Robots Have No Tails Read online

  “Why six months?”

  “His voice wasn’t trained. That took time. But after he’d got in the groove he—”

  “Make us a mental hookup,” the fat Lybblas suggested. “Maybe we can use it to conquer the Earth.”

  “That,” Gallegher said, “is exactly what I’m going to do. With a few reservations—” Gallegher televised Rufus Hellwig, on the chance that he might induce the tycoon to part with some of his fortune, but without success. Hellwig was recalcitrant. “Show me,” he said. “Then I’ll give you a blank check.”

  “But I need the money now,” Gallegher insisted. “I can’t give you what you want if I’m gassed for murder.”

  “Murder? Who’d you kill?” Hellwig wanted to know.

  “I didn’t kill anybody, I’m being framed—”

  “So am I. But I’m not falling, this time. Show me results. I make you no more advances, Gallegher.”

  “Look. Wouldn’t you like to be able to sing like a Caruso? Dance like Nijinsky? Swim like Weissmuller? Make speeches like Secretary Parkinson? Make like Houdini?”

  “Have you got a snootful!” Hellwig said ruminatively and broke the beam. Gallegher glared at the screen. It looked as though he’d have to go to work, after all.

  So he did. His trained, expert fingers flew, keeping pace with his keen brain. Liquor helped, liberating his demon subconscious. When in doubt, he questioned the Lybblas. Nevertheless the job took time.

  He didn’t have all the equipment he needed, and vised a supply company, managing to wangle sufficient credit to swing the deal on the cuff. He kept working. Once he was interrupted by a mild little man in a derby who brought a subpoena, and once Grandpa wandered in to borrow five credits. The circus was in town, and Grandpa, as an old big top enthusiast, couldn’t miss it.

  “Want to come along?” he inquired. “I might get in a crap game with some of the boys. Always got on well with circus people, somehow. Won five hundred once from a bearded lady. Nope? Well, good luck.”

  He went away, and Gallegher returned to his mental hookup device. The Lybblas contentedly stole cookies and squabbled amicably about the division of the world after they’d conquered it. The machine grew slowly but inevitably.

  As for the time machine itself, occasional attempts to turn it off proved only one thing: it had frozen into stasis. It seemed to be fixed in a certain definite pattern, from which it was impossible to budge it. It had been set to bring back Gallegher’s variable corpses. Until it had fulfilled that task, it stubbornly refused to obey additional orders. “There was an old maid from Vancouver,” Gallegher murmured absently.

  “Let’s see. I need a tight beam here—Yeah. She jumped on his knee with a chortle of glee—If I vary the receptor sensibly on the electro-magnetic current—Hm-m-m—And nothing on earth could remove ’er. Yeah, that does it.”

  It was night. Gallegher hadn’t been conscious of the passing of hours. The Lybblas, bulging with filched cookies, had made no complaint, except occasional demands for more milk. Gallegher had drunk steadily as he worked, keeping his subconscious to the fore. He hadn’t realized till now that he was hungry. Sighing, he looked at the completed mental hookup device, shook his head, and opened the door. The back yard lay empty before him.

  Or—

  No, it was empty. No more corpses just yet. Time-variable pattern b was still in operation. He stepped out and let the cool night air blow on his hot cheeks. The blazing towers of Manhattan made ramparts against the night around him. Above, the lights of air traffic flickered like devil fireflies.

  There was a sodden thump near by. Gallegher whirled, startled. A body had fallen out of empty air and lay staring blankly up in the middle of his rose garden. His stomach cold, Gallegher investigated.

  The corpse was that of a middle-aged man, between fifty and sixty, with a silky dark mustache and eye-glasses. Unmistakably, though, it was Gallegher. A Gallegher aged and altered by time variable c—c, now, not b any more—and with a hole burned through the breast by a heat-ray projector.

  At that precise moment, Gallegher realized, corpse b must have vanished from the police morgue, like its predecessor.

  Uh-huh. In time-pattern c, then, he wasn’t to die till he was over fifty—but even then a heat-ray would kill him. Depressing. Gallegher thought of Cantrell, who’d taken the ray projector, and shivered, slightly. Matters were growing more and more confusing.

  Well, presently the police would arrive. In the meantime, he was hungry. With a last shrinking glance at his own dead, aged face, Gallagher returned to the laboratory, picked up the Lybblas on the way, and herded them into the kitchen, where he fixed a makeshift supper. There were steaks, luckily, and Lybblas gobbled their portions like pigs, talking excitedly about their fantastic plans. They’d decided to make Gallegher their Grand Vizier.

  “Is he wicked?” the fat one demanded.

  “I don’t know. Is he?”

  “He’s gotta be wicked. In the novels the Grand Vizier’s always wicked. Wheel” The fat Lybbla choked on a bit of steak. “Ug…uggle…ulp! The world is ours!” Deluded little creatures, Gallegher mused. Incurable romanticists. Their optimism was, to say the least, remarkable.

  His own troubles engrossed him as he slid the plates into the Burner—“It Burns Them Clean”—and fortified himself with a beer. The mental hookup device should work. He knew of no reason why it shouldn’t. His genius subconscious had really built the thing—

  Hell, it had to work. Otherwise the Lybblas wouldn’t have mentioned that the gadget had been invented by Gallegher, long in their past. But he couldn’t very well use Hellwig as a guinea pig.

  A rattle at the door made Gallegher snap his fingers in triumph. Grandpa, of course! That was the answer.

  Grandpa appeared, beaming. “Had fun. Circuses are always fun. Here’s a couple of hundred for you, stupid. Got to playing stud poker with the tattooed man and the guy who dives off a ladder into a tank. Nice fellows. I’m seeing ’em tomorrow.”

  “Thanks,” Gallegher said. The two hundred was penny-ante stuff, but he didn’t want to antagonize the old guy now. He managed to lure Grandpa into the laboratory and explain that he wanted to make an experiment.

  “Experiment away,” said Grandpa, who found the liquor organ.

  “I’ve made some charts of my own mental patterns and located my bump of mathematics. It amounts to that. The atomic structure of pure learning, maybe—It’s a bit vague. But I can transfer the contents of my mind to yours, and I can do it selectively. I can give you my talent for mathematics.”

  “Thanks,” Grandpa said. “Sure you won’t be needing it?”

  “I’ll still have it. It’s the matrix, that’s all.”

  “Matrix?”

  “Matrix Pattern. I’ll just duplicate that pattern in your brain. See?”

  “Sure,” Grandpa said, and allowed himself to be led to a chair where a wired helmet was fitted over his head. Gallegher donned another helmet and began to fiddle with the device. It made noises and flashed lights. Presently a low buzzing rose to a erescendo scream, and then stopped. That was all.

  Gallegher removed both helmets. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Fit as a fiddle.”

  “No different?”

  “I want a drink.”

  “I didn’t give you my drinking ability, because you already had your own. Unless I doubled it—” Gallegher paled. “If I gave you my thirst, too, you couldn’t stand it. You’d die.”

  Muttering something about blasted foolishness, Grandpa replenished his dry palate. Gallegher followed him and stared perplexedly at the old fellow.

  “I couldn’t have made a mistake. The charts—What is the value of pi?” He snapped suddenly.

  “A dime is plenty,” Grandpa said. “For a big slice.”

  Gallegher cursed. The machine must have worked. It had to work, for a number of reasons, chief of which was the question of logic. Perhaps—

&
nbsp; “Let’s try it again. I’ll be the subject this time.”

  “O.K.,” Grandpa said contentedly.

  “Only—hm-m-m. You haven’t got any talents. Nothing unusual. I couldn’t be sure whether it worked or not. If you’d only been a concert pianist or a singer,” Gallegher moaned.

  “Hah!”

  “Wait a minute. I’ve an idea. I’ve got connection at a teleview studio—maybe I can wangle something.” Gallegher used the visor. It took some time, but presently he managed to induce Senor Ramon Firez, the Argentine tenor, to hop an air-taxi and come down to the laboratory in a hurry.

  “Firez!” Gallegher gloated. “That’ll prove it, one way or the other. One of the greatest voices in the hemisphere! If I suddenly find myself signing like a lark, I’ll know I can use the gadget on Hellwig.”

  Firez, it seemed, was nightclubbing, but at the studio’s request he shelved his nocturnal activities for the nonce and appeared within ten minutes, a burly, handsome man with a wide, mobile mouth. He grinned at Gallegher.

  “You say there is trouble, that I can help with my great voice, and so I am at your service. A recording, is it?”

  “Something of the sort.”

  “To win a bet, perhaps?”

  “You can call it that,” Gallegher said, easing Firez into a chair. “I want to record the mental patterns of your voice.”

  “Ah-h, that is something new! Explain, please!”

  The scientist obediently launched into a completely meaningless jargon that served the purpose of keeping Señor Firez pacified while he made the necessary charts. That didn’t take long. The significant curves and patterns showed unmistakably. The graph that represented Firez’s singing ability—his great talent.

  Grandpa watched skeptically while Gallegher made adjustments, fitted the helmets into place, and turned on the device. Again lights flashed and wires hummed. And stopped.

  “It is a success? May I see—”

  “It takes awhile to develop the prints,” Gallegher lied unscrupulously. He didn’t want to burst into song while Firez was still present. “I’ll bring the results out to your apartment as soon as they’re done.”

  “Ah-h, good. Muy bien.” White teeth flashed. “I am always happy to be of service, amigo!”

  Firez went away, Gallegher sat down and looked at the wall, waiting. Nothing happened. He had a slight headache, that was all.

  “Through fiddling?” Grandpa demanded.

  “Yeah. Do-re-mi-fa-so—”

  “What?”

  “Shut up. I Pagliacci—”

  “You’re crazy as a bedbug.”

  “I love a parade!” howled the frantic Gallegher, his tuneless voice cracking. “Oh, hell! Seated one day at the organ—”

  “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain,” Grandpa chimed in chummily. “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain—”

  “I was weary and ill at ease—”

  “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain—”

  “And my fingers wandered idly—”

  “WHEN SHE COMES!” Grandpa blatted, always the life of the party. “Used to carry a tune pretty well in my young days. Let’s get together now. Know ‘Frankie and Johnnie’?”

  Gallegher repressed an impulse to burst into tears. With a cold glance at Grandpa, he went into the kitchen and opened a bulb of beer. The cool catnip taste refreshed him, but failed to raise his spirits. He couldn’t sing. Not in the manner of Firez, anyhow. Nor would six months of training his larynx work any appreciable change, he knew. The device simply had failed to work. Mental hookup, nuts.

  Grandpa’s voice called shrilly.

  “Hey! I found something in the back yard!”

  “I don’t need three guesses,” Gallegher said moodily, and went to work on the beer.

  Three hours later—at 10 P.M.—the police arrived. The reason for the delay was simply explained; the body in the morgue had vanished, but its disappearance hadn’t been detected for some time. Then there had been a thorough search, yielding, of course, not the slightest result. Mahoney appeared, with his cohorts, and Gallegher waved them into the back yard. “You’ll find it out there,” he sighed.

  Mahoney glared at him. “More funny business, eh?” he snapped.

  “None of my doing.”

  The troupe poured out of the lab, leaving a slim, blond man eyeing Gallegher thoughtfully.

  “How goes it?” Cantrell inquired.

  “Uh—O.K.”

  “You got any more of those—gadgets—hidden around here?”

  “The heat-ray projectors? No.”

  “Then how do you keep killing people that way?” Cantrell asked plaintively. “I don’t get it.”

  “He explained it to me,” Grandpa said, “but I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Not then. I do now, of course. It’s simply a matter of variable temporal lines. Planck’s uncertainty principle enters into it, and, Heisenberg, obviously. Laws of thermodynamics show clearly that a universe tends to return to the norm, which is our known rate of entropy, and variations from that norm must necessarily be compensated for by corresponding warps in the temporal-spatial structure of the universal cosmos equation.”

  There was silence.

  Gallegher went to the wall and drew a glass of water, which he poured slowly over his head. “You understand that, do you?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Grandpa said. “Why not? The mental hookup gave me your mathematical talent—which included vocabulary, I suppose.”

  “You been holding out on me?”

  “Hell, no. It takes awhile for the brain to readjust to the new values. That’s a safety valve, I guess. The sudden influx of a completely novel set of thought-patterns would disrupt the mind completely. It sinks in—three hours or so it takes. It’s been that long or more, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Gallegher said. “Yeah.” He caught sight of the watching Cantrell and managed a smile. “A little joke Grandpa and I have between ourselves. Nothing to it.”

  “Hm-m-m,” Cantrell said, his eyes hooded. “That so?”

  “Yeah. Sure. That’s all.”

  A body was carried in from the back yard and through the laboratory. Cantrell winked, patted his pocket significantly, and drew Gallegher into a corner.

  “If I showed anybody that heat-ray of yours, you’d be sunk, Gallegher. Don’t forget that.”

  “I’m not. What the devil do you want, anyhow?”

  “Oh—I dunno. A weapon like this might come in plenty handy. One never knows. Lots of holdups these days. I feel safer with this thing in my pocket.”

  He drew back as Mahoney came in, chewing his lips. The detective was profoundly disturbed.

  “That guy in the back yard—”

  “Yeah?”

  “He looks like you, a bit. Only older.”

  “How about the fingerprints, Mahoney?” Cantrell asked.

  The detective growled something under his breath. “ You know the answer. Impossible, as usual. Eyeprints check, too. Now listen, Gallegher, I’m going to ask you some questions and I want straight answers. Don’t forget you’re under suspicion of murder.”

  “Whom did I murder?” Gallegher asked. “The two guys who vanished from the morgue? There’s no corpus delicti. Under the new Codex, eyewitnesses and photographs aren’t enough to prove murder.”

  “You know why that was put into effect,” Mahoney said. “Three-dimensional broadcast images that people thought were real corpses—there was a stink about that five years ago. But those stiffs in your back yard aren’t three-d’s. They’re real.”

  “Are?”

  “Two were. One is. You’re still on the spot. Well?”

  Gallegher said, “I don’t—” He stopped, his throat working. Abruptly, he stood up, eyes closed.

  “Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge with mine,” Gallegher sang, in a blasting tenor that, though untrained, rang true and resonant. “Or
leave a kiss within the cup—”

  “Hey!” Mahoney snapped, springing up. “Lay off. Hear me?”

  “—and I’ll not ask for wine. The thirst that from the soul doth rise—”

  “Stop it!” the detective shouted. “We’re not here to listen to you sing!”

  Nevertheless, he listened. So did the others. Gallegher, caught in the grip of Senor Firez’s wild talent, sang on and on, his unaccustomed throat gradually relaxing and pouring out the notes like the beak of a nightingale. Gallegher—sang!

  They couldn’t stop him. They fled, with threats. They would return later—with a strait jacket.

  Grandpa also seemed caught in the throes of some strange affliction. Words poured out of him, strange semantic terms, mathematics translated into word-symbols, ranging from Euclid to Einstein and beyond. Grandpa, it seemed, had certainly acquired Gallegher’s wild talent for math.

  It came to an end, as all things, good or bad, inevitably do. Gallegher croaked hoarsely from a dry throat and, after a few feeble gasps, relapsed into silence. He collapsed on the couch, eyeing Grandpa, who was crumpled in a chair, wide-eyed. The three Lybblas had come out of hiding and stood in a row, each with a cookie clasped in furry paws.

  “The world is mine,” the fattest one said.

  Events marched. Mahoney vised to say he was getting out a special injunction, and that Gallegher would be clapped into jail as soon as the machinery could be swung into action. Tomorrow, that meant.

  Gallegher vised an attorney—the best one on the Eastern seaboard. Yes, Persson could quash the injunction, and certainly win the case, or—well, anyhow, Gallegher would have nothing to worry about if he retained the lawyer. The fee was payable partially in advance.

  “How much?…Uh!”

  “Call me,” Persson said, “when you wish me to take charge. You may mail your check tonight?”