The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  He broke off, groping for something else to order.

  Half Pint spoke into the silence. "Who do you think you are, Mr. Flaxman, that you can command the creation of great works of art and set a due-date?"

  "Shut up, you tin pipsqueak!" Flaxman said furiously. "Watch your language," the egghead replied, "or I'll haunt you. I'll swoop through your dreams."

  Flaxman started to roar a reply, then hesitated, looking at the egg very strangely.

  Judging the moment propitious, the chunky Little Leaguer launched into his speech.

  "Dear sir, we are fans and faithful followers of your Outer Sports and Space Rookie series. Our moonball team has been chosen by the Fannish Presidium to present to Rocket House, in recognition of its outstanding contribution to extraterrestrial sporting and space gamesmanship, the highest award it is within the power of the Presidium to grant."

  He lifted his hand. The two boys behind him uncovered the black box. "You win-" he turned around, dipped into the box, and abruptly launched at Flaxman a large gleaming ovoid which, although it shone a trifle more brightly, was identical with Half Pint.

  Flaxman screamed on an indrawn breath. The ovoid struck him on the chest with a little tump and rebounded crookedly.

  "— the Silver Moonball!" the Little Leaguer finished as Flaxman fell flat on his back.

  FORTY-ONE

  Rocket House had prettied itself up for the judging of the Silver Eggheads Writing Derby. At least Gaspard had hung a sign with those four words on it in the big office, Joe the Guard had brought in folding chairs and strung a few strands of silver bunting, Engstrand's was catering a refreshment table, and the escalator was running merrily again.

  The door with the electrolock had been re-repaired rather too well, unfortunately: it now tended, somewhat upsettingly to Flaxman, to swing open at unpredictable intervals without visible agency or a finger anywhere near the control buttons; however, a little heavy pounding on the lock by Joe the Guard seemed to have effectively suppressed this tendency.

  The partners had elected to read all the manuscripts between them-an even fifteen apiece, selected at random and presented to them anonymously. They had both taken Prestissimo Pills, which multiplied their reading speeds by an approximate factor of ten, and the endless sheets from the voicewriters moved across the faces of their two reading machines in nervously frequent rushes between hold-stills.

  Cullingham was taking a little longer on each chunk, or hold-still, of reading, but he was using a larger chunk. Far from showing exhaustion from his forty-eight hours with a ferocious flesh-and-blood woman, the fair editorial director was actually outpacing Flaxman little by little until at the halfway mark he was a full half manuscript ahead-as Gaspard, who had made a small bet with Zane, noticed to his chagrin; as far as Gaspard could tell, neither man was doing any skimming.

  All the Rocket House faithful were on hand; not one of them would have missed seeing the partners do some actual work for a change. Gaspard was there with Nurse Bishop, Zane with Miss Blushes, while the Zangwell brothers sat side by side. Pop Zangwell was fresh-bathed and very pale, quiet enough on the whole though inclined from time to time to weave his beard around his wrist and stare with vacant, apprehensive longing at the drinks end of the refreshment table, which was forbidden territory to him.

  It had been feared, especially by Gaspard, that Heloise Ibsen would strike a wrong or at least raucous note, but as befitted an editorial director's lady, she had appeared dressed in high fashion with a very low neckline, had been very nice indeed to everyone, and was now sitting quietly by herself, smiling composedly at Cullingham whenever he looked up from his contest chore.

  Even Miss Willow was present-it had turned out that Cullingham's lease on her had three days more to run. However, because Flaxman found her disturbing, the femmequin had been draped at the last minute with a white sheet, though it is rather doubtful if this made her any less "creepy" to the publisher.

  Out of tacit deference to Flaxman's weakness it had been decided not to have the eggs physically present, but a two-way TV link had been set up between the Nursery and the office. Unfortunately there was a defect in the circuit which caused the huge screen to black out occasionally or dissolve in a herringbone churning. At the moment, however, it showed Miss Jackson surrounded by a battery of small TV eyes; despite their pretensions of disinterestedness and lonely intellectual grandeur, the eggs were all showing a considerable interest in the judging of their dashed-off masterpieces, not one of which had failed to make the deadline. Half Pint, indeed, had been writing continuously at absolute top speed ever since his restoration to the Nursery.

  The two partners secretly enjoyed having a large audience; actually it was the only way either of them could ever get any work done. They made no comments and concealed all their reactions, favorable or otherwise, even while changing rolls, which created for everyone a nervous light-headed excitement. Conversations, conducted in undertones, skittered and veered.

  "I read some more in The Mauritzius Case last night," Gaspard remarked, shaking his head. "Boy, Bishop, if that's a sample of the oldtimers' mystery stories, I wonder what their mainstream must have been like!"

  "Hurry up and finish it," she told him. "The eggs have got another whodunnit picked out for you, by an old Russian master of suspense-The Brothers Karamazov. After that they're going to let you relax with a little rib-tickler about an Irish funeral called Finnegan's Wake, some light society reminiscenses entifled Remembrance of Things Past, a cloak-and-sword melodrama name of King Lear, a fairy tale called The Magic Mountain and a soap opera about the ups and downs of suffering families-War and Peace, I believe they said. They got lots of easy reading mapped out for you, they tell me, after you finish the two mysteries."

  Gaspard shrugged. "As long as they spare me the old mainstream, I guess I'll make it. There is one mystery that keeps tickling me, though-Zane's Project El."

  "Hasn't he told you about it? You're his friend."

  "Not a word. Do you know anything? I think Half Pint's in on it."

  Nurse Bishop shook her head, then grinned. "We've got our own secret," she whispered. She squeezed his hand.

  Gaspard lightly returned the pressure. "Who do the eggs think is going to win the contest?"

  "They won't say a word. I've never known them to be so secretive. It worries me."

  "Maybe all the scripts'll be knockouts," Gaspard suggested with grandiose optimism. "Thirty best-sellers smack off the bat!"

  The rolls had almost all been read and tension was rising sharply-as reflected by Joe the Guard having a little struggle to keep Pop from bee-lining to the drinks-when Gaspard, visiting the refreshment table, felt himself nudged by the steel elbow of Zane Gort, who with far-seeing diplomacy was fetching a plate for Heloise Ibsen.

  "Gaspard," the robot whispered. "There's something I must tell you about."

  "Project El?" Gaspard inquired quickly.

  "No, far more important than that-at least to me personally. It's something I'd never tell another robot. Gaspard, Miss Blushes and I spent the last two nights together-intimately."

  "Was it good, Zane?"

  "Thrilling beyond belief! But what I didn't realize, Gaspard, what truly startled and to a degree upset me, what I never in fact for a moment anticipated, is that Miss Blushes is such an enthusiast!"

  "You mean, Zane, you're bothered because you think she's had previous-"

  "Oh no, no, no. She was completely innocent-there are ways of telling-yet she almost instantly became a mad enthusiast. She wanted us to plug in on each other again and again-and for long periods!"

  "Is that bad? Watch it, here comes Pop--no, Joe's caught him."

  "No, it's not bad, Gaspard, but it eats up so much time, especially when one envisages a lifetime of such companionship lying ahead. You see, the moment of robot-robix union is the one time when a robot isn't thinking-his mind goes into a sort of ecstatic electronic trance, a blackout with lightning flashes. Now I'm used to thinki
ng twenty-four hours a day, year in and out, and the prospect of having huge chunks cut out of that thinking time is profoundly disquieting. Gaspard, I know you'll hardly credit this, but on the last connection we had, Miss Blushes and I were plugged in for four solid hours!"

  "Oh-oh, Old Bolt," Gaspard commented. "You're up against some of the same problems I had with Ibsen."

  "But what's the answer? When'll I do my writing?"

  "Is it possible, Zane, you're changing your mind about monogamy being the best solution for the author of the Dr. Tungsten stories? At any rate I think a certain amount of travel, or even flitting, is indicated. Hold it, they've finished the readings. Cullingham wins by a roll! Pay you later- I've got to get back to Bishop."

  G. K. Culllngham leaned back, blinking his eyes rapidly, squeezing the lids together. This time he did not return Heloise's smile, but only bowed his head. Then he said in a quack-quack burst, "How-about-a-conference-Flaxy before-you-start-that-last-one? "-his voice was trying to match the drug-goaded speed of his reading. He touched a button and the TV screen went black. "They'll-think-it's-just-the-bad-circuit-again," he explained.

  Flaxnian finished inserting his last roll in his machine and looked around at his partner. Cullingham at last got his voice under control, at least to the extent of not letting the Prestissimo Pills speed it up. In fact the words came out with painful slowness as he inquired, "How are your entries so far?"

  Flaxman's impassive look changed to one of deep sadness. With a painful hushed respectfulness, like one reporting the tragic toll of a flash-fire in a kindergarten, he said softly, "They stink. They all stink."

  Cullingham nodded. "So do mine. All of them."

  FORTY-TWO

  Gaspard's first thought was that deep down inside him he had known all along that this was going to happen. And that all the others must have known the same thing too-deep, deep down. How could anyone really have expected aged ego-maniacs living under incubator conditions to produce anything popular? Or stories about life in the raw to come from canned and coddled hyper-basket-cases? Suddenly Flaxman and Cullingham appeared to Gaspard as figures of tragic romance, friends of the forlorn hope, the lost cause, and sunset illusions.

  And indeed now Flaxman did shrug shoulders like a somewhat undersized romantic hero who bravely takes up tragedy's full burden. "Still-got-one-more-to-wade-through-a-matter-of-form," the publisher said briskly, bent his head, and spun his reading machine.

  Gaspard stood up and gravitated with the others over to Cullingham. They were like pallbearers clustering around a funeral director.

  "It's not lack of skill or inventiveness," Cullingham was explaining almost apologetically, his speech now more under control. "And although it might have helped, it's not even lack of editorial direction." As he said that he gave Gaspard and Zane a faint quizzical smile.

  "No simple human sympathies, I suppose?" Gaspard ventured.

  "Or strong plot-line?" Zane added.

  "Or reader-identification?" Miss Blushes put in.

  "Or plain guts?" Heloise finished.

  Cullingham nodded. "But more than that," he said, "it's simply the incredible conceit of the things, their swollen ego-centeredness. These manuscripts aren't stories, they're puzzles-and most of them insoluble at that. Ulysses, Mars Violet, Alexanderplatz, Venus Deferred, The Fairy Queen, and the riddling Icelandic bards aren't in it for sheer perverse complexity. It adds up to this: the eggheads have tried to be as confusing as possible to show how brilliant they are."

  "I told them-" Nurse Bishop started to say and then broke off. She was crying quietly. Gaspard put his arm lightly around her shoulders. Ten days ago he would simply have said, "I told you so," and launched into a new paean of praise to wordmills, but now he felt almost like crying himself, at any rate, so disturbed that he wasn't even impressed by the philosophic courage with which Cullingham was taking the collapse of his and Flaxman's dream project.

  "The eggs are hardly to be blamed," the editorial director pointed out sympathetically. "Being locked-up minds and little else, it was natural that they should come to look on ideas as things to play with, to fit together in odd patterns, to string and restring like beads. Why, one of the manuscripts is in the form of an epic poem, mixing together, sometimes in one sentence, about seventeen languages. Another tries-quite successfully at its level-to be an epitome of all literature, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead down through Shakespeare and Dickens and Hammerberg. In another the first letters of each word spell out a second story, highly scatological, though I didn't follow it all the way through. Another- Oh, they're not all as bad as that. A couple of them are the sort of thing you'd expect a gifted writer to do while he's still a college student and trying to dazzle the professors. One-by Double Nick, I'd guess-is even pseudo-popular and uses all the good clichйs and smooth techniques, but in a contemptuous, cold-blooded way, no warmth at all. But most of them-"

  "The brats aren't really cold-blooded," Nurse Bishop protested brokenly. "They're — . oh, I was sure that some of their books, at least, would be good. Especially when Rusty told me they weren't really writing new stories, most of them, but stuff they'd painstakingly concocted over a century and more for their own amusement."

  "That's probably a large part of the trouble," Cullingham said. "They're trying to dazzle superminds. Intellectual fireworks. If you don't believe me, just listen to this."

  He picked up a roll he'd set apart from the others, twirled it open a couple of feet, and began to read.

  "This idark motherlink lie spirit ash inner brinks firebucks a lazy headshell sings black o' this clobsit air whering marblying pillawrying and dying. Wish it. Push it. Smash it. Four in a butting mold tease inner ease maykister esau-"

  "Cully!" The cry came like a bugle call.

  They all looked around at Flaxman. The small publisher's eyes were glued to the jerking sheet. His face was radiant.

  "Cully, this is terrific!" he said without looking up or slowing the machine. "It's a system-wide knockout! It does everything a Scribner Scribe story can do and more. You've only got to read a couple of pages-"

  But Cullingham was already peering avidly over his shoulder and the others were jockeying around for glimpses.

  "It's about a girl who's born on Ganymede without a sense of touch," Flaxman explained, still soaking it up. "She becomes a nightclub low-gravity acrobat and the story travels around the system, there's a famous surgeon in it, but the sympathy with which the author presents that girl, the way he gets you right inside her. . It's called You've Felt My Hurtings-"

  "That's Half Pint's story!" Nurse Bishop revealed excitedly. "He kept telling me the plot. I put it last because I was afraid it wasn't much good, not as clever as the others."

  "Boy, would you make a lousy editor!" Flaxman chortled happily. "Cully, why the hell's the TV off? We got to tell the whole Nursery the good news!"

  After a half minute of maddening herringbone, during which the Nursery was informed of Half Pint's victory and reacted with odd squawks and garbled interjections, the screen flashed clear. The upper half of Half Pint-it had to be Half Pint-and his eye, ear and speaker were screen center, banked to either side and above by the twentynine eyes of the others and Miss Jackson's frazzled-looking face.

  "Congratulations, boy!" Flaxman cried, clasping his hands above his head and shaking them vigorously. "How'd you do it? What's your secret? I'm asking because-I hope they won't mind my saying so-I think all your pals can profit from it."

  "I just stayed glued to the voicewriter and let the mighty brain rip," Half Pint asserted drunkenly. "I started the universe whirling like a merry-go-round and grabbed at things as they went by. I saw my shell as a gigantic codpiece and raped the world. I unraveled the cosmos and rewove it again. I hopped on God's chair while he was off feeding the archangels and put on his creating cap. I-"

  Half Pint paused. "No, I didn't," he said more slowly. "At least that wasn't all I did. Tell you what, I had experience-new experience. I got m
yself kidnapped-the whole chase in the last third of my story is just my kidnapping, rewritten a bit. And then Zane Gort took me off on a couple of trips, that helped too, in fact it helped a lot more than-

  "But I won't say anything more about those things, because I want to tell you the real secret of my story-the deep down inside secret. I didn't write my story at all. Nurse Bishop did."

  "Half Pint, you idiot!" she squealed.

  FORTY-THREE

  "Yes you did write my story, Momma," Half Pint continued overridingly, his blank form seeming to swell the screen. "It all came to life when I was telling you the plot. I was thinking of you every minute, trying to make you understand. Trying to court you, really, because you're the girl in the story too, Momma-or maybe I am, maybe I'm the girl who cant feel-no, now I'm getting confused. . Anyway, there's a barrier, an anesthesia, and we get around it. ."

  "Half Pint," Flaxman said hoarsely, a tear trickling down his cheek, "I haven't told anybody about this, but there's a prize for winning this contest-a silver voicewriter that belonged to Hobart Flaxman himself. I wish you were over here right now so you could receive it and I could shake your- Well, anyway, I wish you were here, I really do."

  "That's all right, Mr. Flaxman. We don't need any prizes, do we, Momma? And there'll be lots of chances-"

  "No, by God," Flaxmnn roared, standing up, "you're coming over here right now! Gaspard, go-"

  "Gaspard doesn't need to!" Miss Blushes squealed loudly. "Zane left a minute ago to fetch Half Pint. He told me to tell you."

  "Who the hell does that tin hack think- Wonderful!" Flaxman cried. "Half Pint, boy, we're going to-"