The Complete Roderick

Allbright too seemed at a loss for words. He turned to Hannah, grinning. ‘Edgar Rice Burroughs, for Christ’s sake. Bet you haven’t read him either.’

The old woman blinked at the peanut her hand had raised automatically, and put it down. ‘The, er, The Adding Machine?’ she said. ‘I saw that performed back in—’

‘That’s Elmer Rice, for Christ’s sake. You’re supposed to be teaching Comparative Lit., compared to what for Christ’s sake? You never read any English or American stuff in your life, did you? Come on, did you?’

‘You haven’t told us where the money came from,’ she said.

‘Oh that. Well. While I was in the nut hatchery I met this old pal of mine, knew him back in high school, seen him around campus a few times, but here he was, a fellow nut. This guy used to be a computer freak, coupla wires got crossed somewhere and here he was, playing Chinese checkers with himself. With one goddamn marble.’

Lyle had stopped painting. The North light fell on his port-wine birthmark.

‘Anyway he wasn’t so crazy, you know? He told me all about a neat little trick you can play on these bank terminals—’

‘Memory banks?’ Hannah asked. ‘I’m afraid I don’t…’

‘No real banks. With these terminals all over town like goddamn mailboxes, you just stick in your magnetic card and out comes money. Only he told me how to do it without a card. You just call up the computer on the phone, see, and—’

Lyle finished wiping his hands and threw the rag on the floor. His birthmark grew brighter. ‘You call that selling a poem? Jesus, Allbright, you make me sick with your—’

‘No look, wait. I work for that money. I had to get this job, see, with this data processing company. To find out the secret phone number.’

‘That, that’s worse—’

‘Only they change it every month so I gotta keep my job, just till I get enough—’

‘Enough!’ Lyle jammed his hands in his pockets and walked away to the window. He moved stiffly, as though the hands were working hidden stilts. ‘Enough! Did they take that away from you too? Your honesty? Did they, did they, make you switch brains with some fucking junior executive, some, in some fucking musical toilet comp — Jesus, you don’t even look like Allbright any more.’

Allbright grinned at Hannah. ‘That’s what I like about Lyle. He can get pissed off over nothing. Wonderful set of moral standards he’s got, he figures if you keep your fingernails dirty enough you have to be honest, never mind that you boost books at parties and rip off all your friends, lie to everybody, lie to yourself, somehow it all becomes honest if you can just manage to come up with a case of crabs or scurvy, better still kwashiorkor and beri-beri with maybe a touch of impetigo—’

‘Why don’t you just piss off, Allbright?’ Hannah glared at him, her eyes like black olives startling in her pale, almost albino face. ‘Lyle’s trying to work on something here, something fine. Something even you would have to call “honest”. And all you’re doing is trying to goad him, spoil it for him.’

‘I’m not. “Honest” I’m not. All I want is to get him to admit that he puts a price-tag on honesty just like everybody else, only his price is zero. Am I right, Lyle?’

‘No point in arguing with you, you just—’

‘Am I right though? Anything is honest to you as long as you don’t make money on it, a profit of zero makes it honest, right?’ He stood up, drawing back the curtain of his jacket to plant a fist on one hip, and pointed at the painted head. ‘That, for instance. Bet you worked out your fee so it just covers your materials, right?’

Lyle mumbled something about a commission for a friend. But Allbright seemed to have forgotten the argument completely, as he found himself confronted with this strangely familiar face, so –

‘Uncanny,’ he said. ‘Uncanny, like the face of John Q. Public but — different. Transfigured. Almost see light coming out of it, that transparent skin… and the symmetry…’

Lyle nodded. ‘Just about finished. If I could just get you and Hannah to sit down and entertain each other…’

‘Yeah sure but what’s this movable jaw — you can’t be making a head for some damn ventriloquist’s dummy or — I mean this would scare the shit out of any audience—’

‘For a robot,’ Hannah said, patting the seat next to her. Allbright noticed that the seat, indeed all the seats and tables in the place, were nothing but stacked cubes formed of identical paperback books. ‘And don’t say there’s no such thing, there is now. Just look at it.’

He sat beside her. ‘The symmetry… and no age, no sex, you can’t even be sure of the race…’

‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ She handed him a batch of dusty drawings. ‘Take a look at his working sketches, see how he got there?’

‘What’s this, warts all over it?’

‘Rivets,’ said Lyle, examining a needle-sized brush. ‘See, first I figured he ought to look robotic. So I tried a lot of crap, faces from Metropolis, Egyptian masks even. Hannah finally convinced me he ought to be — well — inhumanly human.’

‘I’ll be damned.’

‘I didn’t convince him of anything he didn’t know already,’ Hannah said. ‘All I said, in so many words, was that we need tribal deities, lesser gods to — to fill the empty spaces between the people. You understand?’

Allbright nodded. ‘I guess that’s it. What would pass, nowadays, for a tribal deity. Not important, just a, as you said, a household god. A — a pet stranger?’ He tore his gaze away from it. ‘Look I’m sorry about, uh, some of the things I said earlier. To both of you. It’s just that I—’

‘Tell you a funny story,’ said Hannah. ‘See all these books?’

Allbright tore open one of the plastic-wrapped cubes and pulled one book out of it. ‘Die! Die! Your Lordship, catchy title there. What have you got, a zillion copies here?’

‘The last tenant this publisher, just walked off and left them,’ she said. ‘But we heard the whole story from the landlord. Seems they printed hundreds of thousands of these without noticing the last few pages were missing — where the name of the killer is revealed.’

‘Great! The ultimate mystery.’

‘That’s not all — you want some wine? There’s a glass by your foot there — that’s not the best part. They decided to cut their losses by announcing a prize for the first reader who came up with the correct answer. Only — so the landlord says — the guy that won it, it turned out he’d been on welfare for years — was feebleminded!’

‘Fair enough, you don’t have to be an Einstein—’

‘No but listen, the welfare people had him arrested for fraud and froze his prize money, and I guess they’re still fighting it out in court — and listen, the whole case—’ She was laughing so hard she could hardly pour the wine. ‘Listen the whole case hinges on the solution to this stupid mystery. His lawyers claim he got the right answer by accident, and the publishers — rather than lose the prize and get no publicity for it — they’re suing to get it back, claiming he got the wrong answer after all!’

‘Yeah, what does the author say?’

‘That’s just it, they kept stalling around about producing him, so I hear, and finally had to admit the author was a—’

‘A what? Sounded like you said a computer.’

‘I — I did. And the computer’s been erased or something, so nobody — nobody knows — ha ha ha, the ultimate mystery!’

Lyle worked on, putting the last touches as the light began to fail. The others lolled on unfinished mysteries, drinking wine and trading computer stories. Allbright, his shirt and shoes off, was beginning to mutter about the C- charged brain.

‘You know what? I think that head wants a drink. Hey head, you wanna drink?’ He stood up, lifted his sloshing glass, and stumbled towards the pedestal.

‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Lyle had a terrible flash of premonition: wine pouring down the face, the indelible purple stain…

‘Good God! You didn’t have to hit him that hard,’ said Hannah in the semi-darkness. ‘Is he all right?’

‘Put on the lights.’ The head was unscathed. Its empty eye-sockets stared back at them across the floor where, amid signs of a struggle, Allbright lay face down, sprawled awkwardly as any body on any drawing-room hearth rug.