The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  FOURTEEN

  Ropes are ancient tools but eternally useful. Two of them now, in picturesque criss-crosses, lashed to their chairs behind their Cupid's-bow desk the partners Flaxman and Cullingham amid a ribbony sheety shambles of ransacked files and bubbly mounds and swatches of fire-fighting foam.

  Gaspard, standing just inside the door, was content to survey the wild scene and gently shift his burden, which now seemed made of solid lead, from one aching arm to the other and back again. On the trip over he had had it ground into his consciousness that his sole current function in life was to cherish the gold-and-purple-wrapped ovoid. The girl hadn't shot him yet, but once when he'd stumbled a little she'd burnt the pavement near his foot.

  Cullingham, his pale cheeks patchily reddened, was smiling a tight-lipped patient martyred smile. Flaxman was silent too, but clearly only because Miss Blushes, standing behind him, had the flat of a pink pincher firmly over his mouth.

  The cerise censoring robot was reciting, honey-sweetly, "May a higher power consign to eternal torment all maternally incestuous scriveners. Pervertedly abuse their odorous integuments. Blank-blank-blank-blankety-blank. There, isn't that much nicer, Mr. Flaxman, and-insofar as I could rephrase it-truly more expressive?"

  Nurse Bishop, vanishing her terrible little green gun under her skirt and whipping out a small pair of wire clippers, began to snip Flaxman's bonds. Zane Gort, carefully setting his red and green package on the floor, led Miss Blushes aside, saying, "You must excuse this overtaxed robix, Mr. Flaxman, for interfering with your freedom of speech. The ruling passion-censorship in her case-is very strong in us metal folk. Electron storms, such as her mind has suffered, only intensify it. Now, now, Miss B., I'm not trying to touch your sockets or open your windows and doors."

  "Gaspard! Who the blankety-blank is the Noose?" Flaxman demanded as soon as he'd worked his lips a few times and swallowed. "Who or what are the Wordmill Avengers? That Ibsen witch was going to have her stooges knock my head off when I couldn't tell her."

  "Oh," Gaspard remarked. "That was something I invented on the spur of the moment to help you by scaring her off. It's a sort of publishers' mafia."

  "Writers aren't supposed to have powers of invention!" Flaxman roared. "You blank near got us killed. Those stooges of hers play rough-two B-authors in striped sweaters, looked like crime-confession types."

  "And Homer Hemingway?" Gaspard asked.

  "He was with them but he acted confused. He was all dressed in his famous captain's rig, as if he were going to have his stereo taken for a sailing saga, but he was looking strangely bulky around the butt. Funny, he's supposed to be a fiend for keeping in training-I guess we're all going to pot. When Ibsen ordered the rough stuff, it seemed to throw him off. But he enjoyed the tieing up part and did his bit to muck up the office-good thing I don't keep any important information in the files."

  "You should have gone along with my Avengers gag," Gaspard said. "Built up the scare."

  "Whose scare? I'd have got my head beat off. Look here, de la Nuit, Ibsen says you've been a publisher's spy for years. Now I don't care how much you boasted to her about being a fink-"

  "I never boasted- I never was-"

  "Don't vibrate that egg!" Nurse Bishop barked at Gaspard from where she was snipping Cullingham loose. "Your voice has a rasp in it."

  "— I just want you to understand there's going to be no retroactive flaking payola, especially for imaginary espionage in the Writers' Union!"

  "Look here, Flaxman, I never-"

  "Don't vibrate it, I said! Here, give it to me, you lummox."

  "Take it and welcome," Gaspard told her. "What did Heloise seem to be after, anyway, Mr. Flaxman?"

  "She charged in accusing us of having a way to grind out fiction without wordmills, but after talking to you on the phone she shifted to 'Who is the Noose?' Gaspard, don't imagine any more maflas. They're dangerous. Ibsen would have done me some real damage except she shifted her attention to poor Cully here."

  Gaspard shrugged. "Seems to me my Avengers red herring at least shifted her attention off the real trail."

  "I can't argue with you any more," Flaxman told him, fishing the phone from a tangle of tape on the floor. "I got to get somebody to clean up this place and look to our defenses. I don't want any more crazy women busting in on us simply because the door won't lock."

  Gaspard walked over to Cullingham, who was rubbing his newly-freed limbs. "So Heloise got rough with you too?"

  The tall editorial director nodded, frowning. "Senselessly so," he said. "She just looked at me after her stooges had tied me up and then without asking a single question she began slapping my face-forehand, backhand, forehand."

  Gaspard shook his head. "That's very bad," he said.

  "Why? — beyond the pain and insult of it," Cullingham inquired. "She was wearing a gruesome necklace of silver skulls."

  "That's worse," Gaspard told him. "You know that backcover stereo they have on her books-Heloise posed with six or seven guys? 'Heloise Ibsen and Her Men,' it's usually titled."

  Cullingham nodded. "It's on practically all the Ibsen Proton Press books. The men keep changing."

  "Well," Gaspard said, "her slapping you while wearing her hunting necklace, as she significantly calls it, shows that she's definitely interested in you. She intends to add you to her male harem. I have to warn you that, as new girl, you'll be in for a grueling time."

  The tall man paled. "Flaxy," he called to his partner, who was talking on the phone, "I hope you're having that electrolock really beefed up. Gaspard, a genuine publishers' Mafia might not be a bad idea at all. We're certainly going to need some sort of protection with bulldog teeth."

  "Well," Gaspard said a bit proudly, "at least my improvisation scared off Heloise and Homer. I take it that after striking out in panic they fled."

  "Oh no," Cullingham told him. "It was Miss Blushes who did that. Remember the little woman in black who came in looking for a blown-up husband and son? Well, Miss Blushes had taken her to the ladies' room to comfort and quiet her. The robix came back while Ibsen was slapping me. She took one look at Homer Hemingway, started to vibrate, ducked out again and came back with a big foam fire-extinguisher. That was what routed the Ibsen gang. Flaxie, how about signing up Miss Blushes as bodyguard? We're going to need as many as we can get. I know she's a fed censor, but she could do a little moonlighting."

  "I know everyone's enjoying his chatter," Nurse Bishop called from where she was unwrapping her packages on a cleared stretch of desk. "But I need some help."

  "Could Miss Blushes provide that?" Zane Gort called winningly from the corner where he had been whispering persistently to the pink robix, the latter having haughtily refused to plug in with Zane for direct metal-to-metal communication. "She's offered to help (Yes, you have, Miss B!) and I think it would do her good to be busy."

  "It'll be the first time I've given a robix occupational therapy," Nurse Bishop said. "But at least she'll be a lot better than any of you lazy gabbling self-centered animal or mineral men. Ditch that tin gasbag, Pinky, and come over here. I sure can use a woman."

  "Thank you, I will," the robix said brightly. "If I've learned one thing since I was manufactured, it's that I have a lot more in common with beings of my own sex, whatever material they're made of, than I do with babbling robots or brunch men."

  FIFTEEN

  Flaxman hung up the phone and looked around at Gaspard and Zane Gort.

  "Nurse Bishop brief you guys on what all this is about?" the publisher asked. "The big project, I mean, the secret business of the Nursery, what it is that she's setting up now, and so on?"

  They shook their heads.

  "Good! — she wasn't supposed to." The small dark man leaned back in his chair, started to wipe some bubblefoam off his elbow, thought better of it, and began reflectively, "About a hundred years back, in the last half of the Twentieth Century, there was a virtuoso surgeon and electronics genius named Daniel Zukertort. I don't suppose
you ever heard of the guy?"

  Gaspard started to say something, then decided to leave it to Zane, but the robot was silent too. Perhaps Nurse Bishop's remarks about babbling males had impressed them both.

  Flaxman grinned. "I thought not! Well, surgery and electronics, especially the micro variety of each, were merely Zukie's two showiest abilities. He was also the greatest sealed-motors-and-processes technician and the greatest catalyst chemist the world has ever know, and a bunch of other mere greats. Unless some of the new stuff they're turning up on Leonardo da Vinci holds water, there never was anybody to match Zukertort, before or since. He was a magician with the micro-scalpel and he had only to whistle at an electron to make it stop short and wait for orders. He perfected a nerve-to-metal link, an organic-to-inorganic synapse, that no other biotechnician has been able to duplicate, with any consistent success, on the higher animals. Despite micro-cameras and every other recording technique, nobody could ever quite figure out what Zukie did, let alone do it themselves.

  "Now like any man of his ability, Zukertort was a crackpot. By ordinary standards he didn't care at all about the practical or theoretical values of his invention-cluster. Although he called himself a humanitarian, he didn't even care about the tremendous prosthetic benefits-being able, for instance, to give a man an artificial arm or leg with metal nerves grafted to those of the stump by directing the crystalline growth of non-corrosive hyper-tough alloys, going back if necessary to the spine to make a connection.

  "All Zukie's interest was aimed at two goals: immortality for the best human minds and the opportunity for those minds to achieve mystical knowledge by functioning in isolation from the distractions of the world and the flesh.

  "Jumping all intermediate stages, he perfected a process for preserving fully-functioning human brains inside inert metal cases. The nerves of sight, hearing, and speech were tissue-metal grafted to appropriate inlets and outlets. Most other nerve connections were blocked off-Zukie believed this would increase the brain's potential store of ideational cells and in this he seems to have been brilliantly right. The isotope-powered heart he provided to circulate and purify the brain's blood and regenerate its oxygen was his sealed-motors masterpiece.

  "Located inside a large fontanel, as he called the thick top of the metal brain-case, this heart-motor would require refueling only once a year. Daily replacing of a smaller fontanel would provide the brain with minor nutrients and get rid of the unavoidable residue of unregenerable waste products. As you may know, the brain requires a far more pure, simple and constant fluid environment than any other section of the human body, but by the same token Zukie showed it to be more susceptible to precise technologic control.

  "A smaller pump-a triumph of subtlety-provided the brain with gentle rhythmic surges of hormones and randomized lower-body stimuli so the brain wouldn't just vegetate.

  "The final achievement, a potentially immortal brain in an ovoid can, still seems nothing less than a miracle cubed, but oddly Zukie never looked on his achievement, as particularly difficult or stupendous. 'I had a lifetime in which to save a life,' he once said. 'How much more time could anyone have?' At any rate Zukie had achieved the means to his aim: immortality for the best human minds."

  Flaxman raised a finger. "Now Zukie had his own ideas about the best human minds. Scientists he didn't give a hoot for, they were all his inferiors and as I've said he didn't rate himself too highly. Statesmen and such he only sneered at. Religion he'd been poisoned against in childhood. But mention the word artist and he would go all goosey inside and goosepimples out, for Zukie was a very literal-minded Joe, absolutely no imagination outside his specialties. Artistic creation, the merest tune-fingering, paint-smearing, or especially word-juggling, remained a miracle to him to his dying day. So it was clear who were going to have their minds pickled if Zukie had his way: creative artists-painters, sculptors, composers, but above all writers.

  "Now this was a very sound idea in at least two ways: one, wordmills were just coming in and a lot of real writers were without employment; two, probably only writers would have been nutty enough to go along with what Zukie had in mind. He was a very shrewd man about some things, he knew there were going to be some highpower objections to what he was doing, so he went around very quietly making his contacts, getting his permissions, setting up his own private research hospital- for geriatrics studies he said-organizing the whole thing practically on a secret-society basis, and when the story finally did break he had thirty brains-all writers'-canned, and he folded his arms and flashed his eyes and teeth and dared the world to do its worse.

  "It did. As you can imagine, there was an horrendous stink. Any organization you can name, from hidebound professional societies to screwball cults, found features to scream about. Most of 'em found six or seven. One church claimed he was denying salvation to mortals, while a branch of the anti-cruelty ladies kept demanding that the brains be instantly put out of their misery, as they sweetly expressed their death wishes.

  "Overshadowing all the other complaints, of course, was the one felt by every two-legged Jack and Jill from here to Jupiter. Here was immortality on a platter, or in a can- limitations, sure, but immortality just the same, brain tissue being undying. Why wasn't it for everybody? It had better be, or else.

  "Jurists say there never was a lego-sociologic issue to match the 'Eggheads Case' as some newsmen dubbed it, for sheer maddening complexity of injunctions, counter-injunctions, fifty-seven varieties of expert testimony, the full treatment. It was hard to get at Zukie, he'd protected himself pretty cleverly. He had superbly complete notarized permissions from all the subjects and every one of his brains backed him up when they were put on the witness stand. He'd also sunk the fortune he'd made from his inventions in a foundation he set up called the Braintrust to care for the brains in perpetuity.

  "Then, just on the eve of what looked like the main trial, Zukie gummed the whole thing up forever. No, he didn't drop dead of heart failure in court-no tame finish like that for our Zukie.

  "He had an assistant who was a whiz. This boy had performed the Psychosomatic Divorce-Zukie's name for the operation-three times with complete success; the last time the maestro had just watched, had not had to prompt once. So Zukie had the operation performed on himself! I guess he figured that once he was safe inside his shell there wasn't a thing the world could do to him and his thirty writers. He was really wound up in the socio-legal side of things by now-he was always a fighter I-and he probably thought that testifying from his metal container would be just the spectacular touch needed to tip the balance and win the big trial.

  "And maybe he wanted his whack at immortality and mystical enlightenment too. Probably he liked the notion of living-floating's more like it, I guess-in a world of ideas for thousands of years, just resting and enjoying the insights of thirty comrade minds he revered, after having been so incredibly active in the body for fifty years or so. In any case he believed that he'd passed on his skill to at least one other person and so had a right to take what chances he wanted to with the rest of his own life.

  "Zukie died on the table. His brilliant assistant destroyed all his notes and every scrap of special apparatus and killed himself."

  As Flaxman uttered those last words, slowly, for maximum effect, which he certainly achieved (he had himself as hypnotized as the others) the door to the office very slowly swung open with a soft long creak.

  Flaxman jumped convulsively. The others jerked around. Standing in the doorway was a bent old man in a shiny serge uniform with a greasy-looking uniform cap that fit down snugly between shaggy white temples and high pale ear flaps that had a couple of long twisty hairs in each of them.

  Gaspard recognized him at once. It was Joe the Guard, looking remarkably wakeful-his eyes were actually half open.

  In his left hand he held his whisk broom and snap-lid dust pan. In his right was a bulbous black handgun with a wide pale stripe down the back of it.

  "Clockin' in, Mr. Flaxman
," he said, touching the monstrous gun to his temple. "All set to clean you up. See you need it. How do, everybody."

  "Are you prepared to repair or jury-rig an electrolock?" Cullingham inquired coolly.

  "No, but 'twont be needful," the old man said cheerfully. "Come trouble I'll be standing guard with my trusty old skunk.pistol."

  "Skunk-pistol?" Nurse Bishop said with an incredulous giggle. "Won't it shoot badgers too?"

  "No'm. Fires soft pellets loaded with a smell intolerable to man or beast. Even seems to bother robots, somehow. Person hit strips and flees for water. Don't believe in deadly weapons, I don't. Can set it for riot-spray at a pinch. That'll take care of anything."

  "I believe you," Flaxman said. "But look, Joe, when you use it what happens to. . well, the players on our team?"

  Joe the Guard smiled shrewdly. "That's the beauty of it," he said. "That's what makes my trusty skunk-pistol the perfect weapon. Had my first cranial nerve severed in the last war. Ever since, I can't smell a thing."

  SIXTEEN

  Joe the Guard had started thoughtfully to work on the fringes of the cellulose shambles after twice checking to reassure Flaxman that the safety catch on his skunk-pistol was firmly snicked down.

  Miss Blushes was splicing an extension cord under the directions of Nurse Bishop, who was making flattering remarks about how nice it must be to have fingernails that could serve as powerful wire clippers.

  Flaxman, resolutely turning his eyes away from the door with the useless electrolock, resumed his narrative.

  "When Zukie died, the general pandemonium got worse, of course. The vision of immortality lost put too great a strain on society. The world headed for something that has never quite happened before or since, but which some of the socio-psychiatry boys have called the universal choke-up syndrome.

  "Very luckily, the top people concerned with the case- lawyers, medics, government men-were smart, realistic, and devoted. They concocted the story, bolstered it every which way, and finally made it stick, that the PSD operation was no good, that every excised brain was reduced to tormented terminal idiocy after a brief period, that the eggheads were no more alive than the bits of chicken heart or Martian muscle the science boys keep pulsing in test tubes for decades, or the human sperm and ova in our Disaster Banks. Just brain tissue that wouldn't die but couldn't function.