Bugs (4 page)

Her eyes widened, but remained cold. ‘My, we have a chip on our shoulder, don’t we? I assure you, Mr Jones, we
are
an informative action company. We couldn’t give you the runaround if we wanted to!’ Her tone indicated that if she had her way, however … ‘So, if there’s been some little mix-up, why don’t we just make another appointment, h’m?’

He sighed. ‘OK.’ He was a sucker for cold motherly types.

‘And, while you’re here, you might fill out another application, just so we know where we are.’

‘OK.’ He took the application form, sat down at a writing-table, and uncapped his lacquered fountain pen. To keep the requirements in mind, he brought out the ad from his calfskin briefcase.

Mauve Toaster, if that could possibly be her name, led him down dim corridors. Fred spotted a few other women wearing metal scrap – toilet-chains, beer-cans, broken keys, tin-openers, a necklace of nails – and asked if they, too, were secretaries.

‘Yeah,’ said Mauve. ‘Only the secretaries get to dress up around this dump. Everything else is real grungy.’

Grungy
here seemed to mean
not wearing a uniform
. He noticed men and women dressed in everything from blue jeans to business suits.

Mauve conducted him past the lighted windows of conference rooms and offices. He could see meetings in progress.

A man in a suit sat in his office, head in hands. Not far away, a burst of laughter from a conference room.

The spaces between rooms were partitioned by cloth-covered walls, five feet high, into cubicles, each with its name-plate. There seemed hundreds of them, thousands. Fred and Mauve turned corners, threading their way through millions and billions more.

In the middle of a sea of cubicles stood a little cluster of offices. Mauve brought him to the office with the name-plate
MELVILLE PRATT.
‘Here he is,’ she said vaguely. Her mascara’d eye winked at Fred, and she was gone.

Fred knocked at the office door. ‘Mr Pratt?’

The man inside was tapping keys at his computer terminal.

‘Howdy,’ he said, not looking up.

‘Uh, hi, Mr Pratt.’

‘I’m Mel.’

More tapping. The stuff on the screen made no sense:

Fred took the opportunity to study his potential boss. Melville Pratt was a tall Lincolnesque figure folded into his chair. His long legs were twisted around the chair legs, and his feet in sneakers were twisted again around rungs. He wore blue jeans and a Western shirt with square pearl buttons. His face was oddly expressionless behind its fringe of Lincoln beard and Lincoln glasses.

There seemed to be more life in his hands than in his face. The fingers were extraordinarily long and splayed, like the toes of a gecko.

‘How’s your Pascal?’ Pratt asked suddenly, not looking round.

‘A little rusty.’ Fred tried to think of something from
Les Pensées
. ‘“La dernière chose qu’on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu’il faut mettre la première,”’ he finally managed.

‘What was that?’

‘Pascal.’

‘Sounded like French,’ said Pratt, still tapping keys.

‘Yes. It means, uh, the last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first.’

‘Ain’t that the, truth?’ Pratt glanced at him. ‘Where you from?’

‘Oh, uh … well, actually I’ve been spending some time in Britain.’

‘“Ectually”, huh? Yup, sounds like it.’ Pratt hit a
return
key and raised his hand like a pianist. He watched the screen for a brief moment more, then turned to look at Fred.

‘Now let me tell you one. How many robots does it take to change a lightbulb?’

‘I don’t know.’

Adopting a nasal monotone, Pratt said:
‘Would that be a bulb that emits light or a bulb that isn’t very heavy?’
Then, in a normal voice, he added: ‘Never mind, I’ll do it myself.’

To show it was a joke, Pratt bared his teeth and erupted in a frightening laugh, really a series of sobbing intakes of breath.

‘Very good, actually.’ Fred chuckled unconvincingly.

‘Ectually. OK, guess I oughta look at all this paper.’

He opened the thick file and leafed rapidly through it. After a moment, Pratt flopped the file closed again. ‘Jones, is it?’

‘I prefer “Fred”.’

‘And I’m Mel. I’m surprised that asshole Boswell okayed you. He usually finds any excuse not to hire blacks, you know.’ Pratt sat back slightly and began kneading his hands, cracking the knuckles.

‘Really.’

‘Yup, rehlly. Of course you look very white. You could probably pass for white.’

‘Mm.’

‘Britain my ass – you’re probably from the West Indies, ectually.’

‘No, honestly. There’s probably been some mix-up. I really am British, and –’

‘Well, who gives a God damn? Your race, creed, colour, sex, politics, brand of beer – all that is your business, man. All I care about is, can you cut it here? We need people who can write code fast, yeah? Because this is going to be a big, b-i-i-i-ig project, a bitchin’ big project.’

Mel Pratt took a deep sobbing breath, before he explained: ‘We’re gonna make us a robot.’

Fred wondered if it was another joke, but Pratt was not sobbing with laughter. Instead, he looked very intense, as though he had begun to concentrate on a melody no one else could hear.

‘A robot.’

‘And I don’t mean some godammed arm to spot-weld cars. I mean an honest-to-God, walking, talking, clanking robot. Probably with red glowing eyes.’

Below the heavy eyelids of Abe Lincoln, there was something red and glowing in Pratt’s own eyes. Then he leaped to his feet and clapped his hands.

‘Tell you more about it later, Fred. First, let me show you around the plant, here.’

The tour began at a window where they could see into a darkened room.

‘Our cad system.’

In the aquarium darkness, a woman sat at a console before two large screens. Using a keyboard and a mouse, she was sketching three views of a Victorian bathtub with lion-claw feet. One screen showed the three views in coloured lines. The other showed a black-and-white perspective view of the same bathtub. The images hung in the dark air like ectoplasmic presences at a seance. There was no sign of the cad himself.

A Victorian bath like that would have done for the Brides in the Bath, he thought. The archetypal cad in 1913: George Joseph Smith, a man with one idea, holding his wife under water until she stopped struggling, then sitting down at the harmonium (a console like this) to play ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. Drowned three wives for their insurance. Possibly with some sense of irony, he married his last bride in Bath. Was the harmonium-playing ironic as well? After all, this was 1913. Two years earlier,
Titanic
had sunk to the tune of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. Was Smith trying to be silly or pious? More likely just chasing away the ghosts.

‘They’re coming back,’ Pratt said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Victorian tubs. Let’s go.’

He led the way to a lower level, where great pale-green machines were clanking, whirring, hissing as they turned out mock-marble washstands. An assembly-line of silver rollers meandered between these great green monsters. The
washstands tumbled along in this silver stream, being pecked at or knocked about by workers. Finally, at the end of the stream, the washstands were boxed and stacked on wooden pallets.

One huge pale-green device was silent, while a tiny man in grease-covered overalls clambered over it, digging here and there with wrenches, wiping away oil tears. Fred thought of a monkey clinging to a giant street-organ.

In the aisles, yellow forklift trucks were in constant motion like so many dodgems: hooting, reversing, spinning, racing headlong at pedestrians, who flung themselves out of the way.

‘Main assembly-line,’ Pratt shouted. ‘All the non-porcelain bathroom products come through here. We could build our own robot body components here, too.’

Fred followed him, ducking through a low doorway, down a twisting corridor and into a room filled with deafening radio music. Several dozen women and a few men sat on high stools, bending low over electronic circuit-boards. All wore white coats and shower-caps. None of them seemed to notice the din, though one or two soldering-guns were tapping out the rhythm.

‘We can make our own circuit-boards here,’ Pratt said in pantomime, his words mouthed against the gale-force sound.

Then it was out another door, up and down stairs, through more tunnels, to a small machine-shop.

‘Here’s where our mechanical prototype gets made. Jerry, this is Fred, going to join my team. Got anything to show us today?’

‘Looky this,’ said Jerry. He was a short man, balding, with a fringe of fuzzy orange hair that stood straight up at the
back, like Joey the clown. He opened a cupboard and brought out a shining silver hand and forearm, which he laid on a workbench. Then he pushed and pulled a lever at the base of the forearm. The hand opened and closed dramatically. Jerry looked proud, as they thanked him and moved on.

Next came a servo system test lab, where stood two pairs of disembodied metal legs. The two pairs faced each other. One had been painted pink, one turquoise. At the top of each was a small platform supporting machinery, from which a cable rose and looped across the room like a liana, ending at a tall grey console.