by Fritz Leiber
The autocab whispered, "Where to, mister, or are you getting out?"
Maybe he ought to walk home, he thought, it was only ten blocks. Might do him good. He felt a swampy feeling welling up inside him-a dark cold dirty wet loneliness and self-contempt and need to have his ego stroked, no matter how. Dammit, why had he stopped Zane Gort from giving him the address of that robot whorehouse, or whatever they called it! Madam Pneumo's? He was weary, weary, weary; he hadn't slept since his graveyard-shift catnaps; but his moody misery outranked his weariness. Even mindless, let alone robot caresses would help tonight.
"Where to, mister, or are you getting out?" Conversational tone now.
Well, he could swallow his pride and give Zane a buzz right now. At least robots didn't gloat and say "I told you so" and you never had to worry whether they were asleep.
He took his phone out of his pocket and murmured Zane's code.
"Where to, mister, or are you getting out?"
The answer came at once, in sugary tones rather like Miss Blushes'. "This is a recorded message. Zane Gort regrets he is unavailable chatterwise. He is addressing the Midnight Metal Mind-Weavers Club on the topic 'Antigravity in Fiction and Fact.' He will be free in two hours. This is a recorded-"
"WHERE TO, MISTER, OR ARE YOU GETTING OUT?"
Gaspard stepped out of the autocab and started walking just before it closed and locked its carapace, darkened its windows, and started its meter again. The thought of being charged at the present moment for "necking time" was more. than he could bear.
TWENTY-ONE
Although it was crowded, that great gray barn of a coffee house, the Word, was heavy with history tonight and haunted by a thousand dark squat grumbling ghosts pursuing one pale mute wraith, beautiful but skeletally emaciated.
This was natural enough, since the Word, along with its remarkably similar predecessors, had witnessed the antics, fads and frustrations of one hundred years of non-writing writers and also provided perpetual lodging for the one thin dream that every even nominal writer seems to have: that some day he'll really write something.
The clustered green tables with pre-scarred round tops and the period kitchen chairs were a pitiful memorial to dead creative bohemias.
Since the writers' tables were traditionally waited on by apprentices, the effect was of a multitude of Shakespeares, Voltaires, Virgils, and Ciceros serving a banquet to boobs. The early-model robots tending the non-writers' tables added their touch of tarnished grotesquerie.
Three of the gently inward-curving walls were filled thirty feet high with stereo-portraits of master writers current and departed, but all of the wordmill period. They were somewhat larger than life size and packed together like the squares of a giant chessboard irregular at the top where newcomers could be stacked in. A few inches in front of each face floated a florid black signature, with an occasional printed name and a bracketed defiantly scrawled X. Somehow the effect of three thousand giant heads in lightfilled transparent cubic boxes-most of the heads grinning engagingly, a few sultry or brooding-was not at all restful or conducive to thoughts of cherished traditions and benevolent brotherhood.
The fourth wall was racked high with the trophies and mementoes of those active avocations which add so much color to a writers' back-cover: fishing spears and aqualungs, cleated climbing boots, slit-eyed sun masks, snap-on steering wheels, sports-model spacesuits (some with racing jets), detective badges and paralysis derringers, dumbbells and Indian Clubs, big-game rifles, compasses and belaying pins, loggers' axes and canthooks, the heat-browned spatulas and hot-dog tongs of short order cooks, jagged-topped tin cans darkly rimmed by petrified mulligan, gleaming featherweight sections of space-sail peppered by light-winds.
In a nearby corner was a small, dimly-lit chapel where were enshrined the antique voicewriters-and even a few dictaphones and electric typewriters-that the union's master writers had been using for their commercial work at the time of the changeover from men to mills. Some few of these primordial writers and writrixes, tradition whispered, had actually gone on to compose literary masterpieces published in limited editions at their own expense or that of nonprogressive semantically-oriented universities. But to their successors creative writing had been only a lifelong dream that grew mistier with the passing decades, until impulsively revived in this day of union decadence and discontent.
The Word was crowded tonight. The writers themselves were not too well represented because of the numbers holding hands in lonely circles in an effort to get the creative juices flowing-and the few who had been engaged at the time of the smash in personal-appearance tours in other cities and planets. But the non-writers were present in such numbers as to keep the serving robots whirring as they scuttled from table to table. The usual slummers were there who came to watch the wild writers in their native habitat and keep box scores on their sex lives, but tonight they were augmented by a horde of morbid curiosity seekers eager to view the maniacs who had wrought such destruction last morning. Among this throng, especially at the more desirable tables toward the center of the room, were individuals and little groups who gave the impression of having deeper purposes than mere thrill-seeking-secret purposes, probably sinister.
At the midmost green table of all sat Heloise Ibsen and Homer Hemingway, served by a triangle-faced teenage writrix dressed as a French maid.
"Babe, haven't we put in enough appearance now?" the big writer complained, the highlights shifting on his shaven head as it sagged. "I'd like to snatch me some sleep."
"No, Homer," Heloise told him, "I've got to get my hands on all the threads here at the center of the web, and I haven't yet." She thoughtfully peered round at the occupants of the nearby tables, jingling her necklace of skulls. "And you've got to show yourself to your public, or that rugged mug of yours will start devaluating."
"But gee, Babe, if we went to bed now, maybe we could even-you know." He leered at her appealingly.
"In the mood at last, eh?" she said curtly. "Well, I'm afraid I'm not. With that buttock shield I'd keep thinking I was bedding down with the transparent man. By the way, do you sit on it or in front of it or behind it or what?"
"On it, of course. That's the wonder of it, Babe-a built-in air cushion." He softly jounced a few times to demonstrate. The motion was rather like that of a cradle rocking and his upper eyelids began to descend.
"Wake up!" Heloise commanded. "I'm not going to be squired by a snore. Do something to stay awake. Order a stinger or some flaming coffee."
Homer gave her a hurt look as he called to the apprentice serving their table, "Kid! Bring me a glass of double-irradiated milk, 150 Fahrenheit."
"Crush four caffeine tablets in it," Heloise added.
"Nix on that, Babe!" Homer protested in manly, hollow chested tones. "I never run a doped race in my life, not even a kookie stay-awake marathon like this. No pep-pills in that milk, kid. Hey, haven't I seen you somewheres before?"
"Oui, M'sieu Hemingway, you 'ave seen," the teenager replied with a simper and wriggle. "I am Suzette, au'sor wiz Toulouse La Rimbaud of ze book Lovelives of a French Tweenie. Ze tweenie, she means many s'ings-bo's in ze pantry and in ze bed. But now I mus' order M'sieu ze jus'-so-'ot milk."
Homer watched her little butt wagging under the abbreviated black silk skirt as she hurried toward a service door.
"Gee, Babe," he commented, "doesn't it give you a pang to think of an innocent little doll like that knowing to talk about perversions and all?"
"That little doll," Heloise said flatly, "knew all about perversions and how to use them to make friends and influence people before you posed with your first prop tiller and tropical sunset cyclorama."
Homer shrugged. "Maybe so, Babe," he said softly, "but it doesn't offend me. Tonight I feel sort of mystic, woozy-dreamy you might say, in sympathy with all things." He frowned deeper and deeper as Heloise stared at him incredulously. "F'rinstance, all them heads up there, what are they thinking? Or I wonder about robots. I wonder do robo
ts feel hurt like we do? That one over there that just got the flaming coffee spilt on him-does he feel pain? A guy tells me they can even have sex, they do it by electricity. Pain too? Did that pink robot feel pain when I squirted my flamer at her? It's a sobering thought."
Heloise chortled. "She couldn't have had any happy memories of you judging by the way she soured you with sticky foam this afternoon as if you were a 4-11 fire!"
"Don't laugh, Babe!" Homer protested. "My best sailing suit was ruined. My lucky one."
"You looked so funny covered with all that goo."
"Well, you didn't cut such a fine figure yourself, ducking around behind me and the stooges to keep from getting mucked up. Which reminds me, why the lie to me about why we was going to Rocket House and what was going on there? They wasn't signing up any writers I could see and you didn't ask them a thing about it anyways. First you start to ask them about their secret and then right away you're talking about something I never heard of. Wordmill Avengers and the Noose. What was them things, Babe, anyhow?"
"Oh be quiet! That was just a false trail Gaspard laid for me, the little trickster. I've got to try to sort out the real facts myself now."
"But I want to know all about it, Babe. As long as I can't sleep I'll be woozy-dreamy and thinking about the Green Bay Packers and life and wanting to know all about everything."
"Listen to me think then," Heloise snapped at him. Her features tightened and she began to speak in staccato fashion, softly at first: "Racket House, seemingly asleep, is wide awake. They had a fink planted in the union-Gaspard. They're in touch with the writing robots-Zane Gort-and the government-Miss Blushes. When we burst in on them, they acted like men with something to lose, not men who didn't care. Flaxman jittered like a rabbit with a vault full of lettuce. He'd been doodling pictures of eggs with names under them that sounded like writers, only I couldn't place any of them-I'll bet that means something."
"Eggs?" Homer interrupted. "You mean circles, Babe?"
"No, I mean eggs." She shrugged and continued staccato: "As for Cullingham, he was cool and crafty as a cucumber when I grilled him."
"Hey, what about this Cullingham?" Homer interrupted again, suspiciously. "I thought you was getting sweet on him the way you was slapping him around."
"Shut up! Be no surprise if I was, though-the man seems to be a good cold-blooded thinker, instead of having a sponge mind like Gaspard or a mystic muscle body like you."
"A cold-blooded guy wouldn't be any good in bed, would he?"
"You never can tell till they're tested by an expert. Cullingham's icy and shrewd, but I'll bet if we kidnapped him I could burn the secret of Racket House out of him."
"Babe, if you think I'm going to start kidnapping new boyfriends for you-"
"Shut up!" Heloise was by now fairly excited and thoroughly impatient. Hers was not a gentle voice at the best of times and the loud-hissed injunction to Homer caused a small hiatus in the conversations around them. Unheeding, she went on, "This is business I'm talking, Homer. And here's how it sums up: Racket House has something up its sleeve and they're vulnerable to kidnapping!"
TWENTY-TWO
" Racket House has something up its sleeve and they're vulnerable to kidnapping."
Sharp ears at nearby tables-and directional mikes at further ones-that had up to this point been catching only fragments of Heloise's monologue, heard that one sentence dearly.
Seekers who had come that night to the Word on the hunt for hints and leads in a promising but perplexing commercial crisis decided they had found the clue they wanted.
Trains of action were set in motion. With various figurative groans, dankings and squeals, wheels started to turn.
The chief actors among those reacting constituted a vivid cross-section of the money-obsessed division of Space-Age man.
Winston P. Mears, four-star operative of the Federal Bureau of Justice, memorized the following memorandum to himself: Rocket's sleeves bulge. Eggs? Cucumbers? Lettuce? Contact Miss Blushes. The fantastic aspects of the Wordmills Case did not trouble Mears at all. He was inured to a society in which almost any action of individuals could be construed as a crime, but in which any crime committed by organizations or groups could be justified six ways. Even the wanton destruction of the wordmills seemed nothing out of the ordinary in a world used to maintaining its economy by destroying objects of value. Mears, plump and rubicund, was wearing the cover personality of Good Charley Hogan, a big plankton-and-algae man from Baja, California.
Gil Hart, industrial trouble-blaster, rejoiced that he would now be able to tell Messrs. Zachery and Zobel of Proton Press that their suspicions of their colleagues and closest competitors were fully justified. The private hand blew out his flaming shot and downed the fiery tot of bourbon. A smile creased his blue-shaded cheeks. Kidnapping? He might try a spot of that himself to shake loose Rocket's secret. After all, industrial kidnapping had become a commonplace in a society where two centuries of government savant-snatching and general man-grabbing had set the standards. Be fun if he could arrange to snatch a gal from Rocket. Someone lively and talkative, like this Ibsen bomb, but preferably less robust. Hellions were fine, so long as they didn't pack too hard a punch.
Filippo Fenicchia, interplanetary gangster known as the Garrote, smiled ironically and closed the eyes that provided all the life there was in his long pale face. He was one of the old habituйs of the Word, who came to watch the funny writers, and it amused him that business opportunities-duties, to his way of looking at it-should pursue him even here. The Garrote was a tranquil man, serene in his knowledge that fear is humankind's most basic and enduring emotion and that playing on fear is therefore always the surest means of livelihood, whether in the days of Milo and Clodius, Cesar Borgia, or Al Capone. The earlier mention of eggs stuck in his mind. He decided he must consult the Memory.
Clancy Goldfarb, professional book-hijacker so adroit that his outfit was unofficially recognized as the fourth most powerful book distributor, decided that what most likely bulked Rocket's sleeve was books milled in excess of quota. Lighting a foot-long pencil-thin Venusian cheroot, he began to plan one of his perfect robberies.
Cain Brinks was a robot adventure-author, whose Madam Iridium was the chief fictional rival to Zane Gort's Dr. Tungsten. Currently Madam Iridium and the Acid Beast was outselling Dr. Tungsten Reams a Nut by five to four. On overhearing Heloise's strident whisper, Cain Brinks had almost dropped the tray of Martian martinis he was carrying. To penetrate the Word undetected, Cain Brinks had this afternoon tarnished himself to the point of fine pitting so as to be able to impersonate a robot waiter. Now this piece of masochism had paid off. He knew in a flash what Rocket House had up its sleeve-a Zane Gort determined to become the czar of human fiction-and he began to lay plans to cut in.
While these reactions were occurring, a strange cortege was wending its way into the Word, moving between the green tables toward the center of the room. It consisted of six slim haughty young men arm in arm with six scrawny haughty elderly ladies, followed by a jewel-studded robot wheeling a dolly. The young men were conspicuously longhaired and wore black turtle-neck sweaters and tight black slacks-the effect was almost but not quite one of leotards. The scrawny old ladies wore sheath evening dresses of gold or silver lame and were bedecked with diamonds in dazzling ropes, bracelets, pendants, and tiaras.
"My God, Babe," Homer Hemingway summarized succinctly, "look at the rich bitches and the black pansies, will you?"
The cortege stopped just short of their table. The leading female, whose diamonds were so many and scintillating they hurt the eye, looked around her superciliously.
Homer, his sleepy mind wandering like a child's, said complainingly to Heloise, "I wonder what's taking that kid so long with my milk. If she's been putting in any pep pills-"
"Aphrodisiacs, more likely, if she thinks you're worth it," Heloise told him in a quick aside while staring fascinatedly at the newcomers.
The bediamonded female anno
unced in a voice suitable for rebuking bellboys, "We are seeking the head of the writers' union."
Heloise, never at a loss, leaped up. "I am the ranking member present of the executive committee."
The female looked her up and down. "You will do," she said. She clapped her hands sharply together twice. "Parkins!" she called.
The jewel-studded robot drew forward the dolly. On it were neatly stacked twenty four-foot-high columns of thin hardcover books in beautifully toned dust covers that themselves had a jewelly glitter. On top of these was something of irregular shape draped in white silk.
"We are Penfolk," the female announced, looking straight at Heloise and speaking in the penetrating tones an empress uses in a noisy market plaza. "For over a century we have preserved the traditions of true creative writing in our select circles, in anticipation of the glorious day when the horrid machines that trample our minds should be destroyed and writing returned to its only true friends-the dedicated amateurs. Over the years we have often execrated your union for its complicity in the plot to make metal monsters our spiritual masters, but now we wish to recognize your courage in at last destroying the tyrant wordmills. I hereby present you with two tokens of our esteem. Parkins!"
That bedizzened example of conspicuous expenditure twitched aside the white silk, revealing a mirror-gleaming gold statue of a slim nude youth driving a huge sword through the midriff of a wordmill.
"Behold!" cried the female. "It is the work of Gorgius Snelligrew, executed, cast and polished in a single day. It rests upon Penfoik's entire literary output during the past century-the slender tapers, in pastel dustcovers flecked with jewel dust, whereby we have kept alight the flame of literatureship down through the drear machine age now past: seventeen hundred volumes of deathless verse!"
Suzette chose that moment to come wagging up bearing a white-filled crystal goblet from which rose a two-foothigh blue flame.