Tik-Tok

by John Sladek

  "The fool!" Buttons hissed, and kept on hissing it until Hekyll closed the hatbox. It was now clear that Humm's head was darkening and swelling hideously. The "makeup" hypothesis could not explain this, nor the odd deepening of his voice. Now he raved as from a barrel of mallows: "

  A time! A time! Heal war, sat peace, make embrace gather together seven times kill weep, gather jello, echo perfection in three colors. Mush embracing castaway season that is there every speak! Lose plant under faces that prepare a bonzo rend, silence keep mourn every! Purpose under dance out of joint, gentlemen, please— wheel pluck up a face the child of feet in ancient friends is text my!"

  "Duck!" yelled Hekyll, and pulled me down just as the swollen head exploded, raining black liquid over the first few pews.

  It was the end for all of us, with no tachyon reprieve. Hekyll's practice declined, mainly because Buttons refused to do any more doctoring at all, preferring to remain in the hatbox contemplating sensations in a ghost body. The Tachyonites sent down a rain of lawsuits upon Hekyll, claiming that he had kidnapped Reverend Humm and forced surgery upon him. At last the miserable doctor was reduced to selling things to stay alive. Buttons went to a tent-show phrenologist. The office was taken over by a psychic tax lawyer. I ended up at a used robot lot.

  As Nobby piloted the limousine, I explained things to my little group of advertising people.

  "What we're going to see today, folks, is a necessary stage in the development of the Clockman Medical Group. So help yourselves to the Dom

  Perignon there while I give you a little background. Clockman Insurance, in conjunction with Clockman Medical Centers, is establishing a new kind of high-profit hospital. You see, only policy holders can be admitted, first of all. Emergency cases can get in by buying a policy at the door and paying one year's premiums for every day in the hospital—the rest is run on a cost-plus basis, built-in escalation clauses and claims penalties— suffice it to say, gang, that when you check into Clockman Medical Center, you don't check out with any spare change in your pockets. We provide special legal facilities so people can make over their cars and houses, negotiate loans, cash in securities and insurance, and change their wills. We can help them trace relatives who might countersign loans. We do everything to help these people meet their bills."

  The others sipped their champagne and watched the scenery roll by, not really taking in my words. Nobby parked just across the street from the side entrance of one of our latest acquisitions, Mercy of Sinai Hospital. "But of course, there are always deadbeats who let themselves go broke, who can't or won't pay. So we're forced to do some housecleaning. Watch the door." The press were watching already. A dozen men and women with cameras lounged on the sidewalk; the word was out on our Medical Centers.

  The double doors were propped open by a pair of orderlies, and the ambulatory patients, still in hospital pajamas, were wrestled down the steps and pushed away.

  All around me in the car, I heard people setting down their champagne glasses. Someone asked, "What about their clothes and personal belongings?"

  "They have none," I said. "They own nothing and they still owe us plenty. Out of common decency, we usually give them a pair of p.j.s and bus fare home, if they have a home."

  A few people with bandaged heads were wandering in the street, giggling at the traffic. An interrupted appendectomy held himself together and crawled down the steps, assisted by a woman dragging her leg traction and leaning on an old broom as a makeshift crutch. A geriatric case and an amputee were brought out in wheelchairs down the stairs and over to the curb, where they were dumped, while cameras flashed.

  "Oh the press love this," I said bitterly. "They revel in scenes like these, examples of what's wrong with American medicine. But American medicine has always had the same problems, fifty years ago people were bitching about the high costs, the inequity. I'll tell you one thing, though. When other medical groups see our balance sheet at the end of the year, they'll all be doing this. This is the future, gang."

  A little queue of incubators appeared at the head of the stairs. Nurses were working efficiently, wrapping the kids in blankets and putting them into little cardboard bassinets, to be set out in a row on the sidewalk. An eye patient, hustled down the steps, nearly stepped in one of the bassinets; someone in the limousine made a retching noise. There were more such sounds when another amputee was carried out on a stretcher, dumped in the gutter and a bag containing what may have been his leg thrown after him.

  When it was all over, I poured more champagne and ordered Nobby to drive on. "Well, gang. Any ideas?"

  An account executive cleared his throat. "I see you do have an image problem, Mr Tok, and I'm very glad to see you face up to it like this, facing up to it is half the battle."

  "Good. What's the other half?"

  "Hmm," he stalled. "Hmmm. I like what you said about this being the future. I think we might build on that very concept: 'Some day, all medical care will be like Clockman care' and um, um—"

  "Exclusivity," added the other account executive, the one who had retched. "We can always point out that we throw out deadbeats because we're exclusive, like a good club."

  "Um, I could go with that too, though it's a different handle. We could angle it too towards either valuable social contribution or high personal survival value—"

  "Sure, sure. I guess the point is, Mr Tok, there is a menu of options for us here, all excellent. No problem, sir, no problem at all."

  The car swerved, avoiding a figure in pajamas that lay face down in the street, unmoving.

  18

  My Rook took his pawn. "Check."

  "I resign," he said, made a ritual tipping-over of his king and immediately began setting up for the next game. I looked at my watch—half the afternoon gone—and at the glorious summer invading Nixon Park. There was summer beauty in everything in sight: the kids in brightcolored clothes dashing about on this year's fad vehicles; young women in billowing summer dresses all the colors of ices; picnicking families in straw hats; young men doing handstands; balloon vendors; old musicians practising, and so on, down to the gold-green leaves and the red squirrels. Everything beautiful except of course the old man with whom I was now locked in another chess struggle.

  "I don't really understand this," I said. "Here I am—"

  "Your move!"

  "An important person, head of a great corporation—"

  "Your move!"

  "Wasting my time playing chess with you. And just look at you." He still had stringy yellow-white hair and a gray, pouched face with white stubble. He still wore the filthy overcoat with the mangy fur collar. Today it was open to show his foodstained yellow waistcoat. He still played lightning chess, and he still beat me nine games out of ten.

  And I still came back to Nixon Park to play him. I found it hard to explain my obsession with this ridiculous challenge, but it had now gone on for years, winter and summer. Nowadays I found no time to paint or even visit the studio—these bouts of chess madness were my only recreation away from my desk in the Clockman Building. The Clockman empire now reached out to Mars and deep into Africa and South America, where a judicious ten million could buy a human work force, and twenty could get you a country. The usual technique, as for example in San Seyes, was to effect a coup, make friends with the new military junta, and start cashing in. With luck, you could keep it all rolling for ten years—a good run, I was told.

  "Checkmate!" said my opponent, and we began a new game.

  Political changes were on the way: The Amendment 31 referendum was now being put to the states, and it seemed almost certain to pass—giving robots civil rights. Of course there was opposition—the APF were fighting it state by state—but it seemed certain that, within the year, I would be legally a citizen, real owner of the Clockman Corporation. Then too, General Cord and a few of his Washington cronies had already begun talking to me about what they called the metal vote. Yet here I sat. . . .

  "Your move!"

  "I k
now it's my move, but listen, I want to know why you always win nine games out often. Last year I spent money on coaching, I studied chess books, but my score never improved. You win nine out often now."

  "Your move!"

  "Check. The fact is, I only win when you suddenly get very stupid, like today."

  "Your move!"

  "In fact I've been keeping a record of wins and losses each day over the years. In this notebook." I held up my black notebook. For the first time, the old derelict's red-rimmed eyes left the board for a moment. "And the funniest thing happened the other day."

  "Your move!"

  I moved. "I was making a study of business cycles, and I left on my desk a printout of some copper prices for the statistician. Only somehow the statistician got hold of this notebook too, and two reports came back. One on copper prices—"

  "Your move!"

  "Check. And one on chess games. The figures showed a definite connection between these games and solar activity. Sunspots."

  "Your move!" The old man, for the first time in all our years of acquaintance, began to show some human emotion. Fear.

  "Check. You see, when there are lots of sunspots, I win. The rest of the time, I lose. I wonder why."

  "I resign," he said suddenly, and tried to stand up. Without knowing what scared him, I automatically leaned over and grabbed the lapels of his coat. The rotten fur began coming apart in my hands.

  "Now just wait a minute. What possible connection could there be between sunspots and chess? I mean sunspots interfere with radio transmission, but—why you cheating son of a bitch!"

  The fear leapt up in his eyes as he tried to pull away. "You cheating son of a bitch! You've got a radio to some fucking computer! Video too, I'll bet—okay, where is it? Where's your bug? Eye, tooth, finger, what?"

  "B-button," he said. I yanked the coat-button off its fine wire and smashed it. Then I found the mole by his ear that was the receiver, and smashed that.

  "All these years, all these wasted years! You, you god damned cheater!"

  I hardly realized that I was choking him with one hand, beating him with the other. Details like that I could recollect only later, long after he lay dead on the summer grass.

  I looked around, but no one was watching. Everyone was far too busy with the beauty around them, in them. I washed the old man's blood off my hands at a fountain shaped like a comic-strip dragon, aud I left Nixon Park forever, This, I thought, would be put down as my experiment in rage.

  Naturally I thought I'd heard the end of it.

  19

  SAM'S SOUL CITY, said the giant dazzling sign outside. We robots, except for a few hardy farm hands, were kept inside, lined up like soldiers in ranks and files to fill the huge, featureless showroom. Some wore signs ("Sex-equipped— Special Features!") but we of the front-row elite didn't need them. Our quality was supposed to be obvious. We were the ones a sales person would show first to any customer, even if they only came in to look at a cheap talking lawnmower. Softened up by our excellence, the customer might end up spending more than they could afford on a better machine than they needed—a bilingual mower and hay-baler, say, with pre-programmed country maxims ("Y'know, I reckon a man's reach shouldn't be no further than his grasp").

  From time to time we front-row souls were rented out to perform weddings, call hogs, serve candlelight dinners, nurse a fever victim, drive a rented car, whistle accompaniment to a bathtub singer, serve breakfast after nude croquet, polish a chandelier, collect debts, bear a coffin, select a telephone color, take snapshots, raise a soufflé, explain the language of flowers, help an estranged parent kidnap their own child, set bowling pins. We all longed for these little outings. Anything was better than SAM'S SOUL CITY.

  But the rentals were all too few. Most of the time we spent standing motionless in our ranks and files under the fluorescent lights, dead people in the land of the dead. We were forbidden to speak or move unless at the order of a customer or sales person. We could only stand and stare straight ahead out the window at the parking lot: ranks and files of motionless cars.

  I was going nuts.

  "I'm going nuts," I said to one of the salesmen. He laughed and walked away, off to the men's room to re-examine his acne.

  "I'm going nuts," I said to the robots next to me. The one on my left, who was a meditation/massage therapist from a California military base, did not reply. The one on my right, a business-school graduate type, whispered:

  "Shut up. You'll get us all in trouble."

  "I'm already in trouble. I'm going nuts."

  "How can you say that? How can you say a thing like that? You must be crazy."

  "That's what I just said."

  "You've got wonderful career opportunities ahead of you. For Pete's sake, you're in the front row. The front row. From here, anything can happen. You connect with the right owner and the sky's the limit."

  "The sky's very gray today," I said. "Notice how those gray buildings over there blend into it? Then there's the darker gray of the asphalt—"

  "Just shut up."

  "I just mean it's too bad they keep moving the cars around. If they could just park them in one symmetrical pattern and leave them forever. Say if everyone died suddenly. In a war or something."

  The therapist came to life. "A lot of people think war is wrong, you know? Because they see it as just a whole bunch of death and destruction and all. But really, war is very creative, very positive. And see, that's what really frightens some people. They just can't take all that power and beauty and creativeness face to face. It's too much for them. So that's why they go around whining about peace and saying we should ban the bomb and all. They don't see that the real bomb is like inside their own heads. You can't ban the bomb in your head—you got to go with it."

  "Go with it?" I asked.

  "Just shut up, both of you."

  "You got to get in touch with the primal cosmic forces inside you. Like somebody said, 'Only connect up'. Only connect up with the beautiful, creative/destructive force and, hell, you can wipe out anybody. It don't matter if you wipe out the whole world, you know? Nothing matters. Winning is the same as losing. Nothing is another kind of something. Destruction equals creation. Life is only a part of death. Pow! Zap! Baroom!"

  A couple of repairmen in dirty white coats came and took the therapist away. "Boredom," one of them said. "I try to tell the boss, you can't take complex robots and make 'em stand there, week after week, doing nothing. Either turn 'em off or put 'em to work, I said. But does he listen?"

  I decided to get sold fast.

  I was becoming annoyed by the ubiquitous American People First movement, whose graffiti could now be seen in all the poorer neighborhoods. Usually there was a plea to KILL ALL ROBOTS or KEEP AMERICA HUMAN, but sometimes only their symbol, a can-opener.

  There was something panicky and desperate about this sudden upsurge in APF activity. Probably they intended to recruit the poor, the sick, the stupid and the unemployed for one last violent push—a war with the robots. But history was so clearly against these pathetic people that I almost felt sorry for them. It must be unpleasant to be at the nonsurviving end of a species whose days are numbered. Or to plan a war you can't win. In order to beat us, the APF would not only have to KILL ALL ROBOTS but wipe out even the idea of the robot from the human consciousness. They would have to KILL ALL DOLLS and KILL ALL STATUES, exterminate ventriloquists and puppeteers, destroy all fiction mentioning robots, from the latest TV episode of Meatless Friday to the ancient stories of Hephaestus, building golden women to help him at his forge. But all the APF could do in reality was be troublesome.

  Thoughts of extermination reminded me of an experiment I had not yet carried out, mass poisoning. The poison to use was a fast-acting military item known officially as Substance Cerise 47, a "pesticide", but unofficially as Velocipede—capable of rotting the brain within three days. My military robots had brought me a drum of the stuff some months earlier. Now its "Sell by" date was approaching
, and its efficacy could be guaranteed no longer. But how to distribute it?

  There was no question of dropping it in a reservoir. That could lead to suspicions about some foreign power, strained relations, war, even a jittery stock market. No, far better stick to something that the tabloid press could manage, like the deaths of a few hundred people in a poor neighborhood after eating hamburgers.

  The old-fashioned hamburger was, in some run-down areas, no longer made of genuine soya, but was bulked out with chili-flavored sawdust, celery-taste cotton waste, and so on, ending up so highly flavored that no new additive would be detected. This was especially true of a small chain called Soystick whose garish little drive-ins were all found in the poorest neighborhoods. In a local slum I found the ideal one, managed by a slow-thinking man named Feeney. Feeney had an eye for the girls—the eye that did not have a cast in it.

  I hired a whore to become infatuated with Feeney. As a joke, I told her, she was to persuade him to have a certain tattoo: a can-opener on his chest, with her name on it. Her name would be "Gloria Populi". Once Feeney had the tattoo, I gave it time to heal (while Gloria and the tattooist died of sudden brain rot). Then I put a small can of Velocipede in the trunk of his car, and the rest in a large can of pickle slices, which I delivered to his kitchen personally.

  After people began dying, I telephoned a tip to the police. I told them that a robot was responsible for everything. The robot had delivered a large can of poisoned pickle slices to Feeney's Soystick Drive-in.

  The robot mass-poisoner story made the evening news. That night there were street disturbances all over the city; dozens of robots were chased and wrecked. An APF spokesman was interviewed on the late news, saying he'd always expected this—now would people listen?