A weary and literarily fruitless half hour later, Zane Gort whistled to him from the foot of the stalled escalator. Zane bad Miss Blushes firmly by the wrist. The pink robix seemed very much of her dignity, while Zane was clearly the prey of mixed emotions.
"I found Mears in the short corridor by Storeroom Three," the blued-steel robot said when Gaspard came up. "He claimed to be an electricity dowser hired by the Electric Light and Power to hunt down a lost feeder line. I told him straight out I thought I'd met him before and he had the nerve to tell me he wouldn't know, all robots looked alike to him. I took pleasure in sending him packing. Then after a long search I discovered Miss Blushes hiding-"
"Not hiding," she protested. "Just thinking. Let me go, you brunch engine."
"It's for your own good, Miss B. Well then,' I discovered her thinking, in a ventilation duct. She says she had a fit of amnesia, that she doesn't remember anything from the time she left the Nursery to the time I found her. I didn't actually see her with the government man."
"But you think she may have been reporting to him?" Gaspard prompted. "You think he knew her?"
"Please, Mr. Nuit!" Miss Blushes objected. "Not 'knew,' but 'were acquainted with.'"
"Why do you keep objecting to 'knew?" Gaspard demanded. "You did it yesterday."
"Don't you ever read your Bible?" the pink censoring robix replied scathingly. "Adam knew Eve, and that was the beginning of all those begattings. Some day I'm going to expurgate the Bible-it's my dream. But until then please don't quote it in deliberate attempts to embarrass me. And now, Zane Gort, you robost beast, let me go!"
She flirted her wrist from his grasp and started up the escalator, head held high. Zane followed her dispiritedly.
"I think you're getting too suspicious, Zane," Gaspard said with forced cheerfulness, bringing up the rear. "What reason would government men have to be interested in Rocket House?"
"The same reason that every consciousness in the system has, flesh, metal, or Venusian vegetable," the robot replied darkly. "Rocket House has something potentially valuable, or at least mysterious, that no one else has. That's all you ever need. To Space-Age man, every mystery is a greed-magnet." He shook his head. "I suppose I ought to take better precautions," he muttered.
As they approached the door to the partner's office Nurse Bishop threw it open, letting a surge of chatter escape into the hail.
"Hi, Gaspard," she called gayly. "Hello, Zane. How do, Miss Blushes. You two boys are just in time to help me trek the brats back to the Nursery."
"What's happened?" Gaspard asked. "Sounds like everybody's happy."
"Sure are! The brats have agreed to give Rocket's proposal a whirl. We buzzed the Nursery and the rest of the brains confirmed it. They'll each write a trial short booklength novel, strict anonymity, editorial direction only if desired, ten days' writing time allowed.
"Your first assignment, Gaspard, Mr. Flaxman says, will be to rent twenty-three voicewriters. Rocket can scare up seven."
THIRTY-ONE
During the first days of the Silver Eggheads Writing Derby, Gaspard de la Nuit found himself rapidly becoming everybody's porter, helper, and errand boy-and nobody's friend. Even dependable, square-shooting Zane Gort acquired the habit of being mysteriously absent more often than not when there was any lugging on the agenda, while it developed that Joe the Guard Zangwell had a heart condition that prevented him from carrying anything heavier than his skunk pistol or a lightly laden dustpan.
When Pop Zangwell quit drinking because he could no longer keep the stuff down, Gaspard had some hopes of getting a third-rate assistant, but it turned out that without liquor the old custodian merely became a jittery wreck twice as disturbing and useless as he had been while on the booze.
Flaxman and Cullingham turned down Gaspard's suggestion that a little extra help be hired, robot or human, on the grounds that it might slit the cloak of secrecy surrounding the Eggheads Project, a garment that seemed to Gaspard more holes than cloth to start with. They also hinted that Gaspard was exaggerating the amount of work the Derby involved.
But from his point of view there was certainly a weary plenty of lugging and kindred jobs to be done. Just getting hold of twenty-three voicewriters proved a Herculean task, involving trips all over New Angeles, since existing local stocks had all been rented or bought by hopeful union authors at the time of the wordmiil smash. Gaspard managed to re-rent a few from the disillusioned and bought the rest at prices that made Flaxman squeal.
Then a special connection had to be made on each voicewriter so that it could be plugged directly into an egg's mouth socket, bypassing the audible-sound stage. It was a simple enough job, taking little more than half an hour, as Zane Gort demonstrated step by step to Gaspard while adapting a voicewriter for Half Pint. Thus instructed, Gaspard adapted the other twenty nine, getting many new insights into the joys of the mechanic's life and the question of whether there really are any. He might have quit right there except that it was fun being badgered and wheedled by Bishop and the other nurses transmitting the imperious demands of the eggheads, who now all wanted to be equipped with voicewriters on the instant and were bitterly jealous of those who got machines first. Zane dropped back briefly to remark with an embittering admiration that while robots excelled at trouble-shooting and original work, it took a human working stiff to really carry through on a monotonous job.
It was during this job that Gaspard took to sleeping in at Rocket House, snatching naps in the mens' room on Joe the Guard's cot, odorous of Odor-Ban. When it was done, Gaspard briefly found a mildly pleasant pride in folding his pricked, gouged, and grim-engrained hands and sitting back in the Nursery to survey the machines he had adapted, each plugged into its egghead, while the endless rolls of paper rustled out in irregular bursts, or backtracked for x-ings out, or more often just sat still and silent while presumably the canned brains thought furiously.
He did not get to enjoy this leisure long, even if helping Miss Bishop and the other nurses with routine chores could be accounted leisure. As soon as the eggheads had machines, they began to demand daily and even more frequent storyconferences with Flaxman or Cullingham, necessitating that they and their voicewriters and other equipment be trundled over to the office, for the partners were always too busy to come to the Nursery. Gaspard early decided that the eggheads were not having any real trouble with their writing and certainly did not expect any sort of useful advice from incarnated humans, but merely enjoyed taking little trips after so many decades of being fettered to the Nursery by Zukie's rules.
It got so that at any time of the working day at least ten eggs would be over at the office, with a nurse, fresh fontanels, and so forth, having or awaiting or recuperating from conference. Gaspard fatigued his arms almost to the point of uselessness with lugging and came bitterly to detest most of the peevish, cruelly witty lead-heavy brains. Finally after applying several times to the partners, Gaspard was grudgingly given the use of Flaxman's limousine, when available, for transporting the eggs portal-to-portal, though even that left lugging a-plenty. He was also permitted after some demurs to set up a sketchy security system with one of the Zangwell brothers standing guard during the loading or unloading of the eggs, which now, also by Gaspard's suggestion, were transported cushioned with excelsior in plain boxes rather than the attention-getting gift wrappings.
As an ultimate concession to Gaspard's importunings about the need for greater security, Flaxman loaned him an antique revolver-style bullet-gun from his great grandfather's collection and even provided him with a stock of the proper ammunition, handmade to ancient specifications by robot gunsmiths. He had earlier tried to borrow Nurse Bishop's more modern handgun but had been curtly refused.