The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  Mister O’Smith had no more idea why he was doing this than did the figures of Randy or Brazos, or even that figure of Herakles (coin-operated and armed with a Scythian bow) that had been drawing against a serpent (when hit, it hissed with surprise) three centuries before Christ. Whether this was a set of Skinnerian contingencies reinforcing the appropriate behaviour (zapping) or a Freudian acting-out of infantile aggression towards the castrating father, Mister O’Smith couldn’t say. Beauty was death, and death beauty, that was all Mister O’Smith knew (on a need-to-know basis).

  ‘Of course I have my own ideas.’ Tarr went on filling his pipe. ‘You both know about my plans for investigating psychic flight orientation in migratory birds.’

  Aikin and Dollsly nodded automatically: they knew, they knew. ‘But it wouldn’t be democratic to put that before the committee without first consulting you, okay?’

  Nods.

  ‘So what about your ideas? Bud?’

  Bud Aikin controlled his stutter remarkably well today, as he outlined his plan for crime prevention by use of the pendulum. He was becoming quite an authority on this psychic instrument, Tarr noticed. Too bad he still had such a hell of a time with that key word.

  Aikin unfolded a map. ‘See, here I’ve been and located the three places where this “Ripper”, this murderer left his victims. The vibrations are very strong, even on a map. Using the p-p-p – swinging thing – I was able to locate them precisely.’

  ‘Fascinating!’ Tarr lit his pipe. ‘Of course sceptics will imagine you read about the locations in the paper …’

  ‘No, but wait. I can do it blindfold, with the map turned any way at all. As soon as the p-p-p – the pen-pen – the Galilean implement – gets over a psychic “hot spot”, it starts swinging violently. And, and that’s not all. I’ve found a fourth location. The place where the next body will be found. See, right here near the Student Union. So I mean when they find the body there, that pretty well clinches it, right? Maybe then crime prevention can take a leap forward, using the p – the isochronic vibrating part of a clock –’

  Tarr exhaled a thick ball of smoke. ‘Lacks scope, if you don’t mind my frankness, Bud. And you don’t really need much of a grant for – but let’s hear what Byron has to say eh?’

  Byron Dollsly grinned and slapped his heavy hand on the table. ‘Scope! Hah! Think you’ll find plenty of scope in my idea, George. See how this grabs you. As you know, I’ve been working on lines suggested by Teilhard de Chardin, Buckminster Fuller and others, namely a kind of engineering approach to consciousness. Well!’

  He beamed at Tarr and Aikin in turn, while they sat awaiting further enlightenment. ‘Well, I’ve only had a major breakthrough, that’s all. As I see it, we have to begin with first principles. Biology!’

  After a moment, Tarr took his pipe from his mouth. ‘Is that it? Biology?’

  ‘Is that it, he asks. Hah! Okay, let me spell it out for you. The divine Teilhard saw life as a radial force, and consciousness as a tangential force. Life, see, is like a gear-wheel growing larger, while consciousness is the gear actually turning – meshing!’

  He grabbed a handful of his thick grey hair and more or less hauled himself to his feet by it. Then he marched to the blackboard. ‘So what’s the next step? Anybody?’

  The other two looked at one another. ‘Mm, suppose you just tell us, Byron. Little short on time here …’

  ‘The screw. The SCREW!’

  ‘The, uh … the …’

  ‘Simple. The creative intellect is a worm-screw with a right-hand thread. Get it? Get it? See, it can never mesh with the destructive or left-handed intellect – never!’

  ‘Well I suppose not, mm –’

  ‘So what is God? Simple. He is the vector sum of the entire network of forces turning back upon themselves to produce ultimate consciousness! I mean isn’t He? Isn’t He just the infinite acceleration of the tangential? POW! POW!’ He smacked an enormous right-hand fist into an enormous left-hand palm. There was silence. There was always silence after one of Byron Dollsly’s little lectures, which always ended pow, pow …

  ‘Interesting, Byron, good line of thinking there … hard to see any practical research possibilities in it just now, but…’

  As chairman, Tarr of course had the final deciding vote, which he cast for his own proposal (to study telepathy in birds). Dismissing his assistants, he prepared to write it up for the committee. That is, he sat cracking his knuckles, one by one, and staring out of the window.

  From here in the Old Psychology Building, he had a limited view of the Mall: a few dirty white drifts, the stump of a snowman. How many seasons had he watched from this narrow window? How many barren Winters? How many hopes shattered like icicles – Tarr was beginning to like the simile – while his career remained frozen, stiff as the heart of poor little Frosty out there, who would never come to life and sing …

  Tarr started on the left-hand knuckles. Beyond the snowman lay the façade of Economics, a dirty old building on whose pediment he could just make out three figures: Labour shouldering a giant gear-wheel, Capital dumping out her cornucopia, and Land applying his scythe to a sheaf of wheat or something.

  His gaze returned to the central figure. Money, that’s what it took. A little money – a tenth of the cash they lavished on the Computer Science Department, say – and he could have parapsychology really on the move. Going places. They were doing it elsewhere: Professor Fether in Chicago was testing precognition in hippos; the Russians claimed a breakthrough on the ouija board to Lenin; the ghost labs of California were fast building a solid reputation. But here, a standstill, a frozen landscape. Nobody in the entire field had ever heard of the University of Minnetonka.

  Nobody had ever heard of Dr George Tarr, either. Now and then his clipping service sent him by mistake some reference to ‘R. Targ’ or ‘C. Tart’. His own name never appeared.

  Still, here was another chance, another crack at the old cornucopia … He cracked the last knuckle and reached for his dictating machine.

  ‘Title: Research into Psychically-Oriented Flock Flight. A project proposal. G. Tarr, B. Aikin, B. Dollsly.

  ‘Ahem. Observers have long obs – noted the uncanny agility of birds flying in formation. This agility has not yet been adequately explained. How is it that a flock of up to a thousand birds, manoeuvring in perfectly co-ordinated flight at high velocities, can avoid collisions? The psychic mechanism we propose may be tested as follows …’

  *

  A man in a red hunting cap and matching face was saying to the bartender, ‘Look, just because I never went to no university that don’t mean I’m drunk.’

  ‘Just take it easy, Jack.’

  ‘Plenny of things a university don’t teach you, am I right?’

  ‘All I said was, take it easy. Take it …’

  In the back booth, Professor Rogers scratched at acne that hadn’t itched for fifteen years. ‘Up to you, of course. Just thought you might want to have all the facts. Before the meeting.’

  Dr Jane Hannah’s face was impassive, the face of a Cheyenne brave which, during her early years in anthropology, she had been. ‘Facts, you say. I keep hearing opinions.’

  ‘Okay, sure, if you want my opinion, we should turn them down. With all these fraud rumours, I don’t see how Fong’s people can expect special treatment.’

  She raised her martini, mumbled something over it, and took a sip. ‘Why not special treatment? Maybe what they have to give us is more precious than anything they could possibly have stolen. After all. true heroes can always break the rules. Think of Prometheus, stealing from the gods.’

  ‘Pro – but this is real life, real theft. Maybe millions of dollars, you can’t just shrug like that and –’

  ‘But NASA, like all fire-gods of the air, won’t miss a few million. We don’t want to get bogged down in petty tribal ethics now, the real question is, is Fong a true hero? Will his robot, his gift to mankind, be a blessing or a curse? If it is good, then we
must help him, even as Spider Woman helped the War Twins on their journey to the lodge of their father, the Sun –’

  ‘Sure, sure, but I mean Fong is playing God himself, he’s like Baron Frankenstein over there, never listens to anybody, a law unto himself.’

  ‘The new Prometheus.’ Her eyes were unfocused; they seemed to be looking right through him into the vinyl fabric of the booth. ‘Prometheus made a man of clay, you know. And Momus the mocker criticized it, saying he should have left a window in the breast, so we could see what secret thoughts were in its heart. But isn’t that our problem? How can we tell if this robot will be good or evil? What’s in his heart?’

  He lifted his Old-fashioned, holding the tiny paper doily in place on the bottom of the glass with his little finger. ‘You want my opinion, the computer freaks have had things their own way just about long enough. Far be it from me to assign guilt labels in a multivalently motivating situation like this, but just look around campus! The process of depersonalization goes irreversibly on, what with computerized grades and tests, teaching machines, enrolment, it’s as though they want to just tear down humanity, yeah? Just rip it out and replace it, yeah? With robotdom, right? Robots are nothing but humanity ripped off, if you want my opinion.’

  Her stare continued to penetrate Rogers, the vinyl padding, and even the next booth where Dora was explaining to Allbright: ‘I think Dr Fred’s senile or something, he screwed up completely on everybody’s horoscopes, I checked mine on the computer and he’s got Saturn in the wrong place.’

  ‘Oh sure, the computer has to be right. Why trust a nice little old man when you can really rely on a damned steel cabinet full of transistors?’ He swallowed a pill and washed it down with Irish whiskey.

  ‘That’s not what I meant, I mean Saturn in the wrong place! And this other kid, this Bill Whatsit in my class, his horoscope’s even worse. I mean Dr Fred put in a conjunction of Pluto and Neptune, it makes Bill born in either 1888 or 2381. And when I tried to tell Bill it was wrong he said, “I know, wrong again, I’m always wrong” – like it was his fault, I mean.’

  ‘We’re all at fault, sure, getting in the way of the damned steel cabinets. Nobody’s gonna survive, just a few technicians …’ His dirty fingers chased another pill across the formica.

  ‘You sound just like him, gloom and doom! For Pete’s sake, you must both have something in Scorpio, you’re so touchy.’ She shrugged her orange coat half-way down her arms and lit a cigarette. ‘I just hate this place, don’t you? Au fond, I mean.’

  ‘… just a few damned technicians, half machines themselves … Listen, I went to school with this kid, a born computer genius. He used to play around all the time with the school terminal, little games of his own, nobody knew what the hell he was up to, least of all the teacher. I mean we were only eleven years old, already he was in a world of his own. Then one day the goddamn FBI came to the school and took him away for a couple of days. Seems he was dabbling in interstate commerce, in a way. When he got back to school I asked him all about it – you know what it was? Peanut butter.’

  ‘Peanut butter?’

  ‘Bugleboy Old Tyme Reconstituted Peanut Butter, nauseating stuff it used to be, nobody could stand it. Only thing us kids liked about it was the jar tops: “Fifty of your favourite cartoon characters – save ’em, swap ’em, loads of fun!” Something like that. Anyway the supermarkets were probably losing money on the crap, because they stopped handling it. So this kid just got on the old terminal, twiddled his way into the inventory computer of this big supermarket chain, Tommy Tucker, and made a few crucial changes. All of a sudden Tommy Tucker was swamped with the crap. They put it on special offer, they even gave it away – and I bet they had to throw away a few tons of it too. But they couldn’t stop their computer from re-ordering, more and more … When they caught up with him, this kid had forty-nine of his favourite cartoon characters – probably more than any other kid in the United States.’

  Dora looked for the waitress. ‘I’ve heard lots of stories like that. Kids are always using their school terminals to dig into some computer somewhere.’

  ‘Yeah, but what Danny did was kind of new. He invented some sinister algorithm, so he told me. I don’t even know what an algorithm is.’

  ‘You don’t? Honest? It’s only a set of instruc –’

  ‘And I don’t want to know. Whatever it was, after he planted it in Tommy Tucker’s computer, it just grew until it took over. I guess they had to finally throw away their whole program and start from scratch. I guess they lost a lot of money, that’s where the FBI came in.’

  ‘What happened to him, then?’

  ‘Oh, they put him on the payroll at Tommy Tucker. As a computer security consultant. All he had to do was promise to leave them alone. But the funny thing is –’

  The waitress arrived, with someone else’s drinks.

  ‘Sorry, kid, I got a bit mixed up, with all the characters in here tonight. Old Jack there’s teed off because he can’t read –’ she gestured at the man in the hunting cap, ‘– and the cowboy next to him wants to know who’s drinking martinis – and then I got some joker in the front tries to tell me he’s a manicure. Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!’

  She delivered the Old-fashioned and the martini to Rogers and Hannah, who was saying:

  ‘… maybe the Blackfeet boy, Kut-o-yis, cooked to life in a cooking pot, but isn’t that the point? Aren’t they always fodder for our desires? Take Pumiyathon for instance, going to bed with his ivory creation –’

  ‘Look, these Indian stories are okay, but I don’t see –’

  ‘Indian? No, he was King of Cyprus, you must know that story, they even made a musical of it, Hello Dolly, was it? Something like that … But take Hephaestus then, those golden girls he made who could talk, help him at his forge, who knows what else … Or Daedalus, not just the statues that guarded the labyrinth, but the dolls he made for the daughters of Cocalus, you see? Love, work, conversation, guard duty, baby, plaything, of course they used them to replace people, isn’t that the point?’

  ‘Yes but the point, my point is –’

  ‘And in Boeotia, the little Daedala, the procession where they carried an oaken bride to the river, much like the argeioi in Rome, the puppets the Vestal Virgins threw into the Tiber to purge the demons; disease, probably, just as the Ewe made clay figures to draw off the spirit of the smallpox, so did the Baganda, they buried the figures under roads and the first –’

  ‘This is all very interesting, yes, but –’

  ‘First person who passed by picked up the sickness. In Borneo they drew sickness into wooden images, so did the Dyaks … Of course the Chinese mostly made toys, a jade automaton in the Fourth Century but much earlier even the first Han Emperor had a little mechanical orchestra but then he was a bit mad, you know. Imagine burning all the books in China and building the Great Wall, quite mad, quite mad … but the Japanese, Prince Kaya was it? Yes, made a wooden figure that held a big bowl, it helped the people water their rice paddies during the drought. Certainly more practical than the Chinese, or even the Pythagoreans, with their steam-driven wooden pigeon, hardly counts even if they did mean it to carry souls up to – but no, we have to make do with the rest, and of course the golem stories, and how clay men fashioned by the Archangel –’

  Chee! Rogers sneezed. ‘Yes, very iderestigg, but –’

  There were Teraphim of course but no one knows their function. But the real question is, what do we want this robot for? Is it to be a bronze Talos, grinning as he clasps people in his red-hot metal embrace? Or an ivory Galatea with limbs so cunningly jointed –’

  ‘Look, couldn’t we – ?’

  ‘As you see, I’ve been turning the problem over, consulting the old stories …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I’ve decided to vote against this robot.’

  Chee! Chee! ‘Thank God. We have to take sides. Those of us who don’t want to be ciphers have to stand up and be counted. Why didn’t you say s
o in the first place?’

  For the first time, her eyes blinked. ‘But I had to explain! You see, I believe in baring the soul.’

  ‘Bearing the – ?’

  ‘I even talk to my food and drink, as you must have noticed.’

  ‘Dot at all,’ he lied, and hid his nose in a handkerchief.

  She sighed. ‘I can’t help feeling that respect for life – even the life of your cold virus there – is paramount. Of course we must take life, we eat food, we destroy germs. But can we not at least apologize for our murders?’ So saying, she took up the olive from her martini and spoke to it quietly: ‘Little olive, I mean you no harm, but my body needs nourishment. For one day soon, my body will go to replenish the earth, to feed new olive trees …’

  Rogers looked away, embarrassed, and caught the eye of a fat, suntanned stranger at the bar, who had turned from the television to watch Dr Hannah. ‘Uh, I’ve got to go home, nurse this cold, so …’

  She put down the olive and checked her watch. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll stick around. Have to kill an hour before I meet my son for dinner. Never see him, since he moved into that fra – But you have your own problems, bless you.’

  Beanie’s Bar was beginning to fill up with the early evening crowd. Rogers had to squeeze his way through an animated discussion of Ruritania (one speaker suffered from halitosis), avoid the non-university drunk and jostle through other conversations:

  ‘… the liberry, but like when I ast for Sense and Sensibility they brung me this novel. This, yeah, by some other J. Austin, only with a e, figure that …’

  ‘… Jungian econ …’

  ‘… this machine heresy, was it?’

  ‘… Barbara Altar for one …’

  The juke box piped him out with a mournful, if not quite coherent song:

  When I feel you’re in my dream

  Images of fortune play me do-o-own

  Destiny don’t seem so far, and I can touch a star