Like Brazos Bill, he thought. O’Smith must have got him at just about fifty airports. They could use a machine like that in here, better than just sittin’ in front of the teevee all day.
‘What you folks do for excitement around here?’ he asked the man in the next chair. Old buzzard, looked like that old body in Florida. Course all old folks look alike.
‘What?’
‘You got any amusement machines in this place?’
‘Machines!’ The old man started shaking all over. ‘Do you know about the machines?’
‘Know what, old-timer?’
‘Old-timer equals Saturn, malefic influence badly aspected to Mars equals iron, iron men in the walls, in the floors, in the—’
‘Jesus H. Christ I only asked—’
But the old man continued, his voice growing shrilclass="underline" ‘In the walls in the floors in the earth, terrestrial currents, magnetic influences pointing North, North is the Mecca of the magnets, the Mecca, the mecca-men, mechanical men feel them in the walls they get in through the power lines, lines of magnetic current, wheels within wheels, lines within lines…’
A pair of white-clad men appeared; one held the old man while the other prepared a syringe. ‘Give him fifty this time Joe, he’ll sleep like a baby — not now, Mary, I can’t wind you up now, I’m busy giving Fred his medication…’
O’Smith leaned forward and concentrated on the teevee, camera zooming in on a page of print:
corrected by (SRn/100) × 4.7004397181 yielding 14.97 bits at 100 milliseconds exposure, using 4-gram array PU on a 43% redundancy input, well within expected limits for the 8688R imaging Unit. POKERSON, MOSSIANT, RICANING…
They cut to Lee Fong who turned out to be fat and fifty, thick glasses and everything — a real disappointment, to look at him. O’Smith hadn’t missed much there. No fun in a body that didn’t put up no fight, martial arts or nothing. Hell, most of ’em were just shit, not like that old boy in St Petersburg with his 12-gauge. He’d made some damn thing, a little machine for talking to old folks, a conversationizer for lonesome old folks. O’Smith didn’t see no harm in it but it was enough for the Agency list, the hit parade.
And after all, the big boys knew what they were doing.
BOOK TWO
I
Then the guests were invited to admire a barrel organ, and Nozdrev immediately began to grind out some music for their benefit. The organ produced a not unpleasant sound, but in the middle of the performance something happened, and a mazurka turned into [a march] and that in turn ended in a popular waltz. Long after Nozdrev had stopped turning the handle, an extraordinarily energetic reed in the organ went on whistling all by itself.
‘Semantics?’ Indica thumped her coffee cup on the pine table. ‘Hank doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’
Bax nodded. ‘I know what you mean. It’s like—’
‘It’s like he’s so damned hot to pick on some word or something, I mean he never hears what I’m really saying.’
‘I hear you, I mean, right on.’
She looked at him. Bax might be a little older than he looked, with his button-beanie and shaggy blond moustache. Right on? She took another sip of dandelion coffee and went on talking about her husband.
‘Like the other day. He got all pissed off just because I said Naomi’s basically a Fundamentalist. Oh, and when I told him I thought germ warfare was just sick? You should have heard him!’
‘No, I mean yeah. I know what you mean.’ Bax finished his glass of bean milk, belched and tipped back in his chair. ‘I mean, words only get in the way. Like people, and like — like things.’
‘Things, God, don’t tell me about things.’ Her thin face assumed its characteristic mask of martyrdom, eyes rolling back to look for guidance from the water-stained kitchen ceiling. ‘Solar panel’s leaking again, everywhere I look I see another busted thing around here. I mean, Hank just keeps buying crap and it just keeps breaking down and will he ever fix it? Ha. He’s always so busy with his crap environment magazine he never even sees the environment he lives in. I mean two years I’ve been shoving match books under the leg of the dining table, been sticking a pail under the garbage disposal where it leaks, you seen our back yard? Six rusty old bikes, I mean six!’
‘I hear you, Indica.’
‘Every time Hank starts another article we get the whole crap thing all over again. Like his survival shelter, three tons of cement in the shape of a pyramid — because of the rays and all — only he has to make the door too small for anybody but the chickens, whole thing smells of rotten eggs all the time. “I’ll fix it,” he says, and goes off to another damned pollution conference, Jesus! I could tell him a thing or two about pollution.’
‘Yeah,’ Bax said. After a moment’s thought, he added, ‘Yeah.’ He tipped his chair back further and reached a leg in her direction.
Indica stared into her earthenware cup, the one with her name and zodiac sign hand-painted on it, the one with the broken handle. ‘I mean, he got this house computer to make everything simpler, and it just made it worse, it never does anything but tell him how wrong he is, how wrong everything in the house is. And since we moved out here, anything goes wrong we have to take it twenty miles to town to get it fixed, there sits the ultrasonic dishwasher, it worked about a week.’
‘Complicated.’
‘Now he only wants to buy a car that runs on chicken-shit, that’s all, a bargain he figures and it only costs about twice as much as an Eldorado. See what I’m up against?’
Bax thought his foot was at that moment up against hers. He pressed, and something hummed and moved away from the contact.
‘Christ! Are you hurt?’ She helped him up.
‘No, I’m — but I guess the chair’s not too good.’ He handed her the splintered chair back, and she placed it in a corner, near a dismantled coffee grinder.
‘Hey, what is this thing under the table?’
Two glittering eyes peered up at him.
Indica shrugged. ‘That? Nothing. A kind of robot, I guess.’
‘A robot! Great!’ Bax stood clear of it.
‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t work either. Just some piece of junk a guy dumped on us. This creep poet Allbright, who never writes any poetry, just rips off stuff. Guess he ripped this off from some computer freak he knows…’
‘Yeah? What’s it, uh, supposed to do?’
‘Who knows? We’ve had it a month, so far all it does is watch TV and get in the way.’
Bax squatted down to look at it. ‘Watches TV?’
‘Sure. Hank’s creep friend said to treat it like a real kid. So Hank plunks it down in front of the TV every day and it just sits there by the hour. Never moves a muscle.’
Man and robot studied each other. ‘Not much to look at,’ said Bax, and it wasn’t: a squat instrument only two feet high with a large spherical head, a small, conical body, and a pair of tiny tank tracks on which it now edged back, further under the table. The spindly arms, resembling miniature dental drills, were folded against the chest, where Bax could read a word stencilled in black on battleship grey.