The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  A look of utter determination came into Gaspard's face. "Heloise," he said firmly, crossing to her, "you're going home with me right now."

  A large hairy paw arrested him and deposited him on his back on the rubberoid pavement.

  "The lady's going home in her own sweet time, buddy," said Homer Hemingway. "With me."

  Gaspard sprang up and aimed a roundhouse swing at the uncouth giant, but was fended off by an easy poke in the chest that made him gasp.

  "You call yourself a writer, buddy?" Homer demanded wonderingly as he launched his own roundhouse that a moment later extinguished Gaspard's consciousness. "Why, you ain't even in training."

  THREE

  Resplendent in their matching turquoise slack suits with opal buttons, father and son stood complacently in front of Gaspard's wordmill. No dayshift writer had turned up. Joe the Guard slept upright by the timeclock. The other visitors had wandered off. A pink robot had appeared from somewhere and was sitting quietly on a stool at the far end of the vaulted room. Its pinchers were moving busily. It seemed to be knitting.

  FATHER: There you are, Son. Look up at it. Now, now, you don't have to lean over backwards that far.

  SON: It's big, Daddy.

  FATHER: Yes, it's big all right. That's a wordmill, Son, a machine that writes fiction books.

  SON: Does it write my story books?

  FATHER: No, it writes novels for grown-ups. A considerably smaller machine (childsize, in fact) writes your little-

  SON: Let's go, Daddy.

  FATHER: No, Son! You wanted to see a wordmill, you begged and begged, I had to go to a lot of trouble to get a visitor's pass, so now you're going to look at this wordmill and listen to me explain it to you.

  SON: Yes, Daddy.

  FATHER: Well, you see, it's this way- No. . Now, it's like this-

  SON: Is it a robot, Daddy?

  FATHER: No, it's not a robot like the electrician or your teacher. A wordmill is not a person like a robot is, though they are both made of metal and work by electricity. A wordmill is like an electric computing machine, except it handles words, not numbers. It's like the big chess-playing war-making machine, except it makes its moves in a novel instead of on a board or battlefield. But a wordmill is not alive like a robot and it cannot move around. It can only write fiction books.

  SON: (kicking it) Dumb old machine!

  FATHER: Don't do that, Son. Now, it's like this-there are any number of ways to tell a story.

  SON: (still kicking it wearily) Yes, Daddy.

  FATHER: The ways depend on the words that are chosen. But once one word is chosen, the other words must fit with that first word. They must carry the same mood or atmosphere and fit into the suspense chain with micrometric precision (I'll explain that later).

  SON: Yes, Daddy.

  FATHER: A wordmill is fed the general pattern for a story and it goes to its big memory bank-much bigger than even Daddy's-and picks the first word at random; they call that turning trump. Or it's given the first word by its programmer. But when it picks the second word it must pick one that has the same atmosphere, and so on and so on. Fed the same story pattern and one hundred different first words-one at a time, of course-it would wnte one hundred completely different novels. Of course it is much more complicated than that, much too complicated for Son to understand, but that is the way it works.

  SON: A wordmill keeps telling the same story with different words?

  FATHER: Well, in a way, yes.

  SON: Sounds dumb to me.

  FATHER: It is not dumb, Son. All grown-ups read novels. Daddy reads novels.

  SON: Yes, Daddy. Who's that?

  FATHER: Where?

  SON: Coming this way. The lady in tight blue pants who hasn't buttoned the top of her shirt.

  FATHER: Ahem! Look away, Son. That's another writer, Son.

  SON: (still looking) What's a writer, Daddy? Is she one of those bad ladies you told me about, who tried to talk to you in Paris, only you wouldn't?

  FATHER: No, no, Son! A writer is merely a person who takes care of a wordmill, who dusts it and so on. The publishers pretend that the writer helps the wordmill write the book, but that's a big fib, Son, a just-for-fun pretend to make things more exciting. Writers are allowed to dress and behave in uncouth ways, like gypsies-it's all part of a union agreement that goes back to the time when wordmills were invented. Now you won't believe-

  SON: She's putting something in this wordmill, Daddy. A round black thing.

  FATHER: (not looking) She's oiling it or replacing a transistor or doing whatever she's supposed to be doing to this wordmill. Now you won't believe what Daddy's going to tell you now, except that it's Daddy telling you. Before wordmills were invented-

  SON: It's smoking, Daddy.

  FATHER: (still not looking) Don't interrupt, she probably spilled the oil or something. Before wordmills were invented, writers actually wrote stories! They had to hunt-

  SON: The writer's running away, Daddy.

  FATHER: Don't interrupt. They had to hunt through their memories for every word in a story. It must have been-

  SON: It's still smoking, Daddy. There are sparks.

  FATHER: I said don't interrupt. It must have been dreadfully hard work, like building the pyramids.

  SON: Yes, Daddy. It's still-

  BOOM! Gaspard's wordmill deafeningly blossomed into shrapnel. Father and son took the full force of the explosion and were blown to turquoise and opal bits. They passed painlessly out of existence, chance victims of a strange occupational revolt. The incident in which they perished was one of many and it was being repeated at a large number of nearby places, fortunately with few further fatalities.

  All along Readership Row, which some call Dream Street, the writers were wrecking the wordmills. From the blackened book-tree under which Gaspard had fallen to the bookship launching pads at the other end of the Row, the unionized authors were ravaging and reaving. Torrenting down the central avenue of Earth's mammoth, and in fact the Solar System's only fully mechanized publishing center, a giddy gaudy mob in their berets and bathrobes, togas and ruffs, kimonos, capes, sport shirts, flowing black bow ties, lace shirt-fronts and top hats, doublets and hose, Tshirts and levis, they burst murderously into each fiction factory, screaming death and destruction to the gigantic machines whose mere tenders they had become and which ground out in their electronic maws the actual reading matter which fed the yearnings and sweetened the subconscious minds of the inhabitants of three planets, a half dozen moons, and several thousand satellites and spaceships in orbit and trajectory.

  No longer content to be bribed by high salaries and the mere trappings of authorship-the ancient costumes that were the vestments of their profession, the traditionfreighted names they were allowed and even required to assume, the exotic love-lives they were permitted and encouraged to pursue-the writers smashed and sabotaged, rioted and ruined, while the police of a Labor Administration intent on breaking the power of the publishers stood complacently aside. Robot goons, hurriedly hired by the belatedly alarmed publishers, also took no action, having received a last-minute negate from the Interplanetary Brotherhood of Free Business Machines; they too merely stood about-grim somber statues, their metal dented by the bricks, stained by the acids, and blackened by the portable lightning-bolts of many a picket-line affray-and watched their stationary mindless cousins die.

  Homer Hemingway axed through the sedate gray control panel of a Random House Write-All and went fiercely to work on the tubes and transistors.

  Sappho Wolistonecraft Shaw shoved a large plastic funnel into the memory unit of a Scribner Scribe and poured two gallons of smoking nitric acid into its indescribably delicate innards.

  Harriet Beecher Brontл drenched a Norton Novelist with gasoline and whinnied as the flames shot skyward.

  Heloise Ibsen, her shirt now torn from her shoulders and waving the gray flag with the ominous black "30" on it, signifying the end of machine-made literature, leaped atop three cower
ing vice-presidents who had come down to "watch the robots scatter those insolent grease-monkeys." For a moment she looked strikingly like "Liberty Leading the People" in Delacroix's painting.

  Abelard de Musset, top hat awry and pockets bulging with proclamations of self-expression and creativity, leveled a submachinegun at a Putnam Plotter. Marcel Feodor Joyce lobbed a grenade into the associator of a Schuster Serious. Dylan Bysshe Donne bazookaed a Bantam Bard.

  Agatha Ngaio Sayers poisoned a Doubleday 'Dunnit with powdered magnetic oxide.

  Somerset Makepeace Dickens sledgehammered a Harcourt Hack.

  H. G. Heinlein planted stiletto explosives in an Appleton S-F and almost lost his life pushing the rest of the mob back to a safe distance until the fiery white jets had stabbed through the involuted leagues of fine silver wiring.

  Norman Vincent Durant blew up a Ballantine Bookbuilder.

  Talbot Fennimore Forester sword-slashed a Houghton Historical, pried it open with a pike, and squirted in Greek fire which he had compounded by an ancient formula.

  Luke Van Tilburg Wister fanned his six-guns at a Whittlesey Western, then finished it off with six sticks of dynamite and a "Ki-yi-yippee!"

  Fritz Ashton Eddison loosed a cloud of radioactive bats inside a Fiction House Fantasizer (really a rebuilt Dutton Dreamer with Fingertip Credibility Control).

  Edgar Allen Block, brandishing an electric cane fearfully powered by portable isotopic batteries, all by himself shorted out forever a whole floorful of assorted cutters, padders, polishers, tighteners, juicers, and hesid-shesids.

  Conan Haggard de Camp rammed a Gold Medal Cloak-'n-Sworder with a spike-nosed five-ton truck.

  Shakespeares ravaged, Dantes dealt electro-chemical death, Aeschyluses and Miltons fought shoulder to shoulder with Zolas and Farrells; Rimbauds and Bradburies shared revolutionary dangers alike; while whole tribes of Sinclairs, Balzacs, Dumas' and authors named White and distinguished only by initials, mopped up in the rear.

  It was a black day for book-lovers. Or perhaps the dawn.

  FOUR

  One of the last incidents in the Massacre of the Wordmills-which some historians later compared to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria and the Nazi book-holocausts and others to the Boston Tea Party and the storming of the Bastille-played itself out in the vaulted millroom shared by Rocket House and Proton Press. There, after the horrid bombing of Gaspard's Wordmaster by Heloise Ibsen, there hac been a lull in the orgy of destruction. All the surviving visitors had run away except for two elderly female schoolteachers, who, backed against a wall, clutched each other for support and peered about in shock and terror, incapable of action.

  Hanging onto both of them and seeming quite as frightened as they, was a slender robot finished in aluminum anodized a deep pink-a robot with a wasp waist and notably slim wrists and ankles, far slenderer than even the trim rangy Zane Gort and of strangely feminine appearance overall.

  A minute or so after the explosion Joe the Guard roused himself beside the timeclock, slowly crossed the room and fished out of a locker a whiskbroom and a dustpan with a snap-back lid, then came as slowly back with them and began even more slowly and potteringly to sweep at the fringes of the debris around the blasted wordmill, brushing together scraps of metal, insulation and turquoise cloth. Once he picked an opal button out of the junk and stared at it for fully ten seconds before shaking his head and dropping it in his pan with a little ping.

  The two schoolteachers and the shocking pink robot followed him with their five eyes, hanging onto his every movement. He was a middling poor father figure and symbol of security, even as such figures and symbols go, but at the moment he was the only one and so would have to do.

  Joe the Guard had twice filled and emptied his dustpan-an operation each time requiring a long trip out of the room-when the victory-frenzied writers appeared in force, surging into the vast chamber in a wedge that was tipped most terrifyingly with the roaring twenty-foot flames of three throwers.

  While the three flame-teams of nozzle-man and packman went whoopingly to work on the five remaining wordmills, the other writers milled about, screeching like fiends and looking even more like denizens of hell in the smoky red glare. They'd shake each qther's hands, clap each other on the back and kiss each other, shout into each other's ears some atrocious detail of the destruction of a particularly hated wordmill, and then laugh uproariously.

  The two schoolteachers and the shocking pink robot clutched each other still more closely. Joe the Guard looked over his stooped shoulder at the intruders, shook his head again, and seeming to curse under his breath, went on with his ineffectual tidying.

  A few of the writers spontaneously formed a serpent and soon all the others, except for the flame-teams, had joined it. Hands on the shoulders of the writer next ahead, they went stamping and shuffling about in a twisted spiral that went twice around the room, passing between some of the blackening, warping wordmills and curving recklessly close to the stinking flames. As they moved along, two steps forward, one back, they rhythmically uttered animal cries and grunts.

  When a coil of the snake bent toward them, the two schoolteachers and the pink robot cowered back further against the wall. Joe the Guard got trapped between inner and outer spiral, but simply went on brushing, though now with a constant headshake and muttering to himself.

  Gradually words shouted in unison began to appear among the animal grunts and to regularize themselves. Finally the whole nasty chant became unmistakably clear:

  Ef the effing publishers!

  Ef the effing publishers!

  Four. . Let. . ter-Word!

  Bugger all the programmers!

  Bugger all the programmers!

  Word. . Mills. . No-more!

  At this, there was a striking change in the demeanor of the pink robot. She stood erect, pushing the two schoolteachers back from her, and then walked courageously forward, flapping her slender aluminum arms as a person might at a cloud of midges and squeaking in a thin voice something that the chant completely drowned.

  The writers noticed her coming, and being as used as other people to getting out of the way of robots when the latter were in certain moods, Ђimply broke their chain to let her pass through, good-humoredly jeering and catcalling as they did so.

  A writer in dented top hat and torn black cape shouted, "She's a breen, kids!" This observation roused enormous merriment and a small writrix in disordered male dress clothes of the 19th Century-her name was Simone Wolfe-Sand Sagan-screamed after her, "Watch it, Pinky! The stuff we're going to write now'll blow the circuits on all you government censoring robots!"

  The pink robot reached the other side of the room, having passed through the snake four times. She turned around and continued for a time to flail her arms and squeak inaudibly, while the nearest writers turned their heads to roar their chant at her with great grins on their faces.

  At this she stamped a dainty aluminum foot, modestly turned to the wall and ducking her head made certain adjustments of the flush knobs at her bosom. Then she turned around and her squeak became at once an ear-splitting whistle that stopped the snake dead in its tracks, shut up the chant, and caused even the distant schoolteachers to cringe and cover their ears.

  "Oh, you dreadful people!" the pink robot cried out then in a high voice that would have been very pleasant if it hadn't been quite so sugary. "You don't know what words like those, repeated over and over, do to my condensors and relays! You couldn't, or you surely wouldn't! If you do it again, I'll really scream. Oh, you poor delinquent dears, you've said and done so many dreadful things that I hardly know where to begin my corrections. . but wouldn't it be nicer-oh, so much nicer! — if, for a start, you chanted your chant this way?"

  And then the pink robot, clasping her slim pinchers before her rosy bosom, cried melodiously:

  Love the lovely publishers!

  Love the lovely publishers!

  Clean. . Pew. . er-Words!

  Praise the perfect p
rogrammers!

  Praise the perfect programmers!

  Word. . Mills. . Al-ways!

  Hysterical laughter and angry snarls, mixed in almost equal proportions, were the writers' answer to that jingle.

  Two of the flame throwers were out of fuel, but they had done their work in full measure: the last mills at which they'd been directed (a Proton Prosepress and Proton Protean) glowed red-hot over half their faces and stank of charred insulation. The third, with Homer Hemingway again at the nozzle, still played lightly on a glowing Rocket Phraser-Homer had reduced it to light spray two minutes earlier to stretch his fun.

  The writers did not reform their snake, but a crowd of them-male apprentices mostly-advanced on the pink robot, shouting at first erratically but then in unison all the dirty words they knew-really surprisingly few for even technically literary people, no more than seven.

  At that the pink robot "really screamed," running her whistle at full volume down and up the scale, from shuddering subsonics to headachy ultrasonics. The effect was that of seven old fire sirens with a hyped-up high treble and low base.

  Palms went to ears. Literally pained looks appeared on faces.

  Homer Hemingway folded his left arm over his head to cover both ears and still squinted with the discomfort of the sounds. With his right hand he swung his diminished flame across the floor until it reached the pink robot.

  "Shut it off, sister!" he roared, brushing the flame back and forth across her slim curved shanks.

  The screaming stopped and a heartbreaking twangy hum came out of the pink robot, rather like a mainspring snapping. She swayed and began to wobble like a top that has almost run down.

  At that instant Zane Gort and Gaspard de la Nuit entered the room. The blued-steel robot strode forward fast as a robot can (which is about five times as fast as a man) and caught the pink robot just as she was wobbling her last. He held her firmly, saying nothing but gazing fixedly at Homer Hemingway, who had rather apprehensively flirted his fire-hose back to the Phraser at the instant of Zane's appearance.