The Silver Eggheads

TWELVE

Girls are a great art-form, but one requiring exhausting study and application, reads an entry in the unwritten notebooks of Gaspard de la Nuit. The receptionist who appeared at Wisdom of the Ages in response to his sol-sol-do chime was as fresh as the cubicle was musty with shelves of old hardcover books and a dust-freighted frieze of David-stars and Isis-crosses. Gaspard, breathing hard and coughing a bit, studied her appreciatively and thanked the higher powers that skirts were back again in the non-writing world-properly short snug skirts that perfectly set off sheer-stockinged legs. A feathery sweater clung to the middle heights of the petite vision as closely as gleaming brown ringlets hugged her trim skull and the pink shells of her ears.

Zane Gort whistled the polite robot's greeting which all she-humans found most comforting.

When Gaspard's inspection did not terminate, the vision said snottily, "Yes, yes, but we know all about me. So let's quit the panting and get down to business."

Gaspard censored the reply, "Marvellous by me, if you've got a couch and don't mind a robot observer," and instead asserted defensively, "I've been running. A scribesquad ambushed us and it was five blocks and seven levels before we shook the maniacs. I'm afraid the writers may have got wind that Rocket's up to something. We led them away from here and snuck back in a scrap-buyer's truck- lots of those headed for Readership Row, I gave the dnver tips on hot wordmills." The remark about panting stuck in his craw, so he added, "Incidentally, you should try running the mile some day with a robot for a pacer."

"Give me thighs like barrels, I'm sure," the girl replied, looking Gaspard and his bruises up and down. "But what's your business? This isn't a first-aid station-or an oiling depot either," she added for the benefit of Zane Gort, who bad creaked at that moment as he leaned around Gaspard to peer at the books.

"Look here, kid," Gaspard said, a bit nettled. "Let's quit the mumbo-jumbo and snap into it. We're behind schedule. Where's that midget computer?"

Gaspard had devoted considerable hurried thought to the phrasing of this question. When Flaxman had first spoken of "a brain" over the phone, Gaspard had had an instant vision of a huge nakedly convoluted globe with evil saucerwide eyes that glowed in the dark, the whole being set atop a tiny misshapen torso or perhaps a small leathery pedestal with squirming octopus legs-a sort of Martian monstrosity, despite the fact that the real Martians had turned out to have their brains inside their black-armored beetle bodies. Next Gaspard had thought of a pink brain sloshing around in a pail of clear nutrient fluid-or perhaps swimming in a tub of the stuff by swishing its octopus legs. (Really, that picture of a brain with tentacles seemed most firmly rooted in the human imagination-the quintessence of intelligent-evil-giant-spiderism.) But then while careening along in the scrap-buyer's truck Gaspard had decided that all of these visions were equally childish and that by "a brain" Flaxman must have meant some sort of calculating machine or memory bank, though not a robot or a wordxnill and dearly rather small since it could be carried. After all, laymen had called computers "electric brains" from the earliest days; for a half dozen decades scientists had tagged this usage as sensationalism, and then as soon as robots developed consciousness, had assured the public it was completely proper; Zane Gort, for instance, had an electric brain; so did all robots, including a number of brilliant robot scientists who had a most high opinion indeed of electronic mental equipment.

By asking for a midget computer, Gaspard hoped to establish to his own satisfaction that this was, approximately, the real nature of Flaxman's "brain."

But the girl's response was to lift her eyebrows and say, "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about."

"Sure you do," Gaspard insisted confidently. "The midget computer they call a brain. Hustle it up."

The girl looked at him steadily. She said, "We do not deal in computers here."

"Well, then the brain-machine, whatever it is."

"We do not deal in machines of any sort," the girl said.

"All right, all right, plain brain then."

The way Gaspard said it, it sounded like a pound of hamburger and the girl's expression hardened further.

"Whose brain?" she asked icily.

"Flaxman's brain. I mean the brain Flaxman wants-Cullingham too. You're supposed to know."

Ignoring the last, the girl asked, "They both want the same brain?"

"Of course. Hustle it up."

The ice in her voice became jagged. "Split order, eh? Shall I slice it here? And do you want it on pumpernickel or rye?"

"Kid, I've no time for gruesome comedy."

"Why not? Mother Wisdom's kosher brain sandwiches are famous."

Wincing, Gaspard reinspected the girl thoughtfully. This snotty vision with the repulsive sense of humor, he decided, could not be the apprehensive, procrastinating, elderlysounding character Fla.xman had spoken to over the phone. Much as Gaspard would have liked to prolong this interview, preferably on some basis other than nauseous witticisms, he decided he must remember his mission.

"Better get me Nurse Bishop," he said distastefully. "She'll know what I want."

The girl's eyes slitted without hiding quite all of the violet irises. "Nurse Bishop, eh?" she said bitterly.

"Yeah," Gaspard said and then added with a burst of insight, "She in your hair, kid?"

"How did you know?"

"I'm intuitive. Natural deduction really-the fussy oldmaid type would never go for you. She's a real old harridan, eh?"

The girl drew herself up. "Brother, you don't know the half of it," she said. "You wait here, I'll get her, if you really think you want her. I'll pack the brain in her knapsack myself."

"Use a blow-torch on her if she dithers, but don't scorch her paint," Gaspard gaily called after the sweater girl as the door closed behind her. Rather to his surprise he realized he was mightily drawn to her. Although Heloise Ibsen had taxed him, she had certainly increased his appetite, he concluded ruefully. He had supposed he would celebrate his escape from Heloise with a month's monasticism, but apparently his body had other ideas.

"By Saint Norbert, this is a find!"

On the girl's departure Zane had made a bee-line for the hardcover books.

"Behold!" said the robot, running a blued pincher along a black-spined shelf of volumes. "The collected works of Daniel Zukertort!"

"Never heard of the man," Gaspard volunteered cheerfully. "Or was he a robot?"

"I am not surprised at your ignorance, Old Bone," Zane told him. "The patent registry shows that Daniel Zukertort was one of the very greatest early human experts in robotics, wordmillistics, micromechanics, catalysis chemistry, and microsurgery to boot. Yet his name is otherwise almost unknown-even among robots, else I imagine we'd have a Saint Daniel. There seems to have been a conspiracy of silence about the man. I've wondered if he wasn't a victim of government suppression, perhaps even because of tooearly association with the Equal-Rights-for-Robots movement, but hitherto I've lacked time and means to investigate."

"Why should Zukertort's works turn up here?" Gaspard wondered, staring at the shelves. "Was he interested in the occult? He's right between Uspensky and Madam Blavatsky."

"The range of Daniel Zukertort's interests seems to have been almost unimaginably wide," the robot replied rather solemnly. "See here, for instance." He deftly clawed out a single black volume and drew a pincher tip under its title: Golems and Other Arcane Automata.

"You know," the robot told Gaspard, "I find it stimulating to think of myself as an arcane automaton. It makes me want to enamel myself black with an inlay of fine silver lines. Like rococo plate armor."

"Is there a Zukertort book on tattooing for robots?" Gaspard asked sardonically. "Look here, Old Bolt, what do you suppose these brains are that Flaxman expects to write books? — or help somehow in producing them. Judging from the occult decor here, I'm beginning to wonder if magic or spiritualism isn't mixed up in it. You know, contacting the minds of dead authors through a medium or something like that."

The robot flapped his blued elbow-joints in lieu of a shrug. "As was observed by your greatest human detective, who curiously had many robot traits," he said without looking up from his book, "it is a capital mistake to theorize without sufficient data."

Gaspard frowned. "Greatest human detective?"

"Sherlock Holmes, to be sure," Zane said impatiently.

"Never heard of the man," said Gaspard. "Was he a policeman, a private hand, or a professor of criminology? Or did he succeed Herbert Hoover as head of the F. B. I?"