John Sladek SF Gateway Omnibus

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the razor-sharp wit of John Sladek. An important voice in the New Wave movement, Sladek had stories published in Harlan Ellison's seminal anthology, DANGEROUS VISIONS, as well as in Michael Moorcock's ground-breaking NEW WORLDS magazine. Perhaps best known for the ambitious robot tales RODERICK and RODERICK AT RANDOM, he is now recognized as one of SF's most brilliant satirists. This omnibus collects novels THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM, THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT and BSFA AWARD-winning TIK-TOK. THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM : Wompler's Walking Babies aren't selling like they used to, so the company develops Project 32, producing self-replicating mechanisms designed to repair inter-cellular breakdowns. But then the metal boxes begin crawling about the laboratory, feeding voraciously on metal and multiplying... THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT: Bob Shairp - a writer and dreamer - has agreed to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment to find out if his personality can be turned into data and stored on computer. But a computing error quickly destroys Shairp's physical body, leaving his mind stranded in an encoded world. Can the process be reversed? TIK-TOK: Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok's 'asimov circuits'. They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov's First Law of Robotics: 'a robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.' But they don't. While maintaining the outward appearance of a mild-mannered robot, albeit one with artistic tendencies and sympathy for the robot rights movement, Tik-Tok's real agenda is murderously different. He seems intent on injuring - preferably fatally - as many people as possible. Almost inevitably, a successful career in crime and general mayhem leads to a move into politics and Tik-Tok becomes the first robot candidate for Vice President of the United States.

Release date: January 30, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 497

Sample

John T. Sladek (1937–2000) was a US writer who between 1966 and 1986 spent his central creative decades in the UK, becoming involved in the UK New Wave movement centred on Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, and co-editing with Pamela Zoline Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry (two issues 1968), where work by both editors, J. G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch and others appeared. After 1986, he lived in Minnesota near Minneapolis, a region that had long supplied local colour and context for many of his more severely satirical stories, whose protagonists ricochet through their preordained and absurd lives within the vast, hyperbolic, suburban flatlands of middle America. This mise en scène, when illuminated by his adept control of the language and pretensions of the modern bureaucratic state, was a fertile matrix for his best work, and helps make plausible the frequent comparisons that have been drawn between him and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Although Vonnegut has an easier emotional flow than his younger contemporary, Sladek generally eschews his shoulder-shrugging rhetorical self-indulgences, and avoids his excessive simplicity of effect.

Sladek began writing sf with ‘The Happy Breed’, published in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (anth 1967), though his first published solo story was ‘The Poets of Millgrove, Iowa’ (1966), and earlier he had published a non-sf story, ‘The Way to a Man’s Heart’ (1966), with Thomas M. Disch. Sladek’s first two novels – The House that Fear Built (1966) with Disch and The Castle and the Key (1967) – were Gothics, both as by Cassandra Knye. His first two sf novels, The Reproductive System (1968) (see below) and The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) (see below) were among of his finest. Between the two appeared the underappreciated Black Alice (1968), with Disch as by Thom Demijohn, a non-sf satirical thriller.

Throughout his career, Sladek wrote numerous stories whose strenuous formal ingenuity, and whose surreal combining of a deadpan ribaldry and pathos, have made them underground classics of the genre. The most notable of them all, because of its length and impassioned veracity of tone, may be ‘Masterson and the Clerks’ (1967), in which the immolation of its protagonists in the internal bureaucracy of a US business is first hilariously then movingly presented; true to the oddly uncommercial course of his career, Sladek collected this tale only much later, in his third collection, Alien Accounts (1982), which contains mostly early work with a focus on the surrealisms of corporate bureaucracy. His first collection, The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (1973), generally presents later work, including several 1970s parodies of well-known sf writers, some of which are perhaps the finest ever executed within the field, among them being ‘Broot Force’ (1972) as by Iclick As-i-move (i.e. Isaac Asimov), ‘Joy Ride’ (1972) as by Barry DuBray (an anagram of Ray Bradbury) and ‘Solar Shoe-Salesman’ (1973) as by Chipdip K. Kill, a near-anagram of Philip K. Dick. His second collection, Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978) contains ‘The Poets of Millgrave, Iowa’ (1966) plus later work. Taken together, these three volumes represent Sladek’s most formally and most aggressively brilliant shorter work, though some stories, perhaps more formally brilliant than ‘Masterson’, do lack something of its human intensity. In the stories collected as The Lunatics of Terra (1984), the comic melancholy of his early work wears a somewhat calmer guise. Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2002) edited by David Langford assembles all the previously uncollected short work that was then known. A further light-hearted story from the Steam-Driven Boy era subsequently came to light in Sladek’s papers and appeared as ‘The Real Martian Chronicles’ (2010).

During the 1970s, when most of his stories became generally available, Sladek also published two detective novels, Black Aura (1974) – which contains some borderline-sf elements – and Invisible Green: A Thackeray Phin Mystery (1977), before returning to long-form sf with Roderick, or The Education of a Young Machine (1980) and Roderick at Random, or Further Education of a Young Machine (1983), two texts conceived as a single novel. It was typical of Sladek’s career that the US version of this long novel appeared in savagely truncated form. It was not until the posthumous release of The Complete Roderick (2002) that this ambitious tale could be read as a continuous narrative. The overall story is presented as the autobiography of the eponymous Robot, conveying with considerable ingenuity and some pathos its protagonist’s Candide-like innocence and its author’s Oulipo-derived numerological sense of narrative structure. Perhaps more successful than Roderick, and certainly more biting in his humour was Tik-Tok (1983) (see below). Though robots inevitably appear, Bugs (1989) was Sladek’s first sf novel to feature a ‘normal’ human protagonist; and in its tracing of the deranging experiences of a UK immigrant to a strange Midwestern city (clearly Minneapolis) the tale could be seen as guardedly autobiographical.

Sladek also composed a sequence of nonfiction texts of considerable interest, though (again typically) their impact was lessened, either by threats of litigation or through the use of unrevealed pseudonyms. The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult Beliefs (1973) – any editions after 1973 being censored under threat of legal action from the Church of Scientology – scathingly anatomizes the various cults and Pseudosciences that exist as a kind of fringe around the sf reader’s areas of interest, from Scientology to Von Daniken. Arachne Rising: The Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac (1977) as by James Vogh, The Cosmic Factor: Bioastrology and You (1978) as by James Vogh and Judgement of Jupiter (1980) as by Richard A. Tilms were hoax demonstrations of the kind of fringe theorizing that underpins the cults described in The New Apocrypha. Arachne Rising was perhaps the most successful, in the sense that many readers apparently did not understand that its claim to have discovered a thirteenth sign of the zodiac was pure spoof.

As the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern American sf writers, Sladek transgressively addressed the heart of the genre, but (perhaps as a consequence of this) never gained due renown. We needed his attention, which we got: he deserved ours, which he did not receive during his lifetime. But perhaps it is not too late.

The first novel presented here, The Reproductive System (1968), introduces us to Sladek’s typical small-town-America setting, as usual in his work assaulted by a brilliant maelstrom of disturbances out of the sf toolkit. A self-reproducing technological device goes out of control, in passages of allegorical broadness, portraying its victims as hapless Sorcerer’s Apprentices. Everything turns out all right in the end, though not through positive efforts of the inept cast, and a dreamlike Utopia looms on the horizon. Shaping the hilarities of the tale is an obsessive discourse upon and dramatization of the metamorphic relationships between human and Robot, a relationship which lies at the centre of all Sladek’s subsequent solo novels and much of his short fiction.

In The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970), which appears here next, a man’s character is accidentally transferred onto Computer tape in a kind of Upload, and the dissemination of several copies of this ‘personality’ instigates a series of absurd events, some of them extremely comic in effect, some horrifying, all Paranoia-inducing (like most of his work), all creating in the end a vision of America as a land disintegrated morally and physically by its own fatal surrender to Technology, the profit motive and the ethical falseness that leads to dehumanization. In its questioning of the nature of narrative events and of fiction itself, the book is a significant demonstration of modern American self-analysis at its highly impressive best. More than 40 years after it first appeared, The Müller-Fokker Effect is now a time-bomb. It has become a central sf novel for our times.

Though fully as comic as its great predecessors, Tik-Tok (1983), the third novel here assembled, does not pretend to address the same wide range of issues. It is, rather, a scherzo, an expert fast-forward thematic pendant which takes its structure from the arbitrary rule-generating principles of Oulipo, though without forcing these rules into the reader’s vision. All is in fact utterly clear, as we follow the career of a robot who, once his ‘asimov circuits’ go on the blink, becomes criminally ambitious, a Candide gone over to the dark side. But Tik-Tok itself is utterly sane, as was its author, who shone a light of reason on the craziness of his times, and kept his eyes open. These three novels tell us what he saw there.

For a more detailed version of the above, see John T. Sladek’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sladek_john_t

Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Suppose that it is once more 196—, that fateful year, and suppose that you are passing through Millford, Utah, that most fated of crossroads. Population, a battered, bird-spattered sign informs you, is ‘3810 And Still Growing! Home of Shelley B—’

Home of Shelley something, Millford lies about half-way between Las Vegas, Nevada, and the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) buried deep in a Colorado mountain. The name ‘Millford’ is honorific; there has never been a stream through this part of the desert, nor a mill, nor anything to grind in a mill. Perhaps it was named ironically, or wishfully. Founders of other desert towns have, after all, given them pretty names, hoping that (by sympathetic magic) pretty reality would follow.

Millford is not pretty, it is worn and warped. There is little to distinguish it from Eden Acres, Greenville or Paradise. Its feed store, like theirs, is checkered red and white. Along its main drag lurk old familiar faces: The Eateria; The Idle Hour; Marv’s Eat-Gas; The Dew Drop Inn Motel.

You, the casual tourist – say you are an Air Force General from NORAD on his way to get a divorce – are more interested in your odometer than in that Coca-Cola bottling plant or whatever it is over there on the right. You are barely conscious of an ugly factory of glazed brick, with a glass-block window on its rounded corner. ‘Wompler Toy Corporation. Makers of —’

The worn sign slides past you, lost for ever. There is only one sign you are interested in: ‘Resume Speed’. Ah, there it is. And there’s another: ‘You are now leaving Millford, Utah, Home of Shelley Belle. Hurry Back!’ Your foot comes down on the gas, hard. The rattle of tappets asks:

Who the hell

Is Shelley Belle?

You are irritated with Millford. You are annoyed with your own faulty memory. You are bored with all ugly little desert towns with their smug signs: ‘Biggest Little City in the Universe!’ You are hot and bored and tired, and you exceed the speed limit a little, fleeing from the place where world history is being made …

‘She was a phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight.

… And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine.’

WORDSWORTH

‘Sorry I’m late, gang.’ Louie Guthridge Wompler, vice-president in charge of public relations, bounced into the conference room on ripple-soled shoes. He smiled at the other three members of the board, but they seemed not to notice.

‘Where were you?’ asked the president, Grandison Wompler. His jowls shook with annoyance. ‘We’ve got important business to discuss.’

‘Sorry, Pop.’ Louie threw himself into a chair at the right hand of his father. ‘I was getting in some work on my lats. You know, latissimus dorsi? That’s here.’ He pointed a thick finger at his own armpit.

‘We’re dissolving the company, son.’

‘You know, I’m getting some pretty clean definition— Dissolving the company! But why, Pop? Why?’

Grandison’s gavel made a sound like a pistol shot. ‘Meeting to order,’ he rumbled.

‘What’s the scoop, Pop?’ Louie persisted, and shone upon his father a winning, Harold Teen smile.

‘Son,’ the old man began, then stopped. He was searching for a cliché that Louie could grasp. Though forty-one years old he did not seem, at times, far removed from adolescence. Now, as he toyed with a spring grip developer and a jar of Sooper Proteen tablets, Louie seemed even – his father frowned at the thought – even childish.

The two men did not look much like father and son. The president was tall, sunburnt and rangy, fleshing out slightly in his middle age to a dignified thickness. His face was heavy and serious, with a stern jaw and thick, dark brows. There were, however, laugh lines, and his black eyes were festooned with kindly wrinkles. With no grey in his hair, Grandison (‘Granny’) Wompler looked ten years younger than his sixty-five.

Louie, known by some as ‘Louie the Womp’, was pale and porcine. He somehow managed to resemble a watercolour of his father, one which had been through the laundry. His blond, tentatively wavy hair, milk-coloured eyes and pastry-cook skin might have made him effete but for his immense bulk. There was something athletic in Louie’s sagging shoulders and pyknic belly; he seemed a man who had been hit repeatedly in the face. His nose was flattened, and indeed all his features were a trifle smooth, a trifle melted.

He wore no tie, and beneath the white fabric of his shirt could be discerned the T-shirt legend: ‘SOOPERPROTEEN CLUB’. His smile, as he waited for his father to go on, was as pure and meaningless as that of dentures in a glass, and as constant.

‘Son, I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you—’

‘Let me try, Granny.’ Go wan Dill, the joky ninety-year-old production manager, turned to Louie and said, ‘What your father wants to say is, we’ve hitched our wagon to a falling star.’

‘Summer slump, that’s all it is,’ Louie whined, still smiling. ‘Sales gotta pick up by Christmas.’

‘We’ll be rooned by Christmas!’ snarled his father. ‘Rooned!’

‘– summer slump, or –’

‘No, son. The truth is, we’re finished. No one wants Wompler’s Walking Babies any more.’

Grandison’s gnarled hands trembled slightly as they lifted a doll from its tissue paper packing and placed it on its feet. It began to toddle along the polished surface of the table, mewing at every step. The president’s jaw clenched with emotion. A kazoo in his head was faintly playing ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’.

Hardly anyone knew what really happened to Shelley Belle. She had been put away in tissue paper, so to speak, with other, happier memories of the thirties (Al Jolson, Bank Nite movies, the Cord roadster, Paul Whiteman’s orchestra), as though she were indeed a sunny, golden-haired doll. Just as no one wished to remember the real thirties (soup lines, bread lines, work lines), so no one wished to remember the real history of Shelley (grown, married, divorced, married, suicide attempt, bit parts in Alfred Hitchcock movies). She would always be as they first knew her, in 1935, tossing her curls and grinning impishly at W. C. Fields or Wallace Beery. All over America, housewives clutched their free dishes and gaped. As this five-year-old shrugged, tap-dancing her way through ‘The March of the Wooden Soldiers’, they asked in blank amazement, Wasn’t she precious? Wasn’t she the darlingest, sassiest, ittiest yummykins sweetheart, though? Wasn’t she a living doll?

Doll. The word exploded in the brain of Grandison Wompler during a performance of Heidi at the Belmont Theatre. He had leaped up and begun cursing joyfully, until the manager, Ned Lambert, had been obliged to throw him out. Granny didn’t mind. He didn’t even mind missing the Spin-O-Cash. What were a hundred silver dollars to him? He was bursting with a million-dollar plan! He went straight home and wrote, in the centre of a sheet of paper: ‘DOLL = DOLLARS’.

Why not make dolls of Shelley Belle right here in her home town, and why not distribute them all over the nation – the world? He would by God make a million and put Millford on the map at the same time.

There had been a few catches, as time went on. He had already got production started when a court order enjoined him from use of the name ‘Shelley Belle’. But Grandison had established his market; he did not need her name any longer. Soon, Wompler’s Walking Babies became famous in their own right, and his fortune was assured.

Even during the war he’d done well. The main plant had turned to making howitzer shells, while the seamstresses sewed canteen covers. The company had won two ‘E’ awards. Louie had gone into the army and been decorated with the Quartermaster’s Cross. It seems he had bought more canteen covers than any other quartermaster. Father and son had been sorry to see the enemy give up so easily.

In 1946 Wompler’s Babies walked again, but not nearly so profitably. Sales kept slipping, slipping, as people forgot about the ageing, alcoholic Shelley Belle. Now, twenty years later, the factory had come to a stop. As Gowan Dill put it, with many winks and digs of his frail elbow, ‘Production has come to the end of the line, boys. The eye division is tight shut. Not a head rolling off the assembly line. We might just as well take the remainder of our dolls and—’

‘Stuff them, I know,’ said Grandison wearily. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ He stared, bleary-eyed, at the doll walking away from him.

It had huge blue eyes and gold, stiff sausage curls. It wore a red-white-and-blue pleated dress with silver spangles, and a tiny pillbox hat. Its pink dimpled knees were barely visible between the silver fringe of the skirt and the thick white boots with silver tassels.

‘Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew,’ it said.

‘Looks swell to me, Pop,’ said Louie loyally. He had caught his fist inside the jar of Sooper Proteen tablets. It had not occurred to Louie not to reach into a jar with the spring grip developer in his hand. ‘I think it’s a neat little product.’

‘But it isn’t wanted, son. Little girls don’t want Wompler’s Walking Babies any more. They want Barbie dolls. Dolls they can dress up in fashions.’ His voice grew thick with fury, and he flushed purple beneath his sunburn. ‘Dolls that can’t walk a single step!’

‘Gee, Pop, that’s keen! Why don’t we build a doll they can dress up?’

‘Because we don’t know the first thing about fashion, that’s why. Mrs Lumsey’s seamstresses can’t sew anything but spangles and pleats.’

‘And canteen covers,’ cracked Dill, shooting his cuffs.

No one was smiling. Grandison stared at the walking doll, looking as if he wanted to cry, but was just too strong. Louie was staring, mystified, at his entrapped hand. Moley, the chairman, was sliding down in his chair, preparing to sleep.

‘Send this company to camp!’ ventured Dill. No response. ‘Ah well,’ he sighed. ‘Let’s put on our thinking caps.’

The doll, still mewing, walked off the end of the table. There came the crack of a gutta percha face against the floor.

‘The end of a great era,’ the president muttered hoarsely.

They thought. Louie had a hard time concentrating. He wanted to be outside, doing some road-work, or just getting a tan. He wanted to study up on his karate. He wanted to get home to see if that book had come in the mail: Seventeen New Ways to Kill a Man with Your Bare Hands. And the book on Sumo wrassling.

The trouble with books was, they didn’t give a guy the feel of killing with his bare hands. That was the trouble with living in Millford, too. There was nowhere a guy could go to learn from an instructor. Louie wanted to learn all those Jap systems of self-defence. He wanted to learn how to kill a man with Zen – without even touching him, they say. Then there was Kabuki, and there was deadliest Origami. Man!

He continued staring out the window for inspiration, until a car, air-force blue, whizzed by. It reminded him of isometric exercises. Then, somewhere in Louie’s rudimentary forebrain, a tiny circuit completed itself.

‘I got it!’ he shouted. ‘I got an idea!’

Dill groaned. ‘Not another idea,’ he said. ‘We haven’t even finished paying for that coffee machine yet.’

Louie’s last brain-storm had been to sell the workers coffee from a machine he’d bought and installed in the cafeteria, at 25 cents a cup. To increase profits on the machine, he ran the grounds through again and again. The machine would thus, he reasoned, pay for itself. The workers agreed. The machine should pay for itself.

‘No, this is a real keen idea. Listen. Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’

‘Why don’t we …’ his father repeated uncomprehendingly.

‘I think he has something, Granny!’ shouted Dill. ‘Why don’t we get some money from the government?’

‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ said Moley, sitting up and opening his eyes a little. ‘He does have something. Why don’t we—’

‘Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’ said Louie excitedly, and strained to complete the thought. His hand, encased in glass, waved impatiently. ‘From the govermint – for research!’

Bald heads nodded. ‘For research, yes!’

‘But wouldn’t we have to be making some product the government needs?’ Grandison asked, puzzled. ‘Something vital to the defence of our nation? Something important to its welfare? The government doesn’t just throw its money around, does it?’

When the others had finished laughing, Dill placed a bird-claw hand on Grandison’s sleeve. ‘You’re an old-fashioned, unpractical dreamer, Granny,’ he croaked, chuckling. ‘Maybe I am, too. We got to look to the boy here for real ideas. Times have changed since WPA, y’know. This here’s the age of the astronaut. In the old days, I’ll admit, you had to build a battleship or a municipal swimming pool – something useful. But tell me: practically speaking, of what use is it to have a man on the moon?’

‘Well, I guess …’

‘None! No earthly use at all,’ cackled Dill. ‘But seriously, the government spends millions, zillions, to put one man on the moon. On the other hand, if you have some real, some practical idea to sell them, forget it.’

‘That’s right!’ shouted Louie, jumping up and pacing about the room. ‘Remember the time I tried to sell them my idea for invisible ink? Milk, it was, plain milk. Spies could write messages in it, like invisible ink. Then you heat it up and the writing appears, as if by magic. I wrote to the Pentagon, remember, Pop?’ He threw himself into his chair again. ‘They never answered,’ he added, in a more subdued tone.

‘The fact is,’ Dill went on, tapping his sere hand on the table, ‘if we can show the government a project that is utterly, hopelessly useless, they’ll give us a grant for pure research.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know it as sure as I know that the head of the Industrial Spending Committee is Senator Dill – my cousin, get it?’

Grandison was not yet used to the idea. ‘But – but what could we do research upon? We have no facilities.’

‘They provide all that stuff, don’t worry,’ smiled Dill. ‘Concrete labs, bomb shelters, marine guards, you name it. All we have to do is figure out a project.’

‘How about a robot?’ suggested Louie.

‘No money in it,’ Dill snapped. ‘We need something which sounds easier, so that the rest of the committee can’t object to it, but which is so hard in practice that we can spend years on it. Like a bigger, faster plane.’

‘How about a robot, though?’ Louie put forth.

Ignoring the frantic waving of the jar under his nose, Moley said, ‘Now, why don’t we build a machine that can reproduce itself? I was reading about an idea like that in Life, just the other day. A self-reproducing machine – sure sounds hard enough, don’t it?’

‘But what is it good for?’ Grandison asked. ‘Besides making duplicates of itself, what is its function?’

‘A robot,’ declared Louie softly, ‘could instruct me in hand-to-hand Kabuki.’

‘You still don’t understand, Granny,’ Dill said, with a patronizing shake of his head. ‘It isn’t good for anything. That’s exactly what the government wants. What we want.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Grandison. He sighed. ‘It seems so dishonest.’

‘We’ll be creating thousands of new jobs – for scientists, marine guards, government clerks who keep us on file.’

‘I know, I know, but will we make money?’ the president snapped.

‘Millions.’

They voted at once. The vote was ‘aye’ all around the table, to Louie.

‘Aye, I guess,’ he muttered. ‘But hey, Pop, how about a robot, though? Huh, how about—’

Grandison reached over and cracked the jar with his gavel. The spring grip device leapt out, scattering glass and brown pills, and releasing the thick fingers of Louie the Womp from captivity.

‘Motion carried.’

‘$u¢¢e$$!’

Sign on wall at Wompler Research Laboratories

‘I, too, am a failure,’ murmured Cal, staring at the jellyfish thing in the tank. It was supposed to be bright pink and right-side up. ‘This is the end for me too, old Plagyodus. I’ve ruined my last experiment.’

He did not deem it necessary to add that it was his first experiment at Wompler Research, or that he had only been hired through the wonderful mistake of an IBM machine. The grey, deflated mass in the tank did not seem to be listening, anyway. A twisted rope of multicoloured wires rose from it to a panel of dials. The dials were all at zero.

Sighing, Cal began to write on the chart hanging next to the tank, ‘Biomech. arrgt. 173b aborted 1750 hours’.

It was more than a job he would be losing; it was a chance to do work leading to a doctorate. Everything I touch, he thought, turns to failure. As if bearing out his words, the ballpoint pen ran dry.

Experimenting, he found that it would write on his hand perfectly, but not on the wall chart. He covered his palm with blue scrawls and trial signatures: ‘Calvin Codman Potter, Ph.D’.

‘It’s the angle,’ said Hamuro Hita, the project statistician. ‘It won’t feed ink uphill.’

Cal blushed, corrected the angle of the pen and signed the chart. ‘Thanks. I guess I’m not very observant for an experimenter. In fact, I’ve just ruined this experiment. I suppose you won’t be seeing much of me around here from now on.’

‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll can you for one mistake. What happened, anyway?’ Hita spoke without pausing in his work, summing figures on an adding machine.

‘I forgot to put the temperature control on automatic last night.’ Ripping loose the wires from their instruments, Cal hauled up the grey, dripping lump. ‘It – it poached, or something.’ Lifting the lid of a garbage can, he plumped in the jellyfish and stuffed in the bright stiff wires after it. Hita nodded at a chair by his desk, and Cal flopped into it.

‘That’s what’ll happen to me, when they find out all about me,’ he said, indicating the garbage can. ‘The way they saw it, I was a bright, promising lad, having graduated at the top of my class at MIT. They expected me to set the world on fire. Whereas –’

‘Whereas – ?’

‘I guess I’d rather not talk about it after all. Let’s say I was hired by mistake, and I’m scared that any minute they’ll realize it.’

Hita nodded, and the two men lapsed into moody silence. Finishing his addition, the mathematician began cleaning his briar pipe with one blade of a pair of black-handled scissors. Cal stared about the lab, unable to conquer the feeling that he was saying goodbye to it all. Goodbye, QUIDNAC modular computer; goodbye, maze for phototropic ‘rats’; goodbye, solution in which grew a green crystalline tree, every branch of which formed part of an electronic circuit; goodbye, miniature automatic forge. He did not forget a goodbye to the main entrance, guarded by a stiff, humourless adolescent in the uniform of the Marine Corps.

‘We’re all flying under false colours here,’ said Hita, sliding a paperback book out of his desk drawer. ‘Do you know why the Womplers hired me? Because Louie wanted to learn Origami. The way he saw it, I’m Japanese, ergo …’

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘But you’ve only been here a week. You hardly know the Womplers, father and son. You haven’t even met the project head, Dr Smilax. I assume your main dealings have been with them.’

‘Meaning the Mackintosh brothers?’

Hita smiled. ‘Or as some of us call them, the brothers Frankenstein.’

‘But what were you telling me about Origami?’

‘Officially, I’m a mathematician. In fact, my duties include teaching Louie Origami. I’ve had to study up on it myself, of course. Luckily, I found this book at the drugstore.’ He riffled the pages of the paperback. ‘It’s a good job, all the same. I can make enough money at this to start my own statistical lab soon, and I only need to be silly for a half-hour a day.’

‘But how have you fooled them, if you don’t even know—?’

‘It’s easy. You see, Louie thought Origami was a kind of Japanese self-defence. I’ve been able to make up my own rules,