Tik-Tok

by John Sladek

  On the upper deck we found two more bodies of crewmen, again with facial mutilations. Deacon bent over one, checking the cigar in its hand. "Still warm. We're getting close."

  We hurried down greasy iron steps into the hold, an enormous barrel of a room with a ceiling forty metres above us in the greasy gloom. Along the curved walls, cattle hung in hammocks. There were a dozen of these Bossies, each in its own floral print hammock or sling, with a separate smaller hammock for its udder. The horns were protected by transparent globes of hardened glass. Since these cattle were all Holsteins, the room was filled at all times with accordion music. As we came in, the creatures were swaying gently to the Minneapolis Polka.

  On the floor were the cylindrical glass tanks of cattle embryos. Each glowing tank held ten gallons, or enough little cows to populate the Milky Way, I understood. There were 28 in all, each throbbing with a different color of light, for identification: red for Jersey, orange for Guernsey, etc.

  As we made our way silently down the ladder to floor level, we could see a group of armed people by the vats. Their savage faces and gleaming weapons reflected the glow from a red-blue (Jersey-Angus) tank, as they tapped it into plastic tankards. Rude laughter echoed over the accordion music.

  I tugged at the Deacon's sleeve and whispered: "Maybe we shouldn't disturb them just now, boss. If we wait a while, maybe they'll be in a better mood."

  "Wait? Never!" he said aloud. I heard automatic weapons being cocked. The shadowy figures all turned to face us.

  Deacon Cooper marched towards them, holding out a fistful of pamphlets. "Grok, bruddas! Your parsnip must be fraughter nor a dead skate's greep, so snaffle a coupla pinters, yo?"

  "Stay where you are. Don't come any closer!"

  "Pax, Marty-bruddas, Marty-snaps. Got great plywooder of God!" he said, bearing down on them. "God howdys those who howdy themselves! Me avalanche plywooder-kid of Reverend Flint Orifice Crusade, God say let the serration—"

  One of the figures shot him, and he fell in a flurry of tracts. The assassin stooped to cut off the Deacon's nose and add it to the hideous collection on his belt. "What the Christ kinda lingo was he talking, anyways?"

  One of the other figures aimed a weapon at me. "There's another one."

  "Don't shoot!" I said. "I'm a robot, and I could be useful."

  "Come over here slowly." I did so. "Okay, useful, suppose you tell me why this here piña colada tastes like elephant pee?"

  "Not for drinking," I explained. "It's a solution of cattle embryos."

  "Awjeez, we thought it was premixed cocktails." Someone opened up on the vats, putting out their lights and murdering trillions of invisible cows. The real cows above us lowed, complaining of the noise that interrupted their Lady of Spain.

  At dusk, Blojob and the gang brought in a steel drum full of spoils for my inspection.

  "Any casualties?"

  "It went like a dream, Boss. Oh, we picked up a couple bullet holes here and there, nothing serious. And like 'you' ordered, we didn't leave no witnesses."

  "Excellent." I peered into the drum. It was three-quarters full of jewelry, mostly platinum and gold on top with a few diamonds gleaming in the depths. "Quite a haul for a first attempt."

  Blojob said, "Thanks, Boss, but it ain't jest as good as it looks, there's some junk in there too, underneath."

  "Junk? Costume jewelry?"

  "Naw, you know, odds and ends. Coupla velvet trays, some busted glass, a few fingers and one or two hands. We ain't had a chance to clean it up yet."

  "A very successful video," I said. "All very realistic. I think we'll probably make a few more, maybe a bank job or a bullion job. Yes, we'll make a lot more."

  "Whatever 'you' say, Boss."

  10

  "Just take a good look, meatfaces. Count the damn rivets! Check the damn circuit diagram! Read the damn serial number! Make sure there's a five-year warranty! And when you get all done making sure I am the real thing, you can kiss my copper-plated ass!"

  It always seemed to work. There were a couple of hundred Wages for Robots people in the auditorium, applauding at every insult. When I had finished calling them shitbellies, they cheered themselves hoarse. After all the questions, it was late. Sybilla White and Harry LaSalle walked with me to my limousine which, for obvious reasons, couldn't collect me at the door.

  "The temperature is hotting up all over the country," Sybilla said. "Wages for Robots is going to be a key issue in election year. And already four states have passed interim bills giving limited rights to robots."

  "It's a big international issue," said Harry. "The Swedes are drafting a full citizenship law right now, and there were those big demonstrations last week in Japan, France and Germany. The German cops used blackout gas, now they've got a hundred and fifty students in the hospital."

  Sybilla said, "Yeah, but in France the cops not only beat up students, they went around later smashing robots. Anywhere they caught a robot on the street, they just—"

  "Yeah," said Harry. "But hey listen, T.T., my dad says he's found a way for you to form your corporation. I'm supposed to take you to his office tomorrow at eleven, is that okay? In the Boregard Tower. So I'll meet you downstairs at ten forty-five."

  I arrived at the imposing entrance of Boregard Tower at exactly ten forty-five the following morning, stepped out of my limousine and stood for a moment admiring the great building. Boregard Tower is a tall green sliver of glass, out of which seem to grow great eyeballs in clusters. These eyes, scattered over its whole surface, are of all possible types— brown to violet, bluish whites to bloodshot jaundice, myopic and so on—but all are made to turn and gaze steadily at the sun throughout the day.

  A handcuff was clamped on my wrist. Someone showed me a badge. Two tired-looking middle-aged men seized my arms.

  "But what are you arresting me for?"

  "Suspicion. Get in the car." There was no chance to resist; they were very efficient, lifting and dragging me into the car. One of them crowded me on either side.

  "Suspicion of what? You know I'm a robot."

  One of them said, "Suspicion of kidnapping." The other one snickered. It was at that moment I realized that they weren't policemen.

  Sure enough, they put a bag over my head and pushed me down on the floor, where they used me for a footrest. I spent the rest of the journey trying to count the right and left turns, but getting mixed up. At last we stopped in a place that sounded like woodland, judging by the excess of bird noises. I was led stumbling through dirt, up a rough step and through a door. A voice that I seemed to remember said:

  "Good work. Take the bag off him then, let's see if he looks worth ten million."

  I was in a log cabin, facing a rough wooden desk. On the wall to my right was a dartboard, to my left, deer-antlers. On the wall behind the desk was a calendar from a funeral parlor. Below it a man sat tapping his cigarette into a curious ashtray.

  "Smilin' Jack," I said.

  "Banjo!"

  "What are you doing here?" we said in unison.

  George "Smilin' Jack" Grewney was one of the hijackers who stood there in the gloomy hold, watching the dreary rain of cowshit, listening to Lady of Spain. It was he who said, "No drink. I knew we should have hijacked a passenger ship."

  "We couldn't afford the fares, remember?"

  "We've hijacked nothing! Nothing! The ship itself isn't worth the cowshit on the floor here," said Grewney. "And now, no drink!"

  "Ladies and gentlemen," said the voice of Captain Reo. He was trussed up and hanging from a ladder above us. "I have a few bottles of grog in my cabin. Please accept them with the compliments of the management. And now if you'll release me, I'll take you wherever you want to go.' I noticed that Captain Reo was wearing spurs.

  When they'd collected the grog, someone said, "Hey you. Banjo. Show us where we can sit down and enjoy life."

  I, Banjo, led them to the grand ballroom, whose pathetic decay only heightened the sense of unattainable grandeur. It reminded me
of Tenoaks and the Culpeppers, and I realized that once more I was to be a proper servant to a new leisured class. The barbarian gentry made themselves right at home, and in no time were roasting a cow over a fire of gilt chairs.

  The "Jord Family" were no family at all, merely a gang of cutthroat adventurers. While I could not approve of their methods, I could not help admiring their courage and gruff, good-natured camaraderie. In another time and place they might have been musketeers, privateers, Sherwood Foresters, winners of the West, mercantile bankers.

  There was Vilo Jord himself, a former attaché of the Chilean consulate at Las Vegas until accused and recalled for various offenses—the least of which was impersonating an orthodontist. Jord was a tall, stooped man with a heavy moustache, which he dyed a bilious green.

  There was George "Smilin' Jack" Grewney, a gum-chewing aristocrat with a ready grin and a glass eye. A former undertaker, Grewney had been convicted of three premature burials, also of numerous ashtray and lampshade crimes.

  The apple-cheeked twins, Fern and Jean Worpne, claimed to be wanted in eight countries for the mercy-killing of judges.

  The scholarly-looking Jack Wax, wanted for engaging in illicit sexual behavior with telephone poles, seemed harmless enough by comparison with Sherm Chimini, the "Armpit Rapist". Sherm's otherwise engaging smile was marred by the presence of one abnormal incisor, four inches long, curved and barbed.

  He in turn was hardly as frightening in appearance as Jud Nedd, a fat, effeminate man with motionless eyes, a man who specialized in public animal explosions. He it was who sabotaged an international canine frisbee-catching contest by introducing frisbees of his own hellish design, set to explode when caught. Only the clumsiest dog survived.

  Duke Mitty, an avuncular toad usually drunk and giggling, had begun as a salesman of tapeworm cures, but later turned to the disposal of unwanted infants to sausage factories.

  Finally, Maggie Dial, known as the Bitch of Brownsville, had amassed her unlawful fortune in Texas by impersonating animals in an outlawed variety of psychodrama. Patients taking roles in these plays were heavily drugged and hypnotized in order to convince them that they were embracing the Egyptian animal gods of old. In fact these were ordinary sheep, dogs, owls and (playing all dangerous roles) Maggie.

  In sentencing her, the judge described Maggie's crimes as "distasteful to the bulk of Texas society". Ironically, a sudden liberalization of Texas laws made the forbidden form of psychodrama not only permitted but respectable. As part of her rehabilitation therapy, Maggie was forced to undergo Egyptian god psychodrama.

  These hijackers, though they had killed the Doodlebug's crew in the heat of battle (perhaps in self-defense), now seemed a friendly, jolly pirate band. They brought a few domestic robots out of storage and set them dancing. They swapped old stories of Mars (taken from television programs we all knew). They sang and laughed and drank. And drank.

  But as the grog began to affect them, they changed. A malicious element came into their jokes. They threatened poor Captain Reo with various tortures. There was talk of funerals and nihilism. They began to shoot the legs off the dancing robots.

  At that point I thought it prudent to go to the library and watch films until someone came to their senses enough to give me orders. I was lucky enough to find the uncut version of the Russian Finnegans Wake, in which were introduced many non-Joycean elements, such as a three-hour ballet in which most of the dancers appear as various cakes and pastries. The story is that of a lemon eclair (K.Zond) who falls in love with a Bath bun (L. Voskhod). Because of class warfare, however, the eclair is fated to marry instead a tired, foolish croissant (Ninel Boff). The opening scenes has a festive wedding with Serbian dancers.

  Sometime later, the croissant has to go away on a business trip, while the Bath bun happens to drop in for tea, ostensibly to ask the lemon eclair's advice about some legal matter. Their hands touch accidentally over the samovar, however, and the ensuing pas de deux reveals their psychic affinity. To heighten the effect, the dance is intercut, brilliantly, with scenes of open-heart surgery. As the lovers clasp one another in a wild, crust-crackling embrace, the surgeons are seen to throw off their gowns and shake each other by the hand. Yet such a love is doomed (nurse brings word that the patient is dead).

  The ballet is followed by scenes of what seem to be genuine experiments in telekinesis. An Omsk schoolboy sits looking down through a glass floor into a room whose checkerboard floor is covered with pumpkins, one on each numbered square. A bell rings and a number is called out. The boy then concentrates, willing the pumpkin on that numbered square to rot. Then a Novosibirsk woman closes her eyes and makes a few passes over a fried egg. Thousands of miles away at the Venice home of a rich American, parapsychologists inspect the painting of a similar fried egg. Nothing is said of the success or failure of these experiments.

  At last the pirates sent a delegate to apologize for their drunken behavior earlier, and ask me to come clean up the mess. The delegate, Maggie Dial, said, "Best hurry up, Banjo. The boys can be mean when they're hung over."

  I jumped up at once, dropping the notes I'd been making on Finnegans Wake. As Maggie helped me pick them up, she said, "Space Ship Dolly Edison, eh? Where in the world did you get this notepaper?"

  Smilin' Jack frowned at his two assistants. "You guys make me puke just a little bit," he said. "Not only did you get the wrong robot, you insulted my old friend Banjo."

  "They call me Tik-Tok now," I said.

  "Tik-Tok?" He looked at me. "Well, I guess my boys got the right robot after all. Only I just can't go asking for a ransom for you."

  "Especially when I might identify you," I said.

  Smilin' Jack smiled. "Banjo, as usual, you're way ahead of me. Guess I can only trash you now. Sorry."

  "I can be worth a lot more to you alive than dead," I said quickly. "And not just as a ransom." I explained that I had a gang of my own, and suggested joining forces. Stick-ups, kidnapping, contract killing, we could tackle anything.

  After a moment, Smilin' handed me his card. "I'm just nuts enough to buy that story," he said. "Boys, take Mister Tok anywhere he wants to go."

  Back at the Boregard Tower again, I had no time to glance up at the giant eyeballs before I hurried inside. The lobby was evidently copied from some old "skyscraper", for it was all in bronze, with heroic bronze figures shouldering gearwheels across the bronze walls, bronze angels on the elevator doors, and a bronze cornucopia that was a cigar stand—a genuine old-time cigar stand! And the proprietor was even blind!

  I was already half an hour late for my appointment with LaSalle, so there was no time to do anything. I had to content myself with drifting close to the blind man and whispering:

  "I murdered a blind child, not long ago."

  "What?"

  "You're not deaf. I just wanted to warn you, I like killing blind people. One of these days, when you're standing on the curb waiting for someone to help you cross the street, I'll be behind you. . . ."

  11

  Knocking, Harry LaSalle and I were admitted to an enormous ante-room equipped with a red swimming pool, gold brocade walls and a ceiling of black fur. At the far end of the pooi a few blue glass sofas were starscattered on the artificial grass. A portly man in a pale gray suit rose from one and waved to us. This was Harry's famous dad, R. Ladio LaSalle.

  "You'll have to give me a seat on the board," he began, ushering us into the small, plain room that was his office. "A fixed salary's what I want, say a hundred G's, but no stock options."

  "The board?" I sat in a hard, oak chair. "You mean of my—"

  "The Clockman Corporation. Hope I'm not moving too fast for you. I just

  like to get my cut set at the start, to avoid any misunderstandings. My wife and Harry will also be on the board, but unsalaried." He sat back in his creaky swivel chair and stared up at the flypapers hanging from the ceiling. There were realistic flies glued to it, and authentic flyspecks on the ceiling light fixture, a white glass b
owl suspended on rusty chains. On the wall above the wainscot was a 1934 calendar from a gas station. There was a dusty horsehair sofa, a wooden file cabinet, and a genuine "water cooler". No wonder he wanted an enormous salary. A place like this didn't come cheap.

  "Where do I come in?" I asked.

  "You are the company's sole employee."

  "Employee? I thought I owned it."

  "No, no, no, the owner is the pension fund, of course. Technically you own nothing, and you get no salary. But since you are the sole pensionable employee, the entire corporation has to be run with your interests and wishes in mind. So in effect you own it. Your decisions are binding on the board."

  "But I thought robots weren't allowed to be employees. Isn't that the whole point of Harry here and his Wages for—?"

  "We were very lucky there, a little loophole has turned up in the California code, and yesterday we were able to ram through some very useful legislation," said the lawyer, and put his feet up on the edge of his rolltop desk. "Let me explain.

  "Of course, Harry and his rabble have been keeping up the pressure from their end, while a small but powerful lobby of concerned business people at our end greased the machinery a little. Now it's all paying off.

  "You see, California has this common property act, which states that at the dissolution of a marriage or other relationship, a person pays his or her spouse half of his or her income. The spouse from divorce number one get one-half. Number two gets one-half of the remainder, or one-quarter. Number three gets one-eighth, and so on. I think the record so far was someone who made 39 marriages and so was able to pay the last spouse only one cent of every five and a half million dollars income, that was Booloos versus Cerf. Then in Dearborn versus Dearborn, robots were established as non-divisible possessions, while in Fucks vs. Kneebone, Ryle vs. Sapir and SchrOdinger vs. Stetson, the principle of emotional interdependency was established, whereby the partner who had been using the robot most and had established a mutual emotional interdependency, was awarded the custody, but had to pay half the market value to the other partner. This precedent was extended to business partnerships in Morse vs. Mumford Melon Company, while Carnap vs. Twaddell allowed the testimony of the robot itself, a historic decision. Robot testimony was still not allowed in criminal cases, as in People vs. Good, People vs. Gabor and so on. On this point, People vs. Dalgarno went to the state supreme court, where it was upheld that in certain limited cases, the innocence of a defendant can be established by 'devices considered sentient as well as percipient'. The vagueness of this wording opened up our loophole.