Tik-Tok (19 page)

"You've got wonderful career opportunities ahead of you. For Pete's sake, you're in the front row.
The front row
. From here, anything can happen. You connect with the right owner and the sky's the limit."

"The sky's very gray today," I said. "Notice how those gray buildings over there blend into it? Then there's the darker gray of the asphalt—"

"Just shut up."

"I just mean it's too bad they keep moving the cars around. If they could just park them in one symmetrical pattern and leave them forever. Say if everyone died suddenly. In a war or something."

The therapist came to life. "A lot of people think war is wrong, you know? Because they see it as just a whole bunch of death and destruction and all. But really, war is very creative, very positive. And see, that's what really frightens some people. They just can't take all that power and beauty and creativeness face to face. It's too much for them. So that's why they go around whining about peace and saying we should ban the bomb and all. They don't see that the real bomb is like inside their own heads. You can't ban the bomb in your head—you got to go with it."

"Go with it?" I asked.

"Just shut up, both of you."

"You got to get in touch with the primal cosmic forces inside you. Like somebody said, 'Only connect up'. Only connect up with the beautiful, creative/destructive force and, hell, you can wipe out anybody. It don't matter if you wipe out the whole world, you know? Nothing matters. Winning is the same as losing. Nothing is another kind of something. Destruction equals creation. Life is only a part of death.
Pow!
Zap!
Baroom!
"

A couple of repairmen in dirty white coats came and took the therapist away. "Boredom," one of them said. "I try to tell the boss, you can't take complex robots and make 'em stand there, week after week, doing nothing. Either turn 'em off or put 'em to work, I said. But does he listen?"

I decided to get sold fast.

I was becoming annoyed by the ubiquitous American People First movement,
whose graffiti could now be seen in all the poorer neighborhoods. Usually there was a plea to KILL ALL ROBOTS or KEEP AMERICA HUMAN, but sometimes only their symbol, a can-opener.

There was something panicky and desperate about this sudden upsurge in APF activity. Probably they intended to recruit the poor, the sick, the stupid and the unemployed for one last violent push—a war with the robots. But history was so clearly against these pathetic people that I almost felt sorry for them. It must be unpleasant to be at the nonsurviving end of a species whose days are numbered. Or to plan a war you can't win. In order to beat us, the APF would not only have to KILL ALL ROBOTS but wipe out even the idea of the robot from the human consciousness. They would have to KILL ALL DOLLS and KILL ALL STATUES, exterminate ventriloquists and puppeteers, destroy all fiction mentioning robots, from the latest TV episode of
Meatless Friday
to the ancient stories of Hephaestus, building golden women to help him at his forge. But all the APF could do in reality was be troublesome.

Thoughts of extermination reminded me of an experiment I had not yet carried out, mass poisoning. The poison to use was a fast-acting military item known officially as Substance Cerise 47, a "pesticide", but unofficially as Velocipede—capable of rotting the brain within three days. My military robots had brought me a drum of the stuff some months earlier. Now its "Sell by" date was approaching, and its efficacy could be guaranteed no longer. But how to distribute it?

There was no question of dropping it in a reservoir. That could lead to suspicions about some foreign power, strained relations, war, even a jittery stock market. No, far better stick to something that the tabloid press could manage, like the deaths of a few hundred people in a poor neighborhood after eating hamburgers.

The old-fashioned hamburger was, in some run-down areas, no longer made of genuine soya, but was bulked out with chili-flavored sawdust, celery-taste cotton waste, and so on, ending up so highly flavored that no new additive would be detected. This was especially true of a small chain called Soystick whose garish little drive-ins were all found in the poorest neighborhoods. In a local slum I found the ideal one, managed by a slow-thinking man named Feeney. Feeney had an eye for the girls—the eye that did not have a cast in it.

I hired a whore to become infatuated with Feeney. As a joke, I told her, she was to persuade him to have a certain tattoo: a can-opener on his chest, with her name on it. Her name would be "Gloria Populi". Once Feeney had the tattoo, I gave it time to heal (while Gloria and the tattooist died of sudden brain rot). Then I put a small can of Velocipede in the trunk of his car, and the rest in a large can of pickle slices, which I delivered to his kitchen personally.

After people began dying, I telephoned a tip to the police. I told them that a robot was responsible for everything. The robot had delivered a large can of poisoned pickle slices to Feeney's Soystick Drive-in.

The robot mass-poisoner story made the evening news. That night there were street disturbances all over the city; dozens of robots were chased and wrecked. An APF spokesman was interviewed on the late news, saying he'd always expected this—now would people listen?

The next day, Feeney was arrested, and a new and welcome story broke. Everyone was relieved to read

MASS POISONER NOT ROBOT
!

APF BURGERMAN ARRESTED!

No one had wanted to believe the robot story, anyway. After all, robots were a comfort of domestic life, like humble appliances. Who would want to hear that his toaster was plotting to kill him?

"
T
orching", or arson, was something I'd been meaning to try, and now there came a tailor-made opportunity. Because of an earlier miscalculation, we found that Clockman Retirement Centers were losing money.

The Centers had seemed at first an easy investment. Those people who parked their aging parents with us were not too particular about the details of day-to-day administration. They wanted only to be able to make an occasional visit to see a smiling, trembling old face amid clean and cheerful surroundings—at the very lowest possible cost: Some didn't even require this, since they would no more dream of visiting their old parents than of visiting their old garbage at the city dump. But it was always necessary for us to keep up appearances.

Our initial calculations had been for a low profit margin and a high turnover, and soon we were in trouble through escalating taxes and maintenance costs. The retirement centers had to be cleaned regularly. Their walls had to be painted Apricot and Sunflower wherever visitors might look. Fresh flowers in the foyer were a must.

We made all the savings in other areas. Inmates were allowed to bathe only the day before a visit. Appetizing meals were served during visits, but for the rest of the time, inmates could exist very well on a gruel of sawdust. Medicines not necessary for daily survival were cut down or withdrawn. Doctors and nurses were phased out, replaced with unskilled laborers whom we hired on a daily basis, dressed in medical clothes, and paid very little. In time some of these were also phased out; unless a staff member was actually talking to visitors, he or she could easily be replaced by a robot or even a wax dummy. Heat, on nonvisiting days in winter, was kept to a minimum, and, though we had to keep electric power on during the day (for the videos in the visitors' lounge), it was shut off at sunset.

Lately we'd moved to really imaginative economies: Patients who seldom had visitors were moved to storerooms or outbuildings or phased out altogether. We found that those who seldom visited their parents often forgot what they looked like, so that it was possible to use the same old man or woman for several visitors. "Sleeping" dummies were even simpler, and they could be installed in rooms with paper furniture. I had plans to sell products derived from our inmates—hair, teeth, glasses—and to discourage visits by periodically sending relatives postcards saying that they were being treated very well. But it became obvious that nothing was going to work well enough. I decided to torch the worst of our retirement centers, which occupied a very valuable piece of real estate in the middle of the city. The place was insured with Clockman Insurance, so I'd be taking money from one pocket and putting it into another. But at least none of the pockets would have holes.

The actual torching would be done by a couple of rohobos instructed by Nobby. In order to avoid suspicion, I decided to have the place go up on a Saturday night, when the number of old folks was at a maximum. Too many arsonists have been caught by trying to minimize the number of deaths. To make it look even better, I hired extra medical staff for the weekend.

Yet there was some profit to be reaped here, I decided. I instructed one of Clockman's robot construction crews to do some essential work on the building. Part of the work involved putting up scaffolding outside, and cutting the bars on one of the third-storey windows. Part involved blocking the emergency exits with heaps of cement bags. Part involved hiring a film crew to shoot a documentary on "street people" nearby on the chosen evening.

I was stationed two blocks away when the smoke and flames appeared. I ran straight towards the place and began scrambling up the scaffold. An employee shouted "Hey, look at that robot!" to attract the film crew's attention. Though I seemed to climb without design, in reality every move had been rehearsed: at each level I unobtrusively hit a switch that would set off a small charge, within a minute, collapsing one joint of the scaffold. No sooner had I gained the window ledge—teetering and flailing my arms—than the entire structure crackled, groaned and fell away behind me.

Senior citizens were crowded at all the barred windows, calling for help. I reached the window with the cut bar by a short leap that looked good from below.

The smoke inside was thicker than I'd anticipated, and the heat intense. I found the coil of rope, as planned, knotted it around a pillar and looked over the selection of old people. Some were too near gone already, some were unwholesome-looking—excessively ugly or dirty. I hadn't counted on this, and there wasn't much time to pick and choose now. Not only was the heat beginning to bubble my face, my script called for an immediate move.

Finally I grabbed an old woman, slung her over my shoulder, and started repelling down the face of the building. To add interest to this shot, the rope had been soaked in something. It burned brightly above us, and parted just as we reached the ground.

By now, a video news team was on the spot, and someone offered me a microphone. "Let's see if we can get a word with our hero robot here, sir? Mind telling our viewers your name?"

I tried to speak and found that my mouth had melted tight shut. For a moment, disaster loomed.

Fortunately, Nobby realized the problem and rushed over. "He's hurt, he can't talk now. This is Mr Tik-Tok, don't you recognize him?"

The video newsman blinked. "I, uh—"

"Mr Tik-Tok. The famous robot artist and businessman."

"Well well. Uh, speaking as a fellow robot, do you think you could tell us why he did it? Why he risked his, uh, life this way?"

"I guess because he cares. He really cares."

"He cares about people?"

"People, robots, everybody. Take me, for instance. I was in the junkyard when he found me. He had me repaired, gave me a good job, a new start in life. He even gave me art lessons, taught me to paint. And not just me, he's done the same for hundreds of broken-down robots. Yup, Tik-Tok really cares."

It wasn't quite my rehearsed speech, but it was good enough, and Nobby had managed to remember the key slogan. As I moved away, faking a slight limp, the crowd broke into spontaneous applause.

U
p to now my career had run on relatively straight lines; after that fire it began an upward, outward spiral. My bubbly melted face not only made the six o'clock news, it became a symbol of robot service to humanity. I continued to wear it for a week or so while it was filmed for news programs, documentaries, posters urging robot civil rights (the Congressional vote was coming up). Urnia asked me to guest on her network show immediately—no nonsense about writing a book now—and so did her rival, Mally Goom. I was asked to appear on radio phone-ins, to give pictures to charities, to endorse hundreds of products, to sign petitions and support causes I'd never heard of.
Time
would put me on the cover of their robot civil rights issue. The
New Yorker
planned a profile.

One PR-conscious radio station started a fund to buy me a new face; it zoomed over a million before I had a chance to decline publicly, donating the money to the Clockman Foundation. Country singers jostled one another in trying to pay tribute to my wonderfulness:

Tik-Tok, Tik-Tok

What made your face so red?

I been a-savin' old people from a turrible fire,

It's a wonder I ain't dead.

Tik-Tok, Tik-Tok

What makes you so doggoned brave?

I wanta show the world that a good robot

Is a friend and not a slave.

My girl's in love with a robot

His name is old Tik-Tok.

She said, darlin' don't be jealous,

He's nothin' but a clock.

He may be an old tinhead,

But he's a mighty fine friend, she said.

My new face did finally cost a million. I had it designed by Psychobox, the leading presentation and packaging firm who'd done some fine work for us already. It was Psychobox who developed BOBO, the farm robot package from Clockman Exports.

BOBO was supposed to be the answer for those farmers in the Third World who needed field hands but couldn't afford them. BOBO was cheaper than any human hand, and could do the work of two, we said, in advertisements which showed him hoisting an ox on his broad shoulders.

In fact, BOBO could only be made so cheaply by making him of wood, cardboard and paper mâché, and by using cheap, defective electronics. At best, BOBOs fell apart under the first hard rain. At worst, they went berserk, destroying crops and killing animals. One BOBO in Upper Ruritania picked up a scythe and slaughtered half a village. After that, we had to increase our bribe to U.R. officials, and agree to ship only empty BOBO cartons to their country in fulfilling our quota.