we need that gimmick.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep calling it a gimmick, Mr Kratt.’
‘Call it a fucking pipe dream I wouldn’t be too far off, would I? Damn it you and Sunshine aren’t at the University now, this is real life. I know you say you built a prototype and it got lost or something, but all I get are explanations, excuses, you haven’t even got your research team together, damn it, bub…’
‘Yes sir, but you know I did mention that Dan was in the hospital, his nerves—’
‘You said he was in the looney ward over at the U Hospital but so what? All these research geniuses are nuts, look at Dr Hare now. Trying to make pancakes with phonograph records on them, no idea what he’s doing or why, we just wind him up and point him at a problem. So why don’t you just spring this pal of yours outa the looney ward, stick him on the payroll and—’
‘Frankly I don’t think he’s well enough to work for us, not yet.’
‘Great, so we sit around waiting, do we? While the competition cuts our nuts off, that’s not my idea of running a company, bub. KUR Industries is a growth company, damnit, and growth needs ideas. See
‘That’s a pinball from my first machine, bub. One stinking machine in a dark corner of a greasy little diner in a neighbourhood so crummy the winos wouldn’t puke on it. And I built up from there — more machines, an arcade, a chain of arcades, a carnival, saunas, leisure centres, bowling alleys, business machines, pleasure machines, fun foods — and all the time I had to feed the company with ideas. Ideas. Hell, I even hired you as an ideas man, and then suddenly all the ideas stopped.’
‘Mr Kratt, I’m sorry if—’
‘Because you drag your feet, bub, you keep on dragging your feet. Look at our funfood venture, Jinjur Boy, you dragged your feet over that. Best damned idea in the whole industry, a gingerbread boy with built-in microcircuitry, a talking toy and one hundred percent edible, how could it lose? Only you had to drag your—’
‘But Mr Kratt, you can’t always hurry research like that, we did have problems with those mercury batteries—’
‘Problems? Only problem we had was a bad press, a handful of kids get a bellyache and right away everybody wants to blame us.’
‘But some of those kids ate Jinjur Boys and died, others still have brain damage from mercur—’
‘Nobody ever proved a thing. Damn it, bub, when you run a growth company, you gotta take chances, okay maybe we made one mistake but that’s all in the past. Forget the damn past, forget it.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘We belong to the future.’ Mr Kratt’s cigar had gone out. He threw it away, got up from his desk and walked to the window.
‘The future, yes sir.’ Frankliln watched Kratt standing there in silence, heavy hands clenched behind him, heavy shoulders hunched against the sky.
‘Look, we need this robot gimmick now. Get Sunshine or get somebody.’
Ben Franklin looked down on the city, etched in grey stone and black glass, a gleaming future to which he wanted to belong.
‘Sonnenschein, initial D?’ asked the hospital receptionist.
‘Yes. I’m his son, Roderick.’
‘I’m sorry, our records show he has no immediate family.’
‘That waiter looks just like Lyle, you remember Lyle? Only he hasn’t got Lyle’s birthmark…’
‘Oh, speaking of plastic surgery, guess what Barb paid for her new chest? You’d think it was gold instead of whatsit, silicon…’
‘Darling, it’s not silicon, it’s sili
‘Yeah but what do you think she paid for her silly cones?’
The voices from the alcoves rose and fell, striving to be heard above the drone of taped music, the noises of feeding animals, other voices from other alcoves.
‘Basically I’m a Manichean myself…’
‘Manic? I wouldn’t call you manic, you’re more…’
‘…Libran basically, I took her to see…’
‘…a puppet government, okay, but
‘…The Reagan Expressway through Hilldale only there was this accident at the Dalecrest exit, we hadda go all the way down to…’
‘Prague? Terrible, just terrible, my phlebitis acted up all week, maybe I should get me some dacron veins or…’
‘Spaghetti, didn’t the Chinese invent that?’
‘…a sage pillow for spirit dreams — but hey, isn’t that Sandy? Over there with the Labrador.’
‘I thought Sandy
‘…Ruritania, I can’t even find it on a map
‘…basically Libran until we went and had her spayed…’
‘Now everybody thinks the Japanese invented transistors just like everybody used to think the Chinese invented the abacus, and even if spaghetti isn’t Western…’
‘That looks just like Sandy…’
‘That sure looks like Lyle…’
The waiter who looked like Lyle moved smoothly through the dining room, serving dog and master with the same polite, mindless devotion. Roderick seemed a perfect minion. He was able to balance a heavy tray while a Sealyham urinated on his foot; to smile at the owner of a pit-bull that was trying to shred his hand; to take down details of a large, complicated order while a toy poodle tried to mount his ankle.
Beneath the smooth surface Roderick dreamt of violence. There would be like this big gangster with all these bodyguards, and Roderick would have to kill each of them in a different way like maybe an exploding rice-flail or a duel on skates with chain-saws and like maybe strangle all their guard dogs and like maybe… hundreds of corpses, oceans of blood, until he would shoot it out with Mr Big, put a blue hole in his forehead and watch him crumple slowly, a look of surprise on his face as he becomes dead, very dead… until Roderick was victorious and alone.
Roderick was not victorious, just alone. He watched the dogs and their owners moving with assurance in their own world, where a Chihuahua and a St Bernard would recognize each other as dogs, a Republican optometrist and a Trotskyist dope dealer speak the same language. No one recognized Roderick or spoke to him as anything but ‘waiter’.
There were conversations of which he understood hardly a word:
‘Well I’m doing Rolfing now, but I was heavy into oneness training.’
‘Connections, I know. I had this gestalt thing to work through with my family, you know? And—’
‘Yeah how is Jaynice, anyway?’
‘She’s more in touch with herself now only — I don’t know, maybe familying just isn’t her mind-set.’
‘Too many tight synapses, I felt just like that after Transactioning, I kept noticing my own tight synapses. I’m gonna try Science of Mind training next, or haptics maybe, you gotta try something…’
‘Nodally it’s probably all oned together anyway.’
‘…yeah…’
‘…yeah, synergy is. Isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. Oh waiter? We’re ready to order here.’
He would take this order and move on to an alcove where two women, having spread paper napkins on the table between them, opened their jewelled pillboxes and set out arrays of coloured pills as though arranging beads for a barter, which, in a sense they were.
‘Oh is that pink one Thanidorm or Toxidol?’
‘That’s Yegrin. Oh you mean this bitty pink one, that’s Zombutal, beautiful, you want one?’
