“Oh, oh,” I said. There was Sanford Grew entering our box.
The smile was still gentle and sad, but it had a kind of warmth about it that puzzled me. I’d never seen that on Grew’s face before. He advanced to Quinby and held out his hand. “Sir,” he said, “I have just dined.”
Quinby rose eagerly, his blond head towering above the little old executive. “You mean my usuform-”
“Your usuform, sir, is indubitably the greatest cook since the Golden Age before the devilish introduction of concentrates. Do you mind if I share your box for this great exhibition?”
Quinby beamed and introduced him to Mike. Grew shook hands warmly with our foreman, then turned to me and spoke even my name with friendly pleasure. Before anybody could say any more, before I could even wipe the numb dazzle off my face, the Head’s voice began to come over the speaker.
His words were few—just a succinct promise of the wonders of usuforms and their importance to our civilization—and by the time he’d finished the dowser was in place on the field.
To everybody watching but us, there was never anything that looked less like a robot. There wasn’t a trace of an android trait to it. It looked like nothing but a heavy duralite box mounted on caterpillar treads.
But it was a robot by legal definition. It had a Zwergenhaus brain and was capable of independent action under human commands or direction. That box housed the brain, with its nth-sensory perception, and eyes and ears, and the spike-laying apparatus. For when the dowser’s perception of water reached a certain level of intensity, it layed a metal spike into the ground. An exploring party could send it out on its own to survey the territory, then follow its tracks at leisure and dig where the spikes were.
After the Head’s speech there was silence. Then Quinby leaned over to the mike in our box and said “Go find water.”
The dowser began to move over the field. Only the Head himself knew where water had been cached at various levels and in various quantities. The dowser raced along for a bit, apparently finding nothing. Then it began to hesitate and veer. Once it paused for noticeable seconds. Even Quinby looked tense. I heard sharp breaths from Sanford Grew, and Mike almost drained his shaker.
Then the dowser moved on. There was water, but not enough to bother drilling for. It zoomed about a little more, then stopped suddenly and definitely. It had found a real treasure trove.
I knew its mechanism. In my mind I could see the Zwergenhaus brain registering and communicating its needs to the metal muscles of the sphincter mechanism that would lay the spike. The dowser sat there apparently motionless, but when you knew it you had the impression of a hen straining to lay.
Then came the explosion. When my eyes could see again through the settling fragments, there was nothing in the field but a huge crater.
It was Quinby, of course, who saw right off what had happened. “Somebody,” my numb ears barely heard him say, “substituted for the spike an explosive shell with a contact-fuse tip.”
Sanford Grew nodded. “Plausible, young man. Plausible. But I rather think that the general impression will be simply that usuforms don’t work.” He withdrew, smiling gently.
I held Mike back by pouring the rest of the shaker down his throat. Mayhem wouldn’t help us any.
“So you converted him?” I said harshly to Quinby. “Brother, the next thing you’d better construct is a good guaranteed working usuform converter.”
The next week was the low point in the history of Q.U.R. I know now, when Quinby’s usuforms are what makes the world tick, it’s hard to imagine Q.U.R. ever hitting a low point. But one reason I’m telling this is to make you realize that no big thing is easy, and that a lot of big things depend for their success on some very little thing, like that chance remark of mine I just quoted.
Not that any of us guessed then how important that remark was. We had other things to worry about. The fiasco of that demonstration had just about cooked our goose. Sure, we explained it must’ve been sabotage, and the Head backed us up; but the wiseacres shook their heads and muttered, “Not bad for an alibi, but-”
Two of three telecommentators who had been backing us switched over to Grew. The solly producer abandoned his plans for a documentary. I don’t know if this was honest conviction or the power of Robinc; it hit us the same either way. People were scared of usuforms now; they might go boom! And the biggest and smartest publicity and advertising campaign of the past century was fizzling out ffft before our helpless eyes.
It was the invaluable Guzub who gave us our first upward push. We were drinking at the Sunspot when he said, “Ah, boys—Zo things are going wrong with you, bud you zdill gome ‘ere. No madder wad abbens, beoble zdill wand three things: eading and dringing and-”
Quinby looked up with the sharp pleasure of a new idea. “There’s nothing we can do with the third,” he said. “But eating and drinking- Guzub, you want to see usuforms go over, don’t you?”
“And remember,” I added practically, “you’ve got a royalty interest in our robot barkeep.”
Guzub rolled all his eyes up once and down once—the Martian trick of nodding assent.
“All right,” said Quinby. “Practically all bartenders are Martians, the tentacles are so useful professionally. Lots of them must be good friends of yours?”
“Lodz,” Guzub agreed.
“Then listen-”
That was how we launched the really appealing campaign. Words? Sure, people have read and heard millions upon billions of words, and one set of them is a lot like another. But when you get down to Guzub’s three essentials-
Within a fortnight there was one of our usuform barkeeps in one bar out of five in the influential metropolitan districts. Guzub’s friends took orders for drinks, gave them to the usuforms, served the drinks, and then explained to the satisfied customers how they’d been made—pointing out besides that there had not been an explosion. The customers would get curious. They’d order more to watch the usuform work. (It had Martoid tentacles and its own body was its shaker.) The set-up was wonderful for business—and for us.
That got at the men. Meanwhile we had usuform cooks touring the residential districts and offering to prepare old-fashioned meals free. There wasn’t a housewife whose husband didn’t say regularly once a week, “Why can’t we have more old-fashioned food instead of all these concentrates? Why, my mother used to-”
Few of the women knew the art. Those of them who could afford android cooks hadn’t found them too satisfactory. And husbands kept muttering about mother. The chance of a happy home was worth the risk of these dreadful dangerous new things. So our usuform cooks did their stuff and husbands were rapturously pleased and everything began to look swell. (We remembered to check up on a few statistics three quarters of an hour later—it seemed we had in a way included Guzub’s third appeal after all.)
So things were coming on sweetly until one day at the Sun-spot I looked up to see we had a visitor. “I heard that I might find you here,” Sanford Grew smiled. He beckoned to Guzub and said, “Your oldest brandy.”
Guzub knew him by sight. I saw one tentacle flicker hesitantly toward a bottle of mikiphin, that humorously named but none the less effective knockout liquor. I shook my head, and Guzub shrugged resignedly.
“Well?” Quinby asked directly.
“Gentlemen,” said Sanford Grew, “I have come here to make a last appeal to you.”
“You can take your appeal,” I said, “and-”
Quinby shushed me. “Yes, sir?”
“This is not a business appeal, young men. This is an appeal to your consciences, to your duty as citizens of the Empire of Earth.”
I saw Quinby looking a little bothered. The smiling old boy was shrewd; he knew that the conscience was where to aim a blow at Quinby. “Our consciences are clear—I think and trust.”
“Are they? This law that you finagled through the Council, that destroyed what you call my monopoly—it did more than that. That ‘monopoly5 rested on our co
ntrol of the factors which make robots safe and prevent them from ever harming living beings. You have removed that control.”
Quinby laughed with relief. “Is that all? I knew you’d been using that line in publicity but I didn’t think you expected us to believe it. There are other safety factors besides yours. We’re using them, and the law still insists on the use of some, though not necessarily Robinc’s. I’m afraid my conscience is untouched.”
“I do not know,” said Sanford Grew, “whether I am flattering or insulting you when I say I know that it is no use trying to buy you out at any price. You are immune to reason-”
“Because it’s on our side,” said Quinby quietly.
“I am left with only one recourse.” He rose and smiled a gentle farewell. “Good day, gentlemen.”
He’d left the brandy untouched. I finished it, and was glad I’d vetoed Guzub’s miki.
“One recourse-” Quinby mused. “That must mean-”
I nodded.
~ * ~
But it started quicker than we’d expected. It started, in fact, as soon as we left the Sunspot. Duralite arms went around my body and a duralite knee dug into the small of my back.
The first time I ever met Dugg Quinby was in a truly major and wondrous street brawl, where the boy was a whirlwind. Quinby was mostly the quiet kind, but when something touched him off—and injustice was the spark that usually did it—he could fight like fourteen Martian mountaineers defending their idols.
But who can fight duralite? Me, I have some sense; I didn’t even try. Quinby’s temper blinded his clear vision for a moment. The only result was a broken knuckle and some loss of blood and skin.
The next thing was duralite fingers probing for the proper spots at the back of my head. Then a sudden deft pressure, and blackness.
~ * ~
We were in a workshop of some sort. My first guess was one of the secret workshops that honeycomb the Robinc plant, where nobody but Grew’s most handpicked men ever penetrate. We were cuffed to the wall. They’d left only one of the androids to guard us.
It was Quinby who spoke to him, and straight to the point. “What happens to us?”
“When I get my next orders,” the android said in his completely emotionless voice, “I kill you.”
I tried to hold up my morale by looking as indifferent as he did. I didn’t make it.
“The last recourse-” Quinby said.
I nodded. Then, “But look!” I burst out. “This can’t be what it looks like. He can’t be a Robinc android because he’s going,” I gulped a fractional gulp, “to kill us. Robinc’s products have the safety factor that prevents them from harming a living being, even on another being’s orders.”
“No,” said Quinby slowly. “Remember that Robinc manufactures androids for the Empire’s army? Obviously those can’t have the safety factor. And Mr. Grew has apparently held out a few for his own bootleg banditti.”
I groaned. “Trust you,” I said. “We’re chained up with a murderous android, and trust you to stand there calmly and look at things straight. Well, are you going to see straight enough to get us out of this?”
“Of course,” he said simply. “We can’t let Grew destroy the future of usuforms.”
There was at least one other future that worried me more, but I knew there was no use bringing up anything so personal. I just stood there and watched Quinby thinking—what time I wasn’t watching the android’s hand hovering around his holster and wondering when he’d get his next orders.
And while I was waiting and watching, half scared sweat-less, half trusting blindly in Quinby, half wondering impersonally what death was like—yes, I know that makes three halves of me, but I was in no state for accurate counting— while I waited, I began to realize something very odd.
It wasn’t me I was most worried about. It was Dugg Quinby. Me going all unselfish on me! Ever since Quinby had first seen the nonsense in androids—no, back of that, ever since that first magnifiscrumptious street brawl, I’d begun to love that boy like a son—which’d have made me pretty precocious.
There was something about him—that damned mixture of almost stupid innocence, combined with the ability to solve any problem by his—not ingenuity, precisely, just his inborn capacity for looking at things straight.
Here I was feeling selfless. And here he was coming forth with the first at all tricky or indirect thing I’d ever known him to pull. Maybe it was like marriage—the way two people sort of grow together and average up.
Anyway, he said to the android now, “I bet you military robots are pretty good marksmen, aren’t you?”
“I’m the best Robinc ever turned out,” the android said.
I worked for Robinc; I knew that each of them was conditioned with the belief that he was the unique best. It gave them confidence.
Quinby reached out his unfettered hand and picked a plastic disk off the worktable. “While you’re waiting for orders, why don’t you show us some marksmanship? It’ll pass the time.”
The robot nodded, and Quinby tossed the disk in the air. The android grabbed at its holster. And the gun stuck.
The metal of the holster had got dented in the struggle of kidnaping us. Quinby must have noticed that; his whole plan developed from that little point.
The robot made comments on the holster; military androids had a soldier’s vocabulary built in, so we’ll skip that.
Quinby said, “That’s too bad. My friend here’s a Robinc repair man, or used to be. If you let him loose, he could fix that.”
The robot frowned. He wanted the repair, but he was no dope. Finally he settled on chaining my foot before releasing my hand, and keeping his own digits constantly on my wrist so he could clamp down if I got any funny notions about snatching the gun and using it. I began to think Quinby’s plan was fizzling, but I went ahead and had the holster repaired in no time with the tools on the worktable.
“Does that happen often?” Quinby asked.
“A little too often.” There was a roughness to the android’s tones. I recognized what I’d run onto so often in trouble-shooting; an android’s resentment of the fact that he didn’t work perfectly.
“I see,” Quinby went on, as casually as though we were on social terms. “Of course the trouble is that you have to use a gun.”
“I’m a soldier. Of course I have to use one.”
“You don’t understand. I mean the trouble is that you have to use one. Now, if you could be a gun-”
It took some explaining. But when the android understood what it could mean to be a usuform, to have an arm that didn’t need to snatch at a holster because it was itself a firing weapon, his eye cells began to take on a new bright glow.
“You could do that to me?” he demanded of me.
“Sure,” I said. “You give me your gun and I’ll-”
He drew back mistrustfully. Then he looked around the room, found another gun, unloaded it, and handed it to me, “Go ahead,” he said.
It was a lousy job. I was in a state and in a hurry and the sweat running down my forehead and dripping off my eyebrows didn’t help any. The workshop wasn’t too well equipped, either, and I hate working from my head. I like a nice diagram to look at.
But I made it somehow, very crudely, replacing one hand by the chamber and barrel and attaching the trigger so that it would be worked by the same nerve currents as actuated the finger movements to fire a separate gun.
The android loaded himself awkwardly. I stood aside, and Quinby tossed up the disk. You never saw a prettier piece of instantaneous trapshooting. The android stretched his face into that very rare thing, a robot grin, and expressed himself in pungently jubilant military language.
“You like it?” Quinby asked.
All that I can quote of the robot’s reply is “Yes,” but he made it plenty emphatic.
“Then--”
But I stepped in. “Just a minute. I’ve got an idea to improve it.” Quinby was probably trusting to our guard’s grati
tude; I wanted a surer hold on him. “Let me take this off just a second-” I removed the chamber and barrel; I still had his hand. “Now,” I said, “we want out.”
He brought up the gun in his other hand, but I said, “Ah, ah! Naughty! You aren’t supposed to kill us till you get orders, and if you do they’ll find you here with one hand. Fine state for a soldier. You can’t repair yourself; you need two hands for it. But if we get out, you can come with us and be made over as much as you want into the first and finest efficient happy usuform soldier.”
Robot and the Man - [Adventures in Science Fiction 04] Page 9
