A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick Page A

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 or not.
    Wonder what he used to be like, he mused. He had notknown Jerry that long. Charles Freck claimed that once Jerry had functioned fairly well. I’d have to see that, Arctor thought, to believe it.
    Maybe I should tell Hank about the sabotage of my ceph-scope, he thought. They’d know immediately what it implies. But what can they do for me anyhow? This is the risk you run when you do this kind of work.
    It isn’t worth it, this work, he thought. There isn’t that much money on the fucking planet. But it wasn’t the money anyhow. “How come you do this stuff?” Hank had asked him. What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives? Boredom, maybe; the desire for a little action. Secret hostility toward every person around him, all his friends, even toward chicks. Or a horrible positive reason: to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all
admired
—to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A
recording. A
closed loop of tape.
    “… I know if I just had another hit …”
    I’d be okay, he thought. And still saying that, like Jerry Fabin, when three quarters of the brain was mush.
    “… I know, if I just had another hit, that my brain would repair itself.”
    He had a flash then: Jerry Fabin’s brain as the fucked-over wiring of the cephalochromoscope: wires cut, shorts, wires twisted, parts overloaded and no good, line surges, smoke, and a bad smell. And somebody sitting there with a voltmeter, tracing the circuit and muttering, “My, my, a lot of resistors and condensers need to be replaced,” and so forth. And then finally from Jerry Fabin would come only a sixty-cycle hum. And they’d give up.
    And in Bob Arctor’s living room his thousand-dollar custom-quality cephscope crafted by Altec would, after supposedlybeing repaired, cast onto the wall in dull gray on one small spot:
    I KNOW IF I JUST HAD ANOTHER HIT …
    After that they’d throw the cephscope, damaged beyond repair, and Jerry Fabin, damaged beyond repair, into the same ash can.
    Oh well, he thought. Who needs Jerry Fabin? Except maybe Jerry Fabin, who had once envisioned designing and building a nine-foot-long quad-and-TV console system as a present for a friend, and when asked how he would get it from his garage to the friend’s house, it being so huge when built and weighing so much, had replied, “No problem, man, I’ll just fold it up—I’ve got the hinges bought already—fold it up, see, fold the whole thing up and put it in an envelope and mail it to him.”
    Anyhow, Bob Arctor thought, we won’t have to keep sweeping aphids out of the house after Jerry’s been by to visit. He felt like laughing, thinking about it; they had, once, invented a routine—mostly Luckman had, because he was good at that, funny and clever—about a psychiatric explanation for Jerry’s aphid trip. It had to do, naturally, with Jerry