“Nice guy,” Fred said bitterly.
“Well, that’s how we find out,” Hank said. “What’s the difference between that and what you’re doing?”
“I’m not doing it for a grudge,” Fred said.
“Why are you doing it, actually?”
Fred, after an interval said, “Damned if I know.”
“You’re off Weeks. I think for the time being I’ll assign you primarily to observe Bob Arctor. Does he have a middle name? He uses the initial—”
Fred made a strangled, robotlike noise. “Why Arctor?”
“Covertly funded, covertly engaged, making enemies by his activities. What’s Arctor’s middle name?” Hank’s pen poised patiently. He waited to hear.
“Postlethwaite.”
“How do you spell that?”
“I don’t know, I don’t fucking know,” Fred said.
“Postlethwaite,” Hank said, writing a few letters. “What nationality is that?”
“Welsh,” Fred said curtly. He could barely hear; his ears had blurred out, and one by one his other senses as well.
“Are those the people who sing about the men of Harlech? What is ‘Harlech’? A town somewhere?”
“Harlech is where the heroic defense against the Yorkists in 1468—” Fred broke off. Shit, he thought. This is terrible.
“Wait, I want to get this down,” Hank was saying, writing away with his pen.
Fred said, “Does this mean you’ll be bugging Arctor’s house and car?”
“Yes, with the new holographic system; it’s better, and we currently have a number of them unrequisitioned. You’ll want storage and printout on everything, I would assume.” Hank noted that too.
“I’ll take what I can get,” Fred said. He felt totally spaced from all this; he wished the debriefing session would end and he thought: If only I could drop a couple tabs—
Across from him the other formless blur wrote and wrote, filling in all the inventory ident numbers for all the technological gadgetry that would, if approval came through, soon be available to him, by which to set up a constant monitoring system of the latest design, on his own house, on himself.
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.