The Silver Eggheads

THIRTY-NINE

Four hours later and three hundred miles out to sea, Zane Gort, who had just rescued Half Pint, spotted Heloise Ibsen's purple and gray helicopter traveling steadily west. The resourceful robot finally raised Gaspard by firing slow screamer missiles near the copter from the 10-passenger hover-jet executive flier he had commandeered from junketing congressmen, needing a speedier plane for the last stages of his multiple rescue mission.

Shortly afterwards, the Ibsen copter having been set on automatic for return across the blue leagues of the Pacific to Homer Hemingway's penthouse, Gaspard and Nurse Bishop, who looked quite flushed, were welcomed aboard the larger and faster flier by Flaxman, Miss Blushes, Half Pint, and a stray congressman just now waking up genially from alcoholic slumbers in the baggage compartment.

Flaxman seemed in good spirits, though nervous, Miss Blushes was talkative and inquisitive-and so was Half Pint; there were dull splotches on the egg's silver shell, as if it had been shallowly eaten by acid.

The quick-thinking Zane informed everyone that he had earlier directed Gaspard to rendezvous with him at this oceanic location, a bit of tactfulness for which Gaspard and Nurse Bishop were grateful. And, as Gaspard privately pointed out to her, if Zane hadn't spotted them, they might very well have fetched Samoa or at least Honolulu before breaking the bonds of their manic mutual somatic obsession and coming out of their deep euphoria.

Thereafter, while the flier fled a lush sunset toward the darkening east and California, Gaspard and Nurse Bishop recounted a children's-movie version of their adventures and listened to familiar voices and speakers give possibly equally censored synopses of the adventures of the others, while the stray congressman sipped sour-mash Old Spaceman and from time to time made kindly sage comments.

Flaxman asked Nurse Bishop if Gil Hart had ever made clear whom he was working for or what he was after.

She replied with suitably downcast eyes, "From the first hammerlock he got on me, he made it very clear what he was after. He let me recover from the anesthone first, he said he liked a good fight. Oh, he did say something about a merger of Rocket House with Proton Press and a vice-presidency for himself, in between demonstrations of his auto-dog and assaults on my virtue."

"Tsk-tsk," Miss Blushes said, lightly touching the girl's hand. "So good you preserved it," she added with a faintly ironic note that may have been purely Nurse Bishop's imagination.

"It's mindless violence-gadgets like auto-dogs that give robots a bad name," Zane observed matter-of-factly.

After firing the blinking star Zane had copted on for sixty miles further into the desert before running down Signal Three in an adobe ghost-village, where as it happened Flaxman was being held prisoner by Cain Brinks' gang of robot authors. Swooping in behind a ragged gray smoke-screen that simulated low rainclouds, the blued-steel robot achieved complete surprise and had the Angry Young Robots nailed down with shorting-beams before they could reach for their own weapons. Before copting off with Flaxman, he devoted a few precious minutes to forcibly reducing, by methods technologically hard to unwork, the energy level of the metal rogues, whether for criminal scheming or literary creativity.

"Hey," Nurse Bishop objected, "I thought you told me that changing a robot's circuits was the worst crime in the world-something you'd never have anything to do with."

"There's a vast difference between tampering with a man's or robot's mind-disturbing his ideas and altering his values-and merely making him lazy, which was all I really did," Zane pointed out. "Most people like to be lazy. Robots too. Think it over."

Zane's next move had been to commandeer the executive flier, in which the junketing legislators had been holding a drunken brawl on the landing field of a nearby desert resort. ("Good thing you grabbed it," the stray congressman observed. "I remember my buddies fighting over which of them would pilot it to Paris, France, to pick up some babes and absinthe if the party started to slacken off.")

Signal Four had led Zane and Flaxman back west to a vast mountain estate of rolling lawns dotted with oak trees and white statues of nymphs pursued by hermaphrodites, where tame deer cantered away from the gusts of the down-swung jets bringing the flier in for a spot-landing. A huge white house fronted with fluted pillars proved to be the abode of Penfolk (along with its terrorist branch The Sons of the Sibyl) and Miss Blushes' dungeon vile.

"Yes, those wickedly fascinating boys got me to go off with them," the pink robix confessed, "by promising me I could censor their poetry and write moral fables for newly-constructed robixes. They were quite nice, even if they didn't keep all their promises-they introduced me to shades of wool I didn't know existed and they'd hold my yarn by the hour and talk to me. But those old society ladies!" Her anodized aluminum quivered. "Nothing but lusts of the flesh and floods of four-letter words. In between they smoked pipes. I wanted Zane to gag them with their own diamond jewelry and weld it tight, but he's too kind hearted." She gazed at him fondly across the flier's plush cabin with its scattering of spilled drinks and trodden-in appetizers.

Signal Five-Half Pint's by a process of elimination-had taken Zane, Flaxman, and Miss Blushes out across the Pacific, far beyond the last purple algae field, to where a sinister low vessel rode the lonely waves just beyond the three-hundred-mile limit-the heavily-armed gambling barge Queen of the Syndicate, which boasted the Solar System's oldest permanent floating crap game.

The barge's armament and eagle-eyed lookouts made airborne approach out of the question. Setting the big flier to circle the Queen at five miles, Zane put his water-resistant construction to the test by dropping into the sea with a space-suit jet unit equipped with extra tanks. In this he drove toward his goal thirty feet under water-a living torpedo. Arriving at the Queen undetected, he cut a hole of carefully calculated size in her bottom and in the course of the considerable excitement this caused aboard, he tethered his jet sea-horse and climbed swiftly up the side-a dripping metal Neptune darkly crowned. His radio-busby allowed him to find in a trice the cabin where the abominable Filippo Fenicchia was trickling nitric acid on Half Pint (with his plug-in eye turned round to watch) in an effort to get the brain to swear on his mother's honor to join the Syndicate at a high level as a memory unit, scare-gadget, and super-spy-the Garrote had begun to see vastly greater potentialities in the canned brains than the blackmailing of a second-class publishing firm.

"He had me pegged," Half Pint put in. "If I had sworn, I would have kept my word-you learn to do that in two hundred years or you go crazy. It would have been an interesting life too-he said, for instance, 'Think how a Syndicate traitor would feel if he opened his suitcase and there you were, staring at him with that eye of yours and telling him he was doomed'-but I got fascinated wondering when I'd start to get scared. And stubborn. And I wanted to draw him out. That acid wouldn't have brought pain to me, you see-just new sensations and maybe new ideas. For a little while."

The instant Zane had burst into the cabin, the robot would have been paralyzed by a shorting-beam the all-foreseeing Fenicchia directed at him, except that Zane was carrying before him a copper net that acted as a Faraday Cage. On seeing the acid-eaten splotches on Half Pint's shell, the robot reached with one pincher for the alkali base the Garrote had ready to neutralize the nitric, and crying, "A yegg for an egg!" slapped the gray gang leader in the face with the other-knocking out half his teeth and removing a large chunk of cheek and chin, half his upper lip, and the end of his nose.

Instantly Zane had poured the neutralizer on Half Pint, snatched him up, and dashed past catastrophe-confused gangsters to plunge into the sea where his jet unit was tethered. Doubting the egg's capacity to resist water under pressure, the robot had scudded along just below the surface, holding Half Pint aloft in one pincher.

"Oh boy, what a ride," the latter put in, adding wistfully, "I could almost feel that water."

"It must indeed have been a strange sight," Zane admitted, "if any of the crew took time off to watch from saving the Queen: a silver egg racing mysteriously through the wave tops."

"Don't, it gives me the creeps!" Flaxman put in, hunching his shoulders and squeezing his eyes shut. "Excuse me, Half Pint."

Reaching the five-mile circle, Zane had radioed Miss Blushes and coached her into hovering the flier above him while Flaxman let down a ladder. The first thing the robot had done when he climbed aboard was to twirl a fresh fontanel into Half Pint.

"I don't believe that eight-hour jazz," Half Pint said. "As I recall it, we all just pretended to pass out that time to scare the nurse."

"Tell me one thing, Zane," Gaspard asked curiously. "What would have happened if your jet unit had failed?"

"I would infallibly have sunk to the bottom of the sea," the robot replied. "I would be lying there right now, holding Half Pint in my arms and-if my structure and headlamp had held out-contemplating the beauties of sediment and abyssal life. Or more likely, knowing my nature, I'd be trying to walk to shore."

"It all goes to show you," the stray congressman said, his voice beginning to thicken as he slopped more whisky in his glass.

"It does indeed, sir," Zane echoed.

"Well, at any rate now you can get back to Project El with a clear conscience," Gaspard told him.

"That's true, I can," Zane agreed with disappointing brevity.

"Look, there's the coast," Miss Blushes said. "The wonderful lights of New Angeles, like a carpet of stars. Oh, I feel romantic."

"What's this Project El?" Flaxman asked Zane. "Anything to do with Rocket House?"

"Yes, sir, in a fashion."

"One of Cullingham's babies?" Flaxman pressed. "You know, I'm worried there. This Ibsen babe may drain him dry as a dead grasshopper and we'll have to take over everything he's doing."

"No, this bad nothing to do with Mr. Cullingham," Zane assured him. "But if you don't mind, I'd rather not discuss it at present."

"Self-assigned project, hey?" Flaxman said shrewdly. "Well, anything for the hero-and believe me, I mean that, Zane."

"I know a secret," Half Pint said.

"Shut up," Zane told him and pulled his speaker plug.