I’d 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 repairman, 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 here 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 with 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 that 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 gratitude; 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.”
It took a little argument, but with the memory of that one perfect shot in his mind it didn’t take much. As Quinby said afterward, “Robinc built pride into its robots to give them self-confidence. But that pride also gave them vanity and dissatisfaction with anything less than perfection. That was what we could use. It was all perfectly simple—”
“—when you looked at it straight,” I chorused with him.
“And besides,” he said, “now we know how to lick Robinc forever.”
That was some comfort, I suppose, though he wouldn’t say another word to explain it. And I needed comfort, because just then things took a nasty turn again. We stuck close to our factory and didn’t dare go out. We were taking no chances on more kidnapings before Quinby finished his new inspiration.
Quinby worked on that alone, secret even from us. I figured out some extra touches of perfection on the usuform soldier, who was now our bodyguard—Grew would never dare complain of the theft because he had no legal right to possess such an android anyway. Mike and his assistants, both living and usuform, turned out barkeeps and dowsers and cooks—our three most successful usuform designs so far.
We didn’t go out, but we heard enough. It was the newest and nastiest step in Grew’s campaign. He had men following up our cooks and bartenders and managing to slip concentrated doses of ptomaine alkaloids into their products. No serious poisoning, you understand; just an abnormally high proportion of people taken sick after taking usuform-prepared food or drink. And a rumor going around that the usuforms secreted a poisonous fluid, which was objective nonsense, but enough to scare a lot of people.
“It’s no use,” Mike said to me one day. “We’re licked. Two new orders in a week. We’re done for. No use keeping up production.”
“The hell we’re licked,” I said.
“If you want to encourage me, you’d ought to sound like you believed it yourself. No, we’re sunk. While he sits in there and— I’m going down to the Sunspot and drink. Three Planets till this one spins. And if Grew wants to kidnap me, he’s welcome to me.”
It was just then the message came from the Head. I read it, and know how the camel feels about that last straw. It said:
I can’t resist popular pressure forever. I know and you know what Grew is up to; but the public is demanding re-enactment of the law giving Robinc exclusive rights. Unless Quinby can see straight through the hat to the rabbit, that re-enactment is going to pass.
“We’ll see what he has to say to this,” I said to Mike. I started for the door, and even as I did so Quinby came out.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “It’s done.” He read the Head’s message with one glance, and it didn’t bother him. He grabbed me by the shoulders and beamed. I’ve never heard my name spoken so warmly. “Mike, too. Come on in and see the greatest usuform we’ve hit on yet. Our troubles are over.”
We went in. We looked. And we gawked. For Quinby’s greatest usuform, so far as our eyes could tell, was just another android robot.
Mike went resolutely off to the Sunspot to carry out his threat of making this planet spin. I began to think myself that the tension had affected Quinby’s clear-seeing mind. I didn’t listen especially when he told me I’d given him the idea myself. I watched the usuform-android go off on his mysterious mission and I even let him take my soldier along. And I didn’t care. We were done for now, if even Dugg Quinby was slipping.
But I didn’t have time to do much worrying that morning. I was kept too busy with androids that came in wanting repairs. Very thoroughgoing repairs, too, that turned them, like my soldier, practically into usuforms. We always had a few such requests—I think I mentioned how they all want to be perfect—but this began to develop into a cloudburst. I stopped the factory lines and put every man and robot on repair.
Along about midaftemoon I began to feel puzzled. It took me a little while to get it, and then it hit me. The last three that I’d repaired had been brand-new. Fresh from the Robinc factory, and rushing over here to be remade into … into usuforms!
As soon as I finished adjusting drill arms on the robot miner, I hurried over to where Quinby was instal
ling an infrared color sense on a soldier intended for camouflage spotting. He looked up and smiled when he saw me. “You get it now?”
“I get what’s happening. But how … who—”
“I just followed your advice. Didn’t you say what we needed was a guaranteed working ususform converter?”
“I don’t need to explain, do I? It’s simple enough once you look at it straight.”
We were sitting in the Sunspot. Guzub was very happy; it was the first time the Head had ever honored his establishment.
“You’d better,” I said, “remember I’m a crooked-viewing dope.”
“But it’s all from things you’ve said. You’re always saying I’m good at things and robots, but lousy at people because people don’t see or act straight. Well, we were stymied with people. They couldn’t see the real importance of usuforms through all the smoke screens that Grew threw up. But you admit yourself that Robots see straight, so I went direct to them. And you said we needed a usuform converter, so I made one.”
The Head smiled. “And what is the utile form of a converter?”
“He had to look like an android, because otherwise they wouldn’t accept him. But he was the sturdiest, strongest android ever made, with several ingenious new muscles. If it came to fighting, he was sure to make converts that way. And besides, he had something that’s never been put in a robot brain before—the ability to argue and convince. With that, he had the usuform soldier as a combination bodyguard and example. So he went out among the androids, even to the guards at Robinc and from then on inside; and since he was a usuform converter, well—he converted.”
The Head let the famous grin play across his black face. “Fine work, Quinby. And if Grew hadn’t had the sense to see at last that he was licked, you could have gone on with your usuform converters until there wasn’t an android left on Earth. Robinc would have toppled like a wooden building with termites.”
“And Grew?” I asked. “What’s become of him?”
“I think, in a way, he’s resigned to his loss. He told me that since his greatest passion was gone, he was going to make the most of his second greatest. He’s gone off to his place in the mountains with the usuform cook you gave him, and he swears he’s going to eat himself to death.”
“Me,” said Mike, getting to appropriate business, “I’d like a damper death.”
“And from now on, my statisticians assure me, we’re in no danger of ever using up our metal stockpile. The savings on usuforms will save us. Do you realize, Quimby, that you’re just about the most important man in the Empire today?”
That was when I first heard the band approaching. It got louder while Quinby got red and gulped. It was going good when he finally said, “You know, if I’d ever thought of that, I … I don’t think I could have done it.”
He meant it, too. You’ve never seen an unhappier face than his when the crowd burst into the Sunspot yelling “Quinby!” and “Q. U. R.!”
But you’ve never seen a prouder face than mine as I saw it then in the bar mirror. Proud of myself, sure, but only because it was me that discovered Dugg Quinby.
Snulbug
“That’s a hell of a spell you’re using,” said the demon, “if I’m the best you can call up.”
He wasn’t much, Bill Hitchens had to admit. He looked lost in the center of that pentacle. His basic design was impressive enough—snakes for hair, curling tusks, a sharptipped tail, all the works—but he was something under an inch tall.
Bill had chanted the words and lit the powder with the highest hopes. Even after the feeble flickering flash and the damp fizzling zzzt which had replaced the expected thunder and lightning, he had still had hopes. He had stared up at the space above the pentacle waiting to be awe-struck until he had heard that plaintive little voice from the floor wailing, "Here I am.”
“Nobody’s wasted time and power on a misfit like me for years,” the demon went on. “Where’d you get the spell?”
“Just a little something I whipped up,” said Bill modestly.
The demon grunted and muttered something about people that thought they were magicians.
“But I’m not a magician,” Bill explained. “I’m a biochemist.”
The demon shuddered. “I land the damnedest cases,” he mourned. “Working for that psychiatrist wasn’t bad enough, I should draw a biochemist. Whatever that is.”
Bill couldn’t check his curiosity. “And what did you do for a psychiatrist?”
“He showed me to people who were followed by little men and told them I’d chase the little men away.” The demon pantomimed shooting motions.
“And did they go away?”
“Sure. Only then the people decided they’d sooner have little men than me. It didn’t work so good. Nothing ever does,” he added woefully. “Yours won’t either.”
Bill sat down and filled his pipe. Calling up demons wasn’t so terrifying after all. Something quiet and homey about it. “Oh, yes it will,” he said. “This is foolproof.”
“That’s what they all think. People—” The demon wistfully eyed the match as Bill lit his pipe. “But we might as well get it over with. What do you want?”
“I want a laboratory for my embolism experiments. If this method works, it’s going to mean that a doctor can spot an embolus in the blood stream long before it’s dangerous and remove it safely. My ex-boss, that screwball old occultist Reuben Choatsby, said it wasn’t practical—meaning there wasn’t a fortune in it for him—and fired me. Everybody else thinks I’m wacky too, and I can’t get any backing. So I need ten thousand dollars.”
“There!” the demon sighed with satisfaction. “I told you it wouldn’t work. That’s out for me. They can’t start fetching money on demand till three grades higher than me. I told you.”
“But you don’t,” Bill insisted, “appreciate all my fiendish subtlety. Look— Say, what is your name?”
The demon hesitated. “You haven’t got another of those things?”
“What things?”
“Matches."
“Sure.”
“Light me one, please?”
Bill tossed the burning match into the center of the pentacle. The demon scrambled eagerly out of the now cold ashes of the powder and dived into the flame, rubbing himself with the brisk vigor of a man under a needle-shower. “There!” he gasped joyously. “That’s more like it.”
“And now what’s your name?”
The demon’s face fell again. “My name? You really want to know?”
“I’ve got to call you something.”
“Oh, no you don’t. I’m going home. No money games for me.
“But I haven’t explained yet what you are to do. What’s your name?”
“Snulbug.” The demon’s voice dropped almost too low to be heard.
“Snulbug?” Bill laughed.
“Uh-huh. I’ve got a cavity in one tusk, my snakes are falling out, I haven’t got enough troubles, I should be named Snulbug.”
“All right. Now listen, Snulbug, can you travel into the future?”
“A little. I don’t like it much, though. It makes you itch in the memory.”
“Look, my fine snake-haired friend. It isn’t a question of what you like. How would you like to be left there in that pentacle with nobody to throw matches at you?” Snulbug shuddered. “I thought so. Now, you can travel into the future?”
“I said a little.”
“And,” Bill leaned forward and puffed hard at his corncob as he asked the vital question, “can you bring back material objects?” If the answer was no, all the fine febrile fertility of his spell-making was useless. And if that was useless, heaven alone knew how the Hitchens Embolus Diagnosis would ever succeed in ringing down the halls of history, and incidentally saving a few thousand lives annually.
Snulbug seemed more interested in the warm clouds of pipe smoke than in the question. “Sure,” he said. “Within reason I can—” He broke off and stared up piteously. “You don’t mean�
� You can’t be going to pull that old gag again?”
“Look, baby. You do what I tell you and leave the worrying to me. You can bring back material objects?”
“Sure. But I warn you—”
Bill cut him off short. “Then as soon as I release you from that pentacle, you’re to bring me tomorrow’s newspaper.”
Snulbug sat down on the burned match and tapped his forehead sorrowfully with his tail tip. “I knew it,” he wailed. “I knew it. Three times already this happens to me. I’ve got limited powers, I’m a runt, I’ve got a funny name, so I should run foolish errands.”
“Foolish errands?” Bill rose and began to pace about the bare attic. “Sir, if I may call you that, I resent such an imputation. I’ve spent weeks on this idea. Think of the limitless power in knowing the future. Think of what could be done with it: swaying the course of empire, dominating mankind. All I want is to take this stream of unlimited power, turn it into the simple channel of humanitarian research, and get me $10,000; and you call that a foolish errand!”
“That Spaniard,” Snulbug moaned. “He was a nice guy, even if his spell was lousy. Had a solid, comfortable brazier where an imp could keep warm. Fine fellow. And he had to ask to see tomorrow’s newspaper. I’m warning you—”
“I know,” said Bill hastily, “I’ve been over in my mind all the things that can go wrong. And that’s why I’m laying three conditions on you before you get out of that pentacle. I’m not falling for the easy snares.”
“All right.” Snulbug sounded almost resigned. “Let’s hear ’em. Not that they’ll do any good.”
“First: This newspaper must not contain a notice of my own death or of any other disaster that would frustrate what I can do with it.”
“But shucks,” Snulbug protested. “I can’t guarantee that. If you’re slated to die between now and tomorrow, what can I do about it? Not that I guess you’re important enough to crash the paper.”
“Courtesy, Snulbug. Courtesy to your master. But I tell you what: When you go into the future, you’ll know then if I’m going to die? Right. Well, if I am, come back and tell me and we’ll work out other plans. This errand will be off.”
The Compleat Werewolf Page 12
