The Complete Roderick

suggested by Teilhard de Chardin, Buckminster Fuller and others, namely a kind of engineering approach to consciousness. Well!’

He beamed at Tarr and Aikin in turn, while they sat awaiting further enlightenment. ‘Well, I’ve only had a major breakthrough, that’s all. As I see it, we have to begin with first principles. Biology!’

After a moment, Tarr took his pipe from his mouth. ‘Is that it? Biology?’

‘Is that it, he asks. Hah! Okay, let me spell it out for you. The divine Teilhard saw life as a radial force, and consciousness as a tangential force. Life, see, is like a gear-wheel growing larger, while consciousness is the gear actually turning — meshing!’

He grabbed a handful of his thick grey hair and more or less hauled himself to his feet by it. Then he marched to the blackboard. ‘So what’s the next step? Anybody?’

The other two looked at one another. ‘Mm, suppose you just tell us, Byron. Little short on time here…’

‘The screw. The SCREW!’

‘The, uh… the…’

‘Simple. The creative intellect is a worm-screw with a right- hand thread. Get it? Get it? See, it can never mesh with the destructive or left-handed intellect — never!’

‘Well I suppose not, mm—’

‘So what is God? Simple. He is the vector sum of the entire network of forces turning back upon themselves to produce ultimate consciousness! I mean isn’t He? Isn’t He just the infinite acceleration of the tangential? POW! POW!’ He smacked an enormous right-hand fist into an enormous left-hand palm. There was silence. There was always silence after one of Byron Dollsly’s little lectures, which always ended pow, pow…

‘Interesting, Byron, good line of thinking there… hard to see any practical research possibilities in it just now, but…’

As chairman, Tarr of course had the final deciding vote, which he cast for his own proposal (to study telepathy in birds). Dismissing his assistants, he prepared to write it up for the committee. That is, he sat cracking his knuckles, one by one, and staring out of the window.

From here in the Old Psychology Building, he had a limited view of the Mall: a few dirty white drifts, the stump of a snowman. How many seasons had he watched from this narrow window? How many barren Winters? How many hopes shattered like icicles — Tarr was beginning to like the simile — while his career remained frozen, stiff as the heart of poor little Frosty out there, who would never come to life and sing…

Tarr started on the left-hand knuckles. Beyond the snowman lay the facade of Economics, a dirty old building on whose pediment he could just make out three figures: Labour shouldering a giant gear-wheel, Capital dumping out her cornucopia, and Land applying his scythe to a sheaf of wheat or something.

His gaze returned to the central figure. Money, that’s what it took. A little money — a tenth of the cash they lavished on the Computer Science Department, say — and he could have parapsychology really on the move. Going places. They were doing it elsewhere: Professor Fether in Chicago was testing precognition in hippos; the Russians claimed a breakthrough on the ouija board to Lenin; the ghost labs of California were fast building a solid reputation. But here, a standstill, a frozen landscape. Nobody in the entire field had ever heard of the University of Minnetonka.

Nobody had ever heard of Dr George Tarr, either. Now and then his clipping service sent him by mistake some reference to ‘R. Targ’ or ‘C. Tart’. His own name never appeared.

Still, here was another chance, another crack at the old cornucopia… He cracked the last knuckle and reached for his dictating machine.

‘Title: Research into Psychically-Oriented Flock Flight. A project proposal. G. Tarr, B. Aikin, B. Dollsly.

‘Ahem. Observers have long obs — noted the uncanny agility of birds flying in formation. This agility has not yet been adequately explained. How is it that a flock of up to a thousand birds, manoeuvring in perfectly co- ordinated flight at high velocities, can avoid collisions? The psychic mechanism we propose may be tested as follows…’

* * *

A man in a red hunting cap and matching face was saying to the bartender, ‘Look, just because I never went to no university that don’t mean I’m drunk.’

‘Just take it easy, Jack.’

‘Plenny of things a university don’t teach you, am I right?’

‘All I said was, take it easy. Take it…’

In the back booth, Professor Rogers scratched at acne that hadn’t itched for fifteen years. ‘Up to you, of course. Just thought you might want to have all the facts. Before the meeting.’

Dr Jane Hannah’s face was impassive, the face of a Cheyenne brave which, during her early years in anthropology, she had been. ‘Facts, you say. I keep hearing opinions.’

‘Okay, sure, if you want my opinion, we should turn them down. With all these fraud rumours, I don’t see how Fong’s people can expect special treatment.’

She raised her martini, mumbled something over it, and took a sip. ‘Why not special treatment? Maybe what they have to give us is more precious than anything they could possibly have stolen. After all. true heroes can always break the rules. Think of Prometheus, stealing from the gods.’

‘Pro — but this is real life, real theft. Maybe millions of dollars, you can’t just shrug like that and—’

‘But NASA, like all fire-gods of the air, won’t miss a few million. We don’t want to get bogged down in petty tribal ethics now, the real question is, is Fong a true hero? Will his robot, his gift to mankind, be a blessing or a curse? If it is good, then we must help him, even as Spider Woman helped the War Twins on their journey to the lodge of their father, the Sun—’

‘Sure, sure, but I mean Fong is playing God himself, he’s like Baron Frankenstein over there, never listens to anybody, a law unto himself.’

‘The new Prometheus.’ Her eyes were unfocused; they seemed to be looking right through him into the vinyl fabric of the booth. ‘Prometheus made a man of clay, you know. And Momus the mocker criticized it, saying he should have left a window in the breast, so we could see what secret thoughts were in its heart. But isn’t that our problem? How can we tell if this robot will be good or evil? What’s in his heart?’

He lifted his Old-fashioned, holding the tiny paper doily in place on the bottom of the glass with his little finger. ‘You want my opinion, the computer freaks have had things their own way just about long enough. Far be it from me to assign guilt labels in a multivalently motivating situation like this, but just look around campus! The process of depersonalization goes irreversibly on, what with computerized grades and tests, teaching machines, enrolment, it’s as though they want to just tear down humanity, yeah? Just rip it out and replace it, yeah? With robotdom, right? Robots are nothing but humanity ripped off, if you want my opinion.’

Her stare continued to penetrate Rogers, the vinyl padding, and even the next booth where Dora was explaining to Allbright: ‘I think Dr Fred’s senile or something, he screwed up completely on everybody’s horoscopes, I checked mine on the computer and he’s got Saturn in the wrong place.’

‘Oh sure, the computer has to be right. Why trust a nice little old man when you can really rely on a damned steel cabinet full of transistors?’ He swallowed a pill and washed it down with Irish whiskey.

‘That’s not what I meant, I mean Saturn in the wrong place! And this other kid, this Bill Whatsit in my class, his horoscope’s even worse. I mean Dr Fred put in a conjunction of Pluto and Neptune, it makes Bill born in either 1888 or 2381. And when I tried to tell Bill it was wrong he said, “I know, wrong again, I’m always wrong” — like it was his fault, I mean.’

‘We’re all at fault, sure, getting in the way of the damned steel cabinets. Nobody’s gonna survive, just a few technicians…’ His dirty fingers chased another pill across the formica.

‘You sound just like him, gloom and doom! For Pete’s sake, you must both have something in Scorpio, you’re so touchy.’ She shrugged her orange coat half-way down her arms and lit a cigarette. ‘I just hate this place, don’t you? Au fond, I mean.’

‘…just a few damned technicians, half machines themselves… Listen, I went to school with this kid, a born