When a coil of the snake bent toward them, the two schoolteachers and the pink robot cowered back further against the wall. Joe the Guard got trapped between inner and outer spiral, but simply went on brushing, though now with a constant headshake and muttering to himself.
Gradually words shouted in unison began to appear among the animal grunts and to regularize themselves. Finally the whole nasty chant became unmistakably clear:
At this, there was a striking change in the demeanor of the pink robot. She stood erect, pushing the two schoolteachers back from her, and then walked courageously forward, flapping her slender aluminum arms as a person might at a cloud of midges and squeaking in a thin voice something that the chant completely drowned.
The writers noticed her coming, and being as used as other people to getting out of the way of robots when the latter were in certain moods, Ђimply broke their chain to let her pass through, good-humoredly jeering and catcalling as they did so.
A writer in dented top hat and torn black cape shouted, "She's a breen, kids!" This observation roused enormous merriment and a small writrix in disordered male dress clothes of the 19th Century-her name was Simone Wolfe-Sand Sagan-screamed after her, "Watch it, Pinky! The stuff we're going to write now'll blow the circuits on all you government censoring robots!"
The pink robot reached the other side of the room, having passed through the snake four times. She turned around and continued for a time to flail her arms and squeak inaudibly, while the nearest writers turned their heads to roar their chant at her with great grins on their faces.
At this she stamped a dainty aluminum foot, modestly turned to the wall and ducking her head made certain adjustments of the flush knobs at her bosom. Then she turned around and her squeak became at once an ear-splitting whistle that stopped the snake dead in its tracks, shut up the chant, and caused even the distant schoolteachers to cringe and cover their ears.
"Oh, you dreadful people!" the pink robot cried out then in a high voice that would have been very pleasant if it hadn't been quite so sugary. "You don't know what words like those, repeated over and over, do to my condensors and relays! You couldn't, or you surely wouldn't! If you do it again, I'll really scream. Oh, you poor delinquent dears, you've said and done so many dreadful things that I hardly know where to begin my corrections. . but wouldn't it be nicer-oh, so much nicer! — if, for a start, you chanted your chant this way?"
And then the pink robot, clasping her slim pinchers before her rosy bosom, cried melodiously:
Hysterical laughter and angry snarls, mixed in almost equal proportions, were the writers' answer to that jingle.
Two of the flame throwers were out of fuel, but they had done their work in full measure: the last mills at which they'd been directed (a Proton Prosepress and Proton Protean) glowed red-hot over half their faces and stank of charred insulation. The third, with Homer Hemingway again at the nozzle, still played lightly on a glowing Rocket Phraser-Homer had reduced it to light spray two minutes earlier to stretch his fun.
The writers did not reform their snake, but a crowd of them-male apprentices mostly-advanced on the pink robot, shouting at first erratically but then in unison all the dirty words they knew-really surprisingly few for even technically literary people, no more than seven.
At that the pink robot "really screamed," running her whistle at full volume down and up the scale, from shuddering subsonics to headachy ultrasonics. The effect was that of seven old fire sirens with a hyped-up high treble and low base.
Palms went to ears. Literally pained looks appeared on faces.
Homer Hemingway folded his left arm over his head to cover both ears and still squinted with the discomfort of the sounds. With his right hand he swung his diminished flame across the floor until it reached the pink robot.
"Shut it off, sister!" he roared, brushing the flame back and forth across her slim curved shanks.
The screaming stopped and a heartbreaking twangy hum came out of the pink robot, rather like a mainspring snapping. She swayed and began to wobble like a top that has almost run down.
At that instant Zane Gort and Gaspard de la Nuit entered the room. The blued-steel robot strode forward fast as a robot can (which is about five times as fast as a man) and caught the pink robot just as she was wobbling her last. He held her firmly, saying nothing but gazing fixedly at Homer Hemingway, who had rather apprehensively flirted his fire-hose back to the Phraser at the instant of Zane's appearance.
As Gaspard came galloping up, Zane said to him, "Hold Miss Blushes for me, my friend. Be gentle, she's in shock." Then he walked straight toward Homer.
"Keep off me, you dirty tin nigger!" the latter shouted, somewhat bleatingly, and directed his flame at the advancing brunch robot. But either his fuel ran out just then, or else there were more and stranger powers in Zane's outstretched right pincher, pointing at Homer, than met the eye, for at that instant the flame died.
Zane snatched the hose from his hands, caught him by the scruff of his shooting vest, bent him over his bluedsteel knee, and spanked him five times with the hot nozzle.
Homer wailed. The writers froze, looking at Zane Gort as a pride of pleasure-mad Romans might have looked at Spartacus.
FIVE
Heloise Ibsen was never one to worry overmuch about the boyish predicaments her men got themselves into. While Homer was still being spanked, she waltzed over to Gaspard.
"Can't say I think much of your new girlfriend," she greeted him, running her eye down Miss Blushes. "Good color for the chorus line, but not enough meat on her." Then, as he groped for a reply to that one, she went on, "Of course, I've heard of men who had to go to robots to get themselves taken care of, but I never thought I'd know one. But then I never thought I'd know a publisher's fink!"
"Look here, Heloise, I'm no fink!" Gaspard retorted, scorning to comment on the other jibe. "I've never spied or scabbed and I never will. I loathe what you've done-I don't mind admitting that as soon as I woke up from that slug your white gorilla put on me, I came rushing here to save Rocket's wordmills if I could! I just ran into Zane on the way. Yes, I loathe and detest what you so-called writers have done, but even if I'd known you were planning it-which I didn't-I'd have fought it out in the union, I'd never have gone to the bosses!"
"Aah, tell it to Flaxman," his ex-sweetie jeered with a toss of her bare brown shoulders. "Maybe Rocket House'll pin a tin medal on you and let you help dream up new titles for reprint scripts at fifteen percent of union wages. Why, you dirty fink, you tried to stop us back at the booktree!"
"I did not!" Gaspard blatted. "And if I did, it wasn't for the bosses." He tried to hold Miss Blushes a little away from him, so as to feel freer to argue, but she vibrated and clung to him closely.
"Aah, ain't she sweet?" Heloise Ibsen commented. "Ain't she the pink tin hotsy-totsy? Make your excuses to Flaxman and Cullingham, fink!"
Just then Zane Gort, who had wrung some information from Joe the Guard in an unprecedented five seconds and then raced to the locker and back in four, came up with a stretcher. He laid it on the floor and eased Miss Blushes down on it.