The Complete Roderick

‘Yes, yes. To six significant figures.’

The younger man shrugged. ‘Six? Then that’s that. I can’t argue with six significant figures.’ He was silent for a minute, staring at the backs of his own hands. On the right one was a small blemish that might in time become a liver spot.

‘So poor Leo Bunsky helped us sabotage his own work. I suppose we did shut down this Project Rubric?’

‘Roderick. Let’s just say, events shut it down with a little help from us. We managed to get the director, Lee Fong, deported to Taipin. I understand he now fixes old poker-playing machines in a low gambling den. And he’ll never have a better job; we dissuaded all reputable firms from hiring him. And let me see — one or two of the others are confined to mental wards for the nonce. Yes, Project Roderick is certainly shut down.’

‘And the Entity? You said they actually built something. Did you destroy it or what?’

There was a hesitation, an Adam’s apple leaping in a wrinkled reptilian throat. ‘Well, in fact… one or two problems there… Entity was taken outside the project and raised more or less as a human child in a human home. We had trouble finding it.’

‘Raised?’

‘As I said, it was a learning machine. And what it learned was to play human. It “grew up”. Became much harder to find and neutralize. The Agency did find it and sent someone, but they ran into some bad luck.’ A throat cleared, with the sound of tearing paper. ‘Bad luck. And now the thing has dropped out of sight again. It is still at large.’

‘I’ll be damned. Still clanking around on the loose. Still chugging up and down the streets, a free robot. Sounds like your worst scenario is about to be realized, and so what?’ The younger man thought of saying this and more. He thought of saying, ‘What could be worse, anyway, than our scenario for poor Leo here? Poor unfree Leo — would any robot do this to him?’

But aloud, all he said was, ‘Still at large, hmm.’

‘At random, one might say…’

II

He had taken only a few steps when he heard rapid footfalls behind him.[1] The guard then ran forward to seize him.

‘That is good!’ he said, as Edgar shot a tall Arab who was rushing at him with uplifted spear. The other Arab got up from the water and placed himself behind the fellow with the knife.

Two of his incisors were lying beside his nose, plastered there with blood. As for the policeman, he had at first seemed indifferent to the fallen man; but after the first shriek he approached him, raised his club and struck him a terrible blow on the temple. The big Irish cop, who’d slapped me before, clouted me from behind with his club.

‘The fancy footwork’s all over for this hoodlum.’ So saying, the detective drew back his foot and kicked poor Lem behind the ear even harder than his colleague had done. Every time he cursed, one of the detectives struck him in the face with his fist. But then the coppers started up all around me. Rau approached the captain and shot him twice.

The blue plastic bowls came in through the pantry hatch. He would first scrape excess food from each bowl into a counter hole, then rinse with a hand-held spray and place upside down in a wire rack, twelve bowls to each rack and three racks to a conveyor stack ready to be loaded on the conveyor leading to the dishwashing machine for which detergent had to be measured and dropped in the top trap before each stack moved through from first wash to final rinse and emerged, ready to be loaded on the cart which took six stacks or eighteen racks or 216 clean pale blue plastic bowls each bearing a white Wedgwood-style cartouche marked DDD opposite an identical white Wedgwood-style cartouche marked DDD, the cart bearing 1296 Ds would then be rolled by him into the pantry and an identical cart full of empty racks be rolled back into the greasy kitchen to continue the cycle.

One of the men had smashed his fist into Julia’s solar plexus, doubling her up like a pocket ruler. A gun muzzle poked into the back of my neck. He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. She shot him five times in the stomach.

The day he found himself dragging pregnant women into the town square where their stomachs were slit open and the foetuses pulled out, his sensibilities were so outraged that he could no longer be part of the Communist organization. Aramis had already killed one of his adversaries, but the other was pressing him warmly. Jim Parsons, trying to creep out of his cabin porthole, was hit on the head and dropped into the sea. The men struggled knee-deep in water. I took a firm grasp on the rail with my left hand and drew my dagger. As soon as I saw his head in a favourable position, I struck him heavily with the poker, just over the fourth cervical. The Boy suddenly drew back his hand and slashed with his razored nail at Brewster’s cheek. He grasped a thick oaken cudgel in his bare right hand. And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. We stan up at the same time an I feel my goddam heart pumpin an Rod hand me his blade. The dagger was an afterthought.

The cycle was never completed without a hitch. An enormous number of bowls would come through the hatch streaming with half-eaten food which could not be scraped until he had emptied the overflowing garbage can beneath the counter hole or then a shortage of clean, empty wire racks would be discovered or then the detergent would run out or finally the cart that should be waiting for stacks of racks of clean bowls would be found in the back kitchen, piled high with dirty pots, and while he emptied the garbage can or searched the pantry for wire racks or fetched a new barrel of detergent from the basement or began scouring the pile of pots, there would be a call for ice for the pantry, towels for the cook, spilled liquid to be mopped and salted at once, while the dirty bowls continued to pile up and perhaps the dish-washing machine jammed, so that even though he felt he was coping with everything; he was not, and even though he felt he could accept stoically the screams of the waitresses, the snarls of the cook, the blows of Mr Danton, Roderick’s fantasies became filled with paperback violence.

The iron fingers went into my throat. Then Rigby was holding him, had taken Feilding’s right arm and done something to it, so that Feilding cried out in pain and fear. There was a sharp cry — and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. His head cracked, and I felt it crunch. The light flashed upon the barrel of a revolver, but Holmes’s hunting crop came down upon the mans wrist, and the pistol clinked upon the stone floor.

Quick as a flash he snatched up Cedar’s gun and, levelling it with both hands, he worked the trigger. Bang! Bang! He shook me off with a furious snarling noise, giving me a terrific blow in the chest, and presented the revolver at my head. He fell to one side against a wall, a slug whispering as it tore past him. Suddenly shot after shot rang out in succession. Special Agent Fox was wounded and fell, but the concentrated fire which all four FBI men poured into the telephone booth made mincemeat out of Johnson. ‘Bang!’ went a pistol. The chopper raked the room swiftly from end to end and the air filled with plaster and splinters. Not so far overhead, an ME-109, pinned by searchlights, suddenly broke out of cloud cover and swooped in.

‘Wake up you! Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!’ The red face of Mr Danton was glowing at him through the hatch, over an unpardonable heap of bowls. ‘Five minutes I been watching you, you washed one dish, what the hell is dis? Just answer me that, what the hell is dis?’

There was no answer; Roderick could only keep his eyes down and work harder until Mr Danton went off to find a waitress without a hairnet or a cook putting too much parsley on the potatoes, until the hatch slid closed and the violence could begin, Dacca-dakka-dakar! and Kerang! silent slaughter amid the screams of ordinary business.

The hatch slammed open and a waitress in Wedgwood blue dumped in a trayload of bowls before passing on to scream at the cook over the steam table:

‘Picking up, picking up! Dave? That’s two Chow-downs and one Upboy, a chopped duck liver together with a Mister Frisk hold the gravy… Dave, that’s only one Chow-down, I ordered two, come on, come on, the customer’s waaaiiting.’

Roderick could see the cook cursing and dishing up, almost flinging food over the high steam table where