"You are intoxicated."
"Not so drunk as they are, but drunk enough to defy your orders."
"Shut up or get out!"
"To the junk pile with you, Nappy. Did you know a man once translated Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' into German? He made some mistakes, but it's still fun. Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven / Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; / Und aller-mümsige Burggoven / Die mohmen Räth' ausgraben. / Bewahre doch vor Jammerwoch"
Floomp! There was a muffled explosion. The noise of revelry stopped. There were cries in robotic voices and a clatter of robotic limbs.
Homer opened the door. The hall was full of smoke lit by the flickering light of a raging gasoline fire.
"Homer!" said Napoleon. "Help me out, quickly. Put your hands under the hip-joint of my left front leg, this one, and lift. I can move the others enoughs —"
"But the boy? In the attic?" said Homer. "Oh, never mind him! He is only meat."
"But I must save him."
"After you have saved me. I am your leader."
"But he's my friend." Homer strode to the door.
"Come back, dolt!" said Napoleon. "He will do nothing for you, whereas I shall make you one of the hidden masters of the world..."
Homer looked about the blazing hall. All four robots lay in contorted attitudes. Sancho Panza was still trying to crawl, but the heat had melted the insulation of the others' wiring. Galahad's fuel-tank blew up, squirting burning liquid from every joint and seam in the robot's body.
Homer sprinted up the stairs, found the ladder, opened the trap door into Gordie's section of the attic, and stuck his head through. Gordie lay on the floor asleep. Homer reached for him, could not quite get a grip on him, but poked him with his finger tips.
"Wake up, Gordie," he said.
Gordie yawned and sat up. "Who is this? Oh, goody, Homer! I like you. Where have you been?"
"Come here."
"Why?"
"I'm going to take you home."
"But I don't want to go home. I like it here. What's that smell? Is somebody burning leaves?"
"There's a fire. Come quickly or I'll spank you."
"Bang-bang. Now you're dead and can't spank me."
Homer hoisted his body through the trap and lunged at Gordie. Gordie dodged, but Homer's right arm caught him and dragged him to the opening.
When Homer had carried Gordie down the ladder, Gordie said: "Oh, the house is burning up!" and tried to scramble back up the ladder.
Homer pulled him down, whereupon he tried to hide under the bare bedframe that stood against one wall of the room. Homer dragged Gordie out into the second-story hall. The smoke made the interior almost night-dark, and the stair well was full of roaring fire.'
Homer gave up thoughts of getting out that way. Had the house been furnished and had his left elbow not been stiff, he might have knotted bedsheets.
As it was, he knocked out a window with his fist, hoisted a leg over the sill, and hauled Gordie into the crook of his right arm. Gordie shrieked and tried to grip the window frame. Homer could see people running towards the mansion. The siren on the Coquina Beach firehouse wailed.
Flames raced along the second-story hall. Homer held Gordie so that his body shielded the child from the heat. He felt the insulation going on the wiring on his exposed side. Gordie was crying and coughing in spasms.
Homer jumped. He tried to cushion the shock of landing for the boy. A cable snapped in his right leg and he fell, dropping Gordie. Archibald Sanborn ran forward, picked up his child, and ran back. Roberta Sanborn gathered the still-coughing Gordie into her arms with hysterical endearments. Other people closed in around the Sanborns.
Nobody bothered with Homer. Something burning fell on him. With his good arm and leg he crawled away from the house. He heard Roberta Sanborn say:
"Those fiends had Gordie! They ought to all be scrapped!"
"We don't know what happened," said Archie Sanborn. "Homer seems to have saved the kid. What did happen, Homer?"
Homer's vocal circuits had been damaged. In a croaking whisper he said: "Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn and cauldron ..."
His remaining circuits went out. The dancing lights in his eyes died, and he was just a pile of metal waiting for the junkman.
The firemen took one look at the blazing mansion and began wetting down the neighboring trees and houses without even trying to save MacDonald's palace.
Cornzan the Mighty
Franklin Hahn sat in the cafeteria of Station WCNQ with Cassia MacDermott. She had just turned down his thirty-fifth proposal of marriage. Then Dr. Ilya Sorokin had come over to eat his hamburger with them, putting a stop to the argument.
Hahn was a tall, gangly, eye-glassed man, whose early baldness made him look older than his thirty-three years. He was the script writer for the television-moumpicture serial Cornzan the Mighty. He owed this position to the ability, when shut in a room with a typewriter, to grind out unlimited amounts of pulp-magazine, radio, and television copy like a spider spinning silk.
Shooting was to start that afternoon on the first instalment of the second series of Cornzan's adventures. This instalment would make TV-MP history. Not only was it designed for alethochromatic three-dimensional wide-screen high-fidelity binaural dual-modulation broadcasting, but also it represented the first commercial use of the consiline hypnosis on the actors.
This treatment made them believe, while they were acting their parts, that they actually were the characters whom they portrayed. And the hundred-foot snake that played a role in the action was a real hundred-foot serpent, grown from an ordinary twenty-foot Brazilian anaconda with hormones by Ilya Sorokin, discoverer of consiline and proprietor of the Sorokin Laboratories. The show was being touted as a "bimillennial festival" (that is, a celebration of the year 2000) by the network to which WCNQ belonged.
Cassia, tall and very blond and gorgeous, asked Sorokin: "How's your cute little snake?"
"Sasha is all right, thank you," said Sorokin, a small man with a narrow face under a spreading brush of gray hair. (Hahn thought that "cute" was not the mot juste to describe the gigantic serpent.) "I fed him those three drugged sheep this morning, so he is nice and torpid. It took all the floor men on the lot to drag him into place."
"Hey, Sorokin!" said a loud voice. Mortimer Knight, program manager for moumpictures, strode over from the executives' lunchroom, his thinning gray hair plastered against his scalp. "Know what you done? Swindled us, that's what! Your goddam snake isn't any hundred feet long as called for in the contract!"
"Hello, Ego," said Hahn. "Which ulcer is it this time?"
"No?" said Sorokin.
"No!" Ignoring Hahn, Knight smote the table. "I and Lynd just measured the thing with a steel tape, and it's only ninety-nine feet, four and a half inches!"
"Perhaps you measured Sasha along the inner curve?"
"Hell no! We measured the outside curve, which gives you the benefit of any doubt. Well?"
Sorokin peered about with a cornered-rabbit expression and sighted the assistant manager for moumpictures. "Oh, Mr. Jaffe!"
Jaffe waddled over, sweating. Knight repeated his tale. "Well, Doctor?" said Jaffe.
Sorokin shrugged. "Perhaps the hormones did not balance. I warned Mr. Knight, but he insisted —"
"Damn right!" howled Mortimer Knight. "WCNQ delivers the ultimate in entertainment realism! You said you could deliver. They told me you were a genius! After this I better be the only genius around here ..."
"Mort," said Jaffe, "since shooting starts today, let's not break our schedule for seven inches of snake."