"Oh, all right, all right," Gaspard said hufffly, starting out. "But where's Nurse Bishop?"
"That," the girl said, "is for you to figure out, step by logical step, as you watch for banana skins."
FOURTEEN
Ropes are ancient tools but eternally useful. Two of them now, in picturesque criss-crosses, lashed to their chairs behind their Cupid's-bow desk the partners Flaxman and Cullingham amid a ribbony sheety shambles of ransacked files and bubbly mounds and swatches of fire-fighting foam.
Gaspard, standing just inside the door, was content to survey the wild scene and gently shift his burden, which now seemed made of solid lead, from one aching arm to the other and back again. On the trip over he had had it ground into his consciousness that his sole current function in life was to cherish the gold-and-purple-wrapped ovoid. The girl hadn't shot him yet, but once when he'd stumbled a little she'd burnt the pavement near his foot.
Cullingham, his pale cheeks patchily reddened, was smiling a tight-lipped patient martyred smile. Flaxman was silent too, but clearly only because Miss Blushes, standing behind him, had the flat of a pink pincher firmly over his mouth.
The cerise censoring robot was reciting, honey-sweetly, "May a higher power consign to eternal torment all maternally incestuous scriveners. Pervertedly abuse their odorous integuments. Blank-blank-blank-blankety-blank. There, isn't that much nicer, Mr. Flaxman, and-insofar as I could rephrase it-truly more expressive?"
Nurse Bishop, vanishing her terrible little green gun under her skirt and whipping out a small pair of wire clippers, began to snip Flaxman's bonds. Zane Gort, carefully setting his red and green package on the floor, led Miss Blushes aside, saying, "You must excuse this overtaxed robix, Mr. Flaxman, for interfering with your freedom of speech. The ruling passion-censorship in her case-is very strong in us metal folk. Electron storms, such as her mind has suffered, only intensify it. Now, now, Miss B., I'm not trying to touch your sockets or open your windows and doors."
"Gaspard! Who the blankety-blank is the Noose?" Flaxman demanded as soon as he'd worked his lips a few times and swallowed. "Who or what are the Wordmill Avengers? That Ibsen witch was going to have her stooges knock my head off when I couldn't tell her."
"Oh," Gaspard remarked. "That was something I invented on the spur of the moment to help you by scaring her off. It's a sort of publishers' mafia."
"Writers aren't supposed to have powers of invention!" Flaxman roared. "You blank near got us killed. Those stooges of hers play rough-two B-authors in striped sweaters, looked like crime-confession types."
"And Homer Hemingway?" Gaspard asked.
"He was with them but he acted confused. He was all dressed in his famous captain's rig, as if he were going to have his stereo taken for a sailing saga, but he was looking strangely bulky around the butt. Funny, he's supposed to be a fiend for keeping in training-I guess we're all going to pot. When Ibsen ordered the rough stuff, it seemed to throw him off. But he enjoyed the tieing up part and did his bit to muck up the office-good thing I don't keep any important information in the files."
"You should have gone along with my Avengers gag," Gaspard said. "Built up the scare."
"Whose scare? I'd have got my head beat off. Look here, de la Nuit, Ibsen says you've been a publisher's spy for years. Now I don't care how much you boasted to her about being a fink-"
"I never boasted- I never was-"
"Don't vibrate that egg!" Nurse Bishop barked at Gaspard from where she was snipping Cullingham loose. "Your voice has a rasp in it."
"— I just want you to understand there's going to be no retroactive flaking payola, especially for imaginary espionage in the Writers' Union!"
"Look here, Flaxman, I never-"
"Don't vibrate it, I said! Here, give it to me, you lummox."
"Take it and welcome," Gaspard told her. "What did Heloise seem to be after, anyway, Mr. Flaxman?"
"She charged in accusing us of having a way to grind out fiction without wordmills, but after talking to you on the phone she shifted to 'Who is the Noose?' Gaspard, don't imagine any more maflas. They're dangerous. Ibsen would have done me some real damage except she shifted her attention to poor Cully here."
Gaspard shrugged. "Seems to me my Avengers red herring at least shifted her attention off the real trail."
"I can't argue with you any more," Flaxman told him, fishing the phone from a tangle of tape on the floor. "I got to get somebody to clean up this place and look to our defenses. I don't want any more crazy women busting in on us simply because the door won't lock."
Gaspard walked over to Cullingham, who was rubbing his newly-freed limbs. "So Heloise got rough with you too?"
The tall editorial director nodded, frowning. "Senselessly so," he said. "She just looked at me after her stooges had tied me up and then without asking a single question she began slapping my face-forehand, backhand, forehand."
Gaspard shook his head. "That's very bad," he said.
"Why? — beyond the pain and insult of it," Cullingham inquired. "She was wearing a gruesome necklace of silver skulls."
"That's worse," Gaspard told him. "You know that backcover stereo they have on her books-Heloise posed with six or seven guys? 'Heloise Ibsen and Her Men,' it's usually titled."
Cullingham nodded. "It's on practically all the Ibsen Proton Press books. The men keep changing."
"Well," Gaspard said, "her slapping you while wearing her hunting necklace, as she significantly calls it, shows that she's definitely interested in you. She intends to add you to her male harem. I have to warn you that, as new girl, you'll be in for a grueling time."
The tall man paled. "Flaxy," he called to his partner, who was talking on the phone, "I hope you're having that electrolock really beefed up. Gaspard, a genuine publishers' Mafia might not be a bad idea at all. We're certainly going to need some sort of protection with bulldog teeth."
"Well," Gaspard said a bit proudly, "at least my improvisation scared off Heloise and Homer. I take it that after striking out in panic they fled."
"Oh no," Cullingham told him. "It was Miss Blushes who did that. Remember the little woman in black who came in looking for a blown-up husband and son? Well, Miss Blushes had taken her to the ladies' room to comfort and quiet her. The robix came back while Ibsen was slapping me. She took one look at Homer Hemingway, started to vibrate, ducked out again and came back with a big foam fire-extinguisher. That was what routed the Ibsen gang. Flaxie, how about signing up Miss Blushes as bodyguard? We're going to need as many as we can get. I know she's a fed censor, but she could do a little moonlighting."
"I know everyone's enjoying his chatter," Nurse Bishop called from where she was unwrapping her packages on a cleared stretch of desk. "But I need some help."
"Could Miss Blushes provide that?" Zane Gort called winningly from the corner where he had been whispering persistently to the pink robix, the latter having haughtily refused to plug in with Zane for direct metal-to-metal communication. "She's offered to help (Yes, you have, Miss B!) and I think it would do her good to be busy."
"It'll be the first time I've given a robix occupational therapy," Nurse Bishop said. "But at least she'll be a lot better than any of you lazy gabbling self-centered animal or mineral men. Ditch that tin gasbag, Pinky, and come over here. I sure can use a woman."
"Thank you, I will," the robix said brightly. "If I've learned one thing since I was manufactured, it's that I have a lot more in common with beings of my own sex, whatever material they're made of, than I do with babbling robots or brunch men."