The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  "To save themselves from mob fury, the eggheads all backed up the story, goo-gooing endlessly at attorneys, judges, and TV audiences. Incidentally, this act also took care of the scare rumor that the canned brains, evilly accumulating knowledge over the centuries, would inevitably become world tyrants.

  "The crisis over, the problem remained of what to do with the thirty eggheads. If the majority of the top people in on the deception had had their way, they'd undoubtedly have been quietly liquidated-but not right away by any means, for that would have reawakened suspicions; rather they'd have been reported as dying one or two at a time over a course of twenty years. But even these naturally spaced deaths would have kept interest alive and the big object was just to let the whole thing simmer away into forgetfulness.

  "Then too, the eggheads, though helpless as so many paralyzed men, would have fought for survival with their keen brains, finding allies in the ambitious lesser lights among their caretakers and blowing the whole case open again if necessary. Also, there was a sizable group among the top people who had always believed that the immortality of the eggheads was purely a wish-dream of Zukie's-and of the press and the people at large-and that the eggheads would all inevitably soon die from unforseeable technological defects in the process of their preservation, from tiny lapses on the part of their nurses-or at any rate soon go insane from their unnatural, disembodied condition.

  "Here another amazing figure comes into the story, not a universal genius, but a very remarkable man in many ways, a science-fiction publisher in the great tradition of Hugo Gernsback. He was Hobart Flaxman, my ancestor and the founder of Rocket House. He'd been Zukertort's close friend, a staunch supporter both with money and enthusiasm, and Zukie had made him head of the Braintrust. Now he simply stepped in and demanded his rights-custody of the brains — and since he was known as a sound man to several of the top people, it seemed the easiest way out. The Braintrust became Wisdom of the Ages, a name selected for its phoniness, and quietly headed for a sort of educated oblivion.

  "Not all his descendants have come up to Old Hobart, but at least we've maintained the Trust. The brains have received tender loving care and a steady diet of world news and any other information they asked for-very much like a wordmill has its vocabulary kept constantly up to date, come to think of it. There were several times in the early years when a threat arose that the brains would get back into the headlines, but each crisis was successfully surmounted. Today with the prolonged-lifespan discoveries that are being made, the brains are no longer a menace to public safety, but we've kept up the policy of secrecy-out of inertia chiefly. My dear Dad, for instance, was hardly what you'd call an enterprising man. And I. . well, that's beside the point.

  "Now you'll be asking me-" (Gaspard came to with a start and realized that Flaxman was shaking a finger at him) "-you'll be asking me why didn't Old Hobart as an imaginative publisher see the potentialities of the eggheads as fictioneers and encourage them to write and then publish their stuff, under false names of course with all precautions. Well, the chief answer is that wordmills had just come in, they were all the rage, readers were almost as sick of writers with individuality as editors were, people loved the pure opium of the wordmill product, there was no time for a publisher to think of anything else and no point in his doing so.

  "But now-" (Flaxman's eyebrows happily soared) "- there are no wordmills, and no writers either, and the thirty brains have a clear field. Just think of it!" He thrust out his palms appealingly. "Thirty writers who've had close to two hundred years apiece to accumulate material and mature their point of view, who are in a position to work steadily day after day without any distractions-no sex, no family problems, no stomach trouble, no nothing!

  "Thirty writers from a hundred years in the past-that's a tremendous selling angle just by itself, people always go for the Old Storyteller. I don't have a list of them here and I haven't checked in several years (confidentially, I once had a slight aversion to Wisdom of the Ages-the idea of brains in cans made me feel just a bit creepy when Dad first told me about it as a kid) but do you realize that Theodore Sturgeon may be among these brains, or Xavier Hammerberg, or even Jean Cocteau or Bertrand Russell? — those last two lived just long enough to catch the PSD I believe.

  "You see, the first writers to undergo the PSD had it performed in absolute secrecy. They pretended to die and went through the rigmarole of having their brainless bodies buried or cremated to fool the world-just as Zukie himself fooled the world for years into thinking he was a garden-variety brain surgeon with electronics as a hobby. It was a pretty grisly operation in eleven stages from what little's known about it, the foreskull and face being lifted off first, the optical, auditory and speech grafts being made next, then came the shift from heart to isotope-pump, and finally all the other nerve connections with the body were blocked off and severed, one by one.

  "Hey, Nurse Bishop, we ready yet?"

  "Only for the last ten minutes," she said.

  Gaspard and Zane Gort looked around. A large dully-gleaming silver egg rested in its black collar on Cullingham's end of the mighty desk, its TV eyes, ears, and speakers arranged neatly before it but none of them plugged in yet. For a moment Gaspard saw it as a man whose nerves had been snipped a century ago, whose body was ashes scattered to the winds or mold that had sifted through a hundred vegetable generations, and he shuddered.

  Flaxman rubbed his hands. "Wait a minute," he said as Nurse Bishop reached for the cable of an eye, "I want to be able to introduce him properly. What's his name?"

  "I don't know."

  "You don't know?" Flaxman looked thunderstruck.

  "No. You said bring any brain. So I did."

  Cullingham interposed smoothly. "I am sure that Mr. Flaxman intended no disrespect whatever to your charges, Nurse Bishop. He said any brain simply because each, as far as we know, is an equally gifted artist. So please tell us how we should address this one."

  "Oh," Nurse Bishop said. "Seven. Number Seven."

  "But I want the name," Flaxman said. "Not some number you use in the Nursery-which strikes me as pretty cold-blooded, incidentally. I certainly hope the Nursery staff hasn't got into the habit of treating the brains as machines-it might spoil their creativity, make them think of themselves as computers."

  Nurse Bishop thought for a bit. "I sometimes call him Rusty," she said, "because there's a faint streak of something brown under his collar, he's the only one that's got it. I was going to bring Half Pint, because he's easiest to carry, but Half Pint was lukewarm about coming and when you sent Mr. Newt I decided on Rusty."

  "I mean the real name." Flaxman was fighting hard to keep his voice down. "You can't introduce a great literary genius to his future publishers as Rusty."

  "Oh." She hesitated, then said decisively, "I'm afraid I can't tell you that. And there isn't any way for you to find out either, not even if you searched the Nursery from top to bottom and went through any records you may have elsewhere."

  "What?"

  "About a year ago," Nurse Bishop explained, "the brains decided for reasons of their own that they wanted to become permanently anonymous. So they had me go through the Nursery files and destroy all records on which their names appeared-and deep-file off the names engraved on the outside of each metal shell. You may have documents with the names here or in some safety deposit vault, I suppose, but they wouldn't tell you which name to attach to which cerebral capsule."

  "And do you mean to stand there and tell me that you went through with this. . this act of wanton concealment!. . without consulting me?"

  "A year ago you weren't one bit interested in Wisdom of the Ages," Nurse Bishop replied with spirit. "Exactly one year ago, Mr. Flaxman, I called you up and started to tell you all about this in detail, and you said not to bother you with skeletons out of the past, that the brains could do anything they damn pleased. You said-and I quote you verbatim, Mr. Flaxman-'If those tin-plated egos, those canned nightmares, want to join the French Fore
ign Legion as fighting computers or tie jets to their tails and go zooming through outer space, it's okay by me.'"

  SEVENTEEN

  Flaxman's eyes grew a trifle glazed-perhaps at the thought of being mocked by thirty masked writers in an age when writers were nothing but vivider-than-life stereo-pix on back covers, perhaps at the riddle of his own nature that would allow him to view thirty canned brains as horrid monsters one minute and commercially precious creative geniuses the next.

  Cullingham took over again.

  "I'm sure this anonymity problem is a matter we can negotiate later," said the quieter, smoother half of the Rocket House partnership. "Perhaps the brains themselves will reverse their policy when they learn that new literary fame is in the offing. Even if they should prefer to maintain strict anonymity, that can be handled easily enough by issuing their works as 'by Brain One and G. K. Cullingham, by Brain Seven and G. K. Cullingham,' and so on."

  "Wow!" Gaspard said loudly, a certain awe in his voice, while Zane Gort observed sotto voce, "Just a shade repetitious, it strikes me."

  The tall fair editorial director merely smiled his martyr's smile, but Flaxman, reddening with loyalty, roared, "Look here, my dear friend Cully has programmed Rocket's wordmills for the past ten years and it's about time he started to get literary recognition of some sort. Writers have been stealing the credit from wordmill-programmers for a century-and before that they stole it from editors! It ought to be obvious even to a wooden-topped glamor-author and a robot with a Johansson block for a brain that the eggheads are going to need lots of programming, editing, coaching-call it what you want to-and Cully's the only man who can do it, and I don't want to hear a whisper of criticism!"

  "Excuse me," Nurse Bishop said, speaking into the echoing silence, "but it's time for Rusty's look-listen, so I'm going to plug him in whether you gentlemen are ready or not."

  "We're ready," Cullingham said softly, while Flaxman, rubbing his face, added just a touch dubiously, "Yeah, I guess we are."

  Nurse Bishop motioned them all to Flaxman's end of the room, then pointed a TV eye in that direction. There was the tiniest thunk as she plugged it into the silver egg's upper right socket and Gaspard realized that he was shivering. It seemed to him that something had come into the TV eye. A faint red glare. Nurse Bishop plugged a microphone into the other top socket, which made Gaspard stop breathing, as he found out when he took an involuntary noisy breath some seconds later.

  "Go on!" Flaxman said with a little gasp of his own. "Plug in. . er. . Mr. Rusty's speaker. I feel crawly this way." He caught himself and made a little wave at the eye. "No offense, old chap."

  "It might be Miss or Mrs. Rusty," the girl reminded him. "There were several women among the thirty, weren't there? No, I think it will be best if you make your full proposal and then I plug in his speaker. It will go more smoothly that way, believe me."

  "He knew you were bringing him here?"

  "Oh yes, I told him."

  Flaxman squared his shoulders at the eye, swallowed, and then looked around helplessly at Cullingham.

  "Hel-lo, Rusty," the partner instantly began, a little too evenly at first, as if he were trying to talk like a machine or for a machine to understand. "I am G. K. Cullingham, partner in Rocket House with Quintus Horatius Flaxman beside me, current custodial director of Wisdom of the Ages." He went on with persuasive clarity to outline the current emergency in the publishing world and the proposal that the brains turn once again to fiction writing. He skirted the question of anonymity, touched lightly on the matter of programming ("customary editorial cooperation") and described attractive alternate plans for administering royalties, ending with a few nicely-phrased remarks about literary tradition and the great shared enterprise of authorship down the ages.

  "I believe that wraps it up, Flaxie."

  The small dark publisher nodded, only a trifle convulsively.

  Nurse Bishop plugged a speaker into the empty socket.

  For a good long time there was absolute silence, until Flaxman could bear it no longer and asked throatily, "Nurse Bishop, has something gone wrong? Has he died in there? Or doesn't the speaker work?"

  "Work, work, work, work, work," the egg instantly said. "That's all I ever do. Think, think, think, think, think. Me-oh-my-oh-my."

  "That's his code for a sigh," Nurse Bishop explained. "They have speakers on which they can make free noises and even sing, but I only let them use them weekends and holidays."

  There was another uncomfortable period of silence, then the egg said very rapidly, "Oh, Messrs. Flaxman and Cullingham, it is an honor, a very great honor, that which you suggest, but it is much too grand for us. We have been too much out of touch with things to tell you incarnated minds how you should entertain yourselves, or presume to provide such entertainment. We thirty discarnates have our little existence together, our little preoccupations and hobbies. It is enough. Incidentally, in this I speak for my twenty-nine brothers and sisters as well as myself-we have not disagreed on matters of this sort for the past seventy-five years. So I must kindly thank you, Messers Cullingham and Flaxman, oh very very kindly, but the answer is no. No, no, no, no, no."

  Because the voice was an uninflected monotone, it was quite impossible to decide whether its humility was serious or mocking or a combination of the two. However, the egg's loquacity ended Flaxman's fit of shyness, and he joined with his partner in bombarding the egg with sound logic, reassurances, pleas, considerations and the like, while even Zane Gort put in a well-phrased encouragement now and again.

  Gaspard, who said nothing and was thoughtfully drifting toward Nurse Bishop, whispered to the robot in passing, "Good going, Zane. I'd have thought you'd find Rusty weird-unrobot, as you put it. After all, he's an immobile thinking machine. Like a wordmill."

  The robot considered that. "No," he whispered back, "he's too small to make me feel that way. Too. . whir. . cuddly, you might say. Besides, he's conscious, wordmills never were. No, he's not unrobot or even inrobot, he's arobot. He's a human being like you. In a box of course, but that doesn't make much difference. You're in a skin box yourself."

  "Yes, but mine's got eyeholes," Gaspard pointed out.

  "So has Rusty's."

  Flaxman glared at them and put his finger to his lips.

  By this time Cullingham had pointed out more than once that the brains would not have to worry about the general nature of the entertainment they would provide, that he as editorial director would accept full responsibility, while Flaxman was enlarging in rather fulsome fashion on the wonderful wisdom the brains must have accumulated over the eons (his word) and the desirability of imparting same (in action-packed, juicy stories) to a Solar System of shortlived, body-trammeled earthlings. From time to time Rusty briefly defended his position, hedging and shifting a bit now and then, but never really giving ground.

  In his slow drift toward Nurse Bishop, Gaspard inched past Joe the Guard, who, having teased up a gobbit of bubble-foam on the end of a pencil, was shredding paper on it so that it wouldn't stick to the inside of his dust pan. It occurred to Gaspard that Flaxman and Cullingham were anything but the hard-headed, march-stealing, shrewd businessmen their manner proclaimed them. Rather, in their fantastic scheme to have two-hundred-year-old canned brains write exciting romances for moderns they were mad gaudy dreamers building moon-high sand castles.

  But, Gaspard asked himself, if publishers could be such dreamers, what sort of dreamers must writers once have been? It was a dizzying thought, like discovering that your great-grandfather was really Jack the Ripper.

  EIGHTEEN

  Gaspard's attention was jerked back to the argument in the main ring by a startling announcement from Rusty.

  The encapsulated brain had never, in its two centuries of existence, read a single wordmilled book.

  Flaxman's first reaction was incredulous horror, as if Rusty had told him that he and his fellow brains were being reduced to idiocy by being systematically starved of oxygen. The publisher,
while admitting dodging in earlier years his responsibilities as custodial director of the Braintrust, was inclined to accuse the Nursery staff of culpable neglect in failing to provide the most elementary literary fare for its charges.

  But Nurse Bishop snappily asserted that No Wordwooze was simply a rule (which Flaxman should have known!) laid down by Daniel Zukertort when organizing the Nursery: his thirty disembodied minds were to receive only the purest intellectual and artistic nourishment and the inventor had considered wordwooze a tainted product. Perhaps a few wordmilled books had been smuggled in from time to time by earlier, less responsible nurses, but on the whole the rule had been strictly kept.

  Rusty confirmed all this in every particular, reminding Flaxnian that he and his fellows had been chosen by Zukertort for their devotion to art and philosophy and their distaste for science and especially engineering; they had had a certain curiosity from time to time about wordmilled books, much as a philosopher might have about the comics, but it had never been great and the No Wordwooze rule had not been a hardship to them.

  Then Cullingham cut in to point out that it was a blessing in disguise that the eggheads had read no wordwooze-they would be able to turn out far fresher, more natural fiction if they did not know the slickly machined product against which they were competing. Instead of sending to the Nursery a complete library of wordmill literature, as Flaxman had suggested, the No Wordwooze rule ought to be enforced more strictly than ever, Cullingham maintained.