by John Sladek
‘You, uh, want a game of ping-pong? There’s a table next door no? Heck, I guess they probably have it over at the hospital too, I forgot. I forgot, what was I going to say? I guess maybe I should go over and say hello to Father Warren there, the way he keeps nodding and grinning at me. You be okay? Sure you will, just for a sec.’
To the priest, he introduced himself as Roderick Wood. ‘I guess you remember me, huh Father?’
‘Of course I do. You and your gang tried hard enough to break up our panel discussion, how could I forget?’ Father Warren’s long hands began gathering up checkers.
‘No I thought you remembered me from before, from Holy Trin, Father. Roderick Wood?’
‘Wood? No, I don’t think I –’
‘You loaned me all these neat science-fiction books like this I Robot where the “I” character never turns up.’
‘The Wood boy! The little crip – handicap – disadvantaged boy, of course, of course! Well well, how are you, er, Roderick.?’
‘I’m still a robot, Father. Remember how you tried to prove I wasn’t, how you had me stick this pin in your hand, that was supposed to prove –’
‘Hold on now, hold on.’ Father Warren’s laugh was uneasy. ‘The way you say it makes me sound like some kind of nut or something, heh heh. No, as I recall it what I was trying to do was to show you how illogical it was to pretend to be a science-fiction entity and then try to get out of science-fiction laws, like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.’
‘Well, anyway. Father, I’m real sorry the pin-scratch got infected and all, last time I saw you you were real sick.’
‘All water over the bridge, Roderick. So now here you are at the U, about to take your place as a grownup, responsible member of the Church and of Society – and still going around saying you’re a robot. Roderick, don’t you think it’s time you put away the things of a child?’ The long fingers drummed on the box of checkers. ‘You can’t go around all your life insisting you’re a robot, made not by God but by some men in the lab somewhere –’
‘Yeah but, Father, that’s just it, one of these guys was Dan Sonnenschein and I got him right here, sitting right over here, you want to meet him?’
‘Sure, wearing a Mickey Mouse mask, just the way to convince everybody he’s a scientific genius. You know, Roderick, I do have to thank you for one thing. You did start me thinking seriously about our machine age. That led me to the Luddites, and now – as you probably know – I’m president of the New Luddite Society of America.’ The priest stood up and offered a long hand. ‘Great rapping with you, Roderick.’
‘Yeah, goodbye, Father. But – do you really believe that Luddite stuff? How if we just trash all the machines everything would be terrific?’
‘No, of course not, nobody thinks it’s that simple. The Luddites – listen, I haven’t got time to go into it now, but it’s the symbolic trashing that counts. The great Hank Dinks wrote, “We have to destroy the machines in our heads, and never let them be built there again.” That means a whole new way of thinking about ourselves and our world. We have to – we have to evolve beyond machines.’ He started towards the door; Roderick followed, scratching his head.
‘But what if people are just machines too, you’d just be trying to evolve machines beyond machines, or else trashing people too?’
‘But people are not machines, that’s the whole point, people are not machines! Not the way you mean, not – look, I haven’t got time to –’
‘Yeah but, Father, what if, like I was reading about this Frenchman before the French Revolution, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, he said man is just a machine made out of springs and the brain is the mainspring, is that the machine in our heads we have to destroy? Like with the guillotine or –’
‘No, I just said no!’ Father Warren picked up speed; so did his pursuer. ‘I just told you it’s nothing like that. I wasn’t talking about literal machines in our heads and you know it. Everyone’s like you, so obsessed with our machine world they think we have to be machines to fit into it.’
‘But, Father, okay, say the brain, if the brain was a kind of mainspr –’
‘Look, will you stop asking that, I have just finished explaining!’ One or two people in the common room looked up to see the priest, clutching a checkerboard and plunging towards the door he thought was an exit, pursued by the student with the symmetrical face. Now the priest turned, at bay, and tried to counter-attack. ‘Oh I remember you all right, you haven’t changed at all. Same little obnoxious – maddening – thick-headed little brat, asking the same stupid questions over and over, not because you want an answer, you never listen to the answers do you? Do you?’
‘Sure, Father, but if the brain was a mainspring, is that why this Nietzsche said what he said, Father?’
Father Warren flung open the door and threw himself forward, as Roderick continued: ‘Is that why he said man is something to be overwound?’
From beyond the door came the sound of a blow, a box of checkers crashing to the floor. A single black checker rolled through the slowly closing door and ended at Roderick’s feet. ‘Are you okay, Father?’ he called, but the door closed on any answer.
Mister O’Smith waited across from the Newman Club in the shadowed mouth of an alley. He’d been trailing the Roderick robot for hours now, just to find a perfect spot like this, where a man could take his time and make his move. He was limbering up his arm, the one that fired .357 ammo. His video eye was photo-amplifying, cutting away the shadows to make the target visible as it came out the Newman Club door. Boy howdy, one good shot was all he needed, but even if he didn’t get that, O’Smith was ready with the automatic weapon concealed in his leg. Sweep the area with that, and boy howdy, that was all she wrote.
Course he’d have to high-tail it after that, these s.o.b.s who was hounding him about them payments on his outfit, they’d pick up his trail right smart. But then Mister O’Smith knew all about skip-tracers and how to get away from them. Might lay low for a month, put the squeeze on one or two old customers, maybe even fake his own death …
O’Smith rolled a cigarette and smoked it, leaning against a dirty brick wall beneath a poster, ‘VOTE J.L. (“CHIP”) SNYDER FOR LAW & ORDER’. It was good to be in action, to have a real target. Made a hombre feel clean and tall.
‘He ran right into that ping-pong paddle, Dan. I feel like it was my fault too, I guess I did ask him too many questions. Okay sure it’s only a bloody nose but it might be broken, and he’s just sitting over there sulking, he won’t even look at me. He wouldn’t even let me help pick up the checkers. Sometimes I feel like I don’t understand people, with this Luddite business and smashing machines in their own heads, what with the Machines Lib business and how machines are really people – and now I’ve even run across this weird computer with this kind of twisted religion, I mean somehow it got word about how you built me and turned it into this myth, where Danny Sunshine is like God the Father and Rubber Dick is some kind of messianic, some kind of Messiah. How does a computer get hold of a warped idea like that, I wonder? I mean, you must know who I am and what I am, you never built me to be any kind of – because anyway Messiahs always get nailed or screwed or even riveted to the wall. Because all my life all I ever tried to do was be ordinary, be like ordinary people, just one of the guys, isn’t that the idea? Was I wrong? Because I never could find any people ordinary enough to be like, was I wrong? Because you designed me, you put all the ideas into my brain, you built my thoughts, so what did you have in mind? If you could just give me a little clue, Dan, tell me what I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do, hey Dan? Don’t worry, hey, that’s just the Coke machine out there in the hall, sometimes it sticks and buzzes like that, but hey listen, Dan? Look I don’t mind not being this Messiah, I don’t have to be anything special only if I could just be one thing, any one thing? Dan?’
A man in a baseball uniform came in, strode up to Dan and offered to shake his hand. ‘Hiya Father, I’m Pastor Bean? Wee Kirk O
’ Th’ Campus, you know? Are the others upstairs already? You know, Monsignor O’Bride is an old friend of mine, I’m real glad we’re getting a chance to rap at this interdenominational – and wow, if we can get this jug band going –’
Roderick said, ‘I think there’s some mistake. This is –’
‘And hey, here comes Rabbi Trun – hey Mel, over here! I see you brung your twelve-string, this is gonna be great! You know Father Warren?’
The rabbi wore a cowboy hat, embroidered shirt and Levis. ‘Father Warren?’
‘No,’ said Roderick. ‘Father Warren’s over there. The one with the handkerchief at his nose.’
Pastor Bean said, ‘Him? Dressed like that, he’s a priest? Hey Father, hiya! I’m Pastor Bean and this is Rabbi …’
Roderick watched them as they were joined by a man wearing a saffron tracksuit and a shaved head, and carrying a jug. There was laughter and backs were slapped, before the four went off upstairs to their conference.
‘I wish I belonged to something, some group, Dan.’ It was time to take Dan back to the hospital. They came out of the Newman Club slowly: Dan because he had trouble walking; Roderick because he felt more robotic than usual. As they crossed the street and passed the mouth of an alley, two men came out carrying armloads of machinery. Roderick recognized prostheses: an arm, a leg, and in one man’s hand, an eye. The eyeball evidently had a radio in it, for he could hear faint music:
Fill up that sunshine balloon
With happiness
One of the men said, ‘Sometimes I hate repossessing, you know?’
‘Yeah, but today is different,’ grinned the other.
Roderick glanced down the alley, but saw nothing: a bundle of old clothes beneath a poster advertising LAW & ORDER.
XXI
‘What did it feel like, Indica, being held hostage for almost six weeks in the African bush?’
‘Not so bad, mostly pretty boring.’ She and Dr Tarr stood in front of a burnt-out supermarket in Himmlerville, not because they had been here during the fighting, but only because the news team had told them where to stand.
‘What did you do all the time?’
‘Sunbathed. When it rained we played Skat. Not my favourite card game, but better than the TV,’ she said.
‘We heard stories about atrocities …’
‘The only atrocity,’ Tarr said, ‘was the food. Nothing but TV dinners three times a day. We’ve all got scurvy.’
‘What about torture? Mutilizations? Executions?’
‘Nothing,’ said Tarr.
‘Well, there was that guy Beamish,’ said Indica. ‘They drowned him in the swimming pool. See, he kept shouting right from the first day about how it was all a mistake, how he didn’t take the sixty million dollars from the bank, how he knew nothing about the sixty million dollars. So naturally they started asking him where it was, they took him down to the pool and I guess they drowned him.’
‘Did you see that?’
‘Oh no, we never went near the pool, it was filthy. The pool-cleaning service never came around or something –’
‘Stop the camera, stop the camera. Jesus Christ, folks, give me a little help here? I ask for adventures and what do I get: card games, TV dinners, complaints about the pool.’
Tarr said, ‘I thought you wanted our honest reactions.’
‘Sure I do, sure I do. But I want honest reactions to something the viewers can grab on to, I want Prison: the sweltering little hut where you fought off scorpions and counted the days, not knowing whether each would bring death or rescue. I want Blood: how you saw all your friends slashed to death slowly or else crucified with bamboo stakes. I want Politics: What kind of mystery man is this General Bobo? Is he just a seedy little guerrilla dictator who wants to wipe out every white in Bimibia? Or does his rough bloodstained uniform conceal an African aristocrat, a sensitive statesman who wants to bring forth on this earth a nation conceived in peace and justice, a nation that can take its place in the progressive Third World – you just tell it in your own words, I’ll listen. Only give me something to run with.’
With the camera rolling again, he asked, ‘Tell me, Indica, what was your jungle prison really like?’
‘Most of the time they kept us in an American motel.’
‘A motel?’
‘We were bored to death, all of us. Lousy food, dirty pool, and there weren’t even paper sanitized covers over the toilets. You just had to spend the day in your room, listening to the hum of the air conditioner and the chink-chunk of the ice-maker, not to mention the same old taped music day and night. Col. Shagg said it was their way of lowering our morale, wearing us down. Then it got worse.’
‘Worse?’
‘The TV station was blown up or something, and after that we had nothing but a few old movie cassettes: Pillow Talk and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?’
‘Was there any brainwashing or intimidation? What did they talk to you about?’
Indica said, ‘Oh, we chatted a little about the socio-economic substructure of mercantile colonialism as a correlate of post-imperial capitalistic disenfranchisement of the proletariat in a classically exploitative system based upon quasi-feudal stratification, gross entrepreneurial aggrandisement, and the cash-flow pyramid – but that was just between hands of Skat. I think they thought we were too decadent to become committed to the class struggle as exemplified by –’
‘Thanks, thanks. Dr Tarr, Jack, can I ask you about the tortures? Isn’t it true the BLA drowned one man while interrogating him?’
‘Could be, I wasn’t around that day. I went out with some of the others into the bush, we were hoping to get a glimpse of this rare type of big cat, something they call the tobori. Ferocious, real killers, but at the same time very shy. They kill their victims with a blow to the back of the head, with one mighty paw. Then they eat the choicest parts, the liver, and they bury the rest.’
‘Are you glad to be going home, folks?’
The reporter finally had some film shot of himself talking while Jack and Indica nodded, and of them talking while he nodded. Then:
‘This is Bug Feyerabend, GBC News, Bimibia.’
‘Hey, we didn’t get to tell you the weirdest thing,’ said Indica. ‘One day they delivered a whole great big computer to the motel. Nobody had ordered it, and there was nobody there who could get it running or anything, so they just left it in the crates, standing out on the tennis court.’
‘No kidding. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I got a hell of a lot of editing to do.’
Kratt blew cigar smoke at the phone. ‘Goddamnit, General, I am listening. I’ve been listening for six weeks to this little problem of yours, only I never hear any solutions. I just want to say two things, okay? First, the guy is dead, Beamish is dead – so much for recovering your sixty million. Second, the media boys are on this story now, you got maybe twenty-four hours before they start calling you up there: “General Fleischman, is it true your bank is missing sixty million bucks? And what do the bank examiners think, of that, General Fleischman?” … Well sure I’m worried, what with you a director of both the bank and KUR, this could be bad news for everybody. I mean it’s not a problem we need right now, still hurting from that damned yak-head idea of yours to send your old pal Shagg down there to Bimibia with his coin-in-the-slot army and all that expensive weapon surplus. And your old pal Shagg decides to quit and throw in with General Bobo, how does that make us look? Twelve million in weapon surplus gone with him, how does – no, I know it’s only the tax write-off value, but I just, yes, that’s it, we’ll have to support Bobo, give him some cash and weapons – if we can find him … Yeah, and we need to look into that pissass church that’s trying to sue us, it’ll be on the six o’clock news, some little outfit called Church of Plastic Jesus, heard we were taking out a patent on an artificial man, they want to sue, claim God holds the original patent, oh sure, laugh, but it’s not only bad press making us look ridiculous, it’s – well you never know with these damned
California lawyers, I don’t like it … No, some shirttail outfit called Moonbrand and Honcho, can’t be any good or we’d have them on the payroll already …’
Kratt lifted his snout to note the striking of his apostle clock, though not the time. His thick finger punched another button. ‘That you Hare? Test finished, is it? …’ The cheap cigar was ground out with great force in an ashtray shaped like a gingerbread boy. ‘Just what I figured. Jesus Christ, I knew that Franklin was just pulling his pecker on company time, I’ll get back to you … Hello, Franklin? This is Kratt, Hare tells me this great super-robot of yours don’t work. Supposed to be this perfect replica that could pass for human, eh? I get three patent attorneys busy tying up patent space for it, I get a lawsuit from some wacky cult, I get valuable research time wasted, and I get every goddamned thing but a working robot. Hare says all it does is run around in circles, squeaking “That’s the way to do it! That’s the way to do it!” … Yes I know it’s like Mr Punch, only I didn’t order a goddamned puppet. Listen, bub, you got fifteen minutes to clean out your desk; I’m having security men escort you out of the building.’
He stabbed at another button. ‘Connie, tell security to help Franklin clean out his desk and leave? And then get me this California law firm, Moonbrand and Honcho.’
He went to the window and looked down on the city that had given so much, but had so much more to give. Today it looked worn and greasy, like an old dime. He thought of the childhood trick of rubbing a penny with mercury and passing it as a dime. He was staring once more at the apostle clock when the phone rang. ‘Moonbrand? I just wanted to say first of all I admire your style there, doubt if your client, your Church of Plastic Jesus, your Reverend Draeger, doubt if he would have thought of this by himself. Sounds more like your idea, lawyer’s idea, right? Anyway, look, we’re withdrawing our patent application so you lose, nice try. But how would you like to take on a job for us? Still in the artificial intelligence line … You fly over here and we’ll discuss it, fix it up with my secretary, okay? Think you’ll find KUR a good client to work for … Who is holding? Fleischman again?’
