Lightning flickered somewhere, and Roderick saw Ma standing by the lake, stooping to pick up something. She seemed to be wearing some kind of cone on her head. Of course! If up was down and day was night, good was evil and this was witchcraft!
He found it hard to believe even when she’d built the fire and begun the incantation: ‘Alcatraz! Mulligatawn! Tapeworm!…’
What a let-down. He’d seen hundreds of old witch movies on TV, every single one a let-down. Probably now she was going to strip off her clothes and dance around the fire, and then screw some giant goat out of the sky or something, then there’d be plenty of thunder and lightning, screaming and flames and that would be that.
A scratchy old record started up: The Bow-wow Symphony. Ma left the circle of firelight, and he could hear her calling down the beach: ‘Hurry up, the rain’s starting…’
Suddenly there was a distant bang, a flash of blue flame, and the unmistakable clatter of Patent Applied For. Then the rain came down and Roderick could no longer be sure what he saw or heard, an electric arc or was it lightning, a man’s scream or was it the scratchy record, Ma shouting not to forget the candy while lightning danced on six stovepipe hats while Roderick tried to run for the shelter of the trees but crashed into another running figure as blinding lightning struck again and he fell into perfect darkness.
XXII
‘…a bad dream?’ said Ma. ‘Your batteries must be low…’
‘Sure, from the long walk. But how did I get home?’
She pretended not to hear. ‘Feel like going to school today?’
‘And what was Cliff doing out there with his Patent Applied For?’
‘…all a bad dream, son.’
Roderick held up a scrap of wet cloth. ‘Yeah but when I woke up I found this in my fist, did I dream this? Look there’s writing on it.’
‘Did I dream this?’
‘Well yes, in a way. I do believe this is a genuine apport, son.’
‘Apport?’
‘A psychic deposit of physical evidence. It was your dream that made it appear, made it pass right through the walls of your room!’
‘Looks familiar only—’
She snatched it away. ‘I’ll just mail it right off to the Society for Psychical Research, they’ll be very interested.’
‘But Ma, I’m interested, I—’
‘Why don’t you stay in bed this morning, school can wait. Oh, and you could work on that psychic message your Pa sent you through the planchette.’
He took her advice, if only to keep an eye on her. Besides, the cipher — if it was a cipher — might hold some indirect clue to Ma’s — madness? He smoothed it out on the bedclothes and opened his notebook to a clean page.
At noon, when he closed the notebook, there were no more clean pages, and no solution. His best so far was a single line:
hpmoy hpoq hw dwnp noh
threw then to gosh set
‘Take a look at this.’ One liver-spotted hand passed the binoculars to another.
It was just possible to make out a tiny group of people standing outside the fence with signs.
‘What do they want?’
‘Would you believe they’re Luddites?’
‘No I would not. Is that what security—?’
‘Precisely. Haven’t you seen the book? By this guy, what’s his name now, Hank Dinks, called Ludd Be Praised, turning into quite a cult item there.’
‘Ha ha, is it now? Think my daughter’s reading it now that you mention… but what’s the premiss?’
‘Crank stuff. Back to Nature, more or less, but with the emphasis on ol’ devil computer. Might know they’d get around to us — though I’m surprised they can’t muster more people for such an obviously populist cause. Can’t be twenty souls out there.’
‘The sun, you forget the sun. And we are a good way from Phoenix. If it weren’t for the sun, you know, I’d be tempted to stroll out and have a chat with them.’
‘Ah but security’s against it. Usual overcaution. I swear, sometimes I think they’d like to put all of us in Leo’s tank, seal us off from the rude world… oh wouldn’t they all be upset out there if they knew about Leo!’
‘Ha ha, wouldn’t they… be more like twenty thousand out there then, eh? But what, ah, what do they actually accuse us of doing? Running a clandestine computer?’
‘Better than that! Listen, they think we’re running robots! Us!’
After a few dry chuckles and coughs, the binoculars changed hands again. ‘Still, too bad they associate us with robots in any way. I don’t like it.’
‘Nobody likes it. The Agency certainly doesn’t like it. But…’
‘These little movements blow over, I suppose.’
‘Precisely. Precisely. Even if they don’t, we might…’
‘Use them? Exactly. Exactly. By the way, how’s that Nebraska business shaping up?’
‘No problem, as our Agency friends like to say. We have a clear set of pictures of the subject, front and profile, we have a voice print, we know exactly where to find him.’
‘Is he passing?’
‘More or less. At the moment he’s trying to pass as a black man.’
‘Fascinating! I wonder if we couldn’t study him for a while before—?’
‘Too risky, look what happened to our last surveillance team, that highly unlikely “accident”. Point oh oh oh oh seven at best, makes you wonder… No in fact I’ve already ordered the destruction for this evening.’
‘Oh well. Fun while it lasted. Better than this Kratt Industries business, that’s just boring. Pinball machines, talking gingerbread, automated concubines — low-grade stuff, all of it.’
‘Precisely what we have to encourage, my friend. Our job, after all, is to—’
‘I know, I know. To keep the world on the graph paper. Only sometimes don’t you feel, just a little like letting it, letting it slip?’
But the other elder was squinting through the glasses again. ‘I can just make out a sign — Oh listen to this! STOP ROBOTS. STOP POLLUTING THOUGHT WAVES.’
‘Fascinating!’
‘Fixed up like a minstrel today, are we? Well never mind, have your last little joke, because this is your last day. Here.’ Sister Filomena shoved a piece of paper at him.
‘What’s this, Sister, I — listen I—’
‘Walking papers, Mister Wood, walking papers. Your diploma. You are now officially graduated, so goodbye.’ She went back into her office and closed the door.
Father O’Bride put his head in at the door, without removing his fishing hat. ‘Hiya Sister, didn’t I see a new pupil come along here just now?’
‘New pupil?’
‘Yeah yeah, I was in my office cutting up one of Father Warren’s old cassocks, boy you wouldn’t believe how many relics you can get out of eleven yards of material, boy I got a hundred and fifty thousand little pieces so far not even half done I mean even at a buck apiece we can’t go wrong there, bandages for five — yeah I meant to ask you, any sign of that blood transfusion unit I ordered?’