Robots Have No Tails
Henry Kuttner
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1952 by Henry Kuttner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition August 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-401-1
More from Henry Kuttner
The Time Trap
Book of Iod
Elak of Atlantis
Prince Raynor
Murder of Eleanor Pope
Murder of a Mistress
Murder of a Wife
Murder of Ann Avery
The Best of Henry Kuttner
Robots Have No Tails
Ahead of Time
Earth’s Last Citadel
Mask of Circe
Man Drowning
Introduction
by C. L. Moore
In 1942, when four of these stories were written, under the name of Lewis Padgett, Henry Kuttner and I had been married for two years and were more or less commuting between New York, where our publishing contacts were, and Laguna Beach in California where—so to speak—our hearts were. We loved Laguna, and all that quiet and blue water and clear, clean air. (Remember?)
In later years we worked more and more closely together on almost everything we wrote, and I was rather astounded on rereading the Gallegher stories to realize that not a word of any of them is mine. So I can say without immodesty that I think they’re very fine, very funny, very sane in a nutty kind of way. Also I am impressed, on reading them all together for the first time, by what seems to me a kind of lucidity which I attribute to the fact that I had no hand in them. (My own style tends to get rather murky now and then.) The only part I played in their creation was to hang impatiently over Hank’s typewriter and snatch the pages as they rolled out, enjoying each one and waiting eagerly to snatch at the next as it emerged.
I’m not sure now which of these Gallegher stories came first, though from internal evidence I think it was “Time Locker.” I’d like to know, because somewhere along the editorial line somebody (possibly us) altered the name of the lead character. In the first story he was called Galloway. Then we packed up and drove to the other coast, and when Hank wrote the second story he had forgotten this and called the character Gallegher. He eventually got around this very neatly by explain that the man was, of course, Galloway Gallegher. Which sounds rather like the logic of Gallegher himself.
Actually, Hank and Gallegher had a lot in common. Among other likenesses, they both rejoiced in a kind of lunatic, inverted logic and a quiet, contented bewilderment about the world and its workings. Gallegher, of course, went a lot farther than Hank in that department. But in many ways he was a self-portrait of his author.
For a while, as I reread this book, I was trying to find something profound in the contrasts between Gallegher and Gallegher Plus, who emerged only when Gallegher was drunk, and performed scientific miracles of which Gallegher sober was totally incapable. But on closer examination I think there were no contrasts at all. Both are utterly ruthless and amoral. Gallegher Plus, drunk but brilliant, will do anything for money, no matter what terrible dealings this lands Gallegher sober in. And Gallegher sober, constantly harried by the resulting financial and legal pressures, is forced into wildly ruthless strategies to get out of the current dilemma as fast as possible.
There is perhaps some justification for thinking of Joe, the vain, transparent robot, as an aspect of the two Galleghers. Possibly the three represent in a way one complete, brilliant, innocently ruthless person split into Joe the Id, Gallegher Plus the Ego and Gallegher sober the Superego.
In fact, the innocent ruthlessness runs like a motif all through the stories. Joe the robot remarks impersonally at one point, “I like blood. It’s a primary color.” And the rabbity little
Lybblas in “The World Is Mine” discover a corpse which when they found it was “Dead, but warm. That was nice.” They sat on him a while until he got cold.
Ruthlessness was not a characteristic of Gallegher’s creator. But a part of Hank’s vision, when confronted with scientific terms, is pure Gallegher. It gives me much pleasure to note that at one point Gallegher finds the company name of Adrenals, Inc., evoking “a mad picture…of building tiny prefabricated houses on top of kidneys,” and mention of positrons means simply “a gang of little boys with fishtails and green whiskers.” (Should I remind you of Poseidon the sea-god?) And in another, non-Gallegher story a character feels the synapses in his brain operating like tiny shutters which slide up and down with faint crashes, while through them the beady little eyes of neurons peep and their agile, spidery forms can be seen scuttling for cover.
(I once asked a neighbor in the apartment above us if she was disturbed by our typewriters going at all hours, and she said no, the only sound she ever heard from our place was me bursting into laughter several times a day. I was a most appreciative audience.)
I believe “Gallegher Plus” was the last of these stories written in 1942, just before Hank entered the army. The fifth, “Ex Machina” was published in 1948, just after the war. I wish there had been many more of them. There probably would have been. The unwritten ones must be regarded as minor war casualties.
So here are all the Gallegher stories there are. And if you wonder about this title, here is how it happened. A case could probably be made for robots and tales, but the fact is that when a publisher asked Hank for a title for this collection, Hank had already had to come up with so many titles that he gave up in despair. “I can’t think of one,” he said. “Call it anything you like. Call it Robots Have No Tails if you want to.”
And they did. I hope you enjoy it. I certainly did.
C. L. Moore
1952
Time Locker
Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician—but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good. He’d wanted to be an experimental technician, and would have been excellent at it, for he had a streak of genius at times. Unfortunately, there had been no funds for such specialized education, and now Gallegher, by profession an integrator machine supervisor, maintained his laboratory purely as a hobby. It was the damnedest-looking lab in six states. Gallegher had once spent months building what he called a liquor organ, which occupied most of the space. He could recline on a comfortable padded couch and, by manipulating buttons, siphon drinks of marvelous quantity, quality, and variety down his scarified throat. Since he had made the liquor organ during a protracted period of drunkenness, he never remembered the basic principles of its construction. In a way, that was a pity.
There was a little of everything in the lab, much of it incongruous. Rheostats had little skirts on them, like ballet dancers, and vacuously grinning faces of clay. A generator was conspicuously labeled, “Monstro,” and a much smaller one rejoiced in the name of “Bubbles.” Inside a glass retort was a china rabbit, and Gallegher alone knew how it had got there. Just inside the door was a hideous iron dog, originally intended for Victorian lawns or perhaps for hell, and its hollowed ears served as sockets for test tubes.
“But how do you do it?”
Vanning asked.
Gallegher, his lank form reclining under the liquor organ, siphoned a shot of double martini into his mouth.
“Huh?”
“You heard me. I could get you a swell job if you’d use that screwball brain of yours. Or even learn to put up a front.”
“Tried it,” Gallegher mumbled. “No use. I can’t work when I concentrate, except at mechanical stuff. I think my subconscious must have a high I.Q.”
Vanning, a chunky little man with a scarred, swarthy face, kicked his heels against Monstro. Sometimes Gallegher annoyed him. The man never realized his own potentialities, or how much they might mean to Horace Vanning, Commerce Analyst. The “commerce,” of course, was extra-legal, but the complicated trade relationships of the day left loopholes a clever man could slip through. The fact of the matter was, Vanning acted in an advisory capacity to crooks. It paid well. A sound knowledge of jurisprudence was rare in these days; the statues were in such a tangle that it took years of research before one could even enter a law school. But Vanning had a staff of trained experts, a colossal library of transcripts, decisions, and legal data, and, for a suitable fee, he could have told Dr. Crippen how to get off scot-free.
The shadier side of his business was handled in strict privacy, without assistants. The matter of the neuro-gun, for example—
Gallegher had made that remarkable weapon, quite without realizing its function. He had hashed it together one evening, piecing out the job with court plaster when his welder went on the fritz. And he’d given it to Vanning, on request. Vanning didn’t keep it long. But already he had earned thousands of credits by lending the gun to potential murderers. As a result, the police department had a violent headache.
A man in the know would come to Vanning and say, “I heard you can beat a murder rap. Suppose I wanted to—”
“Hold on! I can’t condone anything like that.”
“Huh? But—”
“Theoretically, I suppose a perfect murder might be possible. Suppose a new sort of gun had been invented, and suppose—just for the sake of an example—it was in a locker at the Newark Stratoship Field.”
“Huh?”
“I’m just theorizing. Locker Number Seventy-nine, combination thirty-blue-eight. These little details always help one to visualize a theory, don’t they?”
“You mean—”
“Of course if our murderer picked up this imaginary gun and used it, he’d be smart enough to have a postal box ready, addressed to…say…Locker Forty, Brooklyn Port. He could slip the weapon into the box, seal it, and get rid of the evidence at the nearest mail conveyor. But that’s all theorizing. Sorry I can’t help you. The fee for an interview is three thousand credits. The receptionist will take your check.”
Later, conviction would be impossible. Ruling 857-M, Illinois Precinct, case of State vs. Dupson, set the precedent. Cause of death must be determined. Element of accident must be considered. As Chief Justice Duckett had ruled during the trial of Sanderson vs. Sanderson, which involved the death of the accused’s mother-in-law—
Surely the prosecuting attorney, with his staff of toxicological experts, must realize that—
And in short, your honor, I must respectfully request that the case be dismissed for lack of evidence and proof of casus mortis—
Gallegher never even found out that his neuro-gun was a dangerous weapon. But Vanning haunted the sloppy laboratory, avidly watching the results of his friend’s scientific doodling. More than once he had acquired handy little devices in just this fashion. The trouble was, Gallegher wouldn’t work.
He took another sip of martini, shook his head, and unfolded his lanky limbs. Blinking, he ambled over to a cluttered workbench and began toying with lengths of wire.
“Making something?”
“Dunno. Just fiddling. That’s the way it goes, I put things together, and sometimes they work. Trouble is, I never know exactly what they’re going to do. Tsk!” Gallegher dripped the wires and returned to his couch. “Hell with it.”
He was, Vanning reflected, an odd duck. Gallegher was essential amoral, thoroughly out of place in this too-complicated world. He seemed to watch, with a certain wry amusement, from a vantage point of his own, rather disinterested for the most part. And he made things—
But always and only for his own amusement. Vanning sighed and glanced around the laboratory, his orderly soul shocked by the mess. Automatically he picked up a rumpled smock from the floor, and looked for a hook. Of course there was none. Gallagher, running short of conductive metal, had long since ripped them out and used them in some gadget or other.
The so-called scientist was creating a zombie, his eyes half-closed. Vanning went over to a metal locker in one corner and opened the door. There were no hooks, but he folded the smock neatly and laid it on the floor of the locker.
Then he went back to his perch on Monstro.
“Have a drink?” Gallagher asked. Vanning shook his head. “Thanks, no. I’ve got a case coming up tomorrow.”
“There’s always thiamin. Filthy stuff. I work better when I’ve got pneumatic cushions around my brain.”
“Well I don’t.”
“It is purely a matter of skill,” Gallagher hummed, “to which each may attain if he will…What are you gaping at?”
“That—locker,” Vanning said, frowning in a baffled way. “What the—” He got up. The metal door hadn’t been securely latched and had swung open. Of the smock Vanning had placed within the metal compartment there was no trace.
“It’s the paint,” Gallegher explained swiftly. “Or the treatment. I bombarded it with gamma rays. But it isn’t good for anything.”
Vanning went over and swung a fluorescent into a more convenient position. The locker wasn’t empty, as he had first imagined. The smock was no longer there, but instead there was a tiny blob—something, pale green and roughly spherical.
“It melts things?” Vanning asked, staring.
“Uh-huh. Pull it out. You’ll see.”
Vanning felt hesitant about putting his hand inside the locker. Instead, he found a long pair of test tube clamps and tossed the blob out. It was—
Vanning hastily looked away. His eyes hurt. The green blob was changing in color, shape and size. A crawling nongeometrical blur of motion rippled over it. Suddenly, the clamps were remarkably heavy.
No wonder. They were gripping the original smock.
“It does that, you know,” Gallagher said absently. “Must be a reason, too. I put things in the locker and they get small. Take ’em out, and they get big again. I supposed I could sell it to a stage magician.” His voice sounded doubtful.
Vanning sat down, fingering the smock and staring at the metal locker. It was a cube, approximately 3 × 3 × 5, lined with what seemed to be a grayish paint, sprayed on. Outside it was shiny black.
“How’d you do it?”
“Huh? I dunno. Just fiddling around.” Gallagher sipped his zombie. “Maybe it’s a matter of dimensional exorcism. My treatment may have altered the spatiotemporal relationships inside the locker. I wonder what that means?” he murmured in a vague aside. “Words frighten me sometimes.”
Vanning was thinking about tesseracts. “You mean it’s bigger inside than it is outside?”
“A paradox, a paradox, a most delightful paradox. You tell me. I suppose the inside of the locker isn’t in this space time continuum at all. Here, shove that bench in it.
You’ll see.” Gallagher made no moves to rise; he waved toward the article of furniture in question.
“You’re crazy. That bench is bigger than the locker.”
“So it is. Shove it in a bit at a time. That corner first. Go ahead.”
Vanning wrestled with the bench. Despite his shortness, he was stockily muscular.
“Lay the locker on its back. It’ll be easier.”
“I…uh!…O.K. Now what?”
“Edge the bench down into it.”
&n
bsp; Vanning squinted at his companion, shrugged, and tried to obey. Of course the bench wouldn’t go into the locker. One corner did, that was all. Then, naturally, the bench stopped, balancing precariously at an angle.
“Well?”
“Wait.”
The bench moved. It settled slowly, downward. As Vanning’s jaw dropped, the bench seemed to crawl into the locker, with the gentled motion of a not-too-heavy object sinking through water. It wasn’t sucked down. It melted down. The portion still outside the locker was unchanged. But that too settled, and was gone.
Vanning craned forward. A blur of movement had his eyes. Inside the locker was—something. It shifted its contours, shrank, and became a spiky sort of scalene pyramid, deep purple in hue.
It seemed to be less than four inches across at its widest point.
“I don’t believe it.” Vanning said. Gallegher grinned, “As the Duke of Wellington remarked to the subaltern, it was a demned small bottle, sir.”
“Now wait a minute. How the devil could I put an eight-foot bench inside a five-foot locker?”
“Because of Newton,” Gallegher said. “Gravity. Go fill a test tube with water and I’ll show you.”
“Wait a minute…O.K. Now what?”
“Got it brim full? Good. You’ll find some sugar cubes in that drawer labeled FUSES. Lay a cube on top of the test tube, one corner down so it touches the water.”
Vanning racked the tube and obeyed. “Well?”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing. The sugar’s getting wet. And melting.”
“So there you are,” Gallegher said expansively. Vanning gave him a brooding look and turned back to the tube. The cube of sugar was slowly dissolving and melting down.
Presently it was gone.
“Air and water are different physical conditions. In air a sugar cube can exist as a sugar cube. In water it exists in solution. The corner of it extending into water is subject to aqueous conditions. So it alters physically, though not chemically. Gravity does the rest.”
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