The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  The argument went circling on from there, Flaxman and Cullingham bringing to bear their heaviest and most sugary persuasions.

  His drift completed, Gaspard at last stood beside Nurse Bishop, who had retired to the far end of the office once Rusty was talking glibly. Here whispering was possible without disturbing the others, and to Gaspard's satisfaction Nurse Bishop did not seem at all to resent his approach.

  As he freely admitted to himself, Gaspard was experimenting with a yen for this ravishing though acid-tongued girl-seeing how it fitted, as it were, trying on the infatuation for size. Now, with a shallow craftiness born of sexual desire, he sought to ingratiate himself with her by voicing some half honest sympathies he felt for her nursling brains in their present predicament. He murmured on for quite some time, very successfully he thought, about the brains' lonely sensitivity and refined ethical standards, the two publishers' crass approach, Cullingham's 'literary conceit, etcetera, ending with, "I think it's a shame they should be subjected to all this."

  She glanced at him coldly. "You do?" she whispered. "Well, I don't, emphatically. I think it's all a very sensible idea and Rusty's a dope for not seeing it. Those brats need something to do, they need to rub up against the world and get bruised, my God how they need it. If you ask me, our bosses are acting pretty nobly. Mr. Cullingham especially is a much finer man than I ever guessed. You know, I'm beginning to think you really are a writer, Mr. Knew-it. You've certainly been talking like one. Lonely sensitivity indeed! — you tend to your own ivory tower!"

  Gaspard felt considerably ruffled. "Well, if you think it's such a great idea," he told her, "why don't you point it out to Rusty right now? He'd listen to you, I should think."

  She grudged him another sneering glance. "My, a great psychologist as well as a writer. I should step in and take their side when they're all arguing against Rusty? No thanks."

  "We ought to talk this out," Gaspard suggested. "How about supper tonight-if they ever let you out of the Nursery?"

  "I don't mind," the girl said, "if supper and talk's all you have in mind."

  "What else?" Gaspard said blandly, invisibly shaking hands with himself.

  Just then the egg interrupted an argument Flaxman was developing about the debt the eggheads owed to humanity with a, "Now, now, now, now, now hear this."

  Flaxman subsided.

  "I want to say something, don't interrupt," came the tinny voice out of the speaker. "I've been listening to you for a long while, I've been very patient, but the truth must be spoken. We're worlds apart, you incarnates and I, and more than worlds, for there are no worlds where I am-no matter, no clay, no flesh. I exist in a darkness compared to which that of intergalactic space is brightest light.

  "You treat me like a bright child, and I'm not a child. I'm an ancient on the edge of death and I'm a baby in the womb-and more and less than either of those. We discarnates are not geniuses, we're madmen and gods. We play with insanities as you do with your toys and later with your gadgets. We create worlds and destroy them every one of your hours. Your world is nothing to us-just one more sorry scheme among millions. In our intuitive unscientific way we know everything that's happened to you far better than you do, and it interests us not one whit.

  "A Russian once wrote a little story about how on a bet a man let himself be locked alone in a comfortable room for five years; the first three years he asked for many books, the fourth year he asked for the Gospels, the fifth year he asked for nothing. Our situation is his, intensified a thousandfold. How could you ever think that we would stoop to writing books for you, to working out combinations and permutations of your itches and hates?

  "Our loneliness is beyond your understanding. It crawls and shivers and sickens eternally. It transcends yours as death by slow torture does the warm rosy blackout of barbiturates. We suffer this loneliness and from time to time we remember, not lovingly let me tell you, the man who put us here, the hideously talented egomaniac inventorsurgeon who wanted a private library of thirty captive minds to philosophize with, the world that consigned us to eternal night and then went on its scrambling, swinging, grabbing, tweaking way.

  "Once when I still had a body I read a supernaturalhorror story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a writer who died too soon to have had a chance to suffer the PSD operation, but who may have done an important bit to inspire Daniel Zukertort with the idea for it. This story, 'The Whisperer in Darkness,' was a fantasy about pink winged monsters from Pluto who put the brains of men in metal cylinders just like our metal eggs. You are the monsters out there-you, you, you. I always remember how that story ended: there's been an exciting scene going on, but it isn't until the end of it that the narrator realizes that his dearest friend has been helplessly listening in on the whole scene from just such a metal capsule. Then he thinks of his friend's fate-remember, it is mine too-and all he can think is, and I quote, '. . and all the time in that fresh shiny cylinder on the shelf. . poor devil. .'

  "The answer is still No. Unplug me, Nurse Bishop, and take me home."

  NINETEEN

  Even in the smallest things, life lulls us only to snap at us with tiger teeth-or swat us with a slap-stick. The reception cubicle at Wisdom of the Ages had seemed the most mustily tranquil spot in the world, a room that time had forgot, but when late that evening Gaspard returned to it a second time to pick up Nurse Bishop, a mad old figure came lurching through the inner door, brandishing at Gaspard a long ebon staff with two remarkably realistic serpents curled closely around it, and crying out, "Avaunt, dog of a newshound! By Hathor, Set, and black-clawed Bast, begone!"

  The figure was the image of Joe the Guard, even to the two twisty hairs in the margin of each ear, except that it reared instead of bending its back, had a pointy white beard that hung to the crotch and eyes open so wide that the red-branched whites showed all around the irises.

  Also, its gasping shouts perfumed the air ahead of it with the corpse-reek of alcohol that has been through the morgue of the human body.

  The facial resemblance to Joe the Guard was so great that Gaspard, keeping a wary eye on the waving serpent-twined staff, prepared to snatch and yank the wagging beard to test its genuineness.

  But just then Nurse Bishop came pushing past the ancient. "Down, Zangwell!" she commanded hastily, her nostrils wrinkling. "Mr. Noot's no reporter, Pop, all that newspaper work's done nowadays by robots. You watch out for those. And don't break that caduceus-you've told me often enough that it's a museum piece. And go easy on the nectar-remember the times I've found you holding pink elephants at bay and keeping pink pharoahs out of the Nursery. Come on, Mr. K'nut, let's get going. Tonight I'm fed with Wisdom to here." The back of her hand touched her little pink chin.

  Gaspard obediently followed her out, musing how nice it would be to have a girl, especially such a delicately luscious one, whose wisdom was truly all in her body, whose head was airy empty.

  "I don't think Zangwell ever really had to chase reporters," she said with a quick little grin, "but he keeps remembering that his grandfather did. Joe the Guard? Oh, he and Pop are twin brothers. The Zangwells have been family retainers of the Flaxmans for generations. You didn't know?"

  "I never even knew Joe's last name," Gaspard said. "For that matter, I didn't know there were family retainers in the world any more. How does anyone retain a job long enough to rate that classification?"

  The girl looked at him coolly. "It still happens where there's money and a purpose, like the Braintrust, that outlasts one generation. A purpose to which you can dedicate yourself."

  "Do you come from a long line of dedicated family retainers?" Gaspard wanted to know, but, "Don't let's talk about me," the girl replied. "I'm fed with me too."

  "I only asked because you're extraordinarily pretty to be a nurse."

  "What comes next in this approach?" the girl asked crossly. "That I ought to cash in on my face and figure by becoming a writer?"

  "No," Gaspard said judiciously. "A stereo starlet maybe but a
writer never. For that even the sweetest girl has to look as if she were wearing dirty underwear."

  The night outside was pitchy dark except for the pink glow in the sky from the rest of New Angeles and a few spots like Wisdom of the Ages that had an auxiliary electric supply. Perhaps the government felt that if there were no light on Readership Row the public would forget the destruction of the wordmills and the assessing of responsibility for it.

  "Kaput," Gaspard said. "Will the brains really turn down Flaxman's offer, do you think?"

  "Look," the girl answered stridently, "their first answer to anything is always no. Then they dither and swoop around and-" She broke off. "I told you I didn't want to talk about Wisdom, Mr. Gnu."

  "Call me Gaspard," he said. "What's your first name, by the way?" When she didn't reply he said with a sigh, "Okay, I'll call you Nurse and think of you as the Iron Bishop."

  An autocab with dim blue and red cruising lights and a yellow dome-glow came crawling along like a giant tropical beetle. Gaspard whistled and it scuttled tiredly to the curb. Top and side of the dull silver carapace swung back, they climbed in and the door closed over them. Gaspard gave the address of an eatery and the autocab moved off, blindly following a magnetized line in the rubberoid.

  "Not the Word?" the girl asked. "I thought all writers ate at the Word."

  Gaspard nodded. "But I'm classed as a scab now. The Word is practically union headquarters."

  "Is being classed as a scab any different from being one?" the girl inquired fretfully. "Oh excuse me, I really haven't any feelings about it one way or the other. My own job isn't union."

  "Just the same our jobs are a lot alike," Gaspard told her. "I am-well, was-a wordmill mechanic. I was in charge of a giant that produced far smoother and more exciting prose than any man can write, yet I had to treat it like any other nonrobot machine-this autocab, say. Whereas you've got a roomful of canned geniuses and you have to handle them like babies. We do have something in common, Nurse."

  "Stop trying to soften me up for a pass," the girl snapped. "I never knew that writers were wordmill mechanics at all."

  "They aren't," Gaspard admitted, "but at least I was more of a mechanic than any other writer I knew. I always watched the real mechanics when they serviced my mill and once when they had the back plate off I tried to trace some circuits. The main thing was that I was enthusiastic about wordmifls. I loved those machines and the stuff they turned out. Being with them was like being able to watch a culture plate grow the medicine that will make you well."

  "I'm afraid I can't share your enthusiasm," the girl said. "You see, I don't read wordwooze, I only read the old books the brains pick for me."

  "How can you stand them?" Gaspard asked.

  "Oh, I manage," she told him. "I have to if I'm going to keep within ten light years of half understanding those brats."

  "Yes, but is it fun?"

  "What's fun?" She stamped a foot. "My God, but this cab crawls!"

  "It's only got its batteries to go on," Gaspard reminded her. "See the lights ahead? We'll be back to power in a block. It would be nice if they could apply anti-gravity to cabs, though-then we could fly where we're going."

  "Why can't they?" she asked, as if it were Gaspard's fault.

  "It's a matter of size," he told her. "Zane Gort explained it to me a few days ago. Anti-gravity fields are all little short-range fields, like the packing force around an atomic nucleus. They can float stub-missiles but not spaceships, suitcases but not autocabs. If we were small as mice or even cats-"

  "Cats taking cabs doesn't excite me. Is Zane Gort an engineer?"

  "Not unless writing adventure stories for other robots counts-they're full of physics, I believe. But like most of the newer robots he has a lot of hobbies that are almost second professions. Why, he has spools feeding new information into him twenty-four hours a day."

  "You like robots, don't you?"

  "Don't you?" Gaspard demanded, a sudden hardness in his voice.

  The girl shrugged. "They're no worse than some people. They just leave me cold, like lizards."

  "That's a rotten comparison. And completely inaccurate."

  "It is not. Robots are cold-blooded like lizards, aren't they? At least they're cold."

  "Would you expect them to steam-heat themselves just to please you? What has hot-bloodedness ever done for humanity except to make people bitch and declare wars?"

  "It's accomplished a few acts of courage and romance. You know, you're a lot like a robot yourself, Gaspard. Cool and mechanical. I bet you'd like a girl who blew electricity at you, or whatever it is robots do, as soon as you pressed her Love Button."

  "But robots aren't like that! They're anything but mechanical. Zane Gort-"

  The autocab stopped at a brightly lit doorway. A slim golden tentacle came weaving out of the doorway, rippling jollily like a snake that has been taught to shimmy. It helped lift the carapace, then flicked Gaspard very lightly on the shoulder.

  A pair of cupid's-bow lips budded on the end of the supple, tapering rope of gold. Then they bloomed, opening like a flower.

  "Let me guide you and your lady to Engstrand's Interstellar Eatery," lisped the tentacle. "The Cuisine of Space."

  TWENTY

  Engstrand's cuisine was not quite as empty and cold as interstellar space or even a robot's caress, and there was no lizard on the menu. Still, the food was somewhat on the sick side. The drinks were healthy enough, however. After a bit Nurse Bishop let herself be coaxed into telling how she had got interested in the eggheads because when she was a little girl she'd been taken to visit them by an aunt who was herself a Braintrust nurse. Gaspard in turn told about wanting since childhood to become a writer simply because he'd always loved wordwooze, instead of drifting into the business like most authors through stereo, TV, modeling, or public relations work. He started to describe exactly what it was that made wordwooze-especially that of certain mills-so wonderful, but his voice got a little too loud and a fidgety, spider-thin old man at the next table made it an excuse to cut in.

  "You're right about that, young man," the oldster called across. "It's the wordmill that counts every time, not the writer. I read every book Scribner Scribe One ever milled, no matter what writer's name they tacked onto it afterwards. That machine had more juice than any other three working together. Sometimes I had to hunt through the fine print to make sure I was getting SS One, but it was worth it. Only SS One would leave me with that wonderful empty feeling, my mind a warm dark blank. Read the wordmill, I always said."

  "I don't know about that, dear," commented the plump, white-haired, pucker-mouthed woman beside him. "It's always seemed to me that Heloise Ibsen's work has a certain quality, no matter what machine she uses."

  "Moon cheese!" the old man said derisively. "They just use the same program for all her sex-epics, but the quality of the wordmill comes through every time and the Ibsen name or any other doesn't affect that one bit. Writers!" His face darkened as its wrinkles deepened. "They all ought to be lined up and shot after what they did this mormngl Blowing up amusement parks and poisoning ice-cream factories isn't in it for sheer evil. The government's saying it's not so bad and by tomorrow they'll be saying it's suzieswell, but I can always tell when they're covering up a major catastrophe. The news screen starts flickering in a hypno-rhythm for one thing. Did you hear what those writers did to SS One? Nitric acid! They ought to be lined up and have done to them what they did to those mills. The ones that did it to Old SS One ought to have plastic funnels rammed down their throat and-"

  "Dear!" the old lady cautioned him. "People are trying to enjoy their dinners."

  Gaspard, his mouth full of yeast steak, simultaneously smiled and shrugged apologetically at the old man and pointed his fork at his bulging cheek.

  "That's all right, Mam," Nurse Bishop called to her. "His idea might be a good one for getting down this interplanetary kelp chowder." She looked at Gaspard. "How did you get into the writers' union, anyway? Thro
ugh Heloise Ibsen?" she asked even more loudly, coming around the table to pound him on the back when he choked. The old man glared.

  In spite of, or more likely because of this incident, Gaspard made his pass at Nurse Bishop almost as soon as they were again in an autocab.

  "No," she said harshly, lifting his hands away from her and throwing them down in his lap. "You said it was for supper and talk. Supper and talk it is. I know something about what's been happening to you today. After the manic kick you're getting tired and hurt-feeling and lost, and you want sex the way a baby wants its bottle. Well, I'm not changing any more diapers or fontanels for now, thank you. I spend all day with a lot of nasty old babies in tin cans trying to pin my mind down and stick their ideas into it, I don't intend to spend the night submitting to anything like that on the physical level. You don't need a woman anyway, you need a nurse. Oh, shut up!"

  The final command seemed to be directed at both of them.

  Gaspard sat in huffy silence until the autocab had nosed its blind magnetic way within four blocks of her address. Then, "I got to be an apprentice writer," he said, "through my uncle, who was a master wave-guide plumber." Then he began to feed coins into the autocab's slots.

  "I supposed it was something like that," Nurse Bishop said, standing up as the carapace lifted after the last coin had chinked in. "Thanks for the dinner and the talk. Sometimes even the stupidest talk is hard to do, especially when I'm around, and you at least tried. No, don't come to the door-it's only three yards, you can watch me through it." She stepped out and as her apartment entrance scanned her, recognized, and opened to receive her, she said, "Cheer up, Gaspard. What's a woman got, anyway, that wordwooze hasn't?"

  The question hung in the dark air like micro-skywriting after she was gone. It depressed Gaspard, chiefly because it reminded him he hadn't bought a new paperback for tonight and now was in no mood to hunt up an open stand. Then he began to wonder if her remark had meant that, for him, women and wordwooze were nothing more than avenues toward blackout.