The Second Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  “Rita, come back here!” a woman in the third rank of the crowd called angrily.

  Robie scanned the newcomer gravely. His reference silhouettes were not good enough to let him distinguish the sex of children, so he merely repeated, “Hello, youngster.”

  “Rita!”

  “Give me a polly-lop!”

  Disregarding both remarks, for a good salesman is single-minded and does not waste bait, Robie said winningly, “I’ll bet you read Junior Space Killers. Now I have here—”

  “Uh-uh, I’m a girl. He got a polly-lop.”

  * * * *

  At the word “girl,” Robie broke off. Rather ponderously, he said, “I’ll bet you read Gee-Gee Jones, Space Stripper. Now I have here the latest issue of that thrilling comic, not yet in the stationary vending machines. Just give me fifty cents and within five—”

  “Please let me through. I’m her mother.”

  A young woman in the front rank drawled over her powder-sprayed shoulder, “I’ll get her for you,” and slithered out on six-inch platform shoes. “Run away, children,” she said nonchalantly. Lifting her arms behind her head, she pirouetted slowly before Robie to show how much she did for her bolero half-jacket and her form-fitting slacks that melted into skylon just above the knees. The little girl glared at her. She ended the pirouette in profile.

  At this age-level, Robie’s reference silhouettes permitted him to distinguish sex, though with occasional amusing and embarrassing miscalls. He whistled admiringly. The crowd cheered.

  Someone remarked critically to a friend, “It would go over better if he was built more like a real robot. You know, like a man.”

  The friend shook his head. “This way it’s subtler.”

  No one in the crowd was watching the newscript overhead as it scribbled, “Ice Pack for Hot Truce? Vanadin hints Russ may yield on Pakistan.”

  Robie was saying, “…in the savage new glamor-tint we have christened Mars Blood, complete with spray applicator and fit-all fingerstalls that mask each finger completely except for the nail. Just give me five dollars—uncrumpled bills may be fed into the revolving rollers you see beside my arm—and within five seconds—”

  “No, thanks, Robie,” the young woman yawned.

  “Remember,” Robie persisted, “for three more weeks, seductivizing Mars Blood will be unobtainable from any other robot or human vendor.”

  “No, thanks.”

  Robie scanned the crowd resourcefully. “Is there any gentleman here…” he began just as a woman elbowed her way through the front rank.

  “I told you to come back!” she snapped at the little girl.

  “But I didn’t get my polly-lop!”

  “…who would care to.…”

  “Rita!”

  “Robie cheated. Ow!”

  * * * *

  Meanwhile, the young woman in the half bolero had scanned the nearby gentlemen on her own. Deciding that there was less than a fifty percent chance of any of them accepting the proposition Robie seemed about to make, she took advantage of the scuffle to slither gracefully back into the ranks. Once again the path was clear before Robie.

  He paused, however, for a brief recapitulation of the more magical properties of Mars Blood, including a telling phrase about “the passionate claws of a Martian sunrise.”

  But no one bought. It wasn’t quite time. Soon enough silver coins would be clinking, bills going through the rollers faster than laundry, and five hundred people struggling for the privilege of having their money taken away from them by America’s first mobile sales robot.

  But there were still some tricks that Robie had to do free, and one certainly should enjoy those before starting the more expensive fun.

  So Robie moved on until he reached the curb. The variation in level was instantly sensed by his under-scanners. He stopped. His head began to swivel. The crowd watched in eager silence. This was Robie’s best trick.

  Robie’s head stopped swiveling. His scanners had found the traffic light. It was green. Robie edged forward. But then the light turned red. Robie stopped again, still on the curb. The crowd softly ahhed its delight.

  It was wonderful to be alive and watching Robie on such an exciting day. Alive and amused in the fresh, weather-controlled air between the lines of bright skyscrapers with their winking windows and under a sky so blue you could almost call it dark.

  (But way, way up, where the crowd could not see, the sky was darker still. Purple-dark, with stars showing. And in that purple-dark, a silver-green something, the color of a bud, plunged down at better than three miles a second. The silver-green was a newly developed paint that foiled radar.)

  Robie was saying, “While we wait for the light, there’s time for you youngsters to enjoy a nice refreshing Poppy Pop. Or for you adults—only those over five feet tall are eligible to buy—to enjoy an exciting Poppy Pop fizz. Just give me a quarter or—in the case of adults, one dollar and a quarter; I’m licensed to dispense intoxicating liquors—and within five seconds.…”

  But that was not cutting it quite fine enough. Just three seconds later, the silver-green bud bloomed above Manhattan into a globular orange flower. The skyscrapers grew brighter and brighter still, the brightness of the inside of the Sun. The windows winked blossoming white fire-flowers.

  The crowd around Robie bloomed, too. Their clothes puffed into petals of flame. Their heads of hair were torches.

  * * * *

  The orange flower grew, stem and blossom. The blast came. The winking windows shattered tier by tier, became black holes. The walls bent, rocked, cracked. A stony dandruff flaked from their cornices. The flaming flowers on the sidewalk were all leveled at once. Robie was shoved ten feet. His metal hoopskirt dimpled, regained its shape.

  The blast ended. The orange flower, grown vast, vanished overhead on its huge, magic beanstalk. It grew dark and very still. The cornice-dandruff pattered down. A few small fragments rebounded from the metal hoopskirt.

  Robie made some small, uncertain movements, as if feeling for broken bones. He was hunting for the traffic light, but it no longer shone either red or green.

  He slowly scanned a full circle. There was nothing anywhere to interest his reference silhouettes. Yet whenever he tried to move, his under-scanners warned him of low obstructions. It was very puzzling.

  The silence was disturbed by moans and a crackling sound, as faint at first as the scampering of distant rats.

  A seared man, his charred clothes fuming where the blast had blown out the fire, rose from the curb. Robie scanned him.

  “Good day, sir,” Robie said. “Would you care for a smoke? A truly cool smoke? Now I have here a yet-unmarketed brand.…”

  But the customer had run away, screaming, and Robie never ran after customers, though he could follow them at a medium brisk roll. He worked his way along the curb where the man had sprawled, carefully keeping his distance from the low obstructions, some of which writhed now and then, forcing him to jog. Shortly he reached a fire hydrant. He scanned it. His electronic vision, though it still worked, had been somewhat blurred by the blast.

  “Hello, youngster,” Robie said. Then, after a long pause, “Cat got your tongue? Well, I have a little present for you. A nice, lovely polly-lop.

  “Take it, youngster,” he said after another pause. “It’s for you. Don’t be afraid.”

  His attention was distracted by other customers, who began to rise up oddly here and there, twisting forms that confused his reference silhouettes and would not stay to be scanned properly. One cried, “Water,” but no quarter clinked in Robie’s claws when he caught the word and suggested, “How about a nice refreshing drink of Poppy Pop?”

  The rat-crackling of the flames had become a jungle muttering. The blind windows began to wink fire again.

  * * * *

  A little girl marched, stepping neatly over arms and legs she did not look at. A white dress and the once taller bodies around her had shielded her from the brilliance and the blast. Her eyes wer
e fixed on Robie. In them was the same imperious confidence, though none of the delight, with which she had watched him earlier.

  “Help me, Robie,” she said. “I want my mother.”

  “Hello, youngster,” Robie said. “What would you like? Comics? Candy?”

  “Where is she, Robie? Take me to her.”

  “Balloons? Would you like to watch me blow up a balloon?”

  The little girl began to cry. The sound triggered off another of Robie’s novelty circuits, a service feature that had brought in a lot of favorable publicity.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked. “Are you in trouble? Are you lost?”

  “Yes, Robie. Take me to my mother.”

  “Stay right here,” Robie said reassuringly, “and don’t be frightened. I will call a policeman.” He whistled shrilly, twice.

  Time passed. Robie whistled again. The windows flared and roared. The little girl begged, “Take me away, Robie,” and jumped onto a little step in his hoopskirt.

  “Give me a dime,” Robie said.

  The little girl found one in her pocket and put it in his claws.

  “Your weight,” Robie said, “is fifty-four and one-half pounds.”

  “Have you seen my daughter, have you seen her?” a woman was crying somewhere. “I left her watching that thing while I stepped inside—Rita!”

  “Robie helped me,” the little girl began babbling at her. “He knew I was lost. He even called the police, but they didn’t come. He weighed me, too. Didn’t you, Robie?”

  But Robie had gone off to peddle Poppy Pop to the members of a rescue squad which had just come around the corner, more robotlike in their asbestos suits than he in his metal skin.

  TIME IN THE ROUND

  Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1957.

  From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the scene was normal again.

  The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog’s tail thumped the cushiony pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog’s face split in an upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long black tongue lolled.

  The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone called: “Hi, Butch! Sic ’em, Darter, sic ’em!”

  A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that, except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch’s gray dog.

  Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice: “Kill ’em, Brute.”

  The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.

  Butch yawned.

  “What’s the matter?” inquired Darter’s master. “I thought you liked dog fights, Butch.”

  “I do like dog fights,” Butch said somberly, without looking around. “I don’t like uninj fights. They’re just a pretend, like everything else. Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy—and you, too, Hal—when you talk to me, don’t just say Butch. It’s the Butcher, see?”

  “That’s not exactly a functional name,” Hal observed with the judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: “All right, Butcher, I suppose you’d like to have lived way back when people were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?”

  “I certainly would,” the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.

  “A kid can’t do anything anymore,” he announced dramatically. “Can’t break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose. Can’t get dirty except in the dirt-pen—and they graduate him from that when he’s two. Can’t even be bitten by an uninj—it’s contraprogrammed.”

  “Where’d you ever get so fixated on dirt?” Hal asked in a gentle voice acquired from a robot adolescer.

  “I’ve been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn,” the Butcher replied airily. “A swell book. That guy got dirtier than anything.” His eyes became dreamy. “He even ate out of a garbage pail.”

  “What’s a garbage pail?”

  “I don’t know, but it sounds great.”

  The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear and was whirling him around hilariously.

  “Aw, quit it, Brute,” the Butcher said in annoyance.

  Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no attention to his adversary’s efforts to renew the fight.

  The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. “You’re making too much of a rumpus,” he said. “I want to think.”

  He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.

  “Look,” Joggy said, “you wouldn’t hurt an uninj, for instance, would you?”

  “How can you hurt something that’s uninjurable?” the Butcher demanded scathingly. “An uninj isn’t really a dog. It’s just a lot of circuits and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic.” He looked at Brute with guarded wistfulness.

  “I don’t know about that,” Hal put in. “I’ve heard an uninj is programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically has racial memory.”

  “I mean if you could hurt an uninj,” Joggy amended.

  “Well, maybe I wouldn’t,” the Butcher admitted grudgingly. “But shut up, I want to think.”

  “About what?” Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.

  The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. “When I’m World Director,” he said slowly, “I’m going to have warfare again.”

  “You think so now,” Hal told him. “We all do at your age.”

  “We do not,” the Butcher retorted. “I bet you didn’t.”

  “Oh, yes, I was foolish, too,” the older boy confessed readily. “All newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless. They have to be. That’s why we have uninjes to work out on, and death games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult conditioning. And it’s just the same with newborn civilizations. Why, long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them differently. Of course, you can’t appreciate it this year, but Man’s greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all violent solutions to problems. You’ll realize that when you’re older.”

  “I will not!” the Butcher countered hotly. “I’m not going to be a sissy.” Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. “And what if we were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?”

  “The Space Fleet would take care of them,” Hal replied calmly. “That’s what it’s for. Adults aren’t conditioned to reject violent solutions to problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to viruses.”

  “But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?”

  “They can’t. It’s impossible.”

  “Yes, but suppose they did all the same.”

  “You’ve never been inside the Time Theater—you’re not old enough yet—so you just can’t
know anything about it or about the reasons why it’s impossible,” Hal replied with friendly factuality. “The Time Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into the past, at that. But you can’t travel through it because you can’t change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff.”

  “I don’t care,” the Butcher asserted obstinately. “I’m still going to have warfare when I’m World Director.”

  “They’ll condition you out of the idea,” Hal assured him.

  “They will not. I won’t let ’em.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you think now,” Hal said with finality. “You’ll have an altogether different opinion when you’re six.”

  “Well, what if I will?” the Butcher snapped back. “You don’t have to keep telling me about it, do you?”

  * * * *

  The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said in soothing tones: “Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?”

  Butch scowled.

  “How about it, Butch?”

  Still Butch did not seem to hear.

  The older boy shrugged and said: “Oh, well, how about it—Butcher?”

  The Butcher swung around. “They won’t let me in the Time Theater. You said so yourself.”

  “You could walk us over there.”

  “Well, maybe I will and maybe I won’t.”

  “While you’re deciding, we’ll get swimming. Come along, Joggy.”

  Still scowling, the Butcher took a white soapy crayon from the bulging pocket in his silver shorts. Pressed into the pavement, it made a black mark. He scrawled pensively: KEEP ON THE GRASS.

  He gazed at his handiwork. No, darn it, that was just what grownups wanted you to do. This grass couldn’t be hurt. You couldn’t pull it up or tear it off; it hurt your fingers to try. A rub with the side of the crayon removed the sign. He thought for a moment, then wrote: KEEP OFF THE GRASS.

  With an untroubled countenance, he sprang up and hurried after the others.

  * * * *