The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  Quick as a flash he snatched up Cedar’s gun and, levelling it with both hands, he worked the trigger. Bang! Bang! He shook me off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the chest, and presented the revolver at my head. He fell to one side against a wall, a slug whispering as it tore past him. Suddenly shot after shot rang out in succession. Special Agent Fox was wounded and fell, but the concentrated fire which all four FBI men poured into the telephone booth made mincemeat out of Johnson. ‘Bang!’ went a pistol. The chopper raked the room swiftly from end to end and the air filled with plaster and splinters. Not so far overhead, an ME-109, pinned by searchlights, suddenly broke out of cloud cover and swooped in.

  ‘Wake up you! Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!’ The red face of Mr Danton was glowing at him through the hatch, over an unpardonable heap of bowls. ‘Five minutes I been watching you, you washed one dish, what the hell is dis? Just answer me that, what the hell is dis?’

  There was no answer; Roderick could only keep his eyes down and work harder until Mr Danton went off to find a waitress without a hairnet or a cook putting too much parsley on the potatoes, until the hatch slid closed and the violence could begin, Dacca-dakka-dakar! and Kerang! silent slaughter amid the screams of ordinary business.

  The hatch slammed open and a waitress in Wedgwood blue dumped in a trayload of bowls before passing on to scream at the cook over the steam table:

  ‘Picking up, picking up! Dave? That’s two Chow-downs and one Upboy, a chopped duck liver together with a Mister Frisk hold the gravy … Dave, that’s only one Chow-down, I ordered two, come on, come on, the customer’s waaaiiting.’

  Roderick could see the cook cursing and dishing up, almost flinging food over the high steam table where waitresses were visible only as hands and blue rabbit-ears.

  ‘Ordering a chef’s special … side of fried shrimp …’

  ‘I got no shrimp, shrimp finish, kaput!’ the cook screamed. Like everyone else here, he seemed unable to move anything without slamming it down, to say anything without screaming. When Roderick had first come to work here, he’d imagined that somehow the customers were causing all the noise. After all, Danton’s Doggie Dinette did cater for mainly high-class and pedigree dogs, well-known for their constant yipping and snapping. Could it be that humans were catching this canine hysteria and transmitting it to the Dinette kitchen, as a kind of psychic rabies?

  Not at all. Dave the cook (in a rare quiet moment) explained: ‘Everybody yell in kitchen, in every kinda rastorunth across over world, is it were? Good kitchen, lots yell. Bad kitchen, no yellings. No yellings, waitress drop tray, insult castomer. Cook burn finger, cut off eye. Bad.’

  But Roderick never got used to the noise. Whenever there was a lull in his work, he would step out into the alley to sit on a garbage can and meditate. Sometimes he would have a quiet conversation with Allbright.

  Allbright was a garrulous drunk who wandered often into this quiet alley to piss, to drink or now and then to search the garbage cans. But he was never too busy to stop and talk, as now:

  ‘Well well well, if it isn’t our friend, the automatic dish-washer. Still claiming to be a robot? I forget your name.’

  ‘Roderick Wood. And I am a robot.’

  ‘Yes yes well who isn’t? Chateaubriand said he realized he was only a machine for making books, we’re all poor damned machines for some purpose or other, some pathetic, useless … Even you, washing dishes for dogs. Nothing wrong with that, honourable profession as any. Don’t let ’em look down on you, kid.’

  ‘The dogs?’

  ‘Honourable profession as any, skink sexer, awning historian, salad auctioneer, you stick to it. Learn your trade. A man with a trade is going somewhere. He’s going over to the other side of town to fix some poor goddamned machine. Only he needs the bus fare.’

  Roderick said nothing. Allbright appeared to doze for a few minutes, then said, ‘Anyway, I’m a poet.’

  ‘Anyway?’

  ‘And that gives me the right.’

  ‘What right?’

  ‘You name it, that gives it to me.’

  ‘I’ve never met a live poet before,’ Roderick said, not that Allbright looked fully alive. ‘I thought all poets were dead.’

  Allbright almost looked at him. ‘No, you’re thinking of the other people. All poets are alive, and that gives them every right.’ He turned and shook his fist at the empty alley. ‘You hear, you, you bastards! Every right!’

  Roderick watched him stagger off to fight shadows, and finally fall asleep in his usual corner next to an enormous metal bin full of rusty coathangers.

  ‘A poet.’ Roderick was impressed. Poetry! Life!

  Life for Roderick was limited in most dimensions. He worked long hours at Danton’s Doggie Dinette on a ‘split shift’. Danton cursed him and kicked him and paid very poorly, but where else could he work? He was a robot without a social security card.

  The Dinette was close to the bus station where he had arrived in the city, and not far from the ancient hotel where he watched TV or recharged his batteries, or read books from the rack at the local drugstore. Some nights he would turn off the light and pretend to himself that he was sleeping, but he was only watching the dim yellow rectangle of light over the door, listening to the groan of sagging floorboards in the corridor as people walked by in ones and twos all night.

  Most nights he simply read one book after another; he might before dawn get through two or three like Call Me Pig, Doc Bovary’s Wife, The Ego Diet, Ratstar II, God Was My Co-conspirator, Dream New Hair, Sink the Titanic!, Dragons of Darkwound, or Aversion for Happiness. He could shift easily from a spy thriller like The Pisces Perplex to a guide to courtroom-drama therapy, Make a Federal Case Out of It; and on to an unusual medical theory in Your Eyes: Do They Leak Light? They were all one-night stands, forgotten in the morning when the first stack of dirty bowls rattled through the hatch.

  ‘Sonnenschein, initial D?’ asked the hospital receptionist, and touched her keyboard. ‘No visitors except the immediate family, it says here.’

  Roderick said, ‘Well, I’m almost family.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  *

  ‘If you’re a poet, why don’t you read me one of your poems?’

  ‘Oh no. Oh no, you don’t.’ Allbright waggled a dirty finger in admonition. ‘You don’t catch me that way. Read you one of my poems? For nothing?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Against union rules.’

  After a moment, Roderick asked how much a read poem would cost.

  ‘How much have you got?’

  It added up to a dollar and forty-seven cents, exactly enough. Allbright read from the book of his memory:

  SKINNER’S DREAM

  Pigeons all over

  The window ledges of a tall building

  At sunset get down to work.

  Each must swoop to another ledge

  Where it can sit deciding whether

  To swoop to another ledge where it can

  Sit deciding whether to swoop to

  Another ledge or just sit deciding.

  That’s pigeons all over

  A gold-haired man wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses had come into the alley to look into garbage cans. During Skinner’s Dream he came up close and stopped, apparently listening. He cradled a newspaper-wrapped bundle.

  Roderick thanked Allbright. ‘That was some poem. It was real – real –’

  ‘Poetic,’ said the stranger. ‘You mind getting off that garbage can now?’

  Roderick jumped down. The stranger took off the lid and looked in. ‘That’s better.’ He dumped in his bundle and banged on the lid. ‘Must be just about the only empty garbage can in this part of town.’

  Allbright nodded. ‘I guess they recycle a lot, at the Doggie Dinette here.’

  ‘Interesting trend, petfood recycling,’ said the stranger. His face was long and pock-marked, but his glittering gold hair offset these imperfections. ‘Probably affects the grow
th potential of the entire edible foodstuffs industry, though we’d need a thoroughgoing econometric breakdown before we could apply any cogent significance test, engaging other retail foodstuff trends and of course the changing shape of pets.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Roderick. ‘Well, I think I hear Mr Danton yelling for me.’

  ‘You work here?’ said the stranger. ‘Must be fascinating. Unique opportunity to explore at first hand the full rich pattern of human-canine bonding mechanisms in a feeding situation.’

  ‘With a little polishing,’ Allbright said, ‘you got a damned good routine there: add maybe a structuralist tap-dance …’

  ‘Well so long,’ said Roderick. He heard the stranger say something to Allbright about the role of refuse surveys in pre-archaeological studies of any dynamic social mix …

  Mr Danton was waiting for him. He twisted Roderick’s arm and the robot felt pain. ‘See dem dirty dishes?’

  ‘Yes sir. Ouch.’

  ‘I pay you to wash ’em, right?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘I pay you well. I treat you right. You get good hours, pleasant surroundings, friendly co-workers, a fair boss. Right?’

  ‘Ow – yes sir.’

  ‘I treat you like a crown prince. I think of you like my own son. My own son. And all I ask is you wash a lousy coupla bowls now and then, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay, I’m glad we had a little talk, cleared this up.’

  Mr Danton threw Roderick down and kicked him across the greasy floor. ‘Next time you’re fired.’

  When Danton was gone, Dave the cook had a quiet laugh. ‘Watch out he kill you, kid. Old Danton he deeply crazy.’

  ‘Kill me? But why would he kill me? For a few dirty –’

  ‘No thing like that.’ Dave guffawed again. ‘See you look quite one little bit like his son Lyle. You look just like him, yes. Only thing, Lyle got birth-smirch on face, under eye like tear’s drop. Yes? Boy do them two hate. One time Lyle come here, old Danton grabbing cleaver and enchase him, say he gonna depecker him, hee hee hee, Lyle not come back. You watch out, kid.’

  ‘But why should he want to, to kill his own son?’

  ‘Hee hee.’

  Roderick didn’t understand. That evening he turned over the pages of a book on human behaviour. He learned that crowds were lonely, people were one-dimensional, and inner cities were dying; he himself was probably alienated. Real alienated. Boy, he was so alienated it was unbelievable. The only people in the world who cared about him were Ma and Pa Wood, back in Newer, Nebraska. There hadn’t been any letters from Ma since the Newer nuclear power station accident. The accident had been caused by music. It seemed that someone had decided to install 24-hour-a-day music at the power station, and had chosen the new Moxon Music System. This did not rely on local records or tapes, or even on music run through long-distance telephone lines. Instead, the music would originate in a distant city, bounce off a special Moxon satellite, and be picked up by a large dish-antenna on the roof.

  The roof had not been made to bear the extra weight of this antenna. It cracked, throwing the weight of the building on to the reactor shell. Now the entire town was fenced off. The government would say only that ‘no one lives there anymore.’ No wonder a guy felt alienated. Life was like something on TV.

  Roderick turned on the TV to watch an old movie in black-and-white. It was raining, and two people stood in the rain embracing. The woman pulled back from a kiss and said: ‘But don’t you see, my darling? You’re not a nobody. You’re the man I happen to love.’

  Rain dripped from the man’s hat-brim. ‘No, Mildred, your father’s right. I’m no good for you – I know that now. Oh sure, I hoped and dreamed a girl like you would come along. Even a nobody can hope and dream. But this is real life, kid. You just happened to pick the wrong guy.’

  ‘Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that.’ She clung to his sleeve. ‘Listen, you big lug, if you’re a nobody, then so am I – and proud of it! I won’t let you go. I can’t. You see –’

  The scene was cut short to make way for a man in a bright plaid jacket who smiled and shouted details of a sewer-cleaning service.

  Next day Mr Danton asked Roderick to fill in for one of the waitresses.

  ‘Do I get to wear the rabbit ears?’

  ‘You wear what I say you wear, okay?’ Mr Danton’s hand roamed over the cook’s table and came to rest on the handle of a cleaver.

  ‘Okay yes, yes sir.’ Wearing a clean shirt and a black plastic bowtie, Roderick glided out to meet the customers.

  Danton’s Doggie Dinette went to great lengths to treat dogs as humans. A table could only be reserved in a dog’s name, and when the dog arrived at the front door towing its owner, a hostess would pretend to greet the animal and lead it to its table. The tables were very low and bone-shaped and for dogs only; owners sat near their pets but out of sight, in alcoves, so that the restaurant seemed populated exclusively by Yorkies, Corgis and toy Dobermanns. That was how Roderick first saw the dining room, full of dogs wearing bibs.

  III

  May I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet – if you are handling an editor or a politician, it is superfluous advice. I take it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: ‘Quoiqu’elle soit très solidement montée, il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine.’

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

  Noon. The apostle clock chimed, and out of its innards came a parade of tiny wooden figures. Their faces and clothes had long since dissolved in wormholes; they now looked less like apostles than bowling pins.

  Automatically, Mr Kratt lifted his snout to listen. His little black eyes lost their hard focus for a moment, and his powerful hands stopped throttling the pages of a company report.

  ‘You know, bub, my old man left me that clock when he died. I ever tell you about my old man?’

  Ben Franklin, checking his own watch, shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Er, what was he like?’

  The hard focus returned to Mr Kratt’s little black eyes. ‘He was a bum. A professional failure. A dummy. If I had my way, people like him would be turned into fishfood. At birth.’ He gripped the company report again in a stranglehold. ‘At birth. Damn it, I never could stand cripples …’

  He cleared his throat and looked at Franklin. ‘Anyway, where were we?’

  ‘The patent leaseback deal with –?’

  ‘No never mind that now, I want to go into this goddamned learning robot gimmick. You and Hare promised to deliver this thing six months ago, how long are we supposed to carry you? So far I don’t see anything on paper even.’

  Ben Franklin fingered his upper lip as though stroking the moustache he had not worn for years. ‘I can explain.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Well I’ve been having trouble assembling the right research team. Hare’s a good enough research director for ordinary stuff, but this is special. I wanted to bring in this colleague of mine from the University, Dan Sonnenschein. He –’

  ‘I know, I know, he’s the guy who really invented this gimmick.’

  ‘Well we all worked on Roderick, I don’t think it’s fair to say any one of us really invented – but Dan yes Dan was certainly more, more familiar with some of the programming problems. So I wanted –’

  ‘Sure, sure, but we settled all this last year, didn’t we? I gave you the go-ahead, hell, you’re the vice-president in charge of product development, get this Sunshine guy, get Frankenstein, get anybody, only get moving, we need that gimmick.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling it a gimmick, Mr Kratt.’

  ‘Call it a fucking pipe dream I wouldn’t be too far off, would I? Damn it you and Sunshine aren’t at the University now, this is real life. I know you say you built a prototype and it got lost
or something, but all I get are explanations, excuses, you haven’t even got your research team together, damn it, bub …’

  ‘Yes sir, but you know I did mention that Dan was in the hospital, his nerves –’

  ‘You said he was in the looney ward over at the U Hospital but so what? All these research geniuses are nuts, look at Dr Hare now. Trying to make pancakes with phonograph records on them, no idea what he’s doing or why, we just wind him up and point him at a problem. So why don’t you just spring this pal of yours outa the looney ward, stick him on the payroll and –’

  ‘Frankly I don’t think he’s well enough to work for us, not yet.’

  ‘Great, so we sit around waiting, do we? While the competition cuts our nuts off, that’s not my idea of running a company, bub. KUR Industries is a growth company, damnit, and growth needs ideas. See that?’ He suddenly thrust out a thick hand. Ben Franklin flinched, but Mr Kratt was only showing him a ring: a heavy gold claw mounting a steel ball.

  ‘That’s a pinball from my first machine, bub. One stinking machine in a dark corner of a greasy little diner in a neighbourhood so crummy the winos wouldn’t puke on it. And I built up from there – more machines, an arcade, a chain of arcades, a carnival, saunas, leisure centres, bowling alleys, business machines, pleasure machines, fun foods – and all the time I had to feed the company with ideas. Ideas. Hell, I even hired you as an ideas man, and then suddenly all the ideas stopped.’

  ‘Mr Kratt, I’m sorry if –’

  ‘Because you drag your feet, bub, you keep on dragging your feet. Look at our funfood venture, Jinjur Boy, you dragged your feet over that. Best damned idea in the whole industry, a gingerbread boy with built-in microcircuitry, a talking toy and one hundred percent edible, how could it lose? Only you had to drag your –’

  ‘But Mr Kratt, you can’t always hurry research like that, we did have problems with those mercury batteries –’

  ‘Problems? Only problem we had was a bad press, a handful of kids get a bellyache and right away everybody wants to blame us.’

  ‘But some of those kids ate Jinjur Boys and died, others still have brain damage from mercur –’