The Ego Machine
Page 4
II
Nicholas Martin felt like a man suddenly thrust under an ice-coldshower. No, not cold--steaming hot. Perfumed, too. The wind that blew infrom the open window bore with it a frightful stench of gasoline,sagebrush, paint, and--from the distant commissary--ham sandwiches.
"Drunk," he thought frantically. "I'm drunk--or crazy!" He sprang up andspun around wildly; then catching sight of a crack in the hardwood floorhe tried to walk along it. "Because if I can walk a straight line," hethought, "I'm not drunk. I'm only crazy...." It was not a verycomforting thought.
He could walk it, all right. He could walk a far straighter line thanthe crack, which he saw now was microscopically jagged. He had, in fact,never felt such a sense of location and equilibrium in his life. Hisexperiment carried him across the room to a wall-mirror, and as hestraightened to look into it, suddenly all confusion settled and ceased.The violent sensory perceptions leveled off and returned to normal.
Everything was quiet. Everything was all right.
Martin met his own eyes in the mirror.
Everything was _not_ all right.
He was stone cold sober. The Scotch he had drunk might as well have beenspring-water. He leaned closer to the mirror, trying to stare throughhis own eyes into the depths of his brain. For something extremely oddwas happening in there. All over his brain, tiny shutters were beginningto move, some sliding up till only a narrow crack remained, throughwhich the beady little eyes of neurons could be seen peeping, somesliding down with faint crashes, revealing the agile, spidery forms ofstill other neurons scuttling for cover.
Altered thresholds, changing the yes-and-no reaction time of thememory-circuits, with their key emotional indices and associations ...huh?
The robot!
Martin's head swung toward the closed office door. But he made nofurther move. The look of blank panic on his face very slowly, quiteunconsciously, began to change. The robot ... could wait.
Automatically Martin raised his hand, as though to adjust an invisiblemonocle. Behind him, the telephone began to ring. Martin glanced at it.
His lips curved into an insolent smile.
Flicking dust from his lapel with a suave gesture, Martin picked up thetelephone. He said nothing. There was a long silence. Then a hoarsevoice shouted, "Hello, hello, hello! Are you there? You, Martin!"
Martin said absolutely nothing at all.
"You keep me waiting," the voice bellowed. "Me, St. Cyr! Now jump! Therushes are ... Martin, do you hear me?"
Martin gently laid down the receiver on the desk. He turned again towardthe mirror, regarded himself critically, frowned.
"Dreary," he murmured. "Distinctly dreary. I wonder why I ever boughtthis necktie?"
The softly bellowing telephone distracted him. He studied the instrumentbriefly, then clapped his hands sharply together an inch from themouthpiece. There was a sharp, anguished cry from the other end of theline.
"Very good," Martin murmured, turning away. "That robot has done me aconsiderable favor. I should have realized the possibilities sooner.After all, a super-machine, such as ENIAC, would be far cleverer than aman, who is merely an ordinary machine. Yes," he added, stepping intothe hall and coming face to face with Toni LaMotta, who was currentlyworking for Summit on loan. "'_Man is a machine, and woman--_'" Here hegave Miss LaMotta a look of such arrogant significance that she wasquite startled.
"'_And woman--a toy_,'" Martin amplified, as he turned toward TheaterOne, where St. Cyr and destiny awaited him.
* * * * *
Summit Studios, outdoing even MGM, always shot ten times as much footageas necessary on every scene. At the beginning of each shooting day, thisconfusing mass of celluloid was shown in St. Cyr's private projectiontheater, a small but luxurious domed room furnished with lie-back chairsand every other convenience, though no screen was visible until youlooked up. Then you saw it on the ceiling.
When Martin entered, it was instantly evident that ecology took a suddenshift toward the worse. Operating on the theory that the old NicholasMartin had come into it, the theater, which had breathed an expensiveair of luxurious confidence, chilled toward him. The nap of the Persianrug shrank from his contaminating feet. The chair he stumbled against inthe half-light seemed to shrug contemptuously. And the three people inthe theater gave him such a look as might be turned upon one of thelarger apes who had, by sheer accident, got an invitation to BuckinghamPalace.
DeeDee Fleming (her real name was impossible to remember, besides havingnot a vowel in it) lay placidly in her chair, her feet comfortably up,her lovely hands folded, her large, liquid gaze fixed upon the screenwhere DeeDee Fleming, in the silvery meshes of a technicolor mermaid,swam phlegmatically through seas of pearl-colored mist.
Martin groped in the gloom for a chair. The strangest things were goingon inside his brain, where tiny stiles still moved and readjusted untilhe no longer felt in the least like Nicholas Martin. Who did he feellike, then? What had happened?
He recalled the neurons whose beady little eyes he had fancied he sawstaring brightly into, as well as out of, his own. Or had he? The memorywas vivid, yet it couldn't be, of course. The answer was perfectlysimple and terribly logical. ENIAC Gamma the Ninety-Third had told him,somewhat ambiguously, just what his ecological experiment involved.Martin had merely been given the optimum reactive pattern of hissuccessful prototype, a man who had most thoroughly controlled his ownenvironment. And ENIAC had told him the man's name, along with severalconfusing references to other prototypes like an Ivan (who?) and anunnamed Uighur.
The name for Martin's prototype was, of course, Disraeli, Earl ofBeaconsfield. Martin had a vivid recollection of George Arliss playingthe role. Clever, insolent, eccentric in dress and manner, exuberant,suave, self-controlled, with a strongly perceptive imagination....
"No, no, no!" DeeDee said with a sort of calm impatience. "Be careful,Nick. Some other chair, please. I have my feet on this one."
"T-t-t-t-t," said Raoul St. Cyr, protruding his thick lips and snappingthe fingers of an enormous hand as he pointed to a lowly chair againstthe wall. "Behind me, Martin. Sit down, sit down. Out of our way. Now!Pay attention. Study what I have done to make something great out ofyour foolish little play. Especially note how I have so cleverly endedthe solo by building to five cumulative pratt-falls. Timing is all," hefinished. "Now--SILENCE!"
For a man born in the obscure little Balkan country of Mixo-Lydia, RaoulSt. Cyr had done very well for himself in Hollywood. In 1939 St. Cyr,growing alarmed at the imminence of war, departed for America, takingwith him the print of an unpronounceable Mixo-Lydian film he had made,which might be translated roughly as _The Pores In the Face of thePeasant_.
With this he established his artistic reputation as a great director,though if the truth were known, it was really poverty that caused _ThePores_ to be so artistically lighted, and simple drunkenness which hadmade most of the cast act out one of the strangest performances in filmhistory. But critics compared _The Pores_ to a ballet and praisedinordinately the beauty of its leading lady, now known to the world asDeeDee Fleming.
DeeDee was so incredibly beautiful that the law of compensation wouldforce one to expect incredible stupidity as well. One was notdisappointed. DeeDee's neurons didn't know _anything_. She had heard ofemotions, and under St. Cyr's bullying could imitate a few of them, butother directors had gone mad trying to get through the semantic blockthat kept DeeDee's mind a calm, unruffled pool possibly three inchesdeep. St. Cyr merely bellowed. This simple, primordial approach seemedto be the only one that made sense to Summit's greatest investment andtop star.
With this whip-hand over the beautiful and brainless DeeDee, St. Cyrquickly rose to the top in Hollywood. He had undoubted talent. He couldmake one picture very well indeed. He had made it twenty times already,each time starring DeeDee, and each time perfecting his own feudalisticproduction unit. Whenever anyone disagreed with St. Cyr, he had only tothreaten to go over to MGM and take the obedient De
eDee with him, for hehad never allowed her to sign a long-term contract and she worked onlyon a picture-to-picture basis. Even Tolliver Watt knuckled under whenSt. Cyr voiced the threat of removing DeeDee.
* * * * *
"Sit down, Martin," Tolliver Watt said. He was a tall, lean,hatchet-faced man who looked like a horse being starved because he wastoo proud to eat hay. With calm, detached omnipotence he inclined hisgrey-shot head a millimeter, while a faintly pained expression passedfleetingly across his face.
"Highball, please," he said.
A white-clad waiter appeared noiselessly from nowhere and glided forwardwith a tray. It was at this point that Martin felt the last stilesreadjust in his brain, and entirely on impulse he reached out and tookthe frosted highball glass from the tray. Without observing this thewaiter glided on and