The Silver Eggheads

FOUR

One of the last incidents in the Massacre of the Wordmills-which some historians later compared to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria and the Nazi book-holocausts and others to the Boston Tea Party and the storming of the Bastille-played itself out in the vaulted millroom shared by Rocket House and Proton Press. There, after the horrid bombing of Gaspard's Wordmaster by Heloise Ibsen, there hac been a lull in the orgy of destruction. All the surviving visitors had run away except for two elderly female schoolteachers, who, backed against a wall, clutched each other for support and peered about in shock and terror, incapable of action.

Hanging onto both of them and seeming quite as frightened as they, was a slender robot finished in aluminum anodized a deep pink-a robot with a wasp waist and notably slim wrists and ankles, far slenderer than even the trim rangy Zane Gort and of strangely feminine appearance overall.

A minute or so after the explosion Joe the Guard roused himself beside the timeclock, slowly crossed the room and fished out of a locker a whiskbroom and a dustpan with a snap-back lid, then came as slowly back with them and began even more slowly and potteringly to sweep at the fringes of the debris around the blasted wordmill, brushing together scraps of metal, insulation and turquoise cloth. Once he picked an opal button out of the junk and stared at it for fully ten seconds before shaking his head and dropping it in his pan with a little ping.

The two schoolteachers and the shocking pink robot followed him with their five eyes, hanging onto his every movement. He was a middling poor father figure and symbol of security, even as such figures and symbols go, but at the moment he was the only one and so would have to do.

Joe the Guard had twice filled and emptied his dustpan-an operation each time requiring a long trip out of the room-when the victory-frenzied writers appeared in force, surging into the vast chamber in a wedge that was tipped most terrifyingly with the roaring twenty-foot flames of three throwers.

While the three flame-teams of nozzle-man and packman went whoopingly to work on the five remaining wordmills, the other writers milled about, screeching like fiends and looking even more like denizens of hell in the smoky red glare. They'd shake each qther's hands, clap each other on the back and kiss each other, shout into each other's ears some atrocious detail of the destruction of a particularly hated wordmill, and then laugh uproariously.

The two schoolteachers and the shocking pink robot clutched each other still more closely. Joe the Guard looked over his stooped shoulder at the intruders, shook his head again, and seeming to curse under his breath, went on with his ineffectual tidying.

A few of the writers spontaneously formed a serpent and soon all the others, except for the flame-teams, had joined it. Hands on the shoulders of the writer next ahead, they went stamping and shuffling about in a twisted spiral that went twice around the room, passing between some of the blackening, warping wordmills and curving recklessly close to the stinking flames. As they moved along, two steps forward, one back, they rhythmically uttered animal cries and grunts.

When a coil of the snake bent toward them, the two schoolteachers and the pink robot cowered back further against the wall. Joe the Guard got trapped between inner and outer spiral, but simply went on brushing, though now with a constant headshake and muttering to himself.

Gradually words shouted in unison began to appear among the animal grunts and to regularize themselves. Finally the whole nasty chant became unmistakably clear:

At this, there was a striking change in the demeanor of the pink robot. She stood erect, pushing the two schoolteachers back from her, and then walked courageously forward, flapping her slender aluminum arms as a person might at a cloud of midges and squeaking in a thin voice something that the chant completely drowned.

The writers noticed her coming, and being as used as other people to getting out of the way of robots when the latter were in certain moods, Ђimply broke their chain to let her pass through, good-humoredly jeering and catcalling as they did so.

A writer in dented top hat and torn black cape shouted, "She's a breen, kids!" This observation roused enormous merriment and a small writrix in disordered male dress clothes of the 19th Century-her name was Simone Wolfe-Sand Sagan-screamed after her, "Watch it, Pinky! The stuff we're going to write now'll blow the circuits on all you government censoring robots!"

The pink robot reached the other side of the room, having passed through the snake four times. She turned around and continued for a time to flail her arms and squeak inaudibly, while the nearest writers turned their heads to roar their chant at her with great grins on their faces.

At this she stamped a dainty aluminum foot, modestly turned to the wall and ducking her head made certain adjustments of the flush knobs at her bosom. Then she turned around and her squeak became at once an ear-splitting whistle that stopped the snake dead in its tracks, shut up the chant, and caused even the distant schoolteachers to cringe and cover their ears.

"Oh, you dreadful people!" the pink robot cried out then in a high voice that would have been very pleasant if it hadn't been quite so sugary. "You don't know what words like those, repeated over and over, do to my condensors and relays! You couldn't, or you surely wouldn't! If you do it again, I'll really scream. Oh, you poor delinquent dears, you've said and done so many dreadful things that I hardly know where to begin my corrections. . but wouldn't it be nicer-oh, so much nicer! — if, for a start, you chanted your chant this way?"

And then the pink robot, clasping her slim pinchers before her rosy bosom, cried melodiously:

Hysterical laughter and angry snarls, mixed in almost equal proportions, were the writers' answer to that jingle.

Two of the flame throwers were out of fuel, but they had done their work in full measure: the last mills at which they'd been directed (a Proton Prosepress and Proton Protean) glowed red-hot over half their faces and stank of charred insulation. The third, with Homer Hemingway again at the nozzle, still played lightly on a glowing Rocket Phraser-Homer had reduced it to light spray two minutes earlier to stretch his fun.

The writers did not reform their snake, but a crowd of them-male apprentices mostly-advanced on the pink robot, shouting at first erratically but then in unison all the dirty words they knew-really surprisingly few for even technically literary people, no more than seven.

At that the pink robot "really screamed," running her whistle at full volume down and up the scale, from shuddering subsonics to headachy ultrasonics. The effect was that of seven old fire sirens with a hyped-up high treble and low base.

Palms went to ears. Literally pained looks appeared on faces.

Homer Hemingway folded his left arm over his head to cover both ears and still squinted with the discomfort of the sounds. With his right hand he swung his diminished flame across the floor until it reached the pink robot.

"Shut it off, sister!" he roared, brushing the flame back and forth across her slim curved shanks.

The screaming stopped and a heartbreaking twangy hum came out of the pink robot, rather like a mainspring snapping. She swayed and began to wobble like a top that has almost run down.

At that instant Zane Gort and Gaspard de la Nuit entered the room. The blued-steel robot strode forward fast as a robot can (which is about five times as fast as a man) and caught the pink robot just as she was wobbling her last. He held her firmly, saying nothing but gazing fixedly at Homer Hemingway, who had rather apprehensively flirted his fire-hose back to the Phraser at the instant of Zane's appearance.

As Gaspard came galloping up, Zane said to him, "Hold Miss Blushes for me, my friend. Be gentle, she's in shock." Then he walked straight toward Homer.

"Keep off me, you dirty tin nigger!" the latter shouted, somewhat bleatingly, and directed his flame at the advancing brunch robot. But either his fuel ran out just then, or else there were more and stranger powers in Zane's outstretched right pincher, pointing at Homer, than met the eye, for at that instant the flame died.

Zane snatched the hose from his hands, caught him by the scruff of his shooting vest, bent him over his bluedsteel knee, and spanked him five times with the hot nozzle.

Homer wailed. The writers froze, looking at Zane Gort as a pride of pleasure-mad Romans might have looked at Spartacus.