"I believe that wraps it up, Flaxie."
The small dark publisher nodded, only a trifle convulsively.
Nurse Bishop plugged a speaker into the empty socket.
For a good long time there was absolute silence, until Flaxman could bear it no longer and asked throatily, "Nurse Bishop, has something gone wrong? Has he died in there? Or doesn't the speaker work?"
"Work, work, work, work, work," the egg instantly said. "That's all I ever do. Think, think, think, think, think. Me-oh-my-oh-my."
"That's his code for a sigh," Nurse Bishop explained. "They have speakers on which they can make free noises and even sing, but I only let them use them weekends and holidays."
There was another uncomfortable period of silence, then the egg said very rapidly, "Oh, Messrs. Flaxman and Cullingham, it is an honor, a very great honor, that which you suggest, but it is much too grand for us. We have been too much out of touch with things to tell you incarnated minds how you should entertain yourselves, or presume to provide such entertainment. We thirty discarnates have our little existence together, our little preoccupations and hobbies. It is enough. Incidentally, in this I speak for my twenty-nine brothers and sisters as well as myself-we have not disagreed on matters of this sort for the past seventy-five years. So I must kindly thank you, Messers Cullingham and Flaxman, oh very very kindly, but the answer is no. No, no, no, no, no."
Because the voice was an uninflected monotone, it was quite impossible to decide whether its humility was serious or mocking or a combination of the two. However, the egg's loquacity ended Flaxman's fit of shyness, and he joined with his partner in bombarding the egg with sound logic, reassurances, pleas, considerations and the like, while even Zane Gort put in a well-phrased encouragement now and again.
Gaspard, who said nothing and was thoughtfully drifting toward Nurse Bishop, whispered to the robot in passing, "Good going, Zane. I'd have thought you'd find Rusty weird-unrobot, as you put it. After all, he's an immobile thinking machine. Like a wordmill."
The robot considered that. "No," he whispered back, "he's too small to make me feel that way. Too. . whir. . cuddly, you might say. Besides, he's conscious, wordmills never were. No, he's not unrobot or even inrobot, he's arobot. He's a human being like you. In a box of course, but that doesn't make much difference. You're in a skin box yourself."
"Yes, but mine's got eyeholes," Gaspard pointed out.
"So has Rusty's."
Flaxman glared at them and put his finger to his lips.
By this time Cullingham had pointed out more than once that the brains would not have to worry about the general nature of the entertainment they would provide, that he as editorial director would accept full responsibility, while Flaxman was enlarging in rather fulsome fashion on the wonderful wisdom the brains must have accumulated over the eons (his word) and the desirability of imparting same (in action-packed, juicy stories) to a Solar System of shortlived, body-trammeled earthlings. From time to time Rusty briefly defended his position, hedging and shifting a bit now and then, but never really giving ground.
In his slow drift toward Nurse Bishop, Gaspard inched past Joe the Guard, who, having teased up a gobbit of bubble-foam on the end of a pencil, was shredding paper on it so that it wouldn't stick to the inside of his dust pan. It occurred to Gaspard that Flaxman and Cullingham were anything but the hard-headed, march-stealing, shrewd businessmen their manner proclaimed them. Rather, in their fantastic scheme to have two-hundred-year-old canned brains write exciting romances for moderns they were mad gaudy dreamers building moon-high sand castles.
But, Gaspard asked himself, if publishers could be such dreamers, what sort of dreamers must writers once have been? It was a dizzying thought, like discovering that your great-grandfather was really Jack the Ripper.
EIGHTEEN
Gaspard's attention was jerked back to the argument in the main ring by a startling announcement from Rusty.
The encapsulated brain had never, in its two centuries of existence, read a single wordmilled book.
Flaxman's first reaction was incredulous horror, as if Rusty had told him that he and his fellow brains were being reduced to idiocy by being systematically starved of oxygen. The publisher, while admitting dodging in earlier years his responsibilities as custodial director of the Braintrust, was inclined to accuse the Nursery staff of culpable neglect in failing to provide the most elementary literary fare for its charges.
But Nurse Bishop snappily asserted that No Wordwooze was simply a rule (which Flaxman should have known!) laid down by Daniel Zukertort when organizing the Nursery: his thirty disembodied minds were to receive only the purest intellectual and artistic nourishment and the inventor had considered wordwooze a tainted product. Perhaps a few wordmilled books had been smuggled in from time to time by earlier, less responsible nurses, but on the whole the rule had been strictly kept.
Rusty confirmed all this in every particular, reminding Flaxnian that he and his fellows had been chosen by Zukertort for their devotion to art and philosophy and their distaste for science and especially engineering; they had had a certain curiosity from time to time about wordmilled books, much as a philosopher might have about the comics, but it had never been great and the No Wordwooze rule had not been a hardship to them.
Then Cullingham cut in to point out that it was a blessing in disguise that the eggheads had read no wordwooze-they would be able to turn out far fresher, more natural fiction if they did not know the slickly machined product against which they were competing. Instead of sending to the Nursery a complete library of wordmill literature, as Flaxman had suggested, the No Wordwooze rule ought to be enforced more strictly than ever, Cullingham maintained.
The argument went circling on from there, Flaxman and Cullingham bringing to bear their heaviest and most sugary persuasions.
His drift completed, Gaspard at last stood beside Nurse Bishop, who had retired to the far end of the office once Rusty was talking glibly. Here whispering was possible without disturbing the others, and to Gaspard's satisfaction Nurse Bishop did not seem at all to resent his approach.
As he freely admitted to himself, Gaspard was experimenting with a yen for this ravishing though acid-tongued girl-seeing how it fitted, as it were, trying on the infatuation for size. Now, with a shallow craftiness born of sexual desire, he sought to ingratiate himself with her by voicing some half honest sympathies he felt for her nursling brains in their present predicament. He murmured on for quite some time, very successfully he thought, about the brains' lonely sensitivity and refined ethical standards, the two publishers' crass approach, Cullingham's 'literary conceit, etcetera, ending with, "I think it's a shame they should be subjected to all this."
She glanced at him coldly. "You do?" she whispered. "Well, I don't, emphatically. I think it's all a very sensible idea and Rusty's a dope for not seeing it. Those brats need something to do, they need to rub up against the world and get bruised, my God how they need it. If you ask me, our bosses are acting pretty nobly. Mr. Cullingham especially is a much finer man than I ever guessed. You know, I'm beginning to think you really are a writer, Mr. Knew-it. You've certainly been talking like one. Lonely sensitivity indeed! — you tend to your own ivory tower!"
Gaspard felt considerably ruffled. "Well, if you think it's such a great idea," he told her, "why don't you point it out to Rusty right now? He'd listen to you, I should think."
She grudged him another sneering glance. "My, a great psychologist as well as a writer. I should step in and take their side when they're all arguing against Rusty? No thanks."
"We ought to talk this out," Gaspard suggested. "How about supper tonight-if they ever let you out of the Nursery?"