by John Sladek
‘H-he-hell with that. I’m g-g-gonna s-sell these up in the eighth-graders’ c-c-c – toilet.’ The stammerer grabbed the pill bottle and ran out, chased by the lisper. Roderick waited until the bell rang, then leaned over and read Miz Beek’s note.
‘ðu īdeea uv kumbīniNg speeCh Thayrupee wiTh ree-meedyul reediNg iz just wun mōr exampul ov ðu braykdown ov ðu hōl godawful sistum HwiCh ðay keep erjiNg mee tu joyn (az ðō peepul wur glū …’
Nat walked him home from school. ‘I feel safer,’ he explained. ‘Not that I’m really afraid of Chauncey and his gang but heck, two of us got a lot better chance than one, right?’
‘Right.’ said Roderick. ‘I was just wondering you know, how come I read all right at home only at school everything goes wrong?’
‘Yeah? Hey, we could become blood brothers, pledge ourselves to fight to the death, back to back in case Chaun –’
‘Look, I ain’t got any blood.’
‘We could use oil then, you got oil.’
So Roderick tapped a few drops of hydraulic fluid and Nat took a drop of blood from his thumb, and they mixed them.
‘We both swear, right? To defend ourselfs against anybody even Chaunce, we swear on my blood and your oil. Brothers.’
‘Brothers.’
‘To the death.’
‘To the death.’ Roderick walked him to his door. ‘See you tomorrow ’
‘Not tomorrow, hey remember? We got the day off on account of Miz Beek drowning herself in the swimming pool.’
‘See you the day after, then. Brother.’
‘Okay brother.’
‘Settle down, all of you,’ said the principal. ‘I’m not even going to start until you’re quiet. What’s more, no one goes home until we finish here, understood?’
They shifted uneasily, and one or two who had been glancing through the pages of Educationalist Today sat up straight.
‘That’s better. Now you all know why I’ve called this special meeting. But in case anyone hasn’t seen today’s Herald, let me read it out to you.’
‘ROBOT’ BOY AT NEWER SCHOOL: MORE INSANITY?
Following the alleged suicide of a teacher at Newer Public School (Stubbs Cty) come rumours of serious mental disturbances among the pupils. Teachers have confirmed that at least one boy thinks he is a mechanical robot.
The boy, Robert Wool, ‘acts just like a little machine,’ according to second-grade teacher Mrs Delia Dorano. He believes he has mechanical grappling hooks for hands, and tank tracks in place of feet. ‘Robert doesn’t even answer to his name,’ she said. ‘No wonder, what with the constant harping on sex and filth everywhere you look. We must protect our children from the sex-merchants of the state educational system.’
‘George George, school psychologist, blamed the computerizing of modern society, including our schools. ‘We have teaching machines, testing machines, magnetic report cards,’ he said. ‘Where do we stop?’ According to another source, books in the school library have been keypunched on to IBM cards which are unreadable. Said George, ‘It’s getting like Brig Bother around here.’ Mr George is the brother of Hal George, prominent hog auctioneer.
Russian Roulette Club
Newer Junior High, like Newer P.S., has had its share of tragedies. Last year Beanie Vulich, 16, became the first tragic victim of the school’s ‘Russian roulette club’, whose members made use of a school computer to select a duelling pistol at random from a number …
‘It goes on,’ she said, ‘to mention drugs sold openly in the eighth-grade washroom, thefts and vandalism, and a security man with a drink problem. Any comments?’
Ogilvy was the first to speak. ‘Not fair,’ he said. ‘Buncha lies and distortions. Like sure I take a drink now and then, but they make it sound like I spend all day lying in an alley somewheres with a bottle of Tokay in a paper bag.’
‘What really bothers me,’ said Miss Borden, ‘is the way certain people are using this tragic suicide as an excuse to whine about their own pet peeves.’ She looked at Mrs Dorano. ‘Certain people are going to be sorry they ever opened their big –’
‘The truth will out,’ said Mrs Dorano. ‘You can’t suppress –’
Mr Goun jumped to his feet. ‘Suppress, who the hell are you to talk about –?’
At the same time Mr George said, ‘How did I know they were going to print it that way? I didn’t think you’d take my criticism in a personalized way, rather than in a societally –’
‘Filth and corruption driving that young woman to –’
Captain Fest said, ‘Self-discipline, a hard line, lest we forget, moulding Americans, shaping the future –’
‘– nothing but plain murder, no better than abor –’
‘– catalyzing factors –’
‘– easy way out, no backbone, no self-discip –’
‘– building a bridge –’
‘Quiet.’ Miss Borden looked at George. ‘You all disappoint me, you especially, George. Whining to the papers behind my back instead of getting down to work – My God, you’re the school psychologist. We pay you to fix these kids.’
‘Fix? Fix? You talk as if they were a bunch of machines! What do you suggest, I get out the old tool-kit and maybe tighten up a few loose screws here and there?’
Mrs Dorano clapped her hands over her ears. ‘I won’t listen to that filth – I won’t!’
Captain Fest muttered, ‘Like to fix that little Robert whatsis-name myself. Hear he refuses to pledge allegiance to his country’s flag. You give him to me for a week, I’ll knock the robot crap out of him.’
George turned on him. ‘Knock the crap out of him, all you can think of, right? If you had the slightest understanding Look, what you ought to be doing is using his problem, making it work for us, for him. I mean, if he thinks he’s a robot maybe he should be on a teaching machine or –’
‘Good idea,’ said Miss Borden. ‘That’s it, then. Captain, you take charge of this boy and set up a teaching machine program.’ She checked something off on a form. ‘What 1 like to see, people forgetting their little individual differences and all pulling together. So much for one child’s problem. Now how about some of these bigger issues? Dope-pushing, theft, vandalism – any suggestions?’
One of the younger teachers murmured something and Miss Borden took it up. ‘Did you say bridge-building, Ms Russo? That’s the first sensible suggestion I’ve heard so far. Isn’t that our job, after all, building bridges? Reaching out –’
Ms Russo blushed. ‘No, what I shaid was –’
‘– reaching out to isolated, disadvantaged children who –’
‘I shaid I hope thish doesn’t take long becaushe I’ve got a dental appointment.’
‘Dental appointment. I see.’
‘Yah, to have a bridge rebuilt. Shee, what happened was that little bash – that Chaunshy Bangfield hit me in the mouth with a trophy. I was making him voluntarily return it.’
Someone muttered, ‘He reached out to her all right, the little disadvantaged –’
‘Any more suggestions?’
Goun spoke of actualizing the problem within a contextual framework of structured situations ranging from verbal correctives to dis-enrolment. In such an intra-systemic …
The digital clock wiped away another minute, and another.
Pa waved a plate of brass shaped like half a violin. ‘Son, what I’m trying to do here is make me a timepiece, but one that keeps real time. Human time. Like when you’re concentrating hard on one thing and it seems like only a minute goes by, why should you have clocks showing you an hour?’ He laid the brass plate on his bench and started hammering. ‘Other. Times. You wait. For some. Thing to. Happen. Like the. Sunrise. When you. Can’tsleep. You think. One. Hour. Goes by. But ord. Inary clocks. Say one. Minute!’ The coughing fit would not pass; Pa had to sit down. ‘What use is a clock doesn’t tell real time? So. Figure I’ll just hook this one up to a brain-wave gadget, need some other stuff too, fine adjustments for fidgeting, pas
s me that melon scoop will you?’
Roderick wondered what would happen if somebody spent all his real time watching his own real time clock? Could he make it run fast or slow, stop it? Run it back? Or what if two people watched each other’s clock? What if two clocks were hooked together? What if the clocks started running the people? And what if …? He could go on with questions like these for ever, and no time lost. Time didn’t have to move here, because he was at the place where he fitted into the world (as the melon scoop fitted into the brass half-violin turning it into the lever that threw the switch that started up the little water-wheel …). Here was Pa, measuring up and marking out all the precise spots on the brass where he was going to bash it with a hammer. Here was the workshop, with dusty autumn light slanting in through the high little window to illuminate a corner piled with forgotten inventions: the pocket calculator (that could add only 0 + 0, 0 + 1 or 1 + 0); the Goethescope with its ebony prism; ‘talking shoes’; the universal voting machine with its tangle of coloured wires leading from hundreds of switches to one dead-end; ‘Maze-opoly’; audible ink; a large abacus (designed for steam power); the ingenious solar-powered cucumber press (virtual perpetual motion, Pa explained); the Odorphone … Here was the friendly workshop itself, one friendly wall bearing the hand-lettered slogans of Miss Violetta Stubbs; another bearing tools (the dover, bit-mace, graduar etc.) below the golden key below the framed photo of Rex Reason below the shelf with the radio. Now the radio hurried through some assassination attempt on some Shah, anxious to get back to its sunshine balloon, but he could hear Ma singing one of her improvised songs, the one she claimed was from the Bow-wow Symphony – whatever that was:
There were other stanzas just as senseless, stuff about poison candy being good for you when you wake up with an electrode up your nose, stuff like that – anyway, how could a woman be Jake!
XIII
To find out about the past, Roderick had to ask Ma. Pa would only say, ‘History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken.’
Ma sketched as she talked:
Once upon a time the town of Newer had been nothing but a flat spot on the flat prairie: no factory, no grain elevator, no town, not so much as a billboard advertising cream substitute. But to those who founded the town, flatness was ideal: it reminded them daily that God had placed the human race upon a planet shaped like a dinner plate.
They came in 1874, Josephus Butts and his followers. They called the place New Ur, themselves the Urites. They builded here a temple with plain glass windows all around, to shew forth the straightness of God’s ruled line.
There were other rules, gradually revealed by Josephus (who now called himself Jorad): Urites were forbidden to laugh, marry, call hogs, look with pleasure at the sky or upon one another. Nine-tenths of all they owned or produced belonged to Jorad. No one could speak unless Jorad gave permission. No one but Jorad could sing. No one might think unless Jorad allowed him to put on the famous knitted ‘thinking cap’, a device designed to keep thought down to one person at a time. Finally, the Urites were asked to speak, think, sing and pray in a language called Hibble-bibble, the grammatical rules of which were clear only to Jorad.
Jorad was good at this kind of life. In 1888, he defeated a famous orator in debate, a man who had come to New Ur solely to prove the world was round. The Urites would long remember that exchange.
FAMOUS ORATOR: When a ship sails away, the hull vanishes over the horizon first. Then the lower sails. Then the top-gallant. If the world is not round, how do you explain that?
JORAD: DO you see any ships here in town? Any top-gallants vanishing over any horizon? No? Well then.
It was their finest moment. The Urites were happy (in their way) as Jorad went off on a round-the-world tour (assuring them as he left that round was only a figure of speech) to promote flatness.
He was gone for ten years. And in the meantime, the Urites grew soft. One of them invented a device which became a standard part of the bicycle, money poured in, the church was rebuilt with stained-glass windows … by the time Jorad returned, the younger Urites were defiantly saying that Hibble-bibble was mumbo-jumbo, and even that the earth might be a little bit rounded in spots.
In no time at all the town had a dance hall and a Christian Science Reading Room, and all was lost. Jorad smashed the stained-glass windows, called his flock together and tried to urge them back to sense and happiness. But when they looked out of the broken panes, they no longer saw the straight line of the horizon, they saw billboards advertising liver pills, they saw a smoking factory (making beds), they saw steam tractors vanishing over the horizon … well then.
Jorad packed up and left, declaring his intention to travel to the edge of the earth and leap off. Some believed he had, until it turned out that he was only over in the next county, calling himself Baresh and starting up a New Babylon. Some people always learned, Ma said. None of Jorad’s descendants had ever married: Miss Violetta Stubbs and Mr Ferd Joradsen were now the last.
‘Sure it’s sad,’ said Roderick, trying to see the sketch. ‘But what happened to this Hibble-bibble?’
‘Nothing. It vanished.’
‘Heck I liked the other stories better, all about the boy who couldn’t shiver and the girl who couldn’t cry and the little engine that could and – hey, that, is that me? It doesn’t look much like me.’
‘Well who said it has to look like you? Heaven’s sake, Roderick, this is your ideal head. The head you might have on your coin – or in the movie of your life – or when they put up your statue in the park, not to mention the church – but it’s nothing to do with your real head.’
‘Yeah but how come it’s got a nose and a chin and ears when all I got –?’
‘Never mind, you’re too young to understand. Just as you’re too young to understand the history of Newer.’
‘Okay, but I still like the other stories better, the emperor’s new clothes and the constant tin soldier – those are neat, hey.’
‘Well real life isn’t so neat, son.’
Real life at school was now very neat. Every day Captain Fest met him at the school door and conducted him to a janitor’s closet on the top floor where there was nothing but a typewriter keyboard and a television screen.
‘You sit here and learn, Wood. Learn. I know your name and I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Latrine’s down the hall there but don’t you dare need it.’
Old Festy did check on him now and then, and so did Miz Russo, the young teacher who couldn’t talk much because her jaw was wired shut. He sat. He learned.
It began when he pushed the keyboard button marked HELLO. At once words appeared on the screen:
‘Hello. My name is Hank Thoro II. Please type your name.’
‘My whole name?’ he typed.
‘Good. My, do you like baseball? Just type Y for Yes or N for No.’
He typed Y.
‘Good. later on we’ll have fun playing baseball. First you need a little practice talking to me. Now tell me what’s missing in this sentence: Baseball is fun, but football is even more –’
‘Fun.’
‘Very good. My, before every baseball game they play some music, and everyone stands up. The music is called the Star-Spangled Banner. Do you know what a banner is?’
‘Somebody who b –’
‘Just Y or N. My. Y for Yes and N for No. Do you know what a banner is?’
‘What the heck. N.’
‘Banner means flag. The Star-Spangled Banner is the American flag. Star-Spangled means it has stars on it, and banner means flag. The American flag is a Star-Spangled –.’
So it went until recess: Roderick learned all the words of the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, how to salute the flag, carry it in a procession, display it with State flags, fly it at half-mast, and fold it into a three-cornered hat.
At recess Chauncey beat him up. Nat, his blood-oil brother, was nowhere in sight.
After recess he learned the history of the flag, th
e names of the fifty States and their capitals. Baseball never came up again.
At lunch hour, he rescued Nat from Chauncey.
After lunch hour, he learned more about the States: their chief exports and imports, populations, gross expenditures, State birds, flowers and songs, present governors and lieutenant governors, forms of capital punishment.
Finally, the ‘baseball’. The machine gave him three questions on what he’d learned. He answered them all, and it replied:
‘Three home runs wow terrific congratulations My you win program ends … Bye.’
He went to inform Mr Fest that Utah was the only State with death by firing-squad, that Minnesota’s State bird was the loon.
‘Learned all that, have you?’ Mr Fest scratched his grey crewcut. ‘Pretty quick. Puts me in kind of a bind, though, you know? Now I gotta find some more programs for you. Come on, let’s go see what they got in the office.’
Miss Borden was on the phone when they barged in. ‘Yes sir. Yes. Well, you and I know how people can read into … yes, and reporters cook up anything out of pretty ordinary … of course I could look up the medi – now? My secretary’s on her coffee – sure, yes, if you put it like that I, just hang on a minute, what is it Captain?’ She could not see Roderick over the edge of the desk.
‘Just wanted to find a few programs for the teaching machine, American history maybe?’
She detached a key from her gold chain and threw it, the motion sending a batch of pink forms to the floor where they sprawled in a neat fan. ‘Help yourself, cabinet in corner – get those forms will you, Captain? I’m, I’ve got to go look up some kid’s medical rec – Jenny never gets around to keying anything on our data file so it’s always a matter of digging – oh, and if you hear any funny noises on the phone, pick it up, will you? And tell them I’m still hunting?’
‘Can do, ma’am.’
She grabbed a handful of blue forms and strode out, saying, ‘Got to get this place organized, every time we get a bigger data base they throw more junk at us, fill it up before we even …’