The Complete Roderick Read Online Free Page B

are worth finding out, and it doesn’t matter what you or I or Dan or anybody else – So just go away, will you? Just go and, and vote the way
you
feel, and to hell with your committee and to hell with you!’
    Rogers fumbled for the door-handle behind him. His smile was pulling slightly to one side. ‘You’re overwrought, tired. Maybe we can rap again some time, before the committee meeting. Some time when you’re more yourself.’ But he couldn’t resist an exit: ‘Some time when you’re not Galileo, I mean.’
    The door was already closed when Fong’s bottle of Quink crashed against it. He sat quietly for some time, staring at the Permanent Blue splash from which a few dribbles worked their way down. A shape like that could be anything. Could be the silhouette of an old Bell transistor.
    Before dawn the blizzard blew itself away. One or two constellations put in a brief appearance in the fading sky, though of course there was no helmsman on the stiff white sea below who could name them. The star-gazinghad vanished from the earth, leaving only his name to be derived from Greek into
cybernetics
and from Latin into a name for petty State officials.Computers steered ships and charted invisible stars, while men had grown so unused to looking at the sky that fourteen hundred citizens each year mistook Venus (rising now naked from the white foam) for a flying saucer.

II
Men will live according to Nature since in most respects they are puppets, yet having a small part in the truth.
    Plato,
Laws
    49 GOROD
    ‘A different black, and a different ping …’
    RESET . 50 GOROD
    ‘Okay. Okay Dan, I’ve got it now. It’s a face, a face only with nobody inside. Is that possible? … Well, well, a face. What’s this in back, a string? Does it control – see I thought for a minute it was like another string puppet like you showed me last time only this is a loop – self-control? I don’t get it, could you turn it around again? Okay, I give up. A face with a loop of string in back, right? No answer … Why don’t you answer me? No answer … I could give myself no answer, that’s no answer. Neither is that. Neither is that …’
    RESET . 51 GOROD
    ‘… face with nobody inside. The eyes are just holes! If I had a face like this I’d cut my throat. If I had a throat …’
    RESET . 52 GOROD
    ‘Okay, the face. Whatever it is, I call it a face. White and black, mostly white. Hole-eyes. A black nose. The nose looks like a black ping-pong ball, does that make sense? Come to think of it, the ears – if they’re ears – on top look like two ping-pong paddles, also black. I call them Ping and Pong, and one day they were walking through the deep dark forest and …’
    RESET . 53 GOROD
    ‘… But I don’t have a throat or anything because I’m not real, I’m just a, what you called a data construct, a, something that’s not even any place, a rough sketch you said, you could erase me any time. So this is like my face, nobody inside. Nobody by himself. He’s forgotten that he’s forgotten. Looking out these empty hole-eyes at the emptiness outside, there’s no, no …’
    RESET . 54 GOROD
    ‘… when you told me this person Skinner, what he did with pigeons, taught them to play ping-pong, remember? And I asked you what playing was? If they make you do it, is it playing? And you said …’
    RESET . 55 GOROD
    ‘Because conditioning leads to self-control, right? That’s the goal we’re … the ping we’re ponging towards, only only only how do I get self-control without a self? Otherwise it’s just a pigeon hitting the old ball out into the darkness, over and over and it never comes back … You don’t answer me, Dan. Okay, that’s because I’ve conditioned you not to answer. You’re the string puppet and I make all the decigeons. Decisions. That’s what I said. And that’s what I said. And that …’
    3939 INTROSP TEST SW ENDS
    Woopa! Dr Fred McGuffey’s sneeze went to join the Brownian dance of dust-motes