Day Dark, Night Bright

by Fritz Leiber

  At this point George broke down and spilled the whole story: Dave’s incredible claims, the quest for gold and silver to be transformed into metals harder than diamond, the alarm-clock time machine, everything. Fortunately George was able to refute the hinted accusation of murder. True, Dave had visited the shop early the previous evening, they had even put a contribution in the clock and Dave had set it; but after he departed some of George’s regular science-fiction friends had dropped in and been with him at the moment Dave had hurtled downward with a howl that one frightened bum on the sidewalk below described as sounding more like rage than fear.

  But while George was making these helpful admissions, he was also doing something that confirmed the Treasury men’s suspicions of his sanity. While admitting that Dave was an out-and-put swindler and had used the duplicate key to come back secretly each night to loot the time machine, George maintained that the dead crook was still an agent of the futurians.

  According to the new version, George had always sensed that there was something partly fishy about Dave’s claim. Really the futurians couldn’t time-travel themselves at all, they could merely send their thoughts ranging back across the centuries and sometimes manage small shipments of metal if there were a suitable sending station at the other end. They had fixed on Dave as such a suitable station. Without realizing that he was merely following their powerful mental suggestions, Dave set up his swindle.

  This would account, George pointed out excitedly, for Dave’s fits of irritation and suspicion, which must have corresponded to the occasions when the time-traveling setup had actually worked, and also Dave’s suicide, induced by the realization that he, the supercriminal, was being inexplicably rooked.

  The Treasury men were not buying anything like that, though they didn’t tell George so right out. They even went along with him a bit, pretending to round out details and making a serious business out of examining the alarm clock, which had been filled with silver and gold the previous night. Sure enough, it was empty.

  “No, wait a minute, there’s something in it,” one of them said, and extracted a tiny star-shaped button of dull metal with a pin attached to the back of it. He examined it, blinked, and put it down on the desk.

  He wanted to say, “That Kantarian was certainly a crazy stickler for details. He told you, Mercer, that you would get a token of gratitude from the good guys, and sure enough he has a cheap button ready with ‘Time Fighter’ engraved on it. Really pitiful, Mercer, the way he made you look like a kid sending off to a TV program for a spaceman’s badge.”

  Instead he glanced at George’s face and yielded to a rather unprofessional impulse. “Maybe you’d like to keep this,” he said softly, shoving the button at him.

  At that moment a puzzled look came into his face, but a second later he shrugged and followed the other man out of the shop.

  George didn’t miss it, however, because the light was right from where he was sitting. And because he didn’t miss it, he was able to stand up bravely to the loss of his savings and even the endless reproaches of his wife. When things got rough, he merely would smile and glance inside his breast pocket, where he had pinned the cheap little “Time Fighter” button, now with a flat diamond set in the center of it—the dull metal star, one point of which had a golden gleam and, when lightly shoved across the desk, had made a deep scratch in the glass, and later, when George tested it, in the flat diamond.

  FEMMEQUIN 973

  You would have known that the gleaming skeleton hanging from the black work-rack was going to be a girl, although the steel bones were thinner and fewer, the platform for the electronic brain was in the chest and not in the head, and the pelvis held not a womb but a large gyroscope.

  The skeleton had that air and attitude; it was that enticing, provocative gesture that means woman— whether it turns up in a fashion-magazine advertisement or a Stone Age carving.

  It was a room like a cave, black except where bright lights beat on the work-rack and the silvery skeleton. A stooping man was touching a limb of the skeleton with a tool that made a faint grrr.

  Behind the man, unseen by him, was a real woman, clothed in flesh and embellished with clothes— except that after seeing that dangling skeleton you would always doubt a little whether any woman was real and warm and alive. And this woman’s face was straight out of a fashion magazine in its cold inscrutable pride, and deadly purpose. She advanced toward the unknowing man. The silvery skeleton got more distinct to her, she could see the cables of its muscles, thin as threads. She could make out on its gleaming limbs—tiny humps, to which a substitute for flesh would later be attached. She could discern the disdainful curves of the latticework making up its metallic skull. She could see the black motors and batteries crowding its slender waist.

  The stooped man also became clearer. He was short, even allowing for his stoop. The two lines going up between his eyebrows looked as if slashed by a black pencil He seemed to be trembling a little, but never when he touched the gleaming skeleton. The grrr had stopped and he was stroking a silver limb with a pad of rouge.

  The woman hesitated for a moment. Then she said, “Chernik!” and at the same instant touched his shoulder. He jumped as if her two fingers were the fangs of a poisonous snake.

  Harry Chernik had one of the oddest jobs in one of the strangest and most secret businesses in the modern world. He was an assistant engineer and final tune-up man in a femmequin factory.

  Harry owed his job to the intervention of a friend and his own unusual mechanical talents. It was he who cut the cams that gave the pale suede-rubber shoulders of the shimmying femmequins such a delectably lazy wriggle. It was his itch for perfection that kept the powerful electric motors inside the dainty torsos as silent as shy innocence, and the tungsten-steel cables that went down to each rosy toe and fingertip—as quiet in their sheathes as blasé experience. And as for the quartz-crystal inner ear which controlled the gyroscope that kept the femmequin in perfect balance in all attitudes (replacing the less reliable mercury type), he was actually its inventor, though there was no question of patents on such a device, any more than there was on the reciprocating, contractile, variable pulse gadget that was the central feature of each femmequin.

  In fact, Harry Chernik was far more important to the company than Mr. Jones, the chief engineer, though he was never told this by Mr. Bissel—the man who shipped the femmequins to the very wealthy individuals (or the clubbed-together slightly less-wealthy men) buying them, and who also raked in the profits.

  But Harry Chernik would never have stayed on at his peculiar job for a lifetime except that he believed himself to be a very ugly man, and as such incapable of arousing love in any woman. His work was a substitute for the tender relationships that life denied him, or that he denied himself. When he was mounting a motor—whether a powerful one in the molybdenum-steel ribwork of a femmequin, or a feather-weight one in the armored skull to tighten the delicate ring of cable that puckered the lips—he was possessed by an intense and unwearying excitement that was more than that generated by the exercise of fine craftsmanship.

  When a millionaire customer asked for some new and almost undevisably realistic feature in a femmequin, Harry could be depended upon to work five nights running without the prod of extra money. Mr. Bissel and Mr. Jones were well aware of how their assistant engineer was wedded to his work, and how much of their own financial success was due to the passion of this marriage; being wise, if not generous men, they gave him no hint of this. Indeed, they pretended to find a great deal of fault with his work and even after twenty years were not above hinting that he might shortly be discharged. They believed, and quite accurately, that fear of losing a job that meant much more to Chernik than money would drive him to a higher pitch of inventiveness.

  Mr. Bissel would sometimes explain frankly to his intimates, “You can’t turn out a really good product unless you love it. Now most of us here are just a little bit contemptuous of our girls, and of the boobs who buy them.
In the selling end, that doesn’t hurt; but in the production end it does. We have only two people here who really love our girls, and Chernik is one of them.”

  It must not be thought that Harry Chernik’s position allowed him to enjoy the ingenious robot caresses of the femmequins he labored to perfect, and that such crass privileges were the final tie between him and his job. Quite the opposite was the case.

  After the femmequins left him in the form of eerie steel skeletons, to receive their suede-rubber flesh and have their eyes and tongues and other details mounted, he was hardly permitted to touch them. More than once at final tune-up Mr. Bissel had said, “Not you, Harry. Your hands are oily, you’ll smudge her,” and it would be Rita Bruhl’s or Joe Novak’s fingers which would burrow into the invisible slit in the femmequin’s back and unzip the large window there. Only when this was fully open, and the rest of the femmequin draped in a protective shroud, would Harry be allowed to approach and work his magic on the motors, making the final corrections that first testing had shown necessary.

  He was invariably dismissed before final testing. This delicate job was the prerogative of Joe Novak, who nevertheless dressed like a fashion plate and was handsome in a beefy way. Mr. Bissel put a great deal of trust in Joe’s judgement, believing him to have had a wealth of amatory experience in real life. (This last assumption was quite untrue, but there were limits even to Mr. Bissel’s sagacity. In any case Joe’s judgements were vindicated in terms of customer satisfaction.)

  Yet, Harry Chernik’s ardor was not dampened by the fact that he knew vastly more about the insides of his girls than a surgeon knows about the insides of his repeater patients, without enjoying anything of a surgeon’s dignity and prestige. A real skeleton would have horrified a prospective customer less than a glimpse of one of the femmequins in the extremely undressed state in which Harry Chernik worked on them. But Harry, viewing them, was ravished by titillations invisible to other eyes. He saw the languorous undulation of a hip in the curves of a cam, the inviting turn of a haughty head in the routing of a cable, the unswerving glance of wide blue eyes in the adjustment of a photoelectric cell. In fact, Harry might have outgrown his job except for the exceedingly devious nature of the satisfactions he found in it. As in the case of normal love, distance added enchantment.

  There was, of course, a more personal reason for Harry Chernik’s strange pattern of life than these general considerations. Long ago, he had fallen utterly in love. More important, Louise had been submissive, and more easily hurt than himself, so that for once he had managed to conquer his terrible dread of ridicule and really think of asking someone to marry him. She had returned his love; he had been about to propose, when she had been snatched away from him by an exceedingly handsome and brilliant young man, who had overwhelmed her by imaginative romantic attentions and then actually gone on to marry her. It had always seemed unjustly cruel to Harry that John Gottschalk had deprived him of Louise; Gottschalk had the equipment to win any girl, no matter how beautiful, proud and vixenish. Why should John insist on a mousy and gentle creature like Louise?

  It was after this catastrophe, that a guarded message about “an interesting job opportunity” had come from, of all people, Rita Bruhl.

  Rita was an exceptionally handsome, but always severely-dressed girl, who had been John Gottschalk’s companion on double dates with Louise and Harry, before the attraction between John and Louise had shown itself. Harry had always thought of Rita, with impersonal bitterness, as the sort of girl whom men like John should take the trouble to win. He would never have dreamed of risking any advances himself, and was quite startled that she should remember him at all, let alone do him a favor.

  It turned out that Rita worked for a firm manufacturing dress shop mannequins, according to the story she first told him. She introduced him to Mr. Bissel, who, after sounding him out carefully and seeing some evidence of his mechanical ability, bound him to secrecy and then revealed to him that they were bringing out a line of animated mannequins, which a chain of big department stores planned as its smash advertising surprise for next year. Harry found pleasure in discussing the means whereby the movements of wheels and levers and tiny pneumatic pumps could be translated into the flexures and swellings of a chilly pseudo-flesh. (That was before he knew that the femmequins were temperature-controlled to human normal.) Taken to the machine shop, he saw the fleshless steel forms in all their surrealist beauty. Inspecting them more closely, he spotted mechanical crudities that made his fingers and mind itch to be tinkering. He took the job.

  It wasn’t many weeks before he realized that the story about department store advertising had been a blind. But by that time he loved his “skelegirls” (as he sometimes called them) a bit too much.

  Indirectly he heard enough about John Gottschalk to know that both he and his marriage were prospering, though with some setbacks, as when Louise’s first and only child died at birth—a tragedy which happened to coincide with Harry finishing work on the first femmequin which he felt to be stamped with his own individual craftsmanship.

  What he did hear about John Gottschalk was also enough to keep his hatred alive. Once in a while, Rita Bruhl made use of Chernik, curtly asking secret favors. He made no other friends at the factory.

  And so Harry Chernik worked for more than twenty years in his shadow-land of steel houris, nursing his fear of Mr. Bissel; his awe of Rita Bruhl; his contempt for Joe Novak; his hatred of John Gottschalk, and his thin, unreal love for Louise.

  These desires and anxieties, and also his despairs, naturally created a considerable degree of nervousness in Harry Chernik, so that when Rita Bruhl stole up behind him in his workshop and stung him on the shoulder with two fingers, he jumped the earthbound equivalent of half a mile.

  “Rita!” he protested gaspingly, “you make me think it’s Mr. Bissel, you make me think it’s the Federal Bureau of Morals. Why, Rita? We’re friends, Rita. Why?”

  Rita’s eyes were like marble as she looked at him. The pupils and irises were almost lost in the expanse of white.

  “Because there is a special reason,” she said. “Because I want you to make a special femmequin for a special customer.”

  “Do we ever do anything besides that, Rita?”

  “No,” she said, “but Femmequin 973 must have motors many times as powerful as any of the others, it must have cables many times as strong, the gadget must be specially armed—I mean equipped. And I must impress my own voice on the wires.”

  “But that’s against the safety rules,” Chernik protested. “Our femmequins are built to crack up at that point where they could hurt a customer. Besides, Rita, although you dub in a word here and there, you’re not supposed to do whole wires. And as for fooling with the central gadget—”

  “Yes,” Rita said, “but Femmequin 973 is for a very special customer.” And she smiled thoughtfully.

  Rita Bruhl went to work for Mr. Bissel just as any other attractive career girl might join the staff of a couturier or fashion magazine. And her work was very much the same. It was to style the femmequins, to decide from her studies of cafe society and fashion art as to whether legs should be made a trifle longer, waists a bit slimmer, breasts full or budding. In compliance with her recommendations, the suede-rubber faces were given a haughty look one year, a palsy-walsy one the next, or perhaps a dewily-innocent expression—or even an intellectual one.

  In her early days with the company, such expressions were molded into the suede-rubber. Later, as Harry Chernik’s inventiveness bore fruit, they came to depend on the tensions of tiny systems of wires rooted in the suede-rubber, or the inflation and deflation of balloon-like cavities in the cheeks. Expressions became living instead of fixed; variety and a greater degree of naturalness were achieved. Frequently she, and Mr. Jones, and Harry would analyze motion-picture close-ups of glamorous actresses, breaking down a sultry or outraged expression into all its split-second stages; then Harry would go off to cut a miraculous new cam. Sometimes, when they
couldn’t get just what was wanted, Rita herself would emote for Harry; he would watch carefully, and the resultant cam would be even more of a masterpiece.

  Frequently Rita’s styling assignments involved individualizing a femmequin: that is, making it a duplicate of some famous screen or TV star, or of a popular advertising model or society girl. In this case, she would have to do a little research to get the exact measurements and characteristic attitudes and gestures. It would also be necessary to run through a great deal of recorded vocal material from radio broadcasts and the like by the desired star, in order to piece together—from sentences, phrases and even single-words—the saucy and tender utterances to be impressed on the magnetic wires in the femmequin’s voice box. But Rita was a good mimic; she often used her own voice in difficult cases, even when the needed material might have been otherwise obtained.

  Of course such individualizing upped the price of a femmequin considerably, but that was all right with Mr. Bissel.

  On rare occasions, a customer might ask for a copy of some girl not in the public eye. In this case, it would be necessary for Rita to contact the girl—frequently by posing as the representative of a fashion house that wanted to popularize its products by giving them away to selected individuals. Then she got the necessary data by means of tiny hidden cameras and recorders, and by her amazing memory for female mannerisms and behavior.

  Mr. Bissel was uneasy about accepting orders of this sort, ever since one had almost involved him in a murder case. The customer had asked for a duplicate of an obscure strip-tease dancer. Some weeks later, the newspapers were screaming about the murder of a very wealthy relative of this same dancer. The girl was under suspicion, since she inherited a fortune, but she had an unbreakable alibi; she had been performing at the burlesque bar at the crucial time. Mr. Bissel was convinced that the girl herself had ordered the femmequin, and used it to perform her act; but there was nothing he could do about it—especially as his business was much more profitable than blackmail. Afterwards, similar orders always worried Bissel, but he could hardly refuse them; they brought the most money of all.