The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction Megapack(r)

  It was pathetic.

  Summing up the problem in his neat forensic way, Leonard said, “Here’s our dilemma: Do we all keep quiet about this and ruin our lives, or do we speak up and ruin Mother’s experiment?”

  “I think we ought to continue as is, for the time being,” Saul said. “Perhaps Mother will die in the next year or two. We can start over then.”

  “Perhaps she doesn’t die?” Edward wanted to know. “She’s tough as nails. She may last another twenty or thirty or even forty years.”

  “And we’re past twenty-one already,” remarked Raymond. “If we hang on too long at what we’re doing, it’ll be too late to change. You can’t start studying for a new profession when you’re thirty-five.”

  “Maybe we’ll get to like what we’re doing by then,” suggested David hopefully. “Diplomatic service isn’t as bad as all that, and I’d say—”

  “What about me?” Paul yelped. “I can’t paint and I know I can’t paint. I’ve got nothing but starvation ahead of me unless I wise up and get into business in a hurry. You want me to keep messing up good white canvas the rest of my life?”

  “It won’t work,” said Barry in a doleful voice. “We’ll have to tell her.”

  Douglas shook his head. “We can’t do that. You know just what she’ll do. She’ll bring down the umpteen volumes of notes she’s made on this experiment, and ask us if we’re going to let it all come to naught.”

  “He’s right,” Albert said. “I can picture the scene now. The big organ-pipe voice blasting us for our lack of faith, the accusations of ingratitude—”

  “Ingratitude?” William shouted. “She twisted us and pushed us and molded us without asking our permission. Hell, she created us with her laboratory tricks. But that didn’t give her the right to make zombies out of us.”

  “Still,” Martin said, “we can’t just go to her and tell her that it’s all over. The shock would kill her.

  “Well?” Richard asked in the silence that followed. “What’s wrong with that?”

  For a moment, no one spoke. The house was quiet; we heard footsteps descending the stairs. We froze.

  Mother appeared, an imperial figure even in her old housecoat. “You boys are kicking up too much of a racket down here,” she boomed. “I know you’re glad to see each other again after a year, but I need my sleep.”

  She turned and strode upstairs again. We heard her bedroom door slam shut. For an instant we were all ten-year-olds again, diligently studying our books for fear of Mother’s displeasure.

  I moistened my lips. “Well?” I asked. “I call for a vote on Richard’s suggestion.”

  Martin, as a chemist, prepared the drink, using Donald’s medical advice as his guide. Saul, Stephen, and Raymond dug a grave, in the woods at the back of our property. Douglas and Mark built the coffin.

  Richard, ending his criminal career with a murder to which we were all accessories before the fact, carried the fatal beverage upstairs to Mother the next morning, and persuaded her to sip it. One sip was all that was necessary; Martin had done his work well.

  Leonard offered us a legal opinion: It was justifiable homicide. We placed the body in its coffin and carried it out across the fields. Richard, Peter, Jonas and Charles were her pallbearers; the others of us followed in their path.

  We lowered the body into the ground and John said a few words over her. Then, slowly, we closed over the grave and replaced the sod, and began the walk back to the house.

  “She died happy,” Anthony said. “She never suspected the size of her failure.” It was her epitaph.

  As our banker, James supervised the division of her assets, which were considerable, into thirty-one equal parts. Noel composed a short figment of prose which we agreed summed up our sentiments.

  We left the farm that night, scattering in every direction, anxious to begin life. All that went before was a dream from which we now awakened. We agreed to meet at the farm each year, on the anniversary of her death, in memory of the woman who had so painstakingly divided a zygote into thirty-two viable cells, and who had spent a score of years conducting an experiment based on a theory that had proved to be utterly false.

  We felt no regret, no qualm. We had done what needed to be done, and on that last day some of us had finally functioned in the professions for which Mother had intended us.

  I, too. My first and last work of history will be this, an account of Mother and her experiment, which records the beginning and the end of her work. And now it is complete.

  THE WOMAN YOU WANTED

  Originally published in Future Science Fiction, April 1958.

  The offices of the Interstellar Survey Commission were on Greek Street, just off Soho Square. The day that Bradmire decided to sign up for a Commission post was a warm, almost muggy one—unusual for London in late August—and he felt strangely clammy as he left his Bayswater flat and waited opposite Hyde Park for the Number Seventeen bus.

  He thought of all he was giving up. Not much, was it, really? A handful of friends, all of them at loose ends much like himself. Books—well, he could take some with him.

  Music—that, too. No more concerts at dear shabby old Royal Festival Hall, but he could take musicdisks with him on the trip. The Commission were very good to the young men who signed up. The eight-year tour of duty was worth fifteen thousand quid, tax-free; that was good pay, all things considered, and the work was fascinating.

  A lot better than living in an archaic London flat and scribbling poetry. A lot better than spending afternoons in the British Museum and evenings writing critical essays for ephemeral little magazines. Bradmire was slowly coming to the realization that the London literary life was not for him. In the Cambridge days, it had been fine to look forward to London—but now he was here, and it was merely hollow and irritating to him.

  So he would go to space. He would become a planet-rover and record data as a minion of the Survey Commission, and perhaps when he returned he would write a best-seller and live in peace and plenty in some Cornwall town.

  They would make a fuss over him as he signed the contract. Others had told him how it was. They gave you a fistful of pound notes and told you to go out and enjoy yourself for a week; they clucked over you as they found out what you would want by way of comforts on the trip; and they psych-tested you for your android companion—

  Who would be the woman of his dreams. The tests were infallible; they always gave you the woman you wanted, synthetic of course, to aid you in stability-maintenance during the long trip. Bradmire was slightly doubtful about making love to an android, but one of his more decadent friends had already tried it and said it was almost like the real thing—and after a while, no doubt, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

  He wondered. There was a grim, almost fatalistic smile on his face as he spied the Number Seventeen bus topping the rise in the hill. Low-slung, a humming teardrop, it came toward him and stopped as he waved his hand at it. He clambered aboard.

  “Wardour Street,” he told the robot-conductor.

  “Sixpence,” said the blank-faced metal being.

  Bradmire dropped one of the shiny little copper coins into the slot, entered the passenger section of the bus, and tumbled into his seat. The bus sped along down Bayswater Road toward Marble Arch, and thence into the archaic hodgepodge that was London’s West End.

  He examined his money. Two copper sixpences, one of the old silver kind; a florin; a pair of pennies, and a bright gold guinea. Twenty-four shillings and eightpence, of which one of the pennies—the battered old large-size Charles III piece—was his good-luck coin, and therefore unspendable. It wasn’t very much cash at all. And there wouldn’t be any money forthcoming from the publishers for at least a week, by which time he would be very hungry indeed.

  His back was to the wall. He had no choic
e but to sign up.

  Let Marian and John and Kenneth and the others chide him for selling out, he thought doggedly. Let them. He was tired of bohemianism—and with all of the universe waiting to be explored, it was hopelessly provincial to remain in London.

  He got off the bus at Wardour and walked east along Oxford Street, turning south and taking a twisting route through Dean onto Greek Street. The Commission building was one of the new ones, tall and gleaming, fronted with glossy plastic, that had been erected in Soho in the last decade; the architect had inscribed a glittering gold “2129” on the facade for the benefit of future historians.

  Bradmire fingered the card in his pocket. It bore the name of Sir Adrian Laurence, Recruiting Chairman, Suite 1100. He moistened his lips nervously.

  The double doors swung open at his approach. A robot waited inside, seven feet tall and mirror-bright. Bradmire felt unutterably shabby. He straightened his tattered frock coat and said, “Suite 1100, please.”

  Of course, the robot’s expression did not change, but it seemed to Bradmire that it had smiled condescendingly as it said, in suave Oxford tones, “Naturally, sir. The grav tube on your left.”

  “T-thank you,” Bradmire stammered. He had never been sure whether robots were entitled to politeness.

  He stepped into the grav tube and drifted upward to the eleventh floor; there he was deposited in a shining corridor. A vast door loomed above, with an immense 1100 inscribed on it. Bradmire went forward.

  The door rolled back when he was within a foot of it, and he found himself confronted by a blonde receptionist of quite unnerving proportions. He wondered whether she, too, were an android.

  “May I help you?” she asked sweetly.

  “I’m—1ooking for Sir Adrian Laurence,” he blurted. “I want to sign up. I mean…”

  “I understand,” she said, and it seemed to Bradmire that she did. “Come this way, please?”

  She led him down a brightly-lit foyer. He followed, studying her construction avidly, and deciding that if she were a sample of Commission androids he wouldn’t object to getting one.

  “May I have your name, please?” she asked as they reached a broad oak door.

  “Bradmire. David H. K. Bradmire.”

  She inclined her head toward a minute speaker-grid set into the rich oak and said, “Mr. David Bradmire to see you, Sir Adrian.”

  The door opened. Bradmire stared at a man of his own height, fiftyish, with a baronet’s yellow wig and a strikingly modern blue-and-red dress suit. “Won’t you come in, Mr. Bradmire?”

  The office was furnished in the best of taste. Bradmire took a seat in a quivering web hammock facing Sir Adrian’s desk and said, “You know why I’m here, of course. I want to sign up for a Commission post.”

  “Excellent! Drink?”

  Bradmire accepted a cognac and a cigar as if he were fully accustomed to such luxuries before noon every day. He leaned back comfortably. He felt fully at ease, now, with no lingering doubts.

  “What is your profession, Mr. Bradmire?”

  Bradmire grinned. “I’m a poet and essayist, Sir Adrian. Came down from Cambridge in ’29. Average income, 2129-2132, three hundred fifty pounds per annum. So I’m throwing in the towel.”

  Sir Adrian’s face darkened. “You know that’s not really so, of course. You aren’t giving up your ambitions. You’re merely—shall we say—postponing them until you’re more mature. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Ah. You’ll return from the stars at age thirty-four, still a young man in today’s world. You’ll be wealthy—fifteen thousand pounds, plus accrued interest. You’ll have a vast store of experience; you’ll have seen dozens of bizarre alien worlds, gone places and done things few of your poetic contemporaries have done. And you’ll have the comforting knowledge that you have done something valuable for society. Then you’ll be able to create, David! You’ll have something to say to humanity—and humanity will listen, and reward you!”

  Bradmire admitted to himself that Sir Adrian made it sound remarkably attractive—desirable, in fact. Not at all the hopeless last-resort gesture he had seen it as. He felt adrenalin surging through his body.

  He said, “I’m roughly familiar with the terms, but would you run through them again…?”

  “Of course.” Sir Adrian knotted his hands together, smiling. “You sign on for an eight-year term, of which the first three months is spent in preliminary instruction. We supply you with a small two-person scoutship which is equipped with an automatic course computer. There’ll be nothing for you to do but wander from star to star and beam reports to us on planetary systems, possible life forms, and so forth. We need thousands of men to do this work, which is why the terms are so attractive.

  “Your pay is fifteen thousand pounds, placed on deposit for you at Lloyd’s and collectible on the day of your return. It’s tax-free. You’ll also be supplied with whatever books, musicdisks, or other recreational equipment you desire.” He paused. “And also, our laboratories will furnish you with a female android companion who will be as close to your desired specifications as modern science can manage.”

  “It has to be an android, sir? I mean, I couldn’t take any human girl I happened to know…”

  Theoretically, you could, of course. But the requirement is that she must come within .0001 of your subconscious specifications, and we find in practical application that such women are extremely rare. But the manufactured synthetics are—ah—highly desirable, and fully human in all but their origin.”

  “Suppose I—don’t want any companion. What if I want to go it alone?”

  “Impossible, I’m afraid. Our ships are expensive, and we can’t take the risk of losing any. Solitaries are inherently unstable. The sort of man we want is mentally alert, gregarious, well-balanced, and—ahem—normally heterosexual. It’s been our experience that other types don’t provide satisfactory performances.”

  Bradmire chuckled. “I don’t know how well-balanced I am, but I can testify to the heterosexual part.”

  “I hope so. If you accede to our terms, we can test you in a matter of seconds to judge your suitability. Another drink?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Bradmire said.

  * * * *

  Three hours later, and quite some miles away, Bradmire finished what he had to say with, “…so I signed up.” It was early in the afternoon; he sat in The Kenya, one of London’s cozy old espresso-houses, in South Kensington near Exhibition Road. He sipped his cappuccino and smiled at the little group of friends around the table.

  “And they gave you fifty pounds expense money?” John Ryson asked incredulously. He was a slim, pale lad, down from Cambridge like Bradmire, who had been working intermittently on an immense narrative poem for the past four years. “Fifty pounds just to throw away in a week?”

  “You saw the notes,” Bradmire said. “Ten crisp little green fivers. Ten pretty little portraits of Queen Diane.” He scooped three gold guinea coins from his pockets and stacked them on the table. They represented change from his first purchase, a box of cigars for his friends. He tapped the gleaming profile of Henry X and grinned in cheerful commerciality. “I hope you’ll pardon this rather vulgar display on my part, chums. But it’s been years since I last had three of these little things all at the same time, and I feel like crowing about it.”

  “Fifteen thousand when you get back,” Bert Selfridge muttered. He was thirty-two, going prematurely gray, with a sharp little beard. He taught Remedial Grammar at University College. “A fortune! And for what? Chasing around from star to star, looking for little green men.”

  “Jealous, Burt? Why don’t you sign up, then? Surely what I’ll be doing is just as valuable to humanity as teaching the rudiments of our language to a bunch of rebellious would-be chemists and engineers.”
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  “Aren’t you giving up too much, though?” Ryson wanted to know. “Eight solid years…”

  “But there’s no reason why I can’t write during that time. And I’ll have no room and board problems, and no yammering landladies or squalling back-alley tomcats. And the company of my perfect woman.”

  “Perfection can get tiresome,” Selfridge said half to his beard.

  “Have you tried it?” Bradmire retorted.

  “When are you leaving, David?” asked Marian Hawkes.

  Bradmire glanced across the table at her. She was a quiet girl with a deep, soft, easy-to-listen to voice—but she rarely spoke. She was either terribly shy or terribly arrogant, Bradmire had decided earlier; either way, the effect was the same.

  “At the end of this week,” he said. “I passed the first battery of psychological tests this afternoon. All they do is strap a funny hat on your head and throw a switch, and bzzz! A meter ticks, and you’re either in or out. I was okayed.”

  “What are the qualifications?” Marian asked.

  “Not very much,” Bradmire told her. “Good health, sound mental outlook, general stability. And heterosexuality.”

  “They didn’t have to test you for that,” Tyson said. “We could have given them affidavits for you.”

  Bradmire chuckled. He had always had a reputation as a ladies’ man—and, as is usually true in such cases, the reputation was far in excess of actuality, through little fault of his own. “They insisted on doing it their way.” He smiled. “In two days I go back to—ah—get fitted for my android light-o’love. At the end of the week, it’s off to indoctrination camp in Scotland for three months, and then into the great beyond. Eight years from now I return, rich, muscular, space-bronzed.”