John Sladek - The Complete Roderick

But even before he could get rid of Goun, Rogers heard someone else in the outer office, sneezing.

PROJECT ROGER, read the sign on the door, hastily stencilled four years before and somehow never corrected. Ben Franklin paused a moment — should he knock? — before using his keycard and entering the darkened room.

A few red jewel-lights shone weakly in the background like older, more distant stars. Somewhat nearer, the glass box drew the eye to its green glow, the aquarium exhibiting in its luminous depths that marine oddity, the face of Dan Sonnenschein.

It was an odd face. Under normal light it reminded some of the younger Updike; redux under green light it was nearer the face of Jiminy Cricket.

‘Dan?’

‘Just a sec.’ No warmth in that voice, only a flat command that might have issued from some other exhibition oddity: Donovan’s Brain, say… Moxon’s Master?… Ben groped his way towards a chair and a simile…

Bacon’s Brazen Head, that was it. That mysterious entity that (if it ever existed) used even more mysterious Arab clockwork…

‘Bacon knew,’ he muttered, ‘…secret of the peacock fountain of Al-Jazari…’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Nothing.’

‘Just a sec.’ A sec, many secs might tick by on clocks elsewhere, but here time moved in silence and darkness at an unknown speed (secs per sec). He waited as one who has just felt an earth tremor or the kick of an unborn child waits, in darkness and silence for the next, the confirming instance. Time was indivisible, all the silences and uncertainty between the ticks joined up (sec to sec) into one continuum of doubt, reaching back seven centuries to that night when a servant sat waiting for the brass head to speak.

Time is, the servant thought he heard, but waited to be sure. Time was, but why wake Friar Bacon for that? Time is past, said the grinning brass head, and fell to pieces (or so the servant would report, when he had hidden his hammer and wakened the good Friar).

To be fair, the servant was only following the example of Aquinas, who reasoned (with logic ruthless enough for any machine) that to destroy a thing is to create a possibility: ‘If it did already exist, the statue could not come into being,’ he wrote. Just as affirmation and negation cannot exist simultaneously, so neither can privation and the form…” It was Aquinas, the Swine of Sicily, waddling on a Paris street, who was accosted by a stranger made entirely of wood, metal, glass, wax and leather the automaton brought into being (through thirty years’ work) by Albertus Magnus. Instantly Aquinas raised his staff and brought about the possibility of another thirty years’ work…

Dr Helen Boag touched the intercom. ‘Jim, come in here, will you? And bring the diary.’ She unfurled her copy of the Caribou and glanced over the headlines:

Looking up from the last story as Jim came in, she grinned. ‘Listen, what day do I have for that Emergency Finance Committee thing?’

‘Next Tuesday, ma’am.’

‘Scrub it. Just heard terrible whispers, omens of a storm. Fraud, God knows what. The Nibelungen of the Computer Science Department rising up against the pale wraiths of Parapsychology—’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Skip it, I want out. So what else might I be doing?’

He consulted the leather-bound book. ‘How about the Shah of Ruritania’s visit? Were you going to deputize—?’

‘I’ll take it myself. Usual tour of the plant, is it? Lunch at the Faculty Club? Oh, does he have any special dietary—?’

‘Yes, ma’am. He, um, he eats peacocks.’

‘Yuck. Wouldn’t pheasant do?’

‘Afraid not. Has to be peacock, says the Consul, served in plumage on gold plate. Some religious thing.’

‘The sacrifices I have to make. By the way, I’ll need to rent a car that day. Says here mine is the victim of an act of God, guess they have to blame someone. Wonderful, isn’t it?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Wonderful machine-age we live in. Blizzard blows a pinch of snow into the wrong place, and suddenly this million-dollar Park-O-Mat, the cutting edge of the Future, decides to drop my car seven storeys down an elevator shaft. I remember, when old crippled Jake ran that place, all he ever managed was a dented bumper.’

‘Want some coffee, Dr Boag?’

‘Wonderful.’

He moved quietly to the outer office, where he copied her instructions from the diary into the computer. It would make every arrangement for the tour. Yet it did not supplant the leather-bound anachronism. Important persons usually keep something unfashionable close at hand, a contrast to their own up-to-the-minute importance: the Victorian footman (in a really first-class establishment) was required to put on the powdered wig, gold lace, brocade and buckled shoes of the previous century, while his master wore simple black dinner dress. That same dinner dress would, once it fell out of fashion, provide uniforms for butlers and waiters.

In any (really first-class) office of our century, anachronisms multiplied. Executives continued to sit at larger and larger desks, at which they wrote less and less with their quaint fountain-pens finally only their signatures. They required their secretaries to carry shorthand pads (and use them) fifty years after the invention of the dictating machine. They sent one another memos, a century after the invention of the telephone, an instrument which they felt required a secretary to dial, a receptionist to answer, and a special servant in white gloves to clean. Every advance, it seemed, required a step backwards.

By now, the computer threatened this kind of progress. Not only might it sweep away all the paraphernalia of office life — the diaries and memo pads and telephones, the letters and telexes and chequebooks, the adding machines and desks and calendars — it might even sweep away the staff of office servants. In this case, it made an anachronism of not only the leather-bound diary, but of Jim.

Or almost. Jim still had his uses. He finished entering data, washed his hands, and brewed a pot of his excellent coffee.

There were pools of coffee all over the story, and Allbright found that brushing them away only smeared the words.

…in a snowdrift near the Wee… eft leg amputated with what the police say could be an electric carv… no signs of robbery or ra… Ms Cotterel, 34, was an employee of The Daffy Donut, an off-campus eatery. Manager Darrell Feagh… a terrible shock to all of us. Jaynice was just not the kind of person this should happen to.’… lice found near the body… Chief Dobbin would not disclose its tide, but stated, ‘It was the type of a book a student teacher might have.’ This clue may…

Over his shoulder Dora read the next column:

by establishing a remote link with its opponent, Maelzel 6.4. Chephren then instructed the other computer to ‘see’ one of its own pawns as wrongly placed, and ‘adjust’ it. The adjustment enabled Chephren to capture the pawn and eventually force Maelzel’s resignation. Officials did not at once detect the discrepancy, since the game was played at computer-blitz speeds…

‘I still don’t see how a computer can cheat,’ she said.