The Silver Eggheads

by Fritz Leiber

  Nurse Bishop smiled fondly at Gaspard-and rather smugly too, he fancied. "Feeling better?" she asked. He nodded feebly.

  "The last time I talked to you," she said with a chuckle, "I was bawling you out for not bringing the brats' rolls. I was also a bit more dressed." She looked down at herself-very complacently, it seemed to him.

  "How ever did you get on my track so fast?" she asked. Then she threw her shoulders back and took a rather deep breath, to reward him with a little thrill, he guessed.

  He looked straight in her eyes. Relishing every word of it, he said, "Zane Gort planted a mini-sender in one of your falsies. He wants you to switch it off right away so he can locate Half Pint."

  It's fun to watch a girl blush and get furious at the same time, Gaspard decided.

  "That indecent tin sneak!" she grated. "That electronic boudoir stowaway! That relay-brained fetishist!" She glared at Gaspard. "I don't give a danm what you think," she informed him. Crossing her arms, she grasped her shoulder straps and whipped her slip and the brassiere beneath it down to her waist. "As you can plainly see," she told him defiantly while looking down in her lap as she felt for the sender, "upstairs I'm built exactly like a boy."

  "Not exactly," Gaspard said softly as his eyes feasted. "Oh by no means exactly, thank Saint Wuppertal! For some reason I've never been able to understand, most men are supposed to go for girls who look like champion cows with frontally displaced udders. But it's not true of men of real taste. It's not true of me. It's my theory that the hypermammalian monstrosities were popularized by male homosexual editors who wanted to hold girls up to ridicule as top-heavy walking milk factories, or perhaps boys with balloon tires and bumpers. But me-give me Diana, give me Eros, give me a girl who looks as if she'd been built for fun and games, not dairy products!"

  "There, got the goddam thing!" Nurse Bishop said, skidding her brassiere away from her across the floor. Then she looked at him searchingly. "Do you really mean all that, Gaspard?"

  "Do I mean it?" he asked, reaching for her hungrily. "Why-"

  "Not with these carcasses around!" she said sharply, whipping her slip up again. "What have you got to take me home in?"

  "A helicopter I stole from Heloise Ibsen," Gaspard replied flatly.

  "That cannibal queen! That she-sultan! I can just imagine what a flashy, overloaded trash basket that disgustingly big-busted ex-mistress of yours would consider a stylish helicopter," she said in tones of greatest contempt. "Two tone, I suppose?"

  Gaspard nodded.

  "Chromium trim?"

  "Yes."

  "An elaborate cold locker for drinks and snacks?"

  "Yes."

  "A nauseatingly sybaritic, velvet upholstered, foam rubber triple seat big as a three quarters bed?"

  "Yes."

  "One-way vision windows for complete privacy?"

  "Yes."

  "An autopilot, so you can just set it west and keep on going?"

  "Yes."

  Nurse Bishop gave him a big wicked grin. "That's exactly what I was hoping."

  THIRTY-NINE

  Four hours later and three hundred miles out to sea, Zane Gort, who had just rescued Half Pint, spotted Heloise Ibsen's purple and gray helicopter traveling steadily west. The resourceful robot finally raised Gaspard by firing slow screamer missiles near the copter from the 10-passenger hover-jet executive flier he had commandeered from junketing congressmen, needing a speedier plane for the last stages of his multiple rescue mission.

  Shortly afterwards, the Ibsen copter having been set on automatic for return across the blue leagues of the Pacific to Homer Hemingway's penthouse, Gaspard and Nurse Bishop, who looked quite flushed, were welcomed aboard the larger and faster flier by Flaxman, Miss Blushes, Half Pint, and a stray congressman just now waking up genially from alcoholic slumbers in the baggage compartment.

  Flaxman seemed in good spirits, though nervous, Miss Blushes was talkative and inquisitive-and so was Half Pint; there were dull splotches on the egg's silver shell, as if it had been shallowly eaten by acid.

  The quick-thinking Zane informed everyone that he had earlier directed Gaspard to rendezvous with him at this oceanic location, a bit of tactfulness for which Gaspard and Nurse Bishop were grateful. And, as Gaspard privately pointed out to her, if Zane hadn't spotted them, they might very well have fetched Samoa or at least Honolulu before breaking the bonds of their manic mutual somatic obsession and coming out of their deep euphoria.

  Thereafter, while the flier fled a lush sunset toward the darkening east and California, Gaspard and Nurse Bishop recounted a children's-movie version of their adventures and listened to familiar voices and speakers give possibly equally censored synopses of the adventures of the others, while the stray congressman sipped sour-mash Old Spaceman and from time to time made kindly sage comments.

  Flaxman asked Nurse Bishop if Gil Hart had ever made clear whom he was working for or what he was after.

  She replied with suitably downcast eyes, "From the first hammerlock he got on me, he made it very clear what he was after. He let me recover from the anesthone first, he said he liked a good fight. Oh, he did say something about a merger of Rocket House with Proton Press and a vice-presidency for himself, in between demonstrations of his auto-dog and assaults on my virtue."

  "Tsk-tsk," Miss Blushes said, lightly touching the girl's hand. "So good you preserved it," she added with a faintly ironic note that may have been purely Nurse Bishop's imagination.

  "It's mindless violence-gadgets like auto-dogs that give robots a bad name," Zane observed matter-of-factly.

  After firing the blinking star Zane had copted on for sixty miles further into the desert before running down Signal Three in an adobe ghost-village, where as it happened Flaxman was being held prisoner by Cain Brinks' gang of robot authors. Swooping in behind a ragged gray smoke-screen that simulated low rainclouds, the blued-steel robot achieved complete surprise and had the Angry Young Robots nailed down with shorting-beams before they could reach for their own weapons. Before copting off with Flaxman, he devoted a few precious minutes to forcibly reducing, by methods technologically hard to unwork, the energy level of the metal rogues, whether for criminal scheming or literary creativity.

  "Hey," Nurse Bishop objected, "I thought you told me that changing a robot's circuits was the worst crime in the world-something you'd never have anything to do with."

  "There's a vast difference between tampering with a man's or robot's mind-disturbing his ideas and altering his values-and merely making him lazy, which was all I really did," Zane pointed out. "Most people like to be lazy. Robots too. Think it over."

  Zane's next move had been to commandeer the executive flier, in which the junketing legislators had been holding a drunken brawl on the landing field of a nearby desert resort. ("Good thing you grabbed it," the stray congressman observed. "I remember my buddies fighting over which of them would pilot it to Paris, France, to pick up some babes and absinthe if the party started to slacken off.")

  Signal Four had led Zane and Flaxman back west to a vast mountain estate of rolling lawns dotted with oak trees and white statues of nymphs pursued by hermaphrodites, where tame deer cantered away from the gusts of the down-swung jets bringing the flier in for a spot-landing. A huge white house fronted with fluted pillars proved to be the abode of Penfolk (along with its terrorist branch The Sons of the Sibyl) and Miss Blushes' dungeon vile.

  "Yes, those wickedly fascinating boys got me to go off with them," the pink robix confessed, "by promising me I could censor their poetry and write moral fables for newly-constructed robixes. They were quite nice, even if they didn't keep all their promises-they introduced me to shades of wool I didn't know existed and they'd hold my yarn by the hour and talk to me. But those old society ladies!" Her anodized aluminum quivered. "Nothing but lusts of the flesh and floods of four-letter words. In between they smoked pipes. I wanted Zane to gag them with their own diamond jewelry and weld it tight, but he's too kind hearted." She gaze
d at him fondly across the flier's plush cabin with its scattering of spilled drinks and trodden-in appetizers.

  Signal Five-Half Pint's by a process of elimination-had taken Zane, Flaxman, and Miss Blushes out across the Pacific, far beyond the last purple algae field, to where a sinister low vessel rode the lonely waves just beyond the three-hundred-mile limit-the heavily-armed gambling barge Queen of the Syndicate, which boasted the Solar System's oldest permanent floating crap game.

  The barge's armament and eagle-eyed lookouts made airborne approach out of the question. Setting the big flier to circle the Queen at five miles, Zane put his water-resistant construction to the test by dropping into the sea with a space-suit jet unit equipped with extra tanks. In this he drove toward his goal thirty feet under water-a living torpedo. Arriving at the Queen undetected, he cut a hole of carefully calculated size in her bottom and in the course of the considerable excitement this caused aboard, he tethered his jet sea-horse and climbed swiftly up the side-a dripping metal Neptune darkly crowned. His radio-busby allowed him to find in a trice the cabin where the abominable Filippo Fenicchia was trickling nitric acid on Half Pint (with his plug-in eye turned round to watch) in an effort to get the brain to swear on his mother's honor to join the Syndicate at a high level as a memory unit, scare-gadget, and super-spy-the Garrote had begun to see vastly greater potentialities in the canned brains than the blackmailing of a second-class publishing firm.

  "He had me pegged," Half Pint put in. "If I had sworn, I would have kept my word-you learn to do that in two hundred years or you go crazy. It would have been an interesting life too-he said, for instance, 'Think how a Syndicate traitor would feel if he opened his suitcase and there you were, staring at him with that eye of yours and telling him he was doomed'-but I got fascinated wondering when I'd start to get scared. And stubborn. And I wanted to draw him out. That acid wouldn't have brought pain to me, you see-just new sensations and maybe new ideas. For a little while."

  The instant Zane had burst into the cabin, the robot would have been paralyzed by a shorting-beam the all-foreseeing Fenicchia directed at him, except that Zane was carrying before him a copper net that acted as a Faraday Cage. On seeing the acid-eaten splotches on Half Pint's shell, the robot reached with one pincher for the alkali base the Garrote had ready to neutralize the nitric, and crying, "A yegg for an egg!" slapped the gray gang leader in the face with the other-knocking out half his teeth and removing a large chunk of cheek and chin, half his upper lip, and the end of his nose.

  Instantly Zane had poured the neutralizer on Half Pint, snatched him up, and dashed past catastrophe-confused gangsters to plunge into the sea where his jet unit was tethered. Doubting the egg's capacity to resist water under pressure, the robot had scudded along just below the surface, holding Half Pint aloft in one pincher.

  "Oh boy, what a ride," the latter put in, adding wistfully, "I could almost feel that water."

  "It must indeed have been a strange sight," Zane admitted, "if any of the crew took time off to watch from saving the Queen: a silver egg racing mysteriously through the wave tops."

  "Don't, it gives me the creeps!" Flaxman put in, hunching his shoulders and squeezing his eyes shut. "Excuse me, Half Pint."

  Reaching the five-mile circle, Zane had radioed Miss Blushes and coached her into hovering the flier above him while Flaxman let down a ladder. The first thing the robot had done when he climbed aboard was to twirl a fresh fontanel into Half Pint.

  "I don't believe that eight-hour jazz," Half Pint said. "As I recall it, we all just pretended to pass out that time to scare the nurse."

  "Tell me one thing, Zane," Gaspard asked curiously. "What would have happened if your jet unit had failed?"

  "I would infallibly have sunk to the bottom of the sea," the robot replied. "I would be lying there right now, holding Half Pint in my arms and-if my structure and headlamp had held out-contemplating the beauties of sediment and abyssal life. Or more likely, knowing my nature, I'd be trying to walk to shore."

  "It all goes to show you," the stray congressman said, his voice beginning to thicken as he slopped more whisky in his glass.

  "It does indeed, sir," Zane echoed.

  "Well, at any rate now you can get back to Project El with a clear conscience," Gaspard told him.

  "That's true, I can," Zane agreed with disappointing brevity.

  "Look, there's the coast," Miss Blushes said. "The wonderful lights of New Angeles, like a carpet of stars. Oh, I feel romantic."

  "What's this Project El?" Flaxman asked Zane. "Anything to do with Rocket House?"

  "Yes, sir, in a fashion."

  "One of Cullingham's babies?" Flaxman pressed. "You know, I'm worried there. This Ibsen babe may drain him dry as a dead grasshopper and we'll have to take over everything he's doing."

  "No, this bad nothing to do with Mr. Cullingham," Zane assured him. "But if you don't mind, I'd rather not discuss it at present."

  "Self-assigned project, hey?" Flaxman said shrewdly. "Well, anything for the hero-and believe me, I mean that, Zane."

  "I know a secret," Half Pint said.

  "Shut up," Zane told him and pulled his speaker plug.

  FORTY

  Leaving the stray congressman to explain to wondering controlmen how he had piloted the executive flier from the Mohave to an oceanic gambling hell and back completely blacked out-or at most with the help of a few friendly hallucinations-the Rocket House party taxied home to find the place a renewed shambles inhabited only by a dazedly wandering Joe the Guard and twenty blue-uniformed Little League moonball players sitting rigidly at attention in the foyer.

  The chunkiest of these sprang up and barked at Flaxman, "Dear sir, we are fans and faithful followers of your Outer Sports and Space Rookie series. Our moonball team has been chosen by the Fannish Presidium to-"

  "That's fine, that's wonderful," Flaxman bellowed, touseling the boy's hair and peering about anxiously as though he expected to find large holes in the fabric of the building. "Gaspard, buy these young heroes some ice cream. I'll talk to you later, boys. Joe, snap out of it and tell me what's happened. Miss Bishop, phone the Nursery. Zane, scout the storerooms. Miss Blushes, get me a cigar."

  "There's been chaos raging through here and no mistake, Mr. Flaxman," Joe began dolefully. "Government raid. They come busting in through every door and the roof. Fat guy the others called Mr. Mears roughs me up and asks, 'Where are they? Where are those things that are going to write books?' So I show him the three eggheads up in Cullingham's office. He laughs sarcastic-like and says, 'I don't mean these. I know all about these-they're hopeless idiots. Besides, how could they do the work of wordmills, being so much smaller?' I say, 'They're not idiots, they're so smart they're nasty. Speak up, Rusty,' I say and would you believe it, that crazy egg won't say anything but, 'Goo-goo-goo!' Well, after that they just tore the place apart, hunting hidden wordmills. Even tested our big typewriters to see if they'd write anything by themselves. And they went into Accounting and chopped up the old computer. Top of everything else, they impounded my skunk pistol-said it was an internationally illegal horror-weapon, banned in perpetuity along with copper bullets, dum-dums, saw-tooth bayonets, and spring-poisoning chemicals."

  "I talked to Miss Jackson," Nurse Bishop reported. "All twenty-nine brats present and accounted for-Miss Phillips got back safely with her three. They're still yelling for rolls. Pop had post-alcoholic convulsions but is resting quietly. Excuse me now."

  She hurried to the ladies' room, followed by Miss Blushes, who had delivered Flaxman his cigar held by its tip at arm's length.

  "Pardon me, nurse," the pink robix said when they were in the sacred precinct, "but there's a very personal question I've been dying to ask you. I hope you won't mind."

  "Shoot."

  "Well, up through this morning, nurse, I've always noticed that you were quite a sweater girl, if you understand what I mean. But now. ." She indicated with her gaze Nurse Bishop's modestly mounded chest.

&nb
sp; "Oh, those!" Nurse Bishop frowned thoughtfully. "Tell you what, I just decided to get rid of them-they were too sexy."

  "How brave of you!" Miss Blushes quavered. "I know about the Amazons, of course, but what a drastic step. You have more courage than I do-I even shrank from painting myself black when Saint Willi died. I've always been a coward in my inmost circuits. Nurse, you're so brave, tell me, does a feminine being feel utterly evil when she sacrifices honor and decency. . and her innocence. . for the mere pleasure of the one she loves and her own?"

  "Hey, that's a leading question," Nurse Bishop objected, "but yep, she feels plastered thick every square inch with bright black evil. Is that what you wanted to know?"

  Back in the foyer the chunky Little Leaguer, having bolted his ice cream, was approaching Flaxman resolutely when Joe, who'd been scratching his head, said suddenly, "I forgot to ask you, Mr. Flaxman, but when did Clancy Goldfarb start working for the government?"

  "That old pirate, that book buccaneer? You're crazy, Joe."

  "No I'm not, Mr. Flaxman. Clancy and his boys were all mixed in with the government men, following them around and joining in the hunting and chopping. After a while they sort of faded, though."

  Zane Gort came whirring down the escalator, which was once more stalled. The robot was still carrying Half Pint.

  "I am sorry to report," he said, "that fully forty percent of Rocket's undistributed book-stock has been lifted. A clean sweep was made of the sex epics."

  Flaxman flinched and rocked back on his heels.

  The chunky Little Leaguer signed to two boys carrying a large black box to move in behind him.

  "Dear sir-" he began determinedly.

  "Well, what are you standing there for?" Flaxman roared at Zane. "Get that egg back to the Nursery and plugged into his voicewriter! Gaspard! Get those thirty new rolls over to the brains! I'm advancing the finalize date on the novels to day after tomorrow! No more vacations! The first person lets himself be kidnapped again, I fire! That goes for me too. Nurse Bishop! Don't skulk on the balcony, get down here! I want you over at the Nursery sweet-talking those brains into producing at top speed. And get ready some adrenaline and stuff to revive Cullingham when we get him back. Miss Blushes-!"