"Zukie died on the table. His brilliant assistant destroyed all his notes and every scrap of special apparatus and killed himself."
As Flaxman uttered those last words, slowly, for maximum effect, which he certainly achieved (he had himself as hypnotized as the others) the door to the office very slowly swung open with a soft long creak.
Flaxman jumped convulsively. The others jerked around. Standing in the doorway was a bent old man in a shiny serge uniform with a greasy-looking uniform cap that fit down snugly between shaggy white temples and high pale ear flaps that had a couple of long twisty hairs in each of them.
Gaspard recognized him at once. It was Joe the Guard, looking remarkably wakeful-his eyes were actually half open.
In his left hand he held his whisk broom and snap-lid dust pan. In his right was a bulbous black handgun with a wide pale stripe down the back of it.
"Clockin' in, Mr. Flaxman," he said, touching the monstrous gun to his temple. "All set to clean you up. See you need it. How do, everybody."
"Are you prepared to repair or jury-rig an electrolock?" Cullingham inquired coolly.
"No, but 'twont be needful," the old man said cheerfully. "Come trouble I'll be standing guard with my trusty old skunk.pistol."
"Skunk-pistol?" Nurse Bishop said with an incredulous giggle. "Won't it shoot badgers too?"
"No'm. Fires soft pellets loaded with a smell intolerable to man or beast. Even seems to bother robots, somehow. Person hit strips and flees for water. Don't believe in deadly weapons, I don't. Can set it for riot-spray at a pinch. That'll take care of anything."
"I believe you," Flaxman said. "But look, Joe, when you use it what happens to. . well, the players on our team?"
Joe the Guard smiled shrewdly. "That's the beauty of it," he said. "That's what makes my trusty skunk-pistol the perfect weapon. Had my first cranial nerve severed in the last war. Ever since, I can't smell a thing."
SIXTEEN
Joe the Guard had started thoughtfully to work on the fringes of the cellulose shambles after twice checking to reassure Flaxman that the safety catch on his skunk-pistol was firmly snicked down.
Miss Blushes was splicing an extension cord under the directions of Nurse Bishop, who was making flattering remarks about how nice it must be to have fingernails that could serve as powerful wire clippers.
Flaxman, resolutely turning his eyes away from the door with the useless electrolock, resumed his narrative.
"When Zukie died, the general pandemonium got worse, of course. The vision of immortality lost put too great a strain on society. The world headed for something that has never quite happened before or since, but which some of the socio-psychiatry boys have called the universal choke-up syndrome.
"Very luckily, the top people concerned with the case- lawyers, medics, government men-were smart, realistic, and devoted. They concocted the story, bolstered it every which way, and finally made it stick, that the PSD operation was no good, that every excised brain was reduced to tormented terminal idiocy after a brief period, that the eggheads were no more alive than the bits of chicken heart or Martian muscle the science boys keep pulsing in test tubes for decades, or the human sperm and ova in our Disaster Banks. Just brain tissue that wouldn't die but couldn't function.
"To save themselves from mob fury, the eggheads all backed up the story, goo-gooing endlessly at attorneys, judges, and TV audiences. Incidentally, this act also took care of the scare rumor that the canned brains, evilly accumulating knowledge over the centuries, would inevitably become world tyrants.
"The crisis over, the problem remained of what to do with the thirty eggheads. If the majority of the top people in on the deception had had their way, they'd undoubtedly have been quietly liquidated-but not right away by any means, for that would have reawakened suspicions; rather they'd have been reported as dying one or two at a time over a course of twenty years. But even these naturally spaced deaths would have kept interest alive and the big object was just to let the whole thing simmer away into forgetfulness.
"Then too, the eggheads, though helpless as so many paralyzed men, would have fought for survival with their keen brains, finding allies in the ambitious lesser lights among their caretakers and blowing the whole case open again if necessary. Also, there was a sizable group among the top people who had always believed that the immortality of the eggheads was purely a wish-dream of Zukie's-and of the press and the people at large-and that the eggheads would all inevitably soon die from unforseeable technological defects in the process of their preservation, from tiny lapses on the part of their nurses-or at any rate soon go insane from their unnatural, disembodied condition.
"Here another amazing figure comes into the story, not a universal genius, but a very remarkable man in many ways, a science-fiction publisher in the great tradition of Hugo Gernsback. He was Hobart Flaxman, my ancestor and the founder of Rocket House. He'd been Zukertort's close friend, a staunch supporter both with money and enthusiasm, and Zukie had made him head of the Braintrust. Now he simply stepped in and demanded his rights-custody of the brains — and since he was known as a sound man to several of the top people, it seemed the easiest way out. The Braintrust became Wisdom of the Ages, a name selected for its phoniness, and quietly headed for a sort of educated oblivion.
"Not all his descendants have come up to Old Hobart, but at least we've maintained the Trust. The brains have received tender loving care and a steady diet of world news and any other information they asked for-very much like a wordmill has its vocabulary kept constantly up to date, come to think of it. There were several times in the early years when a threat arose that the brains would get back into the headlines, but each crisis was successfully surmounted. Today with the prolonged-lifespan discoveries that are being made, the brains are no longer a menace to public safety, but we've kept up the policy of secrecy-out of inertia chiefly. My dear Dad, for instance, was hardly what you'd call an enterprising man. And I. . well, that's beside the point.
"Now you'll be asking me-" (Gaspard came to with a start and realized that Flaxman was shaking a finger at him) "-you'll be asking me why didn't Old Hobart as an imaginative publisher see the potentialities of the eggheads as fictioneers and encourage them to write and then publish their stuff, under false names of course with all precautions. Well, the chief answer is that wordmills had just come in, they were all the rage, readers were almost as sick of writers with individuality as editors were, people loved the pure opium of the wordmill product, there was no time for a publisher to think of anything else and no point in his doing so.
"But now-" (Flaxman's eyebrows happily soared) "- there are no wordmills, and no writers either, and the thirty brains have a clear field. Just think of it!" He thrust out his palms appealingly. "Thirty writers who've had close to two hundred years apiece to accumulate material and mature their point of view, who are in a position to work steadily day after day without any distractions-no sex, no family problems, no stomach trouble, no nothing!
"Thirty writers from a hundred years in the past-that's a tremendous selling angle just by itself, people always go for the Old Storyteller. I don't have a list of them here and I haven't checked in several years (confidentially, I once had a slight aversion to Wisdom of the Ages-the idea of brains in cans made me feel just a bit creepy when Dad first told me about it as a kid) but do you realize that Theodore Sturgeon may be among these brains, or Xavier Hammerberg, or even Jean Cocteau or Bertrand Russell? — those last two lived just long enough to catch the PSD I believe.