Fritz Leiber - The Silver Eggheads

"There are varying views on kidnapping," Cullingham announced loudly, waving a new drink. "Some dread and deplore it. Others regard it as life's loveliest awakening."

"Oh Cully!" Heloise chortled, grabbing his arm. "Hey, you never did show me that rubber bitch. I think we ought to take her home tonight since you still got paid-up time coming on her, there are some tortures it takes two girls to apply. Cully, you cutie, did you actually call her Tits Willow?"

At that key name, loudly uttered, the femmequin stood up and, the white sheet still covering her from head to ankles, walked straight toward Heloise.

Pop Zangwell looked up from the silver voicewriter just in time to catch his brother pouring himself a generous slug of bourbon. The old soak began to shake again and his eyes went wide. "There it goes!" he quavered.

Flaxman shuddered out of the way of the advancing sheeted femmequin. "Do something about her, somebody!" he demanded, but all that happened for the moment was that Pop Zangwell's gaze traveled over and across Flaxman's head and the old man called hollowly, "There it goes!" Flaxman stared and shuddered again.

At that instant the electrolocked door flew open and a silver egg swooped into the room and circled it, sailing eight feet off the floor. It had a small eye, ear and speaker plugged directly into it without cords-a very odd sensory-motor triangle-and it was based on a little silver platform from which came two small clawed feet, like the hands of a harpy. In fact, if it looked like anything at all, it looked like a wingless metal harpy or a hydrocephalic silver owl designed by the team of Picasso, Chirico, and Salvador Dali.

As it circled him, Flaxman swung around slowly, waving his arms defensively and screaming in a thin high voice. Then the pupils of the publisher's eyes turned up and he slowly fell over backwards.

The egg swooped in to him, fixing its claws in the lapels of his coat and easing his fall.

"Don't be scared, Mr. Flaxman," the egg cried out as it sat on his chest, "It's just me, Half Pint, as regadgeted by Zane Gort. And we can shake hands now. I promise not to pinch."

"Project El was simply short for Project Levitation," Zane Gort explained when order had been restored and Flaxman revived, though still quite white about the gills, with a double shot of Bonnie Lunar Dew. "It was an engineering job, purely. No original scientific work involved at all."

"Don't you believe him, folks," Half Pint interjected from where he was perched on Zane's shoulder. "This robot is only fifty percent tin, the rest is pure genius."

"Quiet, I have the floor," Zane told him. "No, I simply made use of the fact that antigravity fields capable of supporting small objects have been technologically feasible for several years. The field generator is in the platform at Half Pint's base. He varies the field and tips it for flying in a simple way which I'll explain in a moment, just as he controls the skeleton pinchers that serve him as hands.

"Actually, all of this set-up, except for the antigravity feature, could have been achieved over a hundred years ago. Even at the time the brains were excised and canned they could have been given manipulative and locomotive powers. But it wasn't done, wasn't even thought of, for over a century. To explain that amazing blind spot, I must go back to one Daniel Zukertort and the very interesting and enduring influence he had on his creations. That old boy did more to mold (yes, and thwart!) the development of things than anyone has ever realized.

"Daniel Zukertort wanted to create undistracted spirits, minds without any bodies at all. Now of course, as he himself knew very well, he didn't really do that, for the brains do have bodies just as much as any elephant or amoeba or robot-I mean they have nervous tissue, a chopped-down glandular set-up, a circulatory system even though it's run by an isotope-pump, and a digestive and excretory system depending on micro-regeneration of oxygen and on fontanel-carried trace food elements and trace waste products.

"But Zukie didn't want the eggs to think of themselves as having bodies, he wanted to suppress that fact, keep it out of their consciousness, so they'd concentrate on eternal verities and the realm of ideas, and not start thinking about how to operate in the real world again as soon as they got a little bored. So Zukertort proceeded to load the dice."

The phone began to blink on Flaxman's desk. Waving Nurse Bishop away, the publisher snatched up the receiver while signaling Zane to go on.

"Now as to Zukertort's dice-loading," the robot said. "In the first place he picked for his subjects artists and writers of humanistic bent-men and women who wouldn't be interested in engineering or apt to think of a hand, for instance, as a kind of tweezers or shovel, or of feet as being a sort of wheel.

"In the second place physiology was on Zukertort's side, for the brain has no feeling in itself, no sense of pain or anything like that. Touch the brain, torture it even, and you don't get pain, just weird sensations.

"Zukertort gave his sealed minds only the barest minimum of senses and powers. Sight and hearing, but none of the earthier, guttier senses. And the power of speech. He had to let them have that, so mankind could learn the spiritual discoveries the brains made out there in nowhere.

"But he set up the Nursery Rules in such a way that the eggs would think of themselves, and be thought of, as helpless invalids, paralytics. He even insisted on all sorts of outdated hygienic rules, like having the nurses wear masks. He wanted the eggs to be afraid of any activity except mental activity. He played on two of the strongest human urges: the desire, on the part of the brains, to be eternally helpless and cared for and the desire, on the part of the nurses, to endlessly mother and coddle and protect.

"Now, I think we all know the loss the brains feel the most keenly-the power of manipulation. That's why whenever they get mad they call human beings monkeys. It's an indication of deepest envy. Monkeys grabbing things, turning them over, twisting, prying, pulling, handling, feeling-"

"Zane!" Nurse Bishop was waving her hand excitedly. "I dig what you're getting at, but it's impossible! You can't go inside the eggs and attach some sort of machines to the stumps of their kinesthetic and voluntary-muscle nerves," she protested excitedly. "I've thought of that sometimes myself, but no one but Zukertort could have done it. No one else has or ever had the skill to go inside their shells. That's what I still don't understand about what you've done, bless you. How does Half Pint control his antigravity field or his claws?"

"I'm not talking about going inside their shells," Zane replied. "I'm not talking about anything one-tenth as difficult. Voicewriters-there's your clue, as it was mine. If the eggs can operate voicewriters, I told myself ten days ago, then with the proper sound-keyed instruments they could use their voices to operate artificial hands and a flying device and still have their voices, between times, for talking. Of course operating three signal systems on one channel took a little electron juggling and three foreign languages (one for a master control) but it wasn't too difficult.

"What's more, the eggs will eventually be able to use their voices to work instruments and devices of all sorts- not just little claws and float controls, but hammers, saws, cranes, spaceships, bulldozers, chisels, knives, microscopes, pens, paint brushes-"

"Hey!" Flaxman shouted, putting his hand over the phone. "Don't you steal my writers! They're supposed to stay in the Nursery and turn out stories, not go swooping around the Solar System painting lousy pictures and digging ditches on the moon and getting all worked up about woodcarving."