The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  "Just like diapers," Gaspard said.

  "You think that's funny," Nurse Bishop told him, "but on days when there's been an extra lot of hate in the Nursery those fontanels stink. Dr. Krantz says it's my imagination, but I smell what I smell. You get sensitive working here. Intuitive too, though I'm never so sure of that, sometimes it's just worry. Right now I'm worried about those three brats over at Rocket House."

  "Why? Flaxman and Cullingham seem reasonably responsible, even if they are crazy publishers. And then Zane Gort's with them. He's absolutely trustworthy."

  "Says you. Most robots are chuckleheads in my books. Always kiting off to hunt golems or something just when you need them and then giving you some screwy logical explanation ten days later. Robixes are steadier. Oh, Zane's all right, I suppose. I'm just nervous."

  "Are you afraid the brains will get upset or scared away from the Nursery?"

  "More likely get into mischief and irritate someone into taking a crack at them. When you work close to them like I do, you want to pick them up and smash them ten times a day. We're understaffed-just three nurses besides myself and Miss Jackson and Dr. Krantz, who only comes in twice a week, and Pop Zangwell, who isn't exactly a strong staff to lean on."

  "I can believe your nerves get frayed," Gaspard said dryly. "I've had a demonstration."

  She grinned at him. "I really blew you up last night, didn't I? Did everything I could to blast your male confidence and ruin your sleep."

  He shrugged. "That last might conceivably have happened without you, dear Nurse Bishop," he told her. "I didn't have anything new to read and without wordwooze I seem to sleep short and wake up sudden. But what you said last night about sex-" He paused, looking around at the silent silver eggs. "Say, can they hear what we're saying?" he asked in a hushed voice.

  "Of course they can," she replied loudly and contentiously. "Most of them are having look-listen. You wouldn't want them unplugged and put in the dark, would you, just so you could feel private? They have to be unplugged five hours a day anyway. They're supposed to sleep then, but all of them swear to me they never can sleep, the closest they can get to it is what they call black dreaming. They've discovered that consciousness never dies wholly, they say-no matter what we body-clogged people think. So you just say anything you want to, Gaspard, and forget about them."

  "Still-" Gaspard said, looking around again dubiously. "I don't give a damn what they hear me say," Nurse Bishop said, then shouted, "You hear that, you pack of dirty old men and hairy old lesbians?"

  "Whee-wheet!"

  "Zane Gort, who let you in?" she demanded, turning on the robot.

  "The old gentleman in the reception cubicle," he replied respectfully.

  "You mean you hypnotized the combination out of Zangwell as he lay there snoring and perfuming the air for seven yards. It must be wonderful to be a robot-no sense of smell. Or do you?"

  "No, I don't, except for a few powerful chemicals that tickle my transitors. And yes, it is indeed wonderful to be a robot and alive today!" Zane admitted.

  "Hey, you're supposed to be at Rocket House babysitting Half Pint and Nick and Double Nick," Nurse Bishop said.

  "It is true I told you I would," Zane said, "but Mr. Cullingham said I was having a disturbing influence on the conference, so I asked Miss Blushes to take over for me."

  "Well, that's something," Nurse Bishop said. "Miss Blushes seems a solid sensible soul, in spite of her little nervous flare-up yesterday."

  "I'm so glad to hear you say that. I mean, that you like Miss Blushes," Zane said. "Nurse Bishop, could I-? Would you-"

  "What can I do for you, Zane?" she asked.

  He hesitated. "Miss Bishop, I would like your advice on a rather personal matter."

  "Why, of course. But what possible good would my advice be to you on a personal matter? I'm no robot and I'm ashamed of how little I know about them."

  "I know," Zane said, "but you impress me as having a bluff common sense, an instinct for going straight to the heart of a problem, that is very rare, believe me, in both flesh and metal men-and women too. And personal problems seem to be remarkably the same for all intelligent or quasi-intelligent beings, whether organic or inorganic. My problem is highly personal, by the by."

  "Should I leave, Old Battery?" Gaspard asked.

  "No, please stay, Old Gland. Nurse Bishop, as you may well have noted, I am more than a little interested in Miss Blushes."

  "An attractive creature," Nurse Bishop commented without blinking. "Generations of flesh women would have sold their souls for that wasp waist and curves as smooth as hers."

  "True indeed. Perhaps too attractive-at any rate I have no problem there. No, it's the intellectual side I'm bothered about, the mental companionship angle. I'm sure you've noticed that Miss Blushes is a little-no, let's not mince words-really quite stupid. Oh, I know I've laid it to the shock she received when she was attacked in the riot (nasty business that, attacking a walking robot, a true robot) but I'm afraid she's naturally rather stupid. For instance she was completely bored, she told me, by the talk on antigravity I gave at a robots' hobby club last night. And she is very puritanical, as you'd expect from the profession built into her-but puritanism does narrow mental horizons and there's no two ways about it, even though prudery does have its rather dangerous charms. So there's my problem: physical attraction, a mental gulf. Miss Bishop, you're female, I'd deeply appreciate getting your impressions. How far do you think I should go with this lovely robix?"

  Nurse Bishop stared at him.

  "Well, I'll be a tin Dorothy Dix," she said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nurse Bishop lifted her hand. "Excuse me, Zane, please excuse me," she said. "I didn't mean to be flippant. You just threw me off balance. I'll do my best to answer your question. But to begin with you'll have to tell me how far do robots generally go with each other? Oh Lord, now I'm sounding flippant again, but I honestly am not too sure of my knowledge. After all, you're not only a different species of creature, you're an artificial species, capable of evolution by alteration and manufacture, which makes it hard to keep up with you. And then ever since the riots men and robots are forever being so careful of each other's feelings, afraid of upsetting our present state of peaceful coexistence, pussyfooting around instead of speaking straight out, and that makes for more mutual ignorance. Oh, I know you're divided into robots and robixes, and that these two sexes find some sort of comfort in each other, but beyond that I'm a little hazy."

  "Quite understood," Zane assured her. "Well, briefly here's how it is. Robot sexuality emerged in exactly the same way as robot literature and on the latter I'm truly an authority, even if I'm still up to my cheekplates in debt to my manufacturer and splitting royalties with him forty-sixty; you know, it's no joke being a free business machine, you're launched into life with a crushing debt load (since you're approximately as expensive as a space cruiser or re search satellite) and you knock yourself out just keeping up the interest payments, while your normal repairs, replacements and tune-ups are ten times bigger than a hypochondriac's doctor bill. Often you dream, as freedmen did in Roman times, of how much simpler it would be and how much more secure you'd feel if you were just a slave, owned and cared for by someone else, a light-hearted machine without responsibilities.

  "But I digress. What I want to explain to you is how robot literature emerged, as a background to help you understand the emergence of robot sexuality. So here goes, dear humans-hold onto your heads!" He briefly twinkled his headlight at Gaspard and Nurse Bishop in a robot equivalent of a grin.

  "The earliest true robots," he began, "(asexual, of course, or rather protosexual) were highly intelligent and could do their work very well-no human complaints on those scores-but they were subject to fits of extreme depression, often expressing itself in an exaggerated slave-psychology and leading to a sort of melancholia or involutional psychosis which even electroshock was well-nigh powerless to cure and which resulted in rapid general deterioration ter
minating only in death. Few people realized then how easily robots could die, or can die today for that matter, by Saint Isaac! They were blind to the awesome mystery whereby the churning of electrons in complex circuits gives birth to conscious mind and they had no idea of how easily that mind might wink out. Even today people seem to think that a robot doesn't need to be conscious, they think he can be taken apart and put in storage for days or decades and then be the same robot when he's put together again. By Saint Isaac, it is not so! Just a trickle of consciousness will keep a robot alive and essentially himself, but once even trickleconsciousness is broken (as by complete disassembly) that robot dies and any being made from his parts is another robot, a metal zombie. That's why we robots have to organize and to invoke the law to protect ourselves, why we feel about electricity the way you feel about air and water!

  "But once again I've digressed. I was talking about how early-model protosexual robots almost invariably suffered from melancholia and involutional psychosis, marked by slave-psychology.

  "Now in those primitive days there was a robot who was employed as a maid and companion by a wealthy Venezuelan lady. She often read novels to her mistress, a rare but not unheard-of service. This robot (no robixes then, of course, although her mistress called her Maquina) was developing melancholia of the worst sort, though the servicing mechanic (imagine, no robot healers in those days!) was keeping that from Maquina's mistress. In fact, the mechanic even refused to listen to Maquina's highly symptomatic dreams. This happened in the times when some humans, incredible as it may seem, still refused to believe that robots were truly conscious and alive, though these points had been legally established in many countries. In fact, in the most advanced nations robots had won their anti-slavery fight and been recognized as free business machines, metal citizens of the country of their manufacture-an advance that turned out to be of greater advantage to men than to robots, since it was infinitely easier for a man to sit back and collect regular payments from an ambitious, industrious, fully-insured robot than to have to care for and manage that robot himself and take responsibility for him.

  "But I was talking about Maquina. One day she showed an astounding improvement in spirits-no staring into space, no heavy-footed sleep-walking, no kneeling and bumping the head on the floor and whining, 'Vuestra esclava, Senora.' It turned out she'd just been reading to her mistress (who didn't much care for it, I imagine) Isaac Asimov's I, Robot and this old science-fiction romance had foreseen with such accuracy and pictured so vividly the actual development of robots and robot psychology that Maquina had felt herself understood and had experienced a great healing rush of relief. At that moment the Blessed Isaac's informal canonization by us metal folk was assured. The tin niggers-I'm rather proud of that designation, you know-had found one of their patron saints.

  "You can guess the rest of the story: therapeutic reading for robots, search for accurate robot stories (very few), attempts by humans to write such stories (almost completely unsuccessful, they couldn't capture the Asimov touch), attempts to have wordmills do the job (wouldn't work, the mills lacked the proper sensory images, rhythms, even vocabulary), and finally the emergence of robot authors like myself. Robot melancholia and involutional psychosis were markedly reduced, though not eliminated altogether, while robot schizophrenia remained almost untouched. That was left for an even more tremendous discovery.

  "But the birth of robot literature and robot creative writing was a tremendous advance just by itself, aside from medical benefits, doubly so because it came at a time when human writers were giving up and letting wordmills take over. Wordmills! Black mindless spinners of seductive sensory and emotional webs! Black wombs-excuse my heat, Gaspard-of mental death! We robots know how to value consciousness, perhaps because it came to us all at once, miraculously, and we would no more dull it with wordwooze than we would burn out our circuits for kicks. Of course a few robots become excessive in their use of electricity, but they're a tiny addicted minority and soon die from overload if they don't find salvation in Electro-addicts Anonymous. Let me tell you-"

  He stopped because Nurse Bishop was waving her hand at him.

  "Excuse me, Zane, all this is most interesting, but I'm going to have to turn the brats in ten minutes and attend to some other things, and you said you were going to explain robot sexuality, how it came to be and all."

  "That's true, Zane," Gaspard seconded. "You were going to explain how there came to be robots and robixes."

  Zane Gort turned his single eye back and forth between them. "How like humans," he said drily. "The universe is vast, majestic, intricate, patterned with inexhaustible beauty, vivid with infinitely varied life-and there's only one thing in it that really interests you. The same thing that makes you buy books, build families, create atomic theories (I imagine) or, once upon a time, write poetry. Sex."

  As they started to protest he swiftly continued, "Never mind. We robots are every bit as interested in our own brand of sex-with its exquisite metal congruencies, its fiercely invasive electron storms, its impetuous violations of the most intimate circuitry-as you are in yours!"

  And he twinkled his headlamp at them roguishly.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  "At the robot servicing center of Dr. Willi von Wuppertal at Dortmund, Germany," Zane began, "that wise and empathetic old engineer was letting sick robots experiment in giving themselves electroshock, deciding for themselves on voltage, amperage, duration, and other conditions. Electroshock, you see, has the same benign effects on ailing electronic brains as it does on those of humans suffering from depression and melancholia; however, as with humans, electroshock is a two-edged therapeutic weapon and mustn't be overdone, as the horrid example of electro-addiction re minds us.

  "Robots were rather asocial in those days, but two of them (one a newly developed, slimmed-down, ultrasensitive model) decided to take the jolt together, the same jolt, in fact, so that the electric current would enter the circuits of the one and surge through those of the other. To do this, it was necessary that they first plug in on each other's batteries and link wires between each other's motors and electronic brains. They were hooked up in series, you see, rather than parallel. As soon as this was accomplished and the final personal-batteries connections made, before they hooked up to the outside electricity source, they felt a wonderful exaltation and a tingling relief.

  "Incidentally, Nurse, this roughly answers your question as to just how far robots go. One mutual plug-in gives a light thrill, but for deep delight as many as twenty-seven simultaneous male-female connections are made. In some of the newest models-which I consider a bit decadent- thirty-three."

  Nurse Bishop looked suddenly startled. "So that's what those two robots were doing last week behind some bushes in a corner of the park," she murmured. "I thought they were repairing each other. Or trying to, at any rate, and getting their wires all crossed. But please go on, Zane."

  Zane shook his head. "Some of our people haven't the best manners," he said. "A bit exhibitionistic, perhaps. However, sexual desire is an imperious, impetuous, impulsive thing. At any rate, from the Great Dortmund Discovery, which of course resulted in the informal canonization of Saint Wuppertal, there sprang the entire gamut of robot sexuality, becoming a vital factor in the construction or alternation of all robots. (There are still a few unaltered robots around, but they're a sad lot.) Of course much remained to be learned in the way of skills for prolonging delight and making it complete, how to hold back ones electrons until the crucial moment, and so on, but the main step had been taken.

  "It was soon discovered that the sensations were strongest and most satisfying when the one robot was rugged-brunch or robost as we put it-and the other delicate and sensitive-silf or ixy we sometimes say. (Though too extreme a difference between the partners can make for danger, with the ixy one blowing out.) The two original Dortmund robots became the models for our male and female sexes, our robots and robixes, though the usual robot tendency to copy human biology and insti
tutions was at work too. For instance, it's become traditional for a robot-a brunch robot, I mean now-to have connections that are all of the pattern you humans call male, or plug-ins, while a robix has only female connections, or sockets. This can result in bothersome contretemps, as when a robix has to plug into a wall socket in an emergency. For this she carries a double-male connection, though it's an embarrassment to her and she'd dread to be seen using it except in the completest privacy.

  "You can understand now why Miss Blushes was troubled at the thought of being viewed with open sockets while being given emergency electricity.

  "Copying human institutions has also played a great part, not always for the best perhaps, in patterning robot courtships, marriages, and other degrees of attachment and types of union. It has certainly also discouraged the development of additional sexes and wholly new sorts of sexual thrill. After all, you see, since we robots are an artificial, manufactured species, now as often manufactured by robots as by humans, we could in theory engineer sex exactly the way we want it; design wholly new sexes (roboids, robettes, robos, robucks and even robitches have been among the names suggested), devise new sexual organs and modes of intercourse not necessarily limited to two persons (that sort of experience-daisy circuits, as they're called- is occasionally available to robots today but it's not talked about) and in general look at sex with a fresh creative eye.

  "So much for theory," Zane said with a little sigh. "In practice, we robots tend to copy human sex quite closely. After all, our lives are currently much mixed with those of flesh earthlings, and when on earth one acts earthy, especially in bed-or 'with hot cords out,' as we sometimes guttily put it.