by John Sladek
These prisoners of conscience became acquainted: there was Rickwood, a taciturn guy whose symmetrical, bland face probably concealed a real thinker; Luke, a drunken loudmouth but probably revolutionary at heart; Bill, the big guy with the beard who played video games and said little, in fact nothing; Wes, the small intense guy with rimless glasses who talked a blue streak and wanted action! action! and ‘Gert’ who was really Joanne and married to Wes but who preferred not to be known as Mrs or even Ms but adopted the totally unbiased and sex-free title Msr, applicable to men persons and to women persons, in any order.
What was to be done? The entire world was now in the grip of authoritarian zombarchical police states, maintaining power through multinational conglomerates at the top and the jack-booted forces of oppression at the bottom. The world was beginning to resemble something in a satirical science-fiction novel of no great quality. It was time to do something, all right. Time for some all-out, ultimate, definitizing gesture that would make it clear for all time where everybody stood.
Wes wanted to go out right away and collect money to save up for a cobalt bomb that would wipe out all life on this planet for millions or maybe billions of years: that was action. Gert and Luke preferred to argue about the placement of punctuation in a draft manifesto condemning ‘world interdependences/coercive structures/Houston Mission Control/militarist juntas/pigshit bureaucracies’.
Roderick, having gone into the kitchen to find an outlet and recharge his batteries, came back at dawn to find the arguments still raging on, and Bill still playing a video game. Since it was breakfast time, they all sat down and (all but Roderick) had a bread and water breakfast. Bill spoke for the first time:
‘A lot of people talk a lot about blowing up the world, tearing it all down and starting over,’ he said ‘But I’m really doing something. I got me a job with the Hackme Demolition Company, and we’re really tearing stuff down.’
‘You blow stuff up for some capitalist,’ said Wes. ‘That’s no good. A rich guy in silk hat and striped pants holds out this bag with a dollar sign on it, and you say “Yes sir, yes sir. You want me to lose that building? Yes sir.”’
‘But I still blow it up,’ said Bill. ‘It’s still one building less.’ He thought for a moment, chewing his bread. ‘And they’re still hiring, if anybody here wants a job, a honest job.’
Wes already had a job, as clerk to a tax lawyer for a leading investment firm. Joanne had the cafe to run, Wes added.
Roderick and Luke agreed to help dismantle the world.
VIII
The apostle clock chimed. Mr Kratt lifted his snout automatically and listened. For a second the heavy black V of his brow-line softened.
‘Okay Smith, where were we?’
‘O’Smith, sir. The name is O’Smith. And the game today is I do believe industrill espionedge. Ain’t it?’ The insolent tone was unexpected. Nice change of pace, Kratt thought, from all the panting yes-men around here. Of course it was the desperate insolence of a loser, just look at the man. Kratt looked, and found himself trying to stare O’Smith down.
In essence, this ‘Mister’ O’Smith (who seemed to have no first name) was a fat cowboy with a deep tan. He wore the modified Western clothes favoured by bogus oilmen and revivalists on the make, but even his hand-tooled boots failed to give him a prosperous look. His fat would be the fat of poverty, of hash-house burgers dripping with mayonnaise, pancakes or powdered-sugar doughnuts in the morning and greasy pizza at night, watery tap beer and syrupy wine, and cokes glugged down too fast in desert gas stations. Kratt had seen thousands of O’Smiths passing through his amusement arcades and his carnival, hurrying on their way from trailer-camp childhoods to flophouse deaths, losers all the way.
Mr Kratt’s gaze faltered. ‘Okay, let me give you a general rundown on this operation and then turn you over to my product-development boy, Ben Franklin.’
‘Yes sir. Now do I liasonize with you or this Frankelin?’
‘Him, this is all his show. See, Franklin worked on a research project at the University, a few years ago. Building a robot.’
‘Yep.’ O’Smith was staring hard again.
‘When the project broke up, the robot disappeared. Naturally
Franklin was disappointed. After putting in all that work on the thing, to have somebody come along and steal it …’
‘So you want me to steal it back?’
That’s about it. It’s worth ten grand in cash, plus all reasonable expenses. Agreed?’ Mr Kratt stood up and was about to offer his hand when O’Smith turned aside and walked to the window.
‘By God you got a view here, sir. A view! From up here it looks like you could just reach down and pick up any old piece of that city down there, pick it up in your hand. Like it’s all yours. Guess lots of it is yours, right? KUR is such a big old conglomerate, like I guess you manufacture that there Brazos Billy gadget, right?’
‘Brazos Billy? What – oh, you mean the fast-draw amusement machine, yes one of our subsidiaries handles that one, why?’
‘Nothin’, I just always kind of liked old Brazos, boy I must of drawed against him a thousand times – at bus stations, airports, arcades.’
Kratt looked at his watch. ‘There a point to all this?’
‘I like the way when you hit old Brazos he flops down on the floor and bleeds like a stuck pig. Plastic blood I know but boy it surely looks real. I always wanted one of them machines for myself so I could practise at home.’
‘You want me to throw in a toy, is that it?’
O’Smith grinned. ‘’Predate that, Mr Kratt sir. But I was only calling attention to the difference between you and me. I wanted a robot for years and never got it. You want one for five minutes, you just call me in, say “Ten grand in cash” and you got it.’ The grin broadened. ‘You got it, Mr Kratt. Sir.’
O’Smith offered his left hand, a final insult.
Mister O’Smith still had his smile when he had finished talking to Ben Franklin, who could only give him two minutes. He kept the smile on until he was safely out of the building and into a bar, where he ordered a tap beer. Then he let it go.
‘What’s the matter, cowboy? Somebody shoot your horse?’
He looked at the woman in purple with her purple lipstick, and he continued to scowl. She raised her shotglass and nodded to him as though he’d bought her a drink. ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at me now,’ she said, ‘but I was once a Paris model.’
Model what? he wondered.
‘I was. A mannequin.’
‘Lena!’ The bartender shouted at her as at a dog. ‘Quit bothering the customers, I told you before.’
‘Larry’s always telling somebody off …’ she said.
Mister O’Smith ignored the old bat, tried to get his thoughts straight or just not think. Later he would hit an arcade, few games of Star Rats maybe and then shoot it out with old Brazos. Then get a pizza, go back to his hotel room and grab some shuteye. Plenty of time to think after that …
Ten measly grand, fucker was going to make millions off this Roderick, maybe billions. Ten grand was like an insult, like he was so dumb he couldn’t figure what a robot like that was worth. God durn it, a man had his pride, even a man as badly handicapped as Mister O’Smith, handicapped didn’t make him an idiot. There was other people who would pay to find out about Roderick the Robot, this Roderick Wood the Robot. How about the Agency? Them boys wouldn’t forget the work O’Smith done for ’em already, and they was always in the market for dope on robots. He’d stopped it must be twenty different robots getting built, back when he was freelancing for the Agency. The Agency would pay, all right.
Then there was other companies. How about Moxon, now, always hot for some little cybernetic novelty. Others too. Nothing wrong with selling the same robot to everybody, why not?
‘I don’t know why not,’ said the woman with purple. ‘You tell me, honey.’
He saw how it was: he’d been shouting it out to everybody, he’d been in the bar
all day, he was drunk.
‘Boy howdy am I drunk! And I am just shoutin’ it out to everybody!’ he shouted. ‘Whole buncha secrets! Shh! You all need to know em – on a need-to-know-basis WAHOO!’
‘Lena,’ said the bartender. ‘Get your boyfriend out of here? Please?’
‘WAHOO! Big D is beautiful, that’s the secret. Big D is beautiful!’ he roared, as Lena manoeuvred him up some dark stairs. ‘Best-kept secret in the whole world, but everybody needs to know!’
‘Shhh’ She was opening a dark door into darkness. ‘The bed’s this way, honey. By the way, what did you mean about being handicapped?’
‘Shh, secret!’ He fell across the bed, grinning. ‘See, I got an artificial arm.’
‘Oh. Well I don’t mind.’ She reached for him.
‘But I also got an artificial leg.’
‘Oh. Well I guess that’s okay.’ She threw a real one across him.
‘But I also got –’
‘Christ don’t say it!’
‘A glass eye, that’s all. People keep thinking I’m staring at ’em.’
‘You were giving me the eye in the bar.’
‘I’ll give it to you now, maam. Here.’
She screamed, he laughed, there was a confused tumbling that might have included sexual contact, then they slept. Later she turned on the dim rose light.
‘Was it the war?’
‘Naw. I lost the arm in an accident when I was just a kid. Rest of me was okay for a long time, till I come up North here, that was the start. I got run down by a car, first off, and they took me to the hospital.’
‘Were you hurt bad?’
‘I wasn’t hurt at all, just knocked out. But my prosthesis was a total wreck. And the worst thing was, they wouldn’t let me out because I couldn’t pay my bill. And I couldn’t pay until they let me out to get my new arm and get back to work.
‘Finally tried to sneak out one night, climbing down the bottom side of a fire escape, but with one arm it wasn’t so good. I fell and broke my durn leg! So I went back inside, more bills piling up, and they operated and set the leg. Only there was this infection all over the hospital and it got into the leg bone – they had to amputate.’
‘You poor thing.’
‘Next thing, my durn heart stopped on me, right on the operating table. I guess they got pretty excited around there because I was a kidney donor, so they started in testing me to see if I was dead. What they do is, they take a piece of cotton wool and touch the eyeball to see if you blink. I blinked okay, and they got my heart started again. But then the eye got this infection …’
‘You poor, poor thing.’
‘I don’t exactly see it that way, maam. See, I’m a private investigator by trade, and in my line a work, handicaps like these can be a real asset. You can conceal a load of equipment in a prosthesis, if it’s built right.’
He told her how he had to find the money to buy some really good stuff: an eye with a camera in it, an arm that fired .357 ammo, and a leg that could hold an automatic weapon – all of them custom-built and jewel-perfect. But for all this he needed real money, not this chickenshit ten grand. Quarter-million would be more like it.
She couldn’t see why a private dick needed automatic weapons, though.
It was because he didn’t want to be a nickel-and-dime divorce case man. All the real money was in big contract work – for large organizations – even for the government. He’d done Agency work before and he’d do it again. Just had to get his money together.
She had once been a Paris model, so she knew what it was to hit the skids and go all the way down.
‘The best time,’ he said, ‘was on this Agency job down in St Petersburg, Florida. See this old-timer down there was some kinda inventor, and he’d patched together some electronic junk to make himself some kinda talking machine. Guess it sorta made conversation with lonely old folks or something. So the Agency sent me down there to straighten him out. Only time in my life I ever had to be quick on the draw!’
‘Quick on the draw? You mean to shoot somebody?’
Mister O’Smith laughed. ‘Why sure. Like I said, to straighten him out. This old-timer was sittin’ in the shade, with this 12-gauge just outa sight – he brought it up so fast I like to caught my deatha cold right there. Only I been practising a fast draw all my life, so I just terminated his lease – boy howdy! Hot damn! Best contract I ever – what’s the matter?’
She turned away, pulling the covers up around her. ‘I wish you’d just go now.’
Mister O’Smith got up and dressed, and ran a cloth over the toes of his boots. Then he twitched the ring on his little finger and from under the nail slid a thin knife-blade. When a man talked too much, a price had to be paid. He hated like hell to do this to poor old Lena, but that’s the way it goes. All he had to do was lean over and cut her throat, hold her down by the hair till she stopped thrashing, wipe the blade on the bed and retract. Then a quick check for bloodstains – not that there ever were any – and get out quick. Out on the frozen street at dawn, maybe swipe a Sunday paper off some doorstep, nothing looks more innocent than a man at dawn with a Sunday paper under his arm, heading into a hash house for a stack of wheatcakes.
But when Mister O’Smith finally did ease on to a stool at the hash house, Lena was still alive and well. God durn it, he kept saying to himself. God durn it, this was serious. Leaving a live witness who knew all about him, not even busting her arm to scare her a little, that was bad. He must be goin’ soft as shit.
Too blamed late now. Hell he could of blamed it on that ‘Lucky Legs’ killer, another one right here in the Sunday paper, some maniac kills women and saws off their legs, he could of sawed off Lena’s leg and … too late now. Too blamed late.
He looked at his eyes in the mirror behind the pies. A hard man, but goin’ soft. Soft as baby shit.
The site scheduled for demolition was a smart apartment building at 334 East 11th. The crew from Hackme arrived, the police helped clear the street and put up barricades – but when the site manager came to inspect the building, he couldn’t get in. The door was blocked by a doorman in grey livery.
‘You got the wrong address, buddy. This place ain’t coming down, it’s full of residents.’
‘It’s not full of residents, it can’t be.’ The manager started pulling pieces of paper from his attaché case. ‘Look, this says it was vacated two weeks ago. And this says the city gives us permission to blow it up. And this one says the owner wants it blown up so he can build a parking ramp. Your boss wants this place down, see?’
‘You’re crazy,’ said the doorman. ‘There’s twelve floors of residents here, nobody told them about any demolition. Nobody told me. I been workin’ here twenty years, nobody told me to leave.’
Roderick, Luke, Bill and the others stood watching the argument, and so did the great crowd behind the barricades. Policemen came and went, unsure what to do: Hackme’s papers seemed to give it a legal right to blow up the place. But the doorman had a right to prevent anybody’s going inside.
At noon, the president of Hackme Demolition arrived. Mr Vitanuova was a short man in a homburg. The crowd took note of his hat and his car (a Rolls-Royce) and booed him as he approached the door.
‘Look, all I want to do is go inside and talk to any residents who might by chance still be in the building. Okay? Just talk to ’em. Not get ’em out or nothing. Can I go in?’
The doorman stood firm. ‘No sir. I gotta know whom you was wanting to see. first. Then I gotta call it up to them, to see if they’re home to you, sir. Then if they okay it, you can go up.’
‘But hell I don’t know any residents. Just let me see anybody.’
‘Oh no you don’t, that we don’t allow.’
The audience cheered as Mr Vitanuova came away defeated. There was snow on the shoulders of his expensive coat, but he didn’t notice.
The crew went to sit across the street in a doughnut shop called Mistah Kurtz. Outside they could see Mr Vitan
uova pacing in the falling snow and smoking his cigar. Inside they could hear people in fur hats talking across doughnuts and coffee.
‘Well I for one am glad they’re blowing up that place. I always hated it, looks like a stack of TV sets … I’m tired of buildings that look like machines …’
‘Isn’t that Le Corbusier? Or no I must be thinking of Tolstoi, the body is a machine for living in buildings with … no, wait.’
‘Well I for one would rather sleep in the nave of Chartres cathedral
‘Oh you can fall off anywhere … like that angel that loved high places … where was it now they put up that angel of Villard d’Honnecourt’s, the one that could turn to look at the sun?’
‘Henry Adams harking back to the twelfth century …’
Well and Robert Adam harking back to the Etruscans … it seems they all want to get back to the old Adam, Adam and no eaves, hee hee!’
‘Not so funny when you think of all that striving and dreaming, reaching for what, light? And finally it comes down to nothing more than Las Vegas fibreglass casinos with neon walls, a city of the darkness for all those watts
‘All an Etruscan room?’
‘Only job Villard d’Honnecourt could get now is removing unwanted hair maybe.’
‘And that squiggle that Le Corbusier always used for “Man”, that sort of crushed starfish, that could feel right at home now, lifting up one fin to hail an air-conditioned cab … on any street …’
The siege went on. The owner of the building was away skiing somewhere and could not be reached. The police didn’t want to act without talking to him first. Mr Vitanuova applied for a court order, but the judge, too, wanted to think it over.
Three days passed. The steadfast doorman was now more than a local hero; network TV and out-of-town papers were beginning to warm to him. The mayor came to shake his hand.
‘I’m only doing my job,’ he kept saying, to their delight. ‘Protecting this building and the residents.’