by Fritz Leiber
The sentence was not finished, because at that moment the screen dissolved briefly into herringbone and then went dark. Voice cut off too.
Nobody minded. Everyone was too interested in congratulating each other and snagging victory drinks. Joe had another sharp struggle with his brother, who seemed to find the sight of so much rapid-fire imbibing more than sanity could bear. Fighting his way to his feet the old alcoholic pointed a beard-entangled shaking hand at a bottle of scotch Culhingham was lifting and cried out "There it goes!" in a bloodchillingly eerie voice and then followed with shaking hand and bloodshot eye what seemed to be the spirit double of the scotch bottle as it floated past him high in the air and out through the dosed door. "There it goes!" he wailed again despairingly. Joe with difficulty forced him back into his seat.
By that time the excitement had simmered down to the point where chunks of conversation could be heard.
Cullingham was explaining to Gaspard, "So you see it really is a matter of editorial cooperation. A kind of symbiosis. Each brain needs a sensitive human being that it can tell its story to, that it can feel through, a partner who isn't imprisoned. It depends on getting the right person for each brain. There's a job I'll enjoy working at! It'll be a little like conducting a marriage bureau."
"Cully, baby, you get the cutest ideas," Heloise Ibsen said with a ladylike chortle, grabbing his hand.
"Yes, doesn't he?" Nurse Bishop agreed, grabbing Gaspard's.
Gaspard said expansively, "Yes, and once we have wordmills again, with their bigger-than-human stock of memories and sensations, just think of what a three-way possibility we'll have. One egghead, one two-legged writer, and one wordmill-what a writing team that'll be!"
"I'm not sure new wordmills will ever be built, or at least used to the same extent," Cullingham said thoughtfully. "I've programmed them most of my adult life and so I've never said anything against them, but to tell the truth I've always been oppressed by the fact that they are dead machines that can never work by anything but formula. For instance, they never could make the corny but blessed mistake of writing about themselves, as the Half Pint-Bishop team has done." He smiled at Gaspard. "You're surprised I should be saying this sort of thing, aren't you? — but do you realize that although hundreds of millions of people have lived or at least gone to sleep by the power of wordwooze, it's never been established how much of its effect is due to actual story and how much to pure hypnotism and the perfect but sterile manipulation of a few fundamental symbols of security, pleasure and fear-an endlessly repeated formula for feeding the ego, stilling anxiety, and blanking out the mind? Who knows but that tonight may mark the rebirth of true fiction in the world? — fiction that grapples, takes chances, adventures, and explores!"
"Baby, how much have you been drinking?" Heloise asked him anxiously.
"Yeah, watch that scotch, Cully, it goes down easy when you're light-headed," Flaxman advised, coming up at that moment and giving his partner an odd look. "Listen, folks, the instant Half Pint comes through that door, I want everybody to stop what they're doing and give him a big hand. Don't let him feel like a spectre at the feast. Zane'll be trotting him in any minute now."
"Gallop, you mean, Mr. Flaxman-they ought to have been here five minutes ago, the way that robot tears," Joe the Guard opined, come up to sneak a couple of quick shots while his brother's attention was momentarily snared by the antique silver voicewriter that had just been trundled in from the adjoining office.
"Oh, I do hope there's been no more kidnapping," Miss Blushes squealed excitedly. "If anything happened to Zane now, I couldn't bear it!"
"There are varying views on kidnapping," Cullingham announced loudly, waving a new drink. "Some dread and deplore it. Others regard it as life's loveliest awakening."
"Oh Cully!" Heloise chortled, grabbing his arm. "Hey, you never did show me that rubber bitch. I think we ought to take her home tonight since you still got paid-up time coming on her, there are some tortures it takes two girls to apply. Cully, you cutie, did you actually call her Tits Willow?"
At that key name, loudly uttered, the femmequin stood up and, the white sheet still covering her from head to ankles, walked straight toward Heloise.
Pop Zangwell looked up from the silver voicewriter just in time to catch his brother pouring himself a generous slug of bourbon. The old soak began to shake again and his eyes went wide. "There it goes!" he quavered.
Flaxman shuddered out of the way of the advancing sheeted femmequin. "Do something about her, somebody!" he demanded, but all that happened for the moment was that Pop Zangwell's gaze traveled over and across Flaxman's head and the old man called hollowly, "There it goes!" Flaxman stared and shuddered again.
At that instant the electrolocked door flew open and a silver egg swooped into the room and circled it, sailing eight feet off the floor. It had a small eye, ear and speaker plugged directly into it without cords-a very odd sensory-motor triangle-and it was based on a little silver platform from which came two small clawed feet, like the hands of a harpy. In fact, if it looked like anything at all, it looked like a wingless metal harpy or a hydrocephalic silver owl designed by the team of Picasso, Chirico, and Salvador Dali.
As it circled him, Flaxman swung around slowly, waving his arms defensively and screaming in a thin high voice. Then the pupils of the publisher's eyes turned up and he slowly fell over backwards.
The egg swooped in to him, fixing its claws in the lapels of his coat and easing his fall.
"Don't be scared, Mr. Flaxman," the egg cried out as it sat on his chest, "It's just me, Half Pint, as regadgeted by Zane Gort. And we can shake hands now. I promise not to pinch."
FORTY-FOUR
"Project El was simply short for Project Levitation," Zane Gort explained when order had been restored and Flaxman revived, though still quite white about the gills, with a double shot of Bonnie Lunar Dew. "It was an engineering job, purely. No original scientific work involved at all."
"Don't you believe him, folks," Half Pint interjected from where he was perched on Zane's shoulder. "This robot is only fifty percent tin, the rest is pure genius."
"Quiet, I have the floor," Zane told him. "No, I simply made use of the fact that antigravity fields capable of supporting small objects have been technologically feasible for several years. The field generator is in the platform at Half Pint's base. He varies the field and tips it for flying in a simple way which I'll explain in a moment, just as he controls the skeleton pinchers that serve him as hands.
"Actually, all of this set-up, except for the antigravity feature, could have been achieved over a hundred years ago. Even at the time the brains were excised and canned they could have been given manipulative and locomotive powers. But it wasn't done, wasn't even thought of, for over a century. To explain that amazing blind spot, I must go back to one Daniel Zukertort and the very interesting and enduring influence he had on his creations. That old boy did more to mold (yes, and thwart!) the development of things than anyone has ever realized.
"Daniel Zukertort wanted to create undistracted spirits, minds without any bodies at all. Now of course, as he himself knew very well, he didn't really do that, for the brains do have bodies just as much as any elephant or amoeba or robot-I mean they have nervous tissue, a chopped-down glandular set-up, a circulatory system even though it's run by an isotope-pump, and a digestive and excretory system depending on micro-regeneration of oxygen and on fontanel-carried trace food elements and trace waste products.
"But Zukie didn't want the eggs to think of themselves as having bodies, he wanted to suppress that fact, keep it out of their consciousness, so they'd concentrate on eternal verities and the realm of ideas, and not start thinking about how to operate in the real world again as soon as they got a little bored. So Zukertort proceeded to load the dice."
The phone began to blink on Flaxman's desk. Waving Nurse Bishop away, the publisher snatched up the receiver while signaling Zane to go on.
"Now as to Zukertort'
s dice-loading," the robot said. "In the first place he picked for his subjects artists and writers of humanistic bent-men and women who wouldn't be interested in engineering or apt to think of a hand, for instance, as a kind of tweezers or shovel, or of feet as being a sort of wheel.
"In the second place physiology was on Zukertort's side, for the brain has no feeling in itself, no sense of pain or anything like that. Touch the brain, torture it even, and you don't get pain, just weird sensations.
"Zukertort gave his sealed minds only the barest minimum of senses and powers. Sight and hearing, but none of the earthier, guttier senses. And the power of speech. He had to let them have that, so mankind could learn the spiritual discoveries the brains made out there in nowhere.
"But he set up the Nursery Rules in such a way that the eggs would think of themselves, and be thought of, as helpless invalids, paralytics. He even insisted on all sorts of outdated hygienic rules, like having the nurses wear masks. He wanted the eggs to be afraid of any activity except mental activity. He played on two of the strongest human urges: the desire, on the part of the brains, to be eternally helpless and cared for and the desire, on the part of the nurses, to endlessly mother and coddle and protect.
"Now, I think we all know the loss the brains feel the most keenly-the power of manipulation. That's why whenever they get mad they call human beings monkeys. It's an indication of deepest envy. Monkeys grabbing things, turning them over, twisting, prying, pulling, handling, feeling-"
"Zane!" Nurse Bishop was waving her hand excitedly. "I dig what you're getting at, but it's impossible! You can't go inside the eggs and attach some sort of machines to the stumps of their kinesthetic and voluntary-muscle nerves," she protested excitedly. "I've thought of that sometimes myself, but no one but Zukertort could have done it. No one else has or ever had the skill to go inside their shells. That's what I still don't understand about what you've done, bless you. How does Half Pint control his antigravity field or his claws?"
"I'm not talking about going inside their shells," Zane replied. "I'm not talking about anything one-tenth as difficult. Voicewriters-there's your clue, as it was mine. If the eggs can operate voicewriters, I told myself ten days ago, then with the proper sound-keyed instruments they could use their voices to operate artificial hands and a flying device and still have their voices, between times, for talking. Of course operating three signal systems on one channel took a little electron juggling and three foreign languages (one for a master control) but it wasn't too difficult.
"What's more, the eggs will eventually be able to use their voices to work instruments and devices of all sorts- not just little claws and float controls, but hammers, saws, cranes, spaceships, bulldozers, chisels, knives, microscopes, pens, paint brushes-"
"Hey!" Flaxman shouted, putting his hand over the phone. "Don't you steal my writers! They're supposed to stay in the Nursery and turn out stories, not go swooping around the Solar System painting lousy pictures and digging ditches on the moon and getting all worked up about woodcarving."
"Remember Half Pint's kidnapping," Zane Gort countered. "New experiences are exactly what will bring the greatest stories out of the eggs."
"Okay, okay-just as long as you consult me first." The publisher dove back again into his phone call.
"It's the honest truth, every word Zane's said," Half Pint put in. "I've come up from the Underworld after one hundred years, I've flown out of my own tin tomb, and I know."
At that a blast of boos, jeers, hisses and catcalls erupted from the TV screen, where the other twenty-nine eggs were watching delightedly.
Nurse Bishop squeezed Gaspard's hand. "The Nursery'll be a real madhouse," she said happily and loudly for all to hear. "We'll be looking back to the quiet days when the brats just screamed and sang. There'll be all sorts of visiting collaborators-we'll have to knock out walls. There'll be workbenches, ping-pong tables, life classes-"
Gaspard said, "I bet I get the job of adapting antigravity and manipulation to twenty-eight eggs, after Zane has shown me how on Number Two."
"It's not nearly as difficult as you imagine, Gaspard," Zane assured him, "and after the first few the brains themselves will be able to help you. I have in mind for them a wonderful electric workshop and a series of voice-operated tools approaching robot pinchers in versatility, strength and delicacy. The very thought of all the marvelous activity ahead of us makes me feel newly built-in fact I find myself getting a new, wildly zestful perspective on my entire future life." The robot paused and his single eye slowly swung around, stopped. "Miss Blushes," he said to the pink robix, "I have a question to ask you, a far-reaching proposal to make. Will you-"
"Listen here, all of you!" Flaxman commanded, springing up from the phone. "While you've been patting each other on the back and billy-cooing, I've been getting filled in on what other publishers are planning to do-and are already doing! The news is breaking all at once, and let me tell you that Rocket House had better pull some miracles right away or fold! Harper scientists have discovered how to convert advanced anadigital computers into wordmills! Houghton Mififin has done the same with a checkers-and-logistics machine! Doubleday has screened ten thousand potential scribes and weeded out seven who have real promise! Random House has made a system-wide search and discovered three talented foundling robots who have lived their entire lives among humans, without metal companionship, and in consequence think, feel and _write_ exactly like humans! Proton Press has a human sex novel on the stands by a two-year-old French robix originally built illegally for the vice trade. Dutton has two out authored by editorial directors. Van Nostrand is bannering a series of fictionalized case histories supplied by robot psychoanalysts. Gibbet House claims advances on a process for translating the classics into spicy wordwooze. Oxford Press has discovered on Venus a colony of artists who have lived for two generations in complete isolation from tunemill music, computed abstract pictures, and wordmill fiction- and fifty percent of the colony are _writers_! Unless we get off our tails and work like sixty-each egg for two-we'll be out in the street! And I mean you hulking big human and robot eggs as well as them! Gort, where's the next Dr. Tungsten book? I know there's been all this rescuing and antigravity engineering, but you were supposed to have the manuscript in two weeks ago!"
"One moment," the blued-steel robot said imperturbably. He spoke to his pink co-being. "Miss Blushes, will you enter into the companionship-and-solace agreement with me, the exclusive and eternal one?"
"Oh yes," she cried, throwing herself against his plastron with a hollow _bong_. "I'm yours, Zane, forever and wholly. Not one circuit shall be withheld. My windows, doors, and sockets shall always be open to you, beloved, by burning day and through the long watches of the night!"
Half Pint backed off Zane's shoulder, treading air near Flaxman, who did not even wince, but only said wonderingly, "You know, it's amazing what relief a man feels when his childhood nightmares come true."
Heloise Ibsen waved a highball. "Cully, baby," she called piercingly, "I think it's time you told everybody that your torments have been regularized."
"Right! Fellow Rocketeers, Heloise and I plunged into legal matriomony eleven hours ago. She now is mistress of half my voting stock and all my libido."
Gaspard turned to Nurse Bishop. "I haven't any voting stock and I'm not a tin genius," he said, "and I'm too big to fly. But I think you're ixy-the ixiest girl I've ever known."
"And I think you're real brunch," she told him, coming into his arms. "Almost as brunch as Zane Gort."
FB2 document info
Document ID: 2ae03d7a-88a5-43f8-9255-4a22a9fd8406
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 03.04.2012
Created using: TXT_Preparation, FictionBook Editor 2.4 software
Document authors :
Isais
Document history:
ver 1.0 — создание FB2, форматирование — Isais.
About
This file w
as generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/