Answering Service

by Fritz Leiber

from Best SF:1967

In this field of fiction, long known for its pedestrian prose, the writings of Fritz Leiber burn like a beacon to show the shambling walkers the correct path. He is a stylist, one of the only three we have. Here, as it should be, style does not interfere with story, in fact it aids and moves it. This dialogue of two souls in brief contact registers with all the impact of a sudden scream in the night.

The oval bedroom and boudoir rocked with the wind and shook with the thunder. The curving, tempered glass of the continuous view windows strained, relaxed, strained! again. The lightning flashes showed outside only the lash-ing tops of the big pines against inky night. Inside they regularly drowned the clusters of rosy lights and blanched to bone the quilted, pearl-gray satin upholstery. At one end of the oval, the silvery, spiral stairway leading up to the flat roof and down to the elevator floor cast momen-tarily flaring, fantastic shadows across the tufted floor and the great central bed with its huge silk pillows and pearl-gray comforter.

The old lady occupying an edge of the bed looked like the bent-waist mummy of a girl freshly wrapped and hurriedly fitted with a shaggy blond wig and blond silk night-gown. But the brown human claw did not tremble, hold-ing the antique-inspired, pearl-gray phone greedily close to ear and lips, while the wrinkle-webbed eye gleamed with the lightning and without it, like jewels of obsidian or black onyx.

Old Lady: Haven't you got the doctor yet, you bitch?

Answering Service: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm is interfering with short-wave telephony.

O. L.: I know all about the storm. Haven't you arranged yet for my medicine to be delivered, you incompetent slut?

A. S.: No, madam. The copters of all regional taxi and delivery services have been grounded by the storm. There have been two deaths by frightening excuse me, lightning. I have your Cardinal pills here now. If the madam's phone were equipped with a matter-receiver

O. L.: It isn't. Stop tormenting me by holding those pills just out of reach. Haven't you got the doctor yet?

A. S.: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm

O. L.: That tape is beginning to bore me. You are just a bunch of tapes, aren't you? All very cleverly keyed to whatever I say, but still just a bunch of tapes.

A. S.: No, madam. I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age twenty-three, name Doris. It's true, I sometimes think I'm just a tape. I'm surrounded by miles of them, which do answer routine inquiries. Alongside my matter-transmitter and keyboard I have a tape-writer for punching out more tapes. I have a long scissors and a pot of cement for editing them. But I am truly not a tape myself, though once I took a small bottle of sleeping pills because I thought No, no, I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age twenty-three…

O. L.:… name Doris. Yes, I got that on the first spin past the transmitting head. So now we have tapes with biographies, tapes that attempt suicide and ask for sympathy, tapes that play on the customer's feelings. How charming. Here I am, an old woman, all alone in a storm, and without a single servant, ever since the government with its red tape and its oversell of democracy made it impossible to hire them, or even private nurses. An old

A. S.: You haven't a robot nurse, madam?

O. L.: Shining horrors! No! I'm just an old, old woman, all alone, dying for lack of a doctor and medicine, but privileged to listen to tapes making excuses.

A. S.: Please madam, I am not •

O. L.: Ooooh… my heart… please, nurse, my Cardinal pills… please, tape…

A. S.: Madam! Madam?

O. L.:… my heart… I'm going… ooooh…

A. S.: Madam, I'm breaking the rules to say this, but if you're having a heart attack, it's essential that you relax, make no effort or outcry, waste no strength on

O. L.: Oooh… yes, and tapes to help you die quietly, to leave your tortured body without making a fuss that might embarrass the powers that be. Oh, don't worry, dear tape, and let's not have any sympathetic-anxiety spools. I'm over that spasm now and merely waiting for the next. Just an old woman alone in the midst of a dreadful storm hear that crash? listening to tapes and waiting to die for lack of one Cardinal pill.

A. S.: Madam, a phone of your rating should have a matter-receiver. Are you quite certain you have not? I will inquire of our master files

O. L.: And tapes to make a sales pitch while you die. Next you'll be trying to sell me a casket and a burial plot, or even urn space in a tomb satellite. I already have the first two of those, thank you. I do not have a matter-receiver.

A. S.: Madam, I am not trying to sell you anything, I am trying to save your life. I have your Cardinal pills here

O. L.: Stop tantalizing me.

A. S.: and I am doing everything I can to get them to you. If you had a matter-receiver, I would only have to drop one of the pills in the transmitter bowl in front of me or punch out its codes, and you would have it the next microsecond. Well over ninety-nine percent of all phones of your rating have both a matter-receiver and telekinesis glove. I will inquire

O. L.: Oh yes, a telekinesis glove so I'd be able to sign checks long-distance for silver caskets, cool with pearls and orchid plots and pills and masses to be said for my soul in Chartres, no doubt. But I don't have one, ha-ha, or a matter-receiver either. Who'd swallow a pill that came over a wire, all dirty with oil and electricity? Oooh…

A. S.: I have programed an inquiry, madam. It is possible that you have a matter-receiver and aren't aware of it. Please don't distress or in any way exert yourself, madam; but I must point out to you that actual matter is never transmitted over the waves or wires and that, in any case, no oil is involved. The chemical and mass-shape codes for the object are punched into the transmitter or analyzed from a sample. Only those codes travel over the wires or waves. When they reach the receiver, they instantly synthesize an exact duplicate from standard raw materials there. I am oversimplifying somewhat, but

O. L.: Even tapes to give lectures, to contradict and argue with a dying customer. Very clever indeed, especially when one knows that a computer, working a billion times as fast as a mere brain, can always out-think a human being, even one who isn't dying.

A. S.: Madam, I am not a tape! I am a flesh-and-blood… Oh, what's the use?

O. L.: That would have been the third running for that one. Is it possible that even a computer, even a tape has a little shame? Very well, my dear, we will pretend you are not a tape, but a woman: age twenty-three, name Doris. A young woman it's only bitchy little sexpots that get to record those tapes, isn't it? Or do they concoct them entirely nowadays from the squeal of metal and the hum of power? Anyhow, we'll pretend you're a beautiful young woman who is tormenting me with pills I can't have and with grounded delivery-copters and with doctors who have skipped off on emergency visits to their mistresses and can't be reached. Yes, a beautiful vicious young woman, dear tape. At least that will give me something definite to hate while I die here all alone, someone who could conceivably suffer as I suffer. Ooooh…

A. S.: Madam, I am not beautiful and I'm trying hard not to be vicious. And I'm quite as alone as you are. All alone in a tiny cubical surrounded by yards and yards of electric circuits, until my relief turns up. Yet I can faintly hear through the air-conditioning system the same storm you're having. It's moving my way.

O. L.: I'm glad you're all alone. I'm glad you can hear the storm. I'm glad you're in a tiny cubical and can't get away. Then you can imagine something horrible creeping silently toward you, as death is creeping toward me, while you puff your cigarettes into the air-conditioning outlet and drink your cocktails from a flask disguised as a walkie-talkie, I imagine, and preen yourself in front of a mirror and call one of your boyfriends and amuse yourself by cat-and-mousing an old woman dying

A. S.: Stop, Mother, please!

O. L.: So now I've become the mother of a tape. How interesting. Oh, excuse me, dear, I forgot we're pretending you're a beautiful young woman; but my memory's not so good these last hours, or minutes. And besides, it startled me so to discover that now tapes excuse me again even have mother fixations and have been psychoanalyzed, no doubt, and

A. S.: Please, madam, I'm being serious. I may not be dying, but I wish I were

O. L.: You're making me feel better, dear. Thank you.

A. S.: so I'm every bit as miserable as you are. I took this job because of something that happened to me when I was a very little girl. My mother had a sudden heart attack and couldn't move, and she asked me to get her medicine. But I wouldn't do it because I'd asked her for candy a half hour before and she'd refused to give me any, and so I refused to move. She always called my medicine "candy" and I didn't understand what was happening at all. I thought I was just getting even. I didn't realize she was dying. And so long afterward I took this job so I could help other people who were in her situation and make up for my crime and so I could

O. L.: Oh no, my dear, you took this job so you could repeat over and over with gloating satisfaction the hot excitement you got when you watched your mother die and knew it was you who were killing her, so you could go on and on and on refusing to give old women their medicine or get them doctors, meanwhile showering them with sticky-sweet sympathy, like poison for ants, and, not content with that torture, slipping in dirty little pleas for sympathy for your own vicious, murderous self

A. S.: Oh, stop, stop, stop. I'm human! Three point one four one six. Pi. One three five seven eleven thirteen. Primes. Two four eight sixteen

O. L.: How like a machine. Nothing but numbers. Confused with food. You're going crazy, machine.

A. S.: Oh, stop, stop, stop! I tell you I'm flesh-and-blood

O. L.: Female, age twenty-three, name Doris.

A. S.: and I'm serious about all this, and I know this isn't the job for me at all, because I'm so horribly lonely; and what you say about me is the way I suspect myself of feeling, though I'm trying as hard as I can to feel the other way, the loving way, and I'm afraid

O. L.: I'm glad you can feel guilt. Love don't make me laugh. But I'm glad you're afraid. Because then you can imagine something creeping toward you as deadly as what's creeping toward me. What if your tapes should loop out and strangle you? What if your filthy matter-transmitter should suck you in and spit you out into a red-hot volcano or at the North Pole or at the bottom of the Challenger Deep or on the sun side of Mercury? What's that now?- closer than the storm, rattling the grill of your ventilation inlet? What's that coming out of the answer slot of the computer? Why are the needle points of the long narrow blades of the scissors swinging toward you?

A. S.: Oh, stop, stop, stop, or they'll jump at my heart! Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop

O. L.: Shut up! I'm tired of pretending. I'm just an old woman dying. And you're just tapes. Yes, just tapes. I know that because I've been insulting you every way I

could, and you've been taking it. A live human being wouldn't. And only a tape would call me "madam. " A democratized woman and there aren't any others under eighty would call me dearie or senior citizen. And I've made you spend an hour on me. They'd never let a human being waste her working time like that, and she wouldn't care to. But tapes? who cares? Plug the old dame in on them and let her play with them until she dies! And finally one tape got stuck on the word stop and kept jerking back and forth there, over and over. Ooooh… ooooh… this is the end, at last… ooooh…

A. S.: Stop, stop, STOP! Madam, the master files show that your phone is equipped with a miniaturized Important Trifle matter-receiver! It's hidden in the earpiece! I will place the Cardinal pill on the bowl and

O. L.: Ooooh… too late, tape… I'm dying…

A. S.: Please, madam. For my sake.

O. L.: No, tape… I'm going now… I leave the horrors to you… I'm dying… like your mother… I'm… dead…

The cadaverous old lady carefully dropped the phone, not on its prongs or the floor, but with a dull, short clatter on the edge of the thick pale marble top of the night table. She leaned back into the huge pillows. Something tiny rattled on the table top. She did not look. The phone called very faintly with an insect's voice "Madam!" and "Mother!" again and again. She did not answer.

The storm was almost over, the lightning gone, the thunder faded; but now came a different thunder, a muted thunder, a thunder that grew and made the old lady frown. It drowned the phone's faint screaming, like that of a far-off cicada.

Something shook the ceiling, then jarred it. There was a rapid tattoo of footsteps overhead, the creak and slam of a door, a clatter of footsteps down the silver stairs.

Approaching her briskly was a slim, middle-aged man carrying a black bag and shaking a few water drops off his trim gray suit.

"Well, what's it this time?" he demanded with a cheery roughness. "Used your sleeping pills up too fast, I suppose, and then worked yourself into a tantrum. I'll have you know I've delayed delivering the governor's daughter's baby, just to make sure you keep me in your will. "

She grinned at him, the tip of her nose straining toward the point of her chin.

"The sleeping pills, yes, you clever devil. Oh, and I lost my temper with your stupid answering service. "

"Don't blame you there. I curse them a dozen times a day myself. Only get psychoneurotics to take that job. Everyone else demands a social working-life. Now let's just What's that?"

He had stopped with a jerk and was pointing at the phone.

In one frantic scramble the old lady thrust herself halfway across the bed and halfway out of the covers and crouched, looking back. She began to tremble as the doctor was trembling. But her lips were smiling, and her eyes glittered like jet.

Flowing steadily from the small black hole in the center of the pearl-gray receiver, rolling across and dropping down past the pale marble and puddling on the pearl-gray satin comforter was a thin rippling ribbon of bright blood.

"Answering Service, " by Fritz Leiber,

copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.;

reprinted by permission of the author and Robert P. Mills.

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