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’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 kidnapping 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 kidnappings 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 knew 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 midafternoon 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 installing 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 usuform 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, Quinby, 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.
Nine-Finger Jack
John Smith is an unexciting name to possess, and there was of course no way for him to know until the end of his career that he would be forever famous among connoisseurs of murder as Nine-finger Jack. But he did not mind the drabness of Smith; he felt that what was good enough for the great George Joseph was good enough for him.
Not only did John Smith happily share his surname with George Joseph, he was proud to follow the celebrated G. J. in profession and even in method. For an attractive and plausible man of a certain age, there are few more satisfactory sources of income than frequent and systematic widowerhood; and of all the practitioners who have acted upon this practical principle, none have improved upon George Joseph Smith’s sensible and unpatented Brides-inthe-Bath method.
John Smith’s marriage to his ninth bride, Hester Pringle, took place on the morning of May the thirty-first. On the evening of May the thirty-first John Smith, having spent much of the afternoon pointing out to friends how much the wedding had excited Hester and how much he feared the effect on her notoriously weak heart, entered the bathroom and, with the careless ease of the practiced professional, employed five of his fingers to seize Hester’s ankles and jerk her legs out of the tub while with the other Five Fingers he gently pressed her Face just below water level.
So far all had proceeded in the conventional manner of any other wedding night; but the ensuing departure from ritual was such as to upset even John Smith’s professional bathside manner. The moment Hester’s face and neck were submerged below water, she opened her gills.
In his amazement, John released his grasp upon both ends of his bride. Her legs descended into the water and her face rose above it. As she passed from the element of water to that of air, her gills closed and her mouth opened.
“I suppose,” she observed, “that in the intimacy of a long marriage you would eventually have discovered in any case that I am a Venusian. It is perhaps as well that the knowledge came early, so that we may lay a solid basis for understanding.”
“Do you mean,” John asked, for he was a precise man, “that you are a native of the planet Venus?”
“I do,” she said. “You would be astonished to know how many of us there are already among you.”
“I am sufficiently astonished,” said John, “to learn of one. Would you mind convincing me that I did indeed see what I thought I saw?”
Obligingly, Hester lowered her head beneath the water. Her gills opened and her breath bubbled merrily. “The nature of our planet,” she explained when she emerged, “has bred as its dominant race our species of amphibian mammals, in all other respects superficially identical with homo sapiens. You will find it all but impossible to recognize any of us, save perhaps by noticing those who, to avoid accidental opening of the gills, refuse to swim. Such concealment will of course be unnecessary soon when we take over complete control of your planet.”
“And what do you propose to do with the race that already controls it?”
“Kill most of them, I suppose,” said Hester; “and might I trouble you for that towel?”
“That,” pronounced John, with any handcraftsman’s abhorrence of mass production, “is monstrous. I see my duty to my race: I must reveal all.”
“I am afraid,” Hester observed as she dried herself, “that you will not. In the first place, no one will believe you. In the second place, I shall then be forced to present to the authorities the complete dossier which I have gathered on the cumulatively interesting deaths of your first eight wives, together with my direct evidence as to your attempt this evening.”
John Smith, being a reasonable man, pressed the point no further. “In view of this attempt,” he said, “I imagine you would like either a divorce or an annulment.”
“Indeed I should not,” said Hester. “There is no better cover for my activities than marriage to a member of the native race. In fact, should you so much as mention divorce again, I shall be forced to return to the topic of that dossier. And now, if you will hand me that robe, I intend to do a little telephoning. Some of my better-placed colleagues will need to know my new name and address.”
As John Smith heard her ask the long-distance operator for Washington, D.C., he realized with regretful resignation that
he would be forced to depart from the methods of the immortal George Joseph.
Through the failure of the knife, John Smith learned that Venusian blood has extraordinary quick-clotting powers and Venusian organs possess an amazingly rapid system of self-regeneration. And the bullet taught him a further peculiarity of the blood: that it dissolves lead—in fact thrives upon lead.
His skill as a cook was quite sufficient to disguise any of the commoner poisons from human taste; but the Venusian palate not only detected but relished most of them. Hester was particularly taken with his tomato aspic a l’arsenique and insisted on his preparing it in quantity for a dinner of her friends, along with his sole amandine to which the prussic acid lent so distinctively intensified, flavor and aroma.
While the faintest murmur of divorce, even after a year of marriage, evoked from Hester a frowning murmur of “Dossier . . .” the attempts at murder seemed merely to amuse her; so that finally John Smith was driven to seek out Professor Gillingsworth at the State University, recognized as the tiltimate authority (on this planet) on life on other planets.
The professor found the query of much theoretical interest. “From what we are able to hypothesize of the nature of Venusian organisms,” he announced, “I can almost assure you of their destruction by the forced ingestion of the best Beluga caviar, in doses of no less than one-half pound per diem.”
Three weeks of the suggested treatment found John Smith’s bank account seriously depleted and his wife in perfect health.
“That dear Gilly!” she laughed one evening. “It was so nice of him to tell you how to kill me; it’s the first time I’ve had enough of caviar since I came to Earth. It’s so dreadfully expensive.”
“You mean,” John demanded, “that Professor Gillingsworth is . . .”
She nodded.
“And all that money!” John protested. “You do not realize, Hester, how unjust you are. You have deprived me of my income and I have no other source.”
The Compleat Boucher Page 25
