Here are links to blog posts about the stories in Troost me, mijn robot we've already read:
"Comfort Me, My Robot" (1955)
Bloch, of course, is famous for his interest in psychology, and this story is sort of a satire that features the shrinks of the 22nd century, known as the "Adjustors" (with a capital "A.")
After the atomic war, society was totally restructured. One of the innovations was to have robots do all the work. People of means even have robot duplicates made of themselves, complete with artificial brains that mimic their personalities. You send these robots to boring social functions like weddings and funerals and they act so much like you do that your friends can't even tell the difference! Another innovation of postwar society was to institute the guild of Adjustors, who take up all the roles played by sociologists and therapists in pre-nuke times.
Henson comes to an Adjustor, who also happens to be one of his close friends, because he is unhappy about his wife--she is keeping secrets from him, he believes. It is implied he fears she is cheating on him (sex in the stories we are reading today is referred to somewhat obliquely.) To relieve his unhappiness Henson proposes, and the Adjustor approves, "murdering" the robot doppelganger of his wife. As the Adjustor explains at some length, psychiatric and psychological treatment in the 20th century was a load of nonsense, consisting either of destructive physical therapies like shock treatment and lobotomies, or, the pointless and never-ending "talking cure" that never actually cured anything. Nowadays, in the enlightened 2300s, treatment directly addresses the source of a patient's psychological problems, and providing the opportunity to murder a simulacrum of a person he is upset over and thus relieve all his tension is one example of such direct and immediately effective treatment.
(Bloch in this story seems to be suggesting all psychology and related fields are bunk and their practitioners frauds, voicing criticisms of 1950s practice but putting them in the mouth of a knave and offering up future therapies which seem absurd.)
Henson goes through with this play acting murder therapy, destroying the robot that looks like his wife, but then acquires definitive proof that that his wife is unfaithful, and her adulterous lover is none other than Henson's pal the Adjustor! The answer to this psychological crisis, of course, is to therapeutically "murder" a robot that looks like the Adjustor! There follows the twist ending that involves various double crosses as the Adjustor, in love with Henson's wife, comes up with a scheme to get Henson killed while Henson plots to murder the flesh and blood Adjustor and why not his faithless wife besides? These schemes involve impersonating robots and being impersonated by robots, as you might expect.
I'm going to give this one a thumbs down for being too ridiculous. The scene in which Henson strangles the robot imitation of his wife is good, Bloch really bringing to life Henson's rapidly shifting emotions as he sees the beautiful robot and his heart goes out to it, then remembers his suspicions and is filled with hate and blood lust, which he then acts upon. But otherwise the story is not very compelling, the speeches attacking 20th-century therapeutic practice being too long and too boring, and most of the rest of the text being too silly to take at all seriously, while not being funny, either.
"The Proper Spirit" (1957)
In "The Proper Spirit" we have a weak filler story that lacks any surprise or tension and just sort of rolls forward until it runs out of gas. Thumbs down.
Cavendish is a wealthy widower, nearly 60, with an interest in the occult and psychic phenomena. He dislikes all his relatives, whom he considers greedy. Said relatives come to dinner; we've got a fat woman, a guy who is obsessed with the horse races, a slut, etc., people Bloch paints as mildly unpleasant and morally compromised. They eat guinea hen Cavendish has apparently prepared himself, he having no servants. Cavendish, however, eats a little French toast from a separate dish. He tells his relatives that he can summon ghosts, and has conversations with people like Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte and has Handel and Chopin play his piano for him. It is implied that he regularly has sex with famous women from throughout history, like Cleopatra and Madame de Pompadour. The assembled relatives take this presentation of what they consider clear evidence of insanity as an opportunity to reveal that they want Cavendish to sign over to one of them power-of-attorney so they can gain control of Cavendish's (apparently) considerable assets. Then they die--the guinea hen was poisoned. Cavendish, we learn, has liquidated his assets and is moving to Tibet to continue his study of the occult. The ending joke of the story is that Cavendish has had the ghost of Lucrezia Borgia cook the meal. (Or so he says to himself--it is possible there are no ghosts and Cavendish really is insane.)
Cavendish is not likable enough nor his doomed relatives objectionable enough that the reader is rooting for the protagonist to wipe out his antagonists and thrilled or relieved when he succeeds. A related problem with the story is that Cavendish is never at any risk; there is no tension because there is no struggle, no fight, Cavendish's annihilation of his family is like taking candy from a baby, his scheme coming off without a hitch. I sort of expected Cavendish to be hoist by his own petard, killed by one of the ghosts, but it seems he gets off scot-free.
"The Proper Spirit" has reappeared in several Bloch collections, but as far as isfdb knows, only one anthology, the German 13 Psi-Stories from 1976.
"You've Got to Have Brains" (1956)
Our narrator tends bar at a crummy establishment frequented by homeless addicts and lives in an apartment building run by a sort of slum lord. That landlord, a regular customer of the bar, has a new tenant, a short foreigner of some kind whose odd dress at first leads the narrator to think he is another wretched drunk or druggie. But this new little guy, to whom the nickname "Mr. Goofy" is soon affixed, is personally clean and spends lots of time taking notes and making calculations on paper. Goofy starts coming into the bar regularly to eat and scribble; at times he brings with him spare metal parts. Goofy is apparently building something in the big unheated loft he is renting above the room rented by the bartender and the room in which the landlord lives--sometimes they see Mr. Goofy lugging in more hunks of metal, and they can often hear him banging away up there.
The landlord is a domineering jerk, but early in their relationship Mr. Goofy scares him. In the bar, Goofy asks for the music to be turned down so he can concentrate on his figures, and the landlord, whose nickel has just been dropped into the jukebox, gets a little rough with him. Goofy whips out a foot-long blade, which cows the brutish landlord. Some weeks later the landlord investigates the loft while Goofy is out, inviting the bartender to accompany him--they find that Goofy is constructing a large machine the landlord thinks resembles the innards of a rocket or submarine.
The landlord decides to evict Mr. Goofy. The day before he is to be evicted, Goofy is in a celebratory mood and shares drinks with the bartender. His tongue loosened by the booze, the little guy tells the bartender that he has finished his space ship, which is powered by the electricity of the brain--Goofy has developed an apparatus that magnifies this electricity "ten million fold." Hooking the human brain up to the space ship also makes navigation a snap--you think of where you want to go, and zip! you are there.
The bartender warns Goofy that he is going to be evicted, and Goofy now faces a dilemma--he wanted to keep his ship there in the loft where he could show it to scientists and journalists. The bartender asks why he can't just zip to some other location. It turns out the ship is "designed only for space-travel...[and] my brain must be free to act as the control agent." But Goofy gets an idea, makes some calculations, thanks the bartender, and runs off.
Later, the barkeep hears a noise from the loft, runs up to see what is going on, finds Goofy and the space ship gone. In the landlord's apartment he finds the landlord's corpse, besides which rests Mr. Goofy's foot-long knife--the landlord's skull has been carved open and his brain neatly removed!
The fact that the landlord's brain had been pirated is the shock revelation in the last paragraph of the story, and we get the denouement before that--Goofy and his ship are never seen again, despite Goofy's repeated insistence he wanted to become famous and prove to all the scientists of the world the validity of his theories. I guess the ship didn't operate quite as well as Goofy expected.
I kind of like "You've Got to Have Brains," but Bloch has a little trouble connecting his weirdo-builds-a-space-ship and weirdo-removes-and-exploits-a-jerk's-brain plots. For example, the explanation for why Goofy can't just zip his ship to some other warehouse or garage or farmhouse or someplace and instead has to murder a guy is not very convincing. Another problem is that, like in "The Proper Spirit," Bloch doesn't give you reason to have deep feelings for any of the characters; there is no real hero to cheer on, or victim to pity, villain to hate or monster to fear, crummy stuff happens to two people who aren't very likable or deplorable, so you don't really care.
(I sometimes think Bloch comes up with a shock image or joke--a guy finds a corpse whose brain has been removed! or the ghost of Lucrezia Borgia poisoning 20th-century people! and then works backwards, trying to concoct a Rube Goldberg machine to justify the existence of the punchline, as if the story can stand simply on that one leg, the punchline itself.)
"You've Got to Have Brains" first saw print in Fantastic Universe and has been reprinted in a few Bloch collections and in the 1984 anthology Murder Most Foul.
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Bloch's large body of work includes many marginal stories, stories which perhaps could have been good if he had just put some more hours into them, and it looks like we were served up a helping of them today. Let's hope that in our next episode, when we read three more stories that would be translated into Dutch for Troost me, mijn robot, we get some better specimens of Bloch's work.
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