Presently Barris set the book down and left the house, passing out of scanning range. When he returned he carried a little brown-paper bag which he set on the coffee table and opened. From it he removed dried mushrooms, which he then began to compare one by one with the color photos in the book. With excessive deliberation, unusual for him, he compared each. At last he pushed one miserable-looking mushroom aside and restored the others to the bag; from his pocket he brought a handful of empty capsules and then with equally great precision began crumbling bits of the one particular mushroom into the caps and sealing each of them in turn.
After that, Barris started phoning. The phone tap automatically recorded the numbers called.
“Hello, this is Jim.”
“So?”
“Say, have I scored.”
“No shit.”
“Psilocybe mexicana.”
“What’s that?”
“A rare hallucinogenic mushroom used in South American mystery cults thousands of years ago. You fly, you become invisible, understand the speech of animals—”
“No thanks.” Click.
Redialing. “Hello, this is Jim.”
“Jim? Jim who?”
“With the beard … green shades, leather pants. I met you at a happening over at Wanda—”
“Oh yeah. Jim. Yeah.”
“You interested in scoring on some organic psychedelics?”
“Well, I don’t know …” Unease. “You sure this is Jim? You don’t sound like him.”
“I’ve got something unbelievable, a rare organic mushroom from South America, used in Indian mystery cults thousands of years ago. You fly, become invisible, your car disappears, you are able to understand the speech of animals—”
“My car disappears all the time. When I leave it in a towaway zone. Ha-ha.”
“I can lay perhaps six caps of this Psilocybe on you.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars a cap.”
“Outrageous! No kidding? Hey, I’ll meet you somewhere.” Then suspicion. “You know, I believe I remember you—you burned me once. Where’d you get these mushrooms hits? How do I know they’re not weak acid?”
“They were brought to the U.S. inside a clay idol,” Barris said. “As part of a carefully guarded art shipment to a museum, with this one idol marked. The customs pigs never suspected.” Barris added, “If they don’t get you off I’ll refund your money.”
“Well, that’s meaningless if my head’s been eaten and I’m swinging through the trees.”
“I dropped one two days ago myself,” Barris said. “To test it out. The best trip I ever had—lots of colors. Better than mescaline, for sure. I don’t want my customers burned. I always test my stuff myself. It’s guaranteed.”
Behind Fred another scramble suit was watching the holomonitor now too. “What’s he peddling? Mescaline, he says?”
“He’s been capping mushrooms,” Fred said, “that either he picked or someone else picked, locally.”
“Some mushrooms are toxic in the extreme,” the scramble suit behind Fred said.
A third scramble suit knocked off its own holo scrutiny for a moment and stood with them now. “Certain Amanita mushrooms contain four toxins that are red-blood-cell cracking agents. It takes two weeks to die and there’s no antidote. It’s incalculably painful. Only an expert can tell what mushroom he’s picking for sure when they’re wild.”
“I know,” Fred said, and marked the indent numbers of this tape section for department use.
Barris again was dialing.
“What’s the statute violation cited on this?” Fred said.
“Misrepresentation in advertising,” one of the other scramble suits said, and both laughed and returned to their own screens. Fred continued watching.
On Holo Monitor Four the front door of the house opened and Bob Arctor entered, looking dejected. “Hi.”
“Howdy,” Barris said, gathering his caps together and thrusting them deep into his pocket. “How’d you make out with Donna?” He chuckled. “In several ways, maybe, eh?”
“Okay, fuck off,” Arctor said, and passed from Holo Monitor Four, to be picked up in his bedroom a moment later by scanner five. There, with the door kicked shut, Arctor brought forth a number of plastic bags filled with white tabs; he stood a moment uncertainly and then he stuffed them down under the covers of his bed, out of sight, and took off his coat. He appeared weary and unhappy; his face was drawn.
For a moment Bob Arctor sat on the edge of his unmade bed, all by himself. He at last shook his head, rose, stood uncertain … then he smoothed his hair and left the room, to be picked up by the central living room scanner as he approached Barris. During this time scanner two had witnessed Barris hiding the brown bag of mushrooms under the couch cushions and placing the mushroom textbook back on the bookshelf where it was not noticeable.
“What you been doing?” Arctor asked him.
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.