The Silver Eggheads

FORTY-TWO

Gaspard's first thought was that deep down inside him he had known all along that this was going to happen. And that all the others must have known the same thing too-deep, deep down. How could anyone really have expected aged ego-maniacs living under incubator conditions to produce anything popular? Or stories about life in the raw to come from canned and coddled hyper-basket-cases? Suddenly Flaxman and Cullingham appeared to Gaspard as figures of tragic romance, friends of the forlorn hope, the lost cause, and sunset illusions.

And indeed now Flaxman did shrug shoulders like a somewhat undersized romantic hero who bravely takes up tragedy's full burden. "Still-got-one-more-to-wade-through-a-matter-of-form," the publisher said briskly, bent his head, and spun his reading machine.

Gaspard stood up and gravitated with the others over to Cullingham. They were like pallbearers clustering around a funeral director.

"It's not lack of skill or inventiveness," Cullingham was explaining almost apologetically, his speech now more under control. "And although it might have helped, it's not even lack of editorial direction." As he said that he gave Gaspard and Zane a faint quizzical smile.

"No simple human sympathies, I suppose?" Gaspard ventured.

"Or strong plot-line?" Zane added.

"Or reader-identification?" Miss Blushes put in.

"Or plain guts?" Heloise finished.

Cullingham nodded. "But more than that," he said, "it's simply the incredible conceit of the things, their swollen ego-centeredness. These manuscripts aren't stories, they're puzzles-and most of them insoluble at that. Ulysses, Mars Violet, Alexanderplatz, Venus Deferred, The Fairy Queen, and the riddling Icelandic bards aren't in it for sheer perverse complexity. It adds up to this: the eggheads have tried to be as confusing as possible to show how brilliant they are."

"I told them-" Nurse Bishop started to say and then broke off. She was crying quietly. Gaspard put his arm lightly around her shoulders. Ten days ago he would simply have said, "I told you so," and launched into a new paean of praise to wordmills, but now he felt almost like crying himself, at any rate, so disturbed that he wasn't even impressed by the philosophic courage with which Cullingham was taking the collapse of his and Flaxman's dream project.

"The eggs are hardly to be blamed," the editorial director pointed out sympathetically. "Being locked-up minds and little else, it was natural that they should come to look on ideas as things to play with, to fit together in odd patterns, to string and restring like beads. Why, one of the manuscripts is in the form of an epic poem, mixing together, sometimes in one sentence, about seventeen languages. Another tries-quite successfully at its level-to be an epitome of all literature, from the Egyptian Book of the Dead down through Shakespeare and Dickens and Hammerberg. In another the first letters of each word spell out a second story, highly scatological, though I didn't follow it all the way through. Another- Oh, they're not all as bad as that. A couple of them are the sort of thing you'd expect a gifted writer to do while he's still a college student and trying to dazzle the professors. One-by Double Nick, I'd guess-is even pseudo-popular and uses all the good clichйs and smooth techniques, but in a contemptuous, cold-blooded way, no warmth at all. But most of them-"

"The brats aren't really cold-blooded," Nurse Bishop protested brokenly. "They're — . oh, I was sure that some of their books, at least, would be good. Especially when Rusty told me they weren't really writing new stories, most of them, but stuff they'd painstakingly concocted over a century and more for their own amusement."

"That's probably a large part of the trouble," Cullingham said. "They're trying to dazzle superminds. Intellectual fireworks. If you don't believe me, just listen to this."

He picked up a roll he'd set apart from the others, twirled it open a couple of feet, and began to read.

"This idark motherlink lie spirit ash inner brinks firebucks a lazy headshell sings black o' this clobsit air whering marblying pillawrying and dying. Wish it. Push it. Smash it. Four in a butting mold tease inner ease maykister esau-"

"Cully!" The cry came like a bugle call.

They all looked around at Flaxman. The small publisher's eyes were glued to the jerking sheet. His face was radiant.

"Cully, this is terrific!" he said without looking up or slowing the machine. "It's a system-wide knockout! It does everything a Scribner Scribe story can do and more. You've only got to read a couple of pages-"

But Cullingham was already peering avidly over his shoulder and the others were jockeying around for glimpses.

"It's about a girl who's born on Ganymede without a sense of touch," Flaxman explained, still soaking it up. "She becomes a nightclub low-gravity acrobat and the story travels around the system, there's a famous surgeon in it, but the sympathy with which the author presents that girl, the way he gets you right inside her. . It's called You've Felt My Hurtings-"

"That's Half Pint's story!" Nurse Bishop revealed excitedly. "He kept telling me the plot. I put it last because I was afraid it wasn't much good, not as clever as the others."

"Boy, would you make a lousy editor!" Flaxman chortled happily. "Cully, why the hell's the TV off? We got to tell the whole Nursery the good news!"

After a half minute of maddening herringbone, during which the Nursery was informed of Half Pint's victory and reacted with odd squawks and garbled interjections, the screen flashed clear. The upper half of Half Pint-it had to be Half Pint-and his eye, ear and speaker were screen center, banked to either side and above by the twentynine eyes of the others and Miss Jackson's frazzled-looking face.

"Congratulations, boy!" Flaxman cried, clasping his hands above his head and shaking them vigorously. "How'd you do it? What's your secret? I'm asking because-I hope they won't mind my saying so-I think all your pals can profit from it."

"I just stayed glued to the voicewriter and let the mighty brain rip," Half Pint asserted drunkenly. "I started the universe whirling like a merry-go-round and grabbed at things as they went by. I saw my shell as a gigantic codpiece and raped the world. I unraveled the cosmos and rewove it again. I hopped on God's chair while he was off feeding the archangels and put on his creating cap. I-"

Half Pint paused. "No, I didn't," he said more slowly. "At least that wasn't all I did. Tell you what, I had experience-new experience. I got myself kidnapped-the whole chase in the last third of my story is just my kidnapping, rewritten a bit. And then Zane Gort took me off on a couple of trips, that helped too, in fact it helped a lot more than-

"But I won't say anything more about those things, because I want to tell you the real secret of my story-the deep down inside secret. I didn't write my story at all. Nurse Bishop did."

"Half Pint, you idiot!" she squealed.