Fritz Leiber: The Silver Eggheads

"Help me, Gaspard," he said rapidly. "We've got to get her to a quiet spot and give her electricity before she flips all her relays. Take the other end."

" Tin medal is right!" Heloise rasped. "I might have known finking would come natural to a dirty robot-lover!"

"Heloise-" Gaspard began, but then he saw there was no time for talk. The massed writers, stunned by Miss Blushes' screams and the audacity of Zane Gort's maneuvers, had recovered themselves and were advancing menacingly. As he picked up the back end of the stretcher and trotted off after Zane, Heloise swung out her tight-levied hip and slapped it loudly. "Here's one thing your tin friends can't give you!" she called after him with a coarse laugh.

Scraps of metal, hurled by the enraged writers, began to patter around them. Zane quickened his stride until Gaspard was running. A cannoncracker went off near his ear.

"Aagh!" Homer Hemingway sobbed after them angrily, lighting his other remaining cracker at the scorching wordmill. Before hurling it he searched his not over-capitalized memory bank for the worst insult he knew.

"Dirty editors!" he bawled.

But his missile exploded ten feet short as the stretcherbearing robot and man whisked through the door. Once in the street, Zane slowed the pace. Gaspard found to his surprise that he was beginning to feel fine-excited and a bit light-headed. His jacket was torn, his face smeary, there was a lump on his jaw the size of a lemon, but he looked and felt alive.

"Zane, that was a beautiful job you did on Homer!" he cried. "You old tin bastard, I didn't know you had it in you."

"Normally I don't," the robot replied modestly. "As you know, the first law for robots is never to harm a human being, but by Saint Isaac, the being has to come up to human standards! Homer Hemingway doesn't. Besides, what I did to him was in no sense harm, but salutory chastisement."

"Of course I can understand my writing chums getting apoplectic at the things Miss Blushes said, too," Gaspard went on. "Love the lovely publishers!" he repeated, chortling.

"I too can laugh at the undiscriminating hypersensitivity of censors," Zane said, a bit stiffly. "But don't you think, Gaspard, that the human race has during the past two hundred years become a little too attached to mere vulgarity and a few terse words of genito-excretory reference? As I have Dr. Tungsten say to his golden robot girl when she dreams yearningly of becoming a human, 'Humans aren't as you idealize them, Blanda. Humans are dream-killers. They took the bubbles out of soapsuds, Blanda, and called it detergent. They took the moonlight out of romance and called it sex.' But enough of this socio-literary chit-chat, Gaspard. I've got to find Miss Blushes some electricity, and the power to Readership Row has clearly been cut."

"Excuse me," Gaspard said, "but couldn't you simply give her a jolt from your own batteries?"

"She might misunderstand my intentions," the robot replied somewhat reprovingly. "Naturally I'd do it at a pinch, but the squeeze isn't that tight yet. I mean, her condition isn't that critical. She's in no pain. I have set her controls for heavy trance. However-"

"How about Rocket House?" Gaspard suggested. "The editorial offices are on the next power pattern. Heloise be heves I'm a fink, I might as well act like one and run to my publishers."

"An excellent idea," the robot replied, turning right at the next intersection and lengthening his stride so that Gaspard had to trot to keep up. He trotted lightly so as not to jounce Miss Blushes. Stretched out between them absolutely motionless and darkly scorched around the knees and thighs, the robix (female or silf robot) looked ready for the scrapheap to Gaspard's inexpert eyes.

He said, "In any case I want to see Flaxman and Cullingham. I've a bone to pick with them. I want to know why they made no more effort to protect their wordmills than to join in hiring a pack of unreliable (excuse me, Zane) tin goons. It's not like them to fail so in their duty to their own pocketbooks."

"I too have subtle matters to discuss with our illustrious employers," Zane said. "Gaspard, Old Bone, you have been most pluckily helpful today, quite beyond the normal duty one intelligent empathetic race owes to another. I would like to express my gratitude in more than words. I couldn't help hearing the crude jibes of your vigorous and disaffected darling. Now this is a most delicate matter and I don't want to risk being offensive, but Gaspard, Old Corpuscle, it is not quite true what Miss Ibsen said about robots being altogether incapable of tendering certain most intimate services to male human beings. By Saint Wuppertal, no! I'm not referring exactly to our robixes and certainly not to Miss Blushes-perish the thought, I'd rather dive into a bath of acid than have you think that! But if you should ever feel the need and momentarily lack the means of satisfying it, and wish to experience a most astonishing simulacrum of human delight, a most amazing though ersatz ultimate female amiability, I can give you the address of Madam Pneumo's establishment, a-"

"Stow it, Zane!" Gaspard said sharply. "That's one department of my life I can take care of for myself."

"I'm sure you can," Zane said heartily. "Would that all of us could make the same boast. Excuse me, Old Muscle, but have I inadvertently touched a tender-?"

"You have," Gaspard said shortly, "but it's all right. ." He hesitated, then grinned and added, ". . Old Bolt!"

"Do excuse it, please," Zane said softly. "At times I get carried away by my enthusiasm for the amazing capabilities of my metal fellows and I perpetrate some gauche impropriety. I'm a bit robo-centric, I fear. But I am truly fortunate that you expressed your offense at my remark so mildly. Homer Hemingway would undoubtedly have called me a tin pimp."

When the last Harper Editor was gutted, the last Viking Anthologizer reduced to a blackened shell plastered with manifestoes, the victory-flushed writers trooped back to their various bohemian barracks, their Latin and French Quarters, their Bloomsburies and Greenwich Villages and North Beaches, and sat down in happy circles to await inspiration.

None came.

Minutes stretched to hours, hours toward days. Tankcars of coffee were brewed and sipped, mountains of cigarette butts accumulated on the black-enameled slanting floors of attics, garrets and penthouses guaranteed by archeologists to duplicate minutely the dwellings of ancient scribes. But it was no use, the great epics of the future- even the humble work-a-day sex stories and space sagas- refused to come.

At this point many of the writers, still sitting in circles, though now unhappy ones, joined hands in hopes that this would concentrate psychic energy and so induce creativity, or perhaps even put them in touch with the spirits of authors dead and gone, who would kindly provide them with plots of no use in the afterworld.

On the basis of mysterious traditions filtering down from the dim dark days when writers really wrote, most writers believed that writing was a team enterprise in which eight or ten congenial chaps reclined in luxurious surroundings drinking cocktails and "kicking ideas back and forth" (whatever that meant exactly) and occasionally being refreshed by the ministrations of beautiful secretaries, until stories appeared-a picture which made writing a kind of alcoholic parlor football with bedroom rest periods, terminated by miracles.

Or, alternatively, they believed that writing depended on "tapping the unconscious mind," a version of the process which made it more akin to psychoanalysis and drilling for oil ( dowsing for the black gold of the id!) and which raised the hope that at a pinch extrasensory perception or some other form of psionic gymnastics might substitute for creativity. In either case, clasping hands in circles seemed a good bet, as it would provide the proper togetherness and simultaneously favor the appearance of the dark psychic forces. It was accordingly practiced widely.