"But why are you burning books, dear?"
"You call that mill-swill books? You worm! You ground-crawler! Haven't you ever wanted to write something that was really your own? Something that towered?"
"Of course not," Gaspard replied in scandalized tones. "How could I? Dear, you haven't told me why you're burning-"
"This is just a foretaste!" she snapped at him. "A symbol." Then the full fiendishness returned to her grin as she said, "The vital destruction is yet to come! Come on, Gaspard, you can help. Get off your lazy tail and play the man!"
"Help do what? Darling, you still haven't told me-"
Homer Hemingway interrupted with, "Time's a-wasting, babe." He favored Gaspard with a contemptuous blank stare.
The latter ignored him. "And what's that black iron ball you've got in your hand, Heloise?" he wanted to know.
The question seemed to delight his athletic houri. "You read a lot of books, don't you, Gaspard? Ever read anything about nihilism and the nihilists?"
"No, dear, I can't say I have."
"Well, you will, sweetheart, you will. In fact, you're going to find out what it feels like to be one. Give him your axe, Homer."
All at once Gaspard recalled Zane Gort's question. "Are you people striking?" he asked incredulously. "Heloise, you never told me a word."
"Of course not! I couldn't trust you. You've got weaknesses-especially for wordmills. But now you're going to have a chance to prove yourself. Take Homer's axe."
"Look, you people can't get away with any violence," Gaspard protested earnestly. "The Avenue's packed with robot goons."
"They won't bother us, buddy," Homer Hemingway asserted cryptically. "We got inside dope on them tin buggers. If that's all that's been worrying you, buddy, you can grab yourself an axe and smash yourself some wordmills."
"Smash wordmills?" Gaspard gasped in tones suitable for saying, "Shoot the Pope?" "Poison Lake Michigan?" or "Blow up the sun?"
"Yes, smash wordmills!" his lovely man-eater snapped. "Quick, Gaspard, choose! Are you a true writer or a scab? Are you a hero or a publisher's fink?"
A look of utter determination came into Gaspard's face. "Heloise," he said firmly, crossing to her, "you're going home with me right now."
A large hairy paw arrested him and deposited him on his back on the rubberoid pavement.
"The lady's going home in her own sweet time, buddy," said Homer Hemingway. "With me."
Gaspard sprang up and aimed a roundhouse swing at the uncouth giant, but was fended off by an easy poke in the chest that made him gasp.
"You call yourself a writer, buddy?" Homer demanded wonderingly as he launched his own roundhouse that a moment later extinguished Gaspard's consciousness. "Why, you ain't even in training."
THREE
Resplendent in their matching turquoise slack suits with opal buttons, father and son stood complacently in front of Gaspard's wordmill. No dayshift writer had turned up. Joe the Guard slept upright by the timeclock. The other visitors had wandered off. A pink robot had appeared from somewhere and was sitting quietly on a stool at the far end of the vaulted room. Its pinchers were moving busily. It seemed to be knitting.
FATHER: There you are, Son. Look up at it. Now, now, you don't have to lean over backwards that far.
SON: It's big, Daddy.
FATHER: Yes, it's big all right. That's a wordmill, Son, a machine that writes fiction books.
SON: Does it write my story books?
FATHER: No, it writes novels for grown-ups. A considerably smaller machine (childsize, in fact) writes your little-
SON: Let's go, Daddy.
FATHER: No, Son! You wanted to see a wordmill, you begged and begged, I had to go to a lot of trouble to get a visitor's pass, so now you're going to look at this wordmill and listen to me explain it to you.
SON: Yes, Daddy.
FATHER: Well, you see, it's this way- No. . Now, it's like this-
SON: Is it a robot, Daddy?
FATHER: No, it's not a robot like the electrician or your teacher. A wordmill is not a person like a robot is, though they are both made of metal and work by electricity. A wordmill is like an electric computing machine, except it handles words, not numbers. It's like the big chess-playing war-making machine, except it makes its moves in a novel instead of on a board or battlefield. But a wordmill is not alive like a robot and it cannot move around. It can only write fiction books.
SON: (kicking it) Dumb old machine!
FATHER: Don't do that, Son. Now, it's like this-there are any number of ways to tell a story.
SON: (still kicking it wearily) Yes, Daddy.
FATHER: The ways depend on the words that are chosen. But once one word is chosen, the other words must fit with that first word. They must carry the same mood or atmosphere and fit into the suspense chain with micrometric precision (I'll explain that later).
SON: Yes, Daddy.
FATHER: A wordmill is fed the general pattern for a story and it goes to its big memory bank-much bigger than even Daddy's-and picks the first word at random; they call that turning trump. Or it's given the first word by its programmer. But when it picks the second word it must pick one that has the same atmosphere, and so on and so on. Fed the same story pattern and one hundred different first words-one at a time, of course-it would wnte one hundred completely different novels. Of course it is much more complicated than that, much too complicated for Son to understand, but that is the way it works.
SON: A wordmill keeps telling the same story with different words?
FATHER: Well, in a way, yes.
SON: Sounds dumb to me.
FATHER: It is not dumb, Son. All grown-ups read novels. Daddy reads novels.
SON: Yes, Daddy. Who's that?
FATHER: Where?
SON: Coming this way. The lady in tight blue pants who hasn't buttoned the top of her shirt.
FATHER: Ahem! Look away, Son. That's another writer, Son.
SON: (still looking) What's a writer, Daddy? Is she one of those bad ladies you told me about, who tried to talk to you in Paris, only you wouldn't?
FATHER: No, no, Son! A writer is merely a person who takes care of a wordmill, who dusts it and so on. The publishers pretend that the writer helps the wordmill write the book, but that's a big fib, Son, a just-for-fun pretend to make things more exciting. Writers are allowed to dress and behave in uncouth ways, like gypsies-it's all part of a union agreement that goes back to the time when wordmills were invented. Now you won't believe-
SON: She's putting something in this wordmill, Daddy. A round black thing.
FATHER: (not looking) She's oiling it or replacing a transistor or doing whatever she's supposed to be doing to this wordmill. Now you won't believe what Daddy's going to tell you now, except that it's Daddy telling you. Before wordmills were invented-
SON: It's smoking, Daddy.
FATHER: (still not looking) Don't interrupt, she probably spilled the oil or something. Before wordmills were invented, writers actually wrote stories! They had to hunt-
SON: The writer's running away, Daddy.
FATHER: Don't interrupt. They had to hunt through their memories for every word in a story. It must have been-
SON: It's still smoking, Daddy. There are sparks.
FATHER: I said don't interrupt. It must have been dreadfully hard work, like building the pyramids.
SON: Yes, Daddy. It's still-
BOOM! Gaspard's wordmill deafeningly blossomed into shrapnel. Father and son took the full force of the explosion and were blown to turquoise and opal bits. They passed painlessly out of existence, chance victims of a strange occupational revolt. The incident in which they perished was one of many and it was being repeated at a large number of nearby places, fortunately with few further fatalities.