sounds on ordinary car radios like a failure in the spank-suppressors of that vehicle. As if the police car’s ignition is faulty. However, Bob Arctor, as a peace officer, had been allocated a gadget which, when he had mounted it within his car radio, told him a great deal, whereas the noises told other people–most other people–no information at all. These other people did not even recognize the static as information-bearing. First of all, the different subsounds told Bob Arctor how close the law-enforcement vehicle was to his own and, next, what variety of department it represented: city or county, Highway Patrol, or federal, whatever. He, too, picked up the one-minuteapart blips which acted as a time check for a parked vehicle; those in the parked vehicle could determine how many minutes they had waited without any obvious arm gestures. This was useful, for instance, when they had agreed to hit a house in exactly three minutes. The _zt zt zt_ on their car radio told them precisely when three minutes had passed.
He knew, too, about the AM station that played the top-ten-type tunes on and on plus an enormous amount of DJ chatter in between, which sometimes was not chatter, in a sense. If that station had been tuned to, and the racket of it filled your car, anyone casually overhearing it would hear a conventional pop music station and typical boring DJ talk, and either not hang around at all or flash on in any way to the fact that the so-called DJ suddenly, in exactly the same muted chatty style of voice in which he said, “Now here’s a number for Phil and Jane, a new Cat Stevens tune called–” occasionally said something more like “Vehicle blue will proceed a mile north to Bastanchury and the other units will–” and so on. He had never–with all the many dudes and chicks who rode with him, even when he had been obliged to keep tuned to police info-instruct, such as when a major bust was going down or any big action was in progress which might involve him–had anyone notice. Or if they noticed, they probably thought they were personally spaced and paranoid and forgot it.
And also he knew about the many unmarked police vehicles like old Chevys jacked up in the back with loud (illegal) pipes and racing stripes, with wild-looking hip types driving them erratically at high speed–he knew from what his radio emitted in the way of the special information-carrying station at all frequencies when one buzzed him or shot past. He knew to ignore.
Also, when he pushed the bar that supposedly switched from AM to FM on his car radio, a station on a particular frequency groaned out indefinite Muzak-type music, but this noise being transmitted to his car was filtered out, unscrambled, by the microphone-transmitter within his radio, so that whatever was said by those in his car at the time was picked up by his equipment and broadcast to the authorities; but this one funky station playing away, no matter how loud, was not received by them and did not interfere at all; the grid eliminated it.