Fritz Leiber: The Silver Eggheads

Still the stories wouldn't come.

The simple fact was that no professional writer could visualize starting a story except in terms of pressing the Go Button of a wordmill, and marvelous as Space-Age man might be, he still hadn't sprouted buttons; he could only gnash his teeth in envy of the robots, who were in this feature far more advanced.

Many of the writers discovered in passing that they could not arrange words on paper in any pattern or even make words at all; in a great era of pictorial-auditory-kinesthetic-tactile-nosmic-gustatory-somnotic-hypnotic-psionic education they had missed the special classes in that somewhat archaic art. Most of these illiterates purchased voicewriters, handy devices which translated spoken into typed material, but even with such aids a large minority awoke to the sick realization that their mastery of the spoken word extended no further than Simplified Basic or Solar Pidgin. They could drink in the richly purple laudanum of wordwooze, but they could no more create it inside their bodies than they could make honey or spider silk.

In justice it must be pointed out that a few of the nonwriters-purists such as Homer Hemingway-had never once contemplated doing any writing themselves when they destroyed the wordmills, assuming that some of their less athletic, more bookish fellows would be able to turn the trifling trick. And a very few, among them Heloise Ibsen, had ambitions only of becoming union czars, publishing barons, or somehow turning the chaos that would follow the Wordmill Massacre to their own profit, advancement, or at least excitement.

But most of the writers really believed they would be able to write stories-great novels yet! — without ever having done any writing in their lives. They suffered commensurately.

After seventeen hours Lafcadio Cervantes Proust slowly wrote, "Swerving, skimming, evermore turning, mounting higher and higher in ever-widening fiery circles. ." and then stopped.

Gertrude Colette Sand clenched her tongue between her teeth and painstakingly printed, "'Yes, yes, yes, yes , YES!' she said."

Wolfgang Friedrich von Wassermann groaned with worldpain and put down, "Once upon a time. ."

Nothing more.

Meanwhile the Quartermaster General of the Space Marines commanded the PX on the planet Pluto to ration paperbacks and listen-tapes; it looked, he radioed, as if the next fiction shipment would only comprise normal reading for three months instead of four years.

Deliveries of new titles to Terran newsstands were cut fifty and then ninety percent to conserve the miserably tiny stock of written and printed but undistributed novels. Book-a-day housewives phoned mayors and congressmen. Prime ministers, used to putting themselves to sleep with a crime-detective story a night (and often getting shrewd statesmanlike ideas from them), viewed developments with inward panic. A 13-year-old committed suicide "because adventure stories are my only pleasure and now there will be no more."

TV programs and movies-in-depth had to be curtailed in the same proportion as books, since they depended on the same vastly expensive wordmills for their scripts and scenarios. The world's newest entertainment device, the All-Senses-Poem-of-Ecstacy Engine, already well past the planning stage, was shelved indefinitely.

Electronic scientists and cybernetic engineers issued confidential preliminary reports that it would take from ten to fourteen months to get one wordmill working, with dark hints that their secondary surveys might be even more pessimistic. They pointed out that the original wordmills had been detailedly patterned on skilled human writers, whose psychoanalytic draining-in-depth had provided the contents of the wordniills' memory banks, and where were such writers to be found today? Even foreign-language countries depended almost completely on mechanical translations of Anglo-American wordwooze for their fiction.

Anglo-America's smug Labor Government awakened to a belated realization that, although the publishers had been brought to their knees, they would soon be utterly unable to meet their normal payrolls, let alone support the twenty thousand displaced teen-agers the Department of People had been planning to dump on them as semi-skilled word mechanics.

Worse, the Solar System's relatively smooth-running society would soon begin to sour and sicken from the subconscious outward for lack of fresh fictional entertainment.

The Government appealed to the publishers, the publishers to the writers-for new titles at least under which to reissue older milled books, though consulted psychologists warned that, contrary to cynical opinion, this stopgap measure would not work. For some reason a milled book which created the headiest delight on first reading was apt to produce nothing but nervous irritation on rereading.

Plans to reissue the fictional classics of the Twentieth Century and even more primitive times, though eagerly urged by a few idealists and other cranks, met with the unanswerable objection that readers used from childhood to wordwooze found pre-wordmill books (though thought exciting and even daring in their day) insufferably dull-in fact, quite unintelligible. The weird suggestion made by one rogue humanist that this was due to wordwooze itself being completely unintelligible-verbal opium of zero meaningfulness and so providing no training in reading material with a content-never got into the news at all.

The publishers promised the writers full amnesty for their riotings, toilet facilities separate from those of robots, and a seventeen-cent wage boost all around, if they could produce scripts of minimal wordmill quality-Hanover Hack Mark I.

The writers sprang back into their cross-legged circles, locked hands, stared across at each other's pale masks, and concentrated more desperately than ever.

Nothing.

At the far end of Readership Row, well beyond the point where Dream Street changes its name to Nightmare Alley, stands Rocket House, pronounced Racket House by the cognoscenti.

Not five minutes after their decision to seek aid and enlightenment at this spot, Gaspard de la Nuit and Zane Gort were bearing their stretcher and its slender pink burden up a stalled escalator leading to the executive area. Gaspard was now at the head of the stretcher and Zane at the rear end, the robot taking on the more taxing job of holding his end of the stretcher high above his head to keep Miss Blushes horizontal.

"Looks like I gave you a bum steer," Gaspard said. "The power failure extends into this area. Certainly the writers came this far, judging from the shambles downstairs."

"Press on, partner," Zane replied staunchly. "It's my recollection that the power pattern changes halfway through the building."

Gaspard stopped in front of a simple door bearing the name "FLAXMAN" and below it "CULLINGHAM." He doubled up his knee and pressed a waist-high button. When nothing happened he gave the door a savage kick with the flat of his foot. It swung open, revealing a large office furnished with luxurious simplicity. Behind a double desk that was like two half moons joined-a Cupid's-bow effect-sat a short dark man with the broad grin of energetic efficiency and a tall fair man with the faint smile of weary efficiency. They seemed to have been enjoying a quiet conversation together-an odd occupation, it occurred to Gaspard, for two men who have presumably just suffered deadly business injuries. They looked around with some surprise-the short dark man jerked a little-but no annoyance.

Gaspard stepped inside without a word. At a signal from the robot they gently lowered the stretcher to the floor.

"Think you'll be able to take care of her now, Zane?" Gaspard asked.

The robot, his pincher tip probing a wall socket, nodded. "We've reached electricity at last," he replied. "That's all I need."