by Fritz Leiber
WOMAN: Almost. Half an hour.
EGG: Half an hour's half a year. No.
WOMAN: Come along, Half Pint. Come for Mama. Boss wants a brain.
EGG: You take Rusty. He's gone crazy. They'll have fun.
WOMAN: How crazy?
EGG: Crazy as me. Take a bath. You got six months. Take off your smock and show your clothes. Take 'em off, take 'em off.
WOMAN: Lay off, Half Pint, or I'll drop you.
EGG: Go ahead do it. Maybe I'll bounce.
WOMAN: You won't bounce baby.
EGG: Sure I will ma. Just like Humpty.
The woman sighed under her white mask, shaking her head, and stood up. "Look here, Half Pint," she said, "you don't want to sleep, trance, talk, or take a trip. Want to watch me feed the others?"
"All right. But plug the eye in my ear, it's funnier that way."
"No baby, that's nuts."
She plugged a fish-eyed TV camera into his upper right socket, at the same time unplugging his speaker with a quick tug at the cable. Tray hanging balanced at her waist she touched a nearby egg with her fingertips. Her eyes went blank above the mask as she judged the temperature of the metal and timed the beat of the tiny isotope-powered pump built into the larger fontanel. She fitted finger and thumb of her other hand to the dents in the smaller fontanel and gave it a practiced twirl. It rose slowly, spinning. She caught it just as it came unscrewed and plumped it into one of the unoccupied dishes on her tray, plucking a fresh disk from its dish, settled its threads at the first try on the threads in the hole, gave it a reverse twirl, and was on to the next egg without waiting to watch it spin down flush.
She had twirled into place the last fresh disk on her tray when a sol-sol-do chimed.
Nevertheless she said, "Goddammit to Hell and gone!"
TWELVE
Girls are a great art-form, but one requiring exhausting study and application, reads an entry in the unwritten notebooks of Gaspard de la Nuit. The receptionist who appeared at Wisdom of the Ages in response to his sol-sol-do chime was as fresh as the cubicle was musty with shelves of old hardcover books and a dust-freighted frieze of David-stars and Isis-crosses. Gaspard, breathing hard and coughing a bit, studied her appreciatively and thanked the higher powers that skirts were back again in the non-writing world-properly short snug skirts that perfectly set off sheer-stockinged legs. A feathery sweater clung to the middle heights of the petite vision as closely as gleaming brown ringlets hugged her trim skull and the pink shells of her ears.
Zane Gort whistled the polite robot's greeting which all she-humans found most comforting.
When Gaspard's inspection did not terminate, the vision said snottily, "Yes, yes, but we know all about me. So let's quit the panting and get down to business."
Gaspard censored the reply, "Marvellous by me, if you've got a couch and don't mind a robot observer," and instead asserted defensively, "I've been running. A scribesquad ambushed us and it was five blocks and seven levels before we shook the maniacs. I'm afraid the writers may have got wind that Rocket's up to something. We led them away from here and snuck back in a scrap-buyer's truck- lots of those headed for Readership Row, I gave the dnver tips on hot wordmills." The remark about panting stuck in his craw, so he added, "Incidentally, you should try running the mile some day with a robot for a pacer."
"Give me thighs like barrels, I'm sure," the girl replied, looking Gaspard and his bruises up and down. "But what's your business? This isn't a first-aid station-or an oiling depot either," she added for the benefit of Zane Gort, who bad creaked at that moment as he leaned around Gaspard to peer at the books.
"Look here, kid," Gaspard said, a bit nettled. "Let's quit the mumbo-jumbo and snap into it. We're behind schedule. Where's that midget computer?"
Gaspard had devoted considerable hurried thought to the phrasing of this question. When Flaxman had first spoken of "a brain" over the phone, Gaspard had had an instant vision of a huge nakedly convoluted globe with evil saucerwide eyes that glowed in the dark, the whole being set atop a tiny misshapen torso or perhaps a small leathery pedestal with squirming octopus legs-a sort of Martian monstrosity, despite the fact that the real Martians had turned out to have their brains inside their black-armored beetle bodies. Next Gaspard had thought of a pink brain sloshing around in a pail of clear nutrient fluid-or perhaps swimming in a tub of the stuff by swishing its octopus legs. (Really, that picture of a brain with tentacles seemed most firmly rooted in the human imagination-the quintessence of intelligent-evil-giant-spiderism.) But then while careening along in the scrap-buyer's truck Gaspard had decided that all of these visions were equally childish and that by "a brain" Flaxman must have meant some sort of calculating machine or memory bank, though not a robot or a wordxnill and dearly rather small since it could be carried. After all, laymen had called computers "electric brains" from the earliest days; for a half dozen decades scientists had tagged this usage as sensationalism, and then as soon as robots developed consciousness, had assured the public it was completely proper; Zane Gort, for instance, had an electric brain; so did all robots, including a number of brilliant robot scientists who had a most high opinion indeed of electronic mental equipment.
By asking for a midget computer, Gaspard hoped to establish to his own satisfaction that this was, approximately, the real nature of Flaxman's "brain."
But the girl's response was to lift her eyebrows and say, "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about."
"Sure you do," Gaspard insisted confidently. "The midget computer they call a brain. Hustle it up."
The girl looked at him steadily. She said, "We do not deal in computers here."
"Well, then the brain-machine, whatever it is."
"We do not deal in machines of any sort," the girl said.
"All right, all right, plain brain then."
The way Gaspard said it, it sounded like a pound of hamburger and the girl's expression hardened further.
"Whose brain?" she asked icily.
"Flaxman's brain. I mean the brain Flaxman wants-Cullingham too. You're supposed to know."
Ignoring the last, the girl asked, "They both want the same brain?"
"Of course. Hustle it up."
The ice in her voice became jagged. "Split order, eh? Shall I slice it here? And do you want it on pumpernickel or rye?"
"Kid, I've no time for gruesome comedy."
"Why not? Mother Wisdom's kosher brain sandwiches are famous."
Wincing, Gaspard reinspected the girl thoughtfully. This snotty vision with the repulsive sense of humor, he decided, could not be the apprehensive, procrastinating, elderlysounding character Fla.xman had spoken to over the phone. Much as Gaspard would have liked to prolong this interview, preferably on some basis other than nauseous witticisms, he decided he must remember his mission.
"Better get me Nurse Bishop," he said distastefully. "She'll know what I want."
The girl's eyes slitted without hiding quite all of the violet irises. "Nurse Bishop, eh?" she said bitterly.
"Yeah," Gaspard said and then added with a burst of insight, "She in your hair, kid?"
"How did you know?"
"I'm intuitive. Natural deduction really-the fussy oldmaid type would never go for you. She's a real old harridan, eh?"
The girl drew herself up. "Brother, you don't know the half of it," she said. "You wait here, I'll get her, if you really think you want her. I'll pack the brain in her knapsack myself."
"Use a blow-torch on her if she dithers, but don't scorch her paint," Gaspard gaily called after the sweater girl as the door closed behind her. Rather to his surprise he realized he was mightily drawn to her. Although Heloise Ibsen had taxed him, she had certainly increased his appetite, he concluded ruefully. He had supposed he would celebrate his escape from Heloise with a month's monasticism, but apparently his body had other ideas.
"By Saint Norbert, this is a find!"
On the girl's departure Zane had made a bee-line for the har
dcover books.
"Behold!" said the robot, running a blued pincher along a black-spined shelf of volumes. "The collected works of Daniel Zukertort!"
"Never heard of the man," Gaspard volunteered cheerfully. "Or was he a robot?"
"I am not surprised at your ignorance, Old Bone," Zane told him. "The patent registry shows that Daniel Zukertort was one of the very greatest early human experts in robotics, wordmillistics, micromechanics, catalysis chemistry, and microsurgery to boot. Yet his name is otherwise almost unknown-even among robots, else I imagine we'd have a Saint Daniel. There seems to have been a conspiracy of silence about the man. I've wondered if he wasn't a victim of government suppression, perhaps even because of tooearly association with the Equal-Rights-for-Robots movement, but hitherto I've lacked time and means to investigate."
"Why should Zukertort's works turn up here?" Gaspard wondered, staring at the shelves. "Was he interested in the occult? He's right between Uspensky and Madam Blavatsky."
"The range of Daniel Zukertort's interests seems to have been almost unimaginably wide," the robot replied rather solemnly. "See here, for instance." He deftly clawed out a single black volume and drew a pincher tip under its title: Golems and Other Arcane Automata.
"You know," the robot told Gaspard, "I find it stimulating to think of myself as an arcane automaton. It makes me want to enamel myself black with an inlay of fine silver lines. Like rococo plate armor."
"Is there a Zukertort book on tattooing for robots?" Gaspard asked sardonically. "Look here, Old Bolt, what do you suppose these brains are that Flaxman expects to write books? — or help somehow in producing them. Judging from the occult decor here, I'm beginning to wonder if magic or spiritualism isn't mixed up in it. You know, contacting the minds of dead authors through a medium or something like that."
The robot flapped his blued elbow-joints in lieu of a shrug. "As was observed by your greatest human detective, who curiously had many robot traits," he said without looking up from his book, "it is a capital mistake to theorize without sufficient data."
Gaspard frowned. "Greatest human detective?"
"Sherlock Holmes, to be sure," Zane said impatiently.
"Never heard of the man," said Gaspard. "Was he a policeman, a private hand, or a professor of criminology? Or did he succeed Herbert Hoover as head of the F. B. I?"
THIRTEEN
"Gaspard," said Zane Gort severely, "I can forgive your ignorance of Daniel Zukertort, but not of Sherlock Holmes, the greatest fictional detective, bar none, of the whole prewordmill era."
"That accounts for my not knowing," Gaspard said happily. "I can't stand pre-wordmill books. They roil up my mind." His face fell. "You know, Zane, I'm going to have a hard time filling in my leisure or just getting to sleep without new wordniill fiction. Nothing else really gets to me. I've been reading the entire output of the mills for years."
"Can't you reread the old ones?"
"That doesn't work. Besides, the paper darkens and disintegrates a month after the book is purchased and unsealed-you must know that."
"Well then, perhaps you are going to have to widen your tastes," the robot told him, looking up from his black volume. "They're not exactly catholic, you know. For instance, we're friends, yet I'll wager you've never read anything I've written, even one of my Dr. Tungsten tales."
"But how could I?" Gaspard protested. "They're only on spools that plug into a robot's book-niche. You can't even play them on a regular wire recorder."
"Rocket House has manuscript copies available to anyone interested enough to ask for them," Zane informed him coolly. "You'd have to learn a bit more robotese, of course, but some people would find that rewarding."
"Yeah," was all that Gaspard could think to say. Then, to change the subject, "I wonder what's keeping that bloody old nurse? Maybe I'd better call Flaxman." He indicated a phone by the bookshelves.
Zane ignored both question and suggestion and went on, "Doesn't it strike you as strange, Gaspard, that stories for robots are written by live individual beings like myself, while humans read stories written by machinery? An historian might see in that the difference between a youthful and a decadent race."
"Zane, you call yourself-" Gaspard began angrily and then stopped in mid-sentence. He'd been about to say, "You call yourself a live being when you're made of tin?" And that would have been not only unkind and inaccurate (robots had as little actual tin in them as most tin cans) but basically untrue. Zane was clearly far more alive than nine out of ten flesh-and-blood humans.
The robot waited a few seconds and then continued, "To an outsider like myself it's crystal clear that there is a large element of addiction in the human love of wordwooze. As soon as you open a wordmilled book, you people go into a trance, as if you'd taken a large dose of some narcotic drug. Have you ever asked yourself why wordmills can't write any genuine non-fiction? Anything truly factual? I discount autobiography, serenity books, self-help, and popular philosophy. Have you ever wondered why robots can't enjoy wordwooze-can't make anything out of it at all? The stuff seems gibberish even to me, you know."
"Maybe it's too subtle for them! — too subtle for you too!" Gaspard snapped, stung to the quick by this criticism of his favorite form of escape and even more by Zane's deprecation of the machines he had adored. "Stop eating on me, Zane!"
"There, there, don't blow an artery, Old Tissue," Zane said soothingly. "'To eat on one'-an odd expression. Cannibalism is about the only unpleasantness our two races cannot visit on each other." He returned to his black book.
The phone buzzed. Gaspard grabbed at it automatically, hesitated, then picked it up.
"Flaxman speaking!" a voice barked. "Where's my brain? What's happened to those two boobs I sent?"
As Gaspard searched his mind for a suitably dignified rejoinder there erupted from the phone a series of bangs, crashes, howls and gasps. When the racket ceased, there was a moment's silence, then a bright voice said in the jingling rhythms of a receptionist, "Racket House. Miss Jilligan here, speaking for Mr. Flaxman. Who is it please?"
But Gaspard knew the voice, from an infinite-seeming series of intimate encounters. It was that of Heloise Ibsen.
"Gun Seven of Wordmill Avengers here, speaking for the Noose," he replied, extemporizing rapidly. To disguise his own voice he whispered hissingly, seeking a tone of dark menace. "Barricade your office! The notorious nihilist Heloise Thsen has just been observed approaching it with armed writers. We are dispatching a Vengeance Squad to deal with her."
"Cancel that Vengeance Squad please, Gun Seven," the receptionist voice replied without hesitation. "The Ibsen woman has been arrested and handed over to government- Hey, aren't you Gaspard? I didn't tell anyone else about nihilism."
Gaspard indulged in a blood-curdling laugh. "Gaspard de la Nuit is dead! So perish all writers!" he hissed into the phone and hung up.
"Zane," he said to the robot, who was reading rapidly, "We've got to get back to Rocket House on the double. Heloise-"
At that moment the sweater girl came edging back into the room, a huge package in each arm.
"Shut up," she ordered, "and help me with these."
"No time now," Gaspard rapped out. "Zane, get your blue beak out of that book and listen-"
"Shut up!" the girl roared. "If you make me drop these I'll cut your throats with a hacksaw!"
"Okay, okay," Gaspard capitulated, wincing. "But what are these? Christmas-or Easter maybe?"
These were two large colorful packages. One was rectangular with wide red-and-green stripes and silver ribbon, the other was egg-shaped and wrapped in gold paper with large purple dots and tied by a wide purple ribbon with a big bow in it.
"No, Labor Day-for you," the girl told Gaspard. "You take this one." She indicated the ovoid. "Be very careful with it. It's heavy but very fragile."
Gaspard nodded and looked at her with some respect as he received the full weight. The girl must be huskier than she looked to have carried it in one arm. He said, "
I take it this is 'the brain' Flaxman asked for?"
The girl nodded. "Careful, don't joggle it!"
"Look, if it's such an all-fired delicate mechanism," Gaspard said, "we'd better not take it to Rocket House now. Some writers have started another fracas there. I just got a call."
The girl frowned for a moment, then shook her head. "No, we'll go right now and we'll take it with us. I'll bet they can use a brain at Rocket House. I've gone to a lot of trouble getting things set up for this trip and I don't want to back-track. Besides, I promised it that it could go."
Gaspard gulped and rocked a bit. "Look," he said, "you don't mean to tell me that this thing I'm carrying is alive?"
"Don't tip it! And stop asking stupid questions. Tell your browsing metal friend to take this other package. It's equipment for the brain."
"Look at this, Gaspard," Zane said excitedly at that moment, springing up and thrusting the black book in Gaspard's face. "Jewish robots! S'truth! Golems are Jewish robots-made of clay and powered by magic, but robots none the less. By Saint Karel, I never realized that our history goes back-" He noted the situation that had developed while he'd been absorbed in his book, froze for two seconds while he replayed to himself the last minute's conversation, then took the red-and-green package from the girl, saying, "Please excuse me, miss. At your service."
"Now what's that for?" Gaspard asked. That was a small handgun of greened steel which the girl had been carrying under the second package. "Oh, I get it-you're our bodyguard."
"Nuh-uh," the girl said nastily, hefting the wicked-looking weapon. "I just walk right behind you, mister, and when you drop that Easter egg-maybe because someone is trying to cut your throat-I shoot you in the back of the neck, right in the middle of the medulla oblongata. Don't let it make you nervous, you won't feel a thing."
"Oh, all right, all right," Gaspard said hufffly, starting out. "But where's Nurse Bishop?"
"That," the girl said, "is for you to figure out, step by logical step, as you watch for banana skins."