The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  Zane Gort's headlamp flared crimson. "The fiend. He'll pay for it. Don't stand there staring, you two. Move!"

  THIRTY-SIX

  New Angeles was a forest of pastel pillars between the green mountains and the purple algae fields of the Pacific cut by blue ship lanes. Among the palely colorful skyscrapers the new popular semicircular and pentagonal cross-sections predominated. A large circular clearing marked the municipal launching field. A jagged light green jet trail mounted vertically above it. The noon ship had just lifted for High Angeles orbiting some three earth diameters overhead.

  Zane was cruising in a traffic lane at seven hundred feet. Wind and the downstream soused Gaspard, who drew his flapping hood tight around his cheeks. He studied his robot friend covertly.

  Zane was wearing on top of his head a dull black smoothly cylindrical object about two feet high. It made Zane look so exactly like a robot hussar that Gaspard hesitated to ask him about it, thinking the headgear might be of purely private emotional significance to the vengeful robot. And possibly psychotic too, Gaspard added to himself uneasily. But Zane noted the direction of his gaze.

  "This busby is my radio-locater," he volunteered quite sanely, shouting over the drone of the vanes. "Several days ago, anticipating a kidnapping or two, I planted powerful radio mini-senders on all Rocket House and Nursery personnel-yours is in your wristwatch (don't trouble, I've turned it off), Mr. Flaxman's in his truss, Cullingham's in his suicide kit, and so on. I didn't seriously expect any attempts on the eggheads themselves-somehow that facet of human viciousness eluded my imagination-but because I was taking him on brief trips outside his orbit I did attach a sender to Half Pint in a false bottom-Isaac, Hank and Karel be thanked!

  "The trouble is that, not anticipating multiple kidnappings, I used identical senders. So we'll just have to rescue them one by one, each time picking the strongest signal, and hope that Half Pint comes up first-or at least among the first. Ha! Here's Stop Number One coming up."

  Gaspard grabbed hold of his seat as the copter dropped out of the lane with a stomach-wrenching lurch and slanted down at about twice the legal speed limit toward a dirty squat old skyscraper. Several copters were parked on the rectangular roof and there was a white penthouse with blue trim and round windows like portholes and pennons flying from a sundeck in the form of a ship's bridge.

  Gaspard shouted, "I've never seen Homer Hemingway's penthouse, but that's his style. And Heloise's copter is gray and violet with chromium trim, like that one."

  "Ten to one it's Cullingham coming up," Zane agreed. "I'd pass him by, but we can't be dead certain it's not Half Pint."

  They jounced to a landing. Zane sprang out, saying, "The signal's coming from the penthouse, all right." Gaspard hobbled after him, chilled and stiff.

  As they neared it, the penthouse door opened and Homer Hemingway came trudging out with the corners of his mouth turned down. He had on trackpants and sweatshirt; draped over his shoulders was a long, heavy, bigflapped overcoat that would have gone well on a Russian general; and he was carrying two big pigskin suitcases covered with exotic travel labels ranging from Old Spain to the moons of Jupiter.

  "You two again!" he said, stopping as he saw them, but not setting down the suitcases. "Gaspard the pipsqueak and his big tin brother! Gaspard, I want you should know you disgust me so I'd paste you right now and take my chances with the monster, only I'd just feel that she was making me do it and, gentlemen, I've gone the jealousy route the last time. When it gets to the point where a writer's woman who's supposed to be sweet and true throws him over for a kidnapped publisher, claiming it's a matter of business and being clever but really just wanting another skull to hang on her hunting necklace, then, gentlemen, Homer Hemingway is through!

  "Go right on in and tell her from me what I said," he continued with a jerk of his big pale dome at the open door. "Go ahead! Tell her I'm taking that job with the Green Bay Packers where I'll be Right Guard on the Second Team they send in for atmosphere purposes or sometimes comic relief in the Third Quarter. It's honester work than writing, though not much. Off-season I'll probably be running a reducing salon or working as prop skipper on a sport fishing yacht. Tell her that from me too! And now, gentlemen, so long."

  With quiet dignity, eyes straight ahead, the big ex-writer trudged past them toward a red, white and blue copter.

  Without further pause Zane Gort glided into the penthouse, bending low so as not to bump his radio-busby. Gaspard roused himself and stumbled after him. The robot turned, touching pincher to speaker. Gaspard did his best to walk soft-footed.

  They were in a living room furnished with dark leather-upholstered chairs and period ashtrays and hung with antique signs traditionally associated with writing and writers, such as GENIUS AT WORK, BRIDGE OUT, FREE MOONEY, NOBODY HERE BUT US CRAFTSMEN, STOP, UP THE REBELS, STOP ATOMIC TESTS NOW, DANGEROUS CURVES, A LIVING WORDRATE, ASSIGN ME SOMETHING, DON'T WRITE- UNIONIZE, and WE'RE PAID HACKS-NO FREE THINKING.

  Opening off the living room were six doors, all shut, labeled in large gold letters: MASSAGE ROOM, MEDICAL ROOM, TROPHY ROOM, EATERY, CAN, and PAD. Zane Gort considered them thoughtfully.

  Something occurred to Gaspard. "We don't have much time," he whispered to Zane. "If Cullingham has a suicide pack and is locked in with Heloise, he'll use it."

  Zane glided to the door marked PAD and extended his left pincher, which extruded three metal filaments. As soon as they touched the door, voices came from Zane's chest, low but clearly audible.

  CULLINGHAM: My God! You wouldn't!

  HELOISE IBSEN: Yes, I would! I'm going to rough you up as you've never been roughed up before. You'll smart, you'll sizzle, you'll burn-you'll babble every last secret of Racket House. I'm going to make you sorry your mother ever played around. I'm going to-

  CULLINGHAM: Not while I'm helpless this way!

  HELOISE IBSEN: You call that helpless? You just wait a minute-

  CULLINGHAM: I'll kill myself first!

  Gaspard nudged Zane anxiously. The robot shook his head.

  HELOISE IBSEN: You'll live long enough for my purposes. All your post-pubertal life you've been giving orders to wasp-waisted hygienic rubber mattresses. Now you're going to take orders of the filthiest sort from a big strong strapping girl who'll torture you if you hesitate and who knows every trick for prolonging the agony, and you're going to thank her nicely for each unmentionably nasty command and kiss her big toe.

  There was a pause. Again Gaspard nudged Zane anxiously.

  CULLINGHAM: Don't stop, go on! Get to the whipping part again!

  Zane looked at Gaspard. Then he rapped sharply on the door and opened it four inches.

  "Mr. Cullingham," he called, "we just want you to know that we've rescued you."

  There was silence for three or four seconds. Then the laughter began to come from beyond the door, chuckles at first but building to a pealing duet that died away in giggles.

  Then Heloise called, "Don't worry about him, boys-I'll have him back to work the day after tomorrow, believe it or not, even if I have to express him in a ventilated coffin marked 'fragile.'"

  Zane called, "In your S-kit, Mr. Cullingham, you'll find a mini-sender. Kindly switch it off."

  Gaspard called, "And Homer Hemingway said to tell you he's gone to join the Green Bay Packers."

  Zane touched his shoulder and picked up something from a door-side table. As they started out, they heard one last bit of dialogue.

  HELOISE IBSEN: Cully, why the hell should a famous writer want to work in a canning factory? You tell me.

  CULLINGHAM: I don't know. I don't care. What would you do to me if you had me at your mercy in a canning factory?

  HELOISE IBSEN: First I'd take your suicide kit away from you and hang it just out of your reach. Like so. Then-

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  "Gaspard, you copt, don't you?" Zane asked as they emerged on the roof.

  "Yes, but-"

  "Good! No objections to a spot of theft in a go
od cause?"

  "Well-"

  "Better! You'll follow me then in Miss Ibsen's copter. We may need the added capacity, and you'll be warmer in a closed machine. Here are her keys. Stay beamed to me."

  "Okay," Gaspard said a bit dubiously.

  "And see you spank the welkin for all you're worth!" the robot added heartily. "Time is of the essence. I'll broadcast a wounded-robot ambulance code-the skyway patrol will assume you're my helper. Get cracking, Old Muscle!"

  The dosed cabin was cozy but it smelt of Heloise. As Gaspard lifted from the roof, swinging wide of Zane's downstream, he felt a wave of wistful woe at the thought of past encounters that had occurred right where he was sitting. But all sad thoughts were soon swept from his mind by the problem of keeping up with Zane-he found that the only way that worked for him was to aim his copter at the robot's and let the vanes whiffle their worst. The robot fell away east and started to climb.

  "Next strongest signal's from the mountains," Zane's voice sounded in his earphone. "Keep her whizzing. I'll be doing my best to outpace you. Only four hours at most now until Half Pint starts to die in his own cerebral waste products for lack of a fresh fontanel. The fiend."

  The pastel skyscrapers fell behind, abruptly replaced by tall pines. Zane's copter drew ahead swiftly, driving straight east. Gaspard, realizing his inexpert hand-piloting wasn't helping at all, set his own machine on automatic, top speed. The open copter with its gleaming black-shakoed pilot continued to grow smaller, but at a less rapid rate.

  Otherwise, however, the change was for the worse. Gaspard's mind, unoccupied by piloting, obsessed itself with his thwarted desires, jumping back and forth between Nurse Bishop and Heloise Ibsen-with even the hot senseless wish appearing now and then that he somehow have his will of Miss Willow. Could machines be drugged? He tried to think of the brains, especially poor Half Pint, but the subject was too grisly. In desperation he hauled out of his pocket the second brain-recommended book Nurse Bishop had loaned him: an ancient whodunnit called The Mauritzius Case by one Jacob Wasserman. The going was tough and very strange, but at least his mind and feelings were engaged.

  "Come in, Gaspard!"

  The urgent command recalled him from the grim household of the Andergasts. Below, pines were giving way to tawny sand.

  "Roger, Zane!"

  The robot's copter was a dot in the shimmering distance ahead-if that weren't some other flier; there were three other dots hanging in the east.

  "Gaspard, I'm approaching an inflated green ranch house with a black-and-white checked zoomer parked nearby. Signal Two is coming from there. Nurse Bishop, I must assume. Another signal seems to be coming from at least fifty miles further east.

  "Time presses. Half Pint has little more than three hours left before the onset of cerebral suffocation, and it's only a one in three chance that Signal Three is him-it might equally be Mr. Flaxman or Miss Blushes. So I am splitting our forces. You will handle Signal Two while I speed on to Signal Three. Are you armed?"

  "This crazy old bullet gun."

  "It will have to do. I am now passing over the ranch house and will fire a five-second blinking star."

  There was a brief twinkle of intense light beside the second dot north of the one Gaspard had assumed to be Zane's copter.

  "Got you," Gaspard said, altering course.

  "Gaspard, to facilitate my radio-locating, especially if I must go beyond Signal Three to rescue Half Pint, it is vital that Nurse Bishop's mini-sender be switched off as soon as she is rescued. Tell her to do so."

  "Where did you hide it on her?"

  There was a considerable pause before the robot's reply. Gaspard used it to search the flat yellow landscape ahead. He spotted a dull green fleck below the dot of Zane's copter.

  "I trust, Gaspard, that the information I am about to give you will not make you think the less of me, or of any other person, Saint Willi forbid! The mini-sender is buried in the center of one of Nurse Bishop's falsies."

  Another brief pause, then the robot's voice, which had been a bit rapid and hushed, came through loud and hearty.

  "And now good luck! I'm banking on you, Old Bone!"

  "Whir-hey, Old Bolt! Down the fiend!" Gaspard responded bravely.

  But he was not feeling at all brave as he fell away toward the green ranch house with the bulging walls and roof. Miss Jackson's sketchy description and the insolently conspicuous zoomer both indicated that he had to deal with the trouble-blaster Gil Hart, of whom he had heard various ominous anecdotes from Cullingham, such as the one about the time Hart had single-handedly hospitalized two steelworkers and a robot with weak batteries.

  There was no place of concealment within a half mile of the ranch house. So there seemed to be no possible tactic except speed and surprise, setting down as close as possible to the front-door airlock, which looked-yes, was! — open, and dashing inside, gun in hand. This plan had the further advantage of leaving him a minimum of time in which to get scared.

  It had yet one more advantage, it turned out. As he bumped to a landing, jumped out, and ran through the sand-cloud he'd raised toward the dark rectangle of the door, which stood open outward, a nickle-plated automaton watchdog sprang from the back seat of the checked zoomer and with a hideous siren-howling rushed toward him, steel jaws snapping. Gaspard dove into the airlock, catching the door and jerking it to behind him just before the savage mechanism hit the latter, momentarily indenting the rubberoid for about a meter, but not gashing it.

  While the auto-dog continued to howl outside, the inner door of the airlock puffed open-evidently the shutting of the outer door unlocked it. Gaspard went through, waving his bullet gun quite as wildly as Joe the Guard was wont to wave his skunk pistol.

  He found himself in a room furnished with couches and low tables and hung with a positive harem of stereo-pinups.

  To his left crouched Gil Hart, stripped to the waist and armed with a strangely quasi-primitive weapon he'd apparently just snatched up-a thick nickle or nickle-plated thigh-bone about a foot long.

  To his right stood Nurse Bishop in a white silk slip, brazenly posed with her left hand on her hip and a big brown highball held aloft in her right, the very picture of a good girl going to hell.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  "Hi, Gaspard," Nurse Bishop said. "Gil, don't get in a sweat."

  "I've come to rescue you," Gaspard said, a bit sullenly. Nurse Bishop laughed trillingly. "I don't think I want to be rescued. This Gil tells me he's quite a guy, one male in a million, well worth any girl's supreme sacrifice. Maybe he's got something. Look at those muscles, Gaspard. Look-and I quote-at that hairy chest."

  Gil Hart haw-hawed. "Get going, punk," he said. "You heard the lady."

  Gaspard took a deep breath. Somehow it made him take another deep breath and yet another-growling ones. His temples throbbed, his heart began to pound. "You little bitch," he grated. "I'm going to rescue you whether you want to be rescued or not. I'm going to rescue you within an inch of your life!"

  With some idea that it was the sporting thing to do, the sort of thing Zane Gort would have done (and after all it was Nurse Bishop he was really furious with, not this rugchested ape) he fired a warning shot high above the private hand's head.

  The consequences startled Gaspard, who had never fired anything but a raygun in his entire life. There was a thundering boom, recoil painfully jerked the gun out of his hand, stinking smoke spread, a hole appeared in the roof and air started to whiffle out through it. And the autodog's howling rose in volume.

  Gil Hart laughed, dropped his odd weapon on the floor, and came at Gaspard.

  Gaspard punched him in the jaw-a convulsive blow without much weight behind it.

  Gil rode the punch and came back with one in Gaspard's midriff that blew the air out of him with an "Ugh!" and sat him down abruptly on his rear. Stooping, Gil grabbed his collar.

  "Out, punk, I said," he jeered.

  There was a resonant musical bong. A beatific look appeared on Gil's bl
ue-chinned face and he did a neat little somersault over Gaspard, stretched out with a slam and lay still.

  Nurse Bishop stood behind him, hefting the gleaming metal thighbone and smiling happily.

  "I've always wondered," she said, "if I could tap someone on the head and knock them out without splashing their brains all over the place. Haven't you, Gaspard? I'll bet it's everybody's secret dream." She dropped to her knees and felt for the pulse in the private hand's wrist, her eyes going professional as she found it.

  Gaspard hugged his stomach and looked around at her dubiously. Overhead the ceiling had lost its concavity and seemed an inch or two lower. The next moment it began to descend visibly and the siren-howling that had kept up in the background suddenly burst out loud, unmuffled, and accompanied by a horrid clashing. The auto-dog had bitten its way through the wall as the latter grew flaccid. A blur of flashing nickle, it made for Gaspard.

  Nurse Bishop lunged across him, thrusting out the metal bone. The auto-dog's jaws clamped on it and the metal beast stopped dead and cut off its siren so suddenly that the silence seemed to resound.

  "It works sort of like the keeper of a magnet," Nurse Bishop explained to Gaspard as the ceiling settled lightly on them. "Gil had to show it to me three times, he got such a charge out of telling the dog to grab me and then stopping it with the bone."

  Gaspard managed at last to take a painful breath. There was a moment of being almost sick, then he began to feel interested in things again, in a coolly woozy way.

  Nurse Bishop set a coffee table on end to take the slight weight of the collapsed ceiling. The space they occupied, lit by lights half submerged in the collapsed walls, was as pleasantly intimate as a children's tent. They were sitting on the floor facing each other, Gaspard cross-legged, she with her knees to one side. She was still in her slip, though her sweater and skirt lay under her hand. Gil Hart snored on his back with great authenticity. His auto-dog, jaws clamping keeper-bone, crouched beside him, quiet as death.