The Fritz Leiber Megapack

by Fritz Leiber

  “No, you won’t,” Gusterson called back. “You having a face like that would scare the kids. Better cancel that one, Fay. Half the adult race looking like Vina Vidarsson is too awful a thought.”

  “Yah, you’re just scared of making a million dollars,” Daisy jeered.

  “I sure am,” Gusterson said solemnly, scanning the fuzzy floor from one murky glass wall to the other, hesitating at the TV. “How about something homey now, like a flock of little prickly cylinders that roll around the floor collecting lint and flub? They’d work by electricity, or at a pinch cats could bat ’em around. Every so often they’d be automatically herded together and the lint cleaned off the bristles.”

  “No good,” Fay said. “There’s no lint underground and cats are verboten. And the aboveground market doesn’t amount to more moneywise than the state of Southern Illinois. Keep it grander, Gussy, and more impractical—you can’t sell people merely useful ideas.” From his hassock in the center of the room he looked uneasily around. “Say, did that violet tone in the glass come from the high Cleveland hydrogen bomb or is it just age and ultraviolet, like desert glass?”

  “NO, somebody’s grandfather liked it that color,” Gusterson informed him with happy bitterness. “I like it too—the glass, I mean, not the tint. People who live in glass houses can see the stars—especially when there’s a window-washing streak in their germ-plasm.”

  “Gussy, why don’t you move underground?” Fay asked, his voice taking on a missionary note. “It’s a lot easier living in one room, believe me. You don’t have to tramp from room to room hunting things.”

  “I like the exercise,” Gusterson said stoutly.

  “But I bet Daisy’d prefer it underground. And your kids wouldn’t have to explain why their father lives like a Red Indian. Not to mention the safety factor and insurance savings and a crypt church within easy slidewalk distance. Incidentally, we see the stars all the time, better than you do—by repeater.”

  “Stars by repeater,” Gusterson murmured to the ceiling, pausing for God to comment. Then, “No, Fay, even if I could afford it—and stand it—I’m such a bad-luck Harry that just when I got us all safely stowed at the N minus 1 sublevel, the Soviets would discover an earthquake bomb that struck from below, and I’d have to follow everybody back to the treetops. Hey! How about bubble homes in orbit around earth? Micro Systems could subdivide the world’s most spacious suburb and all you moles could go ellipsing. Space is as safe as there is: no air, no shock waves. Free fall’s the ultimate in restfulness—great health benefits. Commute by rocket—or better yet stay home and do all your business by TV-telephone, or by waldo if it were that sort of thing. Even pet your girl by remote control—she in her bubble, you in yours, whizzing through vacuum. Oh, damn-damn-damn-damn-DAMN!”

  He was glaring at the blank screen of the TV, his big hands clenching and unclenching.

  “Don’t let Fay give you apoplexy—he’s not worth it,” Daisy said, sticking her trim head in from the kitchen, while Fay inquired anxiously, “Gussy, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, you worm!” Gusterson roared, “Except that an hour ago I forgot to tune in on the only TV program I’ve wanted to hear this year—Finnegans Wake scored for English, Gaelic and brogue. Oh, damn-damn-DAMN!”

  “Too bad,” Fay said lightly. “I didn’t know they were releasing it on flat TV too.”

  “Well, they were! Some things are too damn big to keep completely underground. And I had to forget! I’m always doing it—I miss everything! Look here, you rat,” he blatted suddenly at Fay, shaking his finger under the latter’s chin, “I’ll tell you what you can have that ignorant team of yours invent. They can fix me up a mechanical secretary that I can feed orders into and that’ll remind me when the exact moment comes to listen to TV or phone somebody or mail in a story or write a letter or pick up a magazine or look at an eclipse or a new orbiting station or fetch the kids from school or buy Daisy a bunch of flowers or whatever it is. It’s got to be something that’s always with me, not something I have to go and consult or that I can get sick of and put down somewhere. And it’s got to remind me forcibly enough so that I take notice and don’t just shrug it aside, like I sometimes do even when Daisy reminds me of things. That’s what your stupid team can invent for me! If they do a good job, I’ll pay ’em as much as fifty dollars!”

  “That doesn’t sound like anything so very original to me,” Fay commented coolly, leaning back from the wagging finger. “I think all senior executives have something of that sort. At least, their secretary keeps some kind of file.…

  “I’m not looking for something with spiked falsies and nylons up to the neck,” interjected Gusterson, whose ideas about secretaries were a trifle lurid. “I just want a mech reminder—that’s all!”

  “Well, I’ll keep the idea in mind,” Fay assured him, “along with the bubble homes and beauty masks. If we ever develop anything along those lines, I’ll let you know. If it’s a beauty mask, I’ll bring Daisy a pilot model—to use to scare strange kids.” He put his watch to his ear. “Good lord, I’m going to have to cut to make it underground before the main doors close. Just ten minutes to Second Curfew! ’Bye, Gus. ’Bye, Daze.”

  Two minutes later, living room lights out, they watched Fay’s foreshortened antlike figure scurrying across the balding ill-lit park toward the nearest escalator.

  Gusterson said, “Weird to think of that big bright space-poor glamor basement stretching around everywhere underneath. Did you remind Smitty to put a new bulb in the elevator?”

  “The Smiths moved out this morning,” Daisy said tonelessly. “They went underneath.”

  “Like cockroaches,” Gusterson said. “Cockroaches leavin’ a sinkin’ apartment building. Next the ghosts’ll be retreatin’ to the shelters.”

  “Anyhow, from now on we’re our own janitors,” Daisy said.

  He nodded. “Just leaves three families besides us loyal to this glass death trap. Not countin’ ghosts.” He sighed. Then, “You like to move below, Daisy?” he asked softly, putting his arm lightly across her shoulders. “Get a woozy eyeful of the bright lights and all for a change? Be a rat for a while? Maybe we’re getting too old to be bats. I could scrounge me a company job and have a thinking closet all to myself and two secretaries with stainless steel breasts. Life’d be easier for you and a lot cleaner. And you’d sleep safer.”

  “That’s true,” she answered and paused. She ran her fingertip slowly across the murky glass, its violet tint barely perceptible against a cold dim light across the park. “But somehow,” she said, snaking her arm around his waist, “I don’t think I’d sleep happier—or one bit excited.”

  II

  Three weeks later Fay, dropping in again, handed to Daisy the larger of the two rather small packages he was carrying.

  “It’s a so-called beauty mask,” he told her, “complete with wig, eyelashes, and wettable velvet lips. It even breathes—pinholed elastiskin with a static adherence-charge. But Micro Systems had nothing to do with it, thank God. Beauty Trix put it on the market ten days ago and it’s already started a teen-age craze. Some boys are wearing them too, and the police are yipping at Trix for encouraging transvestism with psychic repercussions.”

  “Didn’t I hear somewhere that Trix is a secret subsidiary of Micro?” Gusterson demanded, rearing up from his ancient electric typewriter. “No, you’re not stopping me writing, Fay—it’s the gut of evening. If I do any more I won’t have any juice to start with tomorrow. I got another of my insanity thrillers moving. A real id-teaser. In this one not only all the characters are crazy but the robot psychiatrist too.”

  “The vending machines are jumping with insanity novels,” Fay commented. “Odd they’re so popular.”

  Gusterson chortled. “The only way you outer-directed moles will accept individuality any more even in a fictional character, without your superegos getting seasick, is
for them to be crazy. Hey, Daisy! Lemme see that beauty mask!”

  But his wife, backing out of the room, hugged the package to her bosom and solemnly shook her head.

  “A hell of a thing,” Gusterson complained, “not even to be able to see what my stolen ideas look like.”

  “I got a present for you too,” Fay said. “Something you might think of as a royalty on all the inventions someone thought of a little ahead of you. Fifty dollars by your own evaluation.” He held out the smaller package. “Your tickler.”

  “My what?” Gusterson demanded suspiciously.

  “Your tickler. The mech reminder you wanted. It turns out that the file a secretary keeps to remind her boss to do certain things at certain times is called a tickler file. So we named this a tickler. Here.”

  Gusterson still didn’t touch the package. “You mean you actually put your invention team to work on that nonsense?”

  “Well, what do you think? Don’t be scared of it. Here, I’ll show you.”

  As he unwrapped the package, Fay said, “It hasn’t been decided yet whether we’ll manufacture it commercially. If we do, I’ll put through a voucher for you—for ‘development consultation’ or something like that. Sorry no royalty’s possible. Davidson’s squad had started to work up the identical idea three years ago, but it got shelved. I found it on a snoop through the closets. There! Looks rich, doesn’t it?”

  On the scarred black tabletop was a dully gleaming silvery object about the size and shape of a cupped hand with fingers merging. A tiny pellet on a short near-invisible wire led off from it. On the back was a punctured area suggesting the face of a microphone; there was also a window with a date and time in hours and minutes showing through and next to that four little buttons in a row. The concave underside of the silvery “hand” was smooth except for a central area where what looked like two little rollers came through.

  “It goes on your shoulder under your shirt,” Fay explained, “and you tuck the pellet in your ear. We might work up bone conduction on a commercial model. Inside is an ultra-slow fine-wire recorder holding a spool that runs for a week. The clock lets you go to any place on the 7-day wire and record a message. The buttons give you variable speed in going there, so you don’t waste too much time making a setting. There’s a knack in fingering them efficiently, but it’s easily acquired.”

  Fay picked up the tickler. “For instance, suppose there’s a TV show you want to catch tomorrow night at twenty-two hundred.” He touched the buttons. There was the faintest whirring. The clock face blurred briefly three times before showing the setting he’d mentioned. Then Fay spoke into the punctured area: “Turn on TV Channel Two, you big dummy!” He grinned over at Gusterson. “When you’ve got all your instructions to yourself loaded in, you synchronize with the present moment and let her roll. Fit it on your shoulder and forget it. Oh, yes, and it literally does tickle you every time it delivers an instruction. That’s what the little rollers are for. Believe me, you can’t ignore it. Come on, Gussy, take off your shirt and try it out. We’ll feed in some instructions for the next ten minutes so you get the feel of how it works.”

  “I don’t want to,” Gusterson said. “Not right now. I want to sniff around it first. My God, it’s small! Besides everything else it does, does it think?”

  “Don’t pretend to be an idiot, Gussy! You know very well that even with ultra-sub-micro nothing quite this small can possibly have enough elements to do any thinking.”

  Gusterson shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I think bugs think.”

  Fay groaned faintly. “Bugs operate by instinct, Gussy,” he said. “A patterned routine. They do not scan situations and consequences and then make decisions.”

  “I don’t expect bugs to make decisions,” Gusterson said. “For that matter I don’t like people who go around alla time making decisions.”

  “Well, you can take it from me, Gussy, that this tickler is just a miniaturized wire recorder and clock…and a tickler. It doesn’t do anything else.”

  “Not yet, maybe,” Gusterson said darkly. “Not this model. Fay, I’m serious about bugs thinking. Or if they don’t exactly think, they feel. They’ve got an interior drama. An inner glow. They’re conscious. For that matter, Fay, I think all your really complex electronic computers are conscious too.”

  “Quit kidding, Gussy.”

  “Who’s kidding?”

  “You are. Computers simply aren’t alive.”

  “What’s alive? A word. I think computers are conscious, at least while they’re operating. They’ve got that inner glow of awareness. They sort of…well…meditate.”

  “Gussy, computers haven’t got any circuits for meditating. They’re not programmed for mystical lucubrations. They’ve just got circuits for solving the problems they’re on.”

  “Okay, you admit they’ve got problem-solving circuits—like a man has. I say if they’ve got the equipment for being conscious, they’re conscious. What has wings, flies.”

  “Including stuffed owls and gilt eagles and dodoes—and wood-burning airplanes?”

  “Maybe, under some circumstances. There was a wood-burning airplane. Fay,” Gusterson continued, wagging his wrists for emphasis, “I really think computers are conscious. They just don’t have any way of telling us that they are. Or maybe they don’t have any reason to tell us, like the little Scotch boy who didn’t say a word until he was fifteen and was supposed to be deaf and dumb.”

  “Why didn’t he say a word?”

  “Because he’d never had anything to say. Or take those Hindu fakirs, Fay, who sit still and don’t say a word for thirty years or until their fingernails grow to the next village. If Hindu fakirs can do that, computers can!”

  Looking as if he were masticating a lemon, Fay asked quietly, “Gussy, did you say you’re working on an insanity novel?”

  Gusterson frowned fiercely. “Now you’re kidding,” he accused Fay. “The dirty kind of kidding, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fay said with light contrition. “Well, now you’ve sniffed at it, how about trying on Tickler?” He picked up the gleaming blunted crescent and jogged it temptingly under Gusterson’s chin.

  “Why should I?” Gusterson asked, stepping back. “Fay, I’m up to my ears writing a book. The last thing I want is something interrupting me to make me listen to a lot of junk and do a lot of useless things.”

  “But, dammit, Gussy! It was all your idea in the first place!” Fay blatted. Then, catching himself, he added, “I mean, you were one of the first people to think of this particular sort of instrument.”

  “Maybe so, but I’ve done some more thinking since then.” Gusterson’s voice grew a trifle solemn. “Inner-directed worthwhile thinkin’. Fay, when a man forgets to do something, it’s because he really doesn’t want to do it or because he’s all roiled up down in his unconscious. He ought to take it as a danger signal and investigate the roiling, not hire himself a human or mech reminder.”

  “Bushwa,” Fay retorted. “In that case you shouldn’t write memorandums or even take notes.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t,” Gusterson agreed lamely. “I’d have to think that over too.”

  “Ha!” Fay jeered. “No, I’ll tell you what your trouble is, Gussy. You’re simply scared of this contraption. You’ve loaded your skull with horror-story nonsense about machines sprouting minds and taking over the world—until you’re even scared of a simple miniaturized and clocked recorder.” He thrust it out.

  “Maybe I am,” Gusterson admitted, controlling a flinch. “Honestly, Fay, that thing’s got a gleam in its eye as if it had ideas of its own. Nasty ideas.”

  “Gussy, you nut, it hasn’t got an eye.”

  “Not now, no, but it’s got the gleam—the eye may come. It’s the Cheshire cat in reverse. If you’d step over here and look at yourself holding it, you could see what I mean. But I don’t think c
omputers sprout minds, Fay. I just think they’ve got minds, because they’ve got the mind elements.”

  “Ho, ho!” Fay mocked. “Everything that has a material side has a mental side,” he chanted. “Everything that’s a body is also a spirit. Gussy, that dubious old metaphysical dualism went out centuries ago.”

  “Maybe so,” Gusterson said, “but we still haven’t anything but that dubious dualism to explain the human mind, have we? It’s a jelly of nerve cells and it’s a vision of the cosmos. If that isn’t dualism, what is?”

  “I give up. Gussy, are you going to try out this tickler?”

  “No!”

  “But dammit, Gussy, we made it just for you!—practically.”

  “Sorry, but I’m not coming near the thing.”

  “Zen come near me,” a husky voice intoned behind them. “Tonight I vant a man.”

  Standing in the door was something slim in a short silver sheath. It had golden bangs and the haughtiest snub-nosed face in the world. It slunk toward them.

  “My God, Vina Vidarsson!” Gusterson yelled.

  “Daisy, that’s terrific,” Fay applauded, going up to her.

  She bumped him aside with a swing of her hips, continuing to advance. “Not you, Ratty,” she said throatily. “I vant a real man.”

  “Fay, I suggested Vina Vidarsson’s face for the beauty mask,” Gusterson said, walking around his wife and shaking a finger. “Don’t tell me Trix just happened to think of that too.”

  “What else could they think of?” Fay laughed. “This season sex means VV and nobody else.” An odd little grin flicked his lips, a tic traveled up his face and his body twitched slightly. “Say, folks, I’m going to have to be leaving. It’s exactly fifteen minutes to Second Curfew. Last time I had to run and I got heartburn. When are you people going to move downstairs? I’ll leave Tickler, Gussy. Play around with it and get used to it. ’Bye now.”

  “Hey, Fay,” Gusterson called curiously, “have you developed absolute time sense?”