by John Sladek
Roderick scratched his head. ‘Sure okay, but what about the syphilis?’
‘Syphilis? Nobody said anything about –’
‘Right here in your cipher, Pa. “P WOOD IN SOUP (SYPH) SO NOW POSSUM NUMB MUMMY HYPNO-BOUND & SHUN MOB!!!’ I mean you can’t make it plainer than that, and later on there’s something about pox. too, that’s –’
‘Let me see that, where –?’ Pa snatched the paper and held it up to the light of SLUMBERTITE NEVER SLEEPS. ‘Pox that’s nothing, just the words of the song, you don’t want to pay no attention to that. It says Bow wow too, but that don’t mean I got fleas.’
‘Okay but –’
‘But this SYPH – well that is just your Ma’s bad spelling, the word is supposed to be SYLPH. Your Ma never could spell.’
‘Sylph? How can you be in the soup with a sylph?’
‘Not with, son. Like I said, your Ma never could spell, never should of been a writer. Sylph was a poor word for woman anyway.’
Roderick gasped. ‘The wedding picture, that’s what was wrong with it. Pa, you were the bride! Ma was the groom!’
‘Well it’s no reason to break into italics, son. Like I said, it all started off as a joke, just trading clothes now and then – son? You all right?’
Ben was packing up the papers.
‘No hurry, Benny, pour us another drink.’ Mr Kratt bit the end from a cheap cigar and settled back. ‘Goddamn trip was worth it, eh bub? Yes sir, Welby’s our boy. De’Ath better be our boy too, if he knows what’s good for him. Yes sir, a productive damn trip. We oughta lock this one up in a month or so, kick a few asses in our so-called lobby down in Lincoln, don’t see why we can’t be showing a profit this time next year on this little enterprise. You know bub, times like this makes me feel goddamn good.’
‘Yes sir.’ Ben was noticing, not for the first time, the large white square teeth of his employer. They always reminded him of a row of tombstones, and now …
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’
‘I just … wish you wouldn’t grin like that sir, no offence, but –’
‘Grin if I goddamnit grin if I want to, hell we just made a killing here you want me to look sad about it?’
‘No sir but, just thinking of those kids, those dead –’
‘Death certificates, damn it didn’t I tell you not to worry? We’ll beat that, sure it’s a pain in the ass but we’ll beat that. Nothing’s gonna stop us, bub, because nothing can stop us, we’re on the move.’ He grinned again, lighting the cigar. ‘And sure I feel good. Hell, here I am fighting on the last frontier in the fucking world. And winning, sure I feel good.’
‘Winning.’
‘Because that’s what business is, bub, the last frontier. The last place where you can still take hold of the world and change it, make it – make it –’
‘Make it in your own image?’
‘Better, I was going to say. Make it what you want. See everyone else, the world is just something that happens to them, might as well be watching it on TV, right? But for me the world is something you – something you can get. Sure it’s risky. You gotta fight. You need guts and luck and, and imagination. But hell, isn’t it worth it? Just tell me that, isn’t it worth it?’
‘Yes sir.’ Ben found a TV set behind a panel and, after staring for a moment at his dark reflection in the screen, turned it on. It was going to be a long evening. Once Mr Kratt had a few drinks and started talking about the last frontier …
‘Why shouldn’t I feel good? Whole damn business is devoted to one thing, you know? One thing: giving people pleasure. Giving people pleasure. So why shouldn’t I get some pleasure too …?’
The TAPE button brought a canned promotion for the factory: ‘Our advanced integrated control system is continuously optimized by real-time goal-seeking –’ while rows of robot receptionists trundled along with their desks, ‘– routines implemented throughout a hierarchy of processors to attack such performance-characteristic problems as the utilization of modified control algorithms –’ each Roberta the Receptionist wearing more false hair than the automaton chess-playing Turk could have concealed beneath his ample turban. The Turk too had been seated behind a desk (when the Baron von Kempelen first exhibited him in Vienna, shortly before the American Revolution). And his desk had been a necessity, since it concealed that most perfect of chess-playing mechanisms (together with its lunch and piss-pot).
‘– including diagnostic programmes and multi-level alarms and interrupts, debugging and redistribution of modifications within each software sub-package –’
‘… because damnit, pleasure is our business, always meant to make that the group slogan, pleasure is our business. Greatest pleasure for the greatest number …’
Ben nodded agreement and changed channels, stabbing a button at random. Seemed to be something about the French Revolution, torches, billhooks and the laughter of toothless hags.
‘– on both a local and a global level, evaluating each task via sophisticated assessment procedures and providing next-level feedback from supervisory processors. Feasibility analysis, an integral part of each task, is similarly –’
Back to the mob scene, what was it, Tale of Two Cities? Probably get a shot of Madame DeFarge any minute now, knitting shrouds … funny thing was, the real revolution was going on all the time behind the scenes, the Jacquard loom with its punched cards weaving a new pattern, clicking away, a far far better thing it did than anyone had ever done … burial shrouds for human thought, maybe, but very good burial shrouds.
Or was it a different mob scene? The camera zoomed in on faces by torchlight, not at all the faces of Jacques One and Jacques Two and Madame DeFarge, but the faces of men with good teeth, men wearing sweatshirts and golf caps, windbreakers and glasses, baseball caps and twill, crewcuts and army fatigues …
‘Mr Kratt? Sir?’
The camera pulled back again, to show a security fence, and a German Shepherd snapping at a moth.
‘Listen, Mr Kratt?’
‘No, you listen, trying to tell you something damn important.’
‘But listen, there’s a mob heading –’
‘Sure, sure, now just you turn that thing off and pay attention. Bub, you know what my dream is?’
‘No sir.’
‘You know what it is?’
‘No sir.’
‘You know –?I’ll tell you what my dream is. What I’d like to see is, KUR Industries having the world franchise, see –’
‘Yes, sir, now couldn’t we –?’
‘The world franchise, exclusive, on pleasure. Datajoy! What we’d have is like a wire running right into everybody’s head, right into the old pleasure centre. Datajoy! And as long as they pay their lease, we give ’em all the juice they want, see? Datajoy, call it –’
‘Yes Mr Kratt, now –’
‘And by God if they don’t pay, we rip that wire right outa their head! Haha, whatya think a that? Hey? Whatya – leggo my arm, what the hell here?’
‘We’ve got to leave, sir. Now. There’s a mob on the way with torches – I don’t know, maybe the parents of those kids we – those kids who – I don’t know who they are!’
When they had left, the room showed little sign of human occupation. A few chairs out of line, an empty decanter, three glasses on the long table (in one, the faecaloid stub of a cheap cigar floated in fine old Scotch). The cleaning-machines waited a precise number of minutes, then went to work.
‘It’s me they want,’ said Pa. ‘But they’ll have to come in and get me.’
‘Pa, I mean Ma’am, maybe they just want to burn the factory down, you know like the old house in Franken –’
‘No, it’s me. But at least I can choose to make my last stand, among all the wonderful guys and dolls, Roberta the Receptionist, Bert the Bartender, all the only true friends I ever had. Bye, son.’
‘Wait, Pa. I wanted to ask you –’ But she was gone.
Close up, the mob looked as good as anything in F
rankenstein. Roderick spotted pitchforks, axes, garden rakes and electric lawn-edgers as well as rifles, ropes, torches. Dr Smith the dentist seemed to be unarmed until he got close enough for Roderick to see him wield a tiny dental hook.
Doc Smith was not a well man. Later on, when they got around to hanging Roderick, he would try to insist they use his patent dental floss.
XXIV
It was the best of time, it was the worst of time. Choose one.
The pigeon hesitated before the two windows, trying to get it right this time. Finally it pecked the left-hand window. Almost immediately the window lit up, and a tiny feed pellet rattled down into the magic cup. From the pigeon’s point of view it was a triumph of the righteous: yea, God doth reward those who keep His commandments and His rites. Before the next trial, the pigeon worshipped, stepping three times to the left, twice to the right, and lifting its head in turn towards each of the four upper corners of its prison. The pigeon was not aware of the computer.
From the computer’s point of view, the cycle had brought a special instruction into force. It knew only that it had generated the pseudo-random digit o, and that this matched the input o (from the Skinner box). The instruction therefore was to add 1 to the number T (trials), add one to the number H (hits) and calculate P (probability). The computer was aware neither of the pigeon nor of Dr Tarr.
Dr Tarr sat in his new office watching the printer. From his point of view, the test was on the whole a qualified success. Pigeons were precognitive.
Or at least this pigeon, now and then, seemed uncannily able to peer a split-second into the future, determine which plastic window (of a randomly-selected pair) would deliver the goods, and peck that window. Now and then.
Now and then, that was the trouble. Not enough hits, not near enough to convince those Dr Tarr needed to convince. There was NASA, first of all, paying $150,000 towards his expenses; expecting results. Likewise the University, providing not only computer time, but an empty office and lab in the Computer Sciences building. And how about the parapsychology journals, the professional associations waiting for the paper that could make him, career-wise? Finally of course the professional sceptics: he saw them as hyenas, forever trailing the herd of parapsychologists, forever waiting for some weak individual to fall behind. Ready, yes ready to bury their bloodstained snouts in his entrails …
More hits, damn you! he willed at the bird, more hits! Unaware of his telepathic command from the office, the creature in the laboratory preened, digging its beak deep in iridescent neck feathers to chew at a parasite. For the moment, it was aware of nothing else, not even of the cruelly erratic God it had learned to love.
Tarr, acutely aware of his own predicament (for not since Mary of Nazareth had anyone risked so much on the behaviour of a single pigeon) turned to the printer, whose ultimate line still read:
TRIALS = 980 HITS = 502 P < 0.444
Computer error? Sure, damn thing probably wasn’t working at all! Poor pigeon probably pecking away, hit after hit and nothing coming through. He examined the cable running from the computer to the printer, experimentally unplugged it and plugged it in again.
TRIALS = 981 HITS = 503 P < 0.425
More like it. More like it! Funny how it (he repeated the operation) clocked up a hit every time you jiggled the … you could almost … not quite ethical maybe but … well, just to enhance the figures a little, to emphasize what we already know …
TRIALS = 1126 HITS = 648 P < 0.0000000406
The score was getting too sensational, time to stop, but Tarr kept on, tickling just one more reward from the printer, just one more. Had God at that moment been a Skinnerian psychologist, peering in through the office ceiling, He’d have been pleased to recognize His guilty creature here crouched at its task. Working along its reinforcement schedule. ‘Learning’, if not growing wise.
No one was peering in. He looked over his shoulder at the door at nothing, no one, nothing but the door itself, newly painted to hide some old stain that showed through nevertheless, a shadow like a clutching hand.
The mob was making so much noise so many almost city noises Roderick could hardly hear men leaning together like glass buildings falling over follow a skeleton to Junior’s Discount Cameras God call him up every time lousy jackpot blade heavy split up when electric .38 for LAW & ORDER raping housekeepers nigger priest bites dog pills bustup treats me like shit .38 bike overtime MASSAGE THERAPY dolls of Devil’s Island escape from jail and bust into factory Lewd-ite revenge calling for a rope unless we all go back to the Idle Hour boys have a beer and talk it God fight city hall needles bitch freak t-shirt no shit the Klan? What Klan?
‘Klan, shit, we’ll be our own Klan!’
‘What?’ Another man seemed shocked. ‘Take the Klan into our own hands?’
‘I’m serious now Jake, I’ll be the Kladd, you be the Kludd, let old Carl there be the Grand Goblin.’
‘Goblin? That sounds dumb as hell, you know?’ ‘Sure does. Forget all that Klan shit, let’s just teach this motherfucker a lesson!’
‘Why can’t I be the Imperial Wizard, though?’
‘Will you listen to that? Will you I mean listen-to-that?’
‘We gonna hang somebody or what? How about that nigger in the jail? How about him?’
‘Busted out didn’t he?’
‘Hell he did. He –’
‘Yeah but listen, I wanta be the Wizard or I don’t be nothing.’
‘If he’s still in jail who the hell raped them women at the Meeting Hall? I heard –’
‘Bullshit man, they ain’t raped they just got excited.’
‘– perial Wizard, goddamnit is anybody listening to me?’
‘Piss on all this, I’m going to the Idle Hour.’
This seemed a good idea to others, and indeed the whole mob made its way – arguing, shoving Roderick almost as much as they shoved one another — towards Main Street.
‘No but seriously if you’re gonna form a Klan Klavern you –’
‘Will you listen to that? Will-you –?’
‘Yeah see Miss Violetta Stubbs they found out she’s got a kid!’
‘Aw Jesus doesn’t that make you sick? Nice old lady like that raped by a black –’
‘No listen –’
‘I say we hang the bastard right here in front of the Idle Hour. I say we teach him a lesson!’
‘Piss on that I’m going –’
And in a moment, they were all gone, leaving Roderick alone in the street. Immediately the sheriff’s car drew up, flashing all its lights: red, blue, green, tangerine, ochre and plum.
‘Get in, Wood. I’m taking you in – for your own protection. No, in the back.’
Roderick climbed into the cage in the back, and allowed the sheriff to drive him the thirteen yards to jail.
‘County’s too damn busy, you know?’ Sheriff Benson led him inside and snapped on the handcuffs. ‘Like we had a riot earlier at the Meeting Hall, Mrs Dorano trying to throw rocks at Miss Violetta, can you beat that? And now this. Hell I didn’t hardly get time to see Hollywood Squares, hell of an evening.’ He kicked Roderick into a cell, hauled out a blackjack and began beating him carelessly around the face.
‘Ouch! Look is this – ow, this for my own protec – ouch! My own protection? Because I, ouch, you take off these cuffs I could protect myself …’
‘What?’ The sheriff had not been looking at his victim, but through the open door at the TV in his office. Someone was trying to name nine brands of beer in thirty seconds. Sheriff Benson looked at the weapon in his hand. ‘Sorry, son. Just gets to be a habit. I guess.’ Slamming the cell door, he added, ‘Hope I can still count on your support come election day?’
Roderick was not surprised to find a black man in the next cell, even though the man was not wearing faded overalls nor playing a harmonica.
‘Hi man. My name’s Roderick Wood. What’s yours?’ Ignoring him, the man continued taking his own temperature. ‘I’m in protective custody. For my o
wn good. What are you in for? Oh, I hope you don’t find this paint on my face offensive. No insult intended, man. See what it is is mourning. See my Pa died – he’s not really my Pa, in fact he’s not really anybody’s Pa, he’s a woman. Only I didn’t know that, when he looked at this gas bill for a million dollars and just keeled over. Only now I find out he’s not dead and he’s not a he either. Now he lives I mean she lives in the factory. So when I thought Ma, who really isn’t a woman either she’s a man who used to write science fiction that all came true, I thought she was doing witchcraft but it was only scientific stuff to revive Pa. Boy was that ever a shock! I mean last time I had a shock like that was when these gipsies kidnapped me and sold me to this carnival where I was supposed to tell fortunes. Duking, they called it. You know that was about the only time I ever went out of town anyways, oh except when Ma and me went to the city to get me a new eye, this burned-out store only when she left me there I got pretty scared because here was this same carny guy with a pinball on his finger, wouldn’t you be scared? And I didn’t find Ma again until later when I was in one of these two limousines that crashed into a art gallery –’
‘Really?’ The man held the thermometer up to the light. ‘Been seeing a lot of movies have you, sport?’
‘I used to watch them on TV a lot, when I was living with these people in Nevada I think it was only the guy beat me up with a hammer –’
‘Subnormal. As usual. Still say I’m coming down with something, maybe that virus thing that’s going around … I don’t know … “Physician, heal thyself” – Ha! If I could heal myself I wouldn’t be a physician, I’d be a miracle-worker. The name is De’Ath, by the way. Dr Samuel De’Ath.’
‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Roderick Wo –’
‘Yeah I heard you. A robot trying to break into the movies. Do me a favour, will you, look at my throat? Can you manage the light and the tongue depressor with those cuffs … Good. Now I say Ah … see anything?’
‘It’s all pink! I thought it would be, well more –’
‘Pink hell, is it red? That is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question!’
