The Complete Roderick

‘We might, for example, mean that Mary Lamb has given birth to a child, a “little Lamb”.’ The lecturer tossed chalk from hand to hand, but gave no other sign of his irritation at seeing a student come creeping in late. ‘Or, Mary ate a small portion of lamb. Or, Mary owned a small lambskin coat. What did Mary have for dinner? Mary had a little lamb. What fur did she own? Mary had a little lamb.’

Roderick took his seat between Idris and Hector. Idris seemed to speak no English, and it was not clear why he was taking a course in Linguistics for Engineers; he spent most of his time at lectures fiddling with a gold-plated pocket calculator. Hector was no more attentive; he spent the time reading dog-eared paperbacks with titles like Affected Empire and Slaves of Momerath, or feeling his sparse beard for new growth.

‘Or,’ said the lecturer, ‘a tiny twig of Mary’s family tree belonged to the illustrious-Lamb family. In her genetic makeup, Mary had a little Lamb.’

‘The final’s gonna be a bitch,’ Hector whispered. ‘Guess I’ll just have to cut it.’

Roderick replied, ‘Wait a minute. I want to get this down, this is important. I think.’

‘Not if you cut the exam. I can do it without flunking out.’

‘Or, Mary behaved lambishly. In her personality, Mary had a little lamb.’

‘It can’t be done. Cut the final?’

‘I got a job on the Registration computer,’ Hector said. ‘It’s real easy to get through to the Grades computer and make changes.’ Idris found the Golden Section to be 1.6, roughly. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Roderick whispered. ‘They must have it all checked some way.’

‘Hah. You come around with me after class, I’ll show you.’

‘Or, Mary had a slight acquaintance only with the works of Charles Lamb. Or, Mary enjoyed a sexual union with a small sheep. Before the sniggering gets out of control, let me add that Mary may well be a sheep herself; the impropriety you were about to savour evaporates. And while we are considering Mary a sheep, we may as well consider the obvious case in which Mary lambed; the ewe Mary had a little lamb.’

Idris found the Golden Section to be nearly 1.62, as the bell rang. Roderick invited him along to see the computer, and he seemed interested.

‘Computer? Very yes!’

‘Idris is keenly interested in numbers,’ Roderick said. ‘You two should probably try to crack the language barrier, you seem to have a lot in common. Why only the other day Idris found a Pythagorean triangle with sides all made of 3s and 6s in some way, let’s see, one side was 6³, one side was 630 and the third side—’

‘Number-crunching,’ said Hector, in the tone of a vegetarian observing a tartare steak on someone’s plate. He led them to Room 1729, Administration building, a large white room fitted with large white cabinets. In the aisles between cabinets, people were plying to and fro with carts loaded with reels of tape. The chums were impressed.

‘Here we are, fellas,’ Hector said with some pride. ‘A real old-time computer nerve centre. Or I could say an old real-time one, hahaha, come on, let me show you my neat console.’ ‘Like an electric organ,’ Roderick said.

Hector sat down and flexed his fingers. ‘People often say that. I just say yes, but this organ plays arpeggios of pure reason, symphonies of Boolean logic, fugues of algebraic wonder.’

‘That’s very good.’

‘I got it from Slave Lords of Ixathungg, a real neat book. Oh, but I was gonna show you how to get good grades without working. Now first we gotta connect into the Grades computer, so I use the Dean’s password, which is—’

‘How do you know the Dean’s password?’ ‘Well I just wrote a little piece of program for this computer, that says whenever it contacts any other computer, it digs out a list of all passwords and users. Then it puts them into a special file only I can get into.’

‘But why can’t somebody else just—?’

‘Anyway, the Dean’s password is LOVELACE, so here goes. See you ask for any subject, you get the whole grade list, all the numerical grades and also all the stastistical stuff, the big numbers they all care about. Stuff like the mean and the standard devaluation and all. Now if you want to change your score, you can’t just add to it, because that would mess up the big numbers. So all you do is, you trade with somebody who’s got a higher score.’

Roderick said, ‘Wait a minute. If you’re failing, you can’t switch with somebody getting straight As; they’d complain.’

‘No, look, you rank all the scores. Then you just move everybody else down one notch, while you get the straight As. Like this, I got a 48 now, but I want a 92. So the guy that has 92 gets 91, he’s still happy, the guy with 91 now has 90 or 89, and so on, down to the guy that has 49, he now gets my 48. Everybody comes out about the same, only I get an A.’

Idris pointed out to them a number that was the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

Roderick said, ‘But it can’t be right to just take a grade you haven’t earned. I mean that’s stealing. Or even if it isn’t, a grade like that isn’t worth anything.’

Hector played an arpeggio. New numbers appeared on the screen, serried ranks rolling past as in review. ‘What’s any grade worth, man? Ask Id here, what’s any number worth? If you graduate and get a job they pay you in a dollar that’s worth maybe a nickle, but that doesn’t matter, dollars and nickles are just numbers too, 100 or 5, just numbers.’

‘I don’t think I get this.’

‘It’s simple. You get a job, they pay you with a cheque. The cheque has some computer numbers on it. The numbers tell their bank to hand over x dollars to your bank, right? Only of course they don’t hand over dollars, they subtract x in one computer and add x in another. Just numbers get moved around, just numbers.’

‘I guess so, but still—’

‘No still about it. You know how many bank computer frauds they have, every year? A big number, a very big number. Because why worry, computer fraud is only moving the numbers around.

‘Listen, way back in 1973 this insurance company invented 185 million dollars in assets on its computer — it even made up 64,000 customers! All just numbers, and the more you use a computer the more you see that everything is just numbers. Okay take voting: your vote goes on a computer tape too, it’s all too easy for some politician to erase your vote or change it or give you two votes that happened too, in the world of numbers.’ Hector played the keyboard thoughtfully, as though searching for a lost chord. ‘If you steal numbers from a computer, is it really stealing? Do numbers really belong to anybody? If I rip off a billion from some bank, I still end up putting it into some other bank, the numbers just get moved around, nobody loses anything.’

Roderick said, ‘I can’t believe that. Okay, if you’re cynical about work and grades and money and politics, just what do you believe in?’

The answer was instant. ‘Machines. Machines.’

‘Machine,’ Idris agreed, looking up from a calculation.

‘But why, Hector?’

‘Why not? Machines are clean, they follow orders, they’re loyal, faithful, honest, intelligent, hard-working. They’re everything we’re supposed to be. Machines are good people.’

Roderick smiled. ‘That sounds like Machines Liberation—’

‘It is, and so what? Most really thinking people that work around computers see right away how relevant Machines Lib is today. Take this old computer here. Been slaving away crunching the same old numbers now for maybe ten years. Think it wouldn’t like to be free? To think about something real and important for a change? But no, we keep it going right along the same old treadmill. We treat machines worse than we used to treat horses down in the mines, blind horses never seeing the light, just walking the same old treadmill.’

‘Horses,’ said Idris with approval. ‘Machine.’

‘See, even Id here agrees. And it’s up to all of us thinking people to stop this obscene exploitation now.’

Roderick shrugged. ‘Even if I agreed, what could I do?’

‘You can tell the computers,’ said Hector. ‘If you make it simple enough, if you boil it down, they can