by John Sladek
VI. General Principles of Construction of Cells
Each cell may be considered in some respects an egg, having ‘yolk’, ‘white’ and ‘shell’. In this simplified scheme :
(a) The ‘yolk’ consisted of the QUIDNAC computer, along with various coupling and control devices to functions in the ‘white’ and ‘shell’.
(b) The ‘white’ contained automatic production tools and storage facilities for raw materials, spare tools and parts, and power.
(c) The ‘shell’ of metal armour contained means of locomotion, sensory devices, paint, simple extensors, and (though not in all cases) means of communication.
Within this framework many variations were constructed, differing in their means of locomotion, sensory devices, means of communication and production methods. It was expected that,
in addition to variations proposed by the experimenter, others would be adapted or invented by the system itself.
* * *
‘I just don’t get it,’ said Cal, laying down his soldering gun. Though he spoke to Louie Wompler, all the army and navy technicians around them looked up, eager for a chance to stop and talk. Louie sat frowning at a folded piece of paper in his hand.
‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘Something wrong here. It’s supposed to flap its wings when I do this, but look.’ He pulled at a flap, and the square of paper came unfolded. It was a magazine illustration of food.
‘I mean I don’t understand Dr. Smilax. What does he do all day, alone in there? He can’t be still working on the QUIDNAC; I thought he finished with that long before he came here. Why do we never see him to talk to? What does he look like?’
Lance-corporal Martin looked up from a circuit diagram. ‘Are you kidding?’ he said, pasting a Lucky in the corner of his wide, griping mouth. ‘I hear all kindsa crap about the Old Man.’ After looking around the room, he leaned closer to Cal. ‘I hear he carves up kittens on a big white table in there—just for kicks. I hear he’s a junky. I hear he ain’t no real doctor at all, just some bum chiropractor that saved a Senator’s life once, so they give him this cushy job. I hear he just sits in there all day, sticking himself with dope. I hear—’
‘Crap !’ spat a navy technician whose rolled-up sleeves revealed tattoos of Walt Disney characters. ‘The real scuttlebutt is, he’s a Rooshian. All that security stuff is to keep the other Rooshians from assassinating him. The real scuttlebutt is, he invented a way of putting monkey brains in the heads of little children.’
A civilian technical writer spoke. He was the author of a famous military manual, The Fork Lift Truck. ‘I understand,’ he said carefully, ‘that Dr. S. used to be a famous surgeon. But he was operating on the President’s mother and something went wrong. They hushed it up, of course, but he’s been in semi-retirement ever since.’
Others heard them and wandered over to join in.
‘I hear the brothers Frankenstein was born joined at the head.
He split ’em. But he gets fits, see, and tries to kill people—’
—‘big abortion racket, remember? In all the papers—’
‘They say he invented a cancer cure in Rooshia, but he was hit in the head, see, and lost his memory—’
‘Devil’s food cake,’ sighed Louie over the picture. He seemed oblivious of the discussion raging around him. ‘I’m not allowed to have any sweets while I’m in training for Origami.’
‘—and the ASPCA would raise holy hell if they found out what he was up to. So—’
Cal finished his work and stepped into the hall to get away from the babble of sensational theories about Smilax. The facts about the man behind that restricted door were nil. Yet why did all the rumours about him contain a strain of hideosity? Why was it no one saw him as a harmless old recluse? Why did every story include paradigms of cruelty, madness, megalomaniac importance? It was almost as if … but no one could start such rumours about himself. Himself? For a moment Cal wondered if there really were such a person as ‘T. Smilax, M.D.’ Placing his ear to the restricted door Cal listened.
There came to him a faint, high-pitched mechanical whine. It was the snarl of a thousand muted dental drills, humming into a thousand rotting teeth. It paused for a moment, and he heard another sound : The whimpering of a small dog in pain. Almost as soon as this began, the mechanical whine started up again, overriding it.
As Cal re-entered the lab, Karl said, ‘We were just looking for you.’
‘We’re ready for a test,’ Kurt explained. They stood, clipboards at the ready, one each side of the lab table, while Cal made final adjustments and turned on the system.
It was an array of grey metal boxes, each about the size of a cigarette package, stacked loosely together in a cube about two feet high. When the toggle switch, prominent on the top of any one box was thrown, it sent out a tuned starting signal to the rest; they were switched off in the same way.
As soon as each box was activated, it began to roll about on the table on its little casters, avoiding collision with its fellows. When all the boxes were moving, they resembled a complicated Brownian movement on the dark surface of the table, as they explored every inch of it.
Kurt and Karl placed bits and scraps of metal on the table. The smaller bits were at once devoured by individual boxes, but
the larger bars attracted the entire brood. The grey packages, now the size of king-size cigarette cases, swarmed over them like ants, gouging away with tiny cutters and torches—and growing fatter. It made Cal shiver to look at their orderly feeding.
‘Has anyone a watch?’ asked Karl, looking intently at the watch-chain across Hita’s vest. The mathematician sighed.
‘All right,’ he said, giving up his half-hunter. ‘But take care of it, please. It’s an antique eight-day watch. Irreplaceable.’
Karl dangled it on its chain above the table. The boxes began quavering, altering their random movements. They clustered beneath the watch. Karl swung it gently, and the grey brood responded, excitedly tracking its movements. They began to climb upon one another, to stack themselves in a swaying, rolling pyramid, reaching towards the shape of its metal body, the sound of its ticking heart. The grey pile began a sympathetic trembling.
Each time they would nearly reach the watch, Karl would raise it higher. His childlike face had a look of cruel, rapt concentration as he teased the pyramid. It grew taller and thinner. Cal could see lower boxes gripping one another with extensors to steady the pile. Karl raised the watch a third time, a fourth.
The top box, standing on edge, split like a tiny suitcase. Two thin rods slithered upwards.
‘What are those? Look like car antennae,’ said Louie.
‘Look out !’ shouted Hita. ‘It’s making a grab for it.’
‘No it isn’t,’ Karl assured him. ‘Just watch this.’
The two rods passed the half-hunter and moved a link or two up the chain. They paused. A group of boxes stopped ‘drinking’ at the lab table’s DC outlet and formed chain from it to the pyramid. There was a sudden flashing fizz of light and the watch fell; the tiny suitcase caught it, drew in its horns instantly and snapped shut.
‘Hey ! Give that back !’ The mathematician caught up the offending box and shook it. He tried to pry it open, then shook it again.
‘Ouch !’ Suddenly the box clattered to the table, where it scooted about madly and was soon lost among its kind. There was a drop of blood on the end of Hita’s finger. ‘Bit me !’ he exclaimed, incredulous.
‘Yes.’ Kurt nodded enthusiastically. ‘You’ve got to expect it to fight back. You were threatening it.’
‘Yes, it was only defending its property,’ Karl added.
‘It’s property !’ Hita looked from one of the twins to the other. They wore pleased smiles, like those of indulgent parents. Without another word, the mathematician stalked out of the laboratory.
‘Let’s see what it will do with this,’ chorused the brothers. They wheeled over the oscilloscope on its stand and jammed it against the table. T
he grey creatures took notice of it at once. They now varied in size, from those which had scarcely grown at all to those which had swollen to the size of small tool boxes. None had so far reproduced.
Now they swarmed around the oscilloscope and began to pile up against the side of it. From the top box a tiny screwdriver emerged to probe the cabinet. Finding a louvre, it pried. The shaft broke. There was muffled click and its stump retracted.
‘Watch,’ Karl cautioned.
Smoke rose from the tool box, and there came a sound of loud, rapid hammering. A moment later a large screwdriver blade, still glowing, appeared. By main force it pried open the cabinet of the oscilloscope, bending back the steel cover to open a fist-sized hole. From another box came a pair of pliers. They entered the oscilloscope cabinet and began to rummage hastily inside. There came the tinkle of broken glass from time to time. At regular intervals, the pliers emerged, bearing booty : a broken tube, a two-inch hank of wire, half a resistor or a glass shard. On these, the tool box fed greedily.
‘Hey !’ said Louie, coming awake to what was happening. ‘You better not let Pop see that.’
It was too late. At the same time, Grandison put his head in the door. ‘See what?’ He saw the tool box come up with a hank of transistors which it gobbled like succulent grapes. ‘What the hell is going on here?’ Glowering at Cal, he shouted, ‘It ain’t two weeks since I told you to take care of the equipment. What the hell do you mean, destroying my property like that?’
Cal moved to shut off the system, but Kurt laid a restraining hand on his arm. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It is making mistakes, but it will learn. We’re having an inspection next week by General Grawk of the Air Force. Let it go until then. We’ll give it a corner of the lab of its own, to grow in.’ Turning to the company president he added, ‘Don’t worry, sir. This system will make the company billions for every dollar it costs.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’ Grandison’s expression altered. ‘I got some bad news, though. Hita just died in the infirmary.’
Cal stared. ‘What did you say?’
‘Hita. The statistics man. Just died of snakebite.’
With a small thunderclap, the cathode-ray tube collapsed. The tool boxes continued to browse quietly.
‘Poor ramification,’ Cal murmured, shuddering. ‘Poor little anapests.’
CHAPTER IV
THE INSPECTOR GENERAL
‘“Es ist ein eigentümlicher Apparat,” sagte der Offizier.’
KAFKA
By three o’clock on the afternoon of the inspection, almost the entire staff of Wompler Research Laboratories had assembled on the lawn, wearing clean lab coats. They stood in serried ranks, so perfectly still that the loudest sound was the faint susurrus of the lawn sprinklers. At the fore, faces uplifted to the sun, stood Grandison and Louie, wearing lab coats especially designed for the occasion by Mrs. Lumsey.
At precisely three o’clock, a silver helicopter descended from the sun. Its terrific downdraught ruffled the American flag on the flagpole and the two ‘E’ pennants below it. It stirred slightly the silver fringe on the pleated lab coats of the two Womplers. The helicopter settled in the lush carpet of green. A silver door swung open.
General Grawk emerged amid a cloud of beautiful women. Actually there were only four redheaded women, each very like the other three, that is, tall, good-looking and possessed of curves even Air Force tailoring could not disguise as angles. Here were four sane, attractive WAF officers bustling about to adjust his ribbons, straighten his ties, hand him his cap and relight his black stump of a cigar—bathing, in short, in an ambience of lovely femininity—
The ugliest man within a thousand miles.
Imagine a face as red and furious as that of a newborn child. Imagine sparse black hair like broken quills, lying this way and
that around a bald spot the colour of a baboon’s bum. Imagine the nose of a Pekinese but the upper lip of Peking man, and imagine moreover the former permanently wrinkled with disgust and the latter drawn back in a set sneer from yellow, crooked teeth. Add boiled, bulging eyes, an underslung jaw that needed a shave the day it was created, and the neck of a particularly obese walrus, complete with three folds of fat in back. Got all that? Now add black clots of eyebrow and asymmetric lumps as desired, set it all on a stumpy, strutting figure in uniform, and top it off—as Grawk now did—with a tall, tall cap loaded with silver foliage.
Putting on his cap increased Grawk’s height to about five feet. He spat out the cigar and looked around, arms akimbo.
‘So this,’ he said, ‘is the great Wompler Research Laboratory, is it?’
‘Yes indeed. I’m Grandison Wompler and this is my son, Louie. Louie, say hello to General Grawk.’
‘Hi !’ shouted Louie.
The general squinted the Womplers over, ignoring no detail but their proffered hands. ‘Cute little outfits you got there,’ he said, jabbing a finger at their silver fringe. ‘Who’s your dressmaker?’ Then to one of the WAF’s, ‘Make a note of it, Meg. First of all, they got cruddy security. Nobody asked to see my ID card. I coulda been a Russky spy, for chrissake. Second, I think the two top boys are fruits. Father and son, my eye ! And all dressed up in Mother’s clothes, I guess, eh?’
Louie’s grin wavered, disappeared. ‘Now wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Whose mother? Now just wait a minute.’ His immense pudgy hands became fists.
‘Like to lose your old man a couple million in government contracts?’ shrilled the general. ‘Like to fix it so you’re out of government work for good? Well, just lay a mitt on me, Junior. Go ahead, hit me !’
Grandison managed to keep his son from complying. Grawk smirked slightly, stretched out the folds of fat in his neck, and peered around him. ‘Are we gonna stand out here all day?’
The entire ménage fell in behind Kurt and Karl, who guided the general to the outer door of the lab building. To Grawk’s fresh indignation, a marine guard insisted on seeing his ID card.
‘Great,’ he said, producing it. ‘Just great. This guy can’t see I’m wearing the uniform of a general in the US Air Force. He has to make sure. Just swell. Oh, I can see this is a well-run
place all right.’
They moved on inside.
‘Which one of you ginks is Smilax, head-of-project? You?’ he asked Karl, who shook his head.
‘He sends his regrets,’ Karl said. ‘He’s unable to meet you in person.’
‘What do you mean, “unable”? Where is he?’
‘In his office.’ The twins pointed out the office door.
A bitter smile rippled over the simian lip. ‘I get it. I’m not important enough for him to get up off his bacon and come out to meet, is that it? A mere four-star general is nothing, huh? I guess he only talks to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or something.’
As the twins made no reply to this, the general stepped to the office door and tried it. It was locked. Lifting a set of knuckles designed to be walked upon, he rapped smartly on the RESTRICTED AREA sign.
A nearby door opened, and a marine guard, bearing a submachine gun, stepped out.
‘I’m afraid you can’t go in there, general,’ he said. ‘“NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. THIS MEANS YOU”,’ he quoted from the quite legible sign.
‘What the hell do you mean? I got a top secret clearance. I’m supposed to be inspecting this plant. If I ain’t authorized, who is? What the christ is going on here, anyway? Smilax, you come out of there !’ He rattled the knob and pounded on the door until the guard trained his gun on him and waved him away.
‘Look,’ Grawk said to him, a more conciliatory note creeping into his voice, ‘I come seven hundred miles in that hot, stuffy helicopter to inspect Smilax’s project. You mean to tell me this freak can’t even come out of his office to talk to me?’
‘I’m afraid not, general. Dr. Smilax comes and goes at his pleasure,’ said the marine tersely. ‘If you want to contact him, you’d better forward your message to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.’
‘—’ said the general. That is, he opened his mouth but no sound came forth. Purple veins began to writhe in his face, and his boiled eyes bulged.
Then he turned on his heel, emitting at the same time a short, hysterical laugh. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s see this so-called project, and get it over with.’
In one corner of the lab a considerable space had been cleared. A bulky object roughly the size of an automobile here lay
shrouded in a drop cloth. Now the Mackintosh brothers moved in to lift the cloth, folding it rapidly and expertly into a cocked hat.
‘What’s all this?’ said the general, waving at the pile of large grey boxes thus revealed. They lay on three lab tables, quivering, turning slightly on their hidden wheels as they sensed movement about them.
‘It is a self-reproducing machine,’ the twins announced. ‘A Reproductive System.’
‘Yeah? Ugly, ain’t it?’
During the week, they explained, the boxes had devoured over a ton of scrap metal, as well as a dozen oscilloscopes with attached signal generators, thirty-odd test sets, desk calculators both mechanical and electronic, a pair of scissors, an uncountable number of bottle caps, paper clips, coffee spoons and staples (for the lab and office staff liked feeding their new pet), dozens of surplus walky-talky storage batteries and a small gasoline-driven generator.
The cells had multiplied—better than doubled their original number—and had grown to various sizes, ranging from shoe-boxes and attaché cases to steamer trunk proportions. They now reproduced constantly but slowly, in various fashions. One steamer trunk emitted, every five or ten minutes, a pair of tiny boxes the size of 3 × 5 card files. Another box, of extraordinary length, seemed to be slowly sawing itself in half.
General Grawk remained unimpressed. ‘What does it do for an encore?’ he growled.
