The Silver Eggheads

SEVEN

At the far end of Readership Row, well beyond the point where Dream Street changes its name to Nightmare Alley, stands Rocket House, pronounced Racket House by the cognoscenti.

Not five minutes after their decision to seek aid and enlightenment at this spot, Gaspard de la Nuit and Zane Gort were bearing their stretcher and its slender pink burden up a stalled escalator leading to the executive area. Gaspard was now at the head of the stretcher and Zane at the rear end, the robot taking on the more taxing job of holding his end of the stretcher high above his head to keep Miss Blushes horizontal.

"Looks like I gave you a bum steer," Gaspard said. "The power failure extends into this area. Certainly the writers came this far, judging from the shambles downstairs."

"Press on, partner," Zane replied staunchly. "It's my recollection that the power pattern changes halfway through the building."

Gaspard stopped in front of a simple door bearing the name "FLAXMAN" and below it "CULLINGHAM." He doubled up his knee and pressed a waist-high button. When nothing happened he gave the door a savage kick with the flat of his foot. It swung open, revealing a large office furnished with luxurious simplicity. Behind a double desk that was like two half moons joined-a Cupid's-bow effect-sat a short dark man with the broad grin of energetic efficiency and a tall fair man with the faint smile of weary efficiency. They seemed to have been enjoying a quiet conversation together-an odd occupation, it occurred to Gaspard, for two men who have presumably just suffered deadly business injuries. They looked around with some surprise-the short dark man jerked a little-but no annoyance.

Gaspard stepped inside without a word. At a signal from the robot they gently lowered the stretcher to the floor.

"Think you'll be able to take care of her now, Zane?" Gaspard asked.

The robot, his pincher tip probing a wall socket, nodded. "We've reached electricity at last," he replied. "That's all I need."

Gaspard walked up to the double desk. During the few steps he heard, felt and smelt a ghostly encore of the sensations of the past two hours: the screeching writers, Heloise's taunts, Homer's cannoncrackers and the impact of the big boob's fist-above all, the stench of burnt and blasted books and wordmills. The resultant unfamiliar emotion, anger, seemed to Gaspard to be a fuel he had been looking for all his life. He planted the palms of both his hands solidly on the grotesque desk.

"Well?" he said in no friendly voice.

"Well what, Gaspard?" the short dark man asked absently. He was doodling on a sheet of silver gray paper, incising it with very black-edged ovoids, some of them decorated with curlycues and bands, like Easter eggs.

"I mean, where were you when they wrecked your wordmills?" Gaspard slammed the desk with his fist. The short dark man jumped again, though not very much. Gaspard continued, "Look here, Mr. Flaxman. You and Mr. Cullingham here" (he nodded toward the tall fair man) "are Rocket House. To me that means more than ownership, even mastery, it means responsibility, loyalty. Why weren't you down there fighting to save your machines? Why did you leave it to me and one true robot?"

Flaxman laughed in a light friendly way. "Why were you there, Gaspard? on our side, I mean? Nice of you and all that-thanks! — but you seem to have been acting against what your union believes are the best interests of your profession."

"Profession!" Gaspard made the sound of spitting. "Honestly, Mr. Flaxman, I don't see why you dignify it with that name or act so blasted magnanimous to the jumped-up little rats!"

"Tut-tut, Gaspard, where's your own loyalty? I mean of long-hair to long-hair."

Gaspard savagely rammed his own dark wavy locks back from his forehead. "Lay off, Mr. Flaxman. Oh, I wear it that way, all right, just as I wear this Italian monkey-suit, because it's part of the job, it's in my contract, it's what a writer's got to do-just as I've changed my name to Gaspard de la Noo-ee. But I'm not fooled by any of this junk, I don't believe I'm any flaming literary genius. I'm a freak, I guess, a traitor to my union if you like. Maybe you know they call me Gaspard the Nut. Well, that's the way I like it, because at heart I'm just a nuts-and-bolts man, a would-be wordmill mechanic and nothing more."

"Gaspard, what's happened to you?" Flaxman demanded wonderingly. "I've always thought of you as just an average happy conceited writer-no longer on brains than most but a lot more contented-and here you're orating like a fire-breathing fanatic. I'm genuinely startled."

"I'm startled too, come to think of it," Gaspard agreed. "I guess I've begun to ask myself for the first time in my life what I really like and what I don't like. I know this much: I'm no writer!"

"Now that really is odd," Flaxman commented animatedly. "More than once I've remarked to Mr. Cullingham that in your back-cover stereo with Miss Frisky Trisket you look more like a writer than many of the most dramatic literary lights of long standing-even Homer Hemingway himself. Of course, you haven't got Homer's shaven-headed emotional force-"

"Or his singed-rump intellectual feebleness either!" Gaspard snarled, fingering the lump on his jaw. "That muscle-bound boob!"

"Don't underestimate shaven-headedness, Gaspard," Cullingham put in softly yet sharply. "Buddha was shaven-headed."

"Buddha, hell-Yul Brynner was!" Flaxman growled. "Look here, Gaspard, when you've been in this business as long as I have-"

"The hell with how writers look! The hell with writers!" Gaspard paused after that outburst and his voice steadied. "But get this, Mr. Flaxman, I really loved wordmills. I enjoyed their product, sure. But I loved the machines themselves. Why, Mr. Flaxman, I know you owned several, but did you ever actually realize-deep down in your guts-that each wordmill was unique, an immortal Shakespeare, something that couldn't be blueprinted, and that's why there hasn't been a new one built in over sixty years? All we had to do to them was add to their memory banks the new words as they appeared in the language, and feed in a pretty standardized book program, and then press the Go Button. I wonder how many people realize that? Well, they'll find out soon enough, when they try to build a wordmill from scratch without a single living man who understands the creative side of the problem-a real writer, I mean. This morning there were five hundred wordmills on Readership Row, now there's not one in the whole Solar System-three might have been saved, but you were scared for your own hides! Five hundred Shakespeares were murdered while you sat there chatting. Five hundred deathless literary geniuses, unique and absolutely self-sufficient-"

He broke off because Cullingham was laughing at him in little giggly peals that were mounting hysterically.

"Are you sneering at greatness?" Gaspard demanded.

"No!" Cullingham managed to get out. "I am merely lost in admiration of a man who can invest the smashing of a few oversize psychotically creative typewriters with all the grandeur of the Twilight of the Gods."