"I supposed it was something like that," Nurse Bishop said, standing up as the carapace lifted after the last coin had chinked in. "Thanks for the dinner and the talk. Sometimes even the stupidest talk is hard to do, especially when I'm around, and you at least tried. No, don't come to the door-it's only three yards, you can watch me through it." She stepped out and as her apartment entrance scanned her, recognized, and opened to receive her, she said, "Cheer up, Gaspard. What's a woman got, anyway, that wordwooze hasn't?"
The question hung in the dark air like micro-skywriting after she was gone. It depressed Gaspard, chiefly because it reminded him he hadn't bought a new paperback for tonight and now was in no mood to hunt up an open stand. Then he began to wonder if her remark had meant that, for him, women and wordwooze were nothing more than avenues toward blackout.
The autocab whispered, "Where to, mister, or are you getting out?"
Maybe he ought to walk home, he thought, it was only ten blocks. Might do him good. He felt a swampy feeling welling up inside him-a dark cold dirty wet loneliness and self-contempt and need to have his ego stroked, no matter how. Dammit, why had he stopped Zane Gort from giving him the address of that robot whorehouse, or whatever they called it! Madam Pneumo's? He was weary, weary, weary; he hadn't slept since his graveyard-shift catnaps; but his moody misery outranked his weariness. Even mindless, let alone robot caresses would help tonight.
"Where to, mister, or are you getting out?" Conversational tone now.
Well, he could swallow his pride and give Zane a buzz right now. At least robots didn't gloat and say "I told you so" and you never had to worry whether they were asleep.
He took his phone out of his pocket and murmured Zane's code.
"Where to, mister, or are you getting out?"
The answer came at once, in sugary tones rather like Miss Blushes'. "This is a recorded message. Zane Gort regrets he is unavailable chatterwise. He is addressing the Midnight Metal Mind-Weavers Club on the topic 'Antigravity in Fiction and Fact.' He will be free in two hours. This is a recorded-"
"WHERE TO, MISTER, OR ARE YOU GETTING OUT?"
Gaspard stepped out of the autocab and started walking just before it closed and locked its carapace, darkened its windows, and started its meter again. The thought of being charged at the present moment for "necking time" was more. than he could bear.
TWENTY-ONE
Although it was crowded, that great gray barn of a coffee house, the Word, was heavy with history tonight and haunted by a thousand dark squat grumbling ghosts pursuing one pale mute wraith, beautiful but skeletally emaciated.
This was natural enough, since the Word, along with its remarkably similar predecessors, had witnessed the antics, fads and frustrations of one hundred years of non-writing writers and also provided perpetual lodging for the one thin dream that every even nominal writer seems to have: that some day he'll really write something.
The clustered green tables with pre-scarred round tops and the period kitchen chairs were a pitiful memorial to dead creative bohemias.
Since the writers' tables were traditionally waited on by apprentices, the effect was of a multitude of Shakespeares, Voltaires, Virgils, and Ciceros serving a banquet to boobs. The early-model robots tending the non-writers' tables added their touch of tarnished grotesquerie.
Three of the gently inward-curving walls were filled thirty feet high with stereo-portraits of master writers current and departed, but all of the wordmill period. They were somewhat larger than life size and packed together like the squares of a giant chessboard irregular at the top where newcomers could be stacked in. A few inches in front of each face floated a florid black signature, with an occasional printed name and a bracketed defiantly scrawled X. Somehow the effect of three thousand giant heads in lightfilled transparent cubic boxes-most of the heads grinning engagingly, a few sultry or brooding-was not at all restful or conducive to thoughts of cherished traditions and benevolent brotherhood.
The fourth wall was racked high with the trophies and mementoes of those active avocations which add so much color to a writers' back-cover: fishing spears and aqualungs, cleated climbing boots, slit-eyed sun masks, snap-on steering wheels, sports-model spacesuits (some with racing jets), detective badges and paralysis derringers, dumbbells and Indian Clubs, big-game rifles, compasses and belaying pins, loggers' axes and canthooks, the heat-browned spatulas and hot-dog tongs of short order cooks, jagged-topped tin cans darkly rimmed by petrified mulligan, gleaming featherweight sections of space-sail peppered by light-winds.
In a nearby corner was a small, dimly-lit chapel where were enshrined the antique voicewriters-and even a few dictaphones and electric typewriters-that the union's master writers had been using for their commercial work at the time of the changeover from men to mills. Some few of these primordial writers and writrixes, tradition whispered, had actually gone on to compose literary masterpieces published in limited editions at their own expense or that of nonprogressive semantically-oriented universities. But to their successors creative writing had been only a lifelong dream that grew mistier with the passing decades, until impulsively revived in this day of union decadence and discontent.
The Word was crowded tonight. The writers themselves were not too well represented because of the numbers holding hands in lonely circles in an effort to get the creative juices flowing-and the few who had been engaged at the time of the smash in personal-appearance tours in other cities and planets. But the non-writers were present in such numbers as to keep the serving robots whirring as they scuttled from table to table. The usual slummers were there who came to watch the wild writers in their native habitat and keep box scores on their sex lives, but tonight they were augmented by a horde of morbid curiosity seekers eager to view the maniacs who had wrought such destruction last morning. Among this throng, especially at the more desirable tables toward the center of the room, were individuals and little groups who gave the impression of having deeper purposes than mere thrill-seeking-secret purposes, probably sinister.
At the midmost green table of all sat Heloise Ibsen and Homer Hemingway, served by a triangle-faced teenage writrix dressed as a French maid.
"Babe, haven't we put in enough appearance now?" the big writer complained, the highlights shifting on his shaven head as it sagged. "I'd like to snatch me some sleep."
"No, Homer," Heloise told him, "I've got to get my hands on all the threads here at the center of the web, and I haven't yet." She thoughtfully peered round at the occupants of the nearby tables, jingling her necklace of skulls. "And you've got to show yourself to your public, or that rugged mug of yours will start devaluating."
"But gee, Babe, if we went to bed now, maybe we could even-you know." He leered at her appealingly.
"In the mood at last, eh?" she said curtly. "Well, I'm afraid I'm not. With that buttock shield I'd keep thinking I was bedding down with the transparent man. By the way, do you sit on it or in front of it or behind it or what?"
"On it, of course. That's the wonder of it, Babe-a built-in air cushion." He softly jounced a few times to demonstrate. The motion was rather like that of a cradle rocking and his upper eyelids began to descend.
"Wake up!" Heloise commanded. "I'm not going to be squired by a snore. Do something to stay awake. Order a stinger or some flaming coffee."
Homer gave her a hurt look as he called to the apprentice serving their table, "Kid! Bring me a glass of double-irradiated milk, 150 Fahrenheit."
"Crush four caffeine tablets in it," Heloise added.
"Nix on that, Babe!" Homer protested in manly, hollow chested tones. "I never run a doped race in my life, not even a kookie stay-awake marathon like this. No pep-pills in that milk, kid. Hey, haven't I seen you somewheres before?"