The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  Then for preventive maintenance on the Cable, Alarm, Burglar …

  ‘It’s all really logical, really. I mean, it all makes sense when you go through it like this. Like A can’t be done until after B, and B is not as important as C. Only C has to be done at the same time as D. You with me? And D, there’s no use fixing that until E works, but first F and G are gonna break down unless they get some maintenance, only H is really urgent, it’s gotta be done first … so it’s, it’s ninety-four weeks all right.’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Roderick.

  ‘Eh? Eleven what?’ Hank was sweating. His hands trembled on the keyboard.

  ‘Fingers,’ said Roderick, pointing to them. ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Heh heh, no, ten. Ten fingers, Roddy. See, one, two –’

  ‘Bax got eleven.’

  ‘Backs – I don’t know, Roddy, you have to learn to talk plainer than that. Now where was I? Oh yeah, preventive …’ He pushed another button and another page of explanation appeared. ‘Ninety-four – that’s almost two years, all my spare time for two years. And just look at all this stuff that could break down between now and then: the slow cooker, the light-pipe intercom, the rotisserie, the hot food table, the cake baker, the microwave, the deep freeze, the shoe polisher, floor polisher, vacuum cleaner-washer, blenders, mixers, thermostat, lumistat, electrostatic air-conditioner, Jesus Christ the water-purifier system, the pepper-mill, the Jesus H. Christ it’s not just two years it’s the rest of my life, Roddy. The nail buffer, the can opener, the carving knife, where’d I ever get all this stuff? I mean all that’s just stuff for the house, what about this stuff for the car, the fuel computer, the skidproof brakes … what about these bikes I was going to fix up with traffic radar, what made me think I’d have time to … Jesus H., it’s hot in here, bet the damned air-conditioning’s crapped out on me too, everything else is, I need a drink, that’s what.’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Roderick, following him to the bar.

  ‘Yeah, sure, eleven.’ Hank picked up the Scotch bottle and behind it the screen lit up:

  Sure you need this drink? Sure you need it now?

  He put the bottle back. ‘Goddamned life run by machines, can’t even have a drink, can’t even get a cigarette, damned cigarette-box is locked until noon, another goddamned machine running my life, can’t lift a finger without –’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Roderick.

  ‘You too, huh?’ Hank went back to the desk and dropped into his chair. ‘Okay, look. Maybe I can’t beat all the goddamned mechanical systems in this place, but I sure as hell can beat you. Look, ten fingers, ten!’ He shook them in Roderick’s face. ‘Count ’em, ten.’

  Roderick counted. ‘Ten.’

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Bax got eleven.’

  ‘Backs? Wait a minute, Bax! You mean Baxter Logan, that creep Indica met last year, where was it, the health-ranch sure, the, sure, that singles sauna on the health-ranch she kept saying how terrific – Listen, Roddy? Listen, is Bax a man?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Was he here last night?’

  ‘Yeah. Bax got eleven –’

  ‘Forget about the goddamned eleven fingers! You sure he was here? With Indica? With Mommy?’

  Roderick pointed at the ceiling.

  Hank sat motionless for a moment, then turned to the computer.

  ‘She’s gone off with the sonofabitch, back to that goddamned health – must be a message here somewhere.’

  He typed: MAIL FOR HANK?

  The computer replied:

  Dear Hank: I’m leaving you. don’t try to find me or talk to me except through my lawyer. I’m going to live with Bax logan who you may not remember I met last year in Nevada. It so happens that we got a meaningful relationship I mean Bax and me and not Bax and a house full of stupid gadgets like you. You and I were really like strangers ever since we knew each other. I got tired of being treated like property, just another one of your gadgets. I want to belong to just me.

  Yours,

  Indica

  ‘That just about finishes it, Roddy. Everything else breaking down and now this, it’s like the whole world slowly collapsing … every … breaking down and falling apart and wearing out and blowing away and cracking up … Even you, look at you with the dents in your head and that stupid scotch tape collar, I mean why the hell can’t you even learn to count up to ten? I mean why does every single thing have to break down all the time?’

  ‘Eleven?’ Roderick still wanted to tell him all about Bax, how Bax had this eleventh finger right in the middle of his body – but Hank didn’t seem to be listening any more.

  Hank was rummaging through his tool-box, throwing out screwdrivers and wrenches, scraps of wire and folding rulers. Finally he up-ended the box and dumped everything out on the floor. He sat down in the middle of it all.

  ‘Must be here somewhere … that’s not it … that’s not it either …’

  After a while he stopped talking and pawing through the stuff. Hank just sat there like a big shaggy bear at a picnic.

  Roderick found a couple of sanding-discs that looked like plates, set them out with wrenches for silverware, and started piling on the food. Come and get it, plenty more where this come from, finger-lickin’, old-fashioned Southern fried country kitchen grub! For each of them there was a generous, man-sized helpin’ o’ nails, nuts and bolts, insulated wire and sizzlin’ flashlight batteries. Mm-mmm! For dessert there was a roll of friction tape that looked a lot like one of Aunt Lettibelle’s Olde Tyme Golden Dunker doughnuts, hit like to melt in yo’ mouf, chile. Roderick poured machine-oil – gravy – over everything and waited for Hank’s mouth to start a-waterin’. Red-headed kids with freckles were always sitting around having picnics like this with bears, big friendly bears like Hank. All he had to do was find the right words for a square meal like this. Come and get it, plenty more …

  ‘Eat up, Hank,’ said Roderick. ‘It’s yum-scrumpty-umptious!’

  The big bear blinked, looked at the sanding-disc, brushed it aside. ‘That’s not it either …’

  The mumbling and pawing went on until at last Hank came up with a hammer.

  ‘Thaf’s it,’ he said, smiling, and grabbed Roderick’s arm to hold him steady while he raised the hammer to strike.

  III

  Fill up that sunshine balloon

  with happiness!

  Send up that rocket to the moon

  with happiness!

  Every smile was a gift, every laugh was a lift, up up we will drift, and there seemed to be no end of choruses to this one.

  Pa began to wonder if this radio would ever wear out, so he could make out his report and be done with it. Funny, them giving him a radio to test on his last day at the factory. And what had Mr Danton said? Something about brightening the long hours of, of leisure activity? Whatever that meant. He knew they really wanted him to test the radio because they’d given him a key at the same time, so he could get back into the factory with his report.

  For forty years Pa Wood had worked at Slumbertite, fixing first the assembly-line, then later on the machines that worked the assembly-line, and finally just the machines that fixed the machines. At the last there was no one in the place but him, and Mr Danton upstairs in the office with his part-time secretary. And now, so he heard, they were gone too, the factory rumbling on by itself. Probably have to get a machine to read his report, if this damn radio didn’t outlive him. How could he work on his inventions with all that easy listenin’ racket?

  Everyone else in Newer, Nebraska, worked to music. The boys at Clem’s Body Shop hammered away to the Top Twenty; the girls at the Newer Café fried burgers to sad Western songs about drinking too much and losing custody of the children; Dr Smith the dentist had pulled all of Pa’s teeth out to the taped rhythms of his (Dr Smith’s) favourite Latin-American selections; even at the Slumbertite factory the machines worked to a kind of aggravating murmur from hidden speakers that Pa called Muse-suck. The stuff, whatever it was, had probably be
en turned on to entertain the workers years ago; neither Pa nor anyone else had been able to find out how to turn it off.

  ‘That’s the third time I’ve called you to dinner,’ said Ma, coming into the workshop. ‘What are you inventing out here?’

  He started. ‘Oh, uh, well I’m not sure what it is until it’s finished. Might turn out to be a puzzle that nobody can take apart.’ He turned the gadget over, frowning down at it. ‘Or it might be the start of something really big – a tap-dancing shoe that knows all the steps – or even a car that runs on scrap metal.’ He put it down and stared up at something on the wall, a key, a gold-plated key hanging on a nail. ‘Do you suppose they meant that to be a kind of retirement present?’

  ‘I told you they did, and the radio too. It’s you that keeps insisting they want you to test it. Turn the blamed thing off!’

  He reached up to the shelf and hesitated. ‘Seems a shame to get this far and not go on with it. Must be near done now, then I can have some peace and quiet. I’ll just leave it a bit … now what was I going to do?’

  ‘Dinner,’ she said, and led him into the house.

  Mrs Smith let the curtain fall. ‘There they go, a coupla real characters,’ she said, expressing the opinion of half the town. ‘I don’t know who’s the biggest character, him or her. Yesterday she told me –’

  ‘They oughta be locked up, both of them,’ said her husband, speaking for the other half of town. ‘Putting a thing like that in their back yard where every kid can see it!’ He lifted the curtain and glared at the giant toilet bowl, large enough to accommodate a ten-yard width of rump. ‘And remember the time she shaved her head and painted it green? Holy cow, trying to raise kids in this – I mean what the hell are they, atheists or –’

  ‘But listen, yesterday she told me they’re adopting a robot! A robot!’

  ‘Oughta be locked up,’ he said, staring at his hands, which were blushing deep pink. ‘Look, just thinking about them starts off the old allergy again. It’s not enough I gotta wash my hands fifty times a day and stick ’em in every filthy mouth in town, we had to pick a house next door to –’

  ‘You’ll feel better after dinner. Get Judy and wash, I mean –’

  He switched on the TV to catch the news-scan, but saw nothing but a list of names:

  This page is dedicated to all the gang down at Macs: Jil, Meri, Su, Jacqui, Teri, An, Ileen, John, Lu, Judi, Jak, Hari, Lynda, Raelene, Luci, Toni, Allyn, Jazon, Cay, Edd, Fredd, Nik, Carolle, Hanc, Jayne, Kae, Lusi,…

  ‘I had the strangest dream,’ said Ma, dishing up chicken and dumplings. ‘I dreamed I was lost in this waxworks, and everyone I asked for directions was just wax. I came up to this dummy of Ed (“Kookie”) Byrnes and I thought, maybe if I touch him he’ll come to life, so I did and he just stayed wax, only somehow I cut myself on this metal comb he had in his hand – what do you suppose that means?’

  Pa, who was wondering if you could preserve food by stopping time, said: ‘Delicious, delicious.’

  ‘You weren’t listening.’

  ‘Well no. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can’t help it, forty years of Muse-suck and noisy machines – but I hope you heard me when I said he’s coming tomorrow. Because he is.’

  ‘Who? Oh, him?’ He grinned with Dr Smith’s teeth. ‘Well now, there’s something. Life ain’t so bad, eh Mary?’

  ‘Who said life was bad? And if it is it’s only because you can’t behave like any normal retired senior whatsit and go root for the softball team or something, go work in the garden or, or just sit on the park bench in front of the post office with the other old seniors and talk about the state of the nation.’

  He speared a dumpling. ‘More like the state of their bowels. Horse-shoes, you forgot playing horse-shoes. Yep, pinochle, pool, beer, TV – the choice is endless. Only I’m too busy.’

  ‘Busy.’

  ‘Anyway, what about you? Shouldn’t you be crocheting covers for the telephone and the toilet-roll and every other blessed thing that looks like it might embarrass people? Or else TV, you ought to be watching some ads for freezer boxes and electric beet-dicers, and the stuff they squeeze in between the ads too, what is it? Dorinda’s Destiny? Instead you just lounge around, writing stuff you never show anybody, painting pictures you keep hidden – no wonder everybody thinks we’re nuts.’ After another dumpling he said, ‘We are, I guess, but no need for them to say so. This adoption business, you know what they’ll say? “The crazy Woodses is at it again.”’

  ‘If they do, it’s only because you go out of your way to be – eccentric. I remember nineteen fifty-two or was it three, just when everybody was watching Joe MacCarthy on TV –’

  ‘Don’t you mean Charlie McCarthy?’

  ‘When they were hanging on every word, you had to go telling everybody that you were a card-carrying communist, remember? “Hundred per cent Red,” you used to say, “and damned proud of it.” Had the boys at the Idle Hour talking about tar and feathers before we heard the end of it.’

  ‘Come on, you enjoyed every minute of it, you even made up that little card for me, remember? On one side it said, “I am a communist”, and on the other, “Communists always think they’re cards.”’

  She sniffed. ‘I had to join the Ladies’ Guild to smooth that over.’

  ‘Yes, I seem to remember you getting them all around here for a seance, wasn’t it? Getting in touch with a flying saucer, don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy that. Working away on the old ouija-board and all the time –’

  ‘Just a few lines of Apollinaire, to perk them up,’ she said. ‘For their own good, really.’ She sat back in her chair until the noonday sun caught her white hair and gleamed on the green scalp beneath.

  From the red to the green all the yellow dies

  When the macaws are calling in their native forests

  Slaughter of pi-hi’s

  There is a poem to be written about the bird which has only one wing

  We had better send it in the form of a telephone message

  Gigantic state of

  ‘Enough of that,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘I’ve got a million things to do. He’s coming tomorrow and I haven’t even cleaned the house or changed the sheets on the spare bed or baked cookies or anything.’

  ‘But he’s a robot, Mary. He doesn’t sleep in a bed or eat –’

  ‘Oh I know. To you little Roderick is just a chess-player.’

  ‘In a way. I mean, robots are terrific at chess, they say. Wonder if I shouldn’t go down in the basement and dig out a few old magazines with problems –’

  ‘Fine. While you’re down there, dig out our carpet-beater and use it. Understand?’

  ‘Maybe I could invent you a carpet-beating ma –’

  ‘Understand? Roderick is our son (or daughter) and I want to have everything ready for him. I want this to be a place he’ll be proud to live in, and it wouldn’t matter if he was a – a gingerbread boy (or girl). Understand? We have to start right.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘And if it just so happens that he’s not hungry and doesn’t want a cookie, fine. Or if he’s excited about his new home and doesn’t feel like sleeping right away, fine …’

  Jake McIlvaney lay back in Dr Smith’s chair, exposing his large Adam’s apple. When he talked, which he did incessantly, it bobbed up and down disgustingly. Dr Smith could hardly turn his eyes to the man’s filthy mouth.

  ‘How did this happen, Jake?’

  ‘Well, this morning I did a favour for Matt Gomper and fetched these here packages from the bus station – two big packages on the same day, Matt says he never seen nothing like it, and one of ’em has to go clear over to Clyde Honks, you know the old Ezra place, that’s what we always called it even though Hal Ezra never actually bought it, let’s see the bank owned it and then Don Jeepers, you know, married that gal from Belmontane and now Clyde owns it well what it was was a milk analyser, I knew he was talking about gettin’ one but I never knew he’d really buy
one because you know he was thinking of gettin’ rid of them cows last year – and anyways Matt’s missus is sick again, so I said sure I’d handle these here deliveries, so I got rid of that one and started back because the other package was for Ma and Pa Wood, am I talking too much here, doc?’

  ‘Ahmmmm.’

  ‘So I started back, the missus says I talk too much says I should of been a barber, anyway I must of been doing about fifty on that gravel shortcut past Theron Walker’s place, hear he’s gonna sell out and move to California, makes you wonder if it’s true, all them stories about his missus and Gordy Balsh – anyways all of a sudden I hear funny noises coming out of this here package. Like voices, like a voice, maybe a talking doll or one a them talkback computers, you never know what them crazy Woodses might get up to next, coupla real characters – so I stopped and listened real close only I couldn’t make out nothing. So then I recollected that Doc Savage was in that neck of the woods, artificial inseminationing Gary Doody’s herd, so I went over to Gary’s place and we took Doc’s stethescope and you know it sounded just like they had some kid boxed up there. I mean it kept talking to somebody called Dan, if you knocked on top it said, “Dan, somebody’s knocking, is that you?” And if you turned it over it said, “Dan, I think I’m upside down.” Damnedest thing I ever seen –’

  ‘The teeth are okay, Jake, nothing busted but the bridge.’

  ‘So anyways I fetched it over to the Woodses, thought I’d sorta hang around to see ’em open it. Real characters, ain’t they? Remember back in fifty-six was it, must of been before you come to Newer, maybe fifty-seven, remember Ma Wood one day she takes her vacuum out and starts vacuuming the street! No foolin’, vacuuming the street. That ain’t all, she, then she gets Pa up a ladder washing the trees too, never did figure them two.’