The Silver Eggheads

THREE

Resplendent in their matching turquoise slack suits with opal buttons, father and son stood complacently in front of Gaspard's wordmill. No dayshift writer had turned up. Joe the Guard slept upright by the timeclock. The other visitors had wandered off. A pink robot had appeared from somewhere and was sitting quietly on a stool at the far end of the vaulted room. Its pinchers were moving busily. It seemed to be knitting.

FATHER: There you are, Son. Look up at it. Now, now, you don't have to lean over backwards that far.

SON: It's big, Daddy.

FATHER: Yes, it's big all right. That's a wordmill, Son, a machine that writes fiction books.

SON: Does it write my story books?

FATHER: No, it writes novels for grown-ups. A considerably smaller machine (childsize, in fact) writes your little-

SON: Let's go, Daddy.

FATHER: No, Son! You wanted to see a wordmill, you begged and begged, I had to go to a lot of trouble to get a visitor's pass, so now you're going to look at this wordmill and listen to me explain it to you.

SON: Yes, Daddy.

FATHER: Well, you see, it's this way- No. . Now, it's like this-

SON: Is it a robot, Daddy?

FATHER: No, it's not a robot like the electrician or your teacher. A wordmill is not a person like a robot is, though they are both made of metal and work by electricity. A wordmill is like an electric computing machine, except it handles words, not numbers. It's like the big chess-playing war-making machine, except it makes its moves in a novel instead of on a board or battlefield. But a wordmill is not alive like a robot and it cannot move around. It can only write fiction books.

SON: (kicking it) Dumb old machine!

FATHER: Don't do that, Son. Now, it's like this-there are any number of ways to tell a story.

SON: (still kicking it wearily) Yes, Daddy.

FATHER: The ways depend on the words that are chosen. But once one word is chosen, the other words must fit with that first word. They must carry the same mood or atmosphere and fit into the suspense chain with micrometric precision (I'll explain that later).

SON: Yes, Daddy.

FATHER: A wordmill is fed the general pattern for a story and it goes to its big memory bank-much bigger than even Daddy's-and picks the first word at random; they call that turning trump. Or it's given the first word by its programmer. But when it picks the second word it must pick one that has the same atmosphere, and so on and so on. Fed the same story pattern and one hundred different first words-one at a time, of course-it would wnte one hundred completely different novels. Of course it is much more complicated than that, much too complicated for Son to understand, but that is the way it works.

SON: A wordmill keeps telling the same story with different words?

FATHER: Well, in a way, yes.

SON: Sounds dumb to me.

FATHER: It is not dumb, Son. All grown-ups read novels. Daddy reads novels.

SON: Yes, Daddy. Who's that?

FATHER: Where?

SON: Coming this way. The lady in tight blue pants who hasn't buttoned the top of her shirt.

FATHER: Ahem! Look away, Son. That's another writer, Son.

SON: (still looking) What's a writer, Daddy? Is she one of those bad ladies you told me about, who tried to talk to you in Paris, only you wouldn't?

FATHER: No, no, Son! A writer is merely a person who takes care of a wordmill, who dusts it and so on. The publishers pretend that the writer helps the wordmill write the book, but that's a big fib, Son, a just-for-fun pretend to make things more exciting. Writers are allowed to dress and behave in uncouth ways, like gypsies-it's all part of a union agreement that goes back to the time when wordmills were invented. Now you won't believe-

SON: She's putting something in this wordmill, Daddy. A round black thing.

FATHER: (not looking) She's oiling it or replacing a transistor or doing whatever she's supposed to be doing to this wordmill. Now you won't believe what Daddy's going to tell you now, except that it's Daddy telling you. Before wordmills were invented-

SON: It's smoking, Daddy.

FATHER: (still not looking) Don't interrupt, she probably spilled the oil or something. Before wordmills were invented, writers actually wrote stories! They had to hunt-

SON: The writer's running away, Daddy.

FATHER: Don't interrupt. They had to hunt through their memories for every word in a story. It must have been-

SON: It's still smoking, Daddy. There are sparks.

FATHER: I said don't interrupt. It must have been dreadfully hard work, like building the pyramids.

SON: Yes, Daddy. It's still-

BOOM! Gaspard's wordmill deafeningly blossomed into shrapnel. Father and son took the full force of the explosion and were blown to turquoise and opal bits. They passed painlessly out of existence, chance victims of a strange occupational revolt. The incident in which they perished was one of many and it was being repeated at a large number of nearby places, fortunately with few further fatalities.

All along Readership Row, which some call Dream Street, the writers were wrecking the wordmills. From the blackened book-tree under which Gaspard had fallen to the bookship launching pads at the other end of the Row, the unionized authors were ravaging and reaving. Torrenting down the central avenue of Earth's mammoth, and in fact the Solar System's only fully mechanized publishing center, a giddy gaudy mob in their berets and bathrobes, togas and ruffs, kimonos, capes, sport shirts, flowing black bow ties, lace shirt-fronts and top hats, doublets and hose, Tshirts and levis, they burst murderously into each fiction factory, screaming death and destruction to the gigantic machines whose mere tenders they had become and which ground out in their electronic maws the actual reading matter which fed the yearnings and sweetened the subconscious minds of the inhabitants of three planets, a half dozen moons, and several thousand satellites and spaceships in orbit and trajectory.

No longer content to be bribed by high salaries and the mere trappings of authorship-the ancient costumes that were the vestments of their profession, the traditionfreighted names they were allowed and even required to assume, the exotic love-lives they were permitted and encouraged to pursue-the writers smashed and sabotaged, rioted and ruined, while the police of a Labor Administration intent on breaking the power of the publishers stood complacently aside. Robot goons, hurriedly hired by the belatedly alarmed publishers, also took no action, having received a last-minute negate from the Interplanetary Brotherhood of Free Business Machines; they too merely stood about-grim somber statues, their metal dented by the bricks, stained by the acids, and blackened by the portable lightning-bolts of many a picket-line affray-and watched their stationary mindless cousins die.

Homer Hemingway axed through the sedate gray control panel of a Random House Write-All and went fiercely to work on the tubes and transistors.

Sappho Wolistonecraft Shaw shoved a large plastic funnel into the memory unit of a Scribner Scribe and poured two gallons of smoking nitric acid into its indescribably delicate innards.

Harriet Beecher Brontл drenched a Norton Novelist with gasoline and whinnied as the flames shot skyward.

Heloise Ibsen, her shirt now torn from her shoulders and waving the gray flag with the ominous black "30" on it, signifying the end of machine-made literature, leaped atop three cowering vice-presidents who had come down to "watch the robots scatter those insolent grease-monkeys." For a moment she looked strikingly like "Liberty Leading the People" in Delacroix's painting.

Abelard de Musset, top hat awry and pockets bulging with proclamations of self-expression and creativity, leveled a submachinegun at a Putnam Plotter. Marcel Feodor Joyce lobbed a grenade into the associator of a Schuster Serious. Dylan Bysshe Donne bazookaed a Bantam Bard.

Agatha Ngaio Sayers poisoned a Doubleday 'Dunnit with powdered magnetic oxide.

Somerset Makepeace Dickens sledgehammered a Harcourt Hack.

H. G. Heinlein planted stiletto explosives in an Appleton S-F and almost lost his life pushing the rest of the mob back to a safe distance until the fiery white jets had stabbed through the involuted leagues of fine silver wiring.

Norman Vincent Durant blew up a Ballantine Bookbuilder.

Talbot Fennimore Forester sword-slashed a Houghton Historical, pried it open with a pike, and squirted in Greek fire which he had compounded by an ancient formula.

Luke Van Tilburg Wister fanned his six-guns at a Whittlesey Western, then finished it off with six sticks of dynamite and a "Ki-yi-yippee!"

Fritz Ashton Eddison loosed a cloud of radioactive bats inside a Fiction House Fantasizer (really a rebuilt Dutton Dreamer with Fingertip Credibility Control).

Edgar Allen Block, brandishing an electric cane fearfully powered by portable isotopic batteries, all by himself shorted out forever a whole floorful of assorted cutters, padders, polishers, tighteners, juicers, and hesid-shesids.

Conan Haggard de Camp rammed a Gold Medal Cloak-'n-Sworder with a spike-nosed five-ton truck.

Shakespeares ravaged, Dantes dealt electro-chemical death, Aeschyluses and Miltons fought shoulder to shoulder with Zolas and Farrells; Rimbauds and Bradburies shared revolutionary dangers alike; while whole tribes of Sinclairs, Balzacs, Dumas' and authors named White and distinguished only by initials, mopped up in the rear.

It was a black day for book-lovers. Or perhaps the dawn.