Del Rey, Lester - The Best Of Lester Del Rey.rtf

(713 KB) Pobierz

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A Del Key Book.

Published by Baliantine Books

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Baliantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and simultaneously in Canada by Baliantine Books of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-62267 ISBN 0-345-27336-2

Manufactured in the United States of America First Baliantine Books Edition: September 1978 Cover art by H. R. Van Dongen

TO BETTY BALLANTINE,

my long-time editor, with my deepest affection.

Contents

Introduction: The Magnificent Frederik Pohl

Helen O'Loy

The Day Is Done

The Coppersmith

Hereafter, Inc.

The Wings of Night

Into Thy Hands

And It Comes Out Here

The Monster

The Years Draw Nigh

Instinct

Superstition

For I Am a Jealous People

The Keepers of the House

Little Jimmy

The Seat of Judgment

Vengeance Is Mine

Author's Afterword

The Magnificent

THE UNQUESTIONED KING of-the nighttime air in New York radio is a skinny and sardonic fellow named Long John Nebel. Long John's marathon talk show runs from midnight till dawn every night of the week, and what it covers is everything. I don't just mean "everything." I mean everything. Politics. Religion. Sex. Hying saucers. Bermuda triangles. War. Science fiction. Science. Art. Music. You name it, it has been the subject of a Long John talkfest. And over the years, among his chosen nuclear guest family who join him after midnight to chew over the topic of the day, one voice has stood out. Whatever the subject, he has an opinion, and insights and facts to back it up. He has done the show 400 times at least, not counting reruns on tape, and he is so well known to the insomniacs of New York (and most other states) that he is usually introduced only as The Magnificent. He doesn't need to be given a name, because the listeners know him so well. But he has one. It is Lester del Rey.

Of course, there are countless thousands of people who have known Lester del Rey very well for a long time who have never heard him on Long John's show. They are people like you and me: science-fiction readers. We've known Lester for forty years, or even longer

All

if we remember those polemical letters in Astounding's "Brass Tacks" department in the '30s.

Like most sf writers, Lester came to the field as a reader. He liked what he read. After some thought, he concluded that he would like writing it, too. He had never written a science-fiction story at the time. That didn't seem to matter. He reasoned that if he thought of an idea no one else had thought of before, and told it concisely and literately, with some attention to interesting characters and colorful backgrounds, John Campbell would buy it. So he did. And so John did; it was called "The Faithful." That was the first story Lester sold John Campbell. It certainly wasn't the last. The Golden Age of Astounding was all the more lustrous for "Nerves," "Helen O'Loy," and all those others from his hard-driven typewriter.

Once he had formed the habit, Lester did not stop with Astounding. He wrote for all the other magazines, too, and when a few years later a couple of publishers took all their courage in their hands and began to experiment with science-fiction books, Lester was one of the first to get his sf nicely packaged in hard covers. He wrote a couple, then a flood, of novels especially for the book publishers. There are grown men (and grown women, too) all over the country who cut their literary wisdom teeth on sf juveniles by Philip St. John, Erik Van Lhin, and Kenneth Wright-all of whom were, in fact, Lester del Rey. Scott Meredith, then a young (but obviously canny) literary agent, grabbed Lester as a client, and shortly thereafter as an employee, and as Meredith's Number One assistant, Lester guided the careers of scores of other writers. When the science-fiction magazine market mushroomed in the early 1950s Lester became the editor of one of the most interesting-strike that; of four of the most interesting- magazines around. He did most of that pseudony-mously, too. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he was Philip St. John, editor of Science Fiction Adventures. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he was Wade Kaempf ert, editing Rocket Stories; and then he had the whole week-

end to himself, under his own name, to edit Space Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction Magazine.

I first met Lester del Rey when both of us were impossibly apple-cheeked youngsters. I was editing two cut-rate science-fiction magazines for Popular Publications, and Lester, on one of his rare visits to New York, brought to my office a couple of stories that John Campbell had had the unwisdom to turn down. In my youthful foolishness, I did the same. Well, you can excuse Campbell, because he had everybody in the field clamoring to get into his magazines. Maybe you can forgive me, too, because I was inexperienced. But how can you excuse Lester for what he did then? Since two editors had declined the stories, he figured there was something wrong with them. He put them aside-and now, four decades later, they're still aside, in fact lost irretrievably.

A war came along, scattering us all for a while. And then, in 1947, there was a world science-fiction convention in Philadelphia. We all saw each other again, met new friends, had a fine time. All in all it was a fine weekend; and Lester and I liked it so well that we conceived the idea of making it permanent.

Lester was living in New York City by then, and so was I, and we got ourselves and a coterie of friends together and created The Hydra Club, New York's longest-lived sf writers' chowder-and-marching society. Long after both Lester and I had left the city and stopped attending, the club carried on of its own momentum. One of the leading lights of Hydra was the late Fletcher Pratt, a marvelous, lovable, feisty man who had once been a bantamweight prize fighter and converted himself into the writer who produced the best one-volume history of the Civil War ever in print (among very much else that is noteworthy). Fletcher and Inga Pratt owned a great old monster of a house on the New Jersey shore. Lester and I (and our wives) were frequent weekend guests, and grew fond of the Monmouth County area. In 1951 I moved to Red

Bank. In 1954 the del Reys came out to visit the Pohls for a weekend. They stayed seventeen years.

Oh, it wasn't roses, roses all the way! Science-fiction writers are thorny people, given to obstinacy and adrenalin, and Lester is an archetypal science-fiction writer. He has sometimes been described as fulminate of mercury with a beard. I am not at all like that, of course, but nevertheless we had some rousers. We fought like wombats over astrophysics, horticulture, and whether the Bruch violin concerto deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the Mendelssohn. (Lester was wrong about that, though I must admit the Bruch is still very good.) In the days before baseball teams treacherously deserted their God-given home turfs to dally in California, Lester was misguidedly a partisan of the New York Giants, while I, of course, loyally supported the best team in the history of baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers. That caused a lot of trouble. Perhaps you remember hearing about Bobby Thomson's home run that cost Brooklyn a pennant? That was the closest I ever came to punching Lester out. He chortled.

But when the chips were down, when there was trouble-and there was grave trouble now and then for both of us-what Lester was was a friend. In 1970 Evelyn del Rey was killed hi a car crash. After that, Lester did not want to live in their house any more. He moved to New York, and so in a short time Carol and I had lost not only Ewie, but Lester as well. It was a somber

time.

But time passed; and then, when we now and then saw Lester on a visit, it was clear that somehow he was finding joy again. By and by it became clear that the joy had a name, and her name was Judy-Lynn Benjamin. I wholly approved. For one thing, I would not have dared not to; I had introduced them, when Lester was editing one of the magazines at the Galaxy complex and Judy-Lynn was the brand-new, fresh-out-of-college junior editor who saw that everything got done for us. They were married a few months later; and that, my children, is the story of how Del Rey Books got its name.

So I am not very objective about Lester del Rey, either as a writer or as a friend. As a writer, his awards speak for his standing in his field, but they don't have to. The stories speak for themselves, and what I can tell you in this short note cannot say as much for his writing as any of the works that follow. So let me talk about him in other ways. As the person who dyed his beard green in silent protest when his wife changed the color of her hair. As the tinkerer who redesigned the keyboard of his typewriter to economize on finger movements. As the man who taught me so wickedly addictive a form of solitaire that I have never since been able to play any other. As the coach, mentor, and advocate of a hundred newer writers, some of them now in the top rank of science fiction.

Lester has spent a great deal of his time in passing on the writers' tribal lore to newcomers. One of them was a brash young Ohio fan named Harlan Ellison. When Harlan heard I was writing these notes, he demanded equal time.

This is what he said:

I arrived in New York in late 1955; I was notable for two qualities: a relentless determination to be a professional writer, and squeaky-clean poverty. I had no place to live. Lester and his wonderful wife, the late Evelyn del Rey, took me in for a couple of weeks till I could find digs in the city. Sitting at the del Keys' dining room table, using the bartered Royal portable that had been virtually the only thing I'd salvaged when I'd been kicked out of Ohio State University a few months previous, I wrote my first story. Lester was unfailingly helpful. He would walk up behind me, read what I'd typed, see it was syntactically crippled, and bat me across the back of the head. "Not who, dummy! Whoml" He provided auctorial tips, he showed me how to cobble up the extrapolative science that would make my specious concepts work, he edited the manuscript. Ewie fed me.

After Algis Budrys and Andre Norton, who were the first writers to take an interest in me, Lester was the one who got me started thinking and writing as a professional. He wasn't kind, he was murderous; and that is a brutal treasure more valuable than all the strokes given by well-intentioned and inept amateurs who do not perceive one one-millionth as clearly as Lester did that writing is a killing craft, and only the tough survive and prevail.

For that savaging, I will always love and honor Lester.

A decade or so ago, Lester and I were comparing notes in the ril-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours way writers have when they suspect they may be up for the same prize.

Each year the World Science Fiction Convention selects some figure from the field to be its official Guest of Honor. Neither Lester nor I had ever been. The convention that would vote on it was coming up. The committee for the city that gets the convention picks its GoH, and they keep it secret until, and unless, they win the bid.

And it turned out that, in fact, we were competing for the honor that year. What I told Lester at the tune was true: I surely would enjoy being it. But if I had to lose, there wasn't anybody in the field I'd rather lose to.

Of course, I confess, I felt pretty easy at being generous about it. The odds were on my side. Several cities were bidding for the convention. Two of them had asked me to be their Guest of Honor, and only one had asked Lester.

The trouble with betting with the odds is that the odds don't always pay off. Lester's people won. He got the honor, and I had to skulk in darkness for several more years before emerging into glory in Los Angeles. But that's Lester for you. He makes a liar of the odds-layers every time.

He beat the odds for his own life some years back, against all the wisdom of medical science. The name of what happened to him is thromboeytopenia purpura. It

is a disease, and an uncommon one. When it happens at all, it happens to tiny babies. When babies do develop it, the victims are usually female. I will attempt to describe this for you, if you will pardon the use of technical medical terms: For some reason or other, all the platelets in the blood say, "Ah, screw it," at once. They stop clotting. The victim bleeds to death.

When grown male Lester del Rey's platelets did this he was in his forties, and the local doctors competed vigorously for the chance to attend this medical marvel-right away, because they didn't think a lot of his chances of surviving. They said, "Don't cut yourself, don't bump yourself, and, above all, for God's sake, don't sneeze." Lester humored them to that extent. He didn't sneeze. But he didn't die, either. He was one of the vanishingly small number of male adults who contract the disease in the first place, and the even tinier number who survive it to make a full recovery. Doctors don't know how he managed this, but I do. It was his stubbornness. He just didn't feel like dying then.

Let me give you an example of what a person like Lester can do against the odds when he sets his mind to it. I swear every word of this is true.

You know that the Apollo Project, which put the first man on the Moon, began shortly after the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1961.

Well, there is a novel by Lester del Rey (under his penname Philip St. John) called Rocket Jockey. It was published in 1951.

The space program had hardly begun when he was writing it, and Commander Neil Armstrong, who was to take that first great step for mankind a few years later, was still just another Navy pilot with the hope of someday sailing space. More than that. Sputnik and Vostok had made the American space program look pretty silly, and as far as anyone could tell, when that first man did walk on the Moon it was likely that the first message he would radio home might be in Russian.

Nevertheless-

Nevertheless the first sentence of that novel is fascinating. Many science-fiction stories have predicted fu-

ture events. Few have been as uncannily exact,* even to names, as this opening sentence:

"The first spaceship landed on the Moon, and Commander Armstrong stepped out."

Now do you understand why they call him The Magnificent?

FrederikPohl Red Bank, NJ. Christmas, 1977

*See Author's Afterword.

Helen O'Loy

I AM AN old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.

"Man, isn't she a beauty?"

She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that's what I told Dave.

"Helen of Troy, eh?" He looked at her tag. "At least it beats this thing-K2W88. Helen . . . Mmmm . . . Helen of Alloy."

"Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O'Loy?"

"Helen O'Loy she is, Phil." And that's how it began-one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broacast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.

Dave and I hadn't gone to college together, but when I came to Messina to practice medicine, I found him downstairs in a little robot repair shop. After that, we began to pal around, and when I started going with one twin, he found the other equally attractive, so we made it a foursome.

When our business grew better, we rented a house out near the rocket field-noisy but cheap, and the

rockets discouraged apartment building. We liked room enough to stretch ourselves. I suppose, if we hadn't quarreled with them, we'd have married the twins in time. But Dave wanted to look over the latest Venus-rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn. From then on, we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.

But it wasn't until "Lena" put vanilla on our steak instead of salt that we got off on the subject of emotions and robots: While Dave was dissecting Lena to find the trouble, we naturally mulled over the future of the mechs. He was sure that the robots would beat men some day, and I couldn't see it.

"Look here, Dave," I argued. "You know Lena doesn't think-not really. When those wires crossed, she could have corrected herself. But she didn't bother; she followed the mechanical impulse. A man might have reached for the vanilla, but when he saw it in his hand, he'd have stopped. Lena has sense enough, but she has no emotions, no consciousness of self."

"All right, that's the big trouble with the mechs now. But we'll get around it, put in some mechanical emotions, or something." He screwed Lena's head back on, turned on her juice. "Go back to work, Lena, it's nineteen o'clock."

Now I specialized in endocrinology and related subjects. I wasn't exactly a psychologist, but I did understand the glands, secretions, hormones, and miscellanies that are the physical causes of emotions. It took medical science three hundred years to find out how and why they worked, and I couldn't see men duplicating them mechanically in much less time.

I brought home books and papers to prove it, and Dave quoted the invention of memory coils and veritoid eyes. During that year we swapped knowledge until Dave knew the whole theory of endocrinology, and I could have made Lena from memory. The more we talked, the less sure I grew about the impossibility of Homo mechanensis as the perfect type.

Poor Lena. Her cuproberyl body spent half its time

in scattered pieces. Our first attempts were successful only in getting her to serve fried brushes for breakfast and wash the dishes in oleo oil. Then one day she cooked a perfect dinner with six wires crossed, and Dave was in ecstasy.

He worked all night on her wiring, put in a new coil, and taught her a fresh set of words. And the next day she flew into a tantrum and swore vigorously at-us when we told her she wasn't doing her work right.

"It's a lie," she yelled, shaking a suction brush. "You're all liars. If you so-and-so's would leave me whole long enough, I might get something done around the place."

When we calmed her temper and got her back to work, Dave ushered me into the study. "Not taking any chances with Lena," he explained. "We'll have to cut out that adrenal pack and restore her to normality. But we've got to get a better robot. A housemaid mech isn't complex enough."

"How about Dillard's new utility models? They seem to combine everything in one."

"Exactly. Even so, we'll need a special one built to order, with a full range of memory coils. And out of respect to old Lena, let's get a female case for its works."

The result, of course, was Helen. The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case. Even the plastic and rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair. The bill they sent with her was another miracle, but Dave and I scraped it together; we had to turn Lena over to an exchange to complete it, though, and thereafter we ate out.

I'd performed plenty of delicate operations on living tissues, and some of them had been tricky, but I still felt Kke a premed student as we opened the front plate of her torso and began to sever the leads of her "nerves." Dave's mechanical glands were all prepared, complex little bundles of pansistors and wires that heterodyned

on the electrical thought impulses and distorted them as adrenalin distorts the reaction of human minds.

Instead of sleeping that night, we pored over the schematic diagrams of her structures, tracing the complex thought mazes of her wiring, severing the leaders, implanting the heterones, as Dave called them. And while we worked, a mechanical tape fed carefully prepared thoughts of consciousness and awareness of life and feeling into an auxiliary memory coil. Dave believed in leaving nothing to chance.

It was growing light as we finished, exhausted and exultant. All that remained was the starting of her electrical power; like all the Dillard mechs, she was equipped with a tiny atomotor instead of batteries, and once started would need no further attention.

Dave refused to turn her on. "Wait until we've slept and rested," he advised. "I'm as eager to try her as you are, but we can't do much studying with our minds half-dead. Turn in, and we'll leave Helen until later."

Even though we were both reluctant to follow it, we knew the idea was sound. We turned in, and sleep hit us before the air conditioner could cut down to sleeping temperature. And then Dave was pounding on my shoulder.

"Phil! Hey, snap out of it!"

I groaned, turned over, and faced him. "Well? ... Uh! What is it? Did Helen-"

"No, it's old Mrs. van Styler. She 'visored to say her son has an infatuation for a servant girl, and she wants you to come out and give counterhormones. They're at the summer camp in Maine."

Rich Mrs. van Styler! I couldn't afford to let that account down, now that Helen had used up the last of my funds. But it wasn't a job I cared for.

"Counterhormones! That'll take two weeks' full time. Anyway, I'm no society doctor, messing with glands to keep fools happy. My job's taking care of serious trouble."

"And you want to watch Helen." Dave was grinning, but he was serious, too. "I told her it'd cost her fifty thousand!"

"Huh?"

"And she said okay, if you hurried."

Of course, there was only one thing to do, though I could have wrung fat Mrs. van Styler's neck cheerfully. It wouldn't have happened if she'd used robots like everyone else-but she had to be different.

Consequently, while Dave was back home puttering with Helen, I was racking my brain to trick Archy van Styler into getting the counterhormones, and giving the servant girl the same. Oh, I wasn't supposed to, but the poor kid was crazy about Archy. Dave might have written, I thought, but never a word did I get.

It was three weeks later instead of two when I reported that Archy was "cured," and collected on the line. With that money in my pocket, I hired a personal rocket and was back in Messina in half an hour. I didn't waste time in reaching the house.

As I stepped into the alcove, I heard a light patter of feet, and an eager voice called out, "Dave, dear?" For a minute I couldn't answer, and the voice came again, pleading, "Dave?"

I don't know what I expected, but I didn't expect Helen to meet me that way, stopping and staring at me, obvious disappointment on her face, little hands fluttering up against her breast.

"Oh," she cried. "I thought it was Dave. He hardly conies home to eat now, but I've had supper waiting hours." She dropped her hands and managed a smile. "You're Phil, aren't you? Dave told me about you when ... at first. I'm so glad to see you home, Phil."

"Glad to see you doing so well, Helen." Now what does one say for light conversation with a robot? "You said something about supper?"

"Oh, yes. I guess Dave ate downtown again, so we might as well go in. It'll be nice having someone to talk to around the house, Phil. You don't mind if I call you Phil, do you? You know, you're sort of a godfather to me."

We ate. I hadn't counted on such behavior, but apparently she considered eating as normal as walking.

She didn't do much eating, at that; most of the time she spent staring at the front, door.

Dave came in as we were finishing, a frown a yard wide on his face. Helen started to rise, but he ducked toward the stairs, throwing words over his shoulder.

"Hi, Phil. See you up here later."

There was something radically wrong with him. For a moment, I'd thought his eyes were haunted, and as I turned to Helen, hers were filling with tears. She gulped, choked them back, and fell to viciously on her food.

"What's the matter with him ... and you?" I asked.

"He's sick of me." She pushed her plate away and got up hastily. "You'd better see him while I clean up. And there's nothing wrong with me. And it's not my fault anyway," She grabbed the dishes and ducked into the kitchen; I could have sworn she was crying.

Maybe all thought is a series of conditioned reflexes- but she certainly had picked up a lot of conditioning while I was gone. Lena in her heyday had been nothing like this. I went up to see if Dave could make any sense out of the hodge-podge.

He was squirting soda into a large glass of apple brandy, and I saw that the bottle was nearly empty. "Join me?" he asked.

It seemed like a good idea. The roaring blast of an ion rocket overhead was the only familiar thing left in the house. From the look around Dave's eyes, it wasn't the first bottle he'd emptied while I was gone, and there were more left. He dug out a new bottle for his own drink.

"Of course, it's none of my business, Dave, but that stuff won't steady your nerves any. What's gotten into you and Helen? Been seeing ghosts?"

Helen was wrong; he hadn't been eating downtown- nor anywhere else. His muscles collapsed into a chair in a way that spoke of fatigue and nerves, but mostly of hunger. "You noticed it, eh?"

"Noticed it? The two of you jammed it down my throat."

"Uhmmm." He swatted at a nonexistent fly, and slumped further down in the pneumatic. "Guess maybe I should have waited with Helen until you got back. But if that stereo cast hadn't changed . . . anyway, it did. And those mushy books of yours finished the job."

"Thanks. That makes it all clear."

"You know, Phil, I've got a place up in the country . . . fruit ranch. My dad left it to me. Think I'll look it over."

And that's the way it went. But finally, by much liquor and more perspiration, I got some of the story out of him before I gave him an Amytal and put him to bed. Then I hunted up Helen and dug the rest of the story from her, until it made sense.

Apparently as soon as I was gone, Dave had turned her on and made preliminary tests, which were entirely satisfactory. She had reacted beautifully-so well that he decided to leave her and go down to work as usual.

Naturally, with all her untried emotions, she was filled with curiosity, and wanted him to stay. Then he had an inspiration. After showing her what her duties about the house would be, he set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.

The travelogue held her attention until it was finished, and the station switched over to a current serial with Larry Ainslee, the same cute emoter who'd given us all the trouble with the twins. Incidentally, he looked something like Dave.

Helen took to the serial like a seal to water. This play-acting was a perfect outlet for her newly excited emotions. When that particular episode finished, she found a love story on another station, and added still more to her education. The afternoon programs were mostly news and music, but by then she'd found my books; and I do have rather adolescent taste in literature.

Dave came home in the best of spirits. The front alcove was neatly swept, and there was the odor of food

in the air that he'd missed around the house for weeks. He had visions of Helen as the super-efficient housekeeper.

So it was a shock to him to feel two strong arms around his neck from behind and hear a voice all aquiver coo into his ears, "Oh, Dave, darling. I've missed you so, and I'm so thrilled that you're back." Helen's technique may have lacked polish, but it had enthusiasm, as he found when he tried to stop her from kissing him. She had learned fast and furiously-also, Helen was powered by an atomotor.

Dave wasn't a prude, but he remembered that she was only a robot, after all. The fact that she felt, acted, and looked like a young goddess in his arms didn't mean much. With some effort, he untangled her and dragged her off to supper, where he made her eat with him to divert her attention.

After her evening work, he called her into the study and gave her a thorough lecture on the folly of her ways. It must have been good, for it lasted three solid hours, and covered her station in life, the idiocy of stereos, and various other miscellanies. When he finished, Helen looked up with dewy eyes and said wistfully, "I know, Dave, but I still love you."

That's when Dave started drinking.

It grew worse each day. If he stayed downtown, she was crying when he came home. If he returned on time, she fussed over him and threw herself at him. In his room, with the door locked, he could hear her downstairs pacing up and down and muttering; and when he went down, she stared at him reproachfully until he had to go back up.

I sent Helen out on a fake errand in the morning and got Dave up. With her gone, I made him eat a decent breakfast and gave him a tonic for his nerves. He was still listless and moody.

"Look here, Dave," I broke in on his brooding. "Helen isn't human, after all. Why not cut off her power and change a few memory coils? Then we can convince

her that she never was in love and couldn't get that way."

"You try it. I had that idea, but she put up a wail that would wake Homer. She says it would be murder- and the hell of it is that I can't help feeling the same about it. Maybe she isn't human, but you wouldn't guess it when she puts on that martyred look and tells you to go ahead and kill her."

"We never put in substitutes for some of the secretions present in man during the love period."

"I don't know what we put in. Maybe the heterones backfired or something. Anyway, she's made this idea so much a part of her thoughts that we'd have to put in a whole new set of coils."

"Well, why not?"

"Go ahead. You're the surgeon of this family. I'm not used to fussing with emotions. Matter of fact, since she's been acting this way, I'm beginning to hate work on any robot. My business is going to blazes."

He saw Helen coming up the walk and ducked out the back door for the monorail express. I'd intended to put him back in bed, but let him go. Maybe he'd be better off at his shop than at home.

"Dave's gone?" Helen did have that martyred look now.

"Yeah. I got him to eat, and he's gone to work."

"I'm glad he ate." She slumped down in a chair as if she were worn out, though how a mech could be tired beat me. "Phil?"

"Well, what is it?"

"Do you think I'm bad for him? I mean, do you think he'd be happier if I weren't here?"

"He'll go crazy if you keep acting this way around him."

She winced. Those little hands were twisting about pleadingly, and I felt like an inhuman brute. But I'd started, and I went ahead. "Even if I cut out your power and changed your coils, he'd probably still be fcaunted by you."

"I know. But I can't help it. And I'd make him a good wife, really I would, Phil."

I gulped; this was getting a little too far. "And give Mm strapping sons to boot, I suppose. A man wants flesh and blood, not rubber and metal."

"Don't, please! I can't think of myself that way; to me, I'm a woman. And you know how perfectly-I'm made to imitate a real woman ... in all ways. I couldn't give him sons, but in every other way ... I'd try so hard, I know I'd make him a good wife."

I gave up.

Dave didn't come home that night, nor the next day. Helen was fussing and fuming, wanting me to call the hospitals and the police, but I knew nothing had happened to him. He always carried identification. Still, when he didn't come on the third day, I began to worry. And when Helen started out for his shop, I agreed to go with her.

Dave was there, with another man I didn't know. I parked Helen where he couldn't see her, ...

Plik z chomika:

Januszek66

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Back Seat_ A Mumbai Tale - Aditya Kripalani.mobi (755 KB)
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The - Junot Diaz.opf (3 KB)
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited_ - Steve Krug.mobi (9256 KB)
M. T. Anderson - Norumbegan 03 - The Empire of Gut and Bone # (v5.0).epub (2209 KB)
M. T. Anderson - Norumbegan 02 - The Suburb Beyond the Stars # (v5.0).epub (2105 KB)

Del Rey, Lester - The Best Of Lester Del Rey.rtf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: