The Complete Roderick

by John Sladek

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you gotta. What were you doing when we arrested you?’

  ‘I was standing watching some guy painting on a wall. He was painting, “I bring you not peace but an electric carving knife”.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re a Ludder. Sit over there, after you sign for your twenty-nine cents.’

  Over there was a long bench against the wall. Luke was there already, his saffron suit torn and dirty. Roderick sat between him and a fat man.

  ‘Are you all right, Luke? That cut on your forehead –’

  ‘Never felt better, Rickwood. Thinking of forming an escape committee, maybe digging a tunnel while we wait.’

  ‘But we’re on the tenth floor.’

  ‘Always some excuse to do nothing. Rickwood, don’t you realize? Everybody’s on some floor or other.’

  A policeman took Luke out of the room. Roderick now noticed that the fat man was having an argument with his handkerchief. That is, he had drawn a face on the cloth and draped it over his hand to make a puppet.

  ‘The way I see it,’ said the man, ‘machines are responsible for almost every human problem today.’

  The handkerchief coughed. ‘Bullshit, man. If you think machines are trouble, just look at the dumb bastards running them. Machines aren’t good or bad themselves, they don’t make the problems. Take a plough.’

  ‘Why don’t you take a flying plough yourself?’

  ‘A plough,’ said the cloth firmly, ‘feeds the hungry, man. You call that a problem?’

  ‘Sure, overpopulation. And don’t give me that old jive about a machine being no better or worse than the man who uses it, I heard that a hundred times. But can you tell me a tank ain’t evil? A guided missile?’

  ‘Okay, but who made them? Evil people. Get rid of evil in the human spirit,’ shrilled the handkerchief, ‘and you get rid of the so-called evil machines.’

  ‘You got it backwards, rag-head. Get rid of the machines and people won’t have to be so evil. They can be more – more human, like.’

  The cloth made a face. ‘To be human is to be evil, you dumb twat! Get rid of the human race and you sure as hell get rid of all evil.’

  ‘Oh sure, and who benefits? The same damn machines that are exploiting us now!’ The fat man burst into tears, but the handkerchief remained unmoved.

  ‘That’s it, blame the machines for everything. Sometimes the human race reminds me of – of that cop over there, typing with two fingers Slow. Real slow.’

  ‘Stop it! Just stop it!’

  ‘You’re all sleepwalkers and bums. Gimme machines any time, at least they’re clean.’

  A policeman called Roderick’s name and led him to a door at the end of the room. At the door, he looked back. The fat man was using the handkerchief to blow his nose.

  The door led to a small office with dingy green walls, a scarred table with a folder on it, and a window that seemed smeared with shit. A single bare lightbulb with an enamel reflector hung over the single wooden chair. Two men watched Roderick from the shadows.

  ‘Sit down, Bozo.’ He sat down. ‘What do you think of our interrogation room?’

  ‘It looks like something out of the movies, heh heh.’

  ‘Heh heh, you hear that, Cuff? We got us an intellectual anus here.’

  ‘Yeah, lieutenant, a real sage sphincter.’

  The beating seemed to go according to old movie arrangements, too; Roderick even glimpsed a rubber hose. He began to regret being equipped with pain circuits; it was hard not to begin disliking these policemen, who were probably only doing some kind of duty.

  They played all the games he remembered from childhood, from the school playground: stand up sit down; no means yes and yes means no; and sorry I hit you oops sorry I hit you again …

  ‘Look at him,’ said the one called lieutenant. ‘Look at that innocent face, you wouldn’t think a face like that could do anything, would you? I mean does he really look like a guy that would rape a girl, stab her to death, chop up the body and hide the pieces in –’

  Cuff was reading the folder on the table for the first time. ‘Uh, lieutenant. This is a different suspect.’

  ‘All suspects are the same, Cuff, you should know that.’

  ‘I mean this guy is from the Shopping Piazza beef.’

  ‘Then why do I tie him in with the Snowman Killer? Why? Why? He’s not the Moxon’s chauffeur?’

  ‘Nope, he’s clean.’

  Lieutenant turned on normal lights. He was a normal-looking man, despite the propeller beanie he wore, no doubt to give himself character. ‘Isn’t that just it, though? He’s clean, he’s too clean. Anybody this clean has to be hiding something big.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘And this tells me he’s the Snowman!’ The tapping finger slowed, stopped, began exploring the interior of a nostril.

  The finger pointed at Roderick. ‘All right, you. I’m gonna ask you one question and one question only. I want you to listen good. Were you at a party at the house of Everett Moxon, just before Christmas?’

  ‘Yes I was.’

  The two cops exchanged a look.

  ‘Did you leave that party with a woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A woman named Judi Mazzini?’

  ‘No, Connie McBabbitt.’

  The two policemen groaned, withdrew to the other side of the room, and argued. ‘We had such a good case too, lieutenant. Sergeant Placket says he even mentioned an electric carving knife. And he was at the party –’

  ‘Sergeant Placket is a kind of a sophisticated bowel, if you ask me.’

  A fat man was waiting by the counter when Roderick collected his twenty-nine cents.

  ‘How’s the handkerchief?’

  ‘Mister, you got some problem? Huh?’

  ‘Sorry, I thought you were another fat guy, I mean someone else.’ Now he could see the man was a stranger, deeply tanned and wearing a cowboy hat. ‘I was kind of dizzy there, not feeling too well.’

  ‘Roderick Wood,’ said the counter sergeant. ‘Sign here.’

  Somehow Roderick managed to lift the heavy pen and scrawl his name; to drag himself to the elevator and lean on the button. The fat cowboy got on the elevator with him.

  ‘You better take it easy there, partner. You look plumb sick.’

  ‘No I … feeling dizzy I

  ‘Guess I better take you into protective custody then.’ The man handcuffed Roderick’s left wrist to his own right.

  ‘What? Mm? Eh?’

  ‘The name’s O’Smith, I’m a kinda bounty hunter. And there sure is a good price on your little old microchip head, son.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Yep, I know who you are, I know all about you, how they built you over at the University, how they sneaked you off to live with them Dinkses over in Nevada, then when they split up you went to Nebraska to live with Ma and Pa Wood, then finally you hightailed it up here to the big city, I know all that.’ They left the elevator and O’Smith gave a friendly nod to the desk sergeant on their way out.

  It was night-time, to Roderick’s surprise. But he would have been just as surprised by daylight. Time, after all, was, is, has past, would be, will have been passing …

  ‘I been following your trail for some time, son. Mr Kratt and Mr Frankelin wanted you real bad, you’re gonna make their fortune. After you make mine, that is. Come on, the car’s right across the street here. Careful on the ice, don’t want you to fall down and wreck any of that high-tone hardware. You might not believe it to look at me, but I got a few artificial parts myself, I -hey! What’s that gol-durned fool think he’s doin’? Hey!’

  A car with no lights careened around a corner, fishtailed, picked up speed, and drove straight at them. At the last minute, the driver hit the brakes and threw the car into a skid.

  Roderick was aware of being thrown into the air and falling in snow. He lay on his back, watching the stars. One by one, they went out.

  The four boys from Digamma Upsilon Nu got out of t
heir car and looked at the victims.

  ‘They look dead to me. Jeez, this guy’s lost his arm!’

  ‘My old man’ll kill me, drunk driving with no lights - and hit and run.’

  ‘We haven’t run yet.’

  ‘No but we’re gonna. Hey look, this stiffs got the other one’s arm. In a handcuff! Cops!’

  ‘Yeah, hey, there’s the station right there. Aw Jeez, we’re all gonna be in trouble.’

  Someone bent with a match over Roderick. ‘This ain’t no stiff, it’s a dummy, look the wig’s coming loose, you can see metal.’

  ‘And this arm is artificial - the other one must be a dummy too. Or something.’

  As if by a prearranged plan; they loaded Roderick, with O’Smith’s right arm, into their car and drove off. In a fraternity famed for practical jokes, there would always be some use for a realistic dummy.

  XVI

  Father Warren awoke from a brief and terrifying dream in which he’d been playing ping-pong with the Holy Ghost. The Paraclete had taken the form of a pigeon; standing on the table, it pecked the ball back at him. There had been some question about the stakes. Either damnation awaited him if he won, or else if he lost. But the terrifying part was that, in his dream, he knew he was dreaming. He knew that if he succeeded in avoiding damnation, his pleasure would be supreme and lasting into wakefulness - thus damning him anyway.

  All nonsense of course. Here he was in the lounge of the Newman Club, having dozed over his own article on Lewis, nothing worse. He set about exorcizing the dream: ping-pong sounds came from the next room, no mystery about that. As for the pigeon, hadn’t someone the other day said something about Skinner and pigeons? Training them to be superstitious? Yes, something about pigeons understanding how faith could be exactly like a mustard seed.

  Cheap epigram like that, funny it should stick in his craw mind. He turned his attention to the printed words (his own):

  … a fearful symmetry by which the master finds that it is really the slave who is in control of things. The magician who believes he can hold demons in thrall makes the same mistake as the cybernetician who thinks he can order his machine to deliver power or ‘success’ for free. In such a context we find Lewis using a demon name made up of screw (a word rife with both bawdy and mechanistic vulgarity) and tape (symbol of the binding contract). It would be hard to imagine a name more prophetically descriptive of the cybernetic demons that were to come into being. The Screwtape Letters appeared in 1942, the year ENIAC was built. And it is of ENIAC’s descendants that Lewis might have written:

  There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.

  Our own ‘computer generation’ has managed to fall into both errors …

  A fearful symmetry, yes, he ought to have added a word or two about binary numbers, two errors, the Yes/No character of … of …

  His head jerked up. No one else in the lounge seemed to have noticed him. Two students were talking quietly in the corner, near the statue of the Infant of Prague. Two others, flushed from their ping-pong game, were heading for the coke machine.

  The boy with the sparse beard stood in the doorway, looking at him. ‘All right if I come in, Father?’

  ‘Hector, of course. Were you looking for me?’

  ‘Yeah, I tried your office, they said you might be here. Only when I looked in you seemed to be praying.’

  Father Warren remembered to grin. ‘What, at the Newman Club? With all this racket, I’m lucky I can even read. What’s on your mind? Not still worried about your paper?’

  ‘No, it’s going okay. Only I still remember the movie a lot better than the book. And I still don’t see what a clockwork orange is supposed to do, he might as well say an electric banana - I mean, an orange you wind up and then what?’

  ‘Ah well you see it’s - something the English, something musical as I recall, musical references galore there - a kind of music box, perhaps. But was there something else?’

  ‘Yeah, Father, just that the Science Fiction Club is having this panel discussion on artificial intelligence, we thought you might want to, um –’

  ‘Chair the discussion?’

  ‘Well no, just be a panellist, we’ve got a chair, um, person, already.’

  ‘Be on the panel? Sure. See my secretary about the date, but I’ll be glad to.’

  The two of them rose, and the priest put a hand on the other’s shoulder, seemingly controlling him as they strolled towards the door.

  ‘… work orange, difficulty lies in deciding not merely its function, but whether its membership in the class of oranges or the class of clockwork things takes precedence in determining that function. The two classes are thought to be mutually exclusive and indeed they are, for we know intuitively that we are not dealing with a real orange, but rather a token of the type orange. That is, it has some properties that make us call it an orange, properties shared by all oranges and by the type itself, which – I wonder who that was?’

  He had nodded and smiled at a familiar face lurking by the coke machine, it had nodded back: a plain, symmetrical face of no particular age, or sex, or race. It was gone from his thoughts before he had passed out of the Newman Club beneath the motto: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, from shadows and types to the reality.

  The little knot of people by the coke machine were talkative and thirsty; only one said nothing, drank nothing.

  ‘Well sure it applies to religion, we had all about that last week in Computer Appreciation, they said in 1963 a computer proved that not all of St Paul’s epistles were by the same hand.’

  ‘Big deal, so he was ambidextrous.’

  ‘Or maybe it proved they were all by the same hand, I forget which. Anyway the computer proved it, whatever it was.’

  ‘Hey, and Pascal, right after he invented the first adding machine, he got “born again” as a Jansenist.’

  ‘I thought Pascal was a language – but what about the big Mormon computer storing up the names of all the dead people in the whole world?’

  ‘What about Leibniz, he built the first four-function calculator, and he proved the existence of God. And he invented binary numbers. On the other hand, he must not have been too religious, his treatise on ethics turned out to be plagiarized.’

  ‘What about the rosary? Wasn’t that the first religious calculating device? The Catholic abacus, somebody called it …’

  ‘Well I still say cybernetics doesn’t apply to religion, I mean they haven’t even got computer-generated music in the liturgy have they.?’

  ‘Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be happy even if they had a robot pope, like in that Robert Silverberg story. You’d want a robot canonized too.’

  ‘Ask Robbie here what he thinks, does he want to be a saint?’

  ‘Leave Robbie alone,’ said the boy in the sweatshirt marked FYN. ‘He don’t have to think about nothing, he’s our mascot. Our own personal robot mascot. Right, Robbie?’

  The silent, unthirsty one, who wore an identical sweatshirt, nodded. ‘Right, master.’

  ‘He’s no robot,’ said somebody else. ‘He was playing ping-pong a minute ago, he’s just one of your pledges helping you pull a stunt. Robots can’t play ping-pong.’

  ‘That’s all you know, look in his mouth. Robbie, open wide.’

  The mascot opened his mouth for inspection.

  ‘Hey, he ain’t got no tongue! No throat! Just a, what is that, a speaker?’

  ‘Okay, I’m impressed. Only where did you get Robbie? He must be worth millions, a robot that good. I mean I work over at the bio-engineering lab, I know how hard it is to get a robot to walk around normally in the real world, let alone play ping-pong. So how come it’s your mascot?’

  ‘Fraternity secret. Robbie, go wait for me in the lounge. Just sit down in there and wait for me.’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘I’m impre
ssed, I’m impressed. There he goes, sits down you didn’t even tell him to sit in a chair, but he’s doing it. Boy, he is worth millions.’

  The mascot sat down in the lounge, rested one hand on each arm of the chair, and stared straight ahead of him. He took no notice of the couple sitting nearby, nor they of him; they were engrossed in the little statue in the corner.

  ‘… and that’s what’s so peculiar, it’s a copy of a copy, an effigy representing a doll. I mean the original Infant of Prague was a statue of Baby Jesus that they clothed in real finery, brocade and jewels and a gold crown – but this, this is just plaster painted to look like finery: a statue not of Jesus but of a robed doll. There’s something uncanny about it, it’s like making a waxwork model of a robot,’ said the boy.

  The girl replied, ‘The word comes from Prague too. Prague

  keeps getting associated with effigies, one way or another. There was the famous golem of Rabbi Löw of Prague, back in the sixteenth century. It was made of clay, and he brought it to life by putting this amulet under its tongue a paper with the secret name of God or something like that. The golem works for him, runs errands and so on, but on the Sabbath he has to remove the amulet and put it to rest. One Sabbath he forgets; the golem gets out of control and goes rampaging around Prague. Finally he gets it deprogrammed and puts it away in the attic of the synagogue, never to be brought to life again.’

  ‘A legend with a moral?’

  ‘Yes but Rabbi Low was a real man, he died in 1609. About thirty years later, Descartes was suddenly talking and writing about automata.’

  He looked at her. ‘Descartes? What’s the connection?’

  ‘Descartes fought in the Battle of Prague! His side won, and he marched into the city in 1620. Did he hear of the golem? Did he buy it? Did he loot the synagogue? We know he was interested in all sciences; had he heard of the golem, he would almost certainly have tried to see it, if not acquire it. Anyway, in 1637 he wrote about automata, saying that automaton monkeys could not be distinguished from real ones.’