The Silver Eggheads

follow the Wordmill Massacre to their own profit, advancement, or at least excitement.

But most of the writers really believed they would be able to write stories-great novels yet! — without ever having done any writing in their lives. They suffered commensurately.

After seventeen hours Lafcadio Cervantes Proust slowly wrote, 'Swerving, skimming, evermore turning, mounting higher and higher in ever-widening fiery circles. .' and then stopped.

Gertrude Colette Sand clenched her tongue between her teeth and painstakingly printed, ''Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!' she said.'

Wolfgang Friedrich von Wassermann groaned with worldpain and put down, 'Once upon a time. .'

Nothing more.

Meanwhile the Quartermaster General of the Space Marines commanded the PX on the planet Pluto to ration paperbacks and listen-tapes; it looked, he radioed, as if the next fiction shipment would only comprise normal reading for three months instead of four years.

Deliveries of new titles to Terran newsstands were cut fifty and then ninety percent to conserve the miserably tiny stock of written and printed but undistributed novels. Book-a-day housewives phoned mayors and congressmen. Prime ministers, used to putting themselves to sleep with a crime-detective story a night (and often getting shrewd statesmanlike ideas from them), viewed developments with inward panic. A 13-year-old committed suicide 'because adventure stories are my only pleasure and now there will be no more.'

TV programs and movies-in-depth had to be curtailed in the same proportion as books, since they depended on the same vastly expensive wordmills for their scripts and scenarios. The world's newest entertainment device, the All-Senses-Poem-of-Ecstacy Engine, already well past the planning stage, was shelved indefinitely.

Electronic scientists and cybernetic engineers issued confidential preliminary reports that it would take from ten to fourteen months to get one wordmill working, with dark hints that their secondary surveys might be even more pessimistic. They pointed out that the original wordmills had been detailedly patterned on skilled human writers, whose psychoanalytic draining-in-depth had provided the contents of the wordniills' memory banks, and where were such writers to be found today? Even foreign-language countries depended almost completely on mechanical translations of Anglo-American wordwooze for their fiction.

Anglo-America's smug Labor Government awakened to a belated realization that, although the publishers had been brought to their knees, they would soon be utterly unable to meet their normal payrolls, let alone support the twenty thousand displaced teen-agers the Department of People had been planning to dump on them as semi- skilled word mechanics.

Worse, the Solar System's relatively smooth-running society would soon begin to sour and sicken from the subconscious outward for lack of fresh fictional entertainment.

The Government appealed to the publishers, the publishers to the writers-for new titles at least under which to reissue older milled books, though consulted psychologists warned that, contrary to cynical opinion, this stopgap measure would not work. For some reason a milled book which created the headiest delight on first reading was apt to produce nothing but nervous irritation on rereading.

Plans to reissue the fictional classics of the Twentieth Century and even more primitive times, though eagerly urged by a few idealists and other cranks, met with the unanswerable objection that readers used from childhood to wordwooze found pre-wordmill books (though thought exciting and even daring in their day) insufferably dull-in fact, quite unintelligible. The weird suggestion made by one rogue humanist that this was due to wordwooze itself being completely unintelligible-verbal opium of zero meaningfulness and so providing no training in reading material with a content-never got into the news at all.

The publishers promised the writers full amnesty for their riotings, toilet facilities separate from those of robots, and a seventeen-cent wage boost all around, if they could produce scripts of minimal wordmill quality- Hanover Hack Mark I.

The writers sprang back into their cross-legged circles, locked hands, stared across at each other's pale masks, and concentrated more desperately than ever.

Nothing.

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