Harlan Ellison: Brillo

“Heyyyy!” the driver said. “The what?”

“Warrior-lizard,” Polchik said.

“Oh, ain’t he the jive thug,” the smartmouth girl said. “He’s a word user. I’ll bet he knows all the current rage phrases. A philologist. I’ll bet he knows all the solecisms and colloquialisms, catch phrases, catachreses, nicknames and vulgarisms. The ‘warrior-lizard,’ indeed.”

Damned college kids, Polchik fumed inwardly. They always try to make you feel stupid; I coulda gone to college—if I didn’t have to work. Money, they probably always had money. The little bitch.

The driver giggled. “Are you trying to tell me, Mella, my dear, that this Peace Officer is accusing us of being under the influence of the illegal Bolivian drug commonly called Guerrera-Tuera?” He said it with pinpointed scorn, pronouncing the Spanish broadly: gwuh-rare-uh too-err- uh.

Brillo said, “Reviewing my semantic tapes, sir, I find no analogs for ‘Guerrera-Tuera’ as ‘warrior-lizard.’ True, guerrero in Spanish means warrior, but the closest spelling I find is the feminine noun guerra. which translates as war. Neither guerrera nor tuera appear in the Spanish language. If tuera is a species of lizard, I don’t seem to find it—”

Polchik had listened dumbly. The weight on his shoulders was monstrous. All of them were on him. The kids, that lousy stinking robot—they were making fun, such fun, such damned fun of him! “Keep digging,” he directed them. He was surprised to hear his words emerge as a series of croaks.

“And blood and breath tests must be administered, sir—”

“Stay the hell outta this!”

“We’re on our way home from a party,” said the boy with the scalplock, who had been silent till then. “We took a short-cut and got lost.”

“Sure,” Polchik said. “In the middle of Manhattan, you got lost.” He saw a small green bottle dumped out of the last girl’s pouch. She was trying to push it under other items. “What’s that?”

“Medicine,” she said. Quickly. Very quickly. Everyone tensed.

“Let me see it.” His voice was even.

He put out his hand for the bottle, but all six watched his other hand, hanging beside the needler. Hesitantly, the girl picked the bottle out of the mass of goods on the car’s hood, and handed him the plastic container.

Brillo said, “I am equipped with chemical sensors and reference tapes in my memory bank enumerating common narcotics. I can analyze the suspected medicine.”

The six stared wordlessly at the robot. They seemed almost afraid to acknowledge its presence.

Polchik handed the plastic bottle to the robot.

Brillo depressed a color-coded key on a bank set flush into his left forearm, and a panel that hadn’t seemed to be there a moment before slid down in the robot’s chest. He dropped the plastic bottle into the opening and the panel slid up. He stood and buzzed.

“You don’t have to open the bottle?” Polchik asked.

“No, sir.”

“Oh.”

The robot continued buzzing. Polchik felt stupid, just standing and watching. After a few moments the kids began to smirk, then to grin, then to chuckle openly, whispering among themselves. The smartmouthed girl giggled viciously. Polchik felt fifteen years old again; awkward, pimply, the butt of secret jokes among the long-legged high school girls in their miniskirts who had been so terrifyingly aloof he had never even considered asking them out. He realized with some shame that he despised these kids with their money, their cars, their flashy clothes, their dope. And most of all, their assurance. He, Mike Polchik, had been working hauling sides of beef from the delivery trucks to his old man’s butcher shop while others were tooling around in their Electrics. He forced the memories from his mind and took out his anger and frustration on the metal idiot still buzzing beside him.

“Okay, okay, how long does it take you?”

“Tsk, tsk,” said the driver, and went cross-eyed. Polchik ignored him. But not very well.

“I am a mobile unit, sir. Experimental model 44. My parent mechanism—the Master Unit AA—at Universal Electronics laboratories is equipped to perform this function in under one minute.”

“Well, hurry it up. I wanna run these hairies in.”

“Gwuh -rare-uh too- er -uh,” the scalplock said in a nasty undertone.

There was a soft musical tone from inside the chest compartment, the plate slid down again, and the robot withdrew the plastic bottle. He handed it to the girl.

“Now whaddaya think you’re doing?”

“Analysis confirms what the young lady attested, sir. This is a commonly prescribed nose drop for nasal congestion and certain primary allergies.”

Polchik was speechless.

“You are free to go,” the robot said. “With our apologies. We are merely doing our jobs. Thank you.”

Polchik started to protest—he knew he was right—but the kids were already gathering up their belongings. He hadn’t even ripped the car, which was probably where they had it locked away. But he knew it was useless. He was the guinea pig in this experiment, not the robot. It was all painfully clear. He knew if he interfered, if he overrode the robot’s decision, it would only add to the cloud under which the robot had put him: short temper, taking a gift from a neighborhood merchant, letting the robot out-maneuver him in the apartment, false stop on Kyser…and now this. Suddenly, all Mike Polchik wanted was to go back, get out of harness, sign out, and go home to bed. Wet carpets and all. Just to bed.

Because if these metal things were what was coming, he was simply too tired to buck it.

He watched as the kids—hooting and ridiculing his impotency—piled back in the car, the girls showing their legs as they clambered over the side. The driver bummed polyglas speeding up Amsterdam Avenue. In a moment they were gone.

“You see, Officer Polchik,” Brillo said, “false arrest would make us both liable for serious—” But Polchik was already walking away, his shoulders slumped, the weight of his bandolier and five years on the force too much for him.

The robot (making the sort of sound an electric watch makes) hummed after him, keeping stern vigil on the darkened neighborhood in the encroaching dawn. He could not compute despair. But he had been built to serve. He was programmed to protect, and he did it, all the way back to the precinct house.

Polchik was sitting at a scarred desk in the squad room, laboriously typing out his report on a weary IBM Selectric afflicted with grand mal. Across the room Reardon poked at the now-inert metal bulk of Brillo, using some sort of power tool with a teardrop-shaped lamp on top of it. The Mayor’s whiz kid definitely looked sandbagged. He don’t go without sleep very often , Polchik thought with grim satisfaction.

The door to Captain Summit’s office opened, and the Captain, looking oceanic and faraway, waved him in.

“Here it comes,” Polchik whispered to himself. Summit let Polchik pass him in the doorway. He closed the door and indicated the worn plastic chair in front of the desk. Polchik sat down. “I’m not done typin’ the beat report yet, Capt’n.”

Summit ignored the comment. He moved over to the desk, picked up a yellow printout flimsy, and stood silently for a moment in front of Polchik, considering it.

“Accident report out of the 86th precinct uptown. Six kids in a Ford Electric convertible went out of control, smashed down a pedestrian and totaled against the bridge abutment. Three dead, three critical-not expected to live. Fifteen minutes after you let them go.”