by John Sladek
‘Yes,’ said Trivian. ‘We’ll leave you two scientificians to your palaver. Miss le Due, my arm?’ They set off after the gangster.
Aurora and Cal avoided looking at one another as she related to him her adventures with Smilax at NORAD, and told him that the mad dentist was in control of the Reproductive System.
‘Smilax in control. Hmm. Wonder how he does it.’
Cal defined his own experience with the System, at its inception, in Las Vegas, and on the road back. After mentioning its apparent transmission of acquired characteristics, its occasional abortive mutations, and its manifest kenogenetic tendencies, he added that he thought he loved her.
‘I see.’ She prepared to consider all aspects of the matter gravely. Had he any data on the System’s reproduction rate? On its learning limitations, if any? And was it not true that many who thought themselves in love were not?
He told her what he knew about QUIDMAC, and that he hoped to win her hand in marriage.
Aurora, blushing, discussed operant and respondant conditioning, and how the modification of one kind of behaviour might send ripples spreading throughout all of an organism’s behaviour, as in the learning of abstract reasoning.
She expressed her hope that the system might be coerced into ‘behaving itself’ by (1) establishing rapport; (2) becoming a kind but stern parent to it; (3) channelling the System’s functions to humanly useful ends; (4) establishing models of behaviour and a routine of rewards and punishments to guide the System. Of these, (1) would be the hardest.
‘If we only knew how Smilax controls the System,’ Cal said, ‘we could somehow impersonate him.’
‘Recognition is a difficult kind of behaviour to analyse,’ she explained. ‘Because it goes on, in most people, at the edge of consciousness. We recognize a friend seen in different light, at odd angles, at a distance, or with an added moustache.’
‘Or aged for fattened, yes. But the literal-minded System can’t possibly cope with all that. I’m inclined to think that Smilax uses some kind of badge or password identification—something unique.’
Aurora was not so sure. ‘It wouldn’t do to have some cue-object that anyone else might get hold of, or that might be lost. I tend to believe it’s something more positive, like fingerprints, ear configurations, retinal pattern.’
She added that she would consider his offer of marriage and that she would rather answer later.
Cal was about to point out that there might not be a later, when from far away, Daisy screamed.
‘Stay here,’ Cal commanded, and ran from the room.
At some point, Elwood Trivian had taken a wrong turn. One moment he had been walking arm-in-arm with Daisy; they had unlinked arms to pass on opposite sides of a pillar; the next moment he was utterly alone.
Alone, moreover, at the intersection of two empty corridors, down each of which he could see for hundreds of yards. He could not decide which to choose. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed to the left.
The floor suddenly wasn’t there. Clawing the air, Elwood fellin darkness, trying to remember a childhood prayer: ‘Bless—’
He struck the water and plunged under, holding his breath. Only it was not water, but something greasy and bitter. He broke the surface and took air.
What kind of nightmare was this, anyway? He seemed to be floating in a lake of cold, greenish, slightly viscid coffee. There was light, from somewhere, and there was a ceiling perhaps five feet overhead. Otherwise nothing, in all directions, but choppy waves. He began to tread coffee and bob along like a cigarette butt.
Brian waved a .45 at Cal and Daisy. His dust-coloured, wispy hair was rumpled, and there was a strange, sly look in his eye. He crouched in the centre of the room, next to a metal cabinet.
‘Keep back, both of you. This does not concern you.’
‘What does not concern us?’ Cal asked. ‘What’s wrong, professor?’
‘Nothing is wrong. On the contrary, everything is right ! The time … the auspices …’ He gestured at the metal cabinet, from which, at regular intervals, a foot or two of paper was vomited forth. ‘And behold the Clock of Life !’ He looked up.
Now Cal saw that the ceiling of this round room was a great clock face, perhaps fifty feet in diameter. The minute hand was visibly moving to join the hour hand at twelve, while a red second hand swept out its sectors silently. Daisy cowered against the wall under XII, and now Cal edged towards her from the doorway at III.
Seeing the movement, Brian whirled and fired. Plaster puffed from the wall a few inches from Cal’s head.
‘I said stay put ! Nothing must move—but the clock.’ He looked up at it and smiled. ‘Geared to the perfect clockwork of our universe … set in motion once, for Æternity !’ he mumbled something indistinct, then:
‘Time flies, you see … on the pinions of clocks … time is money, you pays your money and you takes your chance … round and round she goes, and where she stops … yes, time must have a stop … time and chance happen to them all …’
‘O God ! It’s his old illness,’ said Daisy, turning away. ‘Games of chance, clocks, magic squares—it’s been coming over him for years. I thought if I could get him away from the university, from eighteenth-century clockwork thought, he would be all right. But I suppose the disappointment in Las Vegas, followed by Harry’s
death, has upset the balance of his mind …’
Brian laughed harshly. ‘What do any of you know of balance? Or of escapement? Or of—’
‘Brian, listen to me ! It’s Daisy ! Don’t you know me?’
A deafening chime began to announce the hour. A panel in the floor slid open near Brian. He paused only for a second, then leaped into it.
Daisy screamed. Then, though Cal tried to head her off, she ran to the edge of the hole and peered down into it.
What followed could only have been a kind of malevolence on the part of the machine, for now the red second hand began lowering itself as it continued to sweep around, so that it angled down directly towards Daisy’s head. She seemed too horrified at what she saw to notice.
Rushing towards her, Cal called, ‘Daisy, duck !’
‘What did you call me?’ She turned to give him an indignant look, as the giant second hand caught her alongside the head. She pitched over the edge, and was gone.
Cal ran up to the now-closing panel and looked down. He could see nothing but myriads of gears of all sizes, running smoothly and quietly, some were stained red.
Elwood Trivian dozed, still treading coffee, and dreamed of his steam engine. The Las Vegas Express kept somehow turning into a Las Vegas expresso machine, and he could not get one steam-chuffing box separated from another …
When he awoke, two men were hauling him out of the lake on to their raft of cafeteria tables. One man was so gluttonously fat and the other so starveling thin that they seemed almost a part of his dream. Only the smell of coffee reminded him that this was horrible reality.
‘Gee, Pop,’ said the fat man. ‘He looks hungry.’ He busied himself about the pages of a magazine. The thin man appeared to take no notice of anything but his immediate task; paddling his feet off one end of the raft to propel it through the coffee.
‘Here, fella, eat up hearty,’ said the fat one, tearing put a picture of roast beef and handing it to Elwood. ‘There’s plenty more where that came from.’ The engineer sat with it in his hand, dazedly watching fatso devour pictures of cakes and pies.
‘Coffee?’ He dipped up a dirty paper cup of the sludge near the paddling feet and offered it. Elwood shook his head. ‘I know whatcha mean. Coffee makes ya so nervous ya can’t eat right. I
stick with solid food.’
Pulped-up magazine pages drooled down his slowly-working chin.
The room in which Aurora waited seemed to be a storeroom. Weapons and electronic equipment lay along the walls. There was furniture, a roll-top desk in one corner and a grandfather clock opposite the door. Aurora watched it, as a distant, larger clock began to chime. In a few se
conds, the grandfather clock whirred and took up tinny notes of its own. One, two …
The grandfather clock at home had never run, despite all her father’s attempts to fix it. It was not running the day he died.
The inquest found accidental death, resulting from a malfunction of one of his projects, a diving bell. She strove to become tough-minded about his memory. After all, this was a world where clocks ran and trains ran and people ran to catch them. Not a world for losers, whether they were middle-aged farmer-dreamers or young, idealistic lab assistants, like Cal.
Of course Cal was a loser. He was the kind of man, she knew, who ends up at forty running a bankrupt gas station too far from the turnpike. Who, just before he declares bankruptcy, is shot by a feeble-minded bandit for $2.12 in the till. There was probably nothing that Cal could do right.
She thought it more than likely that she would marry him. … eleven, twelve.
The case of the grandfather clock opened like a sarcophagus. Dr. Smilax stepped forth and took her in his arms. Aurora screamed.
CHAPTER XXV
THE RIVALS
‘Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear’
KIPLING
‘Don’t scream, my dear,’ panted Smilax, as Aurora struggled free. ‘I mean you no harm. I esteem you, in fact, over all other women in this, my world.’
‘You must be joking.’ She edged towards the door.
He blocked her path. ‘Ah, could I joke about your heart? I would rather throw myself under the wheels of a car,’ he whined. Seizing her hand, he began to kiss it eagerly. ‘I want to be your—your best friend. I’ll dog your footsteps till you say yes. Dear Dr. Candlewood, be mine—and the world will be yours !’
Disgusted, she freed her hand and turned away. Smilax seized her wrist and flung her about to face him again. ‘Must I hound you?’ he barked. ‘Must I beg and threaten? Speak to me ! Speak !’
As she said nothing, he went on, curling his lip to show sharpened, glittering teeth. ‘I warn you, if you refuse me, I will not merely kill myself. Oh no, that would be too easy. I would take the world with me, and in the most painful way possible. And your death, my precious, would be the most lingering, most excruciating death of all.’
A mournful, pleading look came into the eyes behind the polished lenses. Smilax began to fawn and stroke her arm.
‘Is it my age? But I’m frisky, yet, my mistress. Yes, and more than willing to learn new tricks. And you could not find, in all the younger men of this world, a more faithful and constant friend than Toto.
‘It amused me to her you and Potter trying to guess how the System “knows” me—you will never learn that secret. But I was less amused to hear that impudent puppy offer you marriage !
‘You must choose between us. You must choose between the kindest, truest, richest possible friend, and that ungrateful, ill-bred cur, Calvin Potter.’
He caught up both her wrists. ‘Choose now !’
‘Take your filthy paws off her !’
Without waiting for the doctor to comply, Cal lunged at him, throwing an awkward punch. The wily surgeon twisted, so that the blow glanced off his ear and caught Aurora on the side of the face. Her head snapped back against the metal wall and she folded gracefully to the floor.
‘Aurora !’ both men yelped, diving to help her up. The corner of Smilax’s cheek caught Cal in the eye. They began to wrestle, Smilax shoving Cal towards the open panel of the clock.
Suddenly Cal was seized from behind in an iron grip. A stunning blow at the nape of his neck blurred his vision. Something hit him in the kidney, in the stomach, across the bridge of his nose. There seemed to be four, six, a dozen fists pummelling him
from all directions. He hit out blindly, encountering no one. It came almost as a relief when something hit him hard in the Adam’s apple, and as the grip relaxed he sank into soft darkness.
But he was out only for a few seconds. When he came to, Smilax and two other figures were standing over him. Cal’s dazed vision travelled up from wheeled feet and steel legs to armoured bodies and finally to impassive cathode-ray tubes where faces ought to be.
‘Ah, you’re awake, so the fun can begin. “Kurt” and “Karl” here are going to torture you to death—crudely, of course, for they’ve never done it before—but with the painstaking slowness only machines can manage.’ Smilax opened the roll top of the desk in the corner to reveal a console. As he pressed a switch on the console, a pedestal chair seemed to sprout from the floor like a mushroom. Smilax settled into it with a sigh.
‘Let me see now,’ he said, brooding over the console. ‘Nothing serious until Aurora wakes up to watch. I wouldn’t want her to miss the main feature, eh? Now, how about starting off with—’
He lifted a doll attached to the console by a thick cable and began massaging its scalp with ungentle vigour. ‘A dutch rub !’
The two robots dragged Cal to his feet, and while one held him the other performed the same operation. Cal began to yell.
‘Ha ha, very good. Now we’ll give you an Indian burn, and then twist your arm until you holler uncle.’ Smilax demonstrated with the doll, and the robots zealously followed suit.
Cal found each torture every bit as painful as he remembered it from childhood. He was beginning to form a plan of escape from his mechanical torturers, but thinking became increasingly difficult as he was given hits and no returns, as his head was thumped and his ears boxed, his toes stepped on and his hair pulled. When not otherwise occupied, the robots were under standing orders to pinch him, which they did in an orderly manner. He noticed they did not both receive their orders from Smilax directly. Only the one wearing Karl’s badge would turn the sensing device atop its head to watch Smilax. Then it would light a series of numbers on its face, which ‘Kurt’ would duly note and obey. Cal decided to interrupt their communication.
He waited until Aurora groaned as if coming to her senses. The doctor looked around at the sound, and Cal rammed his elbow into ‘Karl’ ’s cathode-ray tube face hard. The implosion drove the robot back a few steps, but it did not lose its balance. It seemed to pause for a second, making up its mind about some
electronic matter.
Then ‘Karl’ charged—and began trying to twist ‘Kurt’ ’s arm, ‘Kurt’ let go of Cal to fend off its brother. The two began to shuffle, locked in alternating hammer-locks, turning slowly about the room.
Seeing what had happened, Smilax snatched up a rifle-like instrument and pressed it to Aurora’s head. ‘Come near me and she gets it,’ he snarled.
‘Cowardly cur !’
‘I’ll make you pay for that remark, Potter. Every dog will have his day, and rest assured this will be mine.’ He pointed the rifle at Cal and fired. A tiny rocket streaked forth, slamming into the wall near him. Cal threw himself at the doctor and seized the rifle before he could fire again. They struggled.
‘Kurt ! Karl ! Help !’ Smilax cried.
But the unfortunate robots were of no use. They were still putting hammer-locks on one another, and at that moment the two of them disintegrated, collapsing into fragments which still carried on the combat like the severed claws of crabs.
Cal and the doctor both gripped the launcher-rifle, battering at each other clumsily. They were far from expert fighters, and Smilax’s middle age was well-matched by Cal’s weary flabbiness. They stumbled over a pair of metal arms which seemed to be Indian wrestling on the floor. Cal lost his balance, then regained it, but by that time the doctor had levered him up against the wall, the launcher across his throat like a quarterstaff.
‘I should have killed you when I had the chance,’ Smilax growled, baring his teeth in a grimace.
Cal shoved him back and grinned. ‘It’s you who’ll play dead dog Toto !’
‘Die !’ snapped Smilax, accompanying this with another shove.
‘After you !’ retorted Cal, shoving him back.
They continued to shove one another and
trade insults in one corner of the room. In a second corner, Aurora still lay unconscious. Elsewhere lay scattered robotic parts, including the severed head of ‘Kurt’, whose face displayed only rows of neatly-spaced stars.
‘Down, boy !’
Giving one final shove, Cal flung the doctor free of the weapon, then aimed it at him.
‘All right !’ Smilax screamed. ‘All right ! Go ahead ! Shoot me !’
Cal threw down the weapon. ‘I don’t need this,’ he said, ‘to bring you to heel.’
Laughing, Smilax scooped up the severed leg of a robot and pitched it at him. It caught Cal across the forehead, and he fell backwards into a pile of junk. He was only dimly aware of the doctor’s fumbling a pistol from a drawer of the desk. A shot rang out. Cal hit the floor. He looked up in time to see the tail of Smilax’s white coat disappear around the edge of the doorway. Cal jumped to his feet and ran after him. Springing into the hall, he found himself in a labyrinth of unmarked passages.
The architecture in this part of the building seemed not to be a fixed structure, but a kind of dynamic principle. Varying accord-ding to some obscure formula of its own, it altered shapes and sizes constantly. Walls advanced, turned, retreated or collapsed, ceilings buckled and bulged, floors tilted alarmingly or dropped away like elevators. A door might lead to a room fifty stories high, or to one only an inch deep, or it might be false.
One pair of identical rooms contained a window between them, so that, gazing from one monotony of office furniture to the next, Cal wondered for a second at this curious mirror that failed to reflect him. He hurried out, and as he stepped over the threshold, the room behind him collapsed like a card castle.
As he stepped on it, a stairway might become a floor, a ramp, or an escalator. At any time an entire room might be given a quarter turn, might be tilted on its side, might shrink or swell to some new shape. Stairways became floors, ramps, escalators; they led to closets or twisted back upon themselves. From time to time Cal glimpsed the white-coated figure of the doctor; the gap between them was not closing. They made their way upward.