SKINNER’S DREAM
A gold-haired man wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses had come into the alley to look into garbage cans. During Skinner’s Dream he came up close and stopped, apparently listening. He cradled a newspaper-wrapped bundle.
Roderick thanked Allbright. ‘That was some poem. It was real — real—’
‘Poetic,’ said the stranger. ‘You mind getting off that garbage can now?’
Roderick jumped down. The stranger took off the lid and looked in. ‘That’s better.’ He dumped in his bundle and banged on the lid. ‘Must be just about the only empty garbage can in this part of town.’
Allbright nodded. ‘I guess they recycle a lot, at the Doggie Dinette here.’
‘Interesting trend, petfood recycling,’ said the stranger. His face was long and pock-marked, but his glittering gold hair offset these imperfections. ‘Probably affects the growth potential of the entire edible foodstuffs industry, though we’d need a thoroughgoing econometric breakdown before we could apply any cogent significance test, engaging other retail foodstuff trends and of course the changing shape of pets.’
‘Yes,’ said Roderick. ‘Well, I think I hear Mr Danton yelling for me.’
‘You work here?’ said the stranger. ‘Must be fascinating. Unique opportunity to explore at first hand the full rich pattern of human-canine bonding mechanisms in a feeding situation.’
‘With a little polishing,’ Allbright said, ‘you got a damned good routine there: add maybe a structuralist tap-dance…’
‘Well so long,’ said Roderick. He heard the stranger say something to Allbright about the role of refuse surveys in pre-archaeological studies of any dynamic social mix…
Mr Danton was waiting for him. He twisted Roderick’s arm and the robot felt pain. ‘See dem dirty dishes?’
‘Yes sir. Ouch.’
‘I pay you to wash ’em, right?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘I pay you well. I treat you right. You get good hours, pleasant surroundings, friendly co-workers, a fair boss. Right?’
‘Ow — yes sir.’
‘I treat you like a crown prince. I think of you like my own son. My own son. And all I ask is you wash a lousy coupla bowls now and then, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Okay, I’m glad we had a little talk, cleared this up.’
Mr Danton threw Roderick down and kicked him across the greasy floor. ‘Next time you’re fired.’
When Danton was gone, Dave the cook had a quiet laugh. ‘Watch out he kill you, kid. Old Danton he deeply crazy.’
‘Kill me? But why would he kill me? For a few dirty—’
‘No thing like that.’ Dave guffawed again. ‘See you look quite one little bit like his son Lyle. You look just like him, yes. Only thing, Lyle got birth-smirch on face, under eye like tear’s drop. Yes? Boy do them two hate. One time Lyle come here, old Danton grabbing cleaver and enchase him, say he gonna depecker him, hee hee hee, Lyle not come back. You watch out, kid.’
‘But why should he want to, to kill his own son?’
‘Hee hee.’
Roderick didn’t understand. That evening he turned over the pages of a book on human behaviour. He learned that crowds were lonely, people were one-dimensional, and inner cities were dying; he himself was probably alienated. Real alienated. Boy, he was so alienated it was unbelievable. The only people in the world who cared about him were Ma and Pa Wood, back in Newer, Nebraska. There hadn’t been any letters from Ma since the Newer nuclear power station accident. The accident had been caused by music. It seemed that someone had decided to install 24-hour-a-day music at the power station, and had chosen the new Moxon Music System. This did not rely on local records or tapes, or even on music run through long-distance telephone lines. Instead, the music would originate in a distant city, bounce off a special Moxon satellite, and be picked up by a large dish-antenna on the roof.
The roof had not been made to bear the extra weight of this antenna. It cracked, throwing the weight of the building on to the reactor shell. Now the entire town was fenced off. The government would say only that ‘no one lives there anymore.’ No wonder a guy felt alienated. Life was like something on TV.
Roderick turned on the TV to watch an old movie in black-and-white. It was raining, and two people stood in the rain embracing. The woman pulled back from a kiss and said: ‘But don’t you see, my darling? You’re not a nobody. You’re the man I happen to love.’
Rain dripped from the man’s hat-brim. ‘No, Mildred, your father’s right. I’m no good for you — I know that now. Oh sure, I hoped and dreamed a girl like you would come along. Even a nobody can hope and dream. But this is real life, kid. You just happened to pick the wrong guy.’
‘Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that.’ She clung to his sleeve. ‘Listen, you big lug, if you’re a nobody, then so am I — and proud of it! I won’t let you go. I can’t. You see—’
The scene was cut short to make way for a man in a bright plaid jacket who smiled and shouted details of a sewer-cleaning service.
Next day Mr Danton asked Roderick to fill in for one of the waitresses.
‘Do I get to wear the rabbit ears?’
‘You wear what I say you wear, okay?’ Mr Danton’s hand roamed over the cook’s table and came to rest on the handle of a cleaver.
‘Okay yes, yes sir.’ Wearing a clean shirt and a black plastic bowtie, Roderick glided out to meet the customers.
Danton’s Doggie Dinette went to great lengths to treat dogs as humans. A table could only be reserved in a dog’s name, and when the dog arrived at the front door towing its owner, a hostess would pretend to greet the animal and lead it to its table. The tables were very low and bone-shaped and for dogs only; owners sat near their pets but out of sight, in alcoves, so that the restaurant seemed populated exclusively by Yorkies, Corgis and toy Dobermanns. That was how Roderick first saw the dining room, full of dogs wearing bibs.
III
May I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet — if you are handling an editor or a politician, it is superfluous advice. I take it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: ‘Quoiqu’elle soit très solidement montée, il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine.’
Noon. The apostle clock chimed, and out of its innards came a parade of tiny wooden figures. Their faces and clothes had long since dissolved in wormholes; they now looked less like apostles than bowling pins.
Automatically, Mr Kratt lifted his snout to listen. His little black eyes lost their hard focus for a moment, and his powerful hands stopped throttling the pages of a company report.
‘You know, bub, my old man left me that clock when he died. I ever tell you about my old man?’
Ben Franklin, checking his own watch, shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Er, what was he like?’
The hard focus returned to Mr Kratt’s little black eyes. ‘He was a bum. A professional failure. A dummy. If I had my way, people like him would be turned into fishfood. At birth.’ He gripped the company report again in a stranglehold. ‘At birth. Damn it, I never could stand cripples…’