The Silver Eggheads

THIRTY-SEVEN

"Gaspard, you copt, don't you?" Zane asked as they emerged on the roof.

"Yes, but-"

"Good! No objections to a spot of theft in a good cause?"

"Well-"

"Better! You'll follow me then in Miss Ibsen's copter. We may need the added capacity, and you'll be warmer in a closed machine. Here are her keys. Stay beamed to me."

"Okay," Gaspard said a bit dubiously.

"And see you spank the welkin for all you're worth!" the robot added heartily. "Time is of the essence. I'll broadcast a wounded-robot ambulance code-the skyway patrol will assume you're my helper. Get cracking, Old Muscle!"

The dosed cabin was cozy but it smelt of Heloise. As Gaspard lifted from the roof, swinging wide of Zane's downstream, he felt a wave of wistful woe at the thought of past encounters that had occurred right where he was sitting. But all sad thoughts were soon swept from his mind by the problem of keeping up with Zane-he found that the only way that worked for him was to aim his copter at the robot's and let the vanes whiffle their worst. The robot fell away east and started to climb.

"Next strongest signal's from the mountains," Zane's voice sounded in his earphone. "Keep her whizzing. I'll be doing my best to outpace you. Only four hours at most now until Half Pint starts to die in his own cerebral waste products for lack of a fresh fontanel. The fiend."

The pastel skyscrapers fell behind, abruptly replaced by tall pines. Zane's copter drew ahead swiftly, driving straight east. Gaspard, realizing his inexpert hand-piloting wasn't helping at all, set his own machine on automatic, top speed. The open copter with its gleaming black-shakoed pilot continued to grow smaller, but at a less rapid rate.

Otherwise, however, the change was for the worse. Gaspard's mind, unoccupied by piloting, obsessed itself with his thwarted desires, jumping back and forth between Nurse Bishop and Heloise Ibsen-with even the hot senseless wish appearing now and then that he somehow have his will of Miss Willow. Could machines be drugged? He tried to think of the brains, especially poor Half Pint, but the subject was too grisly. In desperation he hauled out of his pocket the second brain-recommended book Nurse Bishop had loaned him: an ancient whodunnit called The Mauritzius Case by one Jacob Wasserman. The going was tough and very strange, but at least his mind and feelings were engaged.

"Come in, Gaspard!"

The urgent command recalled him from the grim household of the Andergasts. Below, pines were giving way to tawny sand.

"Roger, Zane!"

The robot's copter was a dot in the shimmering distance ahead-if that weren't some other flier; there were three other dots hanging in the east.

"Gaspard, I'm approaching an inflated green ranch house with a black-and-white checked zoomer parked nearby. Signal Two is coming from there. Nurse Bishop, I must assume. Another signal seems to be coming from at least fifty miles further east.

"Time presses. Half Pint has little more than three hours left before the onset of cerebral suffocation, and it's only a one in three chance that Signal Three is him-it might equally be Mr. Flaxman or Miss Blushes. So I am splitting our forces. You will handle Signal Two while I speed on to Signal Three. Are you armed?"

"This crazy old bullet gun."

"It will have to do. I am now passing over the ranch house and will fire a five-second blinking star."

There was a brief twinkle of intense light beside the second dot north of the one Gaspard had assumed to be Zane's copter.

"Got you," Gaspard said, altering course.

"Gaspard, to facilitate my radio-locating, especially if I must go beyond Signal Three to rescue Half Pint, it is vital that Nurse Bishop's mini-sender be switched off as soon as she is rescued. Tell her to do so."

"Where did you hide it on her?"

There was a considerable pause before the robot's reply. Gaspard used it to search the flat yellow landscape ahead. He spotted a dull green fleck below the dot of Zane's copter.

"I trust, Gaspard, that the information I am about to give you will not make you think the less of me, or of any other person, Saint Willi forbid! The mini-sender is buried in the center of one of Nurse Bishop's falsies."

Another brief pause, then the robot's voice, which had been a bit rapid and hushed, came through loud and hearty.

"And now good luck! I'm banking on you, Old Bone!"

"Whir-hey, Old Bolt! Down the fiend!" Gaspard responded bravely.

But he was not feeling at all brave as he fell away toward the green ranch house with the bulging walls and roof. Miss Jackson's sketchy description and the insolently conspicuous zoomer both indicated that he had to deal with the trouble-blaster Gil Hart, of whom he had heard various ominous anecdotes from Cullingham, such as the one about the time Hart had single-handedly hospitalized two steelworkers and a robot with weak batteries.

There was no place of concealment within a half mile of the ranch house. So there seemed to be no possible tactic except speed and surprise, setting down as close as possible to the front-door airlock, which looked-yes, was! — open, and dashing inside, gun in hand. This plan had the further advantage of leaving him a minimum of time in which to get scared.

It had yet one more advantage, it turned out. As he bumped to a landing, jumped out, and ran through the sand-cloud he'd raised toward the dark rectangle of the door, which stood open outward, a nickle-plated automaton watchdog sprang from the back seat of the checked zoomer and with a hideous siren-howling rushed toward him, steel jaws snapping. Gaspard dove into the airlock, catching the door and jerking it to behind him just before the savage mechanism hit the latter, momentarily indenting the rubberoid for about a meter, but not gashing it.

While the auto-dog continued to howl outside, the inner door of the airlock puffed open-evidently the shutting of the outer door unlocked it. Gaspard went through, waving his bullet gun quite as wildly as Joe the Guard was wont to wave his skunk pistol.

He found himself in a room furnished with couches and low tables and hung with a positive harem of stereo-pinups.

To his left crouched Gil Hart, stripped to the waist and armed with a strangely quasi-primitive weapon he'd apparently just snatched up-a thick nickle or nickle-plated thigh-bone about a foot long.

To his right stood Nurse Bishop in a white silk slip, brazenly posed with her left hand on her hip and a big brown highball held aloft in her right, the very picture of a good girl going to hell.