* * * * *
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 man 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 sweatless, 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 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 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
trap-shooting. 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 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's 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'd
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 mid-afternoon 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."