Adventures in Time and Space

by Raymond J Healy

  The first detail that comes clear is sitting inside the Sunspot I don’t know how much later. The blond boy was with me, and so was one of the factory men. We all seemed to be the best of friends, and there wasn’t any telling whose blood was which.

  Guzub was beaming at us. When you know your Martians pretty well you learn that that trick of shutting the middle eye is a beam. “You zure bolished ’em ub, boys,” he gurgled.

  The factory man felt of his neck and decided his head was stillthere. “Guzub,” he declared, “I’ve learned me a lesson: From now on any green giller is safe around me.”

  “That’z the zbird,” Guzub glurked. “Avder all, we’re all beings, ain’d we? Now, wad’ll id be?”

  Guzub was hurt when the blond youth ordered milk, but delighted when the factory man said he’d have a Three Planet with a double shot of margil. I’m no teetotaler, but I don’t go for these strong drinks; I stuck to my usual straight whiskey.

  We exchanged names while we waited. Mike Warren, the factory man was; and the other‌—‌but then I tipped that off already. That was Quinby. They both knew me by name.

  “So you’re with Robinc,” Mike said. “I want to have a talk with you about that sometime. My brother-in-law’s got a new use for a robot that could make somebody, including me, a pile of credits, and I can’t get a hearing any place.”

  “Glad to,” I said, not paying too much attention. Everybody’s got a new use for a robot, just like writers tell me everybody’s got a swell idea for a solly.

  Dugg Quinby had been staring straight ahead of him and not listening. Now he said, “What I don’t see is why.”

  “Well,” Mike began, “it seems like he was stuck once on the lunar desert and‌—‌”

  “Uh-huh. Not that. What I don’t see is why Venusians. Why we act that way about them, I mean. After all, they’re more or less like us. They’re featherless bipeds, pretty much on our general model. And we treat them like they weren’t even beings. While Martians are a different shape of life altogether, but we don’t have ghettos for them or Martian-baiting.”

  “That’s just it,” said Mike. “The gillers are too much like us. They’re like a cartoon of us. We see them, and they’re like a dirty joke on humans, and we see red. I mean,” he added hastily, his hand rubbing his neck, “that’s the way I used to feel. I was just trying to explain.”

  “Nuts,” I said. “It’s all a matter of historical parallel. We licked the pants‌—‌which they don’t wear‌—‌off the Venusians in the First War of Conquest, so we feel we can push ’em around. The Second War of Conquest went sour on us and damned near put an end to the Empire and the race to boot, so we’ve got a healthy respect for the Martians.” I looked over at the bartender, his tentacles industriously plying an impressive array of bottles and a gleaming duralite shaker. “We only persecute the ones it’s safe to persecute.”

  Quinby frowned. “It’s bad enough to do what no being ought to do, but to do it only when you know you can get away with it‌—‌I’ve been reading,” he announced abruptly, as though it was a challenge to another fight.

  Mike grunted. “Sollies and telecasts are enough for a man, I always say. You get to reading and you get mixed up.”

  “Do you think you aren’t mixed up without it? Do you think you aren’t all mixed up? If people would only try to look at things straight‌—‌”

  “What have you been reading?” I asked.

  “Old stuff. Dating, oh I guess, a millennium or so back. There were people then that used to write a lot about the Brotherhood of Man. They said good things. And it all means something to us now if you translate it into the Brotherhood of Beings. Man is unified now, but what’s the result? The doctrine of Terrene Supremacy.”

  Guzub brought the drinks and we forked out our credits. When he heard the phrase “Terrene Supremacy” his left eyelid went into that little quiver that is the Martian expression of polite incredulity but he said nothing.

  Quinby picked up his milk. “It’s all because nobody looks at things straight. Everybody looks around the corners of his own prejudices. If you look at a problem straight, there isn’t a problem. That’s what I’m trying to do,” he said with that earnestness you never come back to after youth. “I’m trying to train myself to look straight.”

  “So there isn’t a problem. No problems at all.” I thought of the day I’d had and the jobs still ahead of me and I snorted. And then I had an idea and calmly, between swallows of whiskey, changed the course of terrene civilization. “I’ve got problems,” I asserted. “How’d you like to look straight at them? Are you working now?”

  “I’m in my freelance period,” he said. “I’ve finished technical college and I’m not due for my final occupational analysis for another year.”

  “All right,” I said. “How’s about it?”

  Slowly he nodded.

  “If you can look,” said Mike, wobbling his neck, “as straight as you can hit‌—‌”

  I was back in my office when the call came from the space port. I’d seen Thuringer’s face red before, but never purple. He had trouble speaking, but he finally spluttered out, “Somebody did a lousy job of sterilization on your new assistant’s parents.”

  “What seems to be the trouble?” I asked in my soothingest manner.

  “Trouble! The man’s lunatic stock. Not a doubt. When you see what he’s done to‌—‌” He shuddered. He reached out to switch the ike-range, but changed his mind. “Uh-huh. Come over here and see it for yourself. You wouldn’t believe it. But come quick, before I go and apply for sterilization myself.”

  We had a special private tube to the space port; they used so many of our robots. It took me less than five minutes to get there. A robot parked my bus and another robot took me up in the lift. It was a relief to see two in good working order, though I noticed that the second one showed signs of incipient limpness in his left arm. Since he ran the lift with his right, it didn’t really matter, but Robinc had principles of perfection.

  Thuringer’s robot secretary said, “Tower room,” and I went on up. The spaceport manager scanned me and gave the click that meant the beam was on. The tower door opened as I walked in.

  I don’t know what I’d expected to see. I couldn’t imagine what would get the hard-boiled Thuringer into such a blasting dither. This had been the first job that I’d tried Quinby out on, and a routine piece of work it was, or should have been. Routine, that is, in these damnable times. The robot which operated the signal tower had gone limp in the legs and one arm. He’d been quoted as saying some pretty strange things on the beam, too. Backsass to pilots and insubordinate mutterings.

  The first thing I saw was a neat pile of scrap in the middle of the room. Some of it looked like robot parts. The next thing I saw was Thuringer, who had gone from purple to a kind of rosy black. “It’s getting me!” he burst out. “I sit here and watch it and I’m going mad! Do something, man! Then go out and annihilate your assistant, but do something first!”

  I looked where he pointed. I’d been in this tower control room before. The panel had a mike and an ike, a speaker and a viewer, and a set of directional lights. In front of it there used to be a chair where the robot sat, talking on the beam and watching the indicators.

  Now there was no chair. And no robot. There was a table, and on the table was a box. And from that box there extended one arm, which was alive. That arm punched regularly and correctly at the lights, and out of the box there issued the familiar guiding voice.

  I walked around and got a gander at the front of the box. It had eyes and a mouth and a couple of holes that it took me a minute to spot as ear holes. It was like a line with two dots above and two below it, so:

  * * *

  ___

  * * *

  It was like no face that ever was in nature, but it could obviously see and hear and talk.

  Thuringer moaned. “And that’s what you call a repair job! My beautiful robot! Your A-i-A Double Prime All-Utili
ty Extra-Quality De-Luxe Model! Nothing of him left but this”‌—‌he pointed at the box ‌—‌ “and this”‌—‌he gestured sadly at the scrap heap.

  I looked a long time at the box and I scratched my head. “He works, doesn’t he?”

  “Works? What? Oh, works.”

  “You’ve been here watching him. He pushes the right lights? He gets messages right? He gives the right instructions?”

  “Oh yes. I suppose so. Yes, he works all right. But damn it, man, he’s not a robot any more. You’ve ruined him.”

  The box interrupted its beam work. “Ruined hell,” it said in the same toneless voice. “I never felt so good since I was animated. Thanks, boss.”

  Thuringer goggled. I started to leave the room.

  “Where are you going? Are you going to make this right? I demand another A-i-A Double Prime at once, you understand. And I trust you’ll kill that assistant.”

  “Kill him? I’m going to kiss him.”

  “Why, you‌—‌” He’d picked up quite a vocabulary when he ran the space port at Venusberg. “I’ll see that you’re fired from Robinc tomorrow!”

  “I quit today,” I said. “One minute ago.”

  That was the birth of Q. U. R.

  I found Quinby at the next place on the list I’d given him. This was a job repairing a household servant‌—‌one of the Class B androids with a pretty finish, but not up to commercial specifications.

  I gawped when I saw the servant. Instead of two arms he had four tentacles, which he was flexing intently.

  Quinby was packing away his repair kit. He looked up at me, smiling. “It was very simple,” he said. “He’d seen Martoid robots at work, and he realized that flexible tentacles would be much more useful than jointed arms for housework. The more he brooded about it, the clumsier his arms got. But it’s all right now, isn’t it?” “Fine, boss,” said the servant. He seemed to be reveling in the free pleasure of those tentacles.

  “There were some Martoid spares in the kit,” Quinby explained, “and when I switched the circuit a little‌—‌”

  “Have you stopped,” I interposed, “to think what that housewife is going to say when she comes home and finds her servant waving Martoid tentacles at her?”

  “Why, no. You think she’d‌—‌”

  “Look at it straight,” I said. “She’s going to join the procession demanding that I be fired from Robinc. But don’t let it worry you. Robinc’s nothing to us. From now on we’re ourselves. We’re Us Incorporated. Come on back to the Sunspot and we’ll thrash this out.”

  “Thanks, boss,” the semi-Martoid called after us, happily writhing.

  I recklessly ordered a Three Planet. This was an occasion. Quinby stuck to milk. Guzub shrugged‌—‌that is, he wrinkled his skin where shoulders might have been on his circular body‌—‌and said, “You loog abby, boys. Good news?”

  I nodded. “Best yet, Guzub. You’re dishing ’em up for an historic occasion. Make a note.”

  “Lazd dime you zelebrade izdorig oggazion,” said Guzub resignedly, “you breag zevendy-vour glazzes. Wy zhould I maig a node?”

  “This is different, Guz. Now,” I said to Quinby, “tell me how you got this unbelievable idea of repair?”

  “Why, isn’t it obvious?” he asked simply. “When Zwergenhaus invented the first robot, he wasn’t thinking functionally. He was trying to make a mechanical man. He did, and he made a good job of it. But that’s silly. Man isn’t a functionally useful animal. There’s very little he can do himself. What’s made him top dog is that he can invent and use tools to do what needs doing. But why make his mechanical servants as helplessly constructed as he is?

  “Almost every robot, except perhaps a few like farmhands, does only one or two things and does those things constantly. All right. Shape them so that they can best do just those things, with no parts left over. Give them a brain, eyes and ears to receive commands and whatever organs they need for their work.

  “There’s the source of your whole robot epidemic. They were all burdened down with things they didn’t need‌—‌legs when their job was a sedentary one, two arms when they used only one‌—‌or else, like my house servant, their organs were designed to imitate man’s rather than to be ideally functional. Result: the unused waste parts atrophied, and the robots became physically sick, sometimes mentally as well because they were tortured by unrealized potentialities. It was simple enough, once you looked at it straight.”

  The drinks came. I went at the Three Planets cautiously. You know the formula: one part Terrene rum‌—‌170 proof‌—‌one part Venusian margil, and a dash or so of Martian vuzd. It’s smooth and murderous. I’d never tasted one as smooth as this of Guzub’s, and I feared it’d be that much the more murderous.

  “You know something of the history of motor transportation?” Quinby went on. “Look at the twentieth century models in the museum sometime. See how long they kept trying to make a horseless carriage look like a carriage for horses. We’ve been making the same mistake‌—‌trying to make a manless body look like the bodies of men.”

  “Son,” I said‌—‌he was maybe five or ten years younger than I was‌—‌ “there’s something in this looking-straight business of yours. There’s so much, in fact, that I wonder if even you realize how much. Are you aware that if we go at this right we can damned near wipe Robinc out of existence?”

  He choked on his milk. “You mean,” he ventured, slowly and dreamily, “we could‌—‌”

  “But it can’t be done overnight. People are used to android robots. It’s the only kind they ever think of. They’ll be scared of your unhuman-looking contraptions, just like Thuringer was scared. We’ve got to build into this gradually. Lots of publicity. Lots of promotion. Articles, lectures, debates. Give ’em a name. A good name. Keep robots; that’s common domain, I read somewhere, because it comes out of a play written a long time ago in some dialect of Old Slavic. Quinby’s Something Robots‌—‌”

  “Functionoid?”

  “Sounds too much like fungoid. Don’t like. Let me see‌—‌” I took some more Three Planets. “I’ve got it. Usuform. Quinby’s Usuform Robots. Q. U. R.”

  Quinby grinned. “I like it. But shouldn’t it be your name too?”

  “Me,’ I’ll take a cut on the credits. I don’t like my name much. Now what we ought to do is introduce it with a new robot. One that can do something no android in the Robinc stock can tackle‌—‌”

  Guzub called my name. “Man ere looking vor you.”

  It was Mike. “Hi, mister,” he said. “I was wondering did you maybe have a minute to listen to my brother-in-law’s idea. You remember, about that new kind of robot‌—‌”

  “Hey, Guzub,” I yelled. “Two more Three Planets.” “Make it three,” said Quinby quietly.

  We talked all the rest of that night. When the Sunspot closed at twenty-three‌—‌we were going through one of our cyclic periods of blue laws then‌—‌we moved to my apartment and kept at it until we fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, scattered over my furniture.

  Quinby’s one drink‌—‌he stopped there‌—‌was just enough to stimulate him to seeing straighter than ever. He took something under one minute to visualize completely the possibilities of Mike’s contribution.

  This brother-in-law was a folklore hobbyist, and had been reading up on the ancient notion of dowsing. He had realized at once that there could have been no particular virtue in the forked witch-hazel rod which was supposed to locate water in the earth, but that certain individuals must have been able to perceive that water in some nth-sensory manner, communicating this reaction subconsciously to the rod in their hands.

  To train that nth sense in a human being was probably impossible; it was most likely the result of a chance mutation. But you could attempt to develop it in a robot brain by experimentation with the patterns of the sense-perception tracks; and he had succeeded. He could equip a robot with a brain that would infallibly register the presence of wa
ter, and he was working on the further possibilities of oil and other mineral deposits. There wasn’t any need to stress the invaluability of such a robot to an exploring party.

  “All right,” Quinby said. “What does such a robot need beside his brain and his sense organs? A means of locomotion and a means of marking the spots he finds. He’ll be used chiefly in rough desert country, so a caterpillar tread will be far more useful to him than legs that can trip and stumble. The best kind of markers‌—‌lasting and easy to spot‌—‌would be metal spikes. He could, I suppose, carry those and have an arm designed as a pile driver; but … yes, look, this is best: Supposing he lays them?”

  “Lays them?” I repeated vaguely.

  “Yes. When his water sense registers maximum intensity‌—‌that is, when he’s right over a hidden spring‌—‌there’ll be a sort of sphincter reaction, and plop, he’ll lay a sharp spike, driving it into the ground.”

  It was perfect. It would be a cheap robot to make‌—‌just a box on treads, the box containing the brain, the sense organs, and a supply of spikes. Maybe later in a more elaborate model he could be fed crude metal and make his own spikes. There’d be a decided demand for him, and nothing of Robinc’s could compete. An exploring party could simply send him out for the day, then later go over the clear track left by his treads and drill wherever he had laid a spike. And the pure functionalism of him would be the first step in our campaign to accustom the public to Quinby’s Usuform Robots.

  Then the ideas came thick and fast. We had among us figured out at least seventy-three applications in which usuforms could beat androids, before our eyes inevitably folded up on us.

  I woke up with three sensations: First, a firm resolve to stick to whiskey and leave Three Planetses to the Martians that invented them. Second, and practically obliterating this discomfort, a thrill of anticipation at the wonders that lay ahead of us, like a kid that wakes up and knows today’s his birthday. But third, and uncomfortably gnawing at the back of this pleasure, the thought that there was something wrong, something we’d overlooked.