The Complete Roderick

‘And after the war it kept getting stranger. If anybody had a dream, no matter how stupid or futile it was, they went right out and tried to live that dream. It’s as if the whole world just sat down with some crummy old pulp science fiction magazine, read it cover to cover, and then tried to live it. On the cover of that old magazine you’ll see a picture of this city of the future: big glass towers, surrounded by tapeworm roads, coil after coil wound up over and under each other. And on the roads are strange-looking things that must be high-powered cars. And in the air above them, a few helicopters, and maybe the blast of a silver rocket taking off for the moon. And if you see any people they’re wearing plastic clothes, and you know they live on vitamin pills and special artificial foods. Inside the magazine you find out how they live: watching television, killing their enemies with death-rays, running everything with big computers, robot servants, millions of household gadgets doing all the work, atomic power harnessed to turn the wheels of industry, jet planes zipping passengers New York to Paris in a few hours — I probably left out a lot of stuff, but — but just look around you. We got it, all of it. Every glass tower, every tapeworm road, every moon rocket and computer and nuclear power station — everything in the magazine. A joke, by God, and now it’s beyond a joke!’

‘Well I still don’t see—’

‘Because just think back to the guy who wrote all this crap. Here he is, back in the forties, some poor broken-down science fiction hack. Here he sits at his broken-down L. C. Smith, cracking out his crap for a penny a word — a cheap dream, you agree? So he hammers out maybe a hundred stories a year, maybe six novels too, all just to eat and pay the rent. No and he doesn’t even have enough ideas of his own to fill the quota; has to ask his wife for another giant electronic brain, another moon rocket. This guy, I mean he probably has dandruff, he’s overweight, he can hardly drag himself to that oilcloth-covered kitchen table to face the L. C. Smith every day.

‘And he created our world! We have to wear the damn plastic, eat the ice-cream substitutes, live and work in the glass towers. Just because he happened to write it down — imagine! What if the poor slob, what if one day he wrote brass instead of glass, would we all be living in brass towers now? It’s a joke all right.’

Roderick shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘I don’t see how that explains—’

‘Las Vegas? Disneyland? The Muse-suck in this factory? Episode Ten Thousand of Dorinda’s Destiny? Supermarkets selling Upboy, a special food for geriatric dogs? Electric acupuncture? Talking gingerbread? Believe me, it explains everything. Every blessed damned thing. Uh, let’s go outside. I don’t think I can take any more of it here, with that receptionist pouring oil down her nice new dress

They made their way along the yellow road to the entrance, through the security room (where Roderick’s possessions came back to him), past the docile dogs and out at the gate. Pa sat in the grass and contemplated his oxblood feet, or perhaps only the lights of town beyond them.

‘We killed him in 1950. We killed him with a death-ray, and blew up his old L. C. Smith with an H-bomb. That poor old hack was right in the middle of another crappy story, still behind with the rent, and we killed him.’

‘I don’t get you, Pa.’

‘Let me put it another way. One day in 1950 he’s hammering away at the keys, still spelling it glass instead of brass, while his wife is stalling the landlady and maybe trying to work out some new way of combining canned tomatoes, ground beef and elbow macaroni. The next day, they’re both dead. The police will find two little piles of clothes on the shores of Lake Michigan. One pile is weighted down with the L. C. Smith. And a note, got to have a note, double-spaced with wide margins…’

‘You mean you changed your names and moved to Newer?’

‘Son, we changed everything. We became Paul and Mary Wood. We dropped everything from the old life — all we brought along were a few pulp magazines with our stories. We changed our personalities — that looks like Doc Welby’s car.’

Roderick looked up to see the lights of a strange, high-powered car moving away from the executive gate of Slumbertite, off down the tapeworm to town. ‘I wonder what he was doing up here?’

‘Anyway, now you know most of our story. See we thought we could maybe make up for it if we could just have a kid, kids. Somehow we couldn’t, no matter how much we kissed and cuddled… Anyway that’s why one year we fostered a nice little boy called Danny Sonnenschein.’

‘Dan Sonnenschein!’

‘Same guy, yup. Trouble was, he got up in the attic one day, got into these old pulp magazines. Before you knew it, he’d gone and read a story of ours. We called it, “I, Robot”.’

Roderick tried to look at him, but Pa’s face was in shadow. ‘You mean you were Isaac Asimov?’

‘Nope. And we weren’t Eando Binder, either. Nor anybody else who wrote “I, Robot”. Believe me, nobody ever heard of us, nobody even remembers the name of that pulp magazine.

‘Yes it was our story little Danny picked on, that twisted him some way — I don’t know, set him to dreaming or — well. You know the rest. Next time we heard from Danny he was grown up, he’d invented you, and he was in trouble.’

‘Is that how I came to stay here?’

‘Yep, another mistake. See, son, we hoped we could still change the world back, undo some of our damage, take back our terrible joke. Through you. If only we could make you learn how to be human…

‘So what we did, first we burned the old pulp magazines. Then we tried to teach you everything we knew about life. Like I said, a mistake.’

‘Pa, I don’t see it was such a mis—’

‘Because we knew nothing. Nothing at all. Few scraps of logic, a song, coupla half-assed ideas about art… a joke or two

Roderick felt compelled to protest again. ‘Pa, I think you and Ma haven’t done such a bad job. Heck, you only had a robot to begin with.’

‘A joke or two. Another mistake we made was money. Spent all we had and a whole lot we didn’t have yet. Then a whole lot we never would have. We cut a few corners — well hell, we stole. I stole. And when it began to look as if the law was catching up with us, with me, I had to die. Because if they finger-printed me, they’d find out who I was, and there we’d be, right back in the middle of that terrible joke again. You see? You see, son?’

Roderick scratched his head. ‘Sure okay, but what about the syphilis?’

‘Syphilis? Nobody said anything about—’

‘Right here in your cipher, Pa. “P WOOD IN SOUP (SYPH) SO NOW POSSUM NUMB MUMMY HYPNO-BOUND & SHUN MOB!!!’ I mean you can’t make it plainer than that, and later on there’s something about pox. too, that’s—’

‘Let me see that, where—?’ Pa snatched the paper and held it up to the light of SLUMBERTITE NEVER SLEEPS. ‘Pox that’s nothing, just the words of the song, you don’t want to pay no attention to that. It says Bow wow too, but that don’t mean I got fleas.’

‘Okay but—’

‘But this SYPH — well that is just your Ma’s bad spelling, the word is supposed to be SYLPH. Your Ma never could spell.’

‘Sylph? How can you be in the soup with a sylph?’

‘Not with, son. Like I said, your Ma never could spell, never should of been a writer. Sylph was a poor word for woman anyway.’

Roderick gasped. ‘The wedding picture, that’s what was wrong with it. Pa, you were the bride! Ma was the groom!’

‘Well it’s no reason to break into italics, son. Like I said, it all started off as a joke, just trading clothes now and then — son? You all right?’

Ben was packing up the papers.

‘No hurry, Benny, pour us another drink.’ Mr Kratt bit the end from a cheap cigar and settled back. ‘Goddamn trip was worth it, eh bub? Yes sir, Welby’s our boy. De’Ath better be our boy too, if he knows what’s good for him. Yes sir, a productive damn trip. We oughta lock this one up in a month or so, kick a few asses in our so-called lobby down in Lincoln, don’t see why we can’t be showing a profit this time next year on this little enterprise. You know