Nemo

by Ron Goulart

  “Ahem. Ahem.” The Jakesens’ robot bar had rolled into the center of the room, a cylindrical mechanism, highly polished. “I am prepared to serve a second, and final, round of drinks before the evening’s True-False MechanoTherapy session starts.”

  “Another nearvodka,” said Haley.

  Douglas Fine lit a fresh celery-cig, coughed, and said, “Double pseudobourbon on ice.”

  His wife, Dory, wrinkled her nose. “Nothing more, thanks.”

  Ted shook his head. “Nope, nothing for me either.” The first one had hit him unexpectedly hard.

  Cuz McAlpin said, “The same as before, make it a double.”

  Wally Klennan said, “I guess I’ll have just another spruce beer. You’d better not, maybe, Connie, have anymore, since you’re getting over the bug.”

  “Yes,” agreed his wife, “I’ll pass.”

  After taking all the orders the robot bar bowed politely and began to make the drinks.

  “You guys in ZeroPet,” said Fine to his host, “ought to use more re-ams.

  Lot less risk when you—”

  “Zombies,” cut in Jakesen, “can’t do the work of humans.”

  “Damn it, don’t call them zombies, Bruce.” Fine lifted half out of his lucite rocker. “A heck of a lot of my time at RezTech is devoted to getting the public to—”

  “Relax, relax,” suggested McAlpin. “A weekend at one of our Torchy Bathhouses is what you all need. Then you wouldn’t be so compulsive about doing PR for your respective companies every hour of the livelong—”

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing?” asked Haley as the robot handed her her drink.

  Glad McAlpin said, “But Cuz does it so pleasantly, with that familiar crooked little smirk of his. You really don’t mind.”

  “Exactly,” said McAlpin. “Life is too short to take seriously. Eat, drink, be merry, and visit a Torchy Bathhouse once a week.”

  “Whorehouse,” said Jakesen. “That’s what those Torchy setups really are.”

  McAlpin shrugged, chuckled, accepted a new drink. “Don’t care what you call ‘em. Long as you visit ‘em. Whorehouse, cathouse, bathhouse. That’s how I feel about public relations. The important thing is to get our name into—”

  “You guys all really feel close to your jobs,” said Ted, “really identify.”

  “Don’t you?” Jakesen stood up. “In my case I’m absolutely certain I’m doing a valuable and useful service for our twenty-first-century society. With the food supply the way it is, the concept of a pet is no longer—”

  “Propaganda,” said Haley. “You aren’t telling us what you feel.”

  “Oh, believe me, he does feel that,” said Jessica. “I can swear to that.”

  “Even so,” persisted Haley, hands circling the glass which rested on her knee, “I believe he’s simply—”

  “Almost nine,” said Jakesen. “We have to get going with our TF session. Barney, will you withdraw now and send in the TF machine, please?”

  “Yes, sir. Right away.” The robot bar made a deeper bow before exiting. Wally said, “I didn’t know you called that gadget Barney. Funny name for a robot.”

  “Yes, it is a funny name,” said his wife.

  “Don’t start him,” warned Jessica, “on that.”

  “When I was a young man,” started Jakesen, “growing up in the Washington-Oregon Territory, I used to hang around at a—”

  “Save it for the session,” suggested Haley.

  Ted leaned toward her. “Let him tell the story if he wants to.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, he’s the—”

  “No, no,” said their host, “Haley’s right. No reason why I should monopolize.”

  A square man-high mechanism, six-wheeled, came gliding into their midst. It was a gunmetal color, its front rich with dials, gauges, and tiny lights. “Everybody ready for another self-helpful night of it?” the TF machine asked. Its talkbox was down underneath it, which gave its voice an odd, echoing quality. “Then, pray, let us begin.” A door in the machine’s side popped open, several thin wires came spinning out. The ten people in the Jakesen living room each took a wire. At each wire’s end was a synskin bracelet.

  When everyone had a bracelet attached to a wrist, Jakesen said, “Might as well get going. Last week we agreed the topic for tonight’s session would be childhood once again.”

  “I’m really getting tired of everybody’s childhood,” remarked Fine.

  Honk! said the machine. “That’s false!”

  “Caught you that time, Doug,” said McAlpin.

  “Maybe you’d like to start this off, Doug,” said Jakesen.

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  Honk!

  “All right, okay, I’ll go first, then.” Fine settled back in his lucite chair. “I grew up in Canada, as you know. I don’t remember much about my early years or—”

  Honk!

  “Well, there are a few things. . . .”

  Ted stopped listening closely. He was feeling somewhat groggy. “Only one drink,” he said to himself inside his head. “Maybe it’s the drink on top of those antitension capsules I borrowed from Haley. I really feel drowsy.

  Maybe it’s the stupid job. Funny the way these guys seem to love their work, defend it even. I don’t feel that way at all. Oh, the FRB is okay, but . . . but what? What else could I do to make a living? When I took those National Job Center aptitude tests right after college they said I was suited for this kind of work. And all those FRB application exams and psych tests confirmed it. Still if that’s so, why am I so—?”

  “Your turn, Ted.”

  “Hmm?”

  “We’re going counterclockwise tonight,” Jakesen told him.

  “Oh, yeah.” Ted yawned, rubbed at the synskin bracelet. “Childhood . . . the most vivid impression I have about childhood is this . . . is this very peaceful street. The houses are . . . they’re not the sort of houses we live in. They’re two stories high most of them, square, with big wide porches and shutters at the sides of the windows. It’s a beautiful summer day and I’m walking along this quiet, peaceful street. People are sitting out on their porches, dogs are sleeping in the shade of big elm trees. The odd part is . . . I’m wearing this old-fashioned nightgown. Yeah, this old-fashioned nightgown—”

  Honk!

  “I’m walking along the street, in this long white nightgown, the people don’t pay me any mind. Nope, they just go on ab—”

  Honk!

  “You’re telling us a falsehood, Ted,” said Jakesen, “according to the machine.”

  “No, all this is true.”

  Haley pressed her hand over his. “Ted, you’d better—”

  “All this really happened to me,” insisted Ted. “Oh— and I was carrying this suitcase. Doing some kind of errand for my parents, although they didn’t tell me what was in the suitcase. That’s odd, too, since they usually—”

  Honk!

  “Better stick to the rules, Ted,” said Glad McAlpin, “or it’s not going to do you any good in terms of therapy. When the machine catches you in a lie you—”

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  Jakeson said, “But the machine—”

  “The machine’s wrong then!” All at once, the heavy machine shot up from the floor. It jumped nearly three feet straight up, then went slamming down and fell over on its side with a wham.

  “Hey!” said Wally.

  “Hey!” said his wife.

  “Oops, there goes my bracelet,” said Fine.

  The cords connecting the group to the machine were yanked and tangled by its fall.

  Unfastening his bracelet, Jakesen crouched beside the toppled machine. “It’s never done that before,” he said. “What made it jump like that?”

  “Some kind of malfunction obviously,” said Fine. “Nothing works right anymore.”

  “I’ll be glad to take a look,” offered McAlpin. “I can fix anything.”

  “What made it jump like that?” re
peated Jakesen.

  “I did,” said Ted. But he said it to himself, not to any of them.

  Chapter 5

  More rain today, splashing down on the gritty beach beneath Ted’s office windows, chopping at the gray, scummy water.

  “. . . positive identification and location of Nils H. Welker, wanted in Texas-2 for being a year and a half in arrears on his solar-roof payments . . . ,” one of the desk-top readers was chanting.

  Ted watched three forlorn gulls huddled at the water’s edge. What he’d done last Friday night at the Jakesens’, he still hadn’t been able to explain, to account for. “Maybe it really was the stupid machine going blooey,” he suggested to himself. “Yeah, but it worked for the rest of the night, once they got it back on its feet. No, I’m pretty certain I did something to it, something to make it jump. I didn’t even touch it, though, which doesn’t make any—”

  Bleep!

  “Hey, there’s that kid in the nightgown again!”

  The drawing had appeared, and halted, on one of the ID boxes. Ted stared at it, slumping back in his chair.

  After several minutes the door in the wall opened. The handsome Jay Perlberg stood there. Ted had been programmed not to recognize him. “Come along, Nemo,” he beckoned.

  Ted stood, walked to the door in the wall. There was a gradually slanting ramp on the other side of the door. He stepped across.

  Perlberg told him, “A fairly simple assignment for you today, Nemo.” Nodding, Ted followed him down underground.

  Agent Joe Roscoe slit the food pouch, sniffed at the sandwich inside. “That at least smells like corned beef,” he said. “Maybe you’re too young to remember real corned beef, but I sure do. I been after those farbs in the Total Security Agency cafeteria to stock a different brand of fake corned beef for months, and they finally gave in. We’ll see what this stuff tastes like. You want my imitation kosher dill?”

  “No, thanks,” replied Ted. When he was Agent Nemo his voice was a shade deeper.

  “Look down there, will you? That’s where I used to live when I was a kid, right there where all the smoke is billowing up.” Agent Roscoe, a thick-set man of forty-five, was sitting with his legs spread wide so he could look down through the circular observation window in the floor of their self-flying skycar. “Biggest sewage-reclamation facility in New Jersey now, used to be my hometown. There was a deli. . . .” He took a bite of his sandwich, thought about it. “Almost, but not quite right.”

  Ted sat straight in his chair, hands folded. When he returned to New Westport, got back to his desk, he would remember nothing of this trip.

  After a few more thoughtful bites of his sandwich Roscoe said, “This whole task this morning is a waste of manpower. Simple little grab job and TSA uses two of their best men.”

  “Stupid all right,” agreed Ted.

  “Not going to be much fun either.” Agent Roscoe finished up his sandwich. “I’m not saying we have to get rid of some counter-gov farb every time out, but we ought at least to grab something significant.”

  “Really doesn’t make much difference to me.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not career TSA like me.”

  “Target,” announced the control panel of their skycar.

  Roscoe peered down between his legs again. “Yeah, there’s Princeton. We can start circling Professor Ackroyd’s lab.”

  The ship began inscribing a tight circle through the late-morning sky.

  “Never do get used to this part,” said Roscoe, shaking his head. “It’s a terrific stunt, no matter how many—”

  “Quiet until we have the notebook,” Ted told him. “You get the box ready.” Relaxing slightly, he closed his eyes. “Dr. Ackroyd isn’t in the lab.”

  “No, he’s supposed to be at a germ-mutation convention in Pittsburgh, which is why—”

  “The notebook we want is inside the wall safe.” Ted could see these things, see the professor’s windowless cube of an office, the bright orange desk, the safe concealed in the wall.

  “Okay now, let’s get the book.”

  A few seconds passed, then the red plyocovered book was resting in the palm of Ted’s hand.

  “You teleks are really. . . . Well, back to business.” Roscoe took the book, fed it into the copybox next to his seat.

  Ding, said the copybox. The original notebook popped out of one slot, an almost exact copy out of another.

  Roscoe returned the original to Ted.

  Ted rested the professor’s notebook on his knee, closed his eyes once more. The book vanished. “It’s back in the safe, right where it was.”

  “Let’s go home,” Roscoe told the skycar as he dropped the facsimile notebook into an opaque plyosack. “Very smoothly done, Agent Nemo.”

  “Yep,” agreed Ted.

  Putt! Prrrutt! Putt!

  “. . . the star-spangled wienie has to be maintained as a symbol for kids to look—”

  “Dad, I think someone’s here. I’ll talk to you again soon.”

  “If I’m still alive by then.” Woodruff, in a two-piece bizsuit and his Uncle Sam hat, started to sob onto his desk. Haley said, “I’m sure you will be.”

  Prrutt! Putt! Prrutt!

  “If you’d only kept up your dan—”

  “‘Bye, Dad.” Haley shut off the call.

  The sputtering mechanical sounds welled up, died out in front of the house.

  “Wait’ll you see him this time,” remarked the voice of the computer. “Just answer the door.”

  On the themal path was a lanky, feathery-haired man who was hopping on one foot. “I went ahead and purchased the new pair, Haley.” He unscrewed his second wheeled foot, replaced it with his indoor foot. Holding the set of chromed, candy-striped feet up, he said, “More horsepower, and better looking, too.”

  Haley said, “You’re sure, Dr. Waggoner, all these new feet of yours aren’t some sort of test for me? What I keep wondering is maybe I ought to react more honestly.”

  Tipped very slightly to the right, her cyborg therapist came into the living-room area. “I debated about these little silver wings sticking out on the sides,” he said as he placed the power-feet on the floor inside the door. “A slight bit flashy, yet there is the mythological hint . . . what would you say to me if you weren’t being polite?”

  Hugging herself, Haley sat in Ted’s chair. “Well, you’re a splendid therapist, and I guess you’re helping me, but people with a lot of different feet unsettle me.”

  Dr. Waggoner unscrewed his left hand, dropped it into his pocket, and attached a recbox in its place. “Good. What else?”

  “The identity thing,” the girl said. “People with too many spare parts, it’s tough telling who they really are.”

  “Been talking to your father today?”

  “Yes, he called to talk about hotdogs,” answered Haley. “He’s still threatening to kill himself if I don’t come back to look after him. Sales on the star-spangled wienie are down 6.3 percent this month, which always depresses him.”

  Dr. Waggoner opened a trapdoor in the seat of his pants, lowered extendable chair legs, and made himself comfortable near the girl. “The star-spangled wienie is the one which plays our national anthem when you bite into it?”

  “No, you’re thinking of the gloryburger. The star-spangled wienie is star-spangled. Dyed red, white, and blue, with stars and stripes.”

  “Will he kill himself?”

  “No, not a chance.”

  “Forget it, then.”

  “Still he might. . . . I’d hate to fail him, too.”

  “The way you’re failing Ted?”

  “Ted’s still having those dreams. Do you think it could be because he suspects where I really am nights?”

  “Do you?”Haley shrugged her left shoulder and hand. “That’s not the cause of his troubles, I don’t think, but I ought to . . . be able to help him.”

  “What’s Ted doing meanwhile?”

  “Oh, I know, he should help himself, but. . . .” Both shoul
ders and hands went into this shrug.

  “If I didn’t worry and preoccupy myself with Ted and my father, then. . . .” Dr. Waggoner waited for her to complete the sentence.

  Buzz! Buzz!

  “I’ll let that go,” Haley said. “Where was I?”

  “You remember.”

  Buzz! Buzz!

  “Ought to take this call,” suggested the voice of the house. “It’s Colonel Beck.”

  “Colonel?”

  “The Way of Life people promoted him again.” Haley tried to keep her attention on the therapist.

  Buzz! Buzz!

  After an open-mouth sigh, she said, “I have to answer this.”

  Chapter 6

  Everything smelled of chocolate cake. The smell came pouring out of the scentpipes overhead, rolled along the plasticene corridors of Evriman Center to engulf the customers.

  A retired cyborg directly ahead of Ted clutched at his chest with his aluminum hands. “Oy, my allergies,” he gasped as he sank to his knees.

  Ted ran to his side. “What’s the matter?”

  “Respiratory complications,” gasped the old man. “Allergic to chocolate. . . .”

  “Apparently the scentpipes are slightly out of whack. They should have it fix—”

  “Oy!” The old cyborg stretched out flat on the pebbled floor of the shopping-complex corridor. “My. . . atomizer. . . .”

  “I’ll help you get it out. Where is it?” Ted commenced frisking the wheezing cyborg.

  “No, no, schmuck . . . in my finger . . . built in.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure.” Ted caught up the man’s aluminum right hand. “Which finger?”

  “The red . . . fingernail. . . push. . . .”

  His bed had sprayed the wrong thing into Ted’s eyes again this morning and his vision was fuzzy. The middle-finger’s nail looked more or less red to him. Twisting the old man’s arm so the middle finger came into the vicinity of his gaping mouth, Ted pressed the tiny button on the knuckle. “Here you go.”

  A thin stream of black liquid squirted out of the fingertip into the old man’s face. “Putz, that’s machine oil.”

  “Okay, sorry. Wrong finger. How about this one?”