The Silver Eggheads

EIGHTEEN

Gaspard's attention was jerked back to the argument in the main ring by a startling announcement from Rusty.

The encapsulated brain had never, in its two centuries of existence, read a single wordmilled book.

Flaxman's first reaction was incredulous horror, as if Rusty had told him that he and his fellow brains were being reduced to idiocy by being systematically starved of oxygen. The publisher, while admitting dodging in earlier years his responsibilities as custodial director of the Braintrust, was inclined to accuse the Nursery staff of culpable neglect in failing to provide the most elementary literary fare for its charges.

But Nurse Bishop snappily asserted that No Wordwooze was simply a rule (which Flaxman should have known!) laid down by Daniel Zukertort when organizing the Nursery: his thirty disembodied minds were to receive only the purest intellectual and artistic nourishment and the inventor had considered wordwooze a tainted product. Perhaps a few wordmilled books had been smuggled in from time to time by earlier, less responsible nurses, but on the whole the rule had been strictly kept.

Rusty confirmed all this in every particular, reminding Flaxnian that he and his fellows had been chosen by Zukertort for their devotion to art and philosophy and their distaste for science and especially engineering; they had had a certain curiosity from time to time about wordmilled books, much as a philosopher might have about the comics, but it had never been great and the No Wordwooze rule had not been a hardship to them.

Then Cullingham cut in to point out that it was a blessing in disguise that the eggheads had read no wordwooze-they would be able to turn out far fresher, more natural fiction if they did not know the slickly machined product against which they were competing. Instead of sending to the Nursery a complete library of wordmill literature, as Flaxman had suggested, the No Wordwooze rule ought to be enforced more strictly than ever, Cullingham maintained.

The argument went circling on from there, Flaxman and Cullingham bringing to bear their heaviest and most sugary persuasions.

His drift completed, Gaspard at last stood beside Nurse Bishop, who had retired to the far end of the office once Rusty was talking glibly. Here whispering was possible without disturbing the others, and to Gaspard's satisfaction Nurse Bishop did not seem at all to resent his approach.

As he freely admitted to himself, Gaspard was experimenting with a yen for this ravishing though acid-tongued girl-seeing how it fitted, as it were, trying on the infatuation for size. Now, with a shallow craftiness born of sexual desire, he sought to ingratiate himself with her by voicing some half honest sympathies he felt for her nursling brains in their present predicament. He murmured on for quite some time, very successfully he thought, about the brains' lonely sensitivity and refined ethical standards, the two publishers' crass approach, Cullingham's 'literary conceit, etcetera, ending with, "I think it's a shame they should be subjected to all this."

She glanced at him coldly. "You do?" she whispered. "Well, I don't, emphatically. I think it's all a very sensible idea and Rusty's a dope for not seeing it. Those brats need something to do, they need to rub up against the world and get bruised, my God how they need it. If you ask me, our bosses are acting pretty nobly. Mr. Cullingham especially is a much finer man than I ever guessed. You know, I'm beginning to think you really are a writer, Mr. Knew-it. You've certainly been talking like one. Lonely sensitivity indeed! — you tend to your own ivory tower!"

Gaspard felt considerably ruffled. "Well, if you think it's such a great idea," he told her, "why don't you point it out to Rusty right now? He'd listen to you, I should think."

She grudged him another sneering glance. "My, a great psychologist as well as a writer. I should step in and take their side when they're all arguing against Rusty? No thanks."

"We ought to talk this out," Gaspard suggested. "How about supper tonight-if they ever let you out of the Nursery?"

"I don't mind," the girl said, "if supper and talk's all you have in mind."

"What else?" Gaspard said blandly, invisibly shaking hands with himself.

Just then the egg interrupted an argument Flaxman was developing about the debt the eggheads owed to humanity with a, "Now, now, now, now, now hear this."

Flaxman subsided.

"I want to say something, don't interrupt," came the tinny voice out of the speaker. "I've been listening to you for a long while, I've been very patient, but the truth must be spoken. We're worlds apart, you incarnates and I, and more than worlds, for there are no worlds where I am-no matter, no clay, no flesh. I exist in a darkness compared to which that of intergalactic space is brightest light.

"You treat me like a bright child, and I'm not a child. I'm an ancient on the edge of death and I'm a baby in the womb-and more and less than either of those. We discarnates are not geniuses, we're madmen and gods. We play with insanities as you do with your toys and later with your gadgets. We create worlds and destroy them every one of your hours. Your world is nothing to us-just one more sorry scheme among millions. In our intuitive unscientific way we know everything that's happened to you far better than you do, and it interests us not one whit.

"A Russian once wrote a little story about how on a bet a man let himself be locked alone in a comfortable room for five years; the first three years he asked for many books, the fourth year he asked for the Gospels, the fifth year he asked for nothing. Our situation is his, intensified a thousandfold. How could you ever think that we would stoop to writing books for you, to working out combinations and permutations of your itches and hates?

"Our loneliness is beyond your understanding. It crawls and shivers and sickens eternally. It transcends yours as death by slow torture does the warm rosy blackout of barbiturates. We suffer this loneliness and from time to time we remember, not lovingly let me tell you, the man who put us here, the hideously talented egomaniac inventorsurgeon who wanted a private library of thirty captive minds to philosophize with, the world that consigned us to eternal night and then went on its scrambling, swinging, grabbing, tweaking way.

"Once when I still had a body I read a supernaturalhorror story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a writer who died too soon to have had a chance to suffer the PSD operation, but who may have done an important bit to inspire Daniel Zukertort with the idea for it. This story, 'The Whisperer in Darkness,' was a fantasy about pink winged monsters from Pluto who put the brains of men in metal cylinders just like our metal eggs. You are the monsters out there-you, you, you. I always remember how that story ended: there's been an exciting scene going on, but it isn't until the end of it that the narrator realizes that his dearest friend has been helplessly listening in on the whole scene from just such a metal capsule. Then he thinks of his friend's fate-remember, it is mine too-and all he can think is, and I quote, '. . and all the time in that fresh shiny cylinder on the shelf. . poor devil. .'

"The answer is still No. Unplug me, Nurse Bishop, and take me home."