Barris declared, “Research.”

“Into what?”

“The properties of certain mycological entities of a delicate nature.” Barris chuckled. “It didn’t go too well with little miss big-tits, did it?”

Arctor regarded him and then went into the kitchen to plug in the coffeepot.

“Bob,” Barris said, following him leisurely, “I’m sorry if I said anything that offended you.” He hung around as Arctor waited for the coffee to heat, drumming and humming aimlessly.

“Where’s Luckman?”

“I suppose out somewhere trying to rip off a pay phone. He took your hydraulic axle jack with him; that usually means he’s out to knock over a pay phone, doesn’t it?”

“My axle jack,” Arctor echoed.

“You know,” Barris said. “I could assist you professionally in your attempts to hustle little miss—”

Fred shot the tape ahead at high-speed wind. The meter at last read a two-hour passage.

“—pay up your goddamn back rent or goddamn get to work on the cephscope,” Arctor was saying hotly to Barris.

“I’ve already ordered resistors which—”

Again Fred sent the tape forward. Two more hours passed.

Now Holo Monitor Five showed Arctor in his bedroom, in bed, a clock FM radio on to KNX, playing folk rock dimly. Monitor Two in the living room showed Barris alone, again reading about mushrooms. Neither man did much for a long period. Once, Arctor stirred and reached out to increase the radio’s volume as a song, evidently one he liked, came on. In the living room Barris read on and on, hardly moving. Arctor again at last lay back in bed unmoving.

The phone rang. Barris reached out and lifted it to his ear. “Hello?”

On the phone tap the caller, a male, said, “Mr. Arctor?”

“Yes, this is,” Barris said.

I’ll be fucked for a nanny goat, Fred said to himself. He reached to turn up the phone-tap volume level.

“Mr. Arctor,” the unidentified caller said in a slow, low voice, “I’m sorry to bother you so late, but that check of yours that did not clear—”

“Oh yes,” Barris said. “I’ve been intending to call you about that. The situation is this, sir. I have had a severe bout of intestinal flu, with loss of body heat, pyloric spasms, cramps … I just can’t get it all together right now to make that little twenty-dollar check good, and frankly I don’t intend to make it good.”

“What?” the man said, not startled but hoarsely. Ominously.

“Yes, sir,” Barris said, nodding. “You heard me correctly, sir.”

“Mr. Arctor,” the caller said, “that check has been returned by the bank twice now, and these flu symptoms that you describe—”

“I think somebody slipped me something bad,” Barris said, with a stark grin on his face.

“I think,” the man said, “that you’re one of those—” He groped for the word.

“Think what you want,” Barris said, still grinning.

“Mr. Arctor,” the man said, breathing audibly into the phone, “I am going to the D.A.’s office with that check, and while I’m on the phone I have a couple of things to tell you about what I feel about—”

“Turn on, tune out, and good-by,” Barris said, and hung up.

The phone-tap unit had automatically recorded the digits of the caller’s own phone, picking them up electronically from an inaudible signal generated as soon as the circuit was in place. Fred read off the number now visible on a meter, then shut off the tape-transport for all his holo-scanners, lifted his own police phone, and called in for a print-out on the number.

“Englesohn Locksmith, 1343 Harbor in Anaheim,” the police info operator informed him. “Lover boy.”

“Locksmith,” Fred said. “Okay.” He had that written down and now hung up. A locksmith … twenty dollars, a round sum: that suggested a job outside the shop—probably driving out and making a duplicate key. When the “owner’s” key had gotten lost.

Theory. Barris had posed as Arctor, phoned Englesohn Locksmith to have a “duplicate” key made illicitly, for either the house or the car or even both. Telling Englesohn he’d lost his whole key ring … but then the locksmith, doing a security check, had sprung on Barris a request for a check as I.D. Barris had gone back in the house and ripped off an unfilled-out checkbook of Arctor’s and written a check out on it to the locksmith. The check hadn’t cleared. But why not? Arctor kept a high balance in his account; a check that small would clear. But if it cleared Arctor would come across it in his statement and recognize it as not his, as Jim Barris’s. So Barris had rooted about in Arctor’s closets and located—probably at some previous time—an old checkbook from a now abandoned account and used that. The account being closed, the check hadn’t cleared. Now Barris was in hot water.

But why didn’t Barris just go in and pay off the check in cash? This way the creditor was already mad and phoning, and eventually would take it to the D.A. Arctor would find out. A skyful of shit would land on Barris. But the way Barris had talked on the phone to the already outraged creditor … he had slyly goaded him into even further hostility, out of which the locksmith might do anything. And worse—Barris’s description of his “flu” was a description of coming off heroin, and anybody would know who knew anything. And Barris had signed off the phone call with a flat-out insinuation that he was a heavy doper and so what about it? Signed all this off as Bob Arctor.

The locksmith at this point knew he had a junkie debtor who’d written him a rubber check and didn’t care shit and had no intention of making good. And the junkie had this attitude because obviously he was so wired and spaced and mind-blown on his dope it didn’t matter to him. And this was an insult to America. Deliberate and nasty.

In fact, Barris’s sign-off was a direct quote of Tim Leary’s original funky ultimatum to the establishment and all the straights. And this was Orange County. Full of Birchers and Minutemen. With guns. Looking for just this kind of uppity sass from bearded dopers.

Barris had set Bob Arctor up for a fire-bombing. A bust on the bad check at the least, a fire-bombing or other massive retaliatory strike at worst, without Arctor having any notion what was coming down.

Why? Fred wondered. He noted on his scratch pad the ident code on this tape sequence, plus the phone-tap code as well. What was Barris getting Arctor back for? What the hell had Arctor been up to? Arctor must have burned him pretty bad, Fred thought, for this. This is sheer malice. Little, vile, and evil.

This Barris guy, he thought, is a motherfucker. He’s going to get somebody killed.

One of the scramble suits in the safe apartment with him roused him from his introspection. “Do you actually know these guys?” The suit gestured at the now blank holomonitors Fred had before him. “You in there among them on cover assignment?”

“Yep,” Fred said.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to warn them in some way about this mushroom toxicity he’s exposing them to, that clown with the green shades who’s peddling. Can you pass it on to them without faulting your cover?”

The other near scramble suit called from his swivel chair, “Any time one of them gets violently nauseous—that’s sometimes a tip-off on mushroom poisoning.”

“Resembling strychnine?” Fred said. A cold insight grappled with his head then, a rerun of the Kimberly Hawkins dog-shit day and his illness in his car after what—

His.

“I’ll tell Arctor,” he said. “I can lay it on him. Without him flashing on me. He’s docile.”

“Ugly-looking, too,” one of the scramble suits said. “He the individual came in the door stoop-shouldered and hung over?”

“Aw,” Fred said, and swiveled back to his holos. Oh goddamn, he thought, that day Barris gave us the tabs at the roadside—his mind went into spins and double trips and then split in half, directly down the middle. The next thing he knew, he was in the safe apartment’s bathroom with a Dixie cup of water, rinsing out his mouth, by himself, where he could think. When you get down to it, I’m Arctor, he thought. I’m the man on the scanners, the suspect Barris was fucking over with his weird phone call with the locksmith, and I was asking, What’s Arctor been up to to get Barris on him like that? I’m slushed; my brain is slushed. This is not real. I’m not believing this, watching what is me, is Fred—that was Fred down there without his scramble suit; that’s how Fred appears without the suit!