Fritz Leiber: The Silver Eggheads

"Don't you believe it," Gaspard assured him. "Heloise would have told me."

"I'm glad to hear that," Zane said politely with a whir that didn't sound too convinced. Suddenly a bolt of electricty shot from his upraised right pinchers to his forehead.

"Excuse me," he said as Gaspard involuntarily jerked back, "but I'm going to have to dart. I've been hung up for rour hours on my new novel. I got Dr. Tungsten into a prelicament from which I couldn't extricate him. A solution just struck me. Whir-hey!"

He departed down the avenue like a blue flash.

Gaspard continued on his placid way, vaguely wondering what it would feel like to be hung up on a novel for four hours. Of course your wordmill might short-circuit, but that wasn't exactly the same thing. Would it be like being stumped by a chess problem? Or would it be more like those intense emotional frustrations that were supposed to have greatly troubled people (writers even!) back in the bad old days before hypnotherapy, hypertranquilizers, and tireless robot psychiatrists.

But in that case, what would emotional frustrations feel like? Truly, there were times when Gaspard thought that he led an existence a shade too tranquil, too bovine, even for a writer.

Gaspard's misty ruminations were cut short by the big newsstand that marked the end of Readership Row. It loomed up as glitteringly enticing as a Christmas tree and made him feel like a six year old about to be ambushed by Santa Claus.

The general appearance of the insides of paperback books hadn't changed much in two centuries-it was still dark type on light paper-but their covers had blossomed wonderfully. What had been the merest intention in midTwentieth Century had proliferated and come to full flower.

By the magic of stereoprint and 4-action reproduction, voluptuous dollsize girls undressed endlessly, garment by garment, or repeatedly passed in filmy robes across lighted windows. Mobsters and monsters leered, philosophers and ministers looked out with benign, multi-expressioned concern. Blood spattered corpses toppled, bridges fell, storms lashed trees, spaceships whizzed across five-by-five-inch windows in starry infinity.

All the senses were assaulted-the ears by flurries of faint fairy music, as alluring as that of the sirens and punctuated by the smack of slow kisses, the thwack of whips against nubile flesh, the soft rattle of machinegun bullets and the ghostly roar of atomic bombs.

Gaspard's nostrils caught whiffs of turkey dinners, hardwood fires, pine needles, orange groves, gunpowder, the barest hint of marijuana, musk, and such leading perfumes as Fer de Lance and Nebula Number Five: while he knew that if he reached out and touched any single book, it would feel like velvet, mink, rose petals, Spanish leather, handpolished maple, deep-patinaed bronze, Venusian sea-cork, or warm girl-skin.

Momentarily the idea of even three intimate hours with Heloise Ibsen seemed hardly excessive. Approaching the clustered paperbacks, which actually were arranged like the baubles on a bushy Christmas tree (except for the austerely modernistic rack of robots' book-spools) Gaspard slowed his already sedate pace in order to stretch the pleasure of anticipation.

Unlike most writers of his age, Gaspard de la Nuit enjoyed reading books, especially the near-hypnotic wordmill product, sometimes called wordwooze, with its warm rosy clouds of adjectives, its action verbs like wild winds blowing, its four-dimensionally solid nouns and electro-welded connectives.

Right now he was looking forward to two distinct pleasures: selecting and purchasing a new paperback for tonight's reading and once more seeing on display his own flrst novel Passwords to Passion , which was mostly distinguished by the girl on the cover removing seven colored petticoats-a full spectrum. On the back cover was a stereoprint of himself in his smoking jacket against an appropriate Victorian parlor background, bending over a slim beautiful girl with a coiffure full of foot-long hatpins and a lace bodice most interestingly three quarters unhooked. The picture was captioned: "Gaspard de la Nuit collecting material for his Magnum Opus." Below was this statement: 'Gaspard de la Nuit is a French dishwasher who has had extracurricular experience as a spaceship steward, abortionist's helper (working undercover to collect evidence for the Surкte), Montmartre taxi-driver, valet to a vicomte of the ancien regime , high-topper in the pine forests of French Canada, student of interplanetary divorce law at the Sorbonne, Huguenot missionary to the black Martians, and piano player in a maison de joie . Under the influence of mescaline he has relived the infamous lives of five notorious Parisian procurers. He has spent three years as a patient in mental hospitals, where he twice tried to beat a nurse to death. An accomplished skindiver in the deathless tradition of his countryman Captain Cousteau, he has witnessed the sadistic submarine sex rites of the Venusian mermen. Gaspard de la Nuit wrote Passwords to Passion in two and one-third days on a brand-new Rocket Wordmaster equipped with Floating Adverbs and FiveSecond Suspense Injection. He polished the novel on a Simon Super-juicer. 'For outstanding achievement in prose packaging' de la Nuit was awarded by Publishers' Presideo a three-night trip to Exotic Old Lower Manhattan. He is now gathering material for his second novel, which he tells us will be titled Snuggle with Sinners ."

Gaspard knew those words by heart and also that they were completely untrue except for the detail that the milling of the sexscrawl had taken seven shifts. He had never been off earth, visited Paris, indulged in a sport more strenuous than pingpong, held down a job more exotic than stock clerk, or had even the dullest, least newsworthy psychosis.

As for "gathering material," well, his chief memories of that photographing session were of the stabbing stereo lights and the lesbian model complaining repeatedly of his bad breath and sculpturing invitations with her slim restless torso to the mannish lady photographer. Of course now there was Heloise Ibsen, and Gaspard had to admit she counted for three women at least.

Yes, the blurbs were untrue and Gaspard knew them by heart and still it was a pleasure to reread them on the stand, verifying and resavoring their every nuance of disgusting flattering glamor.

As he reached out his hand for the twinkling book (the cover girl was preparing to whip off her ultimate violet shift) a hot red roaring stinking gush of flame erupted from the side and blackened in an instant the pigmy world of the sex doll. Gaspard sprang back, still in the daze of his dream though it had turned to nightmare. In three seconds the lovely book-tree was a shriveled skeleton with wrinkled black fruit. The flame shut off and a medley of harsh murderous laughs replaced its roar. Gaspard recognized the dramatic alto. "Heloise!" he cried incredulously.

For there was no question, it was his master lover whom he'd thought to be building libido abed-her strong features convulsed in fiendish glee, her dark hair streaming like a maenad's, her vigorous form pushing out exuberantly against levis and tailed shirt, and brandishing in her right hand a sinister black globe.

At her side was Homer Hemingway, a shaven-head mas ter writer whom Gaspard had always written off as a hulking boob, though Heloise had recently developed a whim for repeating his oafishly laconic remarks. The distinctive items of Homer's garb were a corduroy shooting vest stuffed with giant firecrackers and a broad belt with a scabbarded axe swinging from it. He held in his hairy-backed paws the smoking nozzle of a flame-thrower.

Behind them were two burly journeyman writers in striped sweaters and dark blue berets. One carried the pack of the flame-thrower, the other a submachinegun and on a short staff a banner with a black "30" on a gray ground.