The Complete Roderick

bub, times like this makes me feel goddamn good.’

‘Yes sir.’ Ben was noticing, not for the first time, the large white square teeth of his employer. They always reminded him of a row of tombstones, and now…

‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’

‘I just… wish you wouldn’t grin like that sir, no offence, but—’

‘Grin if I goddamnit grin if I want to, hell we just made a killing here you want me to look sad about it?’

‘No sir but, just thinking of those kids, those dead—’

‘Death certificates, damn it didn’t I tell you not to worry? We’ll beat that, sure it’s a pain in the ass but we’ll beat that. Nothing’s gonna stop us, bub, because nothing can stop us, we’re on the move.’ He grinned again, lighting the cigar. ‘And sure I feel good. Hell, here I am fighting on the last frontier in the fucking world. And winning, sure I feel good.’

‘Winning.’

‘Because that’s what business is, bub, the last frontier. The last place where you can still take hold of the world and change it, make it — make it—’

‘Make it in your own image?’

‘Better, I was going to say. Make it what you want. See everyone else, the world is just something that happens to them, might as well be watching it on TV, right? But for me the world is something you — something you can get. Sure it’s risky. You gotta fight. You need guts and luck and, and imagination. But hell, isn’t it worth it? Just tell me that, isn’t it worth it?’

‘Yes sir.’ Ben found a TV set behind a panel and, after staring for a moment at his dark reflection in the screen, turned it on. It was going to be a long evening. Once Mr Kratt had a few drinks and started talking about the last frontier…

‘Why shouldn’t I feel good? Whole damn business is devoted to one thing, you know? One thing: giving people pleasure. Giving people pleasure. So why shouldn’t I get some pleasure too…?’

The TAPE button brought a canned promotion for the factory: ‘Our advanced integrated control system is continuously optimized by real-time goal-seeking—’ while rows of robot receptionists trundled along with their desks, ‘—routines implemented throughout a hierarchy of processors to attack such performance-characteristic problems as the utilization of modified control algorithms—’ each Roberta the Receptionist wearing more false hair than the automaton chess-playing Turk could have concealed beneath his ample turban. The Turk too had been seated behind a desk (when the Baron von Kempelen first exhibited him in Vienna, shortly before the American Revolution). And his desk had been a necessity, since it concealed that most perfect of chess-playing mechanisms (together with its lunch and piss-pot).

‘—including diagnostic programmes and multi-level alarms and interrupts, debugging and redistribution of modifications within each software sub-package—’

‘…because damnit, pleasure is our business, always meant to make that the group slogan, pleasure is our business. Greatest pleasure for the greatest number…’

Ben nodded agreement and changed channels, stabbing a button at random. Seemed to be something about the French Revolution, torches, billhooks and the laughter of toothless hags.

‘—on both a local and a global level, evaluating each task via sophisticated assessment procedures and providing next-level feedback from supervisory processors. Feasibility analysis, an integral part of each task, is similarly—’

Back to the mob scene, what was it, Tale of Two Cities? Probably get a shot of Madame DeFarge any minute now, knitting shrouds… funny thing was, the real revolution was going on all the time behind the scenes, the Jacquard loom with its punched cards weaving a new pattern, clicking away, a far far better thing it did than anyone had ever done… burial shrouds for human thought, maybe, but very good burial shrouds.

Or was it a different mob scene? The camera zoomed in on faces by torchlight, not at all the faces of Jacques One and Jacques Two and Madame DeFarge, but the faces of men with good teeth, men wearing sweatshirts and golf caps, windbreakers and glasses, baseball caps and twill, crewcuts and army fatigues…

‘Mr Kratt? Sir?’

The camera pulled back again, to show a security fence, and a German Shepherd snapping at a moth.

‘Listen, Mr Kratt?’

‘No, you listen, trying to tell you something damn important.’

‘But listen, there’s a mob heading—’

‘Sure, sure, now just you turn that thing off and pay attention. Bub, you know what my dream is?’

‘No sir.’

‘You know what it is?’

‘No sir.’

‘You know—?I’ll tell you what my dream is. What I’d like to see is, KUR Industries having the world franchise, see—’

‘Yes, sir, now couldn’t we—?’

‘The world franchise, exclusive, on pleasure. Datajoy! What we’d have is like a wire running right into everybody’s head, right into the old pleasure centre. Datajoy! And as long as they pay their lease, we give ’em all the juice they want, see? Datajoy, call it—’

‘Yes Mr Kratt, now—’

‘And by God if they don’t pay, we rip that wire right outa their head! Haha, whatya think a that? Hey? Whatya — leggo my arm, what the hell here?’

‘We’ve got to leave, sir. Now. There’s a mob on the way with torches — I don’t know, maybe the parents of those kids we — those kids who — I don’t know who they are!’

When they had left, the room showed little sign of human occupation. A few chairs out of line, an empty decanter, three glasses on the long table (in one, the faecaloid stub of a cheap cigar floated in fine old Scotch). The cleaning-machines waited a precise number of minutes, then went to work.

‘It’s me they want,’ said Pa. ‘But they’ll have to come in and get me.’

‘Pa, I mean Ma’am, maybe they just want to burn the factory down, you know like the old house in Franken—’

‘No, it’s me. But at least I can choose to make my last stand, among all the wonderful guys and dolls, Roberta the Receptionist, Bert the Bartender, all the only true friends I ever had. Bye, son.’

‘Wait, Pa. I wanted to ask you—’ But she was gone.

Close up, the mob looked as good as anything in Frankenstein. Roderick spotted pitchforks, axes, garden rakes and electric lawn-edgers as well as rifles, ropes, torches. Dr Smith the dentist seemed to be unarmed until he got close enough for Roderick to see him wield a tiny dental hook.

Doc Smith was not a well man. Later on, when they got around to hanging Roderick, he would try to insist they use his patent dental floss.

XXIV

It was the best of time, it was the worst of time. Choose one.

The pigeon hesitated before the two windows, trying to get it right this time. Finally it pecked the left-hand window. Almost immediately the window lit up, and a tiny feed pellet rattled down into the magic cup. From the pigeon’s point of view it was a triumph of the righteous: yea, God doth reward those who keep His commandments and His rites. Before the next trial, the pigeon worshipped, stepping three times to the left, twice to the right, and lifting its head in turn towards each of the four upper corners of its prison. The pigeon was not aware of the computer.

From the computer’s point of view, the cycle had brought a special instruction into force. It knew only that it had generated the pseudo-random digit o, and that this matched the input o (from the Skinner box). The instruction