Thuringer’s robot secretary said, “Tower room,” and I went on up. The spaceport manager scanned me and gave the click that meant the beam was on. The tower door opened as I walked in.
I don’t know what I’d expected to see. I couldn’t imagine what would get the hard-boiled Thuringer into such a blasting dither. This had been the first job that I’d tried Quinby out on, and a routine piece of work it was, or should have been. Routine, that is, in these damnable times. The robot that operated the signal tower had gone limp in the legs and one arm. He’d been quoted as saying some pretty strange things on the beam, too. Backsass to pilots and insubordinate mutterings.
The first thing I saw was a neat pile of scrap in the middle of the room. Some of it looked like robot parts. The next thing I saw was Thuringer, who had gone from purple to a kind of rosy black. “It’s getting me!” he burst out. “I sit here and watch it and I’m going mad! Do something, man! Then go out and annihilate your assistant, but do something first!”
I looked where he pointed. I’d been in this tower control room before. The panel had a mike and an ike, a speaker and a viewer, and a set of directional lights. In front of it there used to be a chair where the robot sat, talking on the beam and watching the indicators.
Now there was no chair. And no robot. There was a table, and on the table was a box. And from that box there extended one arm, which was alive. That arm punched regularly and correctly at the lights, and out of the box there issued the familiar guiding voice.
I walked around and got a gander at the front of the box. It had eyes and a mouth and a couple of holes that it took me a minute to spot as ear holes. It was like a line with two dots above and two below it, so:
• •
–––––
• •
It was like no face that ever was in nature, but it could obviously see and hear and talk.
Thuringer moaned. “And that’s what you call a repair job! My beautiful robot! Your A-l-A Double Prime All-Utility Extra-Quality De Luxe Model! Nothing of him left but this”—he pointed at the box—“and this”—he gestured sadly at the scrap heap.
I looked a long time at the box and I scratched my head. “He works, doesn’t he?”
“Works? What? Oh, works.”
“You’ve been here watching him. He pushes the right lights? He gets messages right? He gives the right instructions?”
“Oh yes, I suppose so. Yes, he works all right. But damn it, man, he’s not a robot any more. You’ve ruined him.”
The box interrupted its beam work. “Ruined, hell,” it said in the same toneless voice. “I never felt so good since I was animated. Thanks, boss.”
Thuringer goggled. I started to leave the room.
“Where are you going? Are you going to make this right? I demand another A-l-A Double Prime at once, you understand. And I trust you’ll kill that assistant.”
“Kill him? I’m going to kiss him.”
“Why, you—” He’d picked up quite a vocabulary when he ran the space port at Venusberg. “I’ll see that you’re fired from Robinc tomorrow!”
“I quit today,” I said. “One minute ago.”
That was the birth of Q.U.R.
I found Quinby at the next place on the list I’d given him. This was a job repairing a household servant—one of the Class B androids with a pretty finish, but not up to commercial specifications.
I gawped when I saw the servant. Instead of two arms he had four tentacles, which he was flexing intently.
Quinby was packing away his repair kit. He looked up at me, smiling. “It was very simple,” he said. “He’d seen Martoid robots at work, and he realized that flexible tentacles would be much more useful than jointed arms for housework. The more he brooded about it, the clumsier his arms got. But it’s all right now, isn’t it?”
“Fine, boss,” said the servant. He seemed to be reveling in the free pleasure of those tentacles.
“There were some Martoid spares in the kit,” Quinby explained, “and when I switched the circuit a little—”
“Have you stopped,” I interposed, “to think what that housewife is going to say when she comes home and finds her servant waving Martoid tentacles at her?”
“Why, no. You think she’d—”
“Look at it straight,” I said. “She’s going to join the procession demanding that I be fired from Robinc. But don’t let it worry you. Robinc’s nothing to us. From now on we’re ourselves. We’re Us Incorporated. Come on back to the Sunspot and we’ll thrash this out.”
“Thanks, boss,” the semi-Martoid called after us, happily writhing.
I recklessly ordered a Three Planets. This was an occasion. Quinby stuck to milk. Guzub shrugged—that is, he wrinkled his skin where shoulders might have been on his circular body—and said, “You loog abby, boys. Good news?”
I nodded. “Best yet, Guzub. You’re dishing ’em up for a historic occasion. Make a note.”
“Lazd dime you zelebrade izdorig oggazion,” said Guzub resignedly, “you breag zevendy-vour glazzes. Wy zhould I maig a node?”
“This is different, Guz. Now,” I said to Quinby, “tell me how you got this unbelievable idea of repair.”
“Why, isn’t it obvious?” he asked simply. “When Zwergenhaus invented the first robot, he wasn’t thinking functionally. He was trying to make a mechanical man. He did, and he made a good job of it. But that’s silly. Man isn’t a functionally useful animal. There’s very little he can do himself. What’s made him top dog is that he can invent and use tools to do what needs doing. But why make his mechanical servants as helplessly constructed as he is?
“Almost every robot, except perhaps a few like farmhands, does only one or two things and
