All along Readership Row, which some call Dream Street, the writers were wrecking the wordmills. From the blackened book-tree under which Gaspard had fallen to the bookship launching pads at the other end of the Row, the unionized authors were ravaging and reaving. Torrenting down the central avenue of Earth's mammoth, and in fact the Solar System's only fully mechanized publishing center, a giddy gaudy mob in their berets and bathrobes, togas and ruffs, kimonos, capes, sport shirts, flowing black bow ties, lace shirt-fronts and top hats, doublets and hose, Tshirts and levis, they burst murderously into each fiction factory, screaming death and destruction to the gigantic machines whose mere tenders they had become and which ground out in their electronic maws the actual reading matter which fed the yearnings and sweetened the subconscious minds of the inhabitants of three planets, a half dozen moons, and several thousand satellites and spaceships in orbit and trajectory.
No longer content to be bribed by high salaries and the mere trappings of authorship-the ancient costumes that were the vestments of their profession, the traditionfreighted names they were allowed and even required to assume, the exotic love-lives they were permitted and encouraged to pursue-the writers smashed and sabotaged, rioted and ruined, while the police of a Labor Administration intent on breaking the power of the publishers stood complacently aside. Robot goons, hurriedly hired by the belatedly alarmed publishers, also took no action, having received a last-minute negate from the Interplanetary Brotherhood of Free Business Machines; they too merely stood about-grim somber statues, their metal dented by the bricks, stained by the acids, and blackened by the portable lightning-bolts of many a picket-line affray-and watched their stationary mindless cousins die.
Homer Hemingway axed through the sedate gray control panel of a Random House Write-All and went fiercely to work on the tubes and transistors.
Sappho Wolistonecraft Shaw shoved a large plastic funnel into the memory unit of a Scribner Scribe and poured two gallons of smoking nitric acid into its indescribably delicate innards.
Harriet Beecher Brontл drenched a Norton Novelist with gasoline and whinnied as the flames shot skyward.
Heloise Ibsen, her shirt now torn from her shoulders and waving the gray flag with the ominous black "30" on it, signifying the end of machine-made literature, leaped atop three cowering vice-presidents who had come down to "watch the robots scatter those insolent grease-monkeys." For a moment she looked strikingly like "Liberty Leading the People" in Delacroix's painting.
Abelard de Musset, top hat awry and pockets bulging with proclamations of self-expression and creativity, leveled a submachinegun at a Putnam Plotter. Marcel Feodor Joyce lobbed a grenade into the associator of a Schuster Serious. Dylan Bysshe Donne bazookaed a Bantam Bard.
Agatha Ngaio Sayers poisoned a Doubleday 'Dunnit with powdered magnetic oxide.
Somerset Makepeace Dickens sledgehammered a Harcourt Hack.
H. G. Heinlein planted stiletto explosives in an Appleton S-F and almost lost his life pushing the rest of the mob back to a safe distance until the fiery white jets had stabbed through the involuted leagues of fine silver wiring.
Norman Vincent Durant blew up a Ballantine Bookbuilder.
Talbot Fennimore Forester sword-slashed a Houghton Historical, pried it open with a pike, and squirted in Greek fire which he had compounded by an ancient formula.
Luke Van Tilburg Wister fanned his six-guns at a Whittlesey Western, then finished it off with six sticks of dynamite and a "Ki-yi-yippee!"
Fritz Ashton Eddison loosed a cloud of radioactive bats inside a Fiction House Fantasizer (really a rebuilt Dutton Dreamer with Fingertip Credibility Control).
Edgar Allen Block, brandishing an electric cane fearfully powered by portable isotopic batteries, all by himself shorted out forever a whole floorful of assorted cutters, padders, polishers, tighteners, juicers, and hesid-shesids.
Conan Haggard de Camp rammed a Gold Medal Cloak-'n-Sworder with a spike-nosed five-ton truck.
Shakespeares ravaged, Dantes dealt electro-chemical death, Aeschyluses and Miltons fought shoulder to shoulder with Zolas and Farrells; Rimbauds and Bradburies shared revolutionary dangers alike; while whole tribes of Sinclairs, Balzacs, Dumas' and authors named White and distinguished only by initials, mopped up in the rear.
It was a black day for book-lovers. Or perhaps the dawn.
FOUR
One of the last incidents in the Massacre of the Wordmills-which some historians later compared to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria and the Nazi book-holocausts and others to the Boston Tea Party and the storming of the Bastille-played itself out in the vaulted millroom shared by Rocket House and Proton Press. There, after the horrid bombing of Gaspard's Wordmaster by Heloise Ibsen, there hac been a lull in the orgy of destruction. All the surviving visitors had run away except for two elderly female schoolteachers, who, backed against a wall, clutched each other for support and peered about in shock and terror, incapable of action.
Hanging onto both of them and seeming quite as frightened as they, was a slender robot finished in aluminum anodized a deep pink-a robot with a wasp waist and notably slim wrists and ankles, far slenderer than even the trim rangy Zane Gort and of strangely feminine appearance overall.
A minute or so after the explosion Joe the Guard roused himself beside the timeclock, slowly crossed the room and fished out of a locker a whiskbroom and a dustpan with a snap-back lid, then came as slowly back with them and began even more slowly and potteringly to sweep at the fringes of the debris around the blasted wordmill, brushing together scraps of metal, insulation and turquoise cloth. Once he picked an opal button out of the junk and stared at it for fully ten seconds before shaking his head and dropping it in his pan with a little ping.
The two schoolteachers and the shocking pink robot followed him with their five eyes, hanging onto his every movement. He was a middling poor father figure and symbol of security, even as such figures and symbols go, but at the moment he was the only one and so would have to do.
Joe the Guard had twice filled and emptied his dustpan-an operation each time requiring a long trip out of the room-when the victory-frenzied writers appeared in force, surging into the vast chamber in a wedge that was tipped most terrifyingly with the roaring twenty-foot flames of three throwers.
While the three flame-teams of nozzle-man and packman went whoopingly to work on the five remaining wordmills, the other writers milled about, screeching like fiends and looking even more like denizens of hell in the smoky red glare. They'd shake each qther's hands, clap each other on the back and kiss each other, shout into each other's ears some atrocious detail of the destruction of a particularly hated wordmill, and then laugh uproariously.
The two schoolteachers and the shocking pink robot clutched each other still more closely. Joe the Guard looked over his stooped shoulder at the intruders, shook his head again, and seeming to curse under his breath, went on with his ineffectual tidying.
A few of the writers spontaneously formed a serpent and soon all the others, except for the flame-teams, had joined it. Hands on the shoulders of the writer next ahead, they went stamping and shuffling about in a twisted spiral that went twice around the room, passing between some of the blackening, warping wordmills and curving recklessly close to the stinking flames. As they moved along, two steps forward, one back, they rhythmically uttered animal cries and grunts.