The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  ‘Yeesss!’ screamed the child, and breaking free of the old woman’s grasp, bolted from the room.

  ‘The audience is over,’ she announced. ‘Those who wish further study must come another day. You have so far reached the dandelion level of consciousness. Like the fuzzy little dandelion, you have much to learn. Those who double their gifts of sincerity next time can be raised to the level of violets.’ She started to leave, then added, ‘Oh yes, and if you want a mantra, it costs extra.’

  Most of the suppliants sat around for a few minutes, discussing the glow they now felt, the definite glow. Luke, however, looked worried.

  ‘Rickwood,’ he whispered. ‘I got a bad feeling about this place. I think maybe these people are out to get me.’

  ‘Out to get all of us,’ Roderick agreed. ‘I think there’s never been such a blatant fraud.’

  ‘No, I mean to get me. To take over my mind. Do me a favour, will you? I saw a couple of those rainbow women go into a room off the hall there. When we leave, could you listen at their door?’

  ‘Why don’t you listen yourself?’

  ‘Rickwood, don’t be naive. When I listen, they never say anything important, naturally. Will you do it or not?’

  On his way out, Roderick put his ear to the door Luke had pointed out.

  ‘Another nail gone, Christmas! Would you believe it? I got a good notion to tell Mr high and mighty Vitanuova to go dig up his own darned dandelions. I mean, they never told me in Vegas I’d have to dig up weeds.’

  ‘Yeah, well, they never tell you anything, do they? Jeez, one day I was a Keno runner at the Desert Rat, the next day here I am putting rubber sheets on that brat’s bed, what kinda life is that?’

  ‘The money ain’t bad.’

  ‘No, the money ain’t bad.’

  ‘But I sure miss Vegas.’

  Out on the street, Roderick caught up with Luke, who was standing on one leg.

  ‘Any joy, Rickwood?’

  ‘No joy. They’re just people.’

  Luke shook his head. ‘Then either they got you bamboozled too, or else you’re in with ’em. Sometimes I think there must be so many people plotting against me that I oughta just relax and let ’em all cut me up.’

  Roderick decided to tell Luke what was bothering him. ‘I feel the same, Luke. Listen, today I heard a computer talking about me like I was a messiah or something. Now I wouldn’t mind being one, but messiahs always get nailed.’

  ‘Always. Nailed, riveted and especially screwed.’

  ‘But listen, that Roxy theatre fire was deliberate, and you know, I saw the men who set it, they were trying to padlock all the doors of the place. They were pasting paper over the glass doors so people inside couldn’t see the chains and padlocks.’

  ‘And you figure they were after you?’

  Roderick hesitated. ‘Seems impossible. But I could swear I’d seen one of these two guys before. At Mercy Hospital, he got mugged out front and I helped him inside. What if – I don’t know, I guess I’m getting paranoid.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with paranoia, Rickwood. At least the paranoid knows who he is.’ Luke stopped standing on one leg and began taking giant steps. Roderick followed, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.

  ‘Rickwood, do you suppose you could really be the new Messiah? I could use a new religion.’

  ‘Oh sure, yesterday a New Luddite, today a follower of Dodo, tomorrow something else Luke, why don’t you just settle down and found your own religion and your own political party?’

  ‘That’s what Ida said. Maybe I will.’ Luke stopped and looked at the sky, as though expecting a sign. ‘Maybe I will! Sure, I’ll start a religion that’ll set the world on fire! This is America, Rickwood, America! Anything can happen here!’

  ‘That,’ Roderick said, ‘is just what I’m afraid of.’

  XX

  Mister O’Smith rolled and re-rolled the brim of his Stetson between his genuine and his mechanical hand. ‘Are you sure he can’t see me? ’Cause Mr Frankelin and me was old buddies – up until he sent me this telegram saying I was fired.’

  The receptionist’s smile was fixed. ‘He’s very busy, Mr – Smith is it? Smythe?’

  ‘It’s O’Smith, O’Smith, goldurn it, one week I am doing important work for this company, top secret work under the personal supervision of KUR’s highest durn executives – next week nobody even remembers my name! What the Sam Hill is going on here?’

  The fixed smile remained trained on him. ‘If you’ve been fired from a position here, you’ll have to take it up with Personnel, Mr O’Smith.’

  ‘I am not a KUR employee, I am – I was a private consultant hired personally by Mr Kratt. Mr Kratt himself, the big boss!’ The hat-brim was being rolled very tight. ‘And if I don’t get some kinda explanation from somebody, I’m gonna get mean.’

  The smile faltered a little. ‘I’ll see if – if someone can talk to you, Mr O’Smith.’ She pushed buttons and spoke urgently, and in a minute he was shown into the office of Ben Franklin.

  At first he thought someone else had taken over the office. The heat and smell were overpowering. With the outside temperature in the nineties, the air conditioning was turned off and the figure behind the desk was cowled in layers of heavy knitted wool, as grey as his face. The figure was a shrunken, aged version of Ben Franklin. A grey stubble of beard blurred the regularity of his usual face; only the glacial eyes remained.

  The room too had undergone some terrible upheaval. There were papers and books scattered over every surface including the carpet, which also showed cigarette burns and coffee stains. There was a tray of dirty cups full of ash on the desk and another on the file cabinet; a forgotten peanut butter sandwich lay curling on a plate where a fresh cigarette smouldered.

  ‘O’Smith, come in, great to see you,’ the apparition croaked. ‘Grab a chair just put those anywhere.’

  The fat cowboy took a chair. ‘Mr Frankelin, what I wanted to know was why –’

  ‘Baxendall, Baxendall, see it anywhere? Baxendall’s 1926 catalogue of calculating machines and instruments, must be here somewhere. Ah, here. O’Smith, these are great days, great days! I feel as though the universe is about to crack its great bronze hinges and pour forth the ecstasy of the New Age as pure music!’

  ‘Yes sir, well what I was wonderin’ was, if –’

  ‘And to think I worried for so long that we might be bringing forth the wrong quality, negation instead of affirmation, death instead of life.’ Franklin’s chuckle ended in a terrible dry cough. As though to staunch it, he reached for the cigarette with fingers the colour of old peanut butter. ‘Of course death is really there all the time, Jeremiah knew that.’

  ‘Jeremiah? Look if you’re not feeling so well, I –’

  ‘The prophet Jeremiah. He and his son created a golem, and they wrote in the wet clay of its forehead ’emeth, TRUTH, so it came to life. But all it wanted to do was die it begged them to kill it before it could fall into sin. So they erased one letter of the inscription to make meth, DEAD, and the golem died.’

  ‘Uh, yes sir.’

  ‘So you see? The program for life contains death. The affirmation contains the negation. Yes means no!’

  ‘Uh, sir.’

  ‘You don’t understand, do you? Well, neither did Aquinas, neither did Aquinas. He said, if it did already exist, the statue could not come into being. Aquinas said that. But did he say it before or after he smashed the effigy? That is the question. Hamlet’s binary. And did the effigy already exist before he smashed it? Albertus Magnus worked on the thing, you know, for thirty damned years. That wonderful automaton, thirty years abuilding and Aquinas smashing it in an instant. They called him the Swine of Sicily, and there he was, ready to destroy whatever he could not understand. First Luddite, Aquinas. Showed the way for all Luddites: the common man’s revenge on common objects. What thou canst not understand, smite! And what Aquinas couldn’t understand was the statue that already existed before it came into being, righ
t? The original created from memory, right?’

  ‘Well if you ain’t feeling so good, maybe I –’

  ‘I mean, have you ever asked yourself why people make statues at all? Why puppets, dolls, effigies, mannequins, automata? Why were the Chinese building jade men who walked, the Arabs refining clockwork figures, why did Roger Bacon spend seven years making a bronze talking head? What is the motive behind all of our search for self-mockery? What is the secret clockwork within us, that makes us keep building replicas of ourselves? Not just physiological replicas, but functional replicas: machines that seem to talk or write or paint or think – why are we driven to building them?’

  O’Smith seemed about to try an answer, but Franklin cut him off.

  ‘The answer has to be genetic. Our genes are pushing so hard for self-replication that we can no longer satisfy them as other species do, by simple procreation. They demand also that we find a way to build artificial replicas, proof against starvation and pain and disease and death, to carry the human face on into eternity. Don’t you see? We’re only templates, intermediaries between our genes and the immortal image of our genes.

  ‘Yes, that has to be it. I remember once Dan telling me how his creation had no body, just content-addressable memory. Only now do I know what he meant: Roderick was no body, no machine. Roderick was and is a proportion. A measurement. A template.’

  ‘Speakin’ of Roderick, Mr Frank –’

  ‘The creature has always been there, within each of us, don’t you see? God damn it, O’Smith, we each contain the complete instructions for building a robot because we each contain the complete instructions for building a human being! The whole program is within, “For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.” The creature has to create itself, out of its own memory!

  ‘Once I understood that, the rest was easy. No need to design a program piece by piece, it was all there, complete, inside me. Gnosis, holy wisdom was there all the time, like death-in-life. Paradise was never lost at all, it lies within.’ Again the terrible dry cough. Franklin lit another cigarette. ‘And I have done it, O’Smith, I have done it! I have created the New Adam. Poor Victor may have been blasted in these hopes, yet I have succeeded.’

  ‘You, uh, built a robot?’

  ‘I designed a soul. The lab people are taking care of the, the hardware. Dr Hare’s team will be running tests any day now. When the tests are over, so is my work, my, my worldly, my … work.’

  ‘You been working pretty hard, Mr Frankelin?’

  ‘Day and night, day and night. This fever keeps me awake anyway. It’s, sometimes it’s as though God was firing me in the divine forge, that I might glow with holy –’

  ‘Well, now you mention firing people, I just want to get squared away with you about this here telegram you sent me, cancelling this whole search for Roderick and no explanation or nothing. I mean just because you go and build your own robot I don’t see why you have to leave me high and dry there, Mr Frankelin.’

  ‘I, well yes, sure, yes. But did you find Baxendall – did you find Roderick?’

  ‘Course I did, I told you all about it in my weekly report, I came within an inch of grabbing this here robot for you. I even had the danged cuffs on it, only a car hit us. That was last winter, and I spent every minute since tryin’ to pick up this robot’s trail again, every minute! And now just this week I picked it up again, you just gonna tell me to let go? You tellin’ me to just walk away?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Company decision, not mine. It just wasn’t cost-effective to keep on with –’

  ‘But goldurn it, Mr Frankelin, I made a lotta commitments on the basis of that contract, you can’t just go and fold out on me like this, I mean I got some fancy new prostheses to pay for. Dang it. I am a professional, not one a your two-bit outfits like the Honk Honk Agency, I worked hard and – Mr Frankelin?’

  But the haggard face, having awakened from its stupor to deliver holy wisdom, now lost all expression once more, as Franklin contemplated a book page:

  we take a pigeon, cut out his hemispheres carefully and wait till he recovers from the operation. There is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot execute; he seems, too, after some days to execute movements from some inner irritation, for he moves spontaneously. But his emotions and instincts exist no longer. In Schrader’s striking words: ‘The hemisphereless animal moves in a world of bodies which … are all of equal value for him … Every object is for him only a space-occupying mass …’

  When he next looked up, the visitor was gone.

  O’Smith grinned and winked at the receptionist on his way out, but inside he was feeling real mean. Okay, goldurn it, if they wanted to play rough, they had the right hombre. Real funny coincidence how just when he located Roderick, they suddenly lost interest. And all of a sudden Mr Ben Frankelin becomes a hotshot inventor, too? It was all plain as pigshit on a plate, they was fixing to grab the durned robot and claim Frankelin invented it. Nice move, too, cut out O’Smith with a coupla grand plus expenses, cut him right outa that ten grand contractual fee. KUR gets everything, O’Smith gets nothing.

  Okay, then, everybody plays rough. Only one way to make sure KUR never cleans up on this deal: destroy the durned robot. Shoot it up until it was worth maybe ten cents at some junkyard, that would show ’em.

  As soon as he started thinking about destruction, Mister O’Smith felt good again.

  In the common room of the Newman Club, Father Warren looked up from the checkerboard where he had just been willing his hand to pick up a checker – and then, before it moved, cancelling the order. Who was that coming in? Yes, that smirking young man who’d tried to wreck the panel discussion, calling himself a robot and then streaking, damned grinning – but no, Father Warren willed forgiveness. Fraternity boys would be fraternity boys, and the one with him was wearing a Mickey Mouse mask. They sat down at the other end of the room. The ‘robot’ smiled at Father Warren, and that priest, willing forgiveness, smiled back. The insolence! Smile and smile and yet be a robot … the risus sardonicus with which bronze Talos greeted his victims …

  Father Warren now willed himself to return to his task, verification of the fact of free will, as he prepared his article, ‘Machine Function and Human Will: a Final Analysis.’

  His starting point was the classic debate between Arthur Samuel (inventor of the checker-playing program that could beat its inventor) and Norbert Wiener. Wiener contended that machines ‘can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers, to which Samuel replied:

  A machine is not a genie, it does not work by magic, it does not possess a will, and, Wiener to the contrary, nothing comes out which has not been put in, barring, of course, an infrequent case of malfunctioning … The ‘intentions’ which the machine seems to manifest are the intentions of the human programmer, as specified in advance, or they are subsidiary intentions derived from these, following rules specified by the programmer. We can even anticipate the higher levels of abstraction, just as Wiener does, in which the program will not only modify the subsidiary intentions but will also modify the rules which are used in their derivation, or in which it will modify the way in which it modifies the rules, and so on, or even in which one machine will design and construct a second machine with enhanced capabilities. However, and this is important, the machine will not and cannot do any of these things until it has been instructed how to proceed. There is and there must always remain a complete hiatus between (i) any ultimate extension and elaboration in this process of carrying out man’s wishes and (ii) the development within the machine of a will of its own. To believe otherwise is either to believe in magic or to believe that the existence of man’s will is an illusion and that man’s actions are as mechanical as the machine’s.*

  But what followed from this? Mentally he essayed a few trials, attempting to make some effort at tackling the undertaking:

  Yet why is it so many human lives seem unwilled, pathetic examples of garbage in, garbage out?


  Then is man a genie? Does man work by magic? The answer must be an unqualified and resounding …

  If the intentions of the machine come necessarily from the programmer, human intentions might be seen similarly to come from God. The Ten Commandments, for example, engraved in every human heart. Yet human volition can and does subvert Divine Law, just as machine volition …

  Not what he wanted. Not at all what he intended.

  Roderick noticed Father Warren, looking bluer around the gills than usual, sitting contemplating a checker game as though there were a figure nailed to the board. The Luddite priest was today wearing a plain cassock, as were now seldom seen outside Bing Crosby movies. But he did smile and nod at Roderick, in a kind of automatic way.

  ‘Okay, Dan, you just sit right down here, maybe I can get you a coffee from the machine or – you want a peanut butter sandwich? Here, I brought a stack of them, help yourself.

  ‘Probably you’re wondering what kind of place this is, well it’s the Newman Club, named after this English Cardinal who was I guess in favour of “cumulative probabilities”, whatever that means, sounds like he was adding them, but you can only do that if they’re independent and you want the probability of at least one of them happening, look you want a coffee or I could get you a Coke? Oh, don’t worry about that; that’s just the air conditioning, it always makes a funny noise starting up.

  ‘You know I really looked forward to this. I always saw us like this, just sitting down and having a long talk, I mean without all the doctors and nurses hanging around. Because there’s a whole lot of questions I have to ask you, I mean you’re almost like the nearest thing to a father – you sure you don’t want a Coke? Eating all that peanut butter must be dry, and hot inside that mask, look I don’t think they’d mind if you took it off here, you’re not in the ward where I know they want you to wear it, but here – no okay, okay, take it easy, no one wants to take your mask. You know it’s funny but I feel like I saw a Mickey Mouse mask like that before, long ago or in a dream or, I don’t know but it wasn’t just any old mask, it was important, very important. I don’t know why, I thought maybe you knew the answer. I just remember seeing those empty eye-holes, nobody inside, nobody inside looking out …