‘Shh!’ said Mrs Dorano, and went on to Violetta, ‘Imagine having a birthmark like that and showing it off along with everything she’s got!’
‘Birthmark?’
‘Right under her arm there, like a little dumb-bell — what’s the matter?’
Violetta Stubbs stood up and tried to push along the row of crossed legs, handbags, discarded shoes, shopping and knitting. ‘I’m not well, I… gotta go…’
Too late. Indica Dinks stopped speaking to stare at her.
‘Mother!’
‘Son, I knew you’d figure out that cipher in about two minutes flat. So I guess by now you know everything.’ Pa set the oil-can down on a reception desk.
‘Pa, I didn’t work out the cipher at all. I just — saw Ma doing all that witchcraft stuff down by the lake and I knew somehow she was bringing you back to life.’
‘Life, ha.’
‘So I knew you must be hiding out somewhere like this. Because I mean the undead—’
‘Undead? Witchcraft? But son, all you had to do was turn the darn cipher upside down!’
Roderick tried to call up a mental picture of the message, turned upside down, while he watched the receptionist. She picked up the oil-can, placed it to her ear like any smiling suicide, and said, ‘He’ll see you in just a sec, Mr — is it Getty or Goethe?’
‘Pa, maybe you’d better explain.’
‘Maybe I’d better!’ Pa sat down for a shoeshine and, while the eye-rolling contraption buffeted away at his bare feet, he began the story.
XXIII
To make men serfs and villeins it is indispensably necessary to make them brutes… A servant who has been taught to write and read ceases to be any longer a passive machine.
‘Started as a joke,’ said Pa. ‘Well you see right after the war everything seemed like a joke. Listen, during the war they had these cookies with chocolate on them, only they couldn’t get any chocolate so they started putting brown wax on them. That seemed like a joke, you know? Here were millions of people killing each other, and they still managed to find somebody to sit painting brown wax on cookies. And Hitler was a joke. Trying to get half the world to stick its head in the oven and turn on the gas… okay maybe it’s not funny but you gotta admit it’s kind of strange.
‘And after the war it kept getting stranger. If anybody had a dream, no matter how stupid or futile it was, they went right out and tried to live that dream. It’s as if the whole world just sat down with some crummy old pulp science fiction magazine, read it cover to cover, and then tried to live it. On the cover of that old magazine you’ll see a picture of this city of the future: big glass towers, surrounded by tapeworm roads, coil after coil wound up over and under each other. And on the roads are strange-looking things that must be high-powered cars. And in the air above them, a few helicopters, and maybe the blast of a silver rocket taking off for the moon. And if you see any people they’re wearing plastic clothes, and you know they live on vitamin pills and special artificial foods. Inside the magazine you find out how they live: watching television, killing their enemies with death-rays, running everything with big computers, robot servants, millions of household gadgets doing all the work, atomic power harnessed to turn the wheels of industry, jet planes zipping passengers New York to Paris in a few hours — I probably left out a lot of stuff, but — but just look around you. We got it, all of it. Every glass tower, every tapeworm road, every moon rocket and computer and nuclear power station — everything in the magazine. A joke, by God, and now it’s beyond a joke!’
‘Well I still don’t see—’
‘Because just think back to the guy who wrote all this crap. Here he is, back in the forties, some poor broken-down science fiction hack. Here he sits at his broken-down L. C. Smith, cracking out his crap for a penny a word — a cheap dream, you agree? So he hammers out maybe a hundred stories a year, maybe six novels too, all just to eat and pay the rent. No and he doesn’t even have enough ideas of his own to fill the quota; has to ask his wife for another giant electronic brain, another moon rocket. This guy, I mean he probably has dandruff, he’s overweight, he can hardly drag himself to that oilcloth-covered kitchen table to face the L. C. Smith every day.
‘And he created our world! We have to wear the damn plastic, eat the ice-cream substitutes, live and work in the glass towers. Just because he happened to write it down — imagine! What if the poor slob, what if one day he wrote brass instead of glass, would we all be living in brass towers now? It’s a joke all right.’
Roderick shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘I don’t see how that explains—’
‘Las Vegas? Disneyland? The Muse-suck in this factory? Episode Ten Thousand of Dorinda’s Destiny? Supermarkets selling Upboy, a special food for geriatric dogs? Electric acupuncture? Talking gingerbread? Believe me, it explains everything. Every blessed damned thing. Uh, let’s go outside. I don’t think I can take any more of it here, with that receptionist pouring oil down her nice new dress
They made their way along the yellow road to the entrance, through the security room (where Roderick’s possessions came back to him), past the docile dogs and out at the gate. Pa sat in the grass and contemplated his oxblood feet, or perhaps only the lights of town beyond them.
‘We killed him in 1950. We killed him with a death-ray, and blew up his old L. C. Smith with an H-bomb. That poor old hack was right in the middle of another crappy story, still behind with the rent, and we killed him.’
‘I don’t get you, Pa.’
‘Let me put it another way. One day in 1950 he’s hammering away at the keys, still spelling it glass instead of brass, while his wife is stalling the landlady and maybe trying to work out some new way of combining canned tomatoes, ground beef and elbow macaroni. The next day, they’re both dead. The police will find two little piles of clothes on the shores of Lake Michigan. One pile is weighted down with the L. C. Smith. And a note, got to have a note, double-spaced with wide margins…’
‘You mean you changed your names and moved to Newer?’
‘Son, we changed everything. We became Paul and Mary Wood. We dropped everything from the old life — all we brought along were a few pulp magazines with our stories. We changed our personalities — that looks like Doc Welby’s car.’
Roderick looked up to see the lights of a strange, high-powered car moving away from the executive gate of Slumbertite, off down the tapeworm to town. ‘I wonder what he was doing up here?’
‘Anyway, now you know most of our story. See we thought we could maybe make up for it if we could just have a kid, kids. Somehow we couldn’t, no matter how much we kissed and cuddled… Anyway that’s why one year we fostered a nice little boy called Danny Sonnenschein.’
‘Dan Sonnenschein!’
‘Same guy, yup. Trouble was, he got up in the attic one day, got into these old pulp magazines. Before you knew it, he’d gone and read a story of ours. We called it, “I, Robot”.’