The Complete Roderick

‘I meant, uh, you think he really—?’

‘What the hell difference does that make, look, they found the dead girl with her leg cut off, blood all over the place, and in her hand was this book covered with his finger-prints, may not be enough for a court-room but it sure as hell works out fine on the front page. Forget about did he do it, get down to work on why? Why, why, as our police colleague likes to say.’ He picked a morsel from a back tooth and examined it before flicking it away. ‘Listen you try this for size: I’m doing a think piece to go with this story, on how all these cybernetics guys are repressed faggots, sadists and what have you. This a.m. I picked up a coupla their magazines, got a list here somewhere of some of the kinky words they use, strong sex angle running right through it, listen to this, bit, byte, RAM, how about those?’

‘I don’t know, they ain’t got much on him—’

‘Gang punch, flip-flop, input, what do you think that really means, huh? Stand-alone software, how about that? Debugger, you can’t make it plainer, and even the company names, how about Polymorphic Systems, how about The Digital Group? Or Texas Instruments, ever wonder what a Texas Instrument is? Or a Honeywell? IBM, says a lot there…’

Someone held up a little camera. ‘Keep it down, you guys, just while I get this live, he’s gonna show us the book.’

O’Smith woke up feeling just fine, sitting in a fine little parlour with a lot of fine folks, still no arm but what the hell. There was Chief Dobbin’s face beaming at him from the teevee, life wasn’t so bad.

This is the book that cracked this caper wide open. Learning Systems, we thought at first it was an educationalism book but we got our library experts to work on it and — here, I’ll show you a page — pure computers. So then we traced it to Dr Lee Fong of the Computer Science Department, found out he was on campus on the night in question. We put him under blanket surveillance, must of surveilled him for a week before he made a false move. He burned some documents and tried to make a run for it. We got him at the airport.

Like Brazos Bill, he thought. O’Smith must have got him at just about fifty airports. They could use a machine like that in here, better than just sittin’ in front of the teevee all day.

‘What you folks do for excitement around here?’ he asked the man in the next chair. Old buzzard, looked like that old body in Florida. Course all old folks look alike.

‘What?’

‘You got any amusement machines in this place?’

‘Machines!’ The old man started shaking all over. ‘Do you know about the machines?’

‘Know what, old-timer?’

‘Old-timer equals Saturn, malefic influence badly aspected to Mars equals iron, iron men in the walls, in the floors, in the—’

‘Jesus H. Christ I only asked—’

But the old man continued, his voice growing shrill: ‘In the walls in the floors in the earth, terrestrial currents, magnetic influences pointing North, North is the Mecca of the magnets, the Mecca, the mecca-men, mechanical men feel them in the walls they get in through the power lines, lines of magnetic current, wheels within wheels, lines within lines…’

A pair of white-clad men appeared; one held the old man while the other prepared a syringe. ‘Give him fifty this time Joe, he’ll sleep like a baby — not now, Mary, I can’t wind you up now, I’m busy giving Fred his medication…’

O’Smith leaned forward and concentrated on the teevee, camera zooming in on a page of print:

corrected by (SR_n/100) ? 4.7004397181 yielding 14.97 bits at 100 milliseconds exposure, using 4-gram array PU on a 43% redundancy input, well within expected limits for the 8688R imaging Unit. POKERSON, MOSSIANT, RICANING…

They cut to Lee Fong who turned out to be fat and fifty, thick glasses and everything — a real disappointment, to look at him. O’Smith hadn’t missed much there. No fun in a body that didn’t put up no fight, martial arts or nothing. Hell, most of ’em were just shit, not like that old boy in St Petersburg with his 12-gauge. He’d made some damn thing, a little machine for talking to old folks, a conversationizer for lonesome old folks. O’Smith didn’t see no harm in it but it was enough for the Agency list, the hit parade.

And after all, the big boys knew what they were doing.

BOOK TWO

I

Then the guests were invited to admire a barrel organ, and Nozdrev immediately began to grind out some music for their benefit. The organ produced a not unpleasant sound, but in the middle of the performance something happened, and a mazurka turned into [a march] and that in turn ended in a popular waltz. Long after Nozdrev had stopped turning the handle, an extraordinarily energetic reed in the organ went on whistling all by itself.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

‘Semantics?’ Indica thumped her coffee cup on the pine table. ‘Hank doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’

Bax nodded. ‘I know what you mean. It’s like—’

‘It’s like he’s so damned hot to pick on some word or something, I mean he never hears what I’m really saying.’

‘I hear you, I mean, right on.’

She looked at him. Bax might be a little older than he looked, with his button-beanie and shaggy blond moustache. Right on? She took another sip of dandelion coffee and went on talking about her husband.

‘Like the other day. He got all pissed off just because I said Naomi’s basically a Fundamentalist. Oh, and when I told him I thought germ warfare was just sick? You should have heard him!’

‘No, I mean yeah. I know what you mean.’ Bax finished his glass of bean milk, belched and tipped back in his chair. ‘I mean, words only get in the way. Like people, and like — like things.’

‘Things, God, don’t tell me about things.’ Her thin face assumed its characteristic mask of martyrdom, eyes rolling back to look for guidance from the water-stained kitchen ceiling. ‘Solar panel’s leaking again, everywhere I look I see another busted thing around here. I mean, Hank just keeps buying crap and it just keeps breaking down and will he ever fix it? Ha. He’s always so busy with his crap environment magazine he never even sees the environment he lives in. I mean two years I’ve been shoving match books under the leg of the dining table, been sticking a pail under the garbage disposal where it leaks, you seen our back yard? Six rusty old bikes, I mean six!’

‘I hear you, Indica.’

‘Every time Hank starts another article we get the whole crap thing all over again. Like his survival shelter, three tons of cement in the shape of a pyramid — because of the rays and all — only he has to make the door too