The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  She set it in front of Homer, covered it briefly with a silver plate.

  She removed the plate. The flame was gone and the hideous stench of burnt casein filled the air.

  With a final flourish of: her perky rump, Suzette announced, "Here she is, jus'-so-'ot-your flaming milk, M'sieu."

  TWENTY-THREE

  Flaxman and Cullingham sat side by side in their half-cleaned office.

  Joe the Guard had been ordered to bed in a state of collapse after a night of unremitting tidying. He was sleeping on a cot in the men's room with his skunk pistol tucked under his pillow along with a violet cake of Odor-Ban that Zane Gort had thoughtfully placed beside it. Zane and Gaspard, arriving for work at dawn, had been shooed off to put Joe to bed and then check the burglar-foiling systems of all the storerooms with their priceless contents of newly milled books.

  The two partners were alone. It was that magic unsmirched hour of the business day before trouble starts.

  So Flaxman smirched it.

  "Cully, I know we can persuade the eggs, but in spite of that I'm getting cold feet about the whole project," he said miserably.

  "Tell me why, Flaxy," the other responded smoothly. "I think I have a glimmering."

  "Well, my dear Dad gave me a complex about the eggheads. A phobia, you might say. One hell of a phobia-I hadn't realized how big until now. You see, Dad looked on the eggs as a sacred trust that had to be kept a big mystery even from most of his own family, the sort of sacred trust some old aristocratic British families used to have; you know, down in the sub-dungeon is the original castiron crown of England guarded by a slimy toad-monster; or maybe it's an undying great uncle who went mad in the crusades and turned all green and scaly and wants to drink the blood of a virgin every full moon; or maybe it's a sort of a combination of the two and right down there in the sub-sub-dungeon, the ultimate oubliette, they've got the rightful king of England from seven centuries back, only he's turned into a toad-monster who wants a tubful of virgin blood every time the moon squeaks-anyway, there's this sacred trust they've got and are sworn to keep and when the son's thirteen years old the father's got to tell him all about it, with a lot of ritual questions and answers like What Cries in the Night? It is the Trust, What Must We Give It? That Which It Wants, What Does It Want? A Bucket of Blood, and so on, and then when the father does tell the kid and shows him the monster, the kid has a heart attack and is never good for anything much after that except to potter around in the library and garden and tell his son about it. Are you getting the picture, Cully?"

  "In the main," the other replied judiciously.

  "Well anyway that's the way my dear Dad made me feel about the Braintrust. God, how that name got me right from the start! Even when I was a little kid I knew there was something ominous in my home background. My dear Dad was allergic to eggs and also he'd never allow silverware at the table, even plated; once he fainted dead away when a new English robot fresh out of Sheffield brought him a boiled breakfast egg sitting up in its shell in a spindly-footed silver egg cup. And once he took me to a children's party and collapsed during an unannounced egg-rolling contest. And then there were the mysterious phone calls I'd overhear about the Nursery-which was where I slept, I thought-making it pretty bad, let me tell you, the time I overheard Dad say (it was during the Third Anti-Robot Riots) 'I think we should be prepared to take them underground and blow up the Nursery on an instant's notice, day or night.'

  "To make it worse Dad was the sort of fusser who could never bear to wait and I wasn't quite nine years old, let along thirteen, when he took me to the Nursery-their Nursery-and introduced me to all thirty of them. At first I thought they were some sort of robot-minds, of course, but when he told me there was a wet warm brain inside each one of them, I tossed my cookies and almost keeled over. But Dad made me go through with it to the bitter end and then take a horseback riding lesson-Dad belongs to the old school. One of the eggs said to me, 'You remind me of my little nephew who died at the age of eighty eight a hundred and seven years ago.' But the worst was the one who just laughed a dead he-he-he like that and then said, 'Like to get inside with me, sonny?'

  "Well, after that I dreamed about the eggheads every night for weeks and the dreams always had the same Godawful realistic ending. I'd be in my bed in my Nursery and the door would open softly and silently in the dark and in would float about eight feet off the floor, with eyes like faint red coals, one of those things with that Godawful look of a half-finished high-domed metal skull-"

  The door to the office swung inward softly and silently. Flaxman straightened in his chair so that his body was at a 45 degree angle to the floor. His eyes closed and a tremor-not large, but visible-went down and up him.

  Standing in the doorway was a robot tarnished to the point of fine pitting.

  "Who are you, boy?" Cullingham asked coolly.

  After a full five seconds the robot replied, "Electrician, sir," and brought his right claw to his square brownish dome in a salute.

  Flaxman opened his eyes. "Then fix the electrolock on that door!" he roared.

  "Right, sir!" the robot said, saluting again smartly. "Just as soon as I've attended to the escalator." He pulled the door briskly shut.

  Flaxman started to get up, then slacked down again in his chair. Cullingham said, "Strange! Except that he's so foully pitted, that robot is the image of Zane's rival-you know, the one that used to be a bank messenger-Cain Brinks, the author of the Madam Iridium stories. Must be a commoner model of robot than I realized. Well, now, Flaxy, you say the eggheads bug you, but you certainly put up a brave front yesterday when we had Rusty here."

  "I know, but I don't believe I can keep it up," Flaxman said miserably. "I thought it would be a simple over-in-a-flash matter of giving them assignments-you know, 'We want thirty hypnotic action-packed novels by next Thursday!' 'Yessir, Mr. Flaxman!' — but if we're going to have to confer with them and even argue and sweet-talk them just to get them to try it in the first place. . Tell me, Cully, what do you do when you get the jitters?"

  Cullingham looked thoughtful for a moment, then smiled. "A secret for a secret," he said. "You keep mine as I'll keep yours. I go to Madam Pneumo's."

  "Madam Pneumo's? I've heard that name before, but I never could get an explanation."

  "That is as it should be," Cullingham said. "Most men pay three figures of money just to get the briefing I'm about to give you."

  TWENTY-FOUR

  "Madam Pneumo's establishment," Culllngham began, "is a very exclusive house of pleasure owned, managed and staffed entirely by robots. You see, fifty years or so ago there was this mad robot named Harry Chernik-at least I think Chernik was a robot-whose ambition it was to build robots which would be exactly like human beings on the outside, down to the least detail of texture and anatomy. Chernik's ruling idea was that if men and robots were exactly alike-and particularly if they could make love to each other! — then there couldn't possibly be any enmity between them; Chernik was doing his work, you see, around the time of the First Anti-Robot Riots and he was a dedicated interracialist.

  "Well, of course the whole project turned out to be a blind alley as far as Chernik's main purpose was concerned. Most robots simply didn't want to look like human beings and besides all the space inside a Chernik robot was so taken up with machinery to enable the robot to counterfeit the behavior of a human in bed and in other simple acts of social intercourse-fine muscular controls, temperature and moisture and suction controls, etcetera-that there wasn't any room for anything else. Outside of their extraordinary amatory abilities, the Chernik robots were completely mindless-not true robots at all, but mere automata, and to squeeze both a real robot and a Cherik automaton into the same simulated giriskin envelope they would have had to be ten feet tall or as big as circus fatwomen. And besides, as I say, it turned out that most robots didn't go for the idea at all-they wanted to be sleek hard metal and nothing else; a soft bulbous robot or robix who looked like a human being, even a beautifu
l human being, would have been ostracized by them and forever barred from their particular delights, especially all robot-robix acts of tenderness.

  "Chernik was shattered. Like some Indian rajah in the days of suttee, he surrounded himself on an enormous bed with all his most cunningly seductive creations, set fire to the crimson draperies of the bed, and then electrocuted himself. Chernik was mad, you see.

  "The robots financing Chernik weren't. They'd always had in mind certain highly profitable subsidiary uses to which Chernik's automata could be put, though they'd never told Chernik about these ideas. So they doused the fire, saved the automata, and almost immediately put them to work in an establishment catering to male human beings, only adding certain hygienic and economic safeguards that had never occured to Chernik's essentially idealistic imagination."

  Cullingham frowned. "I actually don't know if they've ever done anything similar with the male automata Chernik is supposed to have created-they're a remarkably secretive little robot syndicate-but their femmequins (as they're sometimes called) were a rousing success. Their mindlessness was an outstanding attraction, of course, and it in no way prevented special cams and tapes being temporarily put in them that would enable them to perform any act or murmur any fantasy a customer might desire. Best of all, perhaps, there was absolutely no sense of human entanglement, clash, conflict or consequence involved in your commerce with them.

  "In addition, special features were in time developed which made femmequins particularly attractive to the more fastidious, fanciful, fantastically-oriented men like myself.

  "For you see, Flaxy, the robot syndicate had not only saved Chernik's female automata, they'd also saved all his skills and secret processes. After a time they began to manufacture off-trail femmequins, women who were better than ordinary women or at any rate vastly more interesting, if you go in at all for the outrй." Cullingham became almost animated, spots of color appeared in his pale cheeks. "Can you imagine, Flaxy, having it with a girl who is all velvet or plush, or who really goes all hot and cold, or who can softly sing you a full-orchestra symphony while you're doing it or maybe Ravel's Bolero, or who has slightly-not excessively-prehensile breasts or various refreshingly electric skin areas, or who has some of the features-not overdone, of course-of a cat or a vampire or an octopus, or who has hair like Medusa's or Shambleau's that lives and caresses you, or who has four arms like Siva, or a prehensile tail eight feet long, or. . and at the same time is perfectly safe and can't bother or involve or infect or dominate you in any way? I don't want to sound like a brochure, Flaxy, but believe me, it's the ultimate!"

  "For you, maybe," Flaxman said, looking around at his partner with a certain speculative apprehension. "Hey, now I can understand, those being your tastes, why you got the shudders so especially yesterday when that Ibsen woman began to wet her lip at you."

  "Don't remind me!" Culllngham pleaded, paling.

  "I won't. Well, as I was going to say, Madam Pneumo's off-trail femmequins may be just the thing for you-every man to his own tastes! — but me, I'm afraid they wouldn't relax me one bit, in fact, I'm afraid they'd turn my jitters into shudders, just like those Godawful silver eggheads would in my nursery nightmares as they went swooping around in the dark over my bed, dipping down under it and then slowly rising up at the foot, circling in for the kill."

  For a second time the door to the office swung inward stealthily. Flaxman did only a sketch of his previous reaction, but somehow gave the impression of being quite as deeply affected.

  A burly blue-chinned man in khaki overalls looked them over, then explained crisply, "Electric Light and Power. Routine damage inspection. See your electrolock isn't working. I'll make a note of that." He hauled a book out of a hip pocket.

  "The robot repairing the escalator is going to attend to it," Cullingham volunteered, studying the man thoughtfully.

  "I didn't see any robot when I came up," the other told him. "You ask me, they're all effing tin crooks or crocked tin stumblebums. I just fired one last night. He was drinking high-voltage juice on the job. Or shooting himself with it, if you look at it that way-a main-liner. Must have got away with hundreds of amperes. Be burnt out in two weeks if he finds a way to keep it up."

  Flaxman opened his eyes. "Look, would you do me a great favor?" he said earnestly to the man in the doorway. "I know you're a city inspector, but it's nothing illegal and I'll make it worth your while. Just patch up the electrolock on that door. Now."

  "Glad to oblige you," the man grinned. "Soon as I fetch my kit," he added, rapidly backing off and drawing the door shut.

  "Strange," Cullingham said. "The man's the image of a Gil Hart who was a private hand and industrial troubleblaster when I met him five years ago. Either this was his twin brother or else Gil's come down in the world. Oh well, no loss, he was a pretty bad egg."

  Flaxman automatically flinched at the word. He stared at the now closed and temporarily quiescent door for a long moment, then shrugged.

  "You were saying, Cully, about the eggheads?" he asked. "I wasn't," Cullingham said gently, "but here's the plan I worked out last night. We'll invite two or three of the eggs-not Rusty this trip-over to the office. Gaspard can help bring them, but he mustn't be here during the interview, or any of the nurses either, it's a distracting influence. Gaspard can escort the nurse back, or something like that, while we have a good two-three hour chat and I present some stuff and maybe do some things to the eggs that I think will convince them, tease them into writing, you might say. I realize now that this'll be hard on you, Flaxy, but if it gets too bad at any point you can just walk out and take a rest while I carry on."

  "I suppose you better go ahead with it," Flaxman said resignedly. "We got to get stories out of those horrors, somehow, or we're sunk. And it couldn't be much worse for me to have them here, sitting in their black collars staring at me, than just to sit here myself remembering the Godawful way they used to-"

  This time the door opened so softly and slowly that there was no sense of sudden motion to catch the eye and it was almost wide open before either of them noticed it. And this time Flaxman merely closed his eyes, though with a final flash of white, as if the pupils had rolled upward.

  Standing in the doorway was a tall thin man with a complexion not much more vital than his ash-gray suit. His cavernous eyes, long narrow face, high-hunching shoulders, and hollow chest all made him look rather like a pale cobra fresh-risen from a wicker basket.

  Cullingham said, "What is your business, sir?"

  Without opening his eyes, Flaxman added in a very tired voice, "If you are selling electricity, we are not buying any."

  The gray man smiled faintly. If anything, it made him look more like a cobra. However, all he said (though in a voice that softly hissed) was, "No. I am just browsing. I assumed that since the place was open and empty it must be one of the completely gutted buildings up for sale."

  "Didn't you see the electricians working outside?" Cullingham inquired.

  The gray man said, "There are no electricians working outside. Well, gentlemen, I shall retire now. Within two days my bid will be sent to you."

  "There's nothing here for sale," Flaxman informed him. The gray man smiled. "Nevertheless, my bid will be sent to you," he said. "I am a very persistent man and I am afraid you must put up with my little stubbornnesses."

  "Well, who are you, anyway?" Flaxman demanded.

  The gray man smiled for a third time as he softly drew the door shut after him, saying, "My friends sometimes call me, perhaps for my steely persistence, the Garrote."

  "Strange," Cullingham said when the door was shut. "That man reminds me of someone too. But who? A face like a Sicilian Christ. . Puzzling."

  "What's a garrote?" Flaxman asked.

  "A tight steel collar," Cullingham replied coolly, "with a screw in it for breaking the neck. An invention of the gay old Spaniards. However, the Garrote would also mean simply the Noose."

  As he said that last word, his eyebrows lift
ed. The two partners looked at each other.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Robert Schumann's song "I Will Not Grieve" conveys a feeling of terrible, glorious loneliness with its Germanic images of lost loves, diamond splendors, and coiled serpents chewing at hearts frozen in eternal night, but it is even more impressive when sung in strangely harmonious discords by a chorus of twenty-seven sealed brains.

  At the last low "nicht" shuddered away, Gaspard de la Nuit applauded softly. His hair was crewcut now and his facial bruises had turned a rich greenish purple. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one.

  Nurse Bishop darted about the Nursery unplugging speakers with chipmunk rapidity, though not swiftly enough to escape an encore of whistles, jeers and boos from the encapsulated minds.

  When she returned, flicking into place an imperceptibly disturbed ringlet, Gaspard said, "They're just like a dormitory."

  "Put out that cigarette, you can't smoke here. Yes, you're so right about the brats. Fads, crazes, the latest for Byzantine history and talking in colors with light-up spectrum speakers. Squabbles, feuds-sometimes two will refuse to be plugged in on each other and keep it up for weeks on end. Criticisms, complaints and jealousies-I talk to Half Pint more than I do to the others, he's teacher's pet, I forget Greeny's look-listen, I can't put Big's eye exactly where he wants it, endless-or maybe it's just that I was two minutes and seventeen seconds late giving Scratch his audio-visual bath, which is a flood of color and sound that's supposed to tone up their sensory areas, only we can't hear or see it, thank goodness, Half Pint says it's like a Niagara of suns.

  "Moods, oh good Lord-sometimes one of them won't say a word for a month and I have to coax and coax, or pretend not to care, which is harder but works better in the long run. And just general copy-cat silliness-let one of them think of some new stupid way to behave and in two shakes all the others are imitating. It's like having a family of Mongolian geniuses. Miss Jackson, who goes in for history, calls them the Thirty Tyrants after some collaborators who once bossed Athens. They're really an endless chore. Sometimes I think I never do anything in this world but change fontanels."