The Silver Eggheads

'Well, after that I dreamed about the eggheads every night for weeks and the dreams always had the same Godawful realistic ending. I'd be in my bed in my Nursery and the door would open softly and silently in the dark and in would float about eight feet off the floor, with eyes like faint red coals, one of those things with that Godawful look of a half-finished high-domed metal skull-'

The door to the office swung inward softly and silently. Flaxman straightened in his chair so that his body was at a 45 degree angle to the floor. His eyes closed and a tremor-not large, but visible-went down and up him.

Standing in the doorway was a robot tarnished to the point of fine pitting.

'Who are you, boy?' Cullingham asked coolly.

After a full five seconds the robot replied, 'Electrician, sir,' and brought his right claw to his square brownish dome in a salute.

Flaxman opened his eyes. 'Then fix the electrolock on that door!' he roared.

'Right, sir!' the robot said, saluting again smartly. 'Just as soon as I've attended to the escalator.' He pulled the door briskly shut.

Flaxman started to get up, then slacked down again in his chair. Cullingham said, 'Strange! Except that he's so foully pitted, that robot is the image of Zane's rival-you know, the one that used to be a bank messenger-Cain Brinks, the author of the Madam Iridium stories. Must be a commoner model of robot than I realized. Well, now, Flaxy, you say the eggheads bug you, but you certainly put up a brave front yesterday when we had Rusty here.'

'I know, but I don't believe I can keep it up,' Flaxman said miserably. 'I thought it would be a simple over-in- a-flash matter of giving them assignments-you know, 'We want thirty hypnotic action-packed novels by next Thursday!' 'Yessir, Mr. Flaxman!' — but if we're going to have to confer with them and even argue and sweet-talk them just to get them to try it in the first place. . Tell me, Cully, what do you do when you get the jitters?'

Cullingham looked thoughtful for a moment, then smiled. 'A secret for a secret,' he said. 'You keep mine as I'll keep yours. I go to Madam Pneumo's.'

'Madam Pneumo's? I've heard that name before, but I never could get an explanation.'

'That is as it should be,' Cullingham said. 'Most men pay three figures of money just to get the briefing I'm about to give you.'

TWENTY-FOUR

'Madam Pneumo's establishment,' Culllngham began, 'is a very exclusive house of pleasure owned, managed and staffed entirely by robots. You see, fifty years or so ago there was this mad robot named Harry Chernik-at least I think Chernik was a robot-whose ambition it was to build robots which would be exactly like human beings on the outside, down to the least detail of texture and anatomy. Chernik's ruling idea was that if men and robots were exactly alike-and particularly if they could make love to each other! — then there couldn't possibly be any enmity between them; Chernik was doing his work, you see, around the time of the First Anti-Robot Riots and he was a dedicated interracialist.

'Well, of course the whole project turned out to be a blind alley as far as Chernik's main purpose was concerned. Most robots simply didn't want to look like human beings and besides all the space inside a Chernik robot was so taken up with machinery to enable the robot to counterfeit the behavior of a human in bed and in other simple acts of social intercourse-fine muscular controls, temperature and moisture and suction controls, etcetera-that there wasn't any room for anything else. Outside of their extraordinary amatory abilities, the Chernik robots were completely mindless-not true robots at all, but mere automata, and to squeeze both a real robot and a Cherik automaton into the same simulated giriskin envelope they would have had to be ten feet tall or as big as circus fatwomen. And besides, as I say, it turned out that most robots didn't go for the idea at all-they wanted to be sleek hard metal and nothing else; a soft bulbous robot or robix who looked like a human being, even a beautiful human being, would have been ostracized by them and forever barred from their particular delights, especially all robot-robix acts of tenderness.

'Chernik was shattered. Like some Indian rajah in the days of suttee, he surrounded himself on an enormous bed with all his most cunningly seductive creations, set fire to the crimson draperies of the bed, and then electrocuted himself. Chernik was mad, you see.

'The robots financing Chernik weren't. They'd always had in mind certain highly profitable subsidiary uses to which Chernik's automata could be put, though they'd never told Chernik about these ideas. So they doused the fire, saved the automata, and almost immediately put them to work in an establishment catering to male human beings, only adding certain hygienic and economic safeguards that had never occured to Chernik's essentially idealistic imagination.'

Cullingham frowned. 'I actually don't know if they've ever done anything similar with the male automata Chernik is supposed to have created-they're a remarkably secretive little robot syndicate-but their femmequins (as they're sometimes called) were a rousing success. Their mindlessness was an outstanding attraction, of course, and it in no way prevented special cams and tapes being temporarily put in them that would enable them to perform any act or murmur any fantasy a customer might desire. Best of all, perhaps, there was absolutely no sense of human entanglement, clash, conflict or consequence involved in your commerce with them.

'In addition, special features were in time developed which made femmequins particularly attractive to the more fastidious, fanciful, fantastically-oriented men like myself.

'For you see, Flaxy, the robot syndicate had not only saved Chernik's female automata, they'd also saved all his skills and secret processes. After a time they began to manufacture off-trail femmequins, women who were better than ordinary women or at any rate vastly more interesting, if you go in at all for the outrй.' Cullingham became almost animated, spots of color appeared in his pale cheeks. 'Can you imagine, Flaxy, having it with a girl who is all velvet or plush, or who really goes all hot and cold, or who can softly sing you a full-orchestra symphony while you're doing it or maybe Ravel's Bolero, or who has slightly-not excessively- prehensile breasts or various refreshingly electric skin areas, or who has some of the features-not overdone, of course-of a cat or a vampire or an octopus, or who has hair like Medusa's or Shambleau's that lives and caresses you, or who has four arms like Siva, or a prehensile tail eight feet long, or. . and at the same time is perfectly safe and can't bother or involve or infect or dominate you in any way? I don't want to sound like a brochure, Flaxy, but believe me, it's the ultimate!'

'For you, maybe,' Flaxman said, looking around at his partner with a certain speculative apprehension. 'Hey, now I can understand, those being your tastes, why you got the shudders so especially yesterday when that Ibsen woman began to wet her lip at you.'

'Don't remind me!' Culllngham pleaded, paling.

'I won't. Well, as I was going to say, Madam Pneumo's off-trail femmequins may be just the thing for you- every man to his own tastes! — but me, I'm afraid they wouldn't relax me one bit, in fact, I'm afraid they'd turn my jitters into shudders, just like those Godawful silver eggheads would in my nursery nightmares as they went swooping around in the dark over my bed, dipping down under it and then slowly rising up at the foot, circling in for the kill.'

For a second time the door to the office swung inward stealthily. Flaxman did only a sketch of his previous reaction, but somehow gave the impression of being quite as deeply affected.

A burly blue-chinned man in khaki overalls looked them over, then explained crisply, 'Electric Light and Power. Routine damage inspection. See your electrolock isn't working. I'll make a note of that.' He hauled a book out of a hip pocket.

'The robot repairing the escalator is going to attend to it,' Cullingham volunteered, studying the man thoughtfully.

'I didn't see any robot when I came up,' the other told him. 'You ask me, they're all effing tin crooks or crocked tin stumblebums. I just fired one last night. He was drinking high-voltage juice on the job. Or shooting himself with it, if you look at it that way-a main-liner. Must have got away with hundreds of amperes. Be burnt out in two weeks if he finds a way to keep it up.'