"Are you forgetting our most recent agreement?" asked Drax. "A superfluity of robots tended to stimulate factionalism last time--and certain people grew ambitious..." He let his voice trail off over the years, for emphasis.
"I am not certain as to whether your last allusion contains a hidden accusation," began the other carefully. "If so, permit me to caution you concerning rashness--and to remind you who it was who engineered the Mono-Robot Protection Pact."
"Do you believe things will be different in the case of a multitude of organic subjects?" inquired the other.
"Definitely," said Dran. "There is a certain irrational element in the rationale of the organic being, making it less amenable to direct orders than a machine would be. Our robots, at least, were faithful when we ordered them to destroy each other. Irresponsible organic subjects either do it without being told, which is boorish, or refuse to do it when you order them, which is insubordination."
"True," smiled Drax, unearthing a gem he had preserved for millennia against this occasion. "Concerning organic life the only statement which can be made with certainty is that life is uncertain."
"Hmm." Dran narrowed his eyes to slits. "Let me ponder that for a moment. Like much of your thinking it seems to smack of a concealed sophistry."
"It contains none, I assure you. It is the fruit of much meditation."
"Hmm."
Dran's pondering was cut short, by the arrival of Zindrome who clutched two brownish blurs beneath his metal arms.
"Back already, Zindrome? What have you there? Slow them down so we can see them."
"They are under sedation at present, great Masters. It is the movements caused by their breathing which produce the unpleasant vibration pattern on your retinas. To subject them to more narcosis could prove deleterious."
"Nevertheless," maintained Dran, "we must appraise our new subjects carefully, which requires that we see them. Slow them down some more."
"You gave that order without-" began Drax, but was distracted by the sudden appearance of the two hairy bipeds.
"Warm-blooded?" he asked.
"Yes, Lord."
"That bespeaks a very brief life-span."
"True," offered Dran, "but that kind tends to reproduce quite rapidly."
"That observation tends to be correct," nodded Drax. "Tell me, Zindrome, do they represent the sexes necessary for reproduction?"
"Yes, Master. There are two sexes among these anthropoids, so I brought one of each."
"That was very wise. Where did you find them?"
"Several billion light years from here."
"Turn those two loose outside and go fetch us some more."
The creatures vanished. Zindrome appeared not to have moved.
"Have you the fuel necessary for another such journey?"
"Yes, my Lord. More of it has evolved recently."
"Excellent."
The robot departed.
"What sort of governmental setup should be inaugurate this time?" asked Drax.
"Set us review the arguments for the various types."
"A good idea."
In the midst of their discussion Zindrome returned and stood waiting to be recognized.
"What is it, Zindrome? Did you forget something?"
"No, great Lords. When I returned to the world from which I obtained the samples I discovered that the race had progressed to the point where it developed fission processes, engaged in an atomic war and annihilated itself."
"That was extremely inconsiderate--typical, however, I should say, of warm-blooded instability."
Zindrome continued to shift.
"Have you something else to report?"
"Yes, great Masters. The two specimens I released have multiplied and are now spread over the entire planet of Glan."
"We should have been advised!"
"Yes, great Lords, but I was absent and--"
"They themselves should have reported this action!"
"Masters, I am afraid they are unaware of your existence."
"How could that have happened?" asked Dran.
"We are presently buried beneath several thousand layers of alluvial rock. The geological shifts--"
"You have your orders to maintain the place and clean the grounds," glowered Dran. "Have you been frittering away your time again?"
"No, great Lords! It all occurred during my absence. I shall attend to it immediately."
"First," ordered Drax, "tell us what else our subjects have been up to, that they saw fit to conceal from us."
"Recently," observed the robot, "they have discovered how to forge and temper metals. Upon landing, I observed that they had developed many ingenious instruments of a cutting variety. Unfortunately they were using them to cut one another."
"Do you mean," roared Dran, "that there is strife in the kingdom?"
"Uh, yes, my Lord."
"I will not brook unauthorized violence among my subjects!"
"_Our_ subjects," added Drax, with a meaningful glare.
"_Our_ subjects," amended Dran. "We must take immediate action."
"Agreed."
"Agreed."
"I shall issue orders forbidding their engagement in activities leading to bloodshed."
"I presume that you mean a joint proclamation," stated Drax.
"Of course. I was not slighting you, I was simply shaken by the civil emergency. We shall draft an official proclamation. Let Zindrome fetch us writing instruments."
"Zindrome, fetch--"
"I have them here, my Lords."
"Now, let me see. How shall we phrase it...?"
"Perhaps I should clean the palace while your Excellencies--"
"No! Wait right here! This will be very brief and to the point."
"Mm. 'We hereby proclaim...'"
"Don't forget our titles."
"True. 'We, the imperial monarchs of Glan, herebeneath undersigned, do hereby...'"
A feeble pulse of gamma rays passed unnoticed by the two rulers. The faithful Zindrome diagnosed its nature, however, and tried unsuccessfully to obtain the monarchs' attention. Finally, he dismissed the project with a stoical gesture typical of his kind. He waited.
"There!" they agreed flourishing the document. "Now you can tell us what you have been trying to say, Zindrome. But make it brief, you must deliver this soon."
"It is already too late, great Lords. This race, also, progressed into civilized states, developed nuclear energy and eradicated itself while you were writing."
"Barbarous!"
"Warm-blooded irresponsibility!"
"May I go clean up now, great Masters?"
"Soon, Zindrome, soon. First, though, I move that we file the proclamation in the Archives for future use, in the event of similar occurrences."
Dran nodded.
"I agree. _We_ so order."
The robot accepted the crumbling proclamation and vanished from sight.
"You know," Drax mused, "there must be lots of radioactive material lying about now..."
"There probably is."
"It could be used to fuel a ship for another expedition."
"Perhaps."
"This time we could instruct Zindrome to bring back something with a longer lifespan and more deliberate habits--somewhat nearer our own."
"That would have its dangers. But perhaps we could junk the Mono-Robot Protection Pact and order Zindrome to manufacture extras of himself. Under strict supervision."
"That would have its dangers too."
"At any rate, I should have to ponder your suggestion carefully."
"And I yours."
"It's been a busy day," nodded Dran. "Let's sleep on it."
"A good idea."
Sounds of saurian snoring emerged from the great Throne Hall of Glan.
A Museum Piece
Forced to admit that his art was going unnoticed in a frivolous world, Jay Smith decided to get out of that world. The four dollars and ninety-eight cents he spent for a mail order course entitled
Yoga--the Path to Freedom did not, however, help to free him. Rather, it served to accentuate his humanity, in that it reduced his ability to purchase food by four dollars and ninety-eight cents.
Seated in a padmasana, Smith contemplated little but the fact that his navel drew slightly closer to his backbone with each day that passed. While nirvana is a reasonably esthetic concept, suicide assuredly is not, particularly if you haven't the stomach for it. So he dismissed the fatalistic notion quite reasonably.
"How simply one could take one's own life in ideal surroundings!" he sighed, (tossing his golden locks which, for obvious reasons, had achieved classically impressive lengths). "The fat stoic in his bath, fanned by slave girls and sipping his wine, as a faithful Greek leech opens his veins, eyes downcast! One delicate Circassian," he sighed again, "there perhaps, plucking upon a lyre as he dictates his funeral oration--the latter to be read by a faithful countryman, eyes all a-blink. How easily he might do it! But the fallen artist--say! Born yesterday and scorned today he goes, like the elephant to his graveyard, alone and secret!"
He rose to his full height of six feet, one and a half inches, and swung to face the mirror. Regarding his skin, pallid as marble, and his straight nose, broad forehead, and wide-spaced eyes, he decided that if one could not live by creating art, then one might do worse that turn the thing the other way about, so to speak.
He flexed those thews which had earned him half-tuition as a halfback for the four years in which he had stoked the stithy of his soul to the forging out of a movement all his own: two-dimensional painted sculpture.
"Viewed in the round," one crabbed critic had noted, "Mister Smith's offerings are either frescoes without walls or vertical lines. The Etruscans excelled in the former form because they knew where it belonged; kindergartens inculcate a mastery of the latter in all five-year-olds."
Cleverness! More cleverness! Bah! He was sick of those Johnsons who laid down the law at someone else's dinner table!
He noted with satisfaction that his month-long ascetic regime had reduced his weight by thirty pounds to a mere two twenty-five. He decided that he could pass as a Beaten Gladiator, post-Hellenic.
"It is settled," he pronounced. "I'll be art." Later that afternoon a lone figure entered the Museum of Art, a bundle beneath his arm.
Spiritually haggard (although clean-shaven to the armpits), Smith loitered about the Greek Period until it was emptied of all but himself and marble.
He selected a dark corner and unwrapped his pedestal. He secreted the various personal things necessary for a showcase existence, including most of his clothing, in its hollow bottom.
"Good-bye, world," he renounced, "you should treat your artists better," and mounted the pedestal.
His food money had not been completely wasted, for the techniques he had mastered for four ninety-eight while on the Path to Freedom, had given him a muscular control such as allowed him perfect, motionless statuity whenever the wispy, middle-aged woman followed by forty-four children under age nine, left her chartered bus at the curb and passed through the Greek Period, as she did every Tuesday and Thursday between 9:35 and 9:40 in the morning. Fortunately, he had selected a seated posture.
Before the week passed he had also timed the watchman's movements to an alternate tick of the huge clock in the adjacent gallery (a delicate Eighteenth Century timepiece, all of gold leaf, enamel, and small angels who chased one another around in circles). He should have hated being reported stolen during the first week of his career, with nothing to face then but the prospect of second-rate galleries or an uneasy role in the cheerless private collections of cheerless and private collectors. Therefore, he moved judiciously when raiding staples from the stores in the downstairs lunch room, and strove to work out a sympathetic bond with the racing angels. The directors had never seen fit to secure the refrigerator or pantry from depredations by the exhibits, and he applauded their lack of imagination. He nibbled at boiled ham and pumpernickel (light), and munched ice cream bars by the dozen. After a month he was forced to take calisthenics (heavy) in the Bronze Age.
"Oh, lost!" he reflected amidst the Neos, surveying the kingdom he had once staked out as his own. He wept over the statue of Achilles Fallen as though it were his own. It was.
As in a mirror, he regarded himself in a handy collage of bolts and nutshells. "If you had not sold out," he accused, "if you had hung on a little longer--like these, the simplest of Art's creatures...But no! It could not be!
"Could it?" he addressed a particularly symmetrical mobile overhead. "Could it?"
"Perhaps," came an answer from nowhere, which sent him flying back to his pedestal.
But little came of it. The watchman had been taking guilty delight in a buxom Rubens on the other side of the building and had not overheard the colloquy. Smith decided that the reply signified his accidental nearing of Dharana. He returned to the Path, redoubling his efforts toward negation and looking Beaten. In the days that followed he heard occasional chuckling and whispering, which he at first dismissed as the chortlings of the children of Mara and Maya, intent upon his distractions. Later, he was less certain, but by then he had decided upon a classical attitude of passive inquisitiveness.
And one spring day, as green and golden as a poem by Dylan Thomas, a girl entered the Greek Period and looked about, furtively. He found it difficult to maintain his marbly placidity, for lo! she began to disrobe!
And a square parcel on the floor, in a plain wrapper. It could only mean...
Competition!
He coughed politely, softly, classically...
She jerked to an amazing attention, reminding him of a women's underwear ad having to do with Thermopylae. Her hair was the correct color for the undertaking--that palest shade of Parian manageable--and her gray eyes glittered with the icy-orbed intentness of Athene.
She surveyed the room minutely, guiltily, attractively...
"Surely stone is not susceptible to virus infections," she decided. "'Tis but my guilty conscience that cleared its throat. Conscience, thus do I cast thee off!"
And she proceeded to become Hecuba Lamenting, diagonally across from the Beaten Gladiator and fortunately, not facing in his direction. She handled it pretty well, too, he grudgingly admitted. Soon she achieved an esthetic immobility. After a period of appraisal he decided that Athens was indeed mother of all the arts; she simply could not have carried it as Renaissance nor Romanesque. This made him feel rather good.
When the great doors finally swung shut and the alarms had been set she heaved a sigh and sprang to the floor.
"Not yet," he cautioned, "the watchman will pass through in ninety-three seconds."
She had presence of mind sufficient to stifle her scream, a delicate hand with which to do it, and eighty-seven seconds in which to become Hecuba Lamenting once more. This she did, and he admired her delicate hand and her presence of mind for the next eighty-seven seconds. The watch man came, was nigh, was gone, flashlight and beard bobbing in musty will o' the-wispfulness through the gloom.
"Goodness!" she expelled her breath. "I had thought I was alone!"
"And correctly so," he replied. "'Naked and alone we come into exile...Among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost...Oh, lost--'"
"Thomas Wolfe," she stated.
"Yes," he sulked. "Let's go have supper."
"Supper?" she inquired, arching her eyebrows. "Where? I had brought some K-Rations, which I purchased at an Army Surplus Store--"
"Obviously," he retorted, "you have a short-timer's attitude. I believe that chicken figured prominently on the menu for today. Follow me!"
They made their way through the Tang Dynasty, to the stairs.
"Others might find it chilly in here after hours," he began, "but I daresay you have thoroughly mastered the techniques of breath control?"
"Indeed," she replied, "my fiancee was no mere Zen faddist. He followed the more rugged path of Lhasa. Once he wrote a modern version of the Ramayana, full of topical a
llusions and advice to modern society."
"And what did modern society think of it?"
"Alas! Modern society never saw it. My parents bought him a one-way ticket to Rome, first-class, and several hundred dollars worth of Travelers' Checks. He has been gone ever since. That is why I have retired from the world."
"I take it your parents do not approve of Art?"
"No, and I believe they must have threatened him also."
He nodded.
"Such is the way of society with genius. I, too, in my small way, have worked for its betterment and received but scorn for my labors."
"Really?"
"Yes. If we stop in the Modern Period on the way back, you can see my Achilles Fallen."
A very dry chuckle halted them.
"Who is there?" he inquired, cautiously.
No reply. They stood in the Glory of Rome, and the stone senators were still.
"Someone laughed," she observed.
"We are not alone," he stated, shrugging. "There've been other indications of such, but whoever they are, they're as talkative as Trappists--which is good.
Remember, though art but stone," he called gaily, and they continued on to the cafeteria. One night they sat together at dinner in the Modern Period.
"Had you a name, in life?" he asked.
"Gloria," she whispered. "And yours?"
"Smith, Jay."
"What prompted you to become a statue, Smith--if it is not too bold of me to ask?"
"Not at all," he smiled, invisibly. "Some are born to obscurity and others only achieve it through diligent effort. I am one of the latter. Being an artistic failure, and broke, I decided to become my own monument. It's warm in here, and there's food below. The environment is congenial, and I'll never be found out because no one ever looks at anything standing around museums."
"No one?"
"Not a soul, as you must have noticed. Children come here against their wills, young people come to flirt with one another, and when one develops sufficient sensibility to look at anything," he lectured bitterly, "he is either myopic or subject to hallucinations. In the former case he would not notice, in the latter he would not talk. The parade passes."
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories Page 21