“All right, young lady. When you put it that way, I just know you must be bugging this conversation. So I’ll do my duty and help your father. Now where is he?”
“Here.” Muley held up what was left of the penis of Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson.
“What’s that?” the surgeon inquired.
“The only bit of living tissue that’s left of my father.”
“It isn’t much,” the surgeon observed.
“How well I know,” Nat Dickson sobbed in the background.
“It’s all we could find,” Muley said.
“Let me see it.” The surgeon took it from Muley and examined it. After a moment he raised his head and addressed Muley again. “You expect me to clone your father from this?” he asked.
“Can you do it?”
“No, young lady, I cannot. This material is plastic. It’s not flesh, and it never was. It’s plastic.”
“Plastic?” Muley looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“Plastic!” Natalie Dickson sounded as if the solution to a great mystery had suddenly been revealed to her.
“Plastic!” Pisha Dickson was indignant. “That sounds like another one of those baseless accusations the rad-lib press is always making against daddy.”
Behind the group, unnoticed except by me, PeePee Rococco was lying on the ground and laughing up a storm. I asked the surgeon if it was all right if I talked to Rococco. He told me I could have fifteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes was enough. Rococco was aware of his condition, and of the fact that the odds were heavily against his surviving it. He was eager to set the record straight as far as his role in the affairs of President Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson was concerned.
“Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson was a robot!” Rococco told me for openers.
I had a sudden flash memory of the scene on the toboggan when Dickson had been quoting himself about the news media so obsessively. At the time, I had thought it was as if a button had been pushed and his words were coming out by rote. Now Rococco was saying that Dickson had been a robot. If so, maybe something had jammed Dickson’s voicebox switches back there on the hurtling sled.
“I don’t understand," I said truthfully. “When you say he was a robot, do you mean he was always a robot?”
“No, not always.”
“Well then when did he become a robot?”
“He didn’t exactly become one. It was more that he was sort of replaced by one.”
“When did that happen?”
“I’m not sure exactly.” Rococco’s face grimaced with pain.
“Before he was elected President, or after?”
“Somewhere right around then. I just don’t know precisely.”
“Around the beginning of his first term?” I wanted to be sure I understood Rococco rightly.
“I think so. It might have been earlier though . . . or later.”
“When did you become aware that he was a robot?”
“When the scandals started breaking. That’s when Heinrich let me in on it.”
“Heinrich? You mean Bussinger?”
“Yes. He was the one who substituted the robot for the real Dickson. You see, the real Dickson was flipping out. I mean, he was really going off his rocker. On the verge of pushing the button, maybe.”
“ ‘Pushing the button?’ ” I zeroed in on the remark. “Then the substitution must have been rnade after he was elected President.”
“Not necessarily. There’s more than one button.”
“Oh. I thought you meant --!”
“I thought that’s what you thought,” Rococco said. He didn’t seem to be in as much pain now. I suppose the numbness was setting in. “And it might have been the nuclear button. I’m not saying it wasn’t. But it also might have been any one of a number of other buttons which could have pulled the rug out from under some very important companies, or individuals. The truth is, I don’t know. Bussinger didn’t tell me.”
“What happened to the original Dickson?” I wanted to know. “The one who went bananas?”
“I asked Bussinger that, but I never got a straight answer. Sometimes he’d just laugh and say he poisoned himself in the bunker. Other times he’d tell me that Dickson was alive and well in Argentina38 .”
“Let’s get back to the original substitution,” I decided. “Didn’t his family notice the difference? Didn’t his wife notice?”
“No.”
“But he was a robot instead of a man.”
“If you’d known Dickson, you’d understand how they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
“When Bussinger did tell you about the deception, what was his reason for telling you?”
“He had to go to the Middle East to deal with a crisis. Meanwhile there was another crisis breaking in Washington. He couldn’t be in both places at once. He clued me in so that I could control Dickson during the constantly shifting situation.”
“Why you?”
“I was heavily implicated. Bussinger knew I’d go along and keep my mouth shut. I’d have to protect my interests, which were Dickson’s interests, which were Bussinger’s interests. Nor was it all as selfish as it sounds. We had the good of the country at heart as well. You see, Bussinger feels that the real threat to America today is China. Even back then he was in collusion with the Russians to hold the Chinese threat down. From then until now, all his efforts in control of Nixon were at least partially determined by that end. Also, can you imagine the effect on the faith of the American people in those governing them, on foreign nations with whom we had to deal, on the economy of the country and the world, if it came out that the Chief Executive of the United States was really a robot? Yes, we had the good of the country at heart.”
It never ceased to amaze me how “the good of the country” always seemed to coincide with the interests of the Dickson gang. “Okay. So Bussinger left you in control of Dickson the robot. Then what happened?”
“Dickson threw Don Twitchell to the wolves. Then he issued a public statement. This resulted in Bussinger’s rocketing home.”
“Which statement was that?” I asked.
“The one where he described Hans and Fritz as ‘two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know.’ ”
“Why did that alarm Bussinger?”
“Because of Dickson ditching Twitchell and then publicly praising them. You see, that wasn’t the scenario we’d planned. Twitchell wasn’t supposed to be sacrificed. Hans und Fritz were supposed to be the goats. Bussinger realized immediately that our robot wasn’t following orders. Someone had reprogrammed the President in mid-water.”
“Who?”
“It wasn’t hard to figure. Hans and Fritz themselves, of course. One day Hans—or was it Fritz?— had slapped the President on the back a little too hard. The two of them were always patting Dickson on the back and telling him what a great quarterback he was for the team. Anyway, this time the slap was a little too hard, and the President short-circuited. At first Fritz—or Hans, as the case may be-—thought the President was having some sort of seizure. It took them a while to realize the truth of the matter. But when they did, they didn’t waste any time. They immediately reprogrammed him so that he was under their control.”
“What did Bussinger do?”
“What could he do? Bussinger is a pragmatist. He went along with them for the time being. He even went along with that business with the tapes.” Rococco chuckled drily. “Do you know what the four-letter words were that were removed from the tapes?” he asked. He waited for me to shake my head, and then he answered the question: “‘Good work, John Dean!’ ”
“You were ‘Insecticide.’ Right?” I remembered.
“Yes.”
“And you were working for Bussinger.”
“That’s right.”