The Silver Eggheads

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.'

EIGHT

'Gaspard,' the taller, thinner half of Rocket House went on when he got himself under control, 'You are undoubtedly the wildest-eyed idealist who ever smuggled himself into a conservative union. Let's stick to facts: wordmills aren't even robots, they weren't ever alive; to talk of murder is mere poetry. Men built the wordmills, men also directed them. Yes, men-myself among them, as you know-supervized the dark electrical infinities churning inside them, just as ancient writers had to direct the activities of their own subconscious minds-usually in a most inefficient fashion.'

'Well, at least those old authors had subconscious minds,' Gaspard said. 'I'm not sure we do any more. Certainly we haven't any subconscious minds rich enough to pattern new wordmills on and fill their memory banks.'

'Still, it's a very interesting point,' Cullingham persisted blandly, 'and an important one to keep in view, whatever resources we have to fall back on to meet the approaching fiction famine. Most people believe wordmills were invented and adopted by the publishers because a single writer's mind could no longer hold the vast amount of raw material needed to produce a convincing work of fiction, the world and human society and its endless specialties having become too complex for a single person to comprehend. Nonsense! Wordmills were adopted because they were more efficient publishing-wise.

'Toward the end of the Twentieth Century, most fiction was written by a few top editors-in the sense that they provided the themes, the plot skeletons, the styling, the key shocks; the writers merely filled in the outlines. Naturally a machine that could be owned and kept in one place was incomparably more efficient than a stable of writers galloping around, changing publishers, organizing unions and guilds, demanding higher royalties, having psychoses and sports cars and mistresses and neurotic children, exploding their temperaments all over the lot, and even trying to sneak weird notions of their own into editor-perfected stories.

'In fact, wordmills were so much more efficient than writers that the latter could be kept on as a harmless featherbedded glamor-asset-and of course by then the writers' unions were so strong that some such compromise was inevitable.

'All this simply underlines my main point: that the two activities involved in writing are the workaday unconscious churning and the inspired direction or programming. These two activities are completely separate and it's best when they are carried out by two distinct persons or mechanisms. Actually the name of the directive genius (today called a programmer rather than an editor, of course) ought always in justice to have appeared on each paperback or listen-tape alongside the names of the glamorauthor and the wordmill.. But now I'm riding my hobby away from my point, which is simply that a man is always the ultimate directive force.'

'Maybe, Mr. Cullingham,' Gaspard said unwillingly. 'And you were a good enough programmer, I'll admit, if programming is anywhere near as difficult and important as you make it out to be-which I frankly doubt. Weren't all the basic programs created at the same time the wordmills were?' Cullingham shook his head, then half shrugged. 'Anyway,' Gaspard continued, 'I always thought Whittlesey Wordmaster Four once wrote three best-selling serious novels and a science-fiction romance without any programming at all. Maybe that's just promotion copy, you'll tell me, but I'll believe otherwise when it's proved to me.' The bitter tone returned to his voice. 'Just as I'll believe that my fellow monkeys can actually write books when I read 'em and get to page two. They've been talking big for months, but I'll wait 'til the juice starts to flow through their daisy rings and the words start coming.'

'Excuse me, Gaspard,' Flaxman interjected, 'but would you mind tuning the emotional down and the factual up? I'd like to hear a little more about the fracas on the Row. What happened to Rocket's properties, for instance?'

Gaspard straightened up, scowling. 'Why,' he said simply, 'all your wordmills were wrecked-wrecked beyond any remote possibility of repair. That's all.'

'Tch-tch,' said Flaxman, shaking his head. 'Dreadful,' echoed Cullinghain.

Gaspard looked back and forth between the two partners with deep and puzzled suspicion. Their feeble efforts to appear concerned only made them look to him more like two fat cats full of stolen cream and with a map of the secret tunnel leading to the meat locker tucked inside their fur vests.

'Do you two understand me?' he said. 'I'll print it out for you. Your three wordmills were wrecked-one by bomb, two by flame-thrower.' His eyes widened as the scene came back to him. 'It was murder, Mr. Flaxman, ghastly murder. You know the one we called Rocky? — Rocky Phraser? He was just an old Harper Hardcover Electrobrain, rebuilt in '07 and '49, but I never missed a book he milled- well, I had to watch old Rocky blacken and warp and frizzle. My own girl's new boyfriend was on the hose, too.'

'Tch-tch. His own girl's new boyfriend,' Flaxman said, managing to sound solicitous and to grin at the same time. His composure and Cu]lingham's were positively supernatural.

Gaspard nodded savagely. 'Your great Homer Hemingway, by the way,' he shot at them, trying somehow to get a rise. 'But Zane Gort scorched his rear end for him.'

Flaxman shook his head. 'It's a wicked world,' he said. 'Gaspard, you're a hero. For as long as the other writers are out we'll keep you on at fifteen percent of union wages. But I don't like this about one of our robot authors harming a human. Hey, Zane! — as a self-employed robot you'll have to bear the costs of any suits brought against Rocket House. It's in your contract.'