Fritz Leiber - The Silver Eggheads

Clancy Goldfarb, professional book-hijacker so adroit that his outfit was unofficially recognized as the fourth most powerful book distributor, decided that what most likely bulked Rocket's sleeve was books milled in excess of quota. Lighting a foot-long pencil-thin Venusian cheroot, he began to plan one of his perfect robberies.

Cain Brinks was a robot adventure-author, whose Madam Iridium was the chief fictional rival to Zane Gort's Dr. Tungsten. Currently Madam Iridium and the Acid Beast was outselling Dr. Tungsten Reams a Nut by five to four. On overhearing Heloise's strident whisper, Cain Brinks had almost dropped the tray of Martian martinis he was carrying. To penetrate the Word undetected, Cain Brinks had this afternoon tarnished himself to the point of fine pitting so as to be able to impersonate a robot waiter. Now this piece of masochism had paid off. He knew in a flash what Rocket House had up its sleeve-a Zane Gort determined to become the czar of human fiction-and he began to lay plans to cut in.

While these reactions were occurring, a strange cortege was wending its way into the Word, moving between the green tables toward the center of the room. It consisted of six slim haughty young men arm in arm with six scrawny haughty elderly ladies, followed by a jewel-studded robot wheeling a dolly. The young men were conspicuously longhaired and wore black turtle-neck sweaters and tight black slacks-the effect was almost but not quite one of leotards. The scrawny old ladies wore sheath evening dresses of gold or silver lame and were bedecked with diamonds in dazzling ropes, bracelets, pendants, and tiaras.

"My God, Babe," Homer Hemingway summarized succinctly, "look at the rich bitches and the black pansies, will you?"

The cortege stopped just short of their table. The leading female, whose diamonds were so many and scintillating they hurt the eye, looked around her superciliously.

Homer, his sleepy mind wandering like a child's, said complainingly to Heloise, "I wonder what's taking that kid so long with my milk. If she's been putting in any pep pills-"

"Aphrodisiacs, more likely, if she thinks you're worth it," Heloise told him in a quick aside while staring fascinatedly at the newcomers.

The bediamonded female announced in a voice suitable for rebuking bellboys, "We are seeking the head of the writers' union."

Heloise, never at a loss, leaped up. "I am the ranking member present of the executive committee."

The female looked her up and down. "You will do," she said. She clapped her hands sharply together twice. "Parkins!" she called.

The jewel-studded robot drew forward the dolly. On it were neatly stacked twenty four-foot-high columns of thin hardcover books in beautifully toned dust covers that themselves had a jewelly glitter. On top of these was something of irregular shape draped in white silk.

"We are Penfolk," the female announced, looking straight at Heloise and speaking in the penetrating tones an empress uses in a noisy market plaza. "For over a century we have preserved the traditions of true creative writing in our select circles, in anticipation of the glorious day when the horrid machines that trample our minds should be destroyed and writing returned to its only true friends-the dedicated amateurs. Over the years we have often execrated your union for its complicity in the plot to make metal monsters our spiritual masters, but now we wish to recognize your courage in at last destroying the tyrant wordmills. I hereby present you with two tokens of our esteem. Parkins!"

That bedizzened example of conspicuous expenditure twitched aside the white silk, revealing a mirror-gleaming gold statue of a slim nude youth driving a huge sword through the midriff of a wordmill.

"Behold!" cried the female. "It is the work of Gorgius Snelligrew, executed, cast and polished in a single day. It rests upon Penfoik's entire literary output during the past century-the slender tapers, in pastel dustcovers flecked with jewel dust, whereby we have kept alight the flame of literatureship down through the drear machine age now past: seventeen hundred volumes of deathless verse!"

Suzette chose that moment to come wagging up bearing a white-filled crystal goblet from which rose a two-foothigh blue flame.

She set it in front of Homer, covered it briefly with a silver plate.

She removed the plate. The flame was gone and the hideous stench of burnt casein filled the air.

With a final flourish of: her perky rump, Suzette announced, "Here she is, jus'-so-'ot-your flaming milk, M'sieu."

Flaxman and Cullingham sat side by side in their half-cleaned office.

Joe the Guard had been ordered to bed in a state of collapse after a night of unremitting tidying. He was sleeping on a cot in the men's room with his skunk pistol tucked under his pillow along with a violet cake of Odor-Ban that Zane Gort had thoughtfully placed beside it. Zane and Gaspard, arriving for work at dawn, had been shooed off to put Joe to bed and then check the burglar-foiling systems of all the storerooms with their priceless contents of newly milled books.

The two partners were alone. It was that magic unsmirched hour of the business day before trouble starts.

So Flaxman smirched it.

"Cully, I know we can persuade the eggs, but in spite of that I'm getting cold feet about the whole project," he said miserably.

"Tell me why, Flaxy," the other responded smoothly. "I think I have a glimmering."

"Well, my dear Dad gave me a complex about the eggheads. A phobia, you might say. One hell of a phobia-I hadn't realized how big until now. You see, Dad looked on the eggs as a sacred trust that had to be kept a big mystery even from most of his own family, the sort of sacred trust some old aristocratic British families used to have; you know, down in the sub-dungeon is the original castiron crown of England guarded by a slimy toad-monster; or maybe it's an undying great uncle who went mad in the crusades and turned all green and scaly and wants to drink the blood of a virgin every full moon; or maybe it's a sort of a combination of the two and right down there in the sub-sub-dungeon, the ultimate oubliette, they've got the rightful king of England from seven centuries back, only he's turned into a toad-monster who wants a tubful of virgin blood every time the moon squeaks-anyway, there's this sacred trust they've got and are sworn to keep and when the son's thirteen years old the father's got to tell him all about it, with a lot of ritual questions and answers like What Cries in the Night? It is the Trust, What Must We Give It? That Which It Wants, What Does It Want? A Bucket of Blood, and so on, and then when the father does tell the kid and shows him the monster, the kid has a heart attack and is never good for anything much after that except to potter around in the library and garden and tell his son about it. Are you getting the picture, Cully?"

"In the main," the other replied judiciously.

"Well anyway that's the way my dear Dad made me feel about the Braintrust. God, how that name got me right from the start! Even when I was a little kid I knew there was something ominous in my home background. My dear Dad was allergic to eggs and also he'd never allow silverware at the table, even plated; once he fainted dead away when a new English robot fresh out of Sheffield brought him a boiled breakfast egg sitting up in its shell in a spindly-footed silver egg cup. And once he took me to a children's party and collapsed during an unannounced egg-rolling contest. And then there were the mysterious phone calls I'd overhear about the Nursery-which was where I slept, I thought-making it pretty bad, let me tell you, the time I overheard Dad say (it was during the Third Anti-Robot Riots) 'I think we should be prepared to take them underground and blow up the Nursery on an instant's notice, day or night.'