John Sladek: The Complete Roderick

Before dawn the blizzard blew itself away. One or two constellations put in a brief appearance in the fading sky, though of course there was no helmsman on the stiff white sea below who could name them. The star-gazing had vanished from the earth, leaving only his name to be derived from Greek into cybernetics and from Latin into a name for petty State officials. Computers steered ships and charted invisible stars, while men had grown so unused to looking at the sky that fourteen hundred citizens each year mistook Venus (rising now naked from the white foam) for a flying saucer.

49 GOROD

‘A different black, and a different ping…’

RESET. 50 GOROD

‘Okay. Okay Dan, I’ve got it now. It’s a face, a face only with nobody inside. Is that possible?… Well, well, a face. What’s this in back, a string? Does it control — see I thought for a minute it was like another string puppet like you showed me last time only this is a loop — self-control? I don’t get it, could you turn it around again? Okay, I give up. A face with a loop of string in back, right? No answer… Why don’t you answer me? No answer… I could give myself no answer, that’s no answer. Neither is that. Neither is that…’

RESET. 51 GOROD

‘…face with nobody inside. The eyes are just holes! If I had a face like this I’d cut my throat. If I had a throat…’

RESET. 52 GOROD

‘Okay, the face. Whatever it is, I call it a face. White and black, mostly white. Hole-eyes. A black nose. The nose looks like a black ping-pong ball, does that make sense? Come to think of it, the ears — if they’re ears — on top look like two ping-pong paddles, also black. I call them Ping and Pong, and one day they were walking through the deep dark forest and…’

RESET. 53 GOROD

‘…But I don’t have a throat or anything because I’m not real, I’m just a, what you called a data construct, a, something that’s not even any place, a rough sketch you said, you could erase me any time. So this is like my face, nobody inside. Nobody by himself. He’s forgotten that he’s forgotten. Looking out these empty hole-eyes at the emptiness outside, there’s no, no…’

RESET. 54 GOROD

‘…when you told me this person Skinner, what he did with pigeons, taught them to play ping-pong, remember? And I asked you what playing was? If they make you do it, is it playing? And you said…’

RESET. 55 GOROD

‘Because conditioning leads to self-control, right? That’s the goal we’re… the ping we’re ponging towards, only only only how do I get self-control without a self? Otherwise it’s just a pigeon hitting the old ball out into the darkness, over and over and it never comes back… You don’t answer me, Dan. Okay, that’s because I’ve conditioned you not to answer. You’re the string puppet and I make all the decigeons. Decisions. That’s what I said. And that’s what I said. And that…’

3939 INTROSP TEST SW ENDS

Woopa! Dr Fred McGuffey’s sneeze went to join the Brownian dance of dust-motes in a sunbeam.

‘Pardod be. I seeb to be catchigg this flu bug that’s goigg aroudd. The Sprigg, you see, briggs all thiggs to life. The great Ptoleby called it the begiddigg of the Sud’s life cycle. Quote, Id all creatures, the earliest stages, like the Sprigg, have a larger share of boisture add are ted-der add still delicate, udquote.’ He blew his nose mightily. ‘Today is the first day of Spring. Now who can tell us what that means?’

No hands went up; they were as sullen and silent as so many Mafia victims (Nobody knew nuttin’). He could talk himself blue in the face, he would never succeed in dinning even the simplest facts of Introductory Astrology into these young — these young robots. Day-dreaming girls who never heard the questions. Sneering boys who’d only enrolled in his class to grab an easy three credits. At times like these (10:48 and three seconds by Dr Fred’s pocket watch) he wondered if he hadn’t been born with a retrograde Mercury or something, talk about a failure to cobbudicate!

He blew his nose again. ‘Anyone? The sign of Spring?’ He knew what it was: these kids just couldn’t think for themselves. Couldn’t add 2 and 2 without the almighty computer. Dr Fred wouldn’t touch one of them machines with a ten-foot (3.048 metres, he recalled) pole. No sir, he worked every calculation out on paper for himself, so he could see what he was doing and have the satisfaction of doing it. Quality horoscopes with a human touch. Let all these young upstart astrologers fiddle with their computers — you couldn’t hardly call that astrology at all! No sir, when Dr Fred erected a horoscope, people knew it came from a human brain, and not from a doggone tinkertoy machine!

‘Aries,’ he said, putting disgust into it. ‘The Ram. I see I’d better go over this again on the board. Now the ecliptic…’ One young fool had actually asked him if Ram stood for Random Access Memory, like in a computer. Oh, these cybernetics boys had indoctrinated the young, all right. They would have plenty to answer for, come Judgement Day (Dr Fred had also calculated its date). Like that bunch over at the Computer Science Building now — mostly foreigners, he noticed — actually asking the University to give them money for ‘artificial intelligence research’. Artificial fiddlesticks! Fred McGuffey, D.F.Astrol.S., had not lived seventy-odd years, most of them as a practising astrologer and roofing contractor, without learning to smell a rat, artificial or otherwise. A robot, that’s what they were building in their infernal labs, a robot! Could anyone imagine a more ignoble work for the mind of man? No one could. Why couldn’t they work on something worth while — cancer cures, a plan for lowering taxes — anything was better than this. But no. No, all they could think of was making a tin man go clanking up and down the halls of this institution of so-called higher learning! Over his dead body. This term Fred had a seat on the Emergency Finance Committee. By jing, this term they could expect a scrap! Yes sir, yes sir…

‘Sir, sir?’ The raised hand belonged to Lyle Tate, a young smart-alec with a hideous birthmark, mentality to match. Sniping, always sniping. ‘Sir, how come this Ptolemy doesn’t mention the Southern hemisphere? Because down there Aries can’t be a sign of Spring exactly, can it? Becau—’

‘The great, the great Ptolemy, true, says nothing of the Southern hemisphere.’ Dr Fred coughed. ‘Why? Because it’s not important.’

‘But—’

‘Kindly let me finish? You see, all great civilizations began North of the Equator. Babylon, Egypt, China, India, Aztec Mexico, Rome — all Northern places. I’m glad you brought this up, Lyle, because—’

But the bell prevented further development of this, Dr Fred’s favourite theory: that Northernness was a necessary precondition of civilization. The cause, he felt, was magnetism: just being closer to the North Pole seemed somehow to elevate human brain waves to produce higher thoughts. Without this magnetic boost, man remained primitive and uncreative. Thus the Southern hemisphere produced crude mud huts instead of great cathedrals; witch doctors instead of penicillin; wooden gods instead of philosophy; cannibals instead of vegetarians; boomerangs instead of ICBMs — though perhaps he would not develop his theory quite that far.