The Silver Eggheads

TWENTY-ONE

Although it was crowded, that great gray barn of a coffee house, the Word, was heavy with history tonight and haunted by a thousand dark squat grumbling ghosts pursuing one pale mute wraith, beautiful but skeletally emaciated.

This was natural enough, since the Word, along with its remarkably similar predecessors, had witnessed the antics, fads and frustrations of one hundred years of non-writing writers and also provided perpetual lodging for the one thin dream that every even nominal writer seems to have: that some day he'll really write something.

The clustered green tables with pre-scarred round tops and the period kitchen chairs were a pitiful memorial to dead creative bohemias.

Since the writers' tables were traditionally waited on by apprentices, the effect was of a multitude of Shakespeares, Voltaires, Virgils, and Ciceros serving a banquet to boobs. The early-model robots tending the non-writers' tables added their touch of tarnished grotesquerie.

Three of the gently inward-curving walls were filled thirty feet high with stereo-portraits of master writers current and departed, but all of the wordmill period. They were somewhat larger than life size and packed together like the squares of a giant chessboard irregular at the top where newcomers could be stacked in. A few inches in front of each face floated a florid black signature, with an occasional printed name and a bracketed defiantly scrawled X. Somehow the effect of three thousand giant heads in lightfilled transparent cubic boxes-most of the heads grinning engagingly, a few sultry or brooding-was not at all restful or conducive to thoughts of cherished traditions and benevolent brotherhood.

The fourth wall was racked high with the trophies and mementoes of those active avocations which add so much color to a writers' back-cover: fishing spears and aqualungs, cleated climbing boots, slit-eyed sun masks, snap-on steering wheels, sports-model spacesuits (some with racing jets), detective badges and paralysis derringers, dumbbells and Indian Clubs, big-game rifles, compasses and belaying pins, loggers' axes and canthooks, the heat-browned spatulas and hot-dog tongs of short order cooks, jagged-topped tin cans darkly rimmed by petrified mulligan, gleaming featherweight sections of space-sail peppered by light-winds.

In a nearby corner was a small, dimly-lit chapel where were enshrined the antique voicewriters-and even a few dictaphones and electric typewriters-that the union's master writers had been using for their commercial work at the time of the changeover from men to mills. Some few of these primordial writers and writrixes, tradition whispered, had actually gone on to compose literary masterpieces published in limited editions at their own expense or that of nonprogressive semantically-oriented universities. But to their successors creative writing had been only a lifelong dream that grew mistier with the passing decades, until impulsively revived in this day of union decadence and discontent.

The Word was crowded tonight. The writers themselves were not too well represented because of the numbers holding hands in lonely circles in an effort to get the creative juices flowing-and the few who had been engaged at the time of the smash in personal-appearance tours in other cities and planets. But the non-writers were present in such numbers as to keep the serving robots whirring as they scuttled from table to table. The usual slummers were there who came to watch the wild writers in their native habitat and keep box scores on their sex lives, but tonight they were augmented by a horde of morbid curiosity seekers eager to view the maniacs who had wrought such destruction last morning. Among this throng, especially at the more desirable tables toward the center of the room, were individuals and little groups who gave the impression of having deeper purposes than mere thrill-seeking-secret purposes, probably sinister.

At the midmost green table of all sat Heloise Ibsen and Homer Hemingway, served by a triangle-faced teenage writrix dressed as a French maid.

"Babe, haven't we put in enough appearance now?" the big writer complained, the highlights shifting on his shaven head as it sagged. "I'd like to snatch me some sleep."

"No, Homer," Heloise told him, "I've got to get my hands on all the threads here at the center of the web, and I haven't yet." She thoughtfully peered round at the occupants of the nearby tables, jingling her necklace of skulls. "And you've got to show yourself to your public, or that rugged mug of yours will start devaluating."

"But gee, Babe, if we went to bed now, maybe we could even-you know." He leered at her appealingly.

"In the mood at last, eh?" she said curtly. "Well, I'm afraid I'm not. With that buttock shield I'd keep thinking I was bedding down with the transparent man. By the way, do you sit on it or in front of it or behind it or what?"

"On it, of course. That's the wonder of it, Babe-a built-in air cushion." He softly jounced a few times to demonstrate. The motion was rather like that of a cradle rocking and his upper eyelids began to descend.

"Wake up!" Heloise commanded. "I'm not going to be squired by a snore. Do something to stay awake. Order a stinger or some flaming coffee."

Homer gave her a hurt look as he called to the apprentice serving their table, "Kid! Bring me a glass of double-irradiated milk, 150 Fahrenheit."

"Crush four caffeine tablets in it," Heloise added.

"Nix on that, Babe!" Homer protested in manly, hollow chested tones. "I never run a doped race in my life, not even a kookie stay-awake marathon like this. No pep-pills in that milk, kid. Hey, haven't I seen you somewheres before?"

"Oui, M'sieu Hemingway, you 'ave seen," the teenager replied with a simper and wriggle. "I am Suzette, au'sor wiz Toulouse La Rimbaud of ze book Lovelives of a French Tweenie. Ze tweenie, she means many s'ings-bo's in ze pantry and in ze bed. But now I mus' order M'sieu ze jus'-so-'ot milk."

Homer watched her little butt wagging under the abbreviated black silk skirt as she hurried toward a service door.

"Gee, Babe," he commented, "doesn't it give you a pang to think of an innocent little doll like that knowing to talk about perversions and all?"

"That little doll," Heloise said flatly, "knew all about perversions and how to use them to make friends and influence people before you posed with your first prop tiller and tropical sunset cyclorama."

Homer shrugged. "Maybe so, Babe," he said softly, "but it doesn't offend me. Tonight I feel sort of mystic, woozy-dreamy you might say, in sympathy with all things." He frowned deeper and deeper as Heloise stared at him incredulously. "F'rinstance, all them heads up there, what are they thinking? Or I wonder about robots. I wonder do robots feel hurt like we do? That one over there that just got the flaming coffee spilt on him-does he feel pain? A guy tells me they can even have sex, they do it by electricity. Pain too? Did that pink robot feel pain when I squirted my flamer at her? It's a sobering thought."

Heloise chortled. "She couldn't have had any happy memories of you judging by the way she soured you with sticky foam this afternoon as if you were a 4-11 fire!"

"Don't laugh, Babe!" Homer protested. "My best sailing suit was ruined. My lucky one."

"You looked so funny covered with all that goo."

"Well, you didn't cut such a fine figure yourself, ducking around behind me and the stooges to keep from getting mucked up. Which reminds me, why the lie to me about why we was going to Rocket House and what was going on there? They wasn't signing up any writers I could see and you didn't ask them a thing about it anyways. First you start to ask them about their secret and then right away you're talking about something I never heard of. Wordmill Avengers and the Noose. What was them things, Babe, anyhow?"

"Oh be quiet! That was just a false trail Gaspard laid for me, the little trickster. I've got to try to sort out the real facts myself now."

"But I want to know all about it, Babe. As long as I can't sleep I'll be woozy-dreamy and thinking about the Green Bay Packers and life and wanting to know all about everything."

"Listen to me think then," Heloise snapped at him. Her features tightened and she began to speak in staccato fashion, softly at first: "Racket House, seemingly asleep, is wide awake. They had a fink planted in the union-Gaspard. They're in touch with the writing robots-Zane Gort-and the government-Miss Blushes. When we burst in on them, they acted like men with something to lose, not men who didn't care. Flaxman jittered like a rabbit with a vault full of lettuce. He'd been doodling pictures of eggs with names under them that sounded like writers, only I couldn't place any of them-I'll bet that means something."

"Eggs?" Homer interrupted. "You mean circles, Babe?"

"No, I mean eggs." She shrugged and continued staccato: "As for Cullingham, he was cool and crafty as a cucumber when I grilled him."

"Hey, what about this Cullingham?" Homer interrupted again, suspiciously. "I thought you was getting sweet on him the way you was slapping him around."

"Shut up! Be no surprise if I was, though-the man seems to be a good cold-blooded thinker, instead of having a sponge mind like Gaspard or a mystic muscle body like you."

"A cold-blooded guy wouldn't be any good in bed, would he?"

"You never can tell till they're tested by an expert. Cullingham's icy and shrewd, but I'll bet if we kidnapped him I could burn the secret of Racket House out of him."

"Babe, if you think I'm going to start kidnapping new boyfriends for you-"

"Shut up!" Heloise was by now fairly excited and thoroughly impatient. Hers was not a gentle voice at the best of times and the loud-hissed injunction to Homer caused a small hiatus in the conversations around them. Unheeding, she went on, "This is business I'm talking, Homer. And here's how it sums up: Racket House has something up its sleeve and they're vulnerable to kidnapping!"