The Silver Eggheads

TWENTY-THREE

Flaxman and Cullingham sat side by side in their half-cleaned office.

Joe the Guard had been ordered to bed in a state of collapse after a night of unremitting tidying. He was sleeping on a cot in the men's room with his skunk pistol tucked under his pillow along with a violet cake of Odor-Ban that Zane Gort had thoughtfully placed beside it. Zane and Gaspard, arriving for work at dawn, had been shooed off to put Joe to bed and then check the burglar-foiling systems of all the storerooms with their priceless contents of newly milled books.

The two partners were alone. It was that magic unsmirched hour of the business day before trouble starts.

So Flaxman smirched it.

"Cully, I know we can persuade the eggs, but in spite of that I'm getting cold feet about the whole project," he said miserably.

"Tell me why, Flaxy," the other responded smoothly. "I think I have a glimmering."

"Well, my dear Dad gave me a complex about the eggheads. A phobia, you might say. One hell of a phobia-I hadn't realized how big until now. You see, Dad looked on the eggs as a sacred trust that had to be kept a big mystery even from most of his own family, the sort of sacred trust some old aristocratic British families used to have; you know, down in the sub-dungeon is the original castiron crown of England guarded by a slimy toad-monster; or maybe it's an undying great uncle who went mad in the crusades and turned all green and scaly and wants to drink the blood of a virgin every full moon; or maybe it's a sort of a combination of the two and right down there in the sub-sub-dungeon, the ultimate oubliette, they've got the rightful king of England from seven centuries back, only he's turned into a toad-monster who wants a tubful of virgin blood every time the moon squeaks-anyway, there's this sacred trust they've got and are sworn to keep and when the son's thirteen years old the father's got to tell him all about it, with a lot of ritual questions and answers like What Cries in the Night? It is the Trust, What Must We Give It? That Which It Wants, What Does It Want? A Bucket of Blood, and so on, and then when the father does tell the kid and shows him the monster, the kid has a heart attack and is never good for anything much after that except to potter around in the library and garden and tell his son about it. Are you getting the picture, Cully?"

"In the main," the other replied judiciously.

"Well anyway that's the way my dear Dad made me feel about the Braintrust. God, how that name got me right from the start! Even when I was a little kid I knew there was something ominous in my home background. My dear Dad was allergic to eggs and also he'd never allow silverware at the table, even plated; once he fainted dead away when a new English robot fresh out of Sheffield brought him a boiled breakfast egg sitting up in its shell in a spindly-footed silver egg cup. And once he took me to a children's party and collapsed during an unannounced egg-rolling contest. And then there were the mysterious phone calls I'd overhear about the Nursery-which was where I slept, I thought-making it pretty bad, let me tell you, the time I overheard Dad say (it was during the Third Anti-Robot Riots) 'I think we should be prepared to take them underground and blow up the Nursery on an instant's notice, day or night.'

"To make it worse Dad was the sort of fusser who could never bear to wait and I wasn't quite nine years old, let along thirteen, when he took me to the Nursery-their Nursery-and introduced me to all thirty of them. At first I thought they were some sort of robot-minds, of course, but when he told me there was a wet warm brain inside each one of them, I tossed my cookies and almost keeled over. But Dad made me go through with it to the bitter end and then take a horseback riding lesson-Dad belongs to the old school. One of the eggs said to me, 'You remind me of my little nephew who died at the age of eighty eight a hundred and seven years ago.' But the worst was the one who just laughed a dead he-he-he like that and then said, 'Like to get inside with me, sonny?'

"Well, after that I dreamed about the eggheads every night for weeks and the dreams always had the same Godawful realistic ending. I'd be in my bed in my Nursery and the door would open softly and silently in the dark and in would float about eight feet off the floor, with eyes like faint red coals, one of those things with that Godawful look of a half-finished high-domed metal skull-"

The door to the office swung inward softly and silently. Flaxman straightened in his chair so that his body was at a 45 degree angle to the floor. His eyes closed and a tremor-not large, but visible-went down and up him.

Standing in the doorway was a robot tarnished to the point of fine pitting.

"Who are you, boy?" Cullingham asked coolly.

After a full five seconds the robot replied, "Electrician, sir," and brought his right claw to his square brownish dome in a salute.

Flaxman opened his eyes. "Then fix the electrolock on that door!" he roared.

"Right, sir!" the robot said, saluting again smartly. "Just as soon as I've attended to the escalator." He pulled the door briskly shut.

Flaxman started to get up, then slacked down again in his chair. Cullingham said, "Strange! Except that he's so foully pitted, that robot is the image of Zane's rival-you know, the one that used to be a bank messenger-Cain Brinks, the author of the Madam Iridium stories. Must be a commoner model of robot than I realized. Well, now, Flaxy, you say the eggheads bug you, but you certainly put up a brave front yesterday when we had Rusty here."

"I know, but I don't believe I can keep it up," Flaxman said miserably. "I thought it would be a simple over-in-a-flash matter of giving them assignments-you know, 'We want thirty hypnotic action-packed novels by next Thursday!' 'Yessir, Mr. Flaxman!' — but if we're going to have to confer with them and even argue and sweet-talk them just to get them to try it in the first place. . Tell me, Cully, what do you do when you get the jitters?"

Cullingham looked thoughtful for a moment, then smiled. "A secret for a secret," he said. "You keep mine as I'll keep yours. I go to Madam Pneumo's."

"Madam Pneumo's? I've heard that name before, but I never could get an explanation."

"That is as it should be," Cullingham said. "Most men pay three figures of money just to get the briefing I'm about to give you."