Tik-Tok (16 page)

"Exactly," she said. "It'll probably be a thermonuclear device, just to make sure all traces are erased—headed notepaper and all. And probably a preset Mayday signal will seem to come from a ship somewhere near the sun at the same time."

"And what time would that be?" Sherm asked.

"I'm not sure, but I think it would be a good idea if we all cleared out now."

Maggie stepped to the nearest airlock and hit the series of buttons for Emergency Evacuation. The doors flew back and the air rushed out, catapulting her into inky space.

No, I was just kidding. The doors flew back to show a stretch of desert, covered by sagebrush. We lost no time in leaping out and running for our lives. I know that most of us were thinking what a cruel trick of fate it would be if we almost got away. No doubt Jud Nedd was also thinking about exploding cows.

As luck would have it, we were picked up within minutes by helicopters of the Internal Revenue Service, in their regular sweep of the desert for tax evaders. By the time the bomb went off, we were many hundreds of miles away. I was being polished up for a salvage auction, while the hijackers were all making voluntary statements with their heads being held under water.

My time with these space pirates was one of the most interesting and instructive of my life. Right at the very end of it I learned how to set up a coffin ship—many Clockman ships have since gone to glory—and how to get voluntary statements.

N
ixon Park, here we are, Banjo. I mean Tik." The tank slowed and stopped. "But it's a hell of a place to be getting out. At least let me take you around to the other side, where you can get a taxi."

"No thanks, George. This is fine."

As I stepped out, George ("Smilin' Jack") Grewney said, "And you with one leg gone and all, you sure you're all right?"

"I've got this to lean on." I held up the rifle. "Well, thanks again, George. So long."

As he leaned out to close the lid, I shot him through the left eye.

No one seemed to notice the shot. No one watched me hobbling across the park, not even the old man who sat by his chessboard, waiting for a sucker. When I reached the other side, I threw the rifle into a bush and hailed a cab.

Inside, the cab was covered with signs forbidding smoking or eating, and suggesting that if the passenger didn't like it in America, he or she might go back to Russia. The driver wore mirror sunglasses.

"There's a tank parked on the other side of the park," I said. "No kidding? What kinda tank?"

"I don't know. But it has blood down the side."

"Whaddya know?" He turned a little, to show me his grin.

"I know how the blood got there."

"Yeah? Yeah?"

"I shot the guy driving the tank. In the left eye." He roared with laughter. "Hey that's a good one."

"No I'm serious. He was a friend of mine. I shot him."

"Yeah, in the left eye. Ha ha ha ha . . . hey that's good. I gotta tell that one to my kids. You got any kids?"

"No I'm a robot. Didn't you notice?"

He pounded on the wheel and grimaced. "Stop, you're killin' me. You're, you're, hahahaha . . . left eye!"

"It was a glass eye," I said, setting him off again. He laughed all the way to our destination, and he then refused any money.

"Listen, buddy, I got this gastric ulcer and the doc says relax more, enjoy life. Have a few laughs. But you know, I never get no laughs in this job, nothing but aggravation. You done me more good than a hundred bucks worth of medicine . . . in the left eye!"

O
peration Job was what I decided to call my gratuitous blitzkrieg of misfortune to be visited on a selected subject. The subject would have to be physically, mentally and financially healthy, a committed churchgoer, in love with life. He or she should have a spouse and children, pets, property, a responsible job and some standing in the community. General Gus Austin, I was delighted to find out, had all of these qualifications.

On one of my trips to California, I asked General Cord about his former colleague.

"Gus, he's kind of boring, but I guess you'd have to defenestrate any concept that he wasn't a genuine optimist, right now. He is the one man who has managed to amalgamate the very quintessence of good living. I guess maybe it had to do with his career before he left the Army. He was kind of an all-round expediter, a role that is hard to explain to laymen. He never actually contributed to any ongoing operational exercise, but he had a way of always being there, ubiquitously encouraging
des autres
, smoothing all paths, making people feel—good, I guess that's the word, good. But how do you know him, Tik?"

"We were on a television talk show together. He seemed to be a real nice guy. Real nice."

Cord laughed. "That's Gus all right. You summed up everything I was saying there, Tik.
Real nice guy
, I like that, it has a ring to it. Hand me that glass of water, will you?" Cord was confined to a hospital bed with two broken legs. He hadn't mentioned the fact, and I felt that it was not polite to notice it. But now he said:

"Guess I ought to tell you how I broke both my legs. Darndest fool accident, I fell out of my car. Ever hear of anything like that, falling out of a car?"

I said I hadn't. "Do you mean the door wasn't locked?"

"Not the door, I fell out of the car window. Right in front of a bus, I could have been killed, you know?" He chuckled. "Now you're gonna ask me how I did it. Let me tell you, I don't know. All I was doing was leaning out of the window a little bit to get some sun on my shoulder—oh, you don't know about my shoulder, do you? Well see I've been having a lot of trouble with that shoulder, ever since I sprained it signing a letter, about six months ago. I tried putting in an extra little flourish, and
wham!
" His arm swept out, upsetting the glass of water and starting a small electrical fire in the bed motor. Before anyone could stop him, he was beating the fire out with both hands. When I left, his burns were being bandaged.

All other sources confirmed that General Gus Austin (Ret.) was perfect for Operation Job. He was worshipped by his wife and four children, one grandchild, favorite dog and horse, as he had been by his men in the Army. He had retired to step into an executive position at National Xenophone, a hearing-aid company that had now diversified into aerospace.

One day a week he left his ranch, flew his own helicopter to the city, did a light day's work that was invaluable to the company, returned home for one cocktail and dinner with the family. The family evening would be spent watching home movies, mending harness, swapping jokes and songs around the fire, or playing a lively game of Twenty Questions.

The rest of the week he spent riding his horse, writing memoirs, keeping bees and fishing—but every evening was spent with the family around the fire.

On Sunday he attended the Church of the Flat Nazareth, a place for strong beliefs. The paradox of working in aerospace and at the same time accepting the doctrine of a flat earth, was made easier for him by his minister's assurances that this apparent conflict was resolved in God.

I began by enticing his dog away for a long walk, killing it and burying it in the desert. I toyed with the idea of doing the same for all his family, but where was the finesse in that?

Next, I picked a bundle of what the locals call "vorpal weed" and fed it to his beloved horse. It suffered loud and terrible agonies through the night, I later learned, while he and a flying vet sat up with it. At dawn it turned up its hooves.

The children were far more difficult. Two of them no longer lived at the ranch (having made their escape from home movies and Twenty Questions): Gus Junior had married and moved to Russia, to superintend the construction of a soft-drink bottling plant—the first to be built entirely of reinforced hair. It took me many months to arrange that a certain weak wall collapse, killing him, his wife and Gus III.

The next eldest, Tina, was attending Debenham Bible College in Georgia. It seemed that she was a champion swimmer, tipped for the next Olympics, and so allowed to practice alone each morning in the college pool. At first I entertained the idea of electric eels, but these would seem too unlikely for an accident, also too Freudian. But I was able to divert a delivery of liquid nitrogen from its destination, the college chemistry department, and have it blown through a window into the pool at the right moment.

The youngest son, Gustavus, was small enough easily to be dropped into a beehive. His older sister, Gussie, was dispatched at a carnival, by the simple expedient of loosening two bolts on the roller coaster.

There remained only Gus Austin's wife, Augusta. She was a keen jai alai player, and in this dangerous sport I saw the perfect opportunity for murder. But fate beat me to it: Augusta, while speeding to an important jai alai match with her lover (the famous ballboy Ned August, managed to crash her expensive powered unicycle into a billboard advertising alfalfa flakes. On hearing this, I cancelled my order for a special gun capable of firing jai alai balls, and took stock of Operation Job so far.

General Gus had all of his loved ones, human and even animal, brought to one spot on his ranch and buried together:

Here lie

AUGUSTUS AUSTIN JR,
my son

AUGIE AUSTIN,
his wife

AUGUSTUS AUSTIN III,
their son

AUGUSTINA AUSTIN,
my daughter

GUSSIE AUSTIN,
my daughter

GUSTAVUS AUSTIN,
my son

AUGUSTA AUSTIN,
my wife

PRINCESS,
my dog

CAESAR'S WIFE,
my horse

but not me, hee hee

That amazing last line was my first inkling that all was not well with Operation Job. He seemed in no way perturbed by all these deaths, but carried on with his memoirs and his job and evenings watching home movies. From there on, the story was all downhill. I spent considerable time and money trying to break General Gus: By stock manipulation, it was possible to make his work at National Xenophone look incompetent, if not downright crooked. While he was (I hoped) still reeling from the loss of his job, I managed to wipe out his finances and even take away his ranch. He could no longer visit the graves of his loved ones. My detectives hounded him from job to job, making sure he ended up a vagrant. A hired "doctor" induced alcoholism, malnutrition, and a general deterioration in health, including boils. Gus Austin was reduced to lying in alleys, drinking wine from bottles in paper bags. Yet even then he continued to scrawl his memoirs on the paper bags.

The only remaining step, then, was to cast doubt on his military record, the last fragment of his former life left to love. I waited and watched on the final day when a cadre of military officials approached Gus as he lay, half-conscious, on a curb outside a mission hotel. He was surrounded by half-conscious cronies, all of whom were dazzled by the sight of smart uniforms and shined shoes.

"General Gus Austin?" said one of the officers. Gus tried to get up, failed. "You have been retroactively tried by a court martial for cowardice in the face of the enemy, black marketeering, illicit sexual practices and subordination. This is your dishonorable discharge." The officer slapped his face with a scrap of paper, then reached down and tore from his ragged overcoat a few grubby pieces of colored cloth— ribbons so faded no one had noticed them until now. The triumph of fate over Gus Austin was complete, I thought, as the military men marched back to their car.

Gus blinked for a moment at the scrap of paper, then let it blow away. Beneath the dirt and disease, he wore the same genial, self-satisfied expression as before. Now he turned to the next bum, nudged him and said:

"Come on, ask me if it's animal, vegetable or mineral."

I count Operation Job among my failed experiments.

P
olitical weather changes were on the way, and their isobars were pushing across my part of the map. To begin with, I learned that Duane Studebaker had joined a peculiar new anti-robot group called American People First. I had seen these people on TV, parading in their three-cornered hats, and I knew these parades were often followed by riots and the smashing of robots on the street. But until now, it had always seemed a remote phenomenon, a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a robot's hand. Now the sky seemed overcast with APF clouds. Someone I knew had actually joined in this darkness. I decided to drop in on Duane and Barbie, to find out more about APF.

When I mentioned it to Sybilla White, she said, "I'll go with you. In case they decide to give you any trouble, best to have a human being along, right?"

"You go with me everywhere, these days, Syb. Folks are beginning to talk," I joked. To my great surprise, she blushed.

As we drove out to Fairmont, I thought over this new development. No doubt about it, Sybilla had been hanging around me a lot, lately. My one speech for Wages for Robots never seemed to bore her no matter how often she heard it. And it wasn't just an interest in the movement, because others had complained about her missing committee meetings to be with me. When talking to me she touched my hands and arms a lot. In cars, as now, she leaned against me. And now that I thought of it, there had been a long string of odd, unnecessary compliments: "Tik, you're so
clean
, so wonderfully
clean
." "I'm glad you never eat, Tik. Eating is such a coarse thing to do, shoving bunches of animal and vegetable fiber into a hole in one's face—wish I didn't have to."

Today she said, "Tik, I suppose you're, um, equipped to please women?"

"That's right."

"I don't know if I approve of that or not," she said, staring out the window. "I guess a lot of women just use you, don't they?"

I said nothing.

"If I had a relationship with a robot, I'd want it to be more, um, spiritual. Not just a lot of animal um, pleasure. Not that I've got anything against—"

"Here we are!" I parked in front of the familiar white frame house with green awnings. There were a couple of new additions: a tall flagpole on which an immense American flag hung limp, and a decorative flower bed that spelled out SCRAP ALL ROBOTS ifl beautiful colors. Rivets answered the door. Ignoring me, he spoke to Sybilla. "Mr and Mrs Studebaker aren't home just now," he said. "If you'd like to leave a message. . . ."