The Compleat Boucher

by Anthony Boucher; Editor: James A. Mann

  “You know that a Three Planets must be drunk within thirty seconds of mixing for the first sip to have its ideal flavor.”

  “Then—”

  “All right,” Quinby said. “You let us know when your honored guest arrives, and we’ll have a Three Planets for him.”

  The Head looked doubtful. “If you think you can— A bad one might be more dangerous than none—”

  “And if we do,” I interposed hastily, “you’ll reconsider this business of the usuform robots?”

  “If this mining deal goes through satisfactorily, I should be strong enough to contemplate facing Robinc.”

  “Then you’ll get your Three Planets,” I said calmly, wondering what Quinby had seen straight now.

  We met Mike at the Sunspot as arranged. He was drinking a Three Planets. “This is good,” he announced. “This has spacedrive and zoomf to it. You get it other places and—”

  “I know,” I said. “Find a site?”

  “A honey. Wait’ll I—”

  “Hold it. We’ve got to know have we got anything to go on it. Guzub! One Three Planets.”

  We watched entranced as he mixed the potion. “Get exactly what he does,” Quinby had said. “Then construct a usuform bartender who’ll be infallible. It’ll satisfy the Martian envoy and at the same time remind the Head of why we’re helping him out.”

  But all we saw was a glittering swirl of tentacles. First a flash as each tentacle picked up its burden—one the shaker, one the lid, one the glass, and three others the bottles of rum, margil, and vuzd. Then a sort of spasm that shook all Guzub’s round body as the exact amount of each liquid went in, and finally a gorgeous pinwheel effect of shaking and pouring.

  Guzub handed me my drink, and I knew as much as I had before.

  By the time I’d finished it, I had courage. “Guzub,” I said, “this is wonderful.”

  “Zure,” Guzub glurked. “Always I maig id wondervul.”

  “Nobody else can make ’em like you, Guz. But tell me. How much vuzd do you put in?”

  Guzub made his kind of a shrug. “I dell you, boys, I dunno. Zome dime maybe I wadge myzelv and zee. I juzd go zo! I dunno how mudj.”

  “Give me another one. Let’s see you watch yourself.”

  “Businezz is good by you, you dring zo many Blanedz? O Gay, ere goes.”

  But the whirl stopped in the middle. There was Guzub, all his eyes focused sadly on the characteristic green corkscrew-shaped bottle of vuzd. Twice he started to move that tentacle, then drew it back. At last he made a dash with it.

  “Exactly two drops,” Quinby whispered.

  Guzub handed over the drink unhappily. “Dry id,” he said.

  I did. It was terrible. Too little vuzd, so that you could taste both the heavy sweetness of the rum and the acrid harshness of the margil. I said so.

  “I know, boys. When I zdob do wadge, ici bothers me. No gan do.”

  I gulped the drink. “Mix up another without watching. Maybe we can tell.”

  This one was perfect. And we could see nothing.

  The next time he “wadged.” He used precisely four and a half drops of vuzd. You tasted nothing but the tart decay of the vuzd itself.

  The next time—

  But my memory gets a little vague after that. Like I said, I’m a whiskey drinker. And four Three Planets in quick succession— I’m told the party went on till closing hour at twenty-three, after which Guzub accepted Quinby’s invitation to come on and mix for us at my apartment. I wouldn’t know. All I remember is one point where I found a foot in my face. I bit it, decided it wasn’t mine, and stopped worrying about it. Or about anything.

  I’m told that I slept thirty-six hours after that party—a whole day and more simply vanished out of my existence. I woke up feeling about twelve and spry for my age, but it took me a while to reconstruct what had been going on.

  I was just beginning to get it straightened out when Quinby came in. His first words were, “How would you like a Three Planets?”

  I suddenly felt like two hundred and twelve, and on an off day at that. Not until I’d packed away a superman-size breakfast did he dare repeat the offer. By then I felt brave. “O.K.,” I said. “But with a whiskey chaser.”

  I took one sip and said, “Where’s Guzub? I didn’t know he was staying here too.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “But this Three Planets— It’s perfect. It’s the McCoy. And Guzub—”

  Quinby opened a door. There sat the first original Quinby usuform—no remake of a Robinc model, but a brand-new creation. Quinby said, “Three Planets,” and he went into action. He had tentacles, and the motions were exactly like Guzub’s except that he was himself the shaker. He poured the liquids into his maw, joggled about, and then poured them out of a hollow hoselike tentacle.

  The televisor jangled. Quinby hastily shifted the ike so as to miss the usuform barkeep as I answered. The screen showed the Head himself. He’d been there before on telecasts, but this was the real thing.

  He didn’t waste time. “Tonight, nineteen thirty,” he said. “I don’t need to explain?”

  “We’ll be there,” I choked out.

  A special diplomatic messenger brought the pass to admit the two of us and “one robot or robotlike machine” to the Council building. I was thankful for that alternative phrase; I didn’t want to have to argue with each guard about the technical legal definition of a robot. We were installed in a small room directly off the Head’s private reception room. It was soundproofed and there was no window; no chance of our picking up interplanetary secrets of diplomacy. And there was a bar.

  A dream of a bar, a rhapsody of a bar. The vuzd, the rum, the margil were all of brands that you hear about and brood about but never think to see in a lifetime. And there was whiskey of the same caliber.

  We had hardly set our usuform facing the bar when a servant came in. He was an android. He said, “The Head says now.”

  Quinby asked me, “Do you want one?”

  I shook my head and selected a bottle of whiskey.

  “Two Three Planets,” Quinby said.

  The tentacles flickered, the shaker-body joggled, the hose-tentacle poured. The android took the tray from our usuform. He looked at him with something as close to a mixture of fear, hatred, and envy as his eye cells could express. He went out with the tray.

  I turned to Quinby. “We’ve been busy getting ready for this party ever since I woke up. I still don’t understand how you made him into another Guzub.”

  There was a click and the room was no longer soundproof. The Head was allowing us to hear the reception of our creation. First his voice came, quiet, reserved, and suave. “I think your magnitude would enjoy this insignificant drink. I have been to some slight pains to see that it was worthy of your magnitude’s discriminating taste.”

  There was silence. Then the faintest sound of a sip, a pause, and an exhalation. We could almost hear the Head holding his breath.

  “Bervegd!” a deep voice boomed—which, since no Martian has ever yet learned to pronounce a voiceless consonant, means a verdict of “Perfect!”

  “I am glad that your magnitude is pleased.”

  “Bleased is doo mild a word, my dear Ead. And now thad you ave zo delighdvully welgomed me—”

  The sound went dead again.

  “He liked it, huh?” said Guzub II. “You boys want some, maybe?”

  “No thanks,” said Quinby. “I wonder if I should have given him a Martian accent—they are the best living bartenders. Perhaps when we get the model into mass production—”

  I took a gleefully long swig of whiskey. Its mild warmth felt soothing after memories of last night’s Three Planets. “Look,” I said. “We have just pulled off the trick that ought to net us a change in the code and a future as the great revolutionists of robot design. I feel like . . . hell, like Ley landing on the Moon. And you sit there with nothing on your mind but a bartender’s accent.”

  “Why not?” Quinby a
sked. “What is there to do in life but find what you’re good for and do it the best you can?”

  He had me there. And I began to have some slight inklings of the trouble ahead with a genius who had commercial ideas and the conscience of an otherworldly saint. I said, “All right. I won’t ask you to kill this bottle with me, and in return I expect you not to interfere with my assassinating it. But as to what you’re good for—how did you duplicate Guzub?”

  “Oh, that. That was simple—”

  “—when you looked at it straight,” I ended.

  “Yes.” That was another thing about Quinby; he never knew if he was being ribbed. “Yes. I got one of those new electronic cameras—you know, one thousand exposures per second. Hard to find at that time of night, but we made it.”

  “We?”

  “You helped me. You kept the man from overcharging me. Or maybe you don’t remember? So we took pictures of Guzub making a Three Planets, and I could construct this one to do it exactly right down to the thousandth of a second. The proper proportion of vuzd, in case you’re interested, works out to three-point-six-five-four-seven-eight-two-three drops. It’s done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat. It didn’t seem right to use Guzub to make a robot that would compete with him and probably drive him out of business; so we’ve promised him a generous pension from the royalties on usuform barkeeps.”

  “We?” I said again, more feebly.

  “You drew up the agreement.”

  I didn’t argue. It was fair enough. A good businessman would have slipped Guzub a fiver for posing for pictures and then said the hell with him. But I was beginning to see that running Q.U.R. was not going to be just good business.

  When the Head finally came in, he didn’t need to say a word, though he said plenty. I’ve never seen that white grin flash quite so cheerfully. That was enough; the empire had its Martian leases, and Q.U.R. was a fact.

  When I read back over this story, I can see there’s one thing wrong. That’s about the giller. I met Dugg Quinby, and you met him through me, in the act of rescuing a Venusian from a giller-baiting mob. By all the rights of storytelling, the green being should have vowed everlasting gratitude to his rescuer, and at some point in our troubles he should have showed up and made everything fine for us.

  That’s how it should have been. In actual fact, the giller grabbed his inhalator and vanished without so much as a “thank you.” If anybody helped us, it was Mike, who had been our most vigorous enemy in the battle.

  Which means, I think, that seeing straight can work with things and robots, but not with beings, because no being is really straight, not even to himself.

  Except maybe Dugg Quinby.

  Robinc

  You’d think maybe it meant clear sailing after we’d got the Council’s OK. You’d maybe suppose that’d mean the end of our troubles and the end of android robots for the world.

  That’s what Dugg Quinby thought, anyway. But Quinby may have had a miraculous gift of looking straight at problems and at things and at robots and getting the right answer; but he was always too hopeful about looking straight at people. Because, like I kept saying to him, people aren’t straight, not even to themselves. And our future prospects weren’t anywhere near as good as he thought.

  That’s what the Head of the Council was stressing when we saw him that morning just after the Council had passed the bill. His black face was sober—no trace of that flashing white grin that was so familiar on telecasts. “I’ve put your bill through, boys,” he was saying. “God knows I’m grateful—the whole Empire should be grateful to you for helping me put over the renewal of those Martian mining concessions, and the usuform barkeep you made me is my greatest treasure; but I can’t help you any more. You’re on your own now.”

  That didn’t bother Quinby. He said, “The rest ought to be easy. Once people understand what usuform robots can do for them—”

  “I’m afraid, Mr. Quinby, it’s you who don’t quite understand. Your friend here doubtless does; he has a more realistic slant on things. But you— I wouldn’t say you idealize people, but you flatter them. You expect them to see things as clearly as you do. I’m afraid they usually don’t.”

  “But surely when you explained to the Council the advantages of usuforms—”

  “Do you think the Council passed the bill only because they saw those advantages? They passed it because I backed it, and because the renewal of the Martian concessions has for the moment put me in a powerful position. Oh, I know, we’re supposed to have advanced immeasurably beyond the political corruption of the earlier states; but let progress be what it may, from the cave man on up to the illimitable future, there are three things that people always have made and always will make: love, and music, and politics. And if there’s any difference between me and an old-time political leader, it’s simply that I’m trying to put my political skill at the service of mankind.”

  I wasn’t listening too carefully to all this. The service of mankind wasn’t exactly a hobby of mine. Quinby and the Head were all out for usuforms because they were a service to man and the Empire of Earth; I was in it because it looked like a good thing. Of course, you can’t be around such a mixture of a saint, a genius, and a moron as Quinby without catching a little of it; but I tried to keep my mind fixed clear on what was in it for me.

  And that was plenty. For the last couple of centuries our civilization had been based on robots—android robots. Quinby’s usuform robots—Q.U.R. robots— shaped not as mechanical men, but as independently thinking machines formed directly for their intended function—threatened the whole robot set-up. They were the biggest thing since Zwergenhaus invented the mechanical brain, and I was in on the ground floor.

  With the basement shaking under me.

  It was an android guard that interrupted the conference here. We hadn’t really got started on usuform manufacture yet, and anyway, Quinby was inclined to think that androids might be retained in some places for guards and personal attendants. He said, “Mr. Grew says that you will see him.”

  The Head frowned. “Robinc has always thought it owned the Empire. Now Mr. Grew thinks he owns me. Well, show him in.” As the guard left, he added to us, “This Grew-Quinby meeting has to take place sometime. I’d rather like to see it.”

  The president-owner of Robinc—Robots Incorporated, but nobody ever said it in full—was a quiet old man with silvery hair and a gentle sad smile. It seemed even sadder than usual today. He greeted the Head and then spoke my name with a sort of tender reproach that near hurt me.

  “You,” he said. “The best trouble shooter that Robinc ever had, and now I find you in the enemy’s camp.”

  But I knew his technique, and I was armed against being touched by it. “In the enemy’s camp?” I said. “I am the enemy. And it’s because I was your best trouble shooter that I learned the real trouble with Robinc’s androids: They don’t work, and the only solution is to supersede them.”

  “Supersede is a kind word,” he said wistfully. “But the unkind act is destruction. Murder. Murder of Robinc itself, draining the lifeblood of our Empire.”

  The Head intervened. “Not draining, Mr. Grew, but transfusing. The blood stream, to carry on your own metaphor, is tainted; we want fresh blood, and Mr. Quinby provides it.”

  “I am not helpless, you know,” the old man murmured gently.

  “I’m afraid possibly you are, sir, and for the first time in your life. But you know the situation: In the past few months there has been an epidemic of robot breakdowns. Parts unnecessary and unused, but installed because of our absurd insistence on an android shape, have atrophied. Sometimes even the brain has been affected; my own confidential cryptanalyst went totally mad. Quinby’s usuforms forestall any such problem.”

  “The people will not accept them. They are conditioned to androids.”

  “They must accept them. You know, better than most, the problems of supply that the Empire faces. The conservation of mineral res
ources is one of our essential aims. And usuforms will need variously from seventy to only thirty percent of the metal that goes into your androids. This is no mere matter of business rivalry; it is conflict between the old that depletes the Empire and the new that strengthens it.”

  “And the old must be cast aside and rejected?”

  “You,” I began, “have, of course, always shown such tender mercy to your business compet—” but Quinby broke in on me.

  “I realize, Mr. Grew, that this isn’t fair to you. But there are much more important matters than you involved.”

  “Thank you.” The gentle old voice was frigid.

  “But I wouldn’t feel right if you were simply, as you put it, cast aside and rejected. If you’ll come to see us and talk things over, I’m pretty sure we can—”

  “Sir!” Sanford Grew rose to his full short height. “I do not ask favors from puppies. I have only one request.” He turned to the Head. “The repeal of this ridiculous bill depriving Robinc of its agelong monopoly which has ensured the safety of the Empire.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Grew. That is impossible.”

  The hair was still silvery and the smile was still sad and gentle. But the words he addressed to us were, “Then you understand that this is war?”

  Then he left. I didn’t feel too comfortable. Saving the Empire is all very well. Being a big shot in a great new enterprise is swell. But a war with something the size of Robinc is not what the doctor usually orders.

  “The poor man,” said Quinby.

  The Head flashed an echo of the famous grin. “No wonder he’s upset. It’s not only the threatened loss of power, I heard that yesterday his android cook broke down completely. And you know how devoted he is to unconcentrated food.”

  Quinby brightened. “Then perhaps we—”

  The Head laughed. “Your only hope is that a return to a concentrated diet will poison him. You’ve no chance of winning over Sanford Grew alive.”

  We went from there to the Sunspot. “It’s funny,” Quinby used to say. “I don’t much like to drink, but a bar’s always good for heavy thinking.” And who was I to argue?