by Jack Tunney
I got so lost in my reverie, I missed Cain’s introduction. Everyone stood up and clapped for him as he sorted his notes out on the podium. He spoke in a clear, loud voice that filled the room. To make matters worse, he talked for over an hour. Oh, boy, was this stuff over my head!
He blew a lot of hot air about breeding, good stock, families, and something about producing a race for superior intelligence. I didn’t exactly know how you’d conduct a race for intelligence. Maybe you’d time people doing math problems, and the first one to solve them all would win the trophy or the ribbon. Pretty boring, if you ask me, but what did I know. If this was the Foundation’s racket, I figured they had an uphill go of it.
At the end of the lecture, Cain explained his developmental breakthrough would be unveiled tomorrow at the docks, after which me and him would journey up the Mississippi by paddleboat, ultimately making our way into New York, giving lectures and demonstrations. That got him a round of ear-splitting applause.
I still didn’t know what the hell he wanted me for. I’ve never felt so out of place in my life. As soon as the applause died down, I beat feet for the bar and spent the rest of the night surrounded by fans, talking about Bob Fitzsimmons and Jim Corbett.
Cain came around the next morning and we had breakfast together. Over a couple of poached eggs and toast, I said, “So, is this the day I finally get to hit something?”
Cain nodded through a mouthful of coffee. “Yes,” he gasped. “It’s very simple. I’ll have a special instrument in the arena designed to test your reflexes, your strength, your endurance and your agility.”
“But, you want me to box, right?”
“Oh yes. You’ll attack, defend, and feint as normal.” Cain chuckled. “I’m counting on you to do your best and put the machine through its paces.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “I’m going to punch stuff. That’s all I wanted to know.”
“Just relax,” Cain said. “I’ll walk you through the routine the first few times. The crowd will appreciate it. After a while, you’ll be able to handle the demonstration on your own.”
I told him I wasn’t very good at memorizing things and he told me there wasn’t anything to memorize and, in fact, it’d be better if I didn’t try, but just acted on instinct.
That suited me, since I never put much thought into my fighting. We parted, with instructions on where to meet him later at the docks, and I spent a few pleasant hours walking around, taking in the town and eating those goofy doughnuts without any holes.
By the time I made my way to the docks, a sizeable crowd had gathered. It was mostly the swells from last night, but there were a number of the general citizenry standing around and gawking at the tall dock that had been converted into a speaking platform.
On the far side, by the stairs, was a podium and a microphone. In the middle of the platform was a curtain held in place by a makeshift boom. The curtain was suspended on four sides, to hide what was sitting up there.
Cain had brought all of my luggage down to the docks, so we could leave right after the exhibition, so I changed into my fighting togs behind the platform.
“Are you ready?” Cain asked, looking me over. “Let’s get started.”
“Where do you want me?”
Cain blinked. “Why onstage with me, of course.”
“Yeah, but what do you want me to do.”
“Look, it’s very simple. Just stand there until I introduce you to the crowd, and then we’ll begin. Follow my lead, all right?”
“You’re the doc,” I said, climbing up the stairs behind him. As soon as Cain was visible to the masses, a great cheer broke out. I got up there and looked out over the crowd. Wasn’t nothing I’d never seen before, but it felt more like the day before an election rather than a scientific demonstration of pugilism.
Cain started to talk, and again, I had trouble following him. More of this intelligence race nonsense, and how diluting blood lines made for a nation of imbeciles. I’m approximating what he said, but it was stuff along those lines. Then he motioned over to the curtain.
It came up all at once, and the crowd gave a gasp like they are supposed to do, and I was looking at a six foot tall electric gorilla. At least, that’s what it looked like to me.
“Behold,” Cain said, stepping away from the podium. “This mechanical marvel you see before you was once a steam engine. In fact, it was the very steam engine John Henry, the Negro steel-driving man, defeated in the legendary contest before he succumbed to exhaustion. On that day, it was said, that the Negro bested the machine. But what do you think happened to this machine after John Henry was laid to rest? Nothing! It lay there, broken, but eminently repairable, for almost four decades.”
I had heard the story of John Henry, but this thing standing in front of me didn’t look nothing like a steam engine. It was all cylinders, big gears, and cast iron metal. It had pistons and solid steel beams for arms, and twin red glowing eyes that got brighter and brighter as Cain spoke.
“When I discovered this machine, I recognized there was value in its various components, but more important – rebuilding the machine into the humanoid form you see before you serves to demonstrate that it took a superior intellect to craft and create such a thing. What was, to the common Negro, little more than a scrap pile, has been transformed into a sophisticated device for use in the military and the police force in the suppression of riots. The suppression of riots! This mere machine will actually save lives!”
Everyone started cheering and clapping. Make that, everyone in the Foundation. The general populace of New Orleans didn’t look too thrilled at the prospect of dealing with an electric gorilla, and neither was I.
The arms on the thing were on a swivel joint and they were almost as long as its whole body. At the end of each arm were two clamps that locked and made an O-ring of solid steel.
Dr. Cain basked in the cheering for a minute and then waved them down. “In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the mechanical marvel, former heavyweight great, Sailor Tom Sharkey, has graciously agreed to put the machine through its paces. Are you ready, Tom?”
I looked over at him and addressed the crowd. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
The machine buzzed and suddenly rattled to life. It came out of a crouch, which suddenly added full foot to its height, and its legs were actually a platform with wheels on four sides. I thought it was the palette they rolled it in on at first, but then I saw it was all of a part. The eyes were white hot now, and I could feel electrical current coming off of the thing.
“It’s gonna shock me, Doc!” I said.
“What you’re feeling, Tom, is the electrical field used to sense incoming attacks and deflect them. The current is harmless, save for a slight tickle.”
Cain walked over and slowly raised his hand from his waist and said, “Greetings,” and the robot lifted its claw and shook hands with the doctor. The crowd went nuts, and even the general citizenry looked impressed.
“Simple movements, gentle movements and so forth, interrupt the current at a certain speed,” Cain explained, “and the machine replies accordingly. But if I set the machine to a defensive stance...” He reached into his pocket and did something and, suddenly, both arms folded and tucked in and the claws rotated into O’s and, aside from the fact it didn’t have no legs, the electric gorilla looked ready to fight.
I looked over at Cain. He said, “Go ahead, Tom, give it your best Sunday punch. Let’s see if you can get through Humano’s defenses.”
I looked at the machine. It didn’t have no expression. No sweat on its brow. No eyes to try and read. Nothing to give it away for me. I might as well have been boxing a Packard. I took a deep breath, waded in, and swung a high, fast right, aiming for the square-grilled jaw.
Quicker than I could see, the machine’s torso spun and its right arm shot out and the claw smacked against my wrist and clamped down on it. The torso kept rotating, pulling me with it, and when it completed its spin, the claw let
go and threw me down in front of the podium. Everyone clapped and cheered as I got up and dusted myself off.
“Well, I sure wasn’t expecting that,” I said to Cain, who beamed at me. “May I try again?”
“Certainly, Tom. You may have at it, as they say.”
Okay, so this big metal bastard wasn’t fighting by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. That was good. I could actually scrap without worrying about a referee calling foul on me. I decided to dispense with the technicalities and wade in with both fists flying.
I stalked forward, swinging wide and generous, and I heard Cain dimly say, “You see, Ladies and Gentlemen, whenever Sailor Tom enters the low-voltage electrical field, sensors on the robot react in accordance to where the field has been broken. This simulates the eyesight in a normal human, of course...”
While he was yammering on, I had thrown a variety of my best rights and lefts, the likes of which would have taken anyone else’s head off, had they landed. However, those big, pin-wheeling arms kept rotating and knocking my fists out of the air even as I was counterpunching. I felt like a flat-footed dub fighting this scrap metal monkey, and it was irritating me more than somewhat.
I backed off, my arms numb to the elbow from hitting the I-beams this thing had for wrists. No sooner did I put my guard back up when that monster’s long, slicing left actually looped around my gloves and caught me in the side of the head.
I dropped to the ground with a bunch of Chinese gongs going off in my ears. What a punch! It felt just like getting hit by a horseshoe thrown by an elephant. I got up quickly, but the robot had backed off.
The crowd was laughing and clapping like they’d just seen a show. Cain was talking again, but I couldn’t hear him for the ringing in my ears and the roaring fighting Irish blood surging through me. I wasn’t going to be made a fool of, not by some scrap metal monkey.
I charged the thing with a roar of rage and made for the robot’s bread basket. Or where his stomach would have been, had it been a man. My left crashed into the metal. Had I not been wearing gloves, the impact would have reduced my knuckles to Chiclets.
I followed with a right and while the robot was dealing with my hands, I head butted him right in his jaw. That made the ringing in my ears stop, but it started the blood flowing as the sharp metal edge of its jaw opened a gash over one eye.
I rocked back, but I guess I was still in the electrical field or something because both robot claws started spinning in my direction. I blocked the first few blows, but as my arms went numb under the relentless hammering, my guard slipped and both sets of claws rained down on my head, neck and shoulders again and again.
I felt my knees give out and the floor came rushing up to greet me. I hit the ground hard and I no sooner tried to get up, but here he came again, pressing the advantage.
He was all over me. I covered up, feeling weak and helpless, and those hammering claws kept whaling on my back. He was beating me down, and as I fell to my knees, I appreciated the savagery of the attack. Merciless. Uncompromising.
“You see?” boomed Cain. “Again Mister Sharkey goes down. Every time he gets up, Humano will be there to keep him contained. Any threat will be assessed and dealt with. Let me state this next point, very emphatically – this kind of precision instrument could only have come from the Aryan mind. A mind bred true and pure, through undiluted bloodlines. This device couldn’t come from the mind of the Negro. As a race, they are not creators, but destroyers!”
I heard all of this, dimly, through the cheers of the crowd, and I scanned the sea of people for a face I recognized. What I found were a whole lot of worried-looking black folks.
Their clothes were shabby, and they were working the docks, or they were doing some other kind of day labor. But they all were watching me, and I realized something. Me and them had a lot more in common with each other than I did with this Cain fellow.
I knew honest work. I’d starved before. And I knew what it felt like to be a man, and be called an animal. Irish, black, Chinaman, it didn’t matter none. People were people. I learned that in my travels.
Different ain’t better any more than it’s worse. And furthermore, all of that Aryan superiority talk was a bunch of horse-pucky. I’d boxed Jack Johnson before in sparring sessions and there was no disputing who the best boxer of any skin color was.
I got up, and Cain said, “Even with his vaunted endurance, Mr. Sharkey surely must admit this mechanical marvel is an effective and skillful tool for crowd control and management.”
I said, “It would certainly appear that way,” and I held out my hands. “Would you be so kind as to unlace my gloves?”
“Of course,” said Cain, smooth as you please. “Let’s all give Tom Sharkey a round of applause for his courageous demonstration,” he said to the crowd. They clapped while Cain fumbled with my laces. As soon as my gloves were loose, I dropped them at his feet and charged the machine, bare-handed.
It took the crowd a few seconds to figure out what was going on, and by then, I had the electric gorilla in a clinch. Those elbow joints were great at keeping people at bay and delivering snapping punches, but in close like this, the claws got more in the way of one another as they tried to hammer on my exposed back. I didn’t care none.
With my fingertips, I was trying to do something I couldn’t do with the gloves on. I was looking for a seam or a joint that I could work on. Finding nothing on the drum-barrel body, and there being no refs on hand to call foul, I went for the face and the eyes with my bare hands.
The robot began making a whistling sound, high-pitched – like a little girl’s scream. That’s when the torso started spinning freely around with such force I found myself having to hang on for dear life.
I managed to get my fingers under the thing’s huge chin and climbed on its back like a wrestler. This put me in reach of those strong arms again, but before they could catch hold of me, I gripped the thing’s head in both hands and ripped the topmost part of its face clean off. There was an assortment of gears and belts and other things in the head and neck, and I reached in and grabbed a handful of whatever was handy and ripped it out in pieces and chunks.
Those arms caught me by the shoulders. Had I not curled my legs around the stump of the robot’s neck, they would have dashed me to the boards, head first.
I used my whole body to pull us down, and both me and the robot toppled over onto our asses. The robot’s arms let go and tried to tip its body back over, but with the robot on the ground, it was easy to wade into the body with both hands and start the dismantling process in earnest. I grabbed the right arm at the ball joint and wrenched it off like pulling a chicken leg out of the socket. This I tossed to the crowd, along with an assortment of spare metal parts and a sprinkling of language that need not be repeated here.
I removed the other arm the same way and used it to beat open the chest cavity, cracking it open like an oyster pried wide, and I threw the bits and pieces over my shoulder. My hands were all cut up from the gears and steam pipes inside, but I didn’t care – and from the howls of approval from the audience, neither did they.
Amidst the carnage, a number of men pulled me off of the scattered remnants of the robot. It looked more like a steam engine now, and less like some Aryan brain race winner thing. Steam and oil and sparks were emitting from the scuttled carcass, and I kicked some of the stray pieces and parts in the intentional direction of the squareheads on the committee and told them to go piss up a rope.
That’s when the crowd surged onto the stage and lifted me up on their shoulders, to the dismay of Dr. Cain and the rest of his squarehead friends.
Most of the colored folks, and a fair number of the Irish folks, too, slapped me on the back and congratulated me on my technical knockout. I retrieved my grip, looked over my shoulder at the group of swells standing over the shattered remains of their riot control robot, and blew them a fat raspberry. Then me and two hundred of my new friends crowded into the nearest bar we could get to and drank ours
elves silly.
Needless to say, I didn’t get paid for the appearance. Not one of those duded up swells offered to pay for my ticket back to Frisco. However, when I explained my situation to my friends at the bar, they passed the hat around and put in enough dough to cover my trip home.
One of squareheads threatened me with legal action, but when I showed him the scars on my hands from fighting their electric gorilla, he turned even paler than before and beat a hasty retreat. What’s funny is, as I was waiting at the train station, I heard someone shout my name, and who do you think it was?
“I’m glad I caught you,” Dr. Cain said, running up to me all out of breath. “Listen, we can still salvage the lecture circuit.”
“How’s that?” I said. “Your big robot is scrap metal. And how come you ain’t mad at me?”
“Oh, I was, to be sure,” he said, and then lowered his voice. “Look, I’m an inventor, see? I go where the funding takes me. Here, what we’ll do is rebuild the robot, but not as a robot. It’ll be a man in a suit, and we’ll pit the machine age against homespun American religious values.”
“I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my chin. “Do I really want to fight that thing five times a week, just to sell some bibles – or whatever your racket is this week.”
“No, Mister Sharkey, you misunderstand me. You would actually be inside the robot suit.”
I’d like to set the record straight about my second divorce here and now. The press said it was a bitter one, and said I was holding out because I loved Flo, but that’s just not the case.
I wasn’t hiding out in New Orleans for a month because I didn’t want to be served with the papers. No, I’d taken as big a swing at Cain as I could manage and not only was it big enough to plow into him, but also took in a tin star who was passing by at the time.