‘Roderick Wood,’ said the counter sergeant. ‘Sign here.’
Somehow Roderick managed to lift the heavy pen and scrawl his name; to drag himself to the elevator and lean on the button. The fat cowboy got on the elevator with him.
‘You better take it easy there, partner. You look plumb sick.’
‘No I… feeling dizzy I
‘Guess I better take you into protective custody then.’ The man handcuffed Roderick’s left wrist to his own right.
‘What? Mm? Eh?’
‘The name’s O’Smith, I’m a kinda bounty hunter. And there sure is a good price on your little old microchip head, son.’
‘Uh?’
‘Yep, I know who you are, I know all about you, how they built you over at the University, how they sneaked you off to live with them Dinkses over in Nevada, then when they split up you went to Nebraska to live with Ma and Pa Wood, then finally you hightailed it up here to the big city, I know all that.’ They left the elevator and O’Smith gave a friendly nod to the desk sergeant on their way out.
It was night-time, to Roderick’s surprise. But he would have been just as surprised by daylight. Time, after all, was, is, has past, would be, will have been passing…
‘I been following your trail for some time, son. Mr Kratt and Mr Frankelin wanted you real bad, you’re gonna make their fortune. After you make mine, that is. Come on, the car’s right across the street here. Careful on the ice, don’t want you to fall down and wreck any of that high-tone hardware. You might not believe it to look at me, but I got a few artificial parts myself, I—hey! What’s that gol-durned fool think he’s doin’? Hey!’
A car with no lights careened around a corner, fishtailed, picked up speed, and drove straight at them. At the last minute, the driver hit the brakes and threw the car into a skid.
Roderick was aware of being thrown into the air and falling in snow. He lay on his back, watching the stars. One by one, they went out.
The four boys from Digamma Upsilon Nu got out of their car and looked at the victims.
‘They look dead to me. Jeez, this guy’s lost his arm!’
‘My old man’ll kill me, drunk driving with no lights — and hit and run.’
‘We haven’t run yet.’
‘No but we’re gonna. Hey look, this stiffs got the other one’s arm. In a handcuff! Cops!’
‘Yeah, hey, there’s the station right there. Aw Jeez, we’re all gonna be in trouble.’
Someone bent with a match over Roderick. ‘This ain’t no stiff, it’s a dummy, look the wig’s coming loose, you can see metal.’
‘And this arm is artificial — the other one must be a dummy too. Or something.’
As if by a prearranged plan; they loaded Roderick, with O’Smith’s right arm, into their car and drove off. In a fraternity famed for practical jokes, there would always be some use for a realistic dummy.
XVI
Father Warren awoke from a brief and terrifying dream in which he’d been playing ping-pong with the Holy Ghost. The Paraclete had taken the form of a pigeon; standing on the table, it pecked the ball back at him. There had been some question about the stakes. Either damnation awaited him if he won, or else if he lost. But the terrifying part was that, in his dream, he knew he was dreaming. He knew that if he succeeded in avoiding damnation, his pleasure would be supreme and lasting into wakefulness — thus damning him anyway.
All nonsense of course. Here he was in the lounge of the Newman Club, having dozed over his own article on Lewis, nothing worse. He set about exorcizing the dream: ping-pong sounds came from the next room, no mystery about that. As for the pigeon, hadn’t someone the other day said something about Skinner and pigeons? Training them to be superstitious? Yes, something about pigeons understanding how faith could be exactly like a mustard seed.
Cheap epigram like that, funny it should stick in his craw mind. He turned his attention to the printed words (his own):
…a fearful symmetry by which the master finds that it is really the slave who is in control of things. The magician who believes he can hold demons in thrall makes the same mistake as the cybernetician who thinks he can order his machine to deliver power or ‘success’ for free. In such a context we find Lewis using a demon name made up of screw (a word rife with both bawdy and mechanistic vulgarity) and tape (symbol of the binding contract). It would be hard to imagine a name more prophetically descriptive of the cybernetic demons that were to come into being. The Screwtape Letters appeared in 1942, the year ENIAC was built. And it is of ENIAC’s descendants that Lewis might have written:
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.
Our own ‘computer generation’ has managed to fall into both errors…
A fearful symmetry, yes, he ought to have added a word or two about binary numbers, two errors, the Yes/No character of… of…
His head jerked up. No one else in the lounge seemed to have noticed him. Two students were talking quietly in the corner, near the statue of the Infant of Prague. Two others, flushed from their ping-pong game, were heading for the coke machine.
The boy with the sparse beard stood in the doorway, looking at him. ‘All right if I come in, Father?’
‘Hector, of course. Were you looking for me?’
‘Yeah, I tried your office, they said you might be here. Only when I looked in you seemed to be praying.’
Father Warren remembered to grin. ‘What, at the Newman Club? With all this racket, I’m lucky I can even read. What’s on your mind? Not still worried about your paper?’
‘No, it’s going okay. Only I still remember the movie a lot better than the book. And I still don’t see what a clockwork orange is supposed to do, he might as well say an electric banana — I mean, an orange you wind up and then what?’
‘Ah well you see it’s — something the English, something musical as I recall, musical references galore there — a kind of music box, perhaps. But was there something else?’
‘Yeah, Father, just that the Science Fiction Club is having this panel discussion on artificial intelligence, we thought you might want to, um—’
‘Chair the discussion?’
‘Well no, just be a panellist, we’ve got a chair, um, person, already.’
‘Be on the panel? Sure. See my secretary about the date, but I’ll be glad to.’
The two of them rose, and the priest put a hand on the other’s shoulder, seemingly controlling him as they strolled towards the door.
‘…work orange, difficulty lies in deciding not merely its function, but whether its membership in the class of oranges or the class of clockwork things takes precedence in determining that function. The two classes are thought to be mutually exclusive and indeed they are, for we know intuitively that we are not dealing with a real orange, but rather a token of the type orange. That is, it has some properties that make us call it an orange, properties shared by all oranges and by the type itself, which — I wonder who that was?’
He had nodded and smiled at a familiar face lurking by the coke machine, it had nodded back: a plain, symmetrical face of no particular age, or sex, or race. It was gone from his thoughts before he had passed out of the Newman Club beneath the motto: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem, from shadows and types to the reality.
The little knot of people by the coke machine were talkative and thirsty; only one said nothing, drank nothing.