Part 2

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."

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 that usuform cook you gave him, and he swears he's going to eat himself to death."

"Me," said Mike, with 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.