The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  As Gaspard came galloping up, Zane said to him, "Hold Miss Blushes for me, my friend. Be gentle, she's in shock." Then he walked straight toward Homer.

  "Keep off me, you dirty tin nigger!" the latter shouted, somewhat bleatingly, and directed his flame at the advancing brunch robot. But either his fuel ran out just then, or else there were more and stranger powers in Zane's outstretched right pincher, pointing at Homer, than met the eye, for at that instant the flame died.

  Zane snatched the hose from his hands, caught him by the scruff of his shooting vest, bent him over his bluedsteel knee, and spanked him five times with the hot nozzle.

  Homer wailed. The writers froze, looking at Zane Gort as a pride of pleasure-mad Romans might have looked at Spartacus.

  FIVE

  Heloise Ibsen was never one to worry overmuch about the boyish predicaments her men got themselves into. While Homer was still being spanked, she waltzed over to Gaspard.

  "Can't say I think much of your new girlfriend," she greeted him, running her eye down Miss Blushes. "Good color for the chorus line, but not enough meat on her." Then, as he groped for a reply to that one, she went on, "Of course, I've heard of men who had to go to robots to get themselves taken care of, but I never thought I'd know one. But then I never thought I'd know a publisher's fink!"

  "Look here, Heloise, I'm no fink!" Gaspard retorted, scorning to comment on the other jibe. "I've never spied or scabbed and I never will. I loathe what you've done-I don't mind admitting that as soon as I woke up from that slug your white gorilla put on me, I came rushing here to save Rocket's wordmills if I could! I just ran into Zane on the way. Yes, I loathe and detest what you so-called writers have done, but even if I'd known you were planning it-which I didn't-I'd have fought it out in the union, I'd never have gone to the bosses!"

  "Aah, tell it to Flaxman," his ex-sweetie jeered with a toss of her bare brown shoulders. "Maybe Rocket House'll pin a tin medal on you and let you help dream up new titles for reprint scripts at fifteen percent of union wages. Why, you dirty fink, you tried to stop us back at the booktree!"

  "I did not!" Gaspard blatted. "And if I did, it wasn't for the bosses." He tried to hold Miss Blushes a little away from him, so as to feel freer to argue, but she vibrated and clung to him closely.

  "Aah, ain't she sweet?" Heloise Ibsen commented. "Ain't she the pink tin hotsy-totsy? Make your excuses to Flaxman and Cullingham, fink!"

  Just then Zane Gort, who had wrung some information from Joe the Guard in an unprecedented five seconds and then raced to the locker and back in four, came up with a stretcher. He laid it on the floor and eased Miss Blushes down on it.

  "Help me, Gaspard," he said rapidly. "We've got to get her to a quiet spot and give her electricity before she flips all her relays. Take the other end."

  "Tin medal is right!" Heloise rasped. "I might have known finking would come natural to a dirty robot-lover!"

  "Heloise-" Gaspard began, but then he saw there was no time for talk. The massed writers, stunned by Miss Blushes' screams and the audacity of Zane Gort's maneuvers, had recovered themselves and were advancing menacingly. As he picked up the back end of the stretcher and trotted off after Zane, Heloise swung out her tight-levied hip and slapped it loudly. "Here's one thing your tin friends can't give you!" she called after him with a coarse laugh.

  Scraps of metal, hurled by the enraged writers, began to patter around them. Zane quickened his stride until Gaspard was running. A cannoncracker went off near his ear.

  "Aagh!" Homer Hemingway sobbed after them angrily, lighting his other remaining cracker at the scorching wordmill. Before hurling it he searched his not over-capitalized memory bank for the worst insult he knew.

  "Dirty editors!" he bawled.

  But his missile exploded ten feet short as the stretcherbearing robot and man whisked through the door. Once in the street, Zane slowed the pace. Gaspard found to his surprise that he was beginning to feel fine-excited and a bit light-headed. His jacket was torn, his face smeary, there was a lump on his jaw the size of a lemon, but he looked and felt alive.

  "Zane, that was a beautiful job you did on Homer!" he cried. "You old tin bastard, I didn't know you had it in you."

  "Normally I don't," the robot replied modestly. "As you know, the first law for robots is never to harm a human being, but by Saint Isaac, the being has to come up to human standards! Homer Hemingway doesn't. Besides, what I did to him was in no sense harm, but salutory chastisement."

  "Of course I can understand my writing chums getting apoplectic at the things Miss Blushes said, too," Gaspard went on. "Love the lovely publishers!" he repeated, chortling.

  "I too can laugh at the undiscriminating hypersensitivity of censors," Zane said, a bit stiffly. "But don't you think, Gaspard, that the human race has during the past two hundred years become a little too attached to mere vulgarity and a few terse words of genito-excretory reference? As I have Dr. Tungsten say to his golden robot girl when she dreams yearningly of becoming a human, 'Humans aren't as you idealize them, Blanda. Humans are dream-killers. They took the bubbles out of soapsuds, Blanda, and called it detergent. They took the moonlight out of romance and called it sex.' But enough of this socio-literary chit-chat, Gaspard. I've got to find Miss Blushes some electricity, and the power to Readership Row has clearly been cut."

  "Excuse me," Gaspard said, "but couldn't you simply give her a jolt from your own batteries?"

  "She might misunderstand my intentions," the robot replied somewhat reprovingly. "Naturally I'd do it at a pinch, but the squeeze isn't that tight yet. I mean, her condition isn't that critical. She's in no pain. I have set her controls for heavy trance. However-"

  "How about Rocket House?" Gaspard suggested. "The editorial offices are on the next power pattern. Heloise be heves I'm a fink, I might as well act like one and run to my publishers."

  "An excellent idea," the robot replied, turning right at the next intersection and lengthening his stride so that Gaspard had to trot to keep up. He trotted lightly so as not to jounce Miss Blushes. Stretched out between them absolutely motionless and darkly scorched around the knees and thighs, the robix (female or silf robot) looked ready for the scrapheap to Gaspard's inexpert eyes.

  He said, "In any case I want to see Flaxman and Cullingham. I've a bone to pick with them. I want to know why they made no more effort to protect their wordmills than to join in hiring a pack of unreliable (excuse me, Zane) tin goons. It's not like them to fail so in their duty to their own pocketbooks."

  "I too have subtle matters to discuss with our illustrious employers," Zane said. "Gaspard, Old Bone, you have been most pluckily helpful today, quite beyond the normal duty one intelligent empathetic race owes to another. I would like to express my gratitude in more than words. I couldn't help hearing the crude jibes of your vigorous and disaffected darling. Now this is a most delicate matter and I don't want to risk being offensive, but Gaspard, Old Corpuscle, it is not quite true what Miss Ibsen said about robots being altogether incapable of tendering certain most intimate services to male human beings. By Saint Wuppertal, no! I'm not referring exactly to our robixes and certainly not to Miss Blushes-perish the thought, I'd rather dive into a bath of acid than have you think that! But if you should ever feel the need and momentarily lack the means of satisfying it, and wish to experience a most astonishing simulacrum of human delight, a most amazing though ersatz ultimate female amiability, I can give you the address of Madam Pneumo's establishment, a-"

  "Stow it, Zane!" Gaspard said sharply. "That's one department of my life I can take care of for myself."

  "I'm sure you can," Zane said heartily. "Would that all of us could make the same boast. Excuse me, Old Muscle, but have I inadvertently touched a tender-?"

  "You have," Gaspard said shortly, "but it's all right. ." He hesitated, then grinned and added, ". . Old Bolt!"

  "Do excuse it, please," Zane said softly. "At times I get carried away by my enthusiasm for the amazing capabilities of my metal
fellows and I perpetrate some gauche impropriety. I'm a bit robo-centric, I fear. But I am truly fortunate that you expressed your offense at my remark so mildly. Homer Hemingway would undoubtedly have called me a tin pimp."

  SIX

  When the last Harper Editor was gutted, the last Viking Anthologizer reduced to a blackened shell plastered with manifestoes, the victory-flushed writers trooped back to their various bohemian barracks, their Latin and French Quarters, their Bloomsburies and Greenwich Villages and North Beaches, and sat down in happy circles to await inspiration.

  None came.

  Minutes stretched to hours, hours toward days. Tankcars of coffee were brewed and sipped, mountains of cigarette butts accumulated on the black-enameled slanting floors of attics, garrets and penthouses guaranteed by archeologists to duplicate minutely the dwellings of ancient scribes. But it was no use, the great epics of the future- even the humble work-a-day sex stories and space sagas- refused to come.

  At this point many of the writers, still sitting in circles, though now unhappy ones, joined hands in hopes that this would concentrate psychic energy and so induce creativity, or perhaps even put them in touch with the spirits of authors dead and gone, who would kindly provide them with plots of no use in the afterworld.

  On the basis of mysterious traditions filtering down from the dim dark days when writers really wrote, most writers believed that writing was a team enterprise in which eight or ten congenial chaps reclined in luxurious surroundings drinking cocktails and "kicking ideas back and forth" (whatever that meant exactly) and occasionally being refreshed by the ministrations of beautiful secretaries, until stories appeared-a picture which made writing a kind of alcoholic parlor football with bedroom rest periods, terminated by miracles.

  Or, alternatively, they believed that writing depended on "tapping the unconscious mind," a version of the process which made it more akin to psychoanalysis and drilling for oil (dowsing for the black gold of the id!) and which raised the hope that at a pinch extrasensory perception or some other form of psionic gymnastics might substitute for creativity. In either case, clasping hands in circles seemed a good bet, as it would provide the proper togetherness and simultaneously favor the appearance of the dark psychic forces. It was accordingly practiced widely.

  Still the stories wouldn't come.

  The simple fact was that no professional writer could visualize starting a story except in terms of pressing the Go Button of a wordmill, and marvelous as Space-Age man might be, he still hadn't sprouted buttons; he could only gnash his teeth in envy of the robots, who were in this feature far more advanced.

  Many of the writers discovered in passing that they could not arrange words on paper in any pattern or even make words at all; in a great era of pictorial-auditory-kinesthetic-tactile-nosmic-gustatory-somnotic-hypnotic-psionic education they had missed the special classes in that somewhat archaic art. Most of these illiterates purchased voicewriters, handy devices which translated spoken into typed material, but even with such aids a large minority awoke to the sick realization that their mastery of the spoken word extended no further than Simplified Basic or Solar Pidgin. They could drink in the richly purple laudanum of wordwooze, but they could no more create it inside their bodies than they could make honey or spider silk.

  In justice it must be pointed out that a few of the nonwriters-purists such as Homer Hemingway-had never once contemplated doing any writing themselves when they destroyed the wordmills, assuming that some of their less athletic, more bookish fellows would be able to turn the trifling trick. And a very few, among them Heloise Ibsen, had ambitions only of becoming union czars, publishing barons, or somehow turning the chaos that would follow the Wordmill Massacre to their own profit, advancement, or at least excitement.

  But most of the writers really believed they would be able to write stories-great novels yet! — without ever having done any writing in their lives. They suffered commensurately.

  After seventeen hours Lafcadio Cervantes Proust slowly wrote, "Swerving, skimming, evermore turning, mounting higher and higher in ever-widening fiery circles. ." and then stopped.

  Gertrude Colette Sand clenched her tongue between her teeth and painstakingly printed, "'Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!' she said."

  Wolfgang Friedrich von Wassermann groaned with worldpain and put down, "Once upon a time. ."

  Nothing more.

  Meanwhile the Quartermaster General of the Space Marines commanded the PX on the planet Pluto to ration paperbacks and listen-tapes; it looked, he radioed, as if the next fiction shipment would only comprise normal reading for three months instead of four years.

  Deliveries of new titles to Terran newsstands were cut fifty and then ninety percent to conserve the miserably tiny stock of written and printed but undistributed novels. Book-a-day housewives phoned mayors and congressmen. Prime ministers, used to putting themselves to sleep with a crime-detective story a night (and often getting shrewd statesmanlike ideas from them), viewed developments with inward panic. A 13-year-old committed suicide "because adventure stories are my only pleasure and now there will be no more."

  TV programs and movies-in-depth had to be curtailed in the same proportion as books, since they depended on the same vastly expensive wordmills for their scripts and scenarios. The world's newest entertainment device, the All-Senses-Poem-of-Ecstacy Engine, already well past the planning stage, was shelved indefinitely.

  Electronic scientists and cybernetic engineers issued confidential preliminary reports that it would take from ten to fourteen months to get one wordmill working, with dark hints that their secondary surveys might be even more pessimistic. They pointed out that the original wordmills had been detailedly patterned on skilled human writers, whose psychoanalytic draining-in-depth had provided the contents of the wordniills' memory banks, and where were such writers to be found today? Even foreign-language countries depended almost completely on mechanical translations of Anglo-American wordwooze for their fiction.

  Anglo-America's smug Labor Government awakened to a belated realization that, although the publishers had been brought to their knees, they would soon be utterly unable to meet their normal payrolls, let alone support the twenty thousand displaced teen-agers the Department of People had been planning to dump on them as semi-skilled word mechanics.

  Worse, the Solar System's relatively smooth-running society would soon begin to sour and sicken from the subconscious outward for lack of fresh fictional entertainment.

  The Government appealed to the publishers, the publishers to the writers-for new titles at least under which to reissue older milled books, though consulted psychologists warned that, contrary to cynical opinion, this stopgap measure would not work. For some reason a milled book which created the headiest delight on first reading was apt to produce nothing but nervous irritation on rereading.

  Plans to reissue the fictional classics of the Twentieth Century and even more primitive times, though eagerly urged by a few idealists and other cranks, met with the unanswerable objection that readers used from childhood to wordwooze found pre-wordmill books (though thought exciting and even daring in their day) insufferably dull-in fact, quite unintelligible. The weird suggestion made by one rogue humanist that this was due to wordwooze itself being completely unintelligible-verbal opium of zero meaningfulness and so providing no training in reading material with a content-never got into the news at all.

  The publishers promised the writers full amnesty for their riotings, toilet facilities separate from those of robots, and a seventeen-cent wage boost all around, if they could produce scripts of minimal wordmill quality-Hanover Hack Mark I.

  The writers sprang back into their cross-legged circles, locked hands, stared across at each other's pale masks, and concentrated more desperately than ever.

  Nothing.

  SEVEN

  At the far end of Readership Row, well beyond the point where Dream Street changes its name to Nightmare Alley, stands Rocket House, pronounced Racket H
ouse by the cognoscenti.

  Not five minutes after their decision to seek aid and enlightenment at this spot, Gaspard de la Nuit and Zane Gort were bearing their stretcher and its slender pink burden up a stalled escalator leading to the executive area. Gaspard was now at the head of the stretcher and Zane at the rear end, the robot taking on the more taxing job of holding his end of the stretcher high above his head to keep Miss Blushes horizontal.

  "Looks like I gave you a bum steer," Gaspard said. "The power failure extends into this area. Certainly the writers came this far, judging from the shambles downstairs."

  "Press on, partner," Zane replied staunchly. "It's my recollection that the power pattern changes halfway through the building."

  Gaspard stopped in front of a simple door bearing the name "FLAXMAN" and below it "CULLINGHAM." He doubled up his knee and pressed a waist-high button. When nothing happened he gave the door a savage kick with the flat of his foot. It swung open, revealing a large office furnished with luxurious simplicity. Behind a double desk that was like two half moons joined-a Cupid's-bow effect-sat a short dark man with the broad grin of energetic efficiency and a tall fair man with the faint smile of weary efficiency. They seemed to have been enjoying a quiet conversation together-an odd occupation, it occurred to Gaspard, for two men who have presumably just suffered deadly business injuries. They looked around with some surprise-the short dark man jerked a little-but no annoyance.

  Gaspard stepped inside without a word. At a signal from the robot they gently lowered the stretcher to the floor.

  "Think you'll be able to take care of her now, Zane?" Gaspard asked.

  The robot, his pincher tip probing a wall socket, nodded. "We've reached electricity at last," he replied. "That's all I need."