The Silver Eggheads

face and he did a neat little somersault over Gaspard, stretched out with a slam and lay still.

Nurse Bishop stood behind him, hefting the gleaming metal thighbone and smiling happily.

'I've always wondered,' she said, 'if I could tap someone on the head and knock them out without splashing their brains all over the place. Haven't you, Gaspard? I'll bet it's everybody's secret dream.' She dropped to her knees and felt for the pulse in the private hand's wrist, her eyes going professional as she found it.

Gaspard hugged his stomach and looked around at her dubiously. Overhead the ceiling had lost its concavity and seemed an inch or two lower. The next moment it began to descend visibly and the siren-howling that had kept up in the background suddenly burst out loud, unmuffled, and accompanied by a horrid clashing. The auto-dog had bitten its way through the wall as the latter grew flaccid. A blur of flashing nickle, it made for Gaspard.

Nurse Bishop lunged across him, thrusting out the metal bone. The auto-dog's jaws clamped on it and the metal beast stopped dead and cut off its siren so suddenly that the silence seemed to resound.

'It works sort of like the keeper of a magnet,' Nurse Bishop explained to Gaspard as the ceiling settled lightly on them. 'Gil had to show it to me three times, he got such a charge out of telling the dog to grab me and then stopping it with the bone.'

Gaspard managed at last to take a painful breath. There was a moment of being almost sick, then he began to feel interested in things again, in a coolly woozy way.

Nurse Bishop set a coffee table on end to take the slight weight of the collapsed ceiling. The space they occupied, lit by lights half submerged in the collapsed walls, was as pleasantly intimate as a children's tent. They were sitting on the floor facing each other, Gaspard cross-legged, she with her knees to one side. She was still in her slip, though her sweater and skirt lay under her hand. Gil Hart snored on his back with great authenticity. His auto-dog, jaws clamping keeper-bone, crouched beside him, quiet as death.

Nurse Bishop smiled fondly at Gaspard-and rather smugly too, he fancied. 'Feeling better?' she asked. He nodded feebly.

'The last time I talked to you,' she said with a chuckle, 'I was bawling you out for not bringing the brats' rolls. I was also a bit more dressed.' She looked down at herself-very complacently, it seemed to him.

'How ever did you get on my track so fast?' she asked. Then she threw her shoulders back and took a rather deep breath, to reward him with a little thrill, he guessed.

He looked straight in her eyes. Relishing every word of it, he said, 'Zane Gort planted a mini-sender in one of your falsies. He wants you to switch it off right away so he can locate Half Pint.'

It's fun to watch a girl blush and get furious at the same time, Gaspard decided.

'That indecent tin sneak!' she grated. 'That electronic boudoir stowaway! That relay-brained fetishist!' She glared at Gaspard. 'I don't give a danm what you think,' she informed him. Crossing her arms, she grasped her shoulder straps and whipped her slip and the brassiere beneath it down to her waist. 'As you can plainly see,' she told him defiantly while looking down in her lap as she felt for the sender, 'upstairs I'm built exactly like a boy.'

'Not exactly,' Gaspard said softly as his eyes feasted. 'Oh by no means exactly, thank Saint Wuppertal! For some reason I've never been able to understand, most men are supposed to go for girls who look like champion cows with frontally displaced udders. But it's not true of men of real taste. It's not true of me. It's my theory that the hypermammalian monstrosities were popularized by male homosexual editors who wanted to hold girls up to ridicule as top-heavy walking milk factories, or perhaps boys with balloon tires and bumpers. But me-give me Diana, give me Eros, give me a girl who looks as if she'd been built for fun and games, not dairy products!'

'There, got the goddam thing!' Nurse Bishop said, skidding her brassiere away from her across the floor. Then she looked at him searchingly. 'Do you really mean all that, Gaspard?'

'Do I mean it?' he asked, reaching for her hungrily. 'Why-'

'Not with these carcasses around!' she said sharply, whipping her slip up again. 'What have you got to take me home in?'

'A helicopter I stole from Heloise Ibsen,' Gaspard replied flatly.

'That cannibal queen! That she-sultan! I can just imagine what a flashy, overloaded trash basket that disgustingly big-busted ex-mistress of yours would consider a stylish helicopter,' she said in tones of greatest contempt. 'Two tone, I suppose?'

Gaspard nodded.

'Chromium trim?'

'Yes.'

'An elaborate cold locker for drinks and snacks?'

'Yes.'

'A nauseatingly sybaritic, velvet upholstered, foam rubber triple seat big as a three quarters bed?'

'Yes.'

'One-way vision windows for complete privacy?'

'Yes.'

'An autopilot, so you can just set it west and keep on going?'

'Yes.'

Nurse Bishop gave him a big wicked grin. 'That's exactly what I was hoping.'

THIRTY-NINE

Four hours later and three hundred miles out to sea, Zane Gort, who had just rescued Half Pint, spotted Heloise Ibsen's purple and gray helicopter traveling steadily west. The resourceful robot finally raised Gaspard by firing slow screamer missiles near the copter from the 10-passenger hover-jet executive flier he had commandeered from junketing congressmen, needing a speedier plane for the last stages of his multiple rescue mission.

Shortly afterwards, the Ibsen copter having been set on automatic for return across the blue leagues of the Pacific to Homer Hemingway's penthouse, Gaspard and Nurse Bishop, who looked quite flushed, were welcomed aboard the larger and faster flier by Flaxman, Miss Blushes, Half Pint, and a stray congressman just now waking up genially from alcoholic slumbers in the baggage compartment.

Flaxman seemed in good spirits, though nervous, Miss Blushes was talkative and inquisitive-and so was Half Pint; there were dull splotches on the egg's silver shell, as if it had been shallowly eaten by acid.

The quick-thinking Zane informed everyone that he had earlier directed Gaspard to rendezvous with him at this oceanic location, a bit of tactfulness for which Gaspard and Nurse Bishop were grateful. And, as Gaspard privately pointed out to her, if Zane hadn't spotted them, they might very well have fetched Samoa or at least Honolulu before breaking the bonds of their manic mutual somatic obsession and coming out of their deep euphoria.

Thereafter, while the flier fled a lush sunset toward the darkening east and California, Gaspard and Nurse Bishop recounted a children's-movie version of their adventures and listened to familiar voices and speakers give possibly equally censored synopses of the adventures of the others, while the stray congressman sipped sour-mash Old Spaceman and from time to time made kindly sage comments.

Flaxman asked Nurse Bishop if Gil Hart had ever made clear whom he was working for or what he was after.

She replied with suitably downcast eyes, 'From the first hammerlock he got on me, he made it very clear what he was after. He let me recover from the anesthone first, he said he liked a good fight. Oh, he did say something about a merger of Rocket House with Proton Press and a vice-presidency for himself, in between demonstrations of his auto-dog and assaults on my virtue.'

'Tsk-tsk,' Miss Blushes said, lightly touching the girl's hand. 'So good you preserved it,' she added with a faintly ironic note that may have been purely Nurse Bishop's imagination.

'It's mindless violence-gadgets like auto-dogs that give robots a bad name,' Zane observed matter-of- factly.

After firing the blinking star Zane had copted on for sixty miles further into the desert before running down Signal Three in an adobe ghost-village, where as it happened Flaxman was being held prisoner by Cain Brinks' gang