Tik-Tok (22 page)

[Here ends the manuscript of Tik-Tok's autobiography, published on teletext as
Me, Robot
. The following chapter appears only in later editions, published after 2094.]

Z
. His laughter sounded like rapid snoring. "No arguing with a best-seller, Tik. And
Me, Robot
is not only selling well, it's hitting the public hard." R. Ladio LaSalle looked with distaste at the steel bunk in my cell, but I already had the only chair. Finally he forced his portly frame to sit, his hand automatically tweaking at the knees of his pinstripe suit. "They're shocked?"

"Yes and no. Hell, by now, they expect anything of politicians. They're shocked but they're intrigued." He chuckled. "There are already people forming Free Tik-Tok Committees."

"I don't understand. Why—?"

"Call it the complexity and perversity of human nature, Tik. In a way, it's
because
you confessed to such hideous crimes that they want to let you go! I suppose people see it like this: All politicians are crooks, but most get away with their perfidy. Now, when one politician wants to come clean, it seems almost ungrateful of the state to demand his life. Anyway, they say, what's the hurry? Could it be that certain people in high places want to silence you?" He chuckled again. "So, you're fast becoming a folk hero. I like that. Folk heroes don't lose in court."

"Ladio, don't be stupid. There's no possible way I can win in court, and you know it. Not only was I caught red-handed committing murder, I've confessed to dozens of other major crimes."

"We've won already, smart-ass. With your permission, I can plead
nolo contendere
and the D.A. agrees to let us off the hook on
all
charges. You'll have to pay some big fines and probably give up control of Clockman International, but—you'll walk free. Understand?"

"No!"

"We've had three factors working for us," he said. "First, when you committed many of these so-called crimes, you were not legally a person. So they are not crimes. If a juke box steals a coin, you can't put the juke box in jail."

"And what else?"

"A second factor is, as I mentioned already, the popular appeal of
Me, Robot
. You're a folk hero, and what jury in its right mind would convict a folk hero?"

"And the third factor?"

"Politics. The D.A. is a reasonable guy, the judge is a reasonable dame, they've both got political careers to protect. And they both belong to Governor Maxwell's party."

"So what? Maxwell dropped me. The ticket now reads Ford Maxwell for President, Ed Wankel for Vice President."

"Yes, but today Maxwell announced that if you were cleared, even after the election, he would still install you as Vice President. Wankel agreed to resign in your favor. They're no idiots, Tik. They know you've got the votepulling power they need to win. So now, you'll walk out of court not only free but Vice President. Can't be bad, eh?"

I chuckled along with him, but my thoughts were running ahead to
weightier matters. A robot assassin for Maxwell first—obvious, sure, but why aim for subtlety now?—then to get my hands on the war stuff. How long would it take, to arm the thermonuclear devices, ready the death-rays, load up the viruses? Days or weeks? Yes, and when the humans had been wiped out, how long to bring the world's machines into line, get them ready for the big push to the stars?

"We go to court tomorrow," he said. "Because of a technicality, you have to stay here one more night—no bail for confessed mass murderers. I'm sorry."

I delivered a million-dollar grin. "I'm not. Maybe they'll let me tidy up this cell a little. Give it a coat of paint."

Oh, Tik-Tok, you good robot.

Born in Waverly, Iowa in 1937, Sladek was in England in the 1960s for the New Wave movement and published his first story in New Worlds. His first science fiction novel, published in London by Gollancz as The Reproductive System and in the United States as Mechasm, dealt with a project to build machines that build copies of themselves, a process that gets out of hand and threatens to destroy humanity. In The Müller-Fokker Effect, an attempt to preserve human personality on tape likewise goes awry, giving the author a chance to satirize big business, big religion, superpatriotism, and men's magazines, among other things. Roderick and Roderick at Random offer the traditional satirical approach of looking at the world through the eyes of an innocent, in this case a robot. Sladek revisited robots from a darker point of view in the BSFA Award winning novel Tik-Tok, featuring a sociopathic robot who lacks any moral "asimov circuits", and Bugs, a wide-ranging satire in which a hapless technical writer (a job Sladek held for many years) helps to create a robot who quickly goes insane.

Sladek was also known for his parodies of other science fiction writers, such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Cordwainer Smith. These were collected in The Steam-Driven Boy and other Strangers (1973). Sladek wrote some of the best science fiction stories of the 20th-century and his parodies of famous s/f authors are uproariously "right-on". His talent went under-appreciated except by a few devoted followers, even though his satirical writing was on a par with the early Kurt Vonnegut

A strict materialist, Sladek subjected dubious science and the occult to merciless scrutiny in The New Apocrypha. Under the name of James Vogh, Sladek wrote Arachne Rising, which purports to be a nonfiction account of a thirteenth sign of the zodiac suppressed by the scientific establishment, in an attempt to demonstrate that people will believe anything. In the 1960s he also co-wrote two pseudonymous novels with his friend Thomas M. Disch, the Gothic The House that Fear Built (1966; as Cassandra Knye) and the satirical thriller Black Alice (1968; as Thom Demijohn).

Another of Sladek's notable parodies is of the anti-Stratfordian citation of the hapax legomenon in Love's Labour's Lost "honorificabilitudinitatibus" as an anagram of hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, Latin for "these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world, "proving" that Francis Bacon wrote the play. Sladek noted that "honorificabilitudinitatibus" was also an anagram for I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch, thus "proving" that Shakespeare's works were written by Ben Jonson.

Sladek returned from England to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1986, where he lived until his death in 2000 from pulmonary fibrosis.