“Then why sober up?” Smeith asked cogently. “How does that liquor organ work?”
Gallegher demonstrated. “I feel lousy,” he confided. “ What I need is either a week’s sleep, or else—”
“What?”
“A drink. Here’s how. You know — one item still worries me.”
“What, again?”
“The question of why that machine sings ‘St. James Infirmary’ when it’s operating.”
“It’s a good song,” Smeith said.
“Sure, but my subconscious works logically. Crazy logic, I’ll admit. Nevertheless—”
“Here’s how,” Smeith said.
Gallegher relaxed. He was beginning to feel like himself again. A warm, rosy glow. There was money in the bank. The police had been called off. Max Cuff was, no doubt, suffering for his sins. And a heavy thumping announced that Narcissus was dancing in the kitchen.
It was past midnight when Gallegher choked on a drink and said, “Now I remember!”
“Swmpmf,” Smeith said, startled. “ Whatzat?”
“I feel like singing.”
“So what?”
“Well, I feel like singing ‘St. James Infirmary.’”
“Go right ahead,” Smeith invited.
“But not alone,” Gallegher amplified. “I always like to sing that when I get tight, but I figure it sounds best as a duet. Only I was alone when I was working on that machine.”
“Ah?”
“ I must have built a recording play-back,” Gallegher said, lost in a vast wonder at the mad resources and curious deviations of Gallegher Plus. “My goodness. A machine that performs four operations at once. It eats dirt, turns out a spaceship manual control, makes a stereoscopic nondistorting projection screen, and sings a duet with me. How strange it all seems.”
Smeith considered, “You’re a genius.”
“That, of course. Hm-m-m.” Gallegher got up, turned on the machine, and returned to perch atop Bubbles. Smeith, fascinated by the spectacle, went to hang on the window sill and watch the flashing tentacles eat dirt. Invisible wire spun out along the grooved wheel. The calm of the night was shattered by the more or less melodious tones of the “St. James Infirmary.”
Above the lugubrious voice of the machine rose a deeper bass, passionately exhorting someone unnamed to search the wild world over.
Gallegher Plus was singing too.
Ex Machina
“I got the idea out of a bottle labeled ‘DRINK ME,’” Gallegher said wanly. “I’m no technician, except when I’m drunk. I don’t know the difference between an electron and an electrode, except that one’s invisible. At least I do know, sometimes, but they get mixed up. My trouble is semantics.”
“Your trouble is you’re a lush,” said the transparent robot, crossing its legs with a faint crash. Gallegher winced.
“Not at all. I get along fine when I’m drinking. It’s only during my periods of sobriety that I get confused. I have a technological hangover. The aqueous humor in my eyeballs is coming out by osmosis. Does that make sense?”
“No,” said the robot, whose name was Joe. “You’re crying, that’s all. Did you turn me on just to have an audience? I’m busy at the moment.”
“Busy with what?”
“I’m analyzing philosophy, per se. Hideous as you humans are, you sometimes get bright ideas. The clear, intellectual logic of pure philosophy is a revelation to me.”
Gallegher said something about a hard, gemlike flame. He still wept sporadically, which reminded him of the bottle labeled, “DRINK ME,” which reminded him of the liquor organ beside the couch. Gallegher stiffly moved his long body across the laboratory, detouring around three bulky objects which might have been the dynamos, Monstro and Bubbles, except for the fact that there were three of them. This realization flickered only dimly through Gallegher’s mind. Since one of the dynamos was looking at him, he hurriedly averted his gaze, sank down on the couch, and manipulated several buttons. When no liquor flowed through the tube into his parched mouth, he removed the mouthpiece, blinked at it hopelessly, and ordered Joe to bring beer.
The glass was brimming as he raised it to his lips. But it was empty before he drank.
“That’s very strange,” Gallegher said. “I feel like Tantalus.”
“Somebody’s drinking your beer,” Joe explained. “Now do leave me alone. I’ve an idea I’ll be able to appreciate my baroque beauty even more after I’ve mastered the essentials of philosophy.”
“No doubt,” Gallegher said. “Come away from that mirror. Who’s drinking my beer? A little green man?”
“A little brown animal,” Joe explained cryptically, and turned to the mirror again, leaving Gallegher to glare at him hatefully. There were times when Mr. Galloway Gallegher yearned to bind Joe securely under a steady drip of hydrochloric. Instead, he tried another beer, with equal ill luck.
In a sudden fury, Gallegher rose and procured soda water. The little brown animal had even less taste for such fluids than Gallegher himself; at any rate, the water didn’t mysteriously vanish. Less thirsty but more confused than ever, Gallegher circled the third dynamo with the bright blue eyes and morosely examined the equipment littering his workbench. There were bottles filled with ambiguous liquids, obviously nonalcoholic, but the labels meant little or nothing. Gallegher’s subconscious self, liberated by liquor last night, had marked them for easy reference. Since Gallegher Plus, though a top-flight technician, saw the world through thoroughly distorted lenses, the labels were not helpful. One said “RABBITS ONLY.” Another inquired, “WHY NOT!” A third said “CHRISTMAS NIGHT.”
There was also a complicated affair of wheels, gears, tubes, sprockets and light tubes plugged into an electric outlet.
“Cogito, ergo sum, ” Joe murmured softly. “When there’s no one around on the quad. No. Hm-m-m.”
“What about this little brown animal?” Gallegher wanted to know. “Is it real or merely a figment?”
“What is reality?” Joe inquired, thus confusing the issue still further. “I haven’t resolved that yet to my own satisfaction.”
“Your satisfaction!” Gallegher said. “I wake up with a tenth-power hangover and can’t get a drink. You tell me fairy stories about little brown animals stealing my liquor. Then you quote moldy philosophical concepts at me. If I pick up that crowbar over there, you’ll neither be nor think in very short order.”
Joe gave ground gracefully. “It’s a small creature that moves remarkably fast. So fast it can’t be seen.”
“How come you can see it?”
“I don’t. I varish it,” said Joe, who had more than the five senses normal to humans.
“Where is it now?”
“It went out a while ago.”
“Well—” Gallegher sought inconclusively for words. “Something must have happened last night.”
“Naturally,” Joe agreed. “But you turned me off after the ugly man with the ears came in.”
“I remember that. You were beating your plastic gums…what man?”
“The ugly one. You told your grandfather to take a walk, too, but you couldn’t pry him loose from his bottle.”
“Grandpa. Uh. Oh. Where’s he?”
“Maybe he went back to Maine,” Joe suggested. “He kept threatening to do that.”
“He never leaves till he’s drunk out the cellar,” Gallegher said. He tuned in the audio system and called every room in the house. There was no response. Presently Gallegher got up and made a search. There was no trace of Grandpa.