The Complete Roderick

interrogating at the same time. They know how to get everything out of a machine. They keep him alive, hanging by a thread until they can squeeze out the last bit of data. Then ssquonnge!’ Wcz laughed. ‘That’s the sound of expensive metal being crushed — ssquonnge!’

The Orinoco Institute was a few acres of lush green grass in the middle of the desert, fenced off and guarded, and dotted with windowless buildings. Roderick was taken into one of these. After various pieces of paper were exchanged with various guards, he was marched into an office. The man behind the desk was cleaning his pipe; the air was hazy with smoke.

‘Hello there, Roderick.’

‘Do I know you?’

‘Ha ha no, no. But I sure know you. Been keeping tabs on you for years. Take a chair.’ He scratched his brush-cut hair and looked at the FBI men. ‘Uh, fellas, I need to have a private talk with Roderick here, okay? Could you go solve the Lindbergh case or something?’

When they had meekly shuffled out, the pipe-smoker stoked up his pipe and lit it. Then he sat on the edge of his desk, and he arranged his left hand to grip the leather patch on the right elbow of his tweed jacket, while the right hand held up his smouldering pipe. He didn’t actually smoke the pipe much, mostly tapped his glasses frame with its stem. ‘First thing, I guess, is to tell you a little about the Orinoco Institute. Have you ever heard of us?’

‘I heard you were some kind of government think-tank, that’s all.’

The pipe tapped. ‘Ah yes, that wonderful newspaper phrase, almost makes you think of a bunch of oversized brains in an aquarium, all pulsing with ideas, eh? Ha ha, well that’s not — altogether true. By and large, we’re all ordinary human beings, except that we’re intelligent, we have some expertise, and we work on The Future. We’re what the newspapers would call futurologists, people who try to extend the graph line from the known into the unknown. And sometimes we try to shape that line.’

‘You try to influence trends?’

‘Exactly. In that sense, we’re not just a think tank, we’re an “act” tank too. We try to help provide the kind of future this country (and this world) wants and needs. One of my former colleagues said, “Our job is to keep the damn world on the damn graph paper,” and I think that says it pretty well. We do try to keep the trend lines smooth, the future free from sudden shocks and surprises. I think you’ll like it here, Roderick. It’s a challenging, stimulating place.’

‘Ssquonnge,’ said Roderick.

‘Eh? Anyway, our system does work. We try to spot trends early. A trend spotted early enough can be encouraged, lessened, reshaped, eliminated — at very little cost. Later of course, it’s more expensive. Later still, impossible at any price.’

After a pause to relight his pipe, ‘Which brings us to the robot phenomenon, eh? The artificial intelligence, the android, robot, automaton, or as we prefer to call it, the Entity, constitutes a deep and disturbing trend. Some years ago we did a breakdown of all cybernetic work and worked a few projections. No doubt about it, research teams everywhere were inching their way towards one goal, the production of a viable Entity. Our guess was, someone was going to make it — but was this a good or a bad event? We did a very careful analysis, we discussed, modelled, projected and discussed again, but finally we had to give Entities the thumbs- down. This trend had to be crushed.’

‘But why?’

‘Plenty of reasons. Quite a few. Many.’

‘Such as?’

The pipe-smoker cleared his throat. “Well, it is all classified, but I guess there’s no real harm in telling you. Not now.’

‘Like a gloating villain,’ Roderick murmured.

‘Eh? Anyway, reasons for stopping Entities: for one thing, suppose machines get as intelligent as men, and decide not to take orders any more? Suppose they get even more intelligent and simply wipe out humanity?’

‘Suppose they get so intelligent they see the futility of wiping out other species?’ Roderick countered.

‘Yes yes yes, I didn’t say there were no counter-arguments. I’m just giving you our reasons. Suppose Entities took over all the jobs, all the worthwhile jobs, by virtue of being able to do them better or cheaper than men? That would leave us with a population forced into idleness never desirable, whatever Utopians might think. Or suppose machines begin solving many of our major problems, such as curing cancer or doubling lifespans or cheap fuel or cheap ways of mining other planets — do you see where such a wealth of handed-down answers could lead us? Yes, we could end up a pathetic kind of cargo-cult. Or suppose the intelligent machines did none of the above things, but suppose that just the idea of having intelligent machines on Earth caused a profound shock to the foundations of our societies — a civilization-quake? For example, where such an idea percolates down to the uneasy, fearful or unhappy masses, it could become the focus for any revolutionary tendencies.’

‘Such as Machines Lib or the Luddites?’

‘Precisely.’ The pipe needed lighting again. ‘Machines can become gods or demons, angels or rivals, in the inflamed imaginations of the lunatic fringe. In troubled times, the Entity might become a scapegoat or a messiah — an embodiment of instability. So we voted to stop the Entities. And by and large, we’ve been pretty successful. I won’t go into details, but we did manage things like shutting off funds for certain lines of research. And we used other government agencies to — to persuade people not to go on trying to make Entities.’

‘But I slipped through.’

‘You slipped through.’ The pipe-stem tapped the glasses. ‘You certainly did slip through. A concatenation of circumstances — fraud, resulting in a cover-up that covered you up too; Mr Sonnenschein’s paranoid precautions in smuggling you away; the fact that you had various foster homes and kept dropping out of sight; an unfortunately inept team of men from the Agency — you did slip through, and here you are today.’

‘What happens next?’ Roderick asked, not really wanting to know. Knowing.

‘I think we ought to introduce you around, eh?’

‘Look, what’s the point? If you’re just going to trash me, why not get it over with?’

‘Trash you?’ The man was so startled he forgot to tap his glasses. ‘Good grief, didn’t I make that clear? Our entire policy on Entities has been reversed. We’re not stopping them any more.’

‘No? But then—’

‘We didn’t bring you here to trash you, Roderick. On the contrary: we want you to join our team.’

‘Is this a trick?’

‘Ha ha, no trick. We really are inviting you to dive into our tank for a good think, ha ha.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Roderick seriously.

‘Ha ha, great. Come on in, the water’s fine.’

‘I wonder if it is,’ said Roderick seriously.

‘Ha ha.’

XXIII

At the hour of anguish and vague light
He would rest his eyes on his Golem.
Who can tell us what God felt,
As he gazed on his rabbi in Prague?

Jorge Luis Borges, The Golem