Robots Have No Tails

by Henry Kuttner

  “Vitaplasm. So that was it. That’s why I had a lot of Vitaplasm sent over a couple of nights ago. Hm-m-m.” Gallegher examined the sleek, impermeable surface of the apparent dynamo. After a while he tried a hypodermic syringe. He couldn’t penetrate the hard shell.

  Instead, using a new mixture he had concocted from the bottles on his workbench, he dripped a drop of the liquid on the substance. Presently it softened. At that spot Gallegher made an injection, and was delighted to see a color change spread out from the locus till the entire mass was pallid and plastic.

  “Vitaplasm,” he exulted. “Ordinary artificial protoplasm cells, that’s all. No wonder it looked hard. I’d given it a decelerative treatment. An approach to molecular stasis. Anything metabolizing that slowly would seem hard as iron.” He wadded up great bunches of the surrogate and dumped it into a convenient vat. Something began to form around the blue eyes—the shape of a cranium, broad shoulders, a torso—

  Freed from the disguising mass of Vitaplasm, Jonas Harding was revealed crouching on the floor, silent as a statue.

  His heart wasn’t beating. He didn’t breathe. The decelerator held him in an unbreakable grip of passivity.

  Not quite unbreakable. Gallegher, about to apply the hypodermic, paused and looked from Joe to Grandpa. “Now why did I do that?” he demanded.

  Then he answered his own question.

  “The time limit. Harding gave me an hour to solve his problem. Time’s relative—especially when your metabolism is slowed down. I must have given Harding a shot of the decelerator so he wouldn’t realize how much time had passed. Let’s see.” Gallegher applied a drop to Harding’s impermeable skin and watched the spot soften and change hue. “Uh-huh. With Harding frozen like that, I could take weeks to work on the problem, and when he woke up, he’d figure only a short time had passed. But why did I use the Vitaplasm on him?”

  Grandpa downed a beer. “When you’re drunk, you’re apt to do anything,” he contended, reaching for another steak.

  “True, true. But Gallegher Plus is logical. A strange, eerie kind of logic, but logic, nevertheless. Let me see. I shot the decelerator into Harding, and then—there he was. Rigid and stiff. I couldn’t leave him kicking around the lab, could I? If anybody came in, they’d think I had a corpse on my hands!”

  “You mean he ain’t dead?” Grandpa demanded.

  “Of course not. Merely decelerated. I know! I camouflaged Harding’s body. I sent out for Vitaplasm, molded the stuff around his body, and then applied the decelerator to the Vitaplasm. It works on living cellular substance—slows it down. And slowed down to that extent, it’s impermeable and immovable!”

  “You’re crazy,” Grandpa said.

  “I’m short-sighted,” Gallegher admitted. “At least, Gallegher Plus is. Imagine leaving Harding’s eyes visible, so I’d be reminded the guy was under that pile when I woke up from my binge! What did I construct that recorder for, anyhow? The logic Gallegher Plus uses is far more fantastic than Joe’s.”

  “Don’t bother me,” Joe said. “I’m still skrenning.”

  Gallegher put the hypodermic needle into the soft spot on Harding’s arm. He injected the accelerator, and within a moment or two Jonas Harding stirred, blinked his blue eyes, and got up from the floor. “Ouch!” he said, rubbing his arm. “Did you stick me with something?”

  “An accident,” Gallegher said, watching the man warily. “Uh…this problem of yours—”

  Harding found a chair and sat down, yawning. “Solved it?”

  “You gave me an hour.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course,” Harding looked at his watch. “It’s stopped. Well, what about it?”

  “Just how long a time do you think has elapsed since you came into this laboratory?”

  “Half an hour?” Harding hazarded.

  “Two months,” Grandpa snapped. “You’re both right,” Gallegher said. “I’d have another answer, but I’d be right, too.” Harding obviously thought that Gallegher was still drunk. He stayed doggedly on the subject.

  “What about that specialized animal we need? You still have half an hour—”

  “I don’t need it,” Gallegher said, a great white light dawning in his mind. “I’ve got your answer for you. But it isn’t quite what you think it is.” He relaxed on the couch and considered the liquor organ. Now he could drink again, he found he preferred to prolong the anticipation.

  “I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst,” he remarked.

  “Claptrap,” Grandpa said.

  Gallegher said, “The clients of Adrenals, Incorporated, want to hunt animals. They want a thrill, so they need dangerous animals. They have to be safe, so they can’t have dangerous animals. It seems paradoxical, but it isn’t. The answer doesn’t lie in the animal. It’s in the hunger.”

  Harding blinked. “Come again?”

  “Tigers. Ferocious man-eating tigers. Lions. Jaguars. Water buffalo. The most vicious, carnivorous animals you can get. That’s part of the answer.”

  “Listen—” Harding said. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong idea. The tigers aren’t our customers. We don’t supply clients to the animals, it’s the other way round.”

  “I must make a few more tests,” Gallegher said, “but the basic principle’s right here in my hand. An accelerator. A latent metabolic accelerator with a strong concentration of adrenalin as the catalyst. Like this—”

  He sketched a vivid verbal picture. Armed with a rifle, the client wandered through the artificial jungle, seeking quarry. He had already paid his fee to Adrenals, Incorporated, and got his intravenous shot of the latent accelerator. That substance permeated his blood stream, doing nothing as yet, waiting for the catalyst.

  The tiger launched itself from the underbrush. It shot toward the client like catapulted murder, fangs bared. As the claws neared the man’s back, the suprarenals shot adrenalin into the blood stream in strong concentration.

  That was the catalyst. The latent accelerative factor became active.

  The client speeded up—tremendously. He stepped away from the tiger, which was apparently frozen in midair, and did what seemed best to him before the effect of the accelerator wore off. When it did, he returned to normal—and by that time he could be in the supply station of Adrenals, Incorporated, getting another intravenous shot—unless he’d decided to bag his tiger the easy way.

  It was as simple as that.

  “Ten thousand credits,” Gallegher said, happily counting them. “The balance due as soon as I work out the catalytic angle. Which is a cinch. Any fourth-rate chemist could do it. What intrigues me is the forthcoming interview between Harding and Murdoch Mackenzie. When they compare the time element, it’s going to be funny.”

  “I want a drink,” Grandpa said. “Where’s a bottle?”

  “Even in court, I think I could prove I only took an hour or less to solve the problem. It was Harding’s hour, of course, but time is relative. Entropy—metabolism—what a legal battle that would be! Still, it won’t happen. I know the formula for the accelerator and Harding doesn’t. He’ll pay the other forty thousand—and Mackenzie won’t have any kicks. After all, I’m giving Adrenals, Incorporated the success factor they needed.”

  “Well, I’m still going back to Maine,” Grandpa contended. “Least you can do is give me a bottle.”

  “Go out and buy one,” Gallegher said, tossing the old gentleman several credits. “Buy several. I often wonder what the vintners buy—”

  “Eh?”

  “—one-half so precious as the stuff they sell. No, I’m not tight. But I’m going to be.” Gallegher clutched the liquor organ’s mouthpiece in a loving grip and began to play alcoholic arpeggios on the keyboard. Grandpa, with a parting sneer at such newfangled contraptions, took his departure.

  Silence fell over the laboratory. Bubbles and Monstro, the two dynamos, sat quiescent. Neither of them had bright blue eyes. Gallegher experimented with cocktails and felt a warm, pleasant g
low seep through his soul.

  Joe came out of his corner and stood before the mirror, admiring his gears.

  “Finished skrenning?” Gallegher asked sardonically.

  “Yes.”

  “Rational being, forsooth. You and your philosophy. Well, my fine robot, it turned out I didn’t need your help after all. Pose away.”

  “How ungrateful you are,” Joe said, “after I’ve given you the benefit of my superlogic.”

  “Your…what? You’ve slipped a gear. What superlogic?

  “The third stage, of course. What we were talking about a while back. That’s why I was skrenning. I hope you didn’t think all your problems were solved by your feeble brain, in that opaque cranium of yours.”

  Gallegher sat up. “What are you talking about? Third-stage logic? You didn’t—”

  “I don’t think I can describe it to you. It’s more abstruse than the noumenon of Kant, which can’t be perceived except by thought. You’ve got to be able to skren to understand it, but—well, it’s the third stage. It’s…let’s see…demonstrating the nature of things by making things happen by themselves.”

  “Experiment?”

  “No. By skrenning, I reduce all things from the material plane to the realm of pure thought, and figure out the logical concepts and solutions.”

  “But…wait. Things have been happening! I figured out about Grandpa and Harding and worked out the accelerator—”

  “You think you did,” Joe said, “I simply skrenned. Which is a purely superintellectual process. After I’d done that, things couldn’t help happening. But I hope you don’t think they happened by themselves!”

  Gallegher asked, “What’s skrenning?”

  “You’ll never know.”

  “But…you’re contending you’re the First Cause…no, it’s voluntarism…third-stage logic? No—” Gallegher fell back on the couch, staring. “Who do you think you are? Deus ex machinal”

  Joe glanced down at the conglomeration of gears in this torso.

  “What else?” he asked smugly.

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