Fritz Leiber - The Silver Eggheads

Gaspard lightly returned the pressure. "Who do the eggs think is going to win the contest?"

"They won't say a word. I've never known them to be so secretive. It worries me."

"Maybe all the scripts'll be knockouts," Gaspard suggested with grandiose optimism. "Thirty best-sellers smack off the bat!"

The rolls had almost all been read and tension was rising sharply-as reflected by Joe the Guard having a little struggle to keep Pop from bee-lining to the drinks-when Gaspard, visiting the refreshment table, felt himself nudged by the steel elbow of Zane Gort, who with far-seeing diplomacy was fetching a plate for Heloise Ibsen.

"Gaspard," the robot whispered. "There's something I must tell you about."

"Project El?" Gaspard inquired quickly.

"No, far more important than that-at least to me personally. It's something I'd never tell another robot. Gaspard, Miss Blushes and I spent the last two nights together-intimately."

"Was it good, Zane?"

"Thrilling beyond belief! But what I didn't realize, Gaspard, what truly startled and to a degree upset me, what I never in fact for a moment anticipated, is that Miss Blushes is such an enthusiast! "

"You mean, Zane, you're bothered because you think she's had previous-"

"Oh no, no, no. She was completely innocent-there are ways of telling-yet she almost instantly became a mad enthusiast. She wanted us to plug in on each other again and again-and for long periods!"

"Is that bad? Watch it, here comes Pop--no, Joe's caught him."

"No, it's not bad, Gaspard, but it eats up so much time, especially when one envisages a lifetime of such companionship lying ahead. You see, the moment of robot-robix union is the one time when a robot isn't thinking-his mind goes into a sort of ecstatic electronic trance, a blackout with lightning flashes. Now I'm used to thinking twenty-four hours a day, year in and out, and the prospect of having huge chunks cut out of that thinking time is profoundly disquieting. Gaspard, I know you'll hardly credit this, but on the last connection we had, Miss Blushes and I were plugged in for four solid hours!"

"Oh-oh, Old Bolt," Gaspard commented. "You're up against some of the same problems I had with Ibsen."

"But what's the answer? When'll I do my writing?"

"Is it possible, Zane, you're changing your mind about monogamy being the best solution for the author of the Dr. Tungsten stories? At any rate I think a certain amount of travel, or even flitting, is indicated. Hold it, they've finished the readings. Cullingham wins by a roll! Pay you later- I've got to get back to Bishop."

G. K. Culllngham leaned back, blinking his eyes rapidly, squeezing the lids together. This time he did not return Heloise's smile, but only bowed his head. Then he said in a quack-quack burst, "How-about-a-conference-Flaxy before-you-start-that-last-one? "-his voice was trying to match the drug-goaded speed of his reading. He touched a button and the TV screen went black. "They'll-think-it's-just-the-bad-circuit-again," he explained.

Flaxnian finished inserting his last roll in his machine and looked around at his partner. Cullingham at last got his voice under control, at least to the extent of not letting the Prestissimo Pills speed it up. In fact the words came out with painful slowness as he inquired, "How are your entries so far?"

Flaxman's impassive look changed to one of deep sadness. With a painful hushed respectfulness, like one reporting the tragic toll of a flash-fire in a kindergarten, he said softly, "They stink. They all stink."

Cullingham nodded. "So do mine. All of them."

Gaspard's first thought was that deep down inside him he had known all along that this was going to happen. And that all the others must have known the same thing too-deep, deep down. How could anyone really have expected aged ego-maniacs living under incubator conditions to produce anything popular? Or stories about life in the raw to come from canned and coddled hyper-basket-cases? Suddenly Flaxman and Cullingham appeared to Gaspard as figures of tragic romance, friends of the forlorn hope, the lost cause, and sunset illusions.

And indeed now Flaxman did shrug shoulders like a somewhat undersized romantic hero who bravely takes up tragedy's full burden. "Still-got-one-more-to-wade-through-a-matter-of-form," the publisher said briskly, bent his head, and spun his reading machine.

Gaspard stood up and gravitated with the others over to Cullingham. They were like pallbearers clustering around a funeral director.

"It's not lack of skill or inventiveness," Cullingham was explaining almost apologetically, his speech now more under control. "And although it might have helped, it's not even lack of editorial direction." As he said that he gave Gaspard and Zane a faint quizzical smile.

"No simple human sympathies, I suppose?" Gaspard ventured.

"Or strong plot-line?" Zane added.

"Or reader-identification?" Miss Blushes put in.

"Or plain guts?" Heloise finished.

Cullingham nodded. "But more than that," he said, "it's simply the incredible conceit of the things, their swollen ego-centeredness. These manuscripts aren't stories, they're puzzles-and most of them insoluble at that. Ulysses, Mars Violet, Alexanderplatz, Venus Deferred, The Fairy Queen , and the riddling Icelandic bards aren't in it for sheer perverse complexity. It adds up to this: the eggheads have tried to be as confusing as possible to show how brilliant they are."

"I told them-" Nurse Bishop started to say and then broke off. She was crying quietly. Gaspard put his arm lightly around her shoulders. Ten days ago he would simply have said, "I told you so," and launched into a new paean of praise to wordmills, but now he felt almost like crying himself, at any rate, so disturbed that he wasn't even impressed by the philosophic courage with which Cullingham was taking the collapse of his and Flaxman's dream project.

"The eggs are hardly to be blamed," the editorial director pointed out sympathetically. "Being locked-up minds and little else, it was natural that they should come to look on ideas as things to play with, to fit together in odd patterns, to string and restring like beads. Why, one of the manuscripts is in the form of an epic poem, mixing together, sometimes in one sentence, about seventeen languages. Another tries-quite successfully at its level-to be an epitome of all literature, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead down through Shakespeare and Dickens and Hammerberg. In another the first letters of each word spell out a second story, highly scatological, though I didn't follow it all the way through. Another- Oh, they're not all as bad as that. A couple of them are the sort of thing you'd expect a gifted writer to do while he's still a college student and trying to dazzle the professors. One-by Double Nick, I'd guess-is even pseudo-popular and uses all the good clichйs and smooth techniques, but in a contemptuous, cold-blooded way, no warmth at all. But most of them-"

"The brats aren't really cold-blooded," Nurse Bishop protested brokenly. "They're — . oh, I was sure that some of their books, at least, would be good. Especially when Rusty told me they weren't really writing new stories, most of them, but stuff they'd painstakingly concocted over a century and more for their own amusement."

"That's probably a large part of the trouble," Cullingham said. "They're trying to dazzle superminds. Intellectual fireworks. If you don't believe me, just listen to this."

He picked up a roll he'd set apart from the others, twirled it open a couple of feet, and began to read.

"This idark motherlink lie spirit ash inner brinks firebucks a lazy headshell sings black o' this clobsit air whering marblying pillawrying and dying. Wish it. Push it. Smash it. Four in a butting mold tease inner ease maykister esau-"