John Sladek: The Complete Roderick

‘But I guess you don’t want to hear all this internal gossip, right? So why don’t we move right along?’

The guide was a younger version of the first pipe-smoker. He had the same brush-cut hair (Roderick could imagine the two of them lying end-to-end, the tops of their heads meshing like a pair of military brushes) and the same tweed jacket.

‘I see you’re looking at my leather elbow patches,’ he said in the elevator.

‘Was I? Yes, I guess I was.’

‘Neat, huh? See this one zips open, it’s a pocket. For my pipe.’

‘Oh.’

‘A lot of the fellas have them, see we get these wholesale prices from this big sporting goods outfit, O’Bride International. We tried some blazers too, real neat with our own crest, only we had to send them back, they screwed up the name. Here we are, Subbasement Eight.’

The doors opened on brilliant green rain-forest, complete with steaming undergrowth, sunlight pouring down through the clerestory of tall trees, snakes lazing among the lianas and pennant-bright birds in the shrubs.

‘This can’t be real.’

‘Good, isn’t it? Mostly mirrors and holograms, with a few plastic bushes. Okay, we just follow this trail here.’

They rounded a tree and the jungle vanished, leaving them in an ordinary, even shabby corridor. ‘Some psychiatrist figured having a little foyer like this on each floor would help everybody concentrate. On other floors they have mountains or desert or quiet smalltown streets. One floor’s got Oxford or is it Cambridge? To help everybody concentrate.’

‘Does it help?’

‘Naw, it’s a lot of hooey.’ The guide rapped at the first door and opened it. An old man wearing a frock coat and a huge panama ‘planter’s’ hat sat hunched over his desk. He was using an abacus with no great speed or skill. On the blackboard behind him was written, THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said, not looking up. ‘Have you brought my robot? Just leave it in the corner.’

‘Not this one,’ said the guide, chuckling. ‘I’m showing him around.’

‘Show him around later! This is important!’ Even the beads snapped.

Roderick asked the man what he was calculating.

‘Oh, nothing much! Nothing much! Just setting out a complete moral code for all human conduct, that’s all!’

A complete moral code?’

‘Complete.’ The old man finished a calculation and laid down his abacus. ‘Covering not only every recorded human action, but every possible imaginable human action. Complete, detailed, and mathematically precise. Are you familiar with the principles of Utilitarianism? An act is judged moral if it achieves the greatest possible good for the greatest possible number. But what number? that is the question. Which number?’

Roderick tried to look quizzical.

‘The method is really quite simple. Every human action has its own individual number. And every set of circumstances is an equation. We simply plug the numbers into the equations and off we go!’

The guide said, ‘Yeah, well, off we go, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover—’

‘Wait a minute, just let me show you.’ The old man leaped to his blackboard and erased it energetically, the motion making his hat-brim quiver. He sketched a diagram. ‘Now here for instance we have the classical nuclear war standoff, East against West. Each side has the same two choices, either strike first or wait. So there are four possible outcomes. Now take West’s options. If he strikes first, West can win (that is + 1) but only if East has waited. But if both try to strike first, the whole world is wiped out (that is definitely –1). On balance, then, West neither gains nor loses from striking first. What if he waits? The best that can happen is nothing (o), and that’s if East waits too. The worst that can happen is if East: strikes first and West is destroyed (–1). So on balance, West loses by waiting. Now what is West’s best strategy?’

Roderick looked at the diagram. ‘Striking first?’

‘Exactly. And of course it is also East’s best strategy. Without doubt, both sides ought to strike first. But if they both do that, we get–’

‘The worst of all possible worlds?’

‘Precisely. It’s a dilemma [6]all right: if both sides make their best play, everybody loses. Utilitarianism has to clean up dilemmas like this before it can come to a complete calculus of morality.’ The panama hat-brim vibrated with feeling. ‘Sometimes I’d like to get the real East and West here in my office and give them real buttons to push. Then, by thunder, we’d see!’

When Roderick and his guide were leaving, the old man added, ‘Come back soon. I’ll show you what we’re doing with catastrophe theory…’

They moved on to the next office, where with the aid of more diagrams, a man explained his speculations about solar energy: He was working out ways of storing it in common plants, especially cucumbers.

Next, Roderick met a team planning to recycle sewage to provide not only methane and fertilizers, but intriguing new foods. One of them said:

‘Sure, it must sound crazy, but the fact is. the demand for junk foods and fast foods is rising exponentially. In a few years, the public will demand the right to eat pretty much anything. My only worry is, can we meet the challenge fast enough?’

In the next office a large group were contemplating possible wars, and no combination was too unlikely to be considered: a clash between the navies of Luxembourg and Paraguay, a parachute invasion of Finland by the Boobies of Fernando Po, Las Vegas bombed by Lapps.

Another office was concerned with future possible natural disasters and their implications. Suppose for example California suddenly sank into the waters of the Pacific — how would the national economy be affected by the loss of so many millionaires? With Hollywood gone, where would the Mafia next invest its money? What would be the cultural effect of TV drama without car chases?

Other offices were devoted to monitoring various ‘fringe’ sciences that ‘just might’ turn into worthwhile lines of enquiry: parapsychology, for example. A pipe-smoking parapsychologist explained.

‘The whole field is bursting with new ideas, new research projects. Professor Fether in Chicago has been testing precognition in hippos. The Russians have had a breakthrough on the ouija board to Lenin. The ghost labs of California seem to be doing some solid research… Others are breaking new ground too, testing the hypothesis that hypnagogic visions are real… a new thought-gun that shoots down UFOs, a Dutch psychic who produces rabbits out of a hat… Seems to be a new theory that if you stare at the back of someone’s neck, they’ll turn around and look at you, even in a crowd…’

While in the next office, astrologers were checking a British theory that all black persons were born under Libra, all subversives under Scorpio, all women under Capricorn.

Next came a conference room where a dozen persons smoked pipes or filed nails as they listened to a lecture on Jungian economics. The lecturer broke off to define a few basic principles for Roderick’s benefit:

‘Take market forces, for example: are they real? We see that, just as people’s belief in flying, saucers, so-called, made them really appear in the sky, so too people’s belief in a rising or falling stock market made it really rise or fall. Could “bear” and “bull” be ancient fertility and virility archetypes — Ursa Major and Taurus?’

Though Roderick was to visit only a handful of the five hundred offices at the Orinoco Institute, he met enough people to give him some grasp of the breadth and scope of this mighty academy. There were statisticians and climatologists, news reporters and military historians, oceanographers and Esperanto speakers, bioengineers and anthropologists, a mad gypsy fortune teller and a moping science-fiction writer, and even a psychologist who specialized in probing the minds of infants. All bets seemed to be covered.