The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek

replay of his sermon.
    ‘The Devil can be a lion in the streets, seeking whom he may devour!’
    ‘Well, what I’m worried about is the healing ceremony. Them people get damned close, you know. Closer than that truck I’m tailgating. They can count the drops of sweat on my brow. How will it look if…’
    ‘Don’t worry about a thing, Billy. We’ve thought of every possibility. Our audioanimatron is
exactly
like you, and we’re programming in tapes of all your old sermons. Gestures, speech— LOOK OUT !—speech, why you won’t know it isn’t you. All we need now are these special tapes…’
    ‘Get over, you bastard! OVER !’ Billy leaned far out the window to scream at a taxi, then sawed the ruby steering wheel to change lanes twice, fast.
    ‘He can be a quiet cancer, burning in the brainy,’ continued the figure on the tiny screen. Billy turned it off.
    ‘Christ, they let anybody drive a cab.’
    ‘It’s left at die next light,’ said Jerry. His face was drawn with fear, and the odor of overheated deodorant escaped from his crease-resistant suit. Nevertheless he crossed one artificial leather shoe over the other, in a sketch of relaxation. ‘Better watch out for the old woman crossing.’
    ‘I do the driving, damn you!’
    The old woman was caught by the yellow light. She turned, hesitated, then started back into the path of the car. Billy accelerated, cramped the wheel for the turn, and gave her a blast on his musical horn. ‘Rock of Ages’, it sang hastily, ‘cleft for me.’
    ‘Up yours, y’old bag!’ he called cheerfully.
    She looked up, startled, raised one hand as if to ward off the car, then leaped back nimbly as it slid past.
    ‘Hahaha, I knew it! I knew she could move fast enough if she had to. Christ, I’d like to see all pedestrians fry in Hell!’
    He drew up before the US Government Surplus store and double-parked. ‘Don’t take too long, I got to get back to Crusade HQ.’
    The computer man carried his attaché case and natural shoulders inside the store.
    ‘I could only save you two,’ said the clerk, holding up a reel of tape. ‘I just hadda let the others go. The govermint bought one—at least he said he was govermint. That’s something—buying back their own surplus!’
    ‘Well, two’ll be enough, anyway.’ As Jerry made out the check, the clerk went on. ‘About a million guys called up asking about urn. Wish I had more, but I guess there ain’t no more. Hadda kid in here five minits ago asking for one, but he couldn’t afford it anyway.’
    Ank sat in the pickup, calming his hysterical breathing. He watched a bronze Saette cut the corner badly (nearly hitting an old lady) and pull up across the street. Then his eyes misted over, and for a few seconds he lost interest in looking at anything.
    Anybody who owned a car like that could easily afford a Muller-Fokker tape. While Ank, in his fifty-dollar pickup truck with a wired-on exhaust…
    The beauty of M-F tape was that it was really randomized, the clerk had said. While an ordinary computer could generate ‘random’ numbers, they weren’t really random at all. Just fitted to a very complicated equation. Any mechanism was finally predictable.
    But the Muller-Fokker tape went beyond mechanism. It was philosophically different. There was room enough in it for (according to the clerk) a human mind!
    Sales talk, maybe. And at two thousand dollars a reel, you’d expect a good pitch. Ank wanted it, all the same, more than he’d ever wanted anything—as much as he wanted to be a known painter.
    Well, nothing to be done. He would just have to go on saving his pennies from reviewing other people’s work, get some time on a small, cheap computer.…
    Purring smoke, the old pickup truck pulled away from the curb and moved off. A moment later, Jerry came out of the store, tossed two odd-looking reels or computer tape—pink, it was, flesh pink—into the back seat and climbed in.
    ‘Better fasten your harness, boy.