by Sladek, John
‘They’re just plain evil,’ I said. ‘When I think how they bombed poor Hel Rasmussen’s office –’
‘Oh, he did that himself. Didn’t you know?’
‘Suicide? So that explains the hysterical paralysis!’
My face looked exasperated, as Blenheim peeled it off. ‘Is that what Dr Grobe told you? Paralysed hell, the blast blew his face clean off. Poor Hel’s present face is a solid plate of plastic, bolted on. He breathes through a hole in his shoulder and feeds himself at the armpit. If Grobe told you any different, he’s just working on your morale.’
From upstairs came a kind of machine-gun clatter. The minstrel servant glided in with a tray of drinks.
‘Oh, Rastus. Tell the twins not to practise their tap-dancing just now, will you? Hank looks as if he has a headache.’
‘Yes sir. By the way, the three-legged elephant has arrived. I put it in the front hall. I’m afraid the prosthesis doesn’t fit.’
‘I’ll fix it. Just ask Jumbo to lean up against the wall for half an hour.’
‘Very good, sir.’
After this, I decided to make my escape from this Bedlam.
‘Doesn’t anybody around here ever do anything straightforward or say anything in plain English?’
‘We’re trying to tell you something, Hank, but it isn’t easy. For one thing, I’m not sure we can trust you.’
‘Trust me for what?’
His twisted face twisted out a smile. ‘If you don’t know, then how can we trust you? But come with me to the conservatory and I’ll show you something.’
We went to a large room with dirty glass walls. To me it looked like nothing so much as a bombed-out workshop. Though there were bags of fertilizer on the floor, there wasn’t a living plant in sight. Instead, the tables were littered with machinery and lab equipment: jumbles of retorts and coloured wires and nuts and bolts that made no sense.
‘What do you see, Hank?’
‘Madness and chaos. You might as well have pears in the light sockets and a banana on the telephone cradle, far all I can make of it’
He laughed. ‘That’s better. We’ll crazify you yet’
I pointed to a poster-covered cylinder standing in the corner. One of the posters had Uncle Sam, saying ‘I Need MEN for Congress’.
‘What’s that Parisian advertising kiosk doing here?’
‘Rastus built that for us, out of scrap alloys I had lying around. Like it?’
I shrugged. ‘The top’s too pointed. It looks like –’
‘Yes, go on.’
‘This is silly. All of you need a few sessions with Dr Grobe’ I said. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that. But it’s you who need another session with Dr Grobe, Hank.’
‘You think I’m crazy?’
‘No, you’re too damned sane.’
‘Well you sure as hell are nuts!’ I shouted. ‘Why bother with all the security outside? Afraid someone will steal the idea of a minstrel show or the secret of a kiosk?’
He laughed again. ‘Hank, those guards aren’t there to keep strangers out. They’re to keep us in. You see, my house really and truly is a madhouse.’
I stamped out a side door and ordered my helicopter.
‘My head’s killing me,’ I told the guard. ‘Take it easy with that blindfold.’
‘Oh, sorry, mac. Hey look, it’s none of my business, but what did you do with that tree you brung with you?’
‘Tree?’ God, even the guards were catching it.
That evening I went to see Dr Grobe.
‘Another patient? I swear, I’m going to install a revolving door on this office. Sit down. Uh, Hank LaFarge, isn’t it? Sit down, Hank. Let’s see … oh, you’re the guy who’s afraid of cockroaches, right?’
‘Not exactly afraid of them. In fact they remind me of someone I used to be fond of. Pawlie Sutton used to work with them. But my problem is, I know that cockroaches are the real bosses. We’re just kidding ourselves with our puppet government, our Uncle Sham –’
He chuckled appreciatively.
‘But what “bugs” me is, nobody will recognize this plain and simple truth, Doctor.’
‘Ah, ah. Remember last time, you agreed to call me by my first name?’
‘Sorry, uh, Oddpork.’ I couldn’t imagine why anyone with that name wanted to be called by it, unless the doctor himself was trying to get used to it He was an odd-pork of a man, too: plump and rumpy, with over-large hands that never stopped adjusting his already well-adjusted clothes. He always looked surprised at everything I said, even ‘hello’. Every session, he made the same joke about the revolving door.
Still, repetitive jokes help build a family atmosphere, which was probably what he wanted. There was a certain comfort in this stale atmosphere of no surprises. Happy families are all alike, and their past is exactly like their future.
‘Hank, I haven’t asked you directly about your cockroach theory before, have I? Want to tell me about it?’
‘I know it sounds crazy at first. For one thing, cockroaches aren’t very smart, I know that. In some ways, they’re stupider than ants. And their communication equipment isn’t much, either. Touch and smell, mainly. They aren’t naturally equipped for conquering the world.’
Oddpork lit a cigar and leaned back, looking at the ceiling. ‘What do they do with the world when they get it?’
‘That’s another problem. After all, they don’t need the world. All they need is food, water, a fair amount of darkness and some warmth. But there’s the key, you see?
‘I mean we humans have provided for all these needs for many centuries. Haphazardly, though. So it stands to reason that life would be better for them if we worked for them on a regular basis. But to get us to do that, they have to take over first.’
He tried to blow a smoke ring, failed, and adjusted his tie. ‘Go on. How do they manage this takeover?’
‘I’m not sure, but I think they have help. Maybe some smart tinkerer wanted to see what would happen if he gave them good long-distance vision. Maybe he was so pleased with the result that he then taught them to make semaphore signals with their feelers. The rest is history.’
Dusting his lapel, Dr Grobe said, ‘I don’t quite follow. Semaphore signals?’
‘One cockroach is stupid. But a few thousand of them in good communication could make up a fair brain. Our tinkerer probably hastened that along by intensive breeding and group learning problems, killing off the failures … it would take ten years at the outside.’
‘Really? And how long would the conquest of man take? How would the little insects fare against the armies of the world?’
‘They never need to try. Armies are run by governments, and governments are run, for all practical purposes, by small panels of experts. Think tanks like the Orinoco Institute. And – this just occurred to me – for all practical purposes, you run the Institute.’
For once, Dr Grobe did not looked surprised. ‘Oh, so I’m in on the plot, am I?’
‘We’re all so crazy, we really depend on you. You can ensure that we work for the good of the cockroaches, or else you can get rid of us – send us away, or encourage our suicides.’
‘Why should I do that?’
‘Because you are afraid of them.’
‘Not at all.’ But his hand twitched, and a little cigar ash fell on his immaculate trousers. I felt my point was proved.
‘Damn. I’ll have to sponge that. Excuse me.’
He stepped into his private washroom and closed the door. My feeling of triumph suddenly faded. Maybe I was finally cracking. What evidence did I really have?
On the other hand, Dr Grobe was taking a long time in there. I stole over to the washroom door and listened.
‘… verge of suicide …,’ he murmured. ‘… yes … give up the idea, but … yes, that’s just what I …’
I threw back the door on a traditional spy scene. In the half-darkness, Dr G was hunched over the medicine cabinet, speaking in
to a microphone. He wore earphones.
‘Hank, don’t be a foo–’
I hit him, not hard, and he sat down on the edge of the tub. He looked resigned.
‘So this is my imagined conspiracy, is it? Where do these wires lead?’
They led inside the medicine cabinet, to a tiny apparatus. A dozen brown ellipses had clustered around it, like a family around the TV.
‘Let me explain,’ he said.
‘Explanations are unnecessary, Doctor. I just want to get out of here, unless your six-legged friends can stop me.’
‘They might. So could I. I could order the guards to shoot you. I could have you put away with your crazy friends. I could even have you tried for murder, just now.’
‘Murder?’ I followed his gaze back into the office. From under the desk, a pair of feet. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Hel Rasmussen. Poisoned himself a few minutes before you came in. Believe me, it wasn’t pleasant, seeing the poor fellow holding a bottle of cyanide to his armpit. He left a note blaming you, in a way.’
‘Me!’
‘You were the last straw. This afternoon, he saw you take an axe and deliberately cut down one of those beautiful maple trees in the yard. Destruction of beauty – it was too much for him.’
Trees again. I went to the office window and looked out at the floodlit landscape. One of the maples was missing.
Dr Grobe and I sat dawn again at our respective interview stations, while I thought this over. Blenheim and his mask came into it, I was sure of that. But why?
Dr Grobe fished his lifeless cigar from the ashtray. ‘The point is, I can stop you from making any trouble for me. So you may as well hear me out.’ He scratched a match on the sole of Hel’s shoe and relit the cigar.
‘All right, Oddpork. You win. What happens now?’
‘Nothing much. Nothing at all. If my profession has any meaning, it’s to keep things from happening.’ He blew out the match. ‘I’m selling ordinary life. Happiness, as you must now see, lies in developing a pleasant, comfortable and productive routine – and then sticking to it. No unpleasant surprises. No shocks. Psychiatry has always aimed for that, and now it is within our grasp. The cockroach conspiracy hasn’t taken over the world, but it has taken over the Institute – and it’s our salvation.
‘You see, Hank, our bargain isn’t one-sided. We give them a little shelter, a few scraps of food. But they give us something far more important: real organization. The life of pure routine.’
I snorted. ‘Like hurrying after trains? Or wearing ourselves out on assembly-line work? Or maybe grinding our lives away in boring offices? Punching time-clocks and marching in formation?’
‘None of the above, thank you. Cockroaches never hurry to anything but dinner. They wouldn’t march in formation except for fun. They are free – yet they are part of a highly organized society. And this can be ours.’
‘If we’re not all put in detention camps.’
‘Listen, those camps are only a stage. So what if a few million grumblers get sterilized and shut away for a year or two? Think of the billions of happy, decent citizens, enjoying a freedom they have earned. Someday, every man will live exactly as he pleases and his pleasure will lie in serving his fellow men.’
Put like that, it was persuasive. Another half-hour of this and I was all but convinced.
‘Sleep on it, eh Hank? Let me know tomorrow what you think.’ His large hand on my shoulder guided me to the door.
‘You may be right,’ I said, smiling back at him. I meant it, too. Even though the last thing I saw, as the door closed, was a stream of glistening brown that came from under the washroom door and disappeared under the desk.
I sat up in my own office most of the night, staring out at the maple stump. There was no way out: either I worked for Periplaneta americana and gradually turned into a kind of moral cockroach myself, or I was killed. And there were certain advantages to either choice.
I was about to turn on the video-recorder to leave a suicide note, when I noticed the cassette was already recorded. I ran it back and played it.
Blenheim came on, wearing my face and my usual suit.
‘They think I’m you, Hank, dictating some notes. Right now you’re really at my house, reading a dull book in the library. So dull, in fact, that it’s guaranteed to put you into a light trance. When I’m safely back, Edna will come in and wake you.
‘She’s not as loony as she seems. The black eye is inked for her telescope, and the funny cap with lines on it, that looks like marcelled hair, that’s a weathermap. I won’t explain why she’s doing astronomy – you’ll understand in time.
‘On the other hand, she’s got a fixation that the stars are nothing but the shiny backs of cockroaches, treading around the heavenly spheres. It makes a kind of sense when you think of it: Periplaneta means around the world, and America being the home of the Star-Spangled Banner.
‘Speaking of national anthems, Mexico’s is La Cucaracha – another cockroach reference. They seem to be taking over this message!
‘The gang and I have been thinking about bugs a lot lately. Of course Pawlie has always thought about them, but the rest of us …’ I missed the next part. So Pawlie was at the madhouse? And they hadn’t told me?
‘… when I started work on the famous glass pancakes. I discovered a peculiar feature of glass discs, such as those found on clock faces.
‘Say, you can do us a favour. I’m coming around at dawn with the gang, to show you a gadget or two. We haven’t got all the bugs out of them yet, but – will you go into Dr Grobe’s office at dawn, and check the time on his clock? But first, smash the glass on his window, will you? Thanks. I’ll compensate him for it later.
‘Then go outside the building, but on no account stand between the maple stump and the broken window. The best place to wait is on the little bluff to the North, where you’ll have a good view of the demonstration. We’ll meet you there.
‘Right now you see our ideas darkly, as through a pancake, I guess. But soon you’ll understand. You see, we’re a kind of cockroach ourselves. I mean, living on scraps of sanity. We have to speak in parables and work in silly ways because they can’t They live in a comfortable kind of world where elephants have their feet cut off to make umbrella stands. We have to make good use of the three-legged elephants.
‘Don’t bother destroying this cassette. It won’t mean a thing to any right-living insect.’
It didn’t mean much to me, not yet. Cockroaches in the stars? Clocks? There were questions I had to ask, at the rendezvous.
There was one question I’d already asked that needed an answer. Pawlie had been messing about in her lab, when I asked her to marry me. Two years ago, was it? Or three?
‘But you don’t like cockroaches,’ she said.
‘No, and I’ll never ask a cockroach for its claw in marriage.’ I looked over her shoulder into the glass case. ‘What’s so interesting about these?’
‘Well, for one thing, they’re not laboratory animals. I caught them myself in the basement here at the Institute. See? Those roundish ones are the nymphs – sexless adolescents. Cute, aren’t they?’
I had to admit they were. A little. ‘They look like the fat black exclamation points in comic strips,’ I observed.
‘They’re certainly healthy, all of them. I’ve never seen any like them. I – that’s funny.’ She went and fetched a book, and looked from some illustration to the specimens under glass.
‘What’s funny?’
‘Look, I’m going to be dissecting the rest of the afternoon. Meet you for dinner. Bye.’
‘You haven’t answered my question, Pawlie.’
‘Bye.’
That was the last I saw of her. Later, Dr Grobe put it about that she’d been found, hopelessly insane. Still later, George Hoad cut his throat.
The floodlights went off, and I could see dawn greyness and mist. I took a can of beans and went for a stroll outside.
One of the guards no
dded a wary greeting. They and their cats were always jumpiest at this time of day.
‘Everything all right, officer?’
‘Yeah. Call me crazy, but I think I just heard an elephant.’
When he and his puma were out of sight, I heaved the can of beans through Dr Grobe’s lighted window.
‘What the hell?’ he shouted. I slipped back to my office, waited a few minutes, then went to see him.
A slender ray came through the broken window and struck the clock on the opposite wall. Grobe sat transfixed, staring at it with more surprise than ever. And no wonder, for the clock had become a parrot.
‘Relax, Oddpork,’ I said. ‘It’s only some funny kind of hologram in the clock face, worked by a laser from the lawn. You look like a comic villain, sitting there with that cigar stub in your face.’
The cigar stub moved. Looking closer, I saw it was made up of the packed tails of a few cockroaches, trying to force themselves between his closed lips. More ran up from his spotless collar and joined them, and others made for his nostrils. One approached the queue at the mouth, found another stuck there, and had a nibble at its kicking hind leg.
‘Get away! Get away!’ I gave Grobe a shake to dislodge them, and his mouth fell open. A brown flood of kicking bodies tumbled out and down, over his well-cut lapels.
I had stopped shuddering by the time I joined the others on the bluff. Pawlie and Blenheim were missing. Edna stopped scanning the horizon with her brass telescope long enough to introduce me to the pretty twins, Alice and Celia. They sat in the grass beside a tangled heap of revolvers, polishing their patent-leather tap shoes.
The ubiquitous Rastus was wiping off his burnt cork makeup. I asked him why.
‘Don’t need it anymore. Last night it was my camouflage. I was out in the woods, cutting a path through the electric fence. Quite a wide path, as you’ll understand.’
He continued removing the black until I recognized the late George Hoad.
‘George! But you cut your throat, remember? Mopping up blood –’
‘Hank, that was your blood. It was you cut your throat in the Gents. After Pawlie vanished. Remember?’
