The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  Kerspat!

  Blackridge caught it right on the crest of his bald head, and those three pet hairs stuck up like three black wires. The ink rolled down over his nose, and I thought to myself, “Blackridge!”

  At the moment the name fit him perfectly.

  He grabbed for his handkerchief and began smearing. At the same time he took three swift strides toward Madge, and I saw there was going to be trouble.

  Yes, I knew it. I understood. I was thinking.

  Time out, please. It sounds impossible for a mechanical man to think, doesn’t it? Time out, while I make a few little explanations.

  All credit to the Williams brothers. When they manufactured me, they supplied me with some special thinking equipment, bless their hearts. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this story. They put their very best genius into me, and that’s the reason I’ve got to make good. I’m their number one all-around robot.

  Actually, I’m number thirty-three among their robot experiments. But the first thirty-two were specialized mechanisms. Some could cook. Some could answer telephones. Some could read music. Some could do statistical operations.

  I was different because I was created as something flexible and adjustable, not specialized.

  Moreover, I had one revolutionary improvement over the other thirty-two. I was given a cupful of brain tissue.

  This was experimental, of course, not standard equipment. And it was destined to cause plenty of trouble for me. But you can see how highly important this could be as an instrument for organizing all my other gadgets. It gave me a storehouse for my experiences—a protoplasmic base for my memory. It gave me a means of reflecting upon all the ideas that came my way, and of sifting them, so that I could meet my new troubles halfway.

  To look at me, you might guess that my cupful of brains resides in my head, the same as a man’s or an elephant’s. Not so. The Williams brothers sealed this bit of treasure inside the gleaming brass case which hangs in my chest.

  Where you have a heart, I have a brain. My brain weighs about a fifth as much as your heart, but it is surrounded by a case full of mechanisms that weigh all of seventy-five pounds.

  This brass case is shaped like a thick watch. It’s as big around as a plate, And the mechanisms within are at least a million times as complicated as a watch. And along with the mechanisms, tuned to catch impulses from the brain tissue, are the provisions for sustaining life in that same precious bit of tissue.

  A few ounces of life and hundreds of pounds of machinery—that’s me.

  The real me is, more accurately, that inner part of the mechanical man—that giant brass watch case which has the fun of directing this man-like metal shell around me. Most of the time it’s great sport. Even when I get into trouble—like on that day when Madge threw the ink bottle. I’m coming to that in just a minute.

  You wonder how I happened to be there?

  Two weeks earlier, the Williams Brothers had told me I was all done, stamped and tested, and ready to go out into the world. My feet were ready to walk. My arms were ready to lift. The headlights, looking like two eyes in my metal head, with moving yellow rings around them, were ready to cut a path of light through the darkness.

  But the Williams brothers had a certain corner of the world that they wanted me to fill, and a certain duty for me to perform.

  “Obedience is the first lesson of life,” Herb Williams would say to me over and over. “One who does not know about this world must obey until he learns to make his own judgments.” Waldemar Williams, the older of the two brothers, would shake his iron gray head and say, “I doubt if he understands what you’re saying. He’ll have to make his own mistakes.”

  Waldemar was right, I understood very little of their problem. They wanted to trust me to use my own powers, but they were afraid.

  “First you’ll have to get your bearings,” Herb Williams went on, lecturing me very earnestly.”

  I responded by waving an arm as smoothly as a breeze. Then I tapped the silent mechanism of the elbow.

  “I’m not talking about your roller bearings,” Herb said patiently. “I’m not worried about that part of you. It’s your mental bearings.”

  “Too complicated,” said Waldemar, shaking his head.

  They wrapped me in brown paper all around and crated me, then gave me a ride in a truck. All the way to Blackridge’s real estate office Herb kept talking to me.

  “You’re not to move. You’re just to stand like a statue, for days and days, until we come again. That’s our first lesson in obedience. Just stand. Stand. Stand. Do you understand?”

  Stand. Stand. Understand. Get my bearings. Not roller bearings. Mental bearings.

  Waldemar took from his pocket a dark object that might have been a pocket camera.

  “If you forget—if you get into trouble—we’ll know. This instrument will tell us. We have a way of freezing you if you forget and start to make motions.”

  “There’ll be people around you,” Herb continued. “Later, after you’ve got your bearings, you’ll work with these people. They are my uncle and a friend. They are very busy. They’ll need your help. You must watch them to see how they work.”

  They unloaded me, rolled me on a little cart into the real estate office, and placed me near the front door, quite upright.

  “Here’s some new equipment, Uncle,” Herb said. “I want to park it here for the present.”

  V.V. Blackridge said, “A file cabinet? We’ve got plenty.” His voice was low and gutteral, like the grind of a machine that is being choked with the wrong kind of raw material.

  “No questions now, Uncle,” said Herb. “We’ll explain later. Don’t open it yet. We’ll come back one of these days.”

  “Ah! A mystery!” Madge said, looking up from her typewriter with an interested smile.

  “Ugh! Those letters, Miss LaGrange!” This surly growl from Blackridge caused the girl to turn back to her work. Her expression was odd and it stayed with me, so that later I understood more clearly just what it implied. That half amused glance she shot at Herb Williams showed that she knew, and he knew, that her boss’ hard command was out of order. She was obeying simply to humor him.

  “Take it easy, Uncle,” Herb said. Then he and Waldemar left me.

  I was to stand. I was to obey by remaining motionless. I was to watch and listen and get my bearings. Later I would work here. Meanwhile, neither the boss nor the pretty girl working for him knew anything about me. All they knew was that a wooden crate containing something wrapped in brown paper had been parked against the front wall of their office.

  They were curious, of course. But the Williams brothers had asked them not to open me. And as I later learned, the Williams brothers owned this real estate office. They had bought it a long time before and turned it over to their Uncle Blackridge to give him something to do.

  So V.V. Blackridge and Madge LaGrange both obeyed and left me alone. And I, in turn, obeyed, and stood perfectly still for two weeks, absorbing what I could of their business. Until that day—

  There were openings in the coating of brown paper, so that some of my ten little eyes could see out.

  Yes—ten. Does that seem so strange for a mechanical man? I find them all very useful. Probably you wouldn’t guess they are my eyes. They look like little jeweled, blue, five-pointed stars, and they are located at various points not in my head (remember, those two dark orbs in my face are my headlights) but rather in the brass brain-box that is really me. Brain, eyes, ears, and mechanisms of smell are all a part of this big brass watch—this inner me. Light waves reach me very readily through my dark plexiglass chest and shoulders.

  For two weeks I watched the customers come and go. I heard the telephone ring several hundred times a day, and listened to the irate voice of the boss, picking up the receiver, listening a moment, and shouting, “No vacancy!”

  In contrast, I was pleased by the soft answers of Madge when she answered the phone. “I’m sorry, there’s no vacancy
at present. Would you care to call back in a few weeks?” Or, “Will you please leave your number. I may have something of interest later in the week.”

  Through the nights I stood in solitary reflection, listening to the gentle hum of night traffic.

  At noons, on sunshiny days, I would cease to be a statue for just long enough to shift the position of tny ten star-like eyes. The flicker of shadows from what I later learned was an elm tree directly in front of the door, out on the parking, provided a fascinating show through the openings in my paper covering. I would turn just a trifle to get the full benefit. But if I rustled the paper, Blackridge would look up sharply and growl.

  “Now what did that?”

  But Madge would go right on working, knowing that if she answered, he would snap at her to get back to work.

  Then one noon the rattle of my paper brought Blackridge up with a start.

  “I’m going to see what’s in that damned box.”

  “Please, Mr. Blackridge,” Madge protested. “You know they asked you not to.” She was smiling, trying to put it politely.

  “Who asked your opinion?”

  Her smile faded. “I respect the Williams brothers,” she said firmly.

  “Meaning what? You don’t respect me? Is that it?” His eyes blazed anger. He was as touchy as dynamite. “You might as well say it. You don’t respect me!”

  She returned his glare. “Sometimes ° I wonder.”

  “Shut up! Get your nose back in that ledger and don’t let me hear another word out of you today—ugh—UGH!!”

  That was when he got it. The ink. Right over the topknot. Blackridge! Black ridge, indeed!

  “You can’t talk that way to me!” she had retorted, and wham, zowie, kerspat, splatter! She had let him have it.

  His hands smeared at his face, his eyes flashed fire through ink. He was going toward her, and he drew back a hand to slap. A brutal swing.

  Smack!

  His inky fingers left marks on her cheek. She gave a little cry. And that was when I burst out of my crate.

  CHAPTER II

  They Freeze Me in the Nick of Time

  The very rattle of paper would have been enough, no doubt. It doesn’t take much to stop a man like Blackridge. Especially when he’s in the wrong, and knows he’s caught.

  The paper rattled, the wood ripped, and my shiny steel arms came bursting out into the noonday light. I bumped my elbows outward, the crate splintered, and I pushed out, free, into the room.

  Clunk . . . clunk . . . clunk. My steel feet thumped across the linoleum floor. I caught a flash of my bright steel fingers reflected from the surface of a polished desk. I thought I saw the reflection of my bright metal head in

  V.V. Blackridge’s eyes. Or maybe it was terror. I heard him give a deep-throated, “Uuulp!”

  I didn’t mind that. He had it coming. My left hand jammed out like a piston rod, and my extended fingers snapped over his throat. His head went kerbump against the wall, so hard that the nearby picture jumped sideways.

  There I held him. For just an instant I pulled my punch, to save knocking his head straight through the wall, as I certainly could have done with one moderate blow of my right fist.

  It was the scream of Madge LaGrange that stopped me.

  “Don’t! Don’t do it!” she cried. Then her hands went limp, and her eyes went shut, and she slumped down over her chair.

  That scared me. I didn’t want her to go to sleep. I wanted her to see me return that brutal slap to this hard-boiled old growler.

  Knowing what I know now, I guess it was lucky for me she fainted. It just goes to show how little a fellow knows when he gets angry and starts to use his fists. I was really thinking, now, and I could feel the thousands of little wheels turning.

  Madge was coming to life, breathing slowly, opening her eyes a little. I looked at Blackridge, caught in my left hand, trying with his puny little hands of flesh and bone to pry my steel fingers free. He was kicking at my steel shins, too, with no effect whatever. His face was pink, so I eased up on my one-handed grip. Just a trifle.

  Then, making sure that Madge saw me, I administered my punishment. Her eyes widened curiously as I did the deed.

  With the finesse of a surgeon performing a delicate operation, I reached over with my free hand and removed one of those three pet hairs from the top of Blackridge’s head.

  “Yeee-ouw!” he shouted. “That’s mine!”

  I glanced at Madge. She was sitting up, now, watching me very intently, and I fancied there was a one-thousandth part of a smile showing through the sternness of her lips. So I deposited the inky hair on the desk, still holding my prisoner, and reached slowly, surely, in the same direction again.

  “No. No, don’t take any more!” the inky-faced boss yowled.

  He shook his head violently, so that his eyes wobbled like ball bearings in a test tube.

  But I nodded my head just as decisively, to warn him I wouldn’t be stopped. I saw that my response was understood by Madge. There was at least a tenth of a smile visible now, in her parted lips. So nothing could stop me. I would remove those other two pet hairs.

  Or would I?

  Clink! Something snapped. Something went wrong inside me.

  I was paralyzed!

  There must have been a master switch somewhere within my inner mechanism. Someone had stopped me cold. I was frozen. I could see, I could smell, I could hear. But I couldn’t so much as move a little finger.

  The Williams brothers! They had done it, of course.

  Yes, they had warned me that their pocket instrument would notify them if I became active. So they had received the alarm, at their laboratory, or at lunch, or wherever they were, and they had understood. I had disobeyed. I had broken out and gotten into mischief. And so they had snapped the freeze on me, and here I stood.

  Here I stood, holding a struggling, fretting business man against the wall so firmly he couldn’t possibly escape. He yowled for mercy, rolling his eyes up toward my right hand, poised above his bald head, pleading for me to spare those two pet hairs.

  Then Madge began to plead, too.

  “I don’t know what you are, or where you came from. I don’t know whether you can understand what I’m saying. But please, if this is a gag, you’ve gone far enough. Please—”

  I couldn’t have moved if there had been a flag to salute.

  Madge called for the police, and I was still in the same position ten minutes later when they arrived. I was motionless, and Blackridge was still kicking.

  CHAPTER III

  Dead or Alive?

  The police consisted of Sergeants O’Malley and Cohen. I was impressed by their blue uniforms and their strong handsome faces, and I would have gladly smiled at them if my smile hadn’t been paralyzed. My all-around eyes caught a reflection of my ludicrous pose from their silver badges. It looked bad, all right, the way I had Blackridge by the throat.

  “What’s the gag?” O’Malley said, gulping and staring. “Break it up, there. Break it up.”

  “You break it up!” Blackridge snarled, looking fierce and inky.

  “Don’t get sassy,” said O’Malley. “How did you get into this mess. What have you got here? A Christmas toy? Where do you wind the darned thing?”

  “Careful, O’Malley,” Cohen warned. “It’s some kind of booby trap. We’d better get the fire department.”

  “It came out of that box, Officer.” This from Madge, who was in the act of putting on her hat and coat. “I think I’ll step out for lunch.”

  “Lunch, is it?” O’Malley growled. “You’ll sit right down and tell us what this is all about. You say it come out of that crate? A sort of grown-up jack-in-the-box, huh? Where did the crate come from?”

  The questions and answers flew back and forth, with O’Malley and Cohen exchanging suspicious looks. O’Malley tapped me with his club. I didn’t budge.

  “Now let’s get to the bottom of this,” O’Malley said. “You say this crate has been here for t
wo weeks, and just now this collection of hardware bounced out of it for the first time. Why? Why not yesterday? Why not tomorrow?”

  “S-s-sh!” Blackridge said under his breath.

  “I don’t get it,” said O’Malley. “Was there something in the air today that caused this tin demon to spring loose?”

  “There was ink in the air today,” said Madge. “If that creature knows anything—”

  “S-s-sh!” Her boss tried to hush her. “Stop the argument and get me out of here.”

  “I told you don’t get sassy,” said O’Malley, walking over and thumping him lightly on the knee, but keeping well out of range of my upraised arm. “What’s this about the ink in the air?”

  “Shall I tell?” Madge asked. Her boss gave a threatening growl. She smiled at him sweetly. It was plain that I had him and the police weren’t anxious to pry him loose. “It’s like this,” she began.

  My alert eyes caught sight of the two Williams brothers, then, as they peered in at the side door. You could tell they were getting an earful, all right, the way they listened to Madge’s speech. They heard and they saw. The ink marks were on her cheek to prove her story. Of course, she didn’t realize they were listening.

  When she finished, O’Malley and Cohen went into a huddle. They came out of it shaking their heads.

  “We don’t swallow that,” said O’Malley. “Maybe he sprang out of the box, like you say. But ink didn’t have nothin’ to do with it. He just happened to tear loose at that time. You know how these mechanical toys are.”

  “That’s right,” said Cohen. “Just get on the phone and get those Williams boys over here to take care of their haywire gadget.”

  “Just as you say,” said Madge, going to the phone.

  Then Blackridge fairly screeched. “Ye gods, will you get me out of here!”

  Cohen placed his fists on his hips and studied me skeptically. He said finally, “I wouldn’t touch the thing myself.”

  O’Malley walked around to view me from all angles, his cautious eye ever watchful of my upraised hand.