The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF

by Martin Greenberg

  Jack Williamson

  Underhill was walking home from the office, because his wife had the car, the afternoon he first met the new mechanicals. His feet were following his usual diagonal path across a weedy vacant block – his wife usually had the car – and his preoccupied mind was rejecting various impossible ways to meet his notes at the Two Rivers bank, when a new wall stopped him.

  The wall wasn’t any common brick or stone, but something sleek and bright and strange. Underhill stared up at a long new building. He felt vaguely annoyed and surprised at this glittering obstruction – it certainly hadn’t been here last week.

  Then he saw the thing in the window.

  The window itself wasn’t any ordinary glass. The wide, dustless panel was completely transparent, so that only the glowing letters fastened to it showed that it was there at all. The letters made a severe, modernistic sign:

  Two Rivers Agency

  HUMANOID INSTITUTE

  The Perfect Mechanicals

  “To Serve and Obey,

  And Guard Men from Harm.”

  His dim annoyance sharpened, because Underhill was in the mechanicals business himself. Times were already hard enough, and mechanicals were a drug on the market. Androids, mechanoids, electronoids, automatoids, and ordinary robots. Unfortunately, few of them did all the salesmen promised, and the Two Rivers market was already sadly oversaturated.

  Underhill sold androids – when he could. His next consignment was due tomorrow, and he didn’t quite know how to meet the bill.

  Frowning, he paused to stare at the thing behind that invisible window. He had never seen a humanoid. Like any mechanical not at work, it stood absolutely motionless. Smaller and slimmer than a man. A shining black, its sleek silicone skin had a changing sheen of bronze and metallic blue. Its graceful oval face wore a fixed look of alert and slightly surprised solicitude. Altogether, it was the most beautiful mechanical he had ever seen.

  Too small, of course, for much practical utility. He murmured to himself a reassuring quotation from the Android Salesman: “Androids are big – because the makers refuse to sacrifice power, essential functions, or dependability. Androids are your biggest buy!”

  The transparent door slid open as he turned toward it, and he walked into the haughty opulence of the new display room to convince himself that these streamlined items were just another flashy effort to catch the woman shopper.

  He inspected the glittering layout shrewdly, and his breezy optimism faded. He had never heard of the Humanoid Institute, but the invading firm obviously had big money and big-time merchandising know-how.

  He looked around for a salesman, but it was another mechanical that came gliding silently to meet him. A twin of the one in the window, it moved with a quick, surprising grace. Bronze and blue lights flowed over its lustrous blackness, and a yellow name plate flashed from its naked breast:

  HUMANOID

  Serial No. 81-H-B-27

  The Perfect Mechanical

  “To Serve and Obey

  And Guard Men from Harm.”

  Curiously, it had no lenses. The eyes in its bald oval head were steel-colored, blindly staring. But it stopped a few feet in front of him, as if it could see anyhow, and it spoke to him with a high, melodious voice:

  “At your service, Mr. Underhill.”

  The use of his name startled him, for not even the androids could tell one man from another. But this was a clever merchandising stunt, of course, not too difficult in a town the size of Two Rivers. The salesman must be some local man, prompting the mechanical from behind the partition. Underhill erased his momentary astonishment, and said loudly.

  “May I see your salesman, please?”

  “We employ no human salesmen, sir,” its soft silvery voice replied instantly. “The Humanoid Institute exists to serve mankind, and we require no human service. We ourselves can supply any information you desire, sir, and accept your order for immediate humanoid service.”

  Underhill peered at it dazedly. No mechanicals were competent even to recharge their own batteries and reset their own relays, much less to operate their own branch office. The blind eyes stared blankly back, and he looked uneasily around for any booth or curtain that might conceal the salesman.

  Meanwhile, the sweet thin voice resumed persuasively.

  “May we come out to your home for a free trial demonstration, sir? We are anxious to introduce our service on your planet, because we have been successful in eliminating human unhappiness on so many others. You will find us far superior to the old electronic mechanicals in use here.”

  Underhill stepped back uneasily. He reluctantly abandoned his search for the hidden salesman, shaken by the idea of any mechanicals promoting themselves. That would upset the whole industry.

  “At least you must take some advertising matter, sir.”

  Moving with a somehow appalling graceful deftness, the small black mechanical brought him an illustrated booklet from a table by the wall. To cover his confused and increasing alarm, he thumbed through the glossy pages.

  In a series of richly colored before-and-after pictures, a chesty blond girl was stooping over a kitchen stove, and then relaxing in a daring negligee while a little black mechanical knelt to serve her something. She was wearily hammering a typewriter, and then lying on an ocean beach, in a revealing sun suit, while another mechanical did the typing. She was toiling at some huge industrial machine, and then dancing in the arms of a golden-haired youth, while a black humanoid ran the machine.

  Underhill sighed wistfully. The android company didn’t supply such fetching sales material. Women would find this booklet irresistible, and they selected eighty-six percent of all mechanicals sold. Yes, the competition was going to be bitter.

  “Take it home, sir,” the sweet voice urged him. “Show it to your wife. There is a free trial demonstration order blank on the last page, and you will notice that we require no payment down.”

  He turned numbly, and the door slid open for him. Retreating dazedly, he discovered the booklet still in his hand. He crumpled it furiously, and flung it down. The small black thing picked it up tidily, and the insistent silver voice rang after him:

  “We shall call at your office tomorrow, Mr. Underhill, and send a demonstration unit to your home. It is time to discuss the liquidation of your business, because the electronic mechanicals you have been selling cannot compete with us. And we shall offer your wife a free trial demonstration.”

  Underhill didn’t attempt to reply, because he couldn’t trust his voice. He stalked blindly down the new sidewalk to the corner, and paused there to collect himself. Out of his startled and confused impressions, one clear fact emerged – things looked black for the agency.

  Bleakly, he stared back at the haughty splendor of the new building. It wasn’t honest brick or stone; that invisible window wasn’t glass; and he was quite sure the foundation for it hadn’t even been staked out, the last time Aurora had the car.

  He walked on around the block, and the new sidewalk took him near the rear entrance. A truck was backed up to it, and several slim black mechanicals were silently busy, unloading huge metal crates.

  He paused to look at one of the crates. It was labeled for interstellar shipment. The stencils showed that it had come from the Humanoid Institute, on Wing IV. He failed to recall any planet of that designation; the outfit must be big.

  Dimly, inside the gloom of the warehouse beyond the truck, he could see black mechanicals opening the crates. A lid came up, revealing dark, rigid bodies, closely packed. One by one, they came to life. They climbed out of the crate, and sprang gracefully to the floor. A shining black, glinting with bronze and blue, they were all identical.

  One of them came out past the truck, to the sidewalk, staring with blind steel eyes. Its high silver voice spoke to him melodiously:

  “At your service, Mr. Underhill.”

  He fled. When his name was promptly called by a courteous mechanical, just out of the crate in which it
had been imported from a remote and unknown planet, he found the experience trying.

  Two blocks along, the sign of a bar caught his eye, and he took his dismay inside. He had made it a business rule not to drink before dinner, and Aurora didn’t like him to drink at all; but these new mechanicals, he felt, had made the day exceptional.

  Unfortunately, however, alcohol failed to brighten the brief visible future of the agency. When he emerged, after an hour, he looked wistfully back in hope that the bright new building might have vanished as abruptly as it came. It hadn’t. He shook his head dejectedly, and turned uncertainly homeward.

  Fresh air had cleared his head somewhat, before he arrived at the neat white bungalow in the outskirts of the town, but it failed to solve his business problems. He also realized, uneasily, that he would be late for dinner.

  Dinner, however, had been delayed. His son Frank, a freckled ten-year-old, was still kicking a football on the quiet street in front of the house. And little Gay, who was tow-haired and adorable and eleven, came running across the lawn and down the sidewalk to meet him.

  “Father, you can’t guess what!” Gay was going to be a great musician some day, and no doubt properly dignified, but she was pink and breathless with excitement now. She let him swing her high off the sidewalk, and she wasn’t critical of the bar-aroma on his breath. He couldn’t guess, and she informed him eagerly:

  “Mother’s got a new lodger!”

  Underhill had foreseen a painful inquisition, because Aurora was worried about the notes at the bank, and the bill for the new consignment, and the money for little Gay’s lessons.

  The new lodger, however, saved him from that. With an alarming crashing of crockery, the household android was setting dinner on the table, but the little house was empty. He found Aurora in the back yard, burdened with sheets and towels for the guest.

  Aurora, when he married her, had been as utterly adorable as now her little daughter was. She might have remained so, he felt, if the agency had been a little more successful. However, while the pressure of slow failure had gradually crumbled his own assurance, small hardships had turned her a little too aggressive.

  Of course he loved her still. Her red hair was still alluring, and she was loyally faithful, but thwarted ambitions had sharpened her character and sometimes her voice. They never quarreled, really, but there were small differences.

  There was the little apartment over the garage – built for human servants they had never been able to afford. It was too small and shabby to attract any responsible tenant, and Underhill wanted to leave it empty. It hurt his pride to see her making beds and cleaning floors for strangers.

  Aurora had rented it before, however, when she wanted money to pay for Gay’s music lessons, or when some colorful unfortunate touched her sympathy, and it seemed to Underhill that her lodgers had all turned out to be thieves and vandals.

  She turned back to meet him, now, with the clean linen in her arms.

  “Dear, it’s no use objecting.” Her voice was quite determined. “Mr. Sledge is the most wonderful old fellow, and he’s going to stay just as long as he wants.”

  “That’s all right, darling.” He never liked to bicker, and he was thinking of his troubles at the agency. “I’m afraid we’ll need the money. Just make him pay in advance.”

  “But he can’t!” Her voice throbbed with sympathetic warmth. “He says he’ll have royalties coming in from his inventions, so he can pay in a few days.”

  Underhill shrugged; he had heard that before.

  “Mr. Sledge is different, dear,” she insisted. “He’s a traveler, and a scientist. Here, in this dull little town, we don’t see many interesting people.”

  “You’ve picked up some remarkable types,” he commented.

  “Don’t be unkind, dear,” she chided gently. “You haven’t met him yet, and you don’t know how wonderful he is.” Her voice turned sweeter. “Have you a ten, dear?”

  He stiffened. “What for?”

  “Mr. Sledge is ill.” Her voice turned urgent. “I saw him fall on the street, downtown. The police were going to send him to the city hospital, but he didn’t want to go. He looked so noble and sweet and grand. So I told them I would take him. I got him in the car and took him to old Dr. Winters. He has this heart condition, and he needs the money for medicine.”

  Reasonably, Underhill inquired, “Why doesn’t he want to go to the hospital?”

  “He has work to do,” she said. “Important scientific work – and he’s so wonderful and tragic. Please, dear, have you a ten?”

  Underhill thought of many things to say. These new mechanicals promised to multiply his troubles. It was foolish to take in an invalid vagrant, who could have free care at the city hospital. Aurora’s tenants always tried to pay their rent with promises, and generally wrecked the apartment and looted the neighborhood before they left.

  But he said none of those things. He had learned to compromise. Silently, he found two fives in his thin pocketbook, and put them in her hand. She smiled, and kissed him impulsively – he barely remembered to hold his breath in time.

  Her figure was still good, by dint of periodic dieting. He was proud of her shining red hair. A sudden surge of affection brought tears to his eyes, and he wondered what would happen to her and the children if the agency failed.

  “Thank you, dear!” she whispered. “I’ll have him come for dinner, if he feels able, and you can meet him then. I hope you don’t mind dinner being late.”

  He didn’t mind, tonight. Moved by a sudden impulse of domesticity, he got hammer and nails from his workshop in the basement, and repaired the sagging screen on the kitchen door with a neat diagonal brace.

  He enjoyed working with his hands. His boyhood dream had been to be a builder of fission power plants. He had even studied engineering – before he married Aurora, and had to take over the ailing mechanicals agency from her indolent and alcoholic father. He was whistling happily by the time the little task was done.

  When he went back through the kitchen to put up his tools, he found the household android busily clearing the untouched dinner away from the table – the androids were good enough at strictly routine tasks, but they could never learn to cope with human unpredictability.

  “Stop, stop!” Slowly repeated, in the proper pitch and rhythm, his command made it halt, and then he said carefully, “Set – table; set – table.”

  Obediently, the gigantic thing came shuffling back with the stack of plates. He was suddenly struck with the difference between it and those new humanoids. He sighed wearily. Things looked black for the agency.

  Aurora brought her new lodger in through the kitchen door. Underhill nodded to himself. This gaunt stranger, with his dark shaggy hair, emaciated face, and threadbare garb, looked to be just the sort of colorful, dramatic vagabond that always touched Aurora’s heart. She introduced them, and they sat down to wait in the front room while she went to call the children.

  The old rogue didn’t look very sick, to Underhill. Perhaps his wide shoulders had a tired stoop, but his spare, tall figure was still commanding. The skin was seamed and pale, over his rawboned, cragged face, but his deep-set eyes still had a burning vitality.

  His hands held Underhill’s attention. Immense hands, they hung a little forward when he stood, swung on long bony arms in perpetual readiness. Gnarled and scarred, darkly tanned, with the small hairs on the back bleached to a golden color, they told their own epic of varied adventure, of battle perhaps, and possibly even of toil. They had been very useful hands.

  “I’m very grateful to your wife, Mr. Underhill.” His voice was a deep-throated rumble, and he had a wistful smile, oddly boyish for a man so evidently old. “She rescued me from an unpleasant predicament, and I’ll see that she is well paid.”

  Just another vivid vagabond, Underhill decided, talking his way through life with plausible inventions. He had a little private game he played with Aurora’s tenants – just remembering what they said and count
ing one point for every impossibility. Mr. Sledge, he thought, would give him an excellent score.

  “Where are you from?” he asked conversationally.

  Sledge hesitated for an instant before he answered, and that was unusual – most of Aurora’s tenants had been exceedingly glib.

  “Wing IV.” The gaunt old man spoke with a solemn reluctance, as if he should have liked to say something else. “All my early life was spent there, but I left the planet nearly fifty years ago. I’ve been traveling ever since.”

  Startled, Underhill peered at him sharply. Wing IV, he remembered, was the home planet of those sleek new mechanicals, but this old vagabond looked too seedy and impecunious to be connected with the Humanoid Institute. His brief suspicion faded. Frowning, he said casually:

  “Wing IV must be rather distant.”

  The old rogue hesitated again, and then said gravely:

  “One hundred and nine light-years, Mr. Underhill.”

  That made the first point, but Underhill concealed his satisfaction. The new space liners were pretty fast, but the velocity of light was still an absolute limit. Casually, he played for another point:

  “My wife says you’re a scientist, Mr. Sledge?”

  “Yes.”

  The old rascal’s reticence was unusual. Most of Aurora’s tenants required very little prompting. Underhill tried again, in a breezy conversational tone:

  “Used to be an engineer myself, until I dropped it to go into mechanicals.” The old vagabond straightened, and Underhill paused hopefully. But he said nothing, and Underhill went on, “Fission plant design and operation. What’s your speciality, Mr. Sledge?”

  The old man gave him a long, troubled look, with those brooding, hollowed eyes, and then said slowly:

  “Your wife has been kind to me, Mr. Underhill, when I was in desperate need. I think you are entitled to the truth, but I must ask you to keep it to yourself. I am engaged on a very important research problem, which must be finished secretly.”

  “I’m sorry.” Suddenly ashamed of his cynical little game, Underhill spoke apologetically. “Forget it.”