“It certainly is a word,” Kydd maintained, perspiring heavily. “As in ‘like a dirigible, in the form of or resembling a dirigible.’ It can be used, probably has been used, in some piece of technical prose.”

  “But it’s not in Webster’s Second—and that’s the test. Computer, is it in your dictionary?”

  “As such, no,” the Malcolm Movis replied. “But the word dirigible is derived from the Latin dirigere, to direct. It means steerable, as a dirigible balloon. The suffix -oid may be added to many words of classical derivation. As in spheroid and colloid and asteroid, for example—”

  “Just consider those examples!” Tuezuzim broke in, arguing desperately. “All three have the Greek suffix -oid added to words that were originally Greek, not Latin. Aster means ‘star’ in Greek, so with asteroid you have ‘starlike or in the form of a star.’ And colloid comes from the Greek kolla for ‘glue.’ Are you trying to tell me that dictionaries on the level of Webster’s First or Second mix Greek with Latin?”

  It seemed to the anxiously listening Kydd that the Malcolm Movis computer almost smiled before continuing. “As a matter of fact, in one of those cases, that’s exactly what happens. Webster’s Second describes spheroid as deriving from both Greek and Latin. It provides as etymologies, on the one hand, the Greek sphairoeides (sphaira, ‘sphere,’ plus eidos, ‘form’) and, on the other, the Latin sphaeroides, ‘ball-like’ or ‘spherical.’ Two different words, both of classical origin. Dirigibloid is therefore ruled a valid word.”

  “I protest that ruling!” Tuezuzim waved his claw angrily. “Data are being most selectively used. I am beginning to detect a pro-human, anti-lobstermorph bias in the computer.”

  Another faint suggestion of an electromechanical smile. “Once more, a matter of fact,” the computer noted silkily. “The Malcolm Movis design team was headed by Dr. Hodgodya Hodgodya, the well-known lobstermorph electronicist. Pro-human, anti-lobstermorph bias is therefore most unlikely to have been built in. Dirigibloid is ruled valid; the protest is noted and disallowed. Juan Kydd begins the next round.”

  Since both opponents were now tagged with g-h-o-s, the round coming up would be the rubber, or execution, round. This was most definitely it.

  Kydd and Tuezuzim looked at each other again. One of them would be dead in a few minutes. Then Kydd looked away and began the round with the letter that had always worked best for him in three-cornered Ghost, the letter l.

  The computer added i, and Tuezuzim, a bit rashly, came up with m. He was quite willing for the word to be limit, and thus to end on the Malcolm Movis. A null round, and he, Tuezuzim, would be starting the next one.

  But Kydd was not interested in a null round this time. He added an o to the l-i-m and, when the computer supplied a u, the developing limousine that had to end on Tuezuzim became obvious.

  The lobstermorph thought desperately. With a hopeless squeak from deep in his cephalothorax, he said s.

  It must be recognized here, as the computer testified at the subsequent inquest, that the s already completed a word, to wit limous (“muddy, slimy”). But the Malcolm Movis pointed out that the individual who should have triumphantly called attention to limous, Juan Kydd, was so committed to catching his opponent with limousine that he didn’t notice.

  Limousine moved right along, with an i from Kydd and an n from the computer. And once again it was up to Tuezuzim.

  He waited until his ten-minute time limit had almost expired. Then he came up with a letter. But it wasn’t e.

  It was o.

  Juan Kydd stared at him. “L-i-m-o-u-s-i-n-o?” he said in disbelief, yet already suspecting what the lobstermorph was up to. “I challenge you.”

  Again Tuezuzim waited a long time. Then, slowly rotating his crippled left chela at Juan Kydd’s face, he said, “The word is limousinoid.”

  “There’s no such word! What in hell does it mean?”

  “What does it mean? ‘Like a limousine, in the form of or resembling a limousine.’ It can be used, probably has been used, in some piece of technical prose.”

  “Referee!” Kydd yelled. “Let’s have a ruling. Do you have limousinoid in your dictionary?”

  “Whether or not it’s in the dictionary, Computer,” Tuezuzim countered, “it has to be acceptable. If dirigibloid can exist, so can limousinoid. If limousinoid exists, Kydd’s challenge is invalid and he gets the t of Ghost—and loses. If limousinoid doesn’t exist, neither does dirigibloid, and so Kydd would have lost that earlier round and would therefore now be up to the t of Ghost. Either way, he has to lose.”

  Now it was the Malcolm Movis that took its time. Five full minutes it considered. As it testified later, it need not have done so; its conclusion was reached in microseconds. “But,” it noted in its testimony at the inquest, “an interesting principle was involved here that required the use of this unnecessary time. Justice, it is said, not only must be done, but must seem to be done. Only the appearance of lengthy, careful consideration would make justice seem to be done in this case.”

  Five minutes—and then, at last, the Malcolm Movis gave its verdict.

  “There is no valid equation here between dirigibloid and limousinoid. Since dirigible is a word derived from the so-called classic languages, it may add the Greek suffix -oid. Limousine, on the other hand, derives from French, a Romance language. It comes from Limousin, an old province of France. The suffix -oid cannot therefore be used properly with it— Romance French and classical Greek may not be mixed.”

  The Malcolm Movis paused now for three or four musical beats before going on. Juan Kydd and Tuezuzim stared at it, the human’s mouth moving silently, the crustacean’s antennae beginning to vibrate in frantic disagreement.

  “Tuezuzim has incurred t, the last letter of Ghost,” the computer announced. “He has lost.”

  “I protest!” Tuezuzim screamed. “Bias! Bias! If no limousinoid, then no dirigibl—”

  “Protest disallowed.” And the blast of the Hametz Drive tore through the lobstermorph. “Your meals, Mr. Kydd,” the computer said courteously.

  The inquest, on Karpis VIII of Sector N-42B5, was a swift affair. The backup tapes of the Malcolm Movis were examined; Juan Kydd was merely asked if he had anything to add (he did not).

  But the verdict surprised almost everyone, especially Kydd. He was ordered held for trial. The charge? Aggravated cannibalism in deep space.

  Of course, our present definition of interspecies cannibalism derives from this case:

  The act of cannibalism is not to be construed as limited to the eating of members of one’s own species. In modern terms of widespread travel through deep space, it may be said to occur whenever one highly intelligent individual kills and consumes another highly intelligent individual. Intelligence has always been extremely difficult to define precisely, but it will be here and henceforth understood to involve the capacity to understand and play the terrestrial game of Ghost. It is not to be understood as solely limited to this capacity, but if an individual, of whatever biological construction, possesses such capacity, the killing, consuming and assimilating of that individual shall be perceived as an act of cannibalism and is to be punished in terms of whatever statutes relate to cannibalism in that time and that place.

  —The Galaxy v. Kidd, Karpis VIII, C17603

  Now, Karpis VIII was pretty much a rough-and-ready frontier planet. It was still a rather wide-open place with a fairly tolerant attitude toward most violent crime. As a result, Juan Kydd was assessed a moderate fine, which he was able to pay after two months of working at his new job in computer programming.

  The Malcolm Movis computer did not fare nearly as well.

  First, it was held as a crucial party to the crime and an accessory before the fact. It was treated as a responsible and intelligent individual, since it had unquestionably demonstrated the capacity to understand and play the terrestrial game of Ghost. Its plea of nonbiological construction (and therefore noninvolvement in legal proceedings pertaining to living creatures) was disallowed on the ground that the silicon-based Cascassians who had built the ship and lifeboat were now also subject to this definition of cannibalism. If silicon-chemistry intelligence could be considered biological, the court ruled, so inevitably must silicon-electronics.

  Furthermore, and perhaps most damaging, the computer was held to have lied in a critical situation—or, at least, to have withheld information by not telling the whole truth. When Tuezuzim had accused it of anti-lobstermorph bias, it had pointed to the fact that the Malcolm Movis omicron beta had been designed by a lobstermorph and that anti-lobstermorph bias was therefore highly unlikely. The whole truth, however, was that the designer, Dr. Hodgodya, was living in self-imposed exile at the time because he hated his entire species and, in fact, had expressed this hatred in numerous satirical essays and one long narrative poem. In other words, anti-lobstermorph bias had been built in and the computer knew it.

  To this the computer protested that it was, after all, only a computer. As such, it had to answer questions as simply and directly as possible. It was the questioner’s job to formulate and ask the right questions.

  “Not in this case,” the court held. “The Malcolm Movis omicron beta was not functioning as a simple question-and-answer machine but as a judge and umpire. Its obligations included total honesty and full information. The possibility of anti-lobstermorph bias had to be openly considered and admitted.”

  The Malcolm Movis did not give up. “But you had two top-notch programmers in Kydd and Tuezuzim. Could it not be taken for granted that they would already know a good deal about the design history of a computer in such general use? Surely for such knowledgeable individuals not every i has to be dotted, not every t has to be crossed.”

  “Software people!” the court responded. “What do they know about fancy hardware?”

  The computer was eventually found guilty of being an accessory to the crime of cannibalism and was ordered to pay a fine. Though this was a much smaller fine than the one incurred by Juan Kydd, the Malcolm Movis, unlike Kydd, had no financial resources and no way of acquiring any.

  That made for a touchy situation. On a freewheeling planet such as Karpis VIII, judges and statutes might wink a bit at killers and even cannibals. But never at out-and-out deadbeats. The court ruled that if the computer could not pay its fine, it still could not evade appropriate punishment. “Let justice be done!”

  The court ordered that the Malcolm Movis omicron beta be wired in perpetuity into the checkout counter of a local supermarket. The computer requested that instead it be disassembled forthwith and its parts scattered. The request was denied.

  So.

  You decide. Was justice done?

  Afterword

  THE ESSENTIAL PLOT gimmick here is the variations the characters play on “dirigible” and “limousine”—and the results thereof. It is based on an actual game of Ghost in which Dan Keyes and my brother Mort were participants and used these variations against each other. I won’t tell who did which.

  But an attempted definition of “humanness” is what precipitated the story. If you believe, as I do, that we will shortly (ten years? fifty? a hundred and fifty?) be encountering alien intelligent life-forms and having to learn to live with them on various moral levels (are they to be considered the equivalent of dogs and cats and chimpanzees, or ants and bees, or sixteenth-century Amerindians—or are we to be considered the equivalent of one of these to them?), you must be thinking also of the necessary distinctions in many areas that we and they will have to make.

  So I wrote the story and my agent, Virginia Kidd, sent it to Playboy, and Alice K. Turner, the editor there, said she liked it a lot and would pay a lot for it, but—just as an earlier editor at the magazine had said about an earlier story—would I please cut it down somewhat, say, by at least a fourth?

  One-fourth, I said? One-full-damn-fourth? Impossible! I said. I reread the story almost spluttering.

  But, for the hell of it, I tried to do as she had asked. And much to my chagrin, it turned out to be not only possible, but actually fairly easy. Worse yet, the resulting piece now had much more focus.

  Alas. This sort of thing may keep a writer humble, but it should really not be allowed to go on.

  Written 1994 / Published 1994

  The Flat-Eyed Monster

  FOR THE FIRST FEW moments, Clyde Manship—who up to then had been an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Kelly University—for the first few moments, Manship tried heroically to convince himself that he was merely having a bad dream. He shut his eyes and told himself chidingly, with a little superior smile playing about his lips, that things as ugly as this just did not occur in real life. No. Definitely a dream.

  He had himself half convinced, until he sneezed. It was too loud and wet a sneeze to be ignored. You didn’t sneeze like that in a dream—if you sneezed at all. He gave up. He’d have to open his eyes and take another look. At the thought, his neck muscles went rigid with spasm.

  A little while ago, he’d fallen asleep while reading an article he’d written for a scholarly journal. He’d fallen asleep in his own bed in his own apartment in Callahan Hall—“a charming and inexpensive residence for those members of the faculty who are bachelors and desire to live on campus.” He’d awakened with a slightly painful tingling sensation in every inch of his body. He felt as if he were being stretched, stretched interminably and—and loosened. Then, abruptly, he had floated off the bed and gone though the open window like a rapidly attenuating curl of smoke. He’d gone straight up to the star-drenched sky of night, dwindling in substance until he lost consciousness completely.

  And had come to on this enormous flat expanse of white tabletop, with a multivaulted ceiling above him and dank, barely breathable air in his lungs. Hanging from the ceiling were quantities and quantities of what was indubitably electronic equipment, but the kind of equipment the boys in the Physics Department might dream up, if the grant they’d just received from the government for military radiation research had been a million times larger than it was, and if Professor Bowles, the department head, had insisted that every gadget be carefully constructed to look substantially different from anything done in electronics to date.

  The equipment above him had been rattling and gurgling and whooshing, glowing and blinking and coruscating. Then it had stopped as if someone had been satisfied and had turned off a switch.

  So Clyde Manship had sat up to see who had turned it off.

  He had seen all right.

  He hadn’t seen so much who as he had seen what. And it hadn’t been a nice what. In fact, none of the whats he had glimpsed in that fast look around had been a bit nice. So he had shut his eyes fast and tried to find another mental way out of the situation.

  But now he had to have another look. It might not be so bad the second time. “It’s always darkest,” he told himself with determined triteness, “before the dawn.” And then found himself involuntarily adding, “except on days when there’s an eclipse.”

  But he opened his eyes anyway, wincingly, the way a child opens its mouth for the second spoonful of castor oil.

  Yes, they were all as he had remembered them. Pretty awful.

  The tabletop was an irregular sort of free-form shape, bordered by thick, round knobs a few inches apart. And perched on these knobs, about six feet to the right of him, were two creatures who looked like black leather suitcases. Instead of handles or straps, however, they sported a profusion of black tentacles, dozens and dozens of tentacles, every second or third one of which ended in a moist turquoise eye shielded by a pair of the sweepingest eyelashes Manship had ever seen outside of a mascara advertisement.

  Embedded in the suitcase proper, as if for additional decorative effect, were swarms of other sky-blue eyes, only these, without eyelashes, bulged out in multitudes of tiny, glittering facets like enormous gems. There was no sign of ear, nose or mouth anywhere on the bodies, but there was a kind of slime, a thick, grayish slime, that oozed out of the black bodies and dripped with a steady splash-splash-splash to the floor beneath.

  On his left, about fifteen feet away, where the tabletop extended a long peninsula, there was another one of the creatures. Its tentacles gripped a pulsating spheroid across the surface of which patches of light constantly appeared and disappeared.

  As near as Manship could tell, all the visible eyes of the three were watching him intently. He shivered and tried to pull his shoulders closer together.

  “Well, Professor,” someone asked suddenly, “what would you say?”

  “I’d say this was one hell of a way to wake up,” Manship burst out, feelingly. He was about to go on and develop this theme in more colorful detail when two things stopped him.

  The first was the problem of who had asked the question. He had seen no other human—no other living creature, in fact—besides the three tentacled suitcases anywhere in that tremendous, moisture-filled room.

  The second thing that stopped him was that someone else had begun to answer the question at the same time, cutting across Manship’s words and ignoring them completely.

  “Well, obviously,” this person said, “the experiment is a success. It has completely justified its expense and the long years of research behind it. You can see for yourself, Councilor Glomg, that one-way teleportation is an accomplished fact.”

  Manship realized that the voices were coming from his right. The wider of the two suitcases—evidently “the professor” to whom the original query had been addressed—was speaking to the narrower one, who had swung most of his stalked eyes away from Manship and had focused them on his companion. Only where in blazes were the voices coming from? Somewhere inside their bodies? There was no sign anywhere of vocal apparatus.

  AND HOW COME, Manship’s mind suddenly shrieked, THEY TALK ENGLISH?

  “I can see that,” Councilor Glomg admitted with a blunt honesty that became him well. “It’s an accomplished fact, all right, Professor Lirld. Only, what precisely has it accomplished?”