The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  ‘Oh, he’s better already. They let him out weekends to work his job, even. Fact he’s right over there in that glass box, our esteemed disc-jockey.’

  ‘No kidding? That’s good, isn’t it? He can –’

  ‘He can find the hole in the middle of each record, sure. He can even talk, you notice? Every now and then he says, “Here’s another record.”’

  XXVI

  Roderick awoke in jail again, watching Sheriff Benson watch Top Dollar. Dr De’Ath was sitting in a captain’s chair watching him. Ma was sitting in another watching everything.

  ‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ said the doctor. ‘Really amazing. Course, I nearly flunked medical electronics myself, never could learn to make a good solder joint – but this is really amazing. Mind if I test him?’

  ‘Ask him,’ Ma said. ‘Son, how are you?’

  ‘Fine I guess.’ Roderick allowed the doctor to look into his eyes and ears, to tap his knee and hold up fingers for him to count. ‘Guess you’re okay too, Doc?’

  ‘Shh!’ said the Sheriff. ‘Just gettin’ to the end of The Marriage Stakes. Already missed Big Spender and Heap or Weep.’ When the commercial break came on, Dr De’Ath explained:

  ‘Pretty lucky there. After they hanged you some of the boys got so excited – well, Jake Mcllvaney shot himself in the foot. You know how Doc Welby is about coming out on call, so they had to let me take care of him. Got him in an intensive care unit now, over at Buford.’

  ‘Intensive care?’

  ‘Yup, and there he stays until he runs up a nice fat bill. Anyway I fooled around with him until the highway patrol came and broke things up.’

  ‘Lay it on the Line is next,’ the sheriff explained. ‘But on Channel 18 they got Big Game, followed by Grabopoly. Kind of a hard choice there.’

  ‘They probably wouldn’t have done anything to me anyway,’ said the doctor, when he had swallowed a handful of bright pills. ‘Nope, not after you. Kinda put them off the whole idea, seeing your head come off like that.’

  ‘My head came off?’

  Ma nodded. ‘I managed to get you home and fixed up.’

  De’Ath said, ‘Amazing work. Boy if I could do that for a real patient – well, some day. Your Ma is a wonder, boy.’

  Ma cleared his throat. ‘I did have some help. Er, asked one of the maintenance men from the factory to give me a hand with the tricky parts.’ He held up a mirror for Roderick. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine, is that all?’

  ‘Well it’s – very symmetrical – aw heck, Ma, you know I don’t know how to talk about art. It’s – it’s a very symmetrical head. I like it fine.’

  They sat and talked as the sky beyond the Venetian blinds began to turn grey, then orange, and as the sheriff watched Beat the House, Chance in a Million, Take the Spoils, Up for Grabs and Cash or Crash.

  ‘Guess I’ll drive over to Buford and see my patient,’ said the doctor, after taking his own blood-pressure. ‘On my way home, anyway.’

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘Got everything I need, now. Airtight case against Katrat Fun Foods. Well. Uh, good luck, boy.’ He offered Roderick his hand.

  ‘Good luck to you too, Doctor.’

  ‘I’m glad I did that, shook your hand. You know?’

  Roderick didn’t know.

  ‘Well it’s just that I – last night when your head came off and I saw all the wires – I was really pissed off. The idea of being strung up in the company of a sonofabitching machine – I mean it just seemed like adding a last insult to a last – you know?’

  Roderick nodded, feeling stiffness in his new neck. ‘That’s okay. See I’m not so crazy about human beings, either. But good luck anyway, Doc.’

  ‘Wish you boys would pipe down,’ said Benson. ‘This here is the one I been waiting for, Bust the Bank.’ He watched that, and Dig for Treasure, Wealthy and Wise, Family Fortune, Filthy Rich, Fakeout and Beggar Your Neighbor before he was again interrupted, by a call from the highway patrol.

  *

  The two agents were driving very fast away from the burning wreck.

  ‘Can’t go back now, the highway patrol’s all over the place. If you had any doubts, why the hell didn’t you say something before we torched it?’

  ‘All I said was, he’s black. How come they never said he was black?’

  ‘What are you implying, we finalized the wrong guy? What, some black car-thief or what?’

  ‘I’m not implying nothing.’

  ‘Well you sure as hell sound like you’re implying something. Listen, you got his licence, is his name Death or isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure but –’

  ‘Is he an MD or isn’t he?’

  ‘Sure but –’

  ‘And did the receptionist at Buford City Hospital point him out to us as Dr Death or didn’t she?’

  ‘Sure. Sure.’

  ‘Well then what’s the prob? Study the orders, he has to be the asshole who invented this robot for testing artificial hearts. Dr Sheldon Death, right? The asshole Orinoco wants finalized, right?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because on the licence it says DOG EASY APOSTROPHE ABLE but on the orders we got DOG APOSTROPHE EASY –’

  ‘So?’

  ‘And he’s not Sheldon neither, he’s Samuel.’

  After a silence. ‘So what are you implying? We finalized the wrong customer?’

  ‘I’m not implying nothing.’

  Ma and Roderick sat thinking about Doc De’Ath while the sheriff settled down for Royal Flush and Play for Keeps. Finally Ma said, ‘So. You don’t like people much. I didn’t know.’

  ‘I like you and Pa.’ After a pause, he added, ‘And almost anybody else – only one at a time. But when you get them all together, people are so – weird, Ma.’

  ‘You’ll get used to them.’ He handed Roderick a ticket. ‘Now your bus leaves at three-twenty. So you be sure and be out front of the Newer Home Cafe a little early. You need a recharge or anything before you go? Oil change?’

  ‘I just had one. Ma, don’t worry. I guess you got problems enough of your own.’

  ‘Pshaw! Your Pa and I will be all right. Of course they’re foreclosing on our home, and Mr Swann is suing us for his fees, not to mention Dr Welby and the others – but on the other hand, all the debts we owe are now in the hands of the Bangfield Trust Bank.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘Good? It’s perfect, son. You see, the bank computer has been sabotaged. I don’t know how – guess someone somewhere phoned them up, drew out several million and then covered it by – I guess by changing all the plus signs to minus signs – something like that.’

  ‘So does that mean –?’

  ‘Bangfield Trust now owes us a whole lot of money.’ Ma winked. ‘Of course we won’t try to collect. Only numbers, after all. On the astral plane, pluses and minuses are all the same anyway. Now we can just settle down and live –’

  ‘But Ma! Isn’t Pa officially dead?’

  ‘Sure. And North America is officially a continent, and the Atlantic is officially an ocean, but so what? On the astral plane, it could all be switched around tomorrow, just like that.’

  Sheriff Benson cleared his throat. ‘You mind not snapping your fingers so loud there, Ma? I’m trying to concentrate on Lucky Couple. Heck of a big jackpot there, must be – oh, you leaving young feller?’

  ‘Got to catch the bus.’

  ‘Too bad you can’t stick around. In a minute they got The Big Break, then Mr and Mrs Jackpot, then Beautiful Winners – no wait, that’s on the other network – they got Boom or Bust, For Richer or Poorer, Hit a Gusher, Winning Streak, Crazy-stakes, Cash In, Read the Will, Slush Fun, Crapout …’

  But the young man with the symmetrical face – Benson had no idea who he might be – was gone, faster than the time limit for one of them questions on Take the Cash. One of them real hard questions.

  *

  ‘… Course we’re protected, but we ai
n’t exactly gonna make a pile on that deal,’ said Mr Kratt’s voice. ‘Not unless we buy this Bangfield out of Welby’s company … anyway you get your ass back here, next time don’t go telling the damn chauffeur how to drive the damn car.’

  ‘Yes sir.’ Ben hung up just as the bus was pulling in. Even so, by the time he’d gulped the tepid coffee, paid and tipped, counted his change twice and gathered up his notebook and God is Good Business, he was the last one aboard.

  He found an empty seat behind a pair of nuns. Across the aisle was a young man Ben thought he recognized, until he saw him full-face (without a birthmark).

  ‘Reading about God, are you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ben turned away quickly to the window. For all you knew, this guy could be one of the executioners last night.

  The thought sent Ben back to his notebook:

  ‘In 1791 William Godwin wrote: “A servant who has been taught to write and read ceases to be any longer a passive machine.” In this he expressed the fading hope that any distinction could still be made between the common man and the common gadget. For by the time Godwin’s daughter had completed her New Prometheus (and while in the next room her husband echoed her creation in Prometheus Unbound: “And human hands first mimicked and then mocked,/With moulded limbs more lovely than its own,/The human form, till marble grew divine …”), by that time the French had already celebrated their revolution by creating a new automatic headsman, while in England the law declared that men who smash an automatic knitting machine must be hanged – as though they had committed murder.’

  The man across the aisle was writing, too. Ben looked away, saw an ambulance go by, and heard one of the nuns:

  ‘Poor Father Warren! Imagine, getting malaria right here in the middle of Nebraska!’

  ‘On top of everything else, Sister!’

  ‘Yes, Sister. No wonder Mrs Feeney thinks he’s a saint.’

  ‘Ah, who knows, Sister?’

  ‘Ah, who indeed?’

  *

  It was late afternoon in New York, where they were changing one of the flags in front of the UN building. The peacock-blue-and-gold of the Shah of Ruritania came down to be replaced by the tricolour of a new People’s Republic. There was no ceremony, nothing to disturb the normal rise and fall of pigeons, flapping up to invisible ledges somewhere above, swooping down to join the sea of columbine grey through which waded a few tourists, among them Mr Goun.

  Mr Goun and his camera had come to see the UN building, not to see if it was really (as its architect claimed) a ‘Cartesian skyscraper’ (Cartesian it was, as any sheet of graph-paper) or ‘a passion in glass’, but merely to finish a roll of film and the last afternoon of his vacation. He was passionately aware how much his feet hurt, how tired he was of standing like this in groups of tourists, all snapping away at some sight, all complaining about their feet, all anxious to get back to their homes (that is, to the machines in which they lived).

  He was lonely. The only person he had spoken to (aside from foot complaints) was a policeman yesterday, who said:

  ‘Watch the way ya carry that camera, buddy. Lotsa cameras snatched like that, see?’

  ‘Thanks, offic –’

  He thought of that conversation now, as he reached for his camera and came up with nothing but two ends of the strap, each neatly razored.

  ‘I’ve been robbed!’ he said. No one looked at him.

  ‘Hey I’ve been robbed!’ he said to a man in a Hawaiian shirt (matching the band of his straw hat).

  ‘Yeah? Tough.’ The man turned away to continue his conversation with someone else: ‘Okay so the Shah was a puppet, but I say, whose puppet? Whose puppet?’

  Goun turned and bumped into someone.

  ‘Oh I’m sorry – hey! Professor Rogers, holy –’

  ‘Mistake!’ said the other, in an oddly hoarse voice. Indeed, his glittering gold hair did not look much like that of Rogers (except at the roots, where Goun was now looking), and some of his pock-marks seemed to have been filled in with putty.

  ‘But sure you must be, holy, hey it’s great to see you Prof –’

  ‘Mistake! Mistake! My name Felix Culpa!’

  Goun watched, amazed, as the stranger ran off to jump into a yellow taxi. There was something like blood on the door.

  Dear Dan,

  The picture on the other side of this card is the post office in Newer where I won’t be mailing it. I hope you’re feeling better. Ma & Pa send their love. I’m fine.

  Your pal,

  Roderick

  Nothing to add, so he stared out of the window as familiar places flickered past: Virgil’s Hardware, Joradsen’s Drug, Fellstus Motors, the sort of new Simple Simon Supermart, HAIR TODAY, the Legion Hall, the Idle Hour, Violetta’s shoppe (now it was to be called VI & I NOTIONS), the pool hall, the library, Buttses Dairy, Bangfield Realty, Welby Investments, the site of the proposed Bangwel Building, Newer Produce, Cliff’s junkyard, the motel and chapel, and finally the office recently vacated by Dr Smith the dentist – men were carrying in a new mechanical receptionist, other men were putting gold lettering on the windows:

  LOUIE HONK-HONK’S DETECTIVE AGENCY, INC.

  Stuff Found Out

  NOTE ON DIE! DIE! YOUR LORDSHIP

  The murderer must be Dr Coué, using the billiard cue, between 8:00 and 8:15, and dropping the clue of the hair. Reasoning is as follows:

  1. If the billiard cue was not the weapon, then either Drumm embezzled or Coué was blackmailed, or both. If Drumm embezzled, then the daughter was compromised. Since she was not, Drumm did not embezzle. If Coué was blackmailed, then the butler was an addict; if the butler was an addict, then the billiard cue was the weapon. In short, if the cue was not the weapon, then the cue was the weapon. This contradiction resolves only if:

  The billiard cue was the weapon.

  2. Since Adam used the polo-stick, and Brett the poker, only Coué or Drumm could have used the billiard cue. (Each suspect had access to only one weapon.)

  3. If Coué touched the statuette (weapon) then there was a message under it. If so, then Adam was the thief. If so, then Brett stayed in her room all evening reading. If so, then the bloody handkerchief was used to wipe the statuette. In short, if Coué touched the statuette, he also left the clue of the bloody handkerchief. But we know that Drumm left that clue, not Coué.

  Therefore, Coué did not touch the statuette. Therefore he touched the only remaining weapon, the cue:

  Coué alone had access to the billiard cue.

  From the sentences, a table can be constructed:

  SUSPECT TIME WEAPON CLUE

  Adam (earliest) polo-stick thread

  Brett ? poker sooty smudge

  Coué 8:00—8:15 billiard cue hair

  Drumm 8:15 8:30 statuette bloody handkerchief

  RODERICK AT RANDOM

  or

  THE FURTHER EDUCATION OF

  A YOUNG MACHINE

  I

  Dead or dreaming? It seemed to Leo Bunsky that he had come out of retirement. Somehow he was back in his old office, working on Project Roderick again. And somehow the old heart condition had decided to stop tormenting him: gone was the breathlessness, the tiredness, the draining of fluid down into his feet until they doubled in size and burst his shoes. Without any medication or surgery, he was now cured. Everything was back to normal now, if that word could be used in these miraculous circumstances. Calloo, and also Calais! But what was the explanation?

  He was dreaming. He was dead. Dreaming but dead. Neither. He had slipped through a ‘time-warp’ into a ‘parallel universe’ (Dr Bunsky was a reader of science fiction), probably through a ‘white hole’.

  It didn’t matter; in any case there was plenty of work to do. He could live an unexamined life, until Project Roderick demanded less of his time, okay? Okay, and great to be part of this real-life science-fiction dream, a project to build a ‘viable’ robot. Roderick would be a learning machine. It would learn to think and behave as a human. All the team ha
d to do was solve dozens of enormous problems in artificial intelligence that had defeated everyone else; from there on, it was science fiction.

  Bunsky’s job at the moment was teaching simple computer programs to talk. So far he’d got a program to say Mama am a maam, but not with feeling. If Roderick the Robot was ever going to think as a human, it would of course need to learn and use language as a human: Mama am a maam was not exactly Miltonic, but it was a start.

  How did people learn to talk? No one really knew. There were those who thought it might be a matter of training, like learning to ride a bike. Others seemed to imagine a kind of grammar-machine built into the human head. Still others tried teaching chimpanzees to talk while riding bikes. Chimps, so far, had articulated no theories of their own.

  Bunsky found it easier to scrap general theories and consider the brain as a black box: language stuff went in and different language stuff came out. In between, some sort of processing took place. What Roderick the Robot would have to do, then, was to mimic the hidden processing. The robot would have to learn as human children learn, and that meant making the same kinds of childish mistakes. And only those kinds of mistakes. It was okay for Roderick to say Me finded two mouses on stair. It was not okay to say I found two invisible green guesses on the stair.

  Leo Bunsky lifted his gaze to a file card tacked to the wall above his desk:

  TO ERR (APPROPRIATELY) IS HUMAN

  There was something he couldn’t remember, that made his head ache.

  The door opened and one of the younger men in the project came slouching in. It was that interdisciplinary disciple with the unfortunate name, Ben Franklin. Bunsky didn’t know him well.

  ‘Leo, how’s tricks?’ He slumped into a chair and started flicking cigarette ash on the floor.

  ‘Fine, uh, Ben. Fine. Wish you’d use the ashtray, I know the place is untidy but –’

  ‘Yes, I found two invisible green guesses on the stair. Yours?’

  ‘Very amusing. Now if you’ll excuse me …’

  Franklin stood up. ‘Busy, sure. Sure. I don’t suppose you need any help with anything?’