Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (261 page)

“I didn’t mean to do that,” said Angie, dully, cold with horror. Now the detective would come, the implacable detective who would reconstruct the crime from the dust in the room. She would run and turn and twist, but the detective would find her out and she would be tried in a courtroom before a judge and jury; the lawyer would make speeches, but the jury would convict her anyway, and the headlines would scream: “BLONDE KILLER GUILTY!” and she’d maybe get the chair, walking down a plain corridor where a beam of sunlight struck through the dusty air, with an iron door at the end of it. Her mink, her convertible, her dresses, the handsome man she was going to meet and marry—

The mist of cinematic clichés cleared, and she knew what she would do next. Quite steadily, she picked the incinerator box from its loop in the board—a metal cube with a different-textured spot on one side. “—to dispose of fibroses or other unwanted matter, simply touch the disk—” You dropped something in and touched the disk. There was a sort of soundless whistle, very powerful and unpleasant if you were too close, and a sort of lightless flash. When you opened the box again, the contents were gone. Angie took another of the Cautery Series knives and went grimly to work. Good thing there wasn’t any blood to speak of— She finished the awful task in three hours.

She slept heavily that night, totally exhausted by the wringing emotional demands of the slaying and the subsequent horror. But in the morning, it was as though the doctor had never been there. She ate breakfast, dressed with unusual care—and then undid the unusual care. Nothing out of the ordinary, she told herself. Don’t do one thing different from the way you would have done it before. After a day or two, you can phone the cops. Say he walked out spoiling for a drunk, and you’re worried. But don’t rush it, baby—don’t rush it.

Mrs. Coleman was due at 10:00 A.M. Angie had counted on being able to talk the doctor into at least one more five-hundred-dollar session. She’d have to do it herself now—but she’d have to start sooner or later.

The woman arrived early. Angie explained smoothly: “The doctor asked me to take care of the massage today. Now that he has the tissue-firming process beginning, it only requires somebody trained in his methods—” As she spoke, her eyes swiveled to the instrument case—open! She cursed herself for the single flaw as the woman followed her gaze and recoiled.

“What are those things!” she demanded. “Are you going to cut me with them? I
thought
there was something fishy—”

“Please, Mrs. Coleman,” said Angie, “please,
dear
Mrs. Coleman—you don’t understand about the . . . the massage instruments!”

“Massage instruments, my foot!” squabbled the woman shrilly. “That doctor operated on me. Why, he might have killed me!”

Angie wordlessly took one of the smaller Cutaneous Series knives and passed it through her forearm. The blade flowed like a finger through quicksilver, leaving no wound in its wake.
That
should convince the old cow!

It didn’t convince her, but it did startle her. “What did you do with it? The blade folds up into the handle—that’s it!”

“Now look closely, Mrs. Coleman,” said Angie, thinking desperately of the five hundred dollars. “Look very closely and you’ll see that the, uh, the sub-skin massager simply slips beneath the tissues without doing any harm, tightening and firming the muscles themselves instead of having to work through layers of skin and adipose tissue. It’s the secret of the doctor’s method. Now, how can outside massage have the effect that we got last night?”

Mrs. Coleman was beginning to calm down. “It
did
work, all right,” she admitted, stroking the new line of her neck. “But your arm’s one thing and my neck’s another! Let me see you do that with your neck!”

Angie smiled—

* * * *

Al returned to the clinic after an excellent lunch that had almost reconciled him to three more months he would have to spend on duty. And then, he thought, and then a blessed year at the blessedly super-normal South Pole working on his specialty—which happened to be telekinesis exercises for ages three to six. Meanwhile, of course, the world had to go on and of course he had to shoulder his share in the running of it.

Before settling down to desk work he gave a routine glance at the bag board. What he saw made him stiffen with shocked surprise. A red light was on next to one of the numbers—the first since he couldn’t think when. He read off the number and murmured “Okay, 674,101. That fixes
you
.” He put the number on a card sorter and in a moment the record was in his hand. Oh, yes—Hemingway’s bag. The big dummy didn’t remember how or where he had lost it; none of them ever did. There were hundreds of them floating around.

Al’s policy in such cases was to leave the bag turned on. The things practically ran themselves, it was practically impossible to do harm with them, so whoever found a lost one might as well be allowed to use it. You turn it off, you have a social loss—you leave it on, it may do some good. As he understood it, and not very well at that, the stuff wasn’t “used up.” A temporalist had tried to explain it to him with little success that the prototypes in the transmitter had been transducted through a series of point-events of transfinite cardinality. Al had innocently asked whether that meant prototypes had been stretched, so to speak, through all time, and the temporalist had thought he was joking and left in a huff.

“Like to see him do this,” thought Al darkly, as he telekinized himself to the combox, after a cautious look to see that there were no medics around. To the box he said: “Police chief,” and then to the police chief: “There’s been a homicide committed with Medical Instrument Kit 674,101. It was lost some months ago by one of my people, Dr. John Hemingway. He didn’t have a clear account of the circumstances.”

The police chief groaned and said: “I’ll call him in and question him.” He was to be astonished by the answers, and was to learn that the homicide was well out of his jurisdiction.

Al stood for a moment at the bag board by the glowing red light that had been sparked into life by a departing vital force giving, as its last act, the warning that Kit 674,101 was in homicidal hands. With a sigh, Al pulled the plug and the light went out.

* * * *

“Yah,” jeered the woman. “You’d fool around with my neck, but you wouldn’t risk your own with that thing!”

Angie smiled with serene confidence a smile that was to shock hardened morgue attendants. She set the Cutaneous Series knife to three centimeters before drawing it across her neck. Smiling, knowing the blade would cut only the dead horny tissue of the epidermis and the live tissue of the dermis, mysteriously push aside all major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue—

Smiling, the knife plunging in and its microtomesharp metal shearing through major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue and pharynx, Angie cut her throat.

In the few minutes it took the police, summoned by the shrieking Mrs. Coleman, to arrive, the instruments had become crusted with rust, and the flasks which had held vascular glue and clumps of pink, rubbery alveoli and spare grey cells and coils of receptor nerves held only black slime, and from them when opened gushed the foul gases of decomposition.

* * * *

Copyright © 1950 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc.

(1910–1992)

Fritz Leiber’s parents were Shakespearean actors, and he spent two years touring with his father’s company after graduating from the University of Chicago (with honors in psychology and physiology) in 1932. A marriage and a move to Hollywood followed, where Leiber set out to write both films and supernatural fiction. His writing often lived in a middle ground between science fiction, fantasy, horror, and erotica, and he would discard established genres entirely, as when he coined the term “sword and sorcery” for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser fantasies beginning in 1939. Perhaps because of his theatrical background, there is a brooding sensuality that runs through nearly all of Leiber’s work.

After his son’s birth, Leiber moved back to Chicago, and he alternated between Chicago and California for the rest of his life, writing and working in various publishing, teaching, and other positions. Although he struggled badly with alcoholism, something he wrote about in his last novel,
Our Lady of Darkness
(1977), Leiber wrote right up to his death at age eighty-one. He won six Hugos, three Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and was named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master. His son, Justin, went on to write fantasy as well.

“Robie” in the story is a play on the title character of Isaac Asimov’s over-optimistic robot story, “Robbie.”

First published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, July 1953

The big bright doors parted with a whoosh and Robie glided suavely onto Times Square. The crowd that had been watching the fifty-foot tall clothing-ad girl get dressed, or reading the latest news about the Hot Truce scrawl itself in yard-high script, hurried to look.

Robie was still a novelty. Robie was fun. For a little while yet he could steal the show.

But the attention did not make Robie proud. He had no more vanity than the pink plastic giantess, and she did not even flicker her blue mechanical eyes.

Robie radared the crowd, found that it surrounded him solidly, and stopped. With a calculated mysteriousness, he said nothing.

“Say, ma, he doesn’t look like a robot at all. He looks sort of like a turtle.”

Which was not completely inaccurate. The lower part of Robie’s body was a metal hemisphere hemmed with sponge rubber and not quite touching the sidewalk. The upper was a metal box with black holes in it. The box could swivel and duck.

A chromium-bright hoopskirt with a turret on top.

“Reminds me too much of the Little Joe Baratanks,” a veteran of the Persian War muttered, and rapidly rolled himself away on wheels rather like Robie’s.

His departure made it easier for some of those who knew about Robie to open a path in the crowd. Robie headed straight for the gap. The crowd whooped.

Robie glided very slowly down the path, deftly jogging aside whenever he got too close to ankles in skylon or sockassins. The rubber buffer on his hoopskirt was merely an added safeguard.

The boy who had called Robie a turtle jumped in the middle of the path and stood his ground, grinning foxily.

Robie stopped two feet short of him. The turret ducked. The crowd got quiet.

“Hello, youngster,” Robie said in a voice that was smooth as that of a TV star, and was in fact a recording of one.

The boy stopped smiling. “Hello,” he whispered.

“How old are you?” Robie asked.

“Nine. No, eight.”

“That’s nice,” Robie observed. A metal arm shot down from his neck, stopped just short of the boy. The boy jerked back.

“For you,” Robie said gently.

The boy gingerly took the red polly-lop from the neatly fashioned blunt metal claws. A gray-haired woman whose son was a paraplegic hurried on.

After a suitable pause Robie continued, “And how about a nice refreshing drink of Poppy Pop to go with your polly-lop?” The boy lifted his eyes but didn’t stop licking the candy. Robie wiggled his claws ever so slightly. “Just give me a quarter and within five seconds—”

A little girl wriggled out of the forest of legs. “Give me a polly-lop too, Robie,” she demanded.

“Rita, come back here,” a woman in the third rank of the crowd called angrily.

Robie scanned the newcomer gravely. His reference silhouettes were not good enough to let him distinguish the sex of children, so he merely repeated, “Hello, youngster.”

“Rita!”

“Give me a polly-lop!”

Disregarding both remarks, for a good salesman is single-minded and does not waste bait, Robie said winningly, “I’ll bet you read
Junior Space Killers.
Now I have here—”

“Uh-hhh, I’m a girl.
He
got a polly-lop.”

At the word “girl” Robie broke off. Rather ponderously he said, “Then—” After another pause he continued, “I’ll bet you read
Gee-Gee Jones, Space Stripper.
Now I have here the latest issue of that thrilling comic, not yet in the stationary vending machines. Just give me fifty cents and within five—”

“Please let me through. I’m her mother.”

A young woman in the front rank drawled over her powder-sprayed shoulder. “I’ll get her for you,” and slithered out on six-inch platforms. “Run away, children,” she said nonchalantly and lifting her arms behind her head, pirouetted slowly before Robie to show how much she did for her bolero half-jacket and her form-fitting slacks that melted into skylon just above the knees. The little girl glared at her. She ended the pirouette in profile.

At this age-level Robie’s reference silhouettes permitted him to distinguish sex, though with occasional amusing and embarrassing miscalls. He whistled admiringly. The crowd cheered.

Someone remarked critically to his friend. “It would go better if he was built more like a real robot. You know, like a man.”

The friend shook his head. “This way it’s subtler.”

No one in the crowd was watching the newscript overhead as it scribbled, “Ice Pack for Hot Truce? Vanadin hints Russ may yield on Pakistan.”

Robie was saying, “…in the savage new glamor-tint we have christened Mars Blood, complete with spray applicator and fit-all fingerstalls that mask each finger completely except for the nail. Just give me five dollars—uncrumpled bills may be fed into the revolving rollers you see beside my arm—and within five seconds—”

“No thanks, Robie,” the young woman yawned.

“Remember,” Robie persisted, “for three more weeks seductivising Mars Blood will be unobtainable from any other robot or human vendor.”

“No thanks.”

Robie scanned the crowd resourcefully. “Is there any gentleman here…” he began just as a woman elbowed her way through the front rank.

“I told you come back!” she snarled at the little girl.

“But I didn’t get my polly-lop!”

“…who would care to…”

“Rita!”

“Robie cheated. Ow!”

Meanwhile the young woman in the half-bolero had scanned the nearby gentlemen on her own. Deciding that there was less than a fifty per cent chance of any of them accepting the proposition Robie seemed about to make, she took advantage of the scuffle to slither gracefully back into the ranks. Once again the path was clear before Robie.

He paused, however, for a brief recapitulation of the more magical properties of Mars Blood, including a telling phrase about “the passionate claws of a Martian sunrise.”

But no one bought. It wasn’t quite time yet. Soon enough silver coins would be clinking, bills going through the rollers faster than laundry, and five hundred people struggling for the privilege of having their money taken away from them by America’s only genuine mobile salesrobot.

But now was too soon. There were still some tricks that Robie did free, and one certainly should enjoy those before starting the more expensive fun.

So Robie moved on until he reached the curb. The variation in level was instantly sensed by his under-scanners. He stopped. His head began to swivel. The crowd watched in eager silence. This was Robie’s best trick.

Robie’s head stopped swiveling. His scanners had found the traffic light. It was green. Robie edged forward. But then it turned red. Robie stopped again, still on the curb. The crowd softly ahhed its delight.

Oh, it was wonderful to be alive and watching Robie on such a wonderful day. Alive and amused in the fresh, weather-controlled air between the lines of bright skyscrapers with their winking windows and under a sky so blue you could almost call it dark.

(But way, way up, where the crowd could not see, the sky was darker still. Purple-dark, with stars showing. And in that purple-dark, a silver-green something, the color of a bud, plunged downward at better than three miles a second. The silver-green was a paint that foiled radar.)

Robie was saying, “While we wait for the light there’s time for you youngsters to enjoy a nice refreshing Poppy Pop. Or for you adults—only those over five feet are eligible to buy—to enjoy an exciting Poppy Pop fizz. Just give me a quarter or—I’m licensed to dispense intoxicating liquors—in the case of adults one dollar and a quarter and within five seconds…”

But that was not cutting it quite fine enough. Just three seconds later the silver-green bud bloomed above Manhattan into a globular orange flower. The skyscrapers grew brighter and brighter still, the brightness of the inside of the sun. The windows winked white fire.

The crowd around Robie bloomed too. Their clothes puffed into petals of flame. Their heads of hair were torches.

The orange flower grew, stem and blossom. The blast came. The winking windows shattered tier by tier, became black holes. The walls bent, rocked, cracked. A stony dandruff dribbled from their cornices. The flaming flowers on the sidewalk were all leveled at once. Robie was shoved ten feet. His metal hoopskirt dimpled, regained its shape.

The blast ended. The orange flower, grown vast, vanished overhead on its huge, magic beanstalk. It grew dark and very still. The cornice-dandruff pattered down. A few small fragments rebounded from the metal hoopskirt.

Robie made some small, uncertain movements, as if feeling for broken bones. He was hunting for the traffic light, but it no longer shone, red or green.

He slowly scanned a full circle. There was nothing anywhere to interest his reference silhouettes. Yet whenever he tried to move, his under-scanners warned him of low obstructions. It was very puzzling.

The silence was disturbed by moans and a crackling sound, faint at first as the scampering of rats.

A seared man, his charred clothes fuming where the blast had blown out the fire, rose from the curb. Robie scanned him.

“Good day, sir,” Robie said. “Would you care for a smoke? A truly cool smoke? Now I have here a yet-unmarketed brand…”

But the customer had run away, screaming, and Robie never ran after customers, though he could follow them at a medium brisk roll. He worked his way along the curb where the man had sprawled, carefully keeping his distance from the low obstructions, some of which writhed now and then, forcing him to jog. Shortly he reached a fire hydrant. He scanned it. His electronic vision, though it still worked, had been somewhat blurred by the blast.

“Hello, youngster,” Robie said. Then, after a long pause, “Cat got your tongue? Well, I’ve got a little present for you. A nice, lovely polly-lop.” His metal arm snaked down.

“Take it, youngster,” he said after another pause. “It’s for you. Don’t be afraid.”

His attention was distracted by other customers, who began to rise up oddly here and there, twisting forms that confused his reference silhouettes and would not stay to be scanned properly. One cried, “Water,” but no quarter clinked in Robie’s claws when he caught the word and suggested, “How about a nice refreshing drink of Poppy Pop?”

The rat-crackling of the flames had become a jungle muttering. The blind windows began to wink fire again.

A little girl marched up, stepping neatly over arms and legs she did not look at. A white dress and the once taller bodies around her had shielded her from the brilliance and the blast. Her eyes were fixed on Robie. In them was the same imperious confidence, though none of the delight, with which she had watched him earlier.

“Help me, Robie,” she said. “I want my mother.”

“Hello, youngster,” Robie said. “What would you like? Comics? Candy?”

“Where is she, Robie? Take me to her.”

“Balloons? Would you like to watch me blow up a balloon?”

The little girl began to cry. The sound triggered off another of Robie’s novelty circuits.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. “Are you in trouble? Are you lost?”

“Yes, Robie. Take me to my mother.”

“Stay right here,” Robie said reassuringly, “and don’t be frightened. I will call a policeman.” He whistled shrilly, twice.

Time passed. Robie whistled again. The windows flared and roared. The little girl begged, “Take me away, Robie,” and jumped onto a little step in his hoopskirt.

“Give me a dime,” Robie said. The little girl found one in her pocket and put it in his claws.

“Your weight,” Robie said, “is fifty-four and one-half pounds, exactly.”

“Have you seen my daughter, have you seen her?” a woman was crying somewhere. “I left her watching that thing while I stepped inside—Rita!”

“Robie helped me,” the little girl was telling her moments later. “He knew I was lost. He even called a policeman, but he didn’t come. He weighed me too. Didn’t you, Robie?”

But Robie had gone off to peddle Poppy Pop to the members of a rescue squad which had just come around the corner, more robot-like than he in their fireproof clothing.

* * * *

Copyright © 1953 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.