“There’s the source of your whole robot epidemic. They were all burdened down with things they didn’t need—legs when their job was a sedentary one, two arms when they used only one—or else, like my house servant, their organs were designed to imitate man’s rather than to be ideally functional. Result: the unused waste parts atrophied, and the robots became physically sick, sometimes mentally as well because they were tortured by unrealized potentialities. It was simple enough, once you looked at it straight.”
The drinks came. I went at the Three Planets cautiously. You know the formula: one part Terrene rum—170 proof—one part Venusian margil, and a dash or so of Martian vuzd. It’s smooth and murderous. I’d never tasted one as smooth as this of Guzub’s, and I feared it’d be that much the more murderous.
“You know something of the history of motor transportation?” Quinby went on. “Look at the twentieth-century models in the museum sometime. See how long they kept trying to make a horseless carriage look like a carriage for horses. We’ve been making the same mistake—trying to make a manless body look like the bodies of men.”
“Son,” I said—he was maybe five or ten years younger than I was—“there’s something in this looking-straight business of yours. There’s so much, in fact, that I wonder if even you realize how much. Are you aware that if we go at this right we can damned near wipe Robinc out of existence?”
He choked on his milk. “You mean,” he ventured, slowly and dreamily, “we could—”
“But it can’t be done overnight. People are used to android robots. It’s the only kind they ever think of. They’ll be scared of your unhuman-looking contraptions, just like Thuringer was scared. We’ve got to build into this gradually. Lots of publicity. Lots of promotion. Articles, lectures, debates. Give ’em a name. A good name. Keep robots; that’s common domain, I read somewhere, because it comes out of a play written a long time ago in some dialect of Old Slavic. Quinby’s Something Robots—”
“Functionoid?”
“Sounds too much like fungoid. Don’t like. Let me see—” I took some more Three Planets. “I’ve got it. Usuform. Quinby’s Usuform Robots. Q. U. R.”
Quinby grinned. “I like it. But shouldn’t it have your name too?”
“Me, I’ll take a cut on the credits. I don’t like my name much. Now, what we ought to do is introduce it with a new robot. One that can do something no android in the Robinc stock can tackle—”
Guzub called my name. “Man ere looking vor you.”
It was Mike. “Hi, mister,” he said. “I was wondering did you maybe have a minute to listen to my brother-in-law’s idea. You remember, about that new kind of robot—”
“Hey, Guzub,” I yelled. “Two more Three Planets.”
“Make it three,” said Quinby quietly.
We talked the rest of that night. When the Sunspot closed at twenty-three—we were going through one of our cyclic periods of blue laws then—we moved to my apartment and kept at it until we fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, scattered over my furniture.
Quinby’s one drink—he stopped there—was just enough to stimulate him to seeing straighter than ever. He took something under one minute to visualize completely the possibilities of Mike’s contribution.
This brother-in-law was a folklore hobbyist and had been reading up on the ancient notion of dowsing. He had realized at once that there could have been no particular virtue in the forked witch hazel rod that was supposed to locate water in the earth, but that certain individuals must have been able to perceive that water in some «th-sensory manner, communicating this reaction subconsciously to the rod in their hands.
To train that nth sense in a human being was probably impossible; it was most likely the result of a chance mutation. But you could attempt to develop it in a robot brain by experimentation with the patterns of the sense-perception tracks; and he had succeeded. He could equip a robot with a brain that would infallibly register the presence of water, and he was working on the further possibilities of oil and other mineral deposits. There wasn’t any need to stress the invaluability of such a robot to an exploring party.
“All right,” Quinby said. “What does such a robot need beside his brain and his sense organs? A means of locomotion and a means of marking the spots he finds. He’ll be used chiefly in rough desert country, so a caterpillar tread will be far more useful to him than legs that can trip and stumble. The best kind of markers—lasting and easy to spot—would be metal spikes. He could. I suppose, carry those and have an arm designed as a pile driver; but . . . yes, look, this is best: Supposing he lays them?”
“Lays them?” I repeated vaguely.
“Yes. When his water sense registers maximum intensity—that is, when he’s right over a hidden spring—there’ll be a sort of sphincter reaction, and plop, he’ll lay a sharp spike, driving it into the ground.”
It was perfect. It would be a cheap robot to make—just a box on treads, the box containing the brain, the sense organs, and a supply of spikes. Maybe later in a more elaborate model he could be fed crude metal and make his own spikes. There’d be a decided demand for him, and nothing of Robinc’s could compete. An exploring party could simply send him out for the day, then later go over the clear track left by his treads and drill wherever he had laid a spike. And his pure functionalism would be the first step in our campaign to accustom the public to Quinby’s Usuform Robots.
Then the ideas came thick and fast. We had among us figured out at least seventy-three applications in which usuforms could beat androids, before our eyes inevitably folded
