Harlan was in despair. He knew Campbell would tear the manuscript into tiny pieces and dance a Highland fling on the scraps. Would I call John and put in a personal word for the story? I told Harlan that John Campbell would never be swayed by pleading; either he liked the story or he didn’t.
But Harlan pleaded with me, so I reluctantly phoned Campbell’s office, hoping deep in my heart that he would not be there.
He was there. «Oh, it’s you,» he said. My heart sank.
But then John proceeded to tell me that he had just read «Brillo» and wanted to buy it. He even explained what the story was really about, something that he was certain its authors did not understand. (John was like that. Often he was right.) He asked for a couple of very minor revisions, but he wanted to publish «Brillo»!
I got off the phone as gracefully as I could and quickly dialed Harlan. For some devilish reason I decided to give Harlan somewhat the same treatment Campbell had just given me.
«Harlan, it’s me, Ben.»
A dull, dispirited grunt.
«I … uh, I talked with John.»
A moan.
«And he … well, he’s read the story …»
A groan.
«And, uh … well, what can I say, Harlan? He wants to buy it.»
For several seconds, there was no sound whatever from Harlan’s end of the phone. Then a squawk that could have shattered diamond.
«He’s buying it?» All sorts of screeching and howling noises that might have been some exotic form of merriment. «He’s buying it?»
So we had a happy Christmas and «Brillo» was published in the August 1970 issue of Analog. Harlan still thinks that Campbell thought I had done most of the writing. As you will clearly be able to see, «Brillo» is written in Harlan’s style, not mine. John Campbell was smart enough to know the difference—and not care.
Like several other tales in this book, «Brillo» deals with the differences between what we say we want from the criminal justice system and what we really want. The differences between the everyday pieties that we all give lip service to, and the realities of how we actually behave toward the police.
Oh, yes! After the story was published, Harlan and I were approached by certain parties who wanted to turn «Brillo» into a TV series. That project ended in a plagiarism suit that terminated only after four years of lawyers and a month-long trial in a Federal District courtroom in Los Angeles. I can’t tell you much about the case, because one of the terms of the eventual settlement was that neither Harlan nor I can write or speak about it—unless we are asked direct questions.
So read «Brillo.» And ask me questions.
Crazy season for cops is August. In August the riots start. Not just to get the pigs off campus (where they don’t even happen to be, because school is out) or to rid the railroad flats of Rattus norvegicus, but they start for no reason at all. Some bunch of sweat-stinking kids get a hydrant spouting and it drenches the storefront of a shylock who lives most of his time in Kipps Bay when he’s not sticking it to his Spanish Harlem customers, and he comes out of the pawnshop with a Louisville Slugger somebody hocked once, and he takes a swing at a mestizo urchin, and the next thing the precinct knows, they’ve got a three-star riot going on two full city blocks; then they call in the copchoppers from Governor’s Island and spray the neighborhood with quiescent, and after a while the beat cops go in with breathers, in threes, and they start pulling in the bashhead cases. Why did it get going? A little water on a store window that hadn’t been squeegee’d since 1974? A short temper? Some kid flipping some guy the bird? No.
Crazy season is August.
Housewives take their steam irons to their old men’s heads. Basset hound salesmen who trundle display suitcases full of ready-to-wear for eleven months, without squeaking at their bosses, suddenly pull twine knives and carve up taxi drivers. Suicides go out tenth storey windows and off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge like confetti at an astronaut’s parade down Fifth Avenue. Teenaged rat packs steal half a dozen cars and dragrace them three abreast against traffic up White Plains Road till they run them through the show windows of supermarkets. No reason. Just August. Crazy season.
It was August, that special heat of August when the temperature keeps going till it reaches the secret killcrazy mugginess at which point eyeballs roll up white in florid faces and gravity knives appear as if by magic, it was that time of August, when Brillo arrived in the precinct.
Buzzing softly (the sort of sound an electric watch makes), he stood inert in the center of the precinct station’s bullpen, his bright blue-anodized metal a gleaming contrast to the paintless worn floorboards. He stood in the middle of momentary activity, and no one who passed him seemed to be able to pay attention to anything but him:
Not the two plainclothes officers duckwalking between them a sixty-two-year-old pervert whose specialty was flashing just before the subway doors closed.
Not the traffic cop being berated by his Sergeant for having allowed his parking ticket receipts to get waterlogged in a plastic bag bombardment initiated by the last few residents of a condemned building.
Not the tac/squad macers reloading their weapons from the supply dispensers.
Not the line of beat cops forming up in ranks for their shift on the street.
Not the Desk Sergeant trying to book three hookers who had been arrested soliciting men queued up in front of NBC for a network game show called «Sell A Sin.»
Not the fuzzette using a wrist bringalong on the mugger who had tried to snip a cutpurse on her as she patrolled Riverside Drive.
None of them, even engaged in the hardly ordinary business of sweeping up felons, could avoid staring at him. All eyes kept returning to the robot: a squat cylinder resting on tiny trunnions. Brillo’s optical sensors, up in his dome-shaped head, bulged like the eyes of an arcromegalic insect. The eyes caught the glint of the overhead neons.
The eyes, particularly, made the crowd in the muster room nervous. The crowd milled and thronged, but did not clear until the Chief of Police spread his hands in a typically Semitic gesture of impatience and yelled, «All right, already, can you clear this room!»
There was suddenly a great deal of unoccupied space.
Chief Santorini turned back to the robot. And to Reardon.
Frank Reardon shifted his weight uneasily from one foot to the other. He absorbed the Police Chief’s look and tracked it out around the muster room, watching the men who were watching the robot. His robot. Not that he owned it any longer … but he still thought of it as his. He understood how Dr. Victor Frankenstein could feel paternal about a congeries of old spare body parts.
He watched them as they sniffed around the robot like bulldogs delighted with the discovery of a new fire hydrant. Even beefy Sgt. Loyo, the Desk Sergeant, up in his perch at the far end of the shabby room, looked clearly suspicious of the robot.
Santorini had brought two uniformed Lieutenants with him. Administrative assistants. Donkeywork protocol guardians. By-the-book civil service types, lamps lit against any ee-vil encroachment of dat ole debbil machine into the paydirt of human beings’ job security. They looked grim.
The FBI man sat impassively on a stout wooden bench that ran the length of the room. He sat under posters for the Police Athletic League, the 4th War Bond Offensive, Driver Training Courses and an advertisement for The Christian Science Monitor with a FREE—TAKE ONE pocket attached. He had not said a word since being introduced to Reardon. And Reardon had even forgotten the name. Was that part of the camouflage of FBI agents? He sat there looking steely-eyed and jut-jawed. He looked grim, too.
Only the whiz kid from the Mayor’s office was smiling as he stepped once again through the grilled door into the bullpen. He smiled as he walked slowly all around the robot. He smiled as he touched the matte-finish of the machine, and he smiled as he made pleasure noises: as if he was inspecting a new car on a showroom floor, on the verge of saying, «I’ll take it. What terms can I get?»