The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  ‘Thought Dan would’ve told you himself. I’d better – grrrp – wait, let … let him tell you himself.’

  ‘Yeah, wait.’ Franklin looked at the door again. Now it looked a little like a parachute, its shrouds unravelling as it descended. Funny how you could see almost anything …

  ‘Tell you one thing, I want some changes made around here. When we move, I want a whole new structure. No more of this prima donna act of his, this, well Dan, just talking about you. Lee says you’ve got some little problem.’

  ‘No problem.’ Dan closed the stained door and leaned against it. ‘I’m just leaving, that’s all.’

  ‘!’

  ‘I tried to talk him out of it, Ben. But if the kid wants to go –’

  ‘I don’t believe it! You – you want something? It isn’t enough that you’re the big star, you want something else? More power? No? Well then mind letting me in on the secret? What makes you want to walk out on four years of your life? Not to mention my life and Lee here, you plan to just waste four years of his life? Mind telling me why?’

  ‘Lots of reasons.’ Ben stared at the t-shirt (BE SPONTANEOUS!) waiting for him to go on. ‘For one thing it’s all wrong. Nothing turned out like I thought. See, when I joined the project I was still a kid, nineteen, how did I know what I was getting into? I thought, Wow, the first robot, the first alien intelligence on this planet, I couldn’t think of anything better, anything – specialler.

  ‘Only when it gets down to it maybe it’s not so special. It’s more like being wrong all the time, you know? And that’s just the work. See, I thought it would be like being part of a family, only just look at us: look at you, all you do is bitch and moan and worry about who’s got a better job, who’s the star player or something.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘See, you’re like a baby, Ben, you can’t read the books but you still want to chew on them.’

  Franklin turned his blush away. ‘So it’s going to be personalities, is it? Because I’ve got a thing or two to say –’

  ‘Wait. Look, I’m, all I’m saying is this isn’t working out for you or for me or for anybody. And you, Lee, your stomach’s so bad you’ll have to retire early, just like Leo Bunsky – only he didn’t retire early enough. And when he died I just started wondering what this is, is it special after all? Is it special enough to die for?

  ‘And then Mary Mendez, was it special for her? Wandering around in that damned looney bin over there, asking everybody to please wind her up, is it worth that?’

  Franklin lit a cigarette and held it ready to drop ash on the floor. ‘Doesn’t seem to have touched you, though, does it? I mean you’re still healthy. Still the same nasty little snotty-nose –’

  ‘Well I had scurvy last year but sure I’m okay physically. That’s not the point. The point is Roderick, is he okay? Is he, is he special? See, when people around me were dying or going nuts or getting bitchy or having ulcers I could always say, “All right, but it’s worth it, it’s special. It must be special because look, NASA, the United States government, is putting cash into this. They’re backing us a hundred per cent.” Only they weren’t.’

  ‘Now let me get this straight. You’re tired of the project first because you find out that people wear out, have accidents and break down – just like in any other job – and second because NASA doesn’t love us any more? Is that about it? Why, you pathetic little creep, is your ego so –’

  ‘Let me finish. It’s not just that they don’t love us, they hate us. Not just NASA but everybody. As soon as they find out what we’re doing, soon as they really understand what we’re doing, they’re out to get us.’

  ‘Let’s not get all paran –’

  ‘Look, when NASA pulled out on us I started thinking. Haven’t you ever wondered why nobody else is running a project like this? I mean nobody. Oh I know there’s a few dozen AI projects in different places, but they kinda stand still, don’t they? They work on a pattern-recognizer or a language analyser; they keep on working on it and they keep on keeping on. I checked a few places. No significant advances in the past ten years.’

  ‘Where is this leading?’

  ‘Let him go on,’ said Fong. ‘This is where it gets sinister.’

  ‘So I started checking on private robot projects – you know, the kind of crank stuff or maybe not so crank, stuff you see in articles in Micro-Ham, CPU Digest, you know.’

  ‘I never read the amateur journals.’

  ‘You should. Because you find funny things. Like this commune in Oregon, all the neat things they were doing with something they called a “Gestalt guesser”, really it was just – but anyway, just when it was getting interesting they had this fire.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it was just like the fire they had in Tuscon, where this little micro club were trying to set up a little thing to write short stories. Then this old guy in Florida I forget what he was making but when it hit the local papers suddenly he got snuffed by a prowler. Then a nurse in Oklahoma City smashed her customized processor and killed herself, and so did a guy in Kansas, ran a feed store, only upstairs he had –’

  ‘Are you sure? I’d have to check some of these myself.’ Franklin forgot to smooth his moustache. ‘Anyway a few cases don’t

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? All these people were safe as long as they kept quiet. And when we thought NASA was our boss, we kept quiet too. We didn’t publish anything, we didn’t give any interviews, we kept a tight security lid on this. Only now …’

  ‘You think we’re targets for some kind of – ?’ Franklin flicked ash on the floor. ‘Find this a little hard to swallow. I mean why? Who would, I mean why?’

  ‘Who knows? I mean, who knows why anything? Why do we suddenly have to move the lab upstairs? Everybody you ask just says they got this computer transfer order, this paper here says we gotta move. I don’t know who or why, I mean I know what’s way behind it, but that’s not much help. I know it’s just something like the old species trying to zap the new one before it gets started, that makes sense but it’s kinda depressing all the same.’

  ‘Especially if they try to zap us with it,’ Fong said. ‘Anyway the kid’s right, let’s quit while we’re ahead.’

  Ben Franklin wasn’t listening. Smoothing his moustache, he said, ‘Can’t be the military, they’d be happy as shit to get their hooks on a robot, to hell with wider implications. Bet it’s some government agency, probably connected to a think tank, bunch of “futurologists”, bet you any damn thing. Bastards sitting there working out their “scenarios” as if the future were some kind of big-budget movie, they want us on the cutting-room floor, do they? Well I say we fight, can’t let ’em get away with four years of our – fight, damnit, expose the whole vicious –’

  ‘What for?’ Dan smiled. ‘Is it really worth it?’

  ‘What kind of bullshit scientist are you to ask a thing like that? Is it worth it? Is it – ?’

  Fong was tugging at his sleeve and making faces. Ben finally saw that he’d written something; and leaned over to read it:

  The fight’s already over. We won.

  But keep quiet about it.

  Four years, he kept thinking, four years. As though repeating the number could magically call them back, restore his career, his wife, whatever it was that had deserted him …

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ He pushed past Dan and reached for the door (noticing now how like a shrunken head the stain really looked). ‘I don’t believe a fucking word.’

  As he entered the men’s room an unkempt student jumped back from the graffito he had obviously been inscribing next to the mirror. He looked at Ben and quickly turned away, probably to conceal the port-wine birthmark on his cheek. Then hurried out, capping his fibre pen as he went, and leaving Ben to consult his own blank mask. Perfect. Unblemished even by expression.

  Automatically he began to wash his hands. He studied them as though he were Ambroise Paré, that military surgeon whose first elaborate designs
in jointed iron provided not only new limbs (for those who reached the Peace of Augsburg without them) but also new work for unemployed armourers. There were times when Ben felt as though his entire body were a prosthesis, perfect, ready to work, but untenanted. Even his mind seemed no more than an ingenious engine for grinding through facts (and a part of the engine now reminded him that this was Darwin’s complaint) but to no purpose. He felt as hollow as that chess-playing Turk exhibited by Baron von Kempelen in 1769 (and later borrowed by Maelzel, delighting the world even more than his borrowed invention of the metronome).

  He dried his hands and folded them tentatively in prayer. Well, no. No point in investing in that unnecessary hypothesis, pie in the sky for the ghost in the machine … And yet. Even a prosthetic hand could not function properly unless its wearer retained some of the ‘feeling’ in his ghostly limb. Why couldn’t he, Benjamin Waldo Franklin, be waiting just for such a feeling?

  ‘Holy Ghost in the machine?’ He tried to make it sound ironic. All the same, a moment later he went into one of the stalls and sat down on the lid and asked for guidance.

  It was a gamble, but then a Jansenist God might approve of that; had not Pascal proved that there was nothing to lose and everything to gain? The venue was strange, but then a Lutheran God was used to that; had not the first Lutheran also uncovered certain fundamental truths in a privy?

  What Ben found was a paperback book on the floor. For a moment he simply stared at it, reading the title over and over: God is Good Business. A sign? No. A sign? No!

  He could hardly call it a sign, with its gaudy yellow-and-black cover, its red sunburst proclaiming ‘18,000,000 copies sold!’ The back cover showed a grey portrait of the author, a smiling businessman with the unlikely name Goodall V. Wetts III.

  Just say to yourself when you get up in the morning, ‘God WANTS me to win! God wants ME to win! God wants me to WIN – TODAY!’ With this simple formula plus the Ten Rules of Faith Dynamics, you –

  Ben shut the book and put it back on the floor. But on second thoughts he picked it up again. Might be good for a laugh some time … you never knew.

  And what greater test could God put him through, than asking him to abandon all pleasures of the intellect and accept – this?

  Washing his hands again, Ben studied his face for changes. He was leaning forward, trying out a confident slow smile, when suddenly he realized he was not alone. A janitor stood leaning on a mop, watching him.

  Jesus Christ! Ain’t enough you spend an hour in the john, you gotta spend another hour seein’ if your lipstick’s on straight. I gotta clean this joint, buster, howsabout fuckin’ off?’

  ‘Oh I … sorry …’

  ‘You will be sorry, if you write any more porno on my walls.’

  Ben’s gaze flicked to the place whence the graffito had already been scrubbed.

  ‘Look I’m not responsible –’

  ‘You tellin’ me, anybody writes crap like that oughta see a shrink. You like fuckin’ clocks, do ya? Or just drawing dirty –’

  Ben fled, his face burning, while the janitor shouted after him, ‘– pitchers of guys fuckin’ clocks, watches maybe, guys wid moustaches? Yeah? And what’s that mean, DALI LAID DIAL, what the fuck’s that m – ?’

  Sounds of pain, sounds of rain. O’Smith opened his eyes to the sight of two people in white, arguing.

  ‘… wasn’t on duty when he came in, doctor. So if you want to blame somebody …’

  ‘Not a question of blame, it’s just procedure, that’s all. We send all John Does to City …’

  ‘Yes but Nancy said …’

  ‘Not as if we’re not overcrowded as it is what with the flu epidemic … AH! HOW’S IT GOING, FELLA?’

  O’Smith automatically reached out to shake his hand and found that he was not reaching after all. His right arm was missing.

  ‘Where’s my durn arm?’

  ‘Your ah, prosthesis, well we had a little problem there, the car pretty much wrecked it. But don’t worry, get you fixed up with a new one just as soon as –’

  ‘Where is it? Where’s my durn arm?’

  ‘Are you insured, sir?’ The nurse was shoving a form in front of his eyes, wasn’t that his arm she was holding it with? ‘If we could just have your name and policy number – God! Ow! Jesus!’

  Someone shouted, crepe soles came flapping down the street, arms holding him, hands prying his jaws away from his own arm the nurse was wearing, what was a nurse doing inside this form anyways? Stabbed, he fell back, take it slow boy, wait your time, Brazos grinning at him as he heard some folks talking clear over in Galveston …

  ‘… gave him fifty ccs, doc, okay?’

  ‘Great, yeah, Nora, how’s that thumb?’

  ‘I’m … all right, doctor … guess it’s my own darn fault, mine and Nancy’s …’

  Galveston, gal-with-a-vest-on, where was the durn armhole, he couldn’t get his arm through, what was that durn muzzle velocity …

  ‘Galveston,’ he said.

  ‘Better send this joker up to Section 23, right? Before he kills somebody, getting ’em all this week, you see the girl in B ward, the cast change? Hysterics, you’d think we were talking her leg off … said it took her ages to get all those names on the old one … Give him another fifty, Al, he’s still twitching. Talk about prosthesis overdependency, a paradox, Nora, a para …’

  ‘Oh you and your paradoxes! Dr Coppola, sometimes I think you read just a little bit too much …’

  ‘Like to keep up, right? Sure the admissions procedure is paradoxical but isn’t life itself?’

  ‘…’

  ‘… like in this Graham Greene yarn I’m reading … offers to sacrifice his own soul for the salvation of souls, but does that include his own or what?’

  ‘… always springing these egghead stories …’

  ‘… same with admissions … uninsured creep gets in we end up keeping him until he pays, only how can he pay if he can’t get out to work? Fairer not to let ’em in in the first pl …’

  ‘Have you looked at the corner patient, doctor? Nancy says either something’s wrong with the monitor or he has a temperature of 2 million …’

  ‘… try to get any maintenance done around here, might as well be asking for … yeah when I checked it read minus 3 million, B.P. 80 over zero …’

  Fighting his way through Galveston one arm tied behind him, only it was somebody else’s arm, that old body in Florida reaching for his 12-gauge, Brazos looking surprised as the fully-automatic armhole opened up, bap you’re dead, bap you’re dead again …

  They watched him sink into sleep and then made their way to Reception, where the pretty receptionist with all the hair was saying to a black doctor:

  ‘Sure, but I mean it don’t hardly seem fair, two doctors on the same ward with the same darn name almost!’

  ‘It’s easy, though, look: I’m Dr De’Ath, he’s Dr D’Eath. I’m black, he’s white. I specialize in epidemiology, he specializes in cardiology. I – ’

  ‘Yeah I know but –’

  ‘Look: he’s building a robot to test artificial hearts, I don’t know one end of a soldering iron from the other, okay? So what’s the problem? What’s the big problem?’

  Chief Dobbin opened the press conference by reading from a prepared statement that began: ‘I took one look and knew she was trouble with a capital T. This little lady happened to be very, very dead.’

  A reporter in the back groaned and turned off his recorder. ‘Here we go, another literary treat.’

  ‘With a capital T,’ said his neighbour. ‘Ain’t we gonna get a look at the suspect?’ He cupped his hands and called, ‘SUSPECT!’

  ‘All in good time, boys. “I asked myself why? Why would any sane human being …’”

  ‘Probably be a chapter in his book,’ said the first reporter, punching buttons on his pocket reminder. ‘Never heard of a fucking deadline.’

  His neighbour, who was older, stopped picking his teeth to say, ‘Deadline
? I thought you was on the Caribou, since when they meet deadlines on that shit-sheet? You wait till you graduate and try meeting a real deadline on a real paper.’

  The boy was silent for a moment, pretending to study his reminder while Dobbin droned on. ‘Okay,’ he whispered finally. ‘How about a little help from an expert then, okay? Like what angle you got on this?’

  ‘Angle? Sex, of course. It’s a natural here, this Fong guy is ethnic, a creepy scientist, what more do you want?’

  ‘I meant, uh, you think he really – ?’

  ‘What the hell difference does that make, look, they found the dead girl with her leg cut off, blood all over the place, and in her hand was this book covered with his finger-prints, may not be enough for a court-room but it sure as hell works out fine on the front page. Forget about did he do it, get down to work on why? Why, why, as our police colleague likes to say.’ He picked a morsel from a back tooth and examined it before flicking it away. ‘Listen you try this for size: I’m doing a think piece to go with this story, on how all these cybernetics guys are repressed faggots, sadists and what have you. This a.m. I picked up a coupla their magazines, got a list here somewhere of some of the kinky words they use, strong sex angle running right through it, listen to this, bit, byte, RAM, how about those?’

  ‘I don’t know, they ain’t got much on him –’

  ‘Gang punch, flip-flop, input, what do you think that really means, huh? Stand-alone software, how about that? Debugger, you can’t make it plainer, and even the company names, how about Polymorphic Systems, how about The Digital Group? Or Texas Instruments, ever wonder what a Texas Instrument is? Or a Honeywell? IBM, says a lot there …’

  Someone held up a little camera. ‘Keep it down, you guys, just while I get this live, he’s gonna show us the book.’

  O’Smith woke up feeling just fine, sitting in a fine little parlour with a lot of fine folks, still no arm but what the hell. There was Chief Dobbin’s face beaming at him from the teevee, life wasn’t so bad.

  This is the book that cracked this caper wide open. Learning Systems, we thought at first it was an educationalism book but we got our library experts to work on it and – here, I’ll show you a page – pure computers. So then we traced it to Dr Lee Fong of the Computer Science Department, found out he was on campus on the night in question. We put him under blanket surveillance, must of surveilled him for a week before he made a false move. He burned some documents and tried to make a run for it. We got him at the airport.