The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  It was bigger and greener than even the cemetery. That pure blue-grass colour lay over the floor, what he could see of the distant walls, and over every one of the ‘elephants’. They did look like elephants, turning and twisting their trunks to get at the things on the assembly-lines, twisting back to pick up screws or paint-sprayers or sandpaper or clothes. A hundred green elephants? A thousand? He couldn’t tell, not without strolling down the yellow painted road and counting – and for the moment, he preferred to stay where he was, listening.

  There were no more recorded voices, only a bouncy kind of music from invisible violins. While Roderick stood transfixed, they finished ‘Sunshine Balloon’ and began ‘Oh, You Beautiful Doll’. Just in front of him, a row of beautiful dolls’ heads were being crowned with hair: a blonde, a brunette, a redhead, a blonde, a brunette … he decided to follow the dames.

  After the hair-elephant came the elephant eye-lash curler, a twist of the trunk, while another trunk sorted out a pair of matching earrings and prepared to clamp them on, another with a fine brush was poised to finish the make-up (sprayed on earlier) before the heads reached the test station where trunks probed with electrodes to raise a smile, a blink, a wink. Next came a junction where a gang of assembly Dumbos worked furiously with bolts, pliers, soldering irons, fixing each head to an armless grey torso. Following the new line he watched shapely arms appear (each hand holding its nails apart to dry; left wrists receiving watches) to be fastened on, before the entire assembly was bolted firmly to a metal frame bolted in turn to one side of a coffin-sized formica box then equipped with fake drawer-handles and finally (just as the torso-women were being stitched into their clothes) a sign: RECEPTIONIST.

  Roderick watched a final test, a torso-woman lifting an imaginary phone and saying, ‘I’ll tell him you’re here, Mr – was that Mendozo or Mendoza? I just know he’ll want to see you right away – oh, I’m sorry, he’s in conference … You can go right in, Mr – is it Disnee or Disnay? Thank you sir, and you have a nice day too!’ On either side other tests were in progress. He watched a glossy cocktail waitress dressed in Victorian underwear, black stockings and garters, lower her empty tray to serve non-existent customers: ‘Now who had the Black Russian? And you’re the White Lady, right? Stinger for you.’ Beyond her a torso-man in white seemed to be frying imaginary hamburgers: ‘Yeah okay that’s two with one without and sal, side fries one chicksand on white no mayo one poach on wholewheat no butter I got all that.’ Next a dealer found a possible straight among the invisible cards upon the green baize table to which he was permanently attached, while a masseuse writhed and groaned and told the air it was one hell of a terrific lover. Elsewhere a clown juggled; a bear wearing a grin and a mortarboard recited the multiplication tables; a bearded analyst leaned back in the chair to which he was bolted, looked at the ceiling and said, ‘Suppose we talk a little more about your father …’; a brown lifeguard murmured, ‘Interesting girl like you needs a few swimming lessons’; a black shoeshine boy practised eye-rolls; and a man with an oil-can in his hand did nothing at all during the time it took Roderick to recognize him as Pa.

  ‘… dedicated machines so far, but wait!’ said Mr Kratt. ‘Wait. Bub, I mean Doc, by the time we’re ready to roll on this leisure centre of yours, we figure to have a set of good all-purpose boys and girls that’ll wipe the floor with anything the competition can come up with. Like suppose you find one day you got too many girls in the sauna and not enough caddies, you just switch ’em right over – like that! – change of tapes takes maybe a minute apiece – and away they go.’

  ‘Sounds good, sounds good.’ Dr Welby allowed his glasses to slip even further down his nose, which had reddened perceptibly. ‘But what about special skills … mechanisms … I mean a sauna doll has to …’

  ‘But that’s the point, see, all our boys and girls are gonna have everything. Everything, see? Close as we can get to the real article, and that is pretty goddamn close. You tell him, Ben.’

  Ben stopped doodling cube-headed creatures with stick arms and legs. He sat up. ‘Well, you see we’re planning to bring a former colleague of mine into the R&D division. This is a guy who I guess knows more than anybody in the world about official – artificial intelligence. This guy is the, the Edison of robots. Like the Wizard of Menlo Park himself, he mainly works alone –’

  ‘Wizard of who?’ Dr Welby reached once more for the decanter. ‘Look if this feller is so important, why don’t you have him already?’

  ‘He’s sick, he’s in the hospital. You know how some of these highly-strung geniuses are,’ Ben began. ‘Nervous –’

  ‘You mean he’s nuts?’

  Mr Kratt grinned. ‘Don’t worry, Doc, he can deliver the goods. Just needs a little rest and he’ll be good as new. I figure six months and we’ll have him ready to roll, right Ben?’

  ‘Right. And –’

  ‘Look all this sounds fine, fine, your company goes steaming ahead only what’s in it for me?’

  ‘Just getting to that Doc.’ Kratt flipped open a portfolio. ‘Putting it on that basis, we propose a straight stock trade, share for share, for forty-nine per cent of your firm. We bear all the costs of installation and maintenance of course, you still keep control of your operation and get a piece of our action. And you get a seat on our board, with the usual salary and options.’

  Dr Welby shook his head hard. ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘No catch. No catch at all. Only thing is Doc you’re in a hell of a good position to help us out with another little product running into some snags, our Jinjur Boy talking edible, seems you were the examining physician in twelve outa these eighteen problem cases –’

  ‘He means the eighteen who died, eighteen kids who died,’ Ben said, from behind the knuckle he was gnawing.

  ‘Oh. Oh! Well you can’t expect me to do anything unprof –’

  ‘Hear me out, let’s not get excited.’ Kratt’s thick fingers gripped the table, and the doctor’s eye was drawn to that pinball ring. ‘Anybody can lose a few files, get a lapse of memory now and then … that’s all we need.’

  ‘What about the death certificates? Dr De’Ath did all the autopsies, he’s the one found mercury in all –’

  ‘Forget him. Time this town gets through with him, he won’t be able to find mercury in his own thermometer. They got him in jail right now, attempted murder.’

  ‘What, him? That’s just ridiculous, some mistake – who would he ever –?’

  ‘Some priest name of O’Bride. Housekeeper swears this De’Ath knocked him out and cut his throat.’

  ‘Oh, that. Listen he told me all about it, Father O’Bride had a fall, respiratory trouble so Sam I mean Dr De’Ath performed an emergency tracheotomy –’

  ‘Look, I believe you.’ Kratt laughed. ‘Only the old housekeeper, how do you think it looked to her? Here’s the priest lying knocked out with a cut throat, here’s some darky standing over him with a bloody knife – yes and she says she heard them quarrelling earlier, yelling about blood, blood!’

  Welby gulped his drink. ‘I know all about that too. Father O’Bride was trying to buy whole blood for some reason, only he wanted to get some kind of cheap imported blood without a health certificate. God knows what diseases it might be carrying, malaria, flukes, hepa –’

  ‘Sure, sure. Thing is, this O’Bride was jobbing our products all over the State, begins to look like De’Ath was trying to put the bite on us. right? Little extortion? And then O’Bride wouldn’t play ball … Like I say, time this is over, who’d believe anything De’Ath says?’

  Indica looked out over a sea of new hats, fresh hair-styles, and hostile glasses. How could they hate her so much even before she’d said a word? Was it her youth? Her Western clothes? You’d think they’d never seen dreds before, or Fyre-flye false eyebrows, or a bolero cut to expose one breast – she should have dowdied down for them, too late now.

  ‘Machines,’ she began, ‘are only human …’

  Gradually th
e hard faces began to soften and settle into sleep.

  The flowers on Violetta’s hat brushed the ear of Mrs Dorano. ‘Delia, I haven’t got my glasses, but is that woman really showing a bosom?’

  ‘I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of looking. No sense of decency.’

  ‘No sense of shame.’

  ‘No more sense of shame than – than Ma Wood there.’ Mrs Dorano craned around to glare at her. ‘A cabbage! Ma’s wearing a cabbage on her hat!’

  ‘Oh I wish I had my glasses!’

  ‘You can see everything she’s got! Right up to the armpit, I can see a little birthmark there, looks like a dumb-bell –’

  But Violetta Stubbs had leaned over the other way to hear what Ma Wood was whispering:

  ‘… seems a little fond of Goldwynisms if you ask me, “Clocks and watches are just a waste of time,” “Cars get you nowhere” is that the way she thinks or just an affectation?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Mrs Smith whispered back.

  ‘There she goes again, “Electric blankets can really get on top of you.” I think it must be unconscious, all this about how utility companies just want to use us, how owning a big heap of machines can be heavy … I mean if she wants to say we’re all too dependent on machines, why not just say it? Instead of all this “Do your own dishes, give ’em a break”, and how a free machine is an investment in America’s future …’

  ‘Shh!’ said Mrs Dorano, and went on to Violetta, ‘Imagine having a birthmark like that and showing it off along with everything she’s got!’

  ‘Birthmark?’

  ‘Right under her arm there, like a little dumb-bell – what’s the matter?’

  Violetta Stubbs stood up and tried to push along the row of crossed legs, handbags, discarded shoes, shopping and knitting. ‘I’m not well, I … gotta go …’

  Too late. Indica Dinks stopped speaking to stare at her.

  ‘Mother!’

  ‘Son, I knew you’d figure out that cipher in about two minutes flat. So I guess by now you know everything.’ Pa set the oil-can down on a reception desk.

  ‘Pa, I didn’t work out the cipher at all. I just – saw Ma doing all that witchcraft stuff down by the lake and I knew somehow she was bringing you back to life.’

  ‘Life, ha.’

  ‘So I knew you must be hiding out somewhere like this. Because I mean the undead –’

  ‘Undead? Witchcraft? But son, all you had to do was turn the darn cipher upside down!’

  Roderick tried to call up a mental picture of the message, turned upside down, while he watched the receptionist. She picked up the oil-can, placed it to her ear like any smiling suicide, and said, ‘He’ll see you in just a sec, Mr – is it Getty or Goethe?’

  ‘Pa, maybe you’d better explain.’

  ‘Maybe I’d better!’ Pa sat down for a shoeshine and, while the eye-rolling contraption buffeted away at his bare feet, he began the story.

  XXIII

  To make men serfs and villeins it is indispensably necessary to make them brutes … A servant who has been taught to write and read ceases to be any longer a passive machine.

  William Godwin, Political Justice

  ‘Started as a joke,’ said Pa. ‘Well you see right after the war everything seemed like a joke. Listen, during the war they had these cookies with chocolate on them, only they couldn’t get any chocolate so they started putting brown wax on them. That seemed like a joke, you know? Here were millions of people killing each other, and they still managed to find somebody to sit painting brown wax on cookies. And Hitler was a joke. Trying to get half the world to stick its head in the oven and turn on the gas … okay maybe it’s not funny but you gotta admit it’s kind of strange.

  ‘And after the war it kept getting stranger. If anybody had a dream, no matter how stupid or futile it was, they went right out and tried to live that dream. It’s as if the whole world just sat down with some crummy old pulp science fiction magazine, read it cover to cover, and then tried to live it. On the cover of that old magazine you’ll see a picture of this city of the future: big glass towers, surrounded by tapeworm roads, coil after coil wound up over and under each other. And on the roads are strange-looking things that must be high-powered cars. And in the air above them, a few helicopters, and maybe the blast of a silver rocket taking off for the moon. And if you see any people they’re wearing plastic clothes, and you know they live on vitamin pills and special artificial foods. Inside the magazine you find out how they live: watching television, killing their enemies with death-rays, running everything with big computers, robot servants, millions of household gadgets doing all the work, atomic power harnessed to turn the wheels of industry, jet planes zipping passengers New York to Paris in a few hours – I probably left out a lot of stuff, but – but just look around you. We got it, all of it. Every glass tower, every tapeworm road, every moon rocket and computer and nuclear power station – everything in the magazine. A joke, by God, and now it’s beyond a joke!’

  ‘Well I still don’t see –’

  ‘Because just think back to the guy who wrote all this crap. Here he is, back in the forties, some poor broken-down science fiction hack. Here he sits at his broken-down L. C. Smith, cracking out his crap for a penny a word – a cheap dream, you agree? So he hammers out maybe a hundred stories a year, maybe six novels too, all just to eat and pay the rent. No and he doesn’t even have enough ideas of his own to fill the quota; has to ask his wife for another giant electronic brain, another moon rocket. This guy, I mean he probably has dandruff, he’s overweight, he can hardly drag himself to that oilcloth-covered kitchen table to face the L. C. Smith every day.

  ‘And he created our world! We have to wear the damn plastic, eat the ice-cream substitutes, live and work in the glass towers. Just because he happened to write it down – imagine! What if the poor slob, what if one day he wrote brass instead of glass, would we all be living in brass towers now? It’s a joke all right.’

  Roderick shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘I don’t see how that explains –’

  ‘Las Vegas? Disneyland? The Muse-suck in this factory? Episode Ten Thousand of Dorinda’s Destiny? Supermarkets selling Upboy, a special food for geriatric dogs? Electric acupuncture? Talking gingerbread? Believe me, it explains everything. Every blessed damned thing. Uh, let’s go outside. I don’t think I can take any more of it here, with that receptionist pouring oil down her nice new dress

  They made their way along the yellow road to the entrance, through the security room (where Roderick’s possessions came back to him), past the docile dogs and out at the gate. Pa sat in the grass and contemplated his oxblood feet, or perhaps only the lights of town beyond them.

  ‘We killed him in 1950. We killed him with a death-ray, and blew up his old L. C. Smith with an H-bomb. That poor old hack was right in the middle of another crappy story, still behind with the rent, and we killed him.’

  ‘I don’t get you, Pa.’

  ‘Let me put it another way. One day in 1950 he’s hammering away at the keys, still spelling it glass instead of brass, while his wife is stalling the landlady and maybe trying to work out some new way of combining canned tomatoes, ground beef and elbow macaroni. The next day, they’re both dead. The police will find two little piles of clothes on the shores of Lake Michigan. One pile is weighted down with the L. C. Smith. And a note, got to have a note, double-spaced with wide margins …’

  ‘You mean you changed your names and moved to Newer?’

  ‘Son, we changed everything. We became Paul and Mary Wood. We dropped everything from the old life – all we brought along were a few pulp magazines with our stories. We changed our personalities – that looks like Doc Welby’s car.’

  Roderick looked up to see the lights of a strange, high-powered car moving away from the executive gate of Slumbertite, off down the tapeworm to town. ‘I wonder what he was doing up here?’

  ‘Anyway, now you know most of our story. See we thought we could maybe ma
ke up for it if we could just have a kid, kids. Somehow we couldn’t, no matter how much we kissed and cuddled … Anyway that’s why one year we fostered a nice little boy called Danny Sonnenschein.’

  ‘Dan Sonnenschein!’

  ‘Same guy, yup. Trouble was, he got up in the attic one day, got into these old pulp magazines. Before you knew it, he’d gone and read a story of ours. We called it, “I, Robot”.’

  Roderick tried to look at him, but Pa’s face was in shadow. ‘You mean you were Isaac Asimov?’

  ‘Nope. And we weren’t Eando Binder, either. Nor anybody else who wrote “I, Robot”. Believe me, nobody ever heard of us, nobody even remembers the name of that pulp magazine.

  ‘Yes it was our story little Danny picked on, that twisted him some way – I don’t know, set him to dreaming or – well. You know the rest. Next time we heard from Danny he was grown up, he’d invented you, and he was in trouble.’

  ‘Is that how I came to stay here?’

  ‘Yep, another mistake. See, son, we hoped we could still change the world back, undo some of our damage, take back our terrible joke. Through you. If only we could make you learn how to be human …

  ‘So what we did, first we burned the old pulp magazines. Then we tried to teach you everything we knew about life. Like I said, a mistake.’

  ‘Pa, I don’t see it was such a mis –’

  ‘Because we knew nothing. Nothing at all. Few scraps of logic, a song, coupla half-assed ideas about art … a joke or two

  Roderick felt compelled to protest again. ‘Pa, I think you and Ma haven’t done such a bad job. Heck, you only had a robot to begin with.’

  ‘A joke or two. Another mistake we made was money. Spent all we had and a whole lot we didn’t have yet. Then a whole lot we never would have. We cut a few corners – well hell, we stole. I stole. And when it began to look as if the law was catching up with us, with me, I had to die. Because if they finger-printed me, they’d find out who I was, and there we’d be, right back in the middle of that terrible joke again. You see? You see, son?’