The Silver Eggheads

SIXTEEN

Joe the Guard had started thoughtfully to work on the fringes of the cellulose shambles after twice checking to reassure Flaxman that the safety catch on his skunk-pistol was firmly snicked down.

Miss Blushes was splicing an extension cord under the directions of Nurse Bishop, who was making flattering remarks about how nice it must be to have fingernails that could serve as powerful wire clippers.

Flaxman, resolutely turning his eyes away from the door with the useless electrolock, resumed his narrative.

"When Zukie died, the general pandemonium got worse, of course. The vision of immortality lost put too great a strain on society. The world headed for something that has never quite happened before or since, but which some of the socio-psychiatry boys have called the universal choke-up syndrome.

"Very luckily, the top people concerned with the case- lawyers, medics, government men-were smart, realistic, and devoted. They concocted the story, bolstered it every which way, and finally made it stick, that the PSD operation was no good, that every excised brain was reduced to tormented terminal idiocy after a brief period, that the eggheads were no more alive than the bits of chicken heart or Martian muscle the science boys keep pulsing in test tubes for decades, or the human sperm and ova in our Disaster Banks. Just brain tissue that wouldn't die but couldn't function.

"To save themselves from mob fury, the eggheads all backed up the story, goo-gooing endlessly at attorneys, judges, and TV audiences. Incidentally, this act also took care of the scare rumor that the canned brains, evilly accumulating knowledge over the centuries, would inevitably become world tyrants.

"The crisis over, the problem remained of what to do with the thirty eggheads. If the majority of the top people in on the deception had had their way, they'd undoubtedly have been quietly liquidated-but not right away by any means, for that would have reawakened suspicions; rather they'd have been reported as dying one or two at a time over a course of twenty years. But even these naturally spaced deaths would have kept interest alive and the big object was just to let the whole thing simmer away into forgetfulness.

"Then too, the eggheads, though helpless as so many paralyzed men, would have fought for survival with their keen brains, finding allies in the ambitious lesser lights among their caretakers and blowing the whole case open again if necessary. Also, there was a sizable group among the top people who had always believed that the immortality of the eggheads was purely a wish-dream of Zukie's-and of the press and the people at large-and that the eggheads would all inevitably soon die from unforseeable technological defects in the process of their preservation, from tiny lapses on the part of their nurses-or at any rate soon go insane from their unnatural, disembodied condition.

"Here another amazing figure comes into the story, not a universal genius, but a very remarkable man in many ways, a science-fiction publisher in the great tradition of Hugo Gernsback. He was Hobart Flaxman, my ancestor and the founder of Rocket House. He'd been Zukertort's close friend, a staunch supporter both with money and enthusiasm, and Zukie had made him head of the Braintrust. Now he simply stepped in and demanded his rights-custody of the brains — and since he was known as a sound man to several of the top people, it seemed the easiest way out. The Braintrust became Wisdom of the Ages, a name selected for its phoniness, and quietly headed for a sort of educated oblivion.

"Not all his descendants have come up to Old Hobart, but at least we've maintained the Trust. The brains have received tender loving care and a steady diet of world news and any other information they asked for-very much like a wordmill has its vocabulary kept constantly up to date, come to think of it. There were several times in the early years when a threat arose that the brains would get back into the headlines, but each crisis was successfully surmounted. Today with the prolonged-lifespan discoveries that are being made, the brains are no longer a menace to public safety, but we've kept up the policy of secrecy-out of inertia chiefly. My dear Dad, for instance, was hardly what you'd call an enterprising man. And I. . well, that's beside the point.

"Now you'll be asking me-" (Gaspard came to with a start and realized that Flaxman was shaking a finger at him) "-you'll be asking me why didn't Old Hobart as an imaginative publisher see the potentialities of the eggheads as fictioneers and encourage them to write and then publish their stuff, under false names of course with all precautions. Well, the chief answer is that wordmills had just come in, they were all the rage, readers were almost as sick of writers with individuality as editors were, people loved the pure opium of the wordmill product, there was no time for a publisher to think of anything else and no point in his doing so.

"But now-" (Flaxman's eyebrows happily soared) "- there are no wordmills, and no writers either, and the thirty brains have a clear field. Just think of it!" He thrust out his palms appealingly. "Thirty writers who've had close to two hundred years apiece to accumulate material and mature their point of view, who are in a position to work steadily day after day without any distractions-no sex, no family problems, no stomach trouble, no nothing!

"Thirty writers from a hundred years in the past-that's a tremendous selling angle just by itself, people always go for the Old Storyteller. I don't have a list of them here and I haven't checked in several years (confidentially, I once had a slight aversion to Wisdom of the Ages-the idea of brains in cans made me feel just a bit creepy when Dad first told me about it as a kid) but do you realize that Theodore Sturgeon may be among these brains, or Xavier Hammerberg, or even Jean Cocteau or Bertrand Russell? — those last two lived just long enough to catch the PSD I believe.

"You see, the first writers to undergo the PSD had it performed in absolute secrecy. They pretended to die and went through the rigmarole of having their brainless bodies buried or cremated to fool the world-just as Zukie himself fooled the world for years into thinking he was a garden-variety brain surgeon with electronics as a hobby. It was a pretty grisly operation in eleven stages from what little's known about it, the foreskull and face being lifted off first, the optical, auditory and speech grafts being made next, then came the shift from heart to isotope-pump, and finally all the other nerve connections with the body were blocked off and severed, one by one.

"Hey, Nurse Bishop, we ready yet?"

"Only for the last ten minutes," she said.

Gaspard and Zane Gort looked around. A large dully-gleaming silver egg rested in its black collar on Cullingham's end of the mighty desk, its TV eyes, ears, and speakers arranged neatly before it but none of them plugged in yet. For a moment Gaspard saw it as a man whose nerves had been snipped a century ago, whose body was ashes scattered to the winds or mold that had sifted through a hundred vegetable generations, and he shuddered.

Flaxman rubbed his hands. "Wait a minute," he said as Nurse Bishop reached for the cable of an eye, "I want to be able to introduce him properly. What's his name?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Flaxman looked thunderstruck.

"No. You said bring any brain. So I did."

Cullingham interposed smoothly. "I am sure that Mr. Flaxman intended no disrespect whatever to your charges, Nurse Bishop. He said any brain simply because each, as far as we know, is an equally gifted artist. So please tell us how we should address this one."

"Oh," Nurse Bishop said. "Seven. Number Seven."

"But I want the name," Flaxman said. "Not some number you use in the Nursery-which strikes me as pretty cold-blooded, incidentally. I certainly hope the Nursery staff hasn't got into the habit of treating the brains as machines-it might spoil their creativity, make them think of themselves as computers."

Nurse Bishop thought for a bit. "I sometimes call him Rusty," she said, "because there's a faint streak of something brown under his collar, he's the only one that's got it. I was going to bring Half Pint, because he's easiest to carry, but Half Pint was lukewarm about coming and when you sent Mr. Newt I decided on Rusty."

"I mean the real name." Flaxman was fighting hard to keep his voice down. "You can't introduce a great literary genius to his future publishers as Rusty."

"Oh." She hesitated, then said decisively, "I'm afraid I can't tell you that. And there isn't any way for you to find out either, not even if you searched the Nursery from top to bottom and went through any records you may have elsewhere."

"What?"

"About a year ago," Nurse Bishop explained, "the brains decided for reasons of their own that they wanted to become permanently anonymous. So they had me go through the Nursery files and destroy all records on which their names appeared-and deep-file off the names engraved on the outside of each metal shell. You may have documents with the names here or in some safety deposit vault, I suppose, but they wouldn't tell you which name to attach to which cerebral capsule."

"And do you mean to stand there and tell me that you went through with this. . this act of wanton concealment!. . without consulting me?"

"A year ago you weren't one bit interested in Wisdom of the Ages," Nurse Bishop replied with spirit. "Exactly one year ago, Mr. Flaxman, I called you up and started to tell you all about this in detail, and you said not to bother you with skeletons out of the past, that the brains could do anything they damn pleased. You said-and I quote you verbatim, Mr. Flaxman-'If those tin-plated egos, those canned nightmares, want to join the French Foreign Legion as fighting computers or tie jets to their tails and go zooming through outer space, it's okay by me.'"