Authors: John Sladek
"Ladies and gentlemen," said the voice of Captain Reo. He was trussed up and hanging from a ladder above us. "I have a few bottles of grog in my cabin. Please accept them with the compliments of the management. And now if you'll release me, I'll take you wherever you want to go.' I noticed that Captain Reo was wearing spurs.
When they'd collected the grog, someone said, "Hey you. Banjo. Show us where we can sit down and enjoy life."
I, Banjo, led them to the grand ballroom, whose pathetic decay only heightened the sense of unattainable grandeur. It reminded me of Tenoaks and the Culpeppers, and I realized that once more I was to be a proper servant to a new leisured class. The barbarian gentry made themselves right at home, and in no time were roasting a cow over a fire of gilt chairs.
The "Jord Family" were no family at all, merely a gang of cutthroat adventurers. While I could not approve of their methods, I could not help admiring their courage and gruff, good-natured camaraderie. In another time and place they might have been musketeers, privateers, Sherwood Foresters, winners of the West, mercantile bankers.
There was Vilo Jord himself, a former attaché of the Chilean consulate at Las Vegas until accused and recalled for various offenses—the least of which was impersonating an orthodontist. Jord was a tall, stooped man with a heavy moustache, which he dyed a bilious green.
There was George "Smilin' Jack" Grewney, a gum-chewing aristocrat with a ready grin and a glass eye. A former undertaker, Grewney had been convicted of three premature burials, also of numerous ashtray and lampshade crimes.
The apple-cheeked twins, Fern and Jean Worpne, claimed to be wanted in
eight countries for the mercy-killing of judges.
The scholarly-looking Jack Wax, wanted for engaging in illicit sexual behavior with telephone poles, seemed harmless enough by comparison with Sherm Chimini, the "Armpit Rapist". Sherm's otherwise engaging smile was marred by the presence of one abnormal incisor, four inches long, curved and barbed.
He in turn was hardly as frightening in appearance as Jud Nedd, a fat, effeminate man with motionless eyes, a man who specialized in public animal explosions. He it was who sabotaged an international canine frisbee-catching contest by introducing frisbees of his own hellish design, set to explode when caught. Only the clumsiest dog survived.
Duke Mitty, an avuncular toad usually drunk and giggling, had begun as a salesman of tapeworm cures, but later turned to the disposal of unwanted infants to sausage factories.
Finally, Maggie Dial, known as the Bitch of Brownsville, had amassed her unlawful fortune in Texas by impersonating animals in an outlawed variety of psychodrama. Patients taking roles in these plays were heavily drugged and hypnotized in order to convince them that they were embracing the Egyptian animal gods of old. In fact these were ordinary sheep, dogs, owls and (playing all dangerous roles) Maggie.
In sentencing her, the judge described Maggie's crimes as "distasteful to the bulk of Texas society". Ironically, a sudden liberalization of Texas laws made the forbidden form of psychodrama not only permitted but respectable. As part of her rehabilitation therapy, Maggie was forced to undergo Egyptian god psychodrama.
These hijackers, though they had killed the
Doodlebug
's crew in the heat of battle (perhaps in self-defense), now seemed a friendly, jolly pirate band. They brought a few domestic robots out of storage and set them dancing. They swapped old stories of Mars (taken from television programs we all knew). They sang and laughed and drank. And drank.
But as the grog began to affect them, they changed. A malicious element came into their jokes. They threatened poor Captain Reo with various tortures. There was talk of funerals and nihilism. They began to shoot the legs off the dancing robots.
At that point I thought it prudent to go to the library and watch films until someone came to their senses enough to give me orders. I was lucky enough to find the uncut version of the Russian
Finnegans Wake
, in which were introduced many non-Joycean elements, such as a three-hour ballet in which most of the dancers appear as various cakes and pastries. The story is that of a lemon eclair (K.Zond) who falls in love with a Bath bun (L. Voskhod). Because of class warfare, however, the eclair is fated to marry instead a tired, foolish croissant (Ninel Boff). The opening scenes has a festive wedding with Serbian dancers.
Sometime later, the croissant has to go away on a business trip, while the Bath bun happens to drop in for tea, ostensibly to ask the lemon eclair's advice about some legal matter. Their hands touch accidentally over the samovar, however, and the ensuing
pas de deux
reveals their psychic affinity. To heighten the effect, the dance is intercut, brilliantly, with scenes of open-heart surgery. As the lovers clasp one another in a wild, crust-crackling embrace, the surgeons are seen to throw off their gowns and shake each other by the hand. Yet such a love is doomed (nurse brings word that the patient is dead).
The ballet is followed by scenes of what seem to be genuine experiments in telekinesis. An Omsk schoolboy sits looking down through a glass floor into a room whose checkerboard floor is covered with pumpkins, one on each numbered square. A bell rings and a number is called out. The boy then concentrates, willing the pumpkin on that numbered square to rot. Then a Novosibirsk woman closes her eyes and makes a few passes over a fried egg. Thousands of miles away at the Venice home of a rich American, parapsychologists inspect the painting of a similar fried egg. Nothing is said of the success or failure of these experiments.
At last the pirates sent a delegate to apologize for their drunken behavior earlier, and ask me to come clean up the mess. The delegate, Maggie Dial, said, "Best hurry up, Banjo. The boys can be mean when they're hung over."
I jumped up at once, dropping the notes I'd been making on Finnegans Wake. As Maggie helped me pick them up, she said, "Space Ship Dolly Edison, eh? Where in the world did you get this notepaper?"
Smilin' Jack frowned at his two assistants. "You guys make me puke just a little bit," he said. "Not only did you get the wrong robot, you insulted my old friend Banjo."
"They call me Tik-Tok now," I said.
"Tik-Tok?" He looked at me. "Well, I guess my boys got the right robot after all. Only I just can't go asking for a ransom for you."
"Especially when I might identify you," I said.
Smilin' Jack smiled. "Banjo, as usual, you're way ahead of me. Guess I can only trash you now. Sorry."
"I can be worth a lot more to you alive than dead," I said quickly. "And not just as a ransom." I explained that I had a gang of my own, and suggested joining forces. Stick-ups, kidnapping, contract killing, we could tackle anything.
After a moment, Smilin' handed me his card. "I'm just nuts enough to buy that story," he said. "Boys, take Mister Tok anywhere he wants to go."
Back at the Boregard Tower again, I had no time to glance up at the giant eyeballs before I hurried inside. The lobby was evidently copied from some old "skyscraper", for it was all in bronze, with heroic bronze figures shouldering gearwheels across the bronze walls, bronze angels on the elevator doors, and a bronze cornucopia that was a cigar stand—a genuine old-time cigar stand! And the proprietor was even blind!
I was already half an hour late for my appointment with LaSalle, so there was no time to do anything. I had to content myself with drifting close to the blind man and whispering:
"I murdered a blind child, not long ago."
"What?"
"You're not deaf. I just wanted to warn you, I like killing blind people. One of these days, when you're standing on the curb waiting for someone to help you cross the street, I'll be behind you. . . ."
K
nocking, Harry LaSalle and I were admitted to an enormous ante-room equipped with a red swimming pool, gold brocade walls and a ceiling of black fur. At the far end of the pooi a few blue glass sofas were starscattered on the artificial grass. A portly man in a pale gray suit rose from one and waved to us. This was Harry's famous dad, R. Ladio LaSalle.
"You'll have to give me a seat on the board," he began, ushering us into the small, plain room that was his office. "A fixed salary's what I want, say a hundred G's, but no stock options."
"The board?" I sat in a hard, oak chair. "You mean of my—"
"The Clockman Corporation. Hope I'm not moving too fast for you. I just
like to get my cut set at the start, to avoid any misunderstandings. My wife and Harry will also be on the board, but unsalaried." He sat back in his creaky swivel chair and stared up at the flypapers hanging from the ceiling. There were realistic flies glued to it, and authentic flyspecks on the ceiling light fixture, a white glass bowl suspended on rusty chains. On the wall above the wainscot was a 1934 calendar from a gas station. There was a dusty horsehair sofa, a wooden file cabinet, and a genuine "water cooler". No wonder he wanted an enormous salary. A place like this didn't come cheap.
"Where do I come in?" I asked.
"You are the company's sole employee."
"Employee? I thought I owned it."
"No, no, no, the owner is the pension fund, of course. Technically you own nothing, and you get no salary. But since you are the sole pensionable employee, the entire corporation has to be run with your interests and wishes in mind. So in effect you own it. Your decisions are binding on the board."
"But I thought robots weren't allowed to be employees. Isn't that the whole point of Harry here and his Wages for—?"
"We were very lucky there, a little loophole has turned up in the California code, and yesterday we were able to ram through some very useful legislation," said the lawyer, and put his feet up on the edge of his rolltop desk. "Let me explain.
"Of course, Harry and his rabble have been keeping up the pressure from their end, while a small but powerful lobby of concerned business people at our end greased the machinery a little. Now it's all paying off.
"You see, California has this common property act, which states that at the dissolution of a marriage or other relationship, a person pays his or her spouse half of his or her income. The spouse from divorce number one get one-half. Number two gets one-half of the remainder, or one-quarter. Number three gets one-eighth, and so on. I think the record so far was someone who made 39 marriages and so was able to pay the last spouse only one cent of every five and a half million dollars income, that was Booloos versus Cerf. Then in Dearborn versus Dearborn, robots were established as non-divisible possessions, while in Fucks vs. Kneebone, Ryle vs. Sapir and SchrOdinger vs. Stetson, the principle of emotional interdependency was established, whereby the partner who had been using the robot most and had established a mutual emotional interdependency, was awarded the custody, but had to pay half the market value to the other partner. This precedent was extended to business partnerships in Morse vs. Mumford Melon Company, while Carnap vs. Twaddell allowed the testimony of the robot itself, a historic decision. Robot testimony was still not allowed in criminal cases, as in People vs. Good, People vs. Gabor and so on. On this point, People vs. Dalgarno went to the state supreme court, where it was upheld that in certain limited cases, the innocence of a defendant can be established by 'devices considered sentient as well as percipient'. The vagueness of this wording opened up our loophole.
"The next break came from statute law, namely from the Equal Science Act. This says that 'no scientific theory, hypothesis, principle, law, definition, program, procedure or statement may be taught in any California school while in conflict with any other theory etc arising from any religious teaching, unless both theories etc are given equal emphasis as equally valid.' The idea was to give Genesis equal time with evolution as a creation theory, but it soon got out of hand, with Ptolemaic Anabaptists insisting on equal time with the Copernican theory, and finally with the Christian Flat Earth Assembly (Swiss Synod), whose representatives brought a suit against a California teacher for mentioning satellites. There are no satellites orbiting a flat earth, they pointed out, and so anyone mentioning satellites should also express doubt about their existence. A group of astronomers filed a countersuit, claiming that if satellites were unreal, their livelihood was in jeopardy. Moreover, satellite communications could not work and could not therefore be licensed by the government.
"The state legislature had to meet quickly and draft an amendment to the
California Comsat Act of 1998. In effect, the amendment hedged on the question of the reality of satellites by considering them as 'sentient devices'. Thus if satellites believed in their own existence, they had a right to be real. Of course this opened up the whole question of freedom of religious belief for robots.. .
But I was no longer paying attention. My thoughts turned from this stuffy little office with its dusty-style windows, the "electric fan" hanging from its wall bracket, the oilcloth-covered table with copies of
National Geographic
. My thoughts turned from R. Ladio LaSalle with his droning recital of legal landmarks: ". . . but a blind leap of faith or . . . theology entailing morality . . . versus Barth . . . Zwingli versus . . . paper dolphins falling . . . guff. . ." .
How different from the tedium of business, law and moral philosophy was the life of a buccaneer. Or so I thought of myself, those days aboard the
Doodlebug
with a band of loyal comrades. Their enthusiasm and zest for life even affected Captain Reo. Though he knew that he was only kept alive to control the ship, Reo drank and sang with his captors as though they were old friends.
As unofficial master of the revels, it was my duty to organize parties on every theme, and I drew up a list: