'Baxendall, Baxendall, see it anywhere? Baxendall's 1926 catalogue of calculating machines and instruments, must be here somewhere. Ah, here. O'Smith, these are great days, great days! I feel as though the universe is about to crack its great bronze hinges and pour forth the ecstasy of the New Age as pure music!'

'Yes sir, well what I was wonderin' was, if '

'And to think I worried for so long that we might be bringing forth the wrong quality, negation instead of affirmation, death instead of life.' Franklin's chuckle ended in a terrible dry cough. As though to staunch it, he reached for the cigarette with fingers the colour of old peanut butter. 'Of course death is really there all the time, Jeremiah knew that.'

'Jeremiah? Look if you're not feeling so well, I '

'The prophet Jeremiah. He and his son created a golem, and they wrote in the wet clay of its forehead 'emeth, TRUTH, so it came to life. But all it wanted to do was die it begged them to kill it before it could fall into sin. So they erased one letter of the inscription to make meth, DEAD, and the golem died.'

'Uh, yes sir.'

'So you see? The program for life contains death. The affirmation contains the negation. Yes means no!'

'Uh, sir.'

'You don't understand, do you? Well, neither did Aquinas, neither did Aquinas. He said, if it did already exist, the statue could not come into being. Aquinas said that. But did he say it before or after he smashed the effigy? That is the question. Hamlet's binary. And did the effigy already exist before he smashed it? Albertus Magnus worked on the thing, you know, for thirty damned years. That wonderful automaton, thirty years abuilding and Aquinas smashing it in an instant. They called him the Swine of Sicily, and there he was, ready to destroy whatever he could not understand. First Luddite, Aquinas. Showed the way for all Luddites: the common man's revenge on common objects. What thou canst not understand, smite! And what Aquinas couldn't understand was the statue that already existed before it came into being, right? The original created from memory, right?'

'Well if you ain't feeling so good, maybe I '

'I mean, have you ever asked yourself why people make statues at all? Why puppets, dolls, effigies, mannequins, automata? Why were the Chinese building jade men who walked, the Arabs refining clockwork figures, why did Roger Bacon spend seven years making a bronze talking head? What is the motive behind all of our search for self-mockery? What is the secret clockwork within us, that makes us keep building replicas of ourselves? Not just physiological replicas, but functional replicas: machines that seem to talk or write or paint or think why are we driven to building them?'

O'Smith seemed about to try an answer, but Franklin cut him off.

'The answer has to be genetic. Our genes are pushing so hard for self-replication that we can no longer satisfy them as other species do, by simple procreation. They demand also that we find a way to build artificial replicas, proof against starvation and pain and disease and death, to carry the human face on into eternity. Don't you see? We're only templates, intermediaries between our genes and the immortal image of our genes.

'Yes, that has to be it. I remember once Dan telling me how his creation had no body, just content-addressable memory. Only now do I know what he meant: Roderick was no body, no machine. Roderick was and is a proportion. A measurement. A template.'

'Speakin' of Roderick, Mr Frank '

'The creature has always been there, within each of us, don't you see? God damn it, O'Smith, we each contain the complete instructions for building a robot because we each contain the complete instructions for building a human being! The whole program is within, "For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make." The creature has to create itself, out of its own memory!

'Once I understood that, the rest was easy. No need to design a program piece by piece, it was all there, complete, inside me. Gnosis, holy wisdom was there all the time, like death-in-life. Paradise was never lost at all, it lies within.' Again the terrible dry cough. Franklin lit another cigarette. 'And I have done it, O'Smith, I have done it! I have created the New Adam. Poor Victor may have been blasted in these hopes, yet I have succeeded.'

'You, uh, built a robot?'

'I designed a soul. The lab people are taking care of the, the hardware. Dr Hare's team will be running tests any day now. When the tests are over, so is my work, my, my worldly, my ... work.'

'You been working pretty hard, Mr Frankelin?'

'Day and night, day and night. This fever keeps me awake anyway. It's, sometimes it's as though God was firing me in the divine forge, that I might glow with holy '

'Well, now you mention firing people, I just want to get squared away with you about this here telegram you sent me, cancelling this whole search for Roderick and no explanation or nothing. I mean just because you go and build your own robot I don't see why you have to leave me high and dry there, Mr Frankelin.'

'I, well yes, sure, yes. But did you find Baxendall did you find Roderick?'

'Course I did, I told you all about it in my weekly report, I came within an inch of grabbing this here robot for you. I even had the danged cuffs on it, only a car hit us. That was last winter, and I spent every minute since tryin' to pick up this robot's trail again, every minute! And now just this week I picked it up again, you just gonna tell me to let go? You tellin' me to just walk away?'

'I'm sorry. Company decision, not mine. It just wasn't cost-effective to keep on with '

'But goldurn it, Mr Frankelin, I made a lotta commitments on the basis of that contract, you can't just go and fold out on me like this, I mean I got some fancy new prostheses to pay for. Dang it. I am a professional, not one a your two-bit outfits like the Honk Honk Agency, I worked hard and Mr Frankelin?'

But the haggard face, having awakened from its stupor to deliver holy wisdom, now lost all expression once more, as Franklin contemplated a book page: we take a pigeon, cut out his hemispheres carefully and wait till he recovers from the operation. There is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot execute; he seems, too, after some days to execute movements from some inner irritation, for he moves spontaneously. But his emotions and instincts exist no longer. In Schrader's striking words: 'The hemisphereless animal moves in a world of bodies which ... are all of equal value for him ... Every object is for him only a space-occupying mass ...'

When he next looked up, the visitor was gone.

O'Smith grinned and winked at the receptionist on his way out, but inside he was feeling real mean. Okay, goldurn it, if they wanted to play rough, they had the right hombre. Real funny coincidence how just when he located Roderick, they suddenly lost interest. And all of a sudden Mr Ben Frankelin becomes a hotshot inventor, too? It was all plain as pigshit on a plate, they was fixing to grab the durned robot and claim Frankelin invented it. Nice move, too, cut out O'Smith with a coupla grand plus expenses, cut him right outa that ten grand contractual fee. KUR gets everything, O'Smith gets nothing.

Okay, then, everybody plays rough. Only one way to make sure KUR never cleans up on this deal: destroy the durned robot. Shoot it up until it was worth maybe ten cents at some junkyard, that would show 'em.

As soon as he started thinking about destruction, Mister O'Smith felt good again.

In the common room of the Newman Club, Father Warren looked up from the checkerboard where he had just been willing his hand to pick up a checker and then, before it moved, cancelling the order. Who was that coming in? Yes, that smirking young man who'd tried to wreck the panel discussion, calling himself a robot and then streaking, damned grinning but no, Father Warren willed forgiveness. Fraternity boys would be fraternity boys, and the one with him was wearing a Mickey Mouse mask. They sat down at the other end of the room. The 'robot' smiled at Father Warren, and that priest, willing forgiveness, smiled back. The insolence! Smile and smile and yet be a robot ... the risus sardonicus with which bronze Talos greeted his victims ...

Father Warren now willed himself to return to his task, verification of the fact of free will, as he prepared his article, 'Machine Function and Human Will: a Final Analysis.'

His starting point was the classic debate between Arthur Samuel (inventor of the checker-playing program that could beat its inventor) and Norbert Wiener. Wiener contended that machines 'can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers, to which Samuel replied: A machine is not a genie, it does not work by magic, it does not possess a will, and, Wiener to the contrary, nothing comes out which has not been put in, barring, of course, an infrequent case of malfunctioning ... The 'intentions' which the machine seems to manifest are the intentions of the human programmer, as specified in advance, or they are subsidiary intentions derived from these, following rules specified by the programmer. We can even anticipate the higher levels of abstraction, just as Wiener does, in which the program will not only modify the subsidiary intentions but will also modify the rules which are used in their derivation, or in which it will modify the way in which it modifies the rules, and so on, or even in which one machine will design and construct a second machine with enhanced capabilities. However, and this is important, the machine will not and cannot do any of these things until it has been instructed how to proceed. There is and there must always remain a complete hiatus between (i) any ultimate extension and elaboration in this process of carrying out man's wishes and (ii) the development within the machine of a will of its own. To believe otherwise is either to believe in magic or to believe that the existence of man's will is an illusion and that man's actions are as mechanical as the machine's.*

But what followed from this? Mentally he essayed a few trials, attempting to make some effort at tackling the undertaking: Yet why is it so many human lives seem unwilled, pathetic examples of garbage in, garbage out?

Then is man a genie? Does man work by magic? The answer must be an unqualified and resounding ...

If the intentions of the machine come necessarily from the programmer, human intentions might be seen similarly to come from God. The Ten Commandments, for example, engraved in every human heart. Yet human volition can and does subvert Divine Law, just as machine volition ...

Not what he wanted. Not at all what he intended.

Roderick noticed Father Warren, looking bluer around the gills than usual, sitting contemplating a checker game as though there were a figure nailed to the board. The Luddite priest was today wearing a plain cassock, as were now seldom seen outside Bing Crosby movies. But he did smile and nod at Roderick, in a kind of automatic way.

'Okay, Dan, you just sit right down here, maybe I can get you a coffee from the machine or you want a peanut butter sandwich? Here, I brought a stack of them, help yourself.

'Probably you're wondering what kind of place this is, well it's the Newman Club, named after this English Cardinal who was I guess in favour of "cumulative probabilities", whatever that means, sounds like he was adding them, but you can only do that if they're independent and you want the probability of at least one of them happening, look you want a coffee or I could get you a Coke? Oh, don't worry about that; that's just the air conditioning, it always makes a funny noise starting up.

'You know I really looked forward to this. I always saw us like this, just sitting down and having a long talk, I mean without all the doctors and nurses hanging around. Because there's a whole lot of questions I have to ask you, I mean you're almost like the nearest thing to a father you sure you don't want a Coke? Eating all that peanut butter must be dry, and hot inside that mask, look I don't think they'd mind if you took it off here, you're not in the ward where I know they want you to wear it, but here no okay, okay, take it easy, no one wants to take your mask. You know it's funny but I feel like I saw a Mickey Mouse mask like that before, long ago or in a dream or, I don't know but it wasn't just any old mask, it was important, very important. I don't know why, I thought maybe you knew the answer. I just remember seeing those empty eye-holes, nobody inside, nobody inside looking out ...

'You, uh, want a game of ping-pong? There's a table next door no? Heck, I guess they probably have it over at the hospital too, I forgot. I forgot, what was I going to say? I guess maybe I should go over and say hello to Father Warren there, the way he keeps nodding and grinning at me. You be okay? Sure you will, just for a sec.'

To the priest, he introduced himself as Roderick Wood. 'I guess you remember me, huh Father?'

'Of course I do. You and your gang tried hard enough to break up our panel discussion, how could I forget?' Father Warren's long hands began gathering up checkers.

'No I thought you remembered me from before, from Holy Trin, Father. Roderick Wood?'

'Wood? No, I don't think I '

'You loaned me all these neat science-fiction books like this I Robot where the "I" character never turns up.'

'The Wood boy! The little crip handicap disadvantaged boy, of course, of course! Well well, how are you, er, Roderick.?'

'I'm still a robot, Father. Remember how you tried to prove I wasn't, how you had me stick this pin in your hand, that was supposed to prove '

'Hold on now, hold on.' Father Warren's laugh was uneasy. 'The way you say it makes me sound like some kind of nut or something, heh heh. No, as I recall it what I was trying to do was to show you how illogical it was to pretend to be a science-fiction entity and then try to get out of science-fiction laws, like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.'

'Well, anyway. Father, I'm real sorry the pin-scratch got infected and all, last time I saw you you were real sick.'

'All water over the bridge, Roderick. So now here you are at the U, about to take your place as a grownup, responsible member of the Church and of Society and still going around saying you're a robot. Roderick, don't you think it's time you put away the things of a child?' The long fingers drummed on the box of checkers. 'You can't go around all your life insisting you're a robot, made not by God but by some men in the lab somewhere '

'Yeah but, Father, that's just it, one of these guys was Dan Sonnenschein and I got him right here, sitting right over here, you want to meet him?'

'Sure, wearing a Mickey Mouse mask, just the way to convince everybody he's a scientific genius. You know, Roderick, I do have to thank you for one thing. You did start me thinking seriously about our machine age. That led me to the Luddites, and now as you probably know I'm president of the New Luddite Society of America.' The priest stood up and offered a long hand. 'Great rapping with you, Roderick.'

'Yeah, goodbye, Father. But do you really believe that Luddite stuff? How if we just trash all the machines everything would be terrific?'

'No, of course not, nobody thinks it's that simple. The Luddites listen, I haven't got time to go into it now, but it's the symbolic trashing that counts. The great Hank Dinks wrote, "We have to destroy the machines in our heads, and never let them be built there again." That means a whole new way of thinking about ourselves and our world. We have to we have to evolve beyond machines.' He started towards the door; Roderick followed, scratching his head.

'But what if people are just machines too, you'd just be trying to evolve machines beyond machines, or else trashing people too?'

'But people are not machines, that's the whole point, people are not machines! Not the way you mean, not look, I haven't got time to '

'Yeah but, Father, what if, like I was reading about this Frenchman before the French Revolution, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, he said man is just a machine made out of springs and the brain is the mainspring, is that the machine in our heads we have to destroy? Like with the guillotine or '

'No, I just said no!' Father Warren picked up speed; so did his pursuer. 'I just told you it's nothing like that. I wasn't talking about literal machines in our heads and you know it. Everyone's like you, so obsessed with our machine world they think we have to be machines to fit into it.'

'But, Father, okay, say the brain, if the brain was a kind of mainspr '

'Look, will you stop asking that, I have just finished explaining!' One or two people in the common room looked up to see the priest, clutching a checkerboard and plunging towards the door he thought was an exit, pursued by the student with the symmetrical face. Now the priest turned, at bay, and tried to counter-attack. 'Oh I remember you all right, you haven't changed at all. Same little obnoxious maddening thick-headed little brat, asking the same stupid questions over and over, not because you want an answer, you never listen to the answers do you? Do you?'

'Sure, Father, but if the brain was a mainspring, is that why this Nietzsche said what he said, Father?'

Father Warren flung open the door and threw himself forward, as Roderick continued: 'Is that why he said man is something to be overwound?'

From beyond the door came the sound of a blow, a box of checkers crashing to the floor. A single black checker rolled through the slowly closing door and ended at Roderick's feet. 'Are you okay, Father?' he called, but the door closed on any answer.

Mister O'Smith waited across from the Newman Club in the shadowed mouth of an alley. He'd been trailing the Roderick robot for hours now, just to find a perfect spot like this, where a man could take his time and make his move. He was limbering up his arm, the one that fired .357 ammo. His video eye was photo-amplifying, cutting away the shadows to make the target visible as it came out the Newman Club door. Boy howdy, one good shot was all he needed, but even if he didn't get that, O'Smith was ready with the automatic weapon concealed in his leg. Sweep the area with that, and boy howdy, that was all she wrote.

Course he'd have to high-tail it after that, these s.o.b.s who was hounding him about them payments on his outfit, they'd pick up his trail right smart. But then Mister O'Smith knew all about skip-tracers and how to get away from them. Might lay low for a month, put the squeeze on one or two old customers, maybe even fake his own death ...

O'Smith rolled a cigarette and smoked it, leaning against a dirty brick wall beneath a poster, 'VOTE J.L. ("CHIP") SNYDER FOR LAW & ORDER'. It was good to be in action, to have a real target. Made a hombre feel clean and tall.

'He ran right into that ping-pong paddle, Dan. I feel like it was my fault too, I guess I did ask him too many questions. Okay sure it's only a bloody nose but it might be broken, and he's just sitting over there sulking, he won't even look at me. He wouldn't even let me help pick up the checkers. Sometimes I feel like I don't understand people, with this Luddite business and smashing machines in their own heads, what with the Machines Lib business and how machines are really people and now I've even run across this weird computer with this kind of twisted religion, I mean somehow it got word about how you built me and turned it into this myth, where Danny Sunshine is like God the Father and Rubber Dick is some kind of messianic, some kind of Messiah. How does a computer get hold of a warped idea like that, I wonder? I mean, you must know who I am and what I am, you never built me to be any kind of because anyway Messiahs always get nailed or screwed or even riveted to the wall. Because all my life all I ever tried to do was be ordinary, be like ordinary people, just one of the guys, isn't that the idea? Was I wrong? Because I never could find any people ordinary enough to be like, was I wrong? Because you designed me, you put all the ideas into my brain, you built my thoughts, so what did you have in mind? If you could just give me a little clue, Dan, tell me what I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to do, hey Dan? Don't worry, hey, that's just the Coke machine out there in the hall, sometimes it sticks and buzzes like that, but hey listen, Dan? Look I don't mind not being this Messiah, I don't have to be anything special only if I could just be one thing, any one thing? Dan?'

A man in a baseball uniform came in, strode up to Dan and offered to shake his hand. 'Hiya Father, I'm Pastor Bean? Wee Kirk O' Th' Campus, you know? Are the others upstairs already? You know, Monsignor O'Bride is an old friend of mine, I'm real glad we're getting a chance to rap at this interdenominational and wow, if we can get this jug band going '

Roderick said, 'I think there's some mistake. This is '

'And hey, here comes Rabbi Trun hey Mel, over here! I see you brung your twelve-string, this is gonna be great! You know Father Warren?'

The rabbi wore a cowboy hat, embroidered shirt and Levis. 'Father Warren?'

'No,' said Roderick. 'Father Warren's over there. The one with the handkerchief at his nose.'

Pastor Bean said, 'Him? Dressed like that, he's a priest? Hey Father, hiya! I'm Pastor Bean and this is Rabbi ...'

Roderick watched them as they were joined by a man wearing a saffron tracksuit and a shaved head, and carrying a jug. There was laughter and backs were slapped, before the four went off upstairs to their conference.

'I wish I belonged to something, some group, Dan.' It was time to take Dan back to the hospital. They came out of the Newman Club slowly: Dan because he had trouble walking; Roderick because he felt more robotic than usual. As they crossed the street and passed the mouth of an alley, two men came out carrying armloads of machinery. Roderick recognized prostheses: an arm, a leg, and in one man's hand, an eye. The eyeball evidently had a radio in it, for he could hear faint music: Fill up that sunshine balloon With happiness One of the men said, 'Sometimes I hate repossessing, you know?'

'Yeah, but today is different,' grinned the other.

Roderick glanced down the alley, but saw nothing: a bundle of old clothes beneath a poster advertising LAW & ORDER.

XXI.

'What did it feel like, Indica, being held hostage for almost six weeks in the African bush?'

'Not so bad, mostly pretty boring.' She and Dr Tarr stood in front of a burnt-out supermarket in Himmlerville, not because they had been here during the fighting, but only because the news team had told them where to stand.

'What did you do all the time?'

'Sunbathed. When it rained we played Skat. Not my favourite card game, but better than the TV,' she said.

'We heard stories about atrocities ...'

'The only atrocity,' Tarr said, 'was the food. Nothing but TV dinners three times a day. We've all got scurvy.'

'What about torture? Mutilizations? Executions?'

'Nothing,' said Tarr.

'Well, there was that guy Beamish,' said Indica. 'They drowned him in the swimming pool. See, he kept shouting right from the first day about how it was all a mistake, how he didn't take the sixty million dollars from the bank, how he knew nothing about the sixty million dollars. So naturally they started asking him where it was, they took him down to the pool and I guess they drowned him.'

'Did you see that?'

'Oh no, we never went near the pool, it was filthy. The pool-cleaning service never came around or something '

'Stop the camera, stop the camera. Jesus Christ, folks, give me a little help here? I ask for adventures and what do I get: card games, TV dinners, complaints about the pool.'

Tarr said, 'I thought you wanted our honest reactions.'

'Sure I do, sure I do. But I want honest reactions to something the viewers can grab on to, I want Prison: the sweltering little hut where you fought off scorpions and counted the days, not knowing whether each would bring death or rescue. I want Blood: how you saw all your friends slashed to death slowly or else crucified with bamboo stakes. I want Politics: What kind of mystery man is this General Bobo? Is he just a seedy little guerrilla dictator who wants to wipe out every white in Bimibia? Or does his rough bloodstained uniform conceal an African aristocrat, a sensitive statesman who wants to bring forth on this earth a nation conceived in peace and justice, a nation that can take its place in the progressive Third World you just tell it in your own words, I'll listen. Only give me something to run with.'

With the camera rolling again, he asked, 'Tell me, Indica, what was your jungle prison really like?'