The Complete Roderick

tinder, one scream could set off a conflagration. Through the visor she could see the glowing eyes. She screamed…

She started to put the gun away. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’

‘I’m your—’

‘Indica! Indica!’ It was Mr Shredder, calling from the spiral stairs. ‘Come up here, quick. Something’s happened.’

She went up at once to the little green office. A man lay on the green carpet, with a priest squatting next to him.

‘It’s Hank,’ said Shredder. ‘I was just showing him our nerve centre when the mob showed up.’

‘Hank? I don’t understand.’ Was that blood or oil on the priest’s fingers?

‘Same lunatic in that mob must of let off a gun,’ said Mr Shrudder. ‘Hank’s dead.’

Father Warren looked up. ‘He gave his life for us, for all of us. Now his fight must go on! We must go on smashing, smashing, smashing the machines!’

Mr Shredder looked alarmed and stood in front of his computer terminal. ‘I think we’ve had enough talk about smashing things today.’

The priest stood up. ‘Oh, I don’t mean literally smash machines with hammers. Those poor men today got the message a little wrong. No, we must smash the machines inside us, smash the idea of the machine.’ He held out a hand to Indica. ‘Won’t you join us? I know that in your heart you feel Hank was right — this is your fight too. Join the New Luddites.’

‘You don’t have to be so paternalistic, Father. You go smash the machine inside you if you want, I happen to think it’s a screwloose idea.’ She turned to make her exit.

‘With you or without you,’ he said, ‘we’ll win.’

‘Over my dead body.’

Mr Kratt turned off the TV news and picked up his cheap cigar. It had gone out. ‘Well, bub, your little plan to reunite the Dinkses doesn’t seem to have worked out too well. Unless you figured on a riot and the guy getting killed.’

Jud Mill leaned forward suddenly, the long striped wings of his shirt collar crackling with the movement. He thrust out a lighter. ‘In the media management business, you gotta expect surprises. You notice I managed to get a clear shot of the cover of Indica’s book in that news item? And the title is mentioned twice.’

‘Kind of tough though for Fishfold and Tove, losing their big name.’

‘Well, sir, I been thinking about just that problem, and I think this priest, this Father Warren, is going to take over the Luddite leadership. You put him under contract now and you can get him cheap, get all the books you can out of this little movement before they get boring. Too bad the cops didn’t arrest Indica though, you can always get a lotta mileage out of the big name family murder angle.

‘Now about this next book on your list, Red Situation, what is it, a spy thriller kind of thing? I guess we could always pretend the author was really in the CIA or MI5 or something, but people are getting tired of authenticity too; we need a better angle.’ Mill sat back, shirt collar crackling, and looked at the world through half-moon reading glasses. ‘I understand this author is sitting in Nassau sending all this stuff in via satellite to a typesetting computer, right? What if we just shot down the satellite and blamed Russia? I know it’s expensive, but—’

‘Hell, bub, you’d be starting a war.’

‘Sure, but probably a limited war, and maybe only an international crisis. Meanwhile we get maximum worldwide coverage of our boy and his book, “The Book the Russians Trie’d to Stop!”’

Mr Kratt exhaled a cloud of oily smoke. ‘All sounds kind of crazy to me.’

‘But all part of the creative evolution of a literary property, and I do mean creative. Hell, I once got an author to sue himself for plagiarism — claimed a book he did under a pseudonym was ripped off. Of course the judge had him committed for psychiatric observation and the author ended up spending a year in a looney bin, but then we got a great book out of that, Call Me Schizo… yes, he ghosted that one for himself…’

‘For the last time,’ said the sergeant, ‘are you a Ludder or a Libber?’ He was counting change from Roderick’s pocket into a large envelope. ‘You gotta be one or the other.’

‘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.