Quinby asked me, “Do you want one?”
I shook my head and selected a bottle of whiskey.
“Two Three Planets,” Quinby said.
The tentacles flickered, the shaker-body joggled, the hose-tentacle poured. The android took the tray from our usuform. He looked at him with something as close to a mixture of fear, hatred, and envy as his eye cells could express. He went out with the tray.
I turned to Quinby. “We’ve been busy getting ready for this party ever since I woke up. I still don’t understand how you made him into another Guzub.”
There was a click and the room was no longer soundproof. The Head was allowing us to hear the reception of our creation. First his voice came, quiet, reserved, and suave. “I think your magnitude would enjoy this insignificant drink. I have been to some slight pains to see that it was worthy of your magnitude’s discriminating taste.”
There was silence. Then the faintest sound of a sip, a pause, and an exhalation. We could almost hear the Head holding his breath.
“Bervegd!” a deep voice boomed—which, since no Martian has ever yet learned to pronounce a voiceless consonant, means a verdict of “Perfect!”
“I am glad that your magnitude is pleased.”
“Bleased is doo mild a word, my dear Ead. And now thad you ave zo delighdvully welgomed me—”
The sound went dead again.
“He liked it, huh?” said Guzub II. “You boys want some, maybe?”
“No thanks,” said Quinby. “I wonder if I should have given him a Martian accent—they are the best living bartenders. Perhaps when we get the model into mass production—”
I took a gleefully long swig of whiskey. Its mild warmth felt soothing after memories of last night’s Three Planets. “Look,” I said. “We have just pulled off the trick that ought to net us a change in the code and a future as the great revolutionists of robot design. I feel like . . . hell, like Ley landing on the Moon. And you sit there with nothing on your mind but a bartender’s accent.”
“Why not?” Quinby asked. “What is there to do in life but find what you’re good for and do it the best you can?”
He had me there. And I began to have some slight inklings of the trouble ahead with a genius who had commercial ideas and the conscience of an otherworldly saint. I said, “All right. I won’t ask you to kill this bottle with me, and in return I expect you not to interfere with my assassinating it. But as to what you’re good for—how did you duplicate Guzub?”
“Oh, that. That was simple—”
“—when you looked at it straight,” I ended.
“Yes.” That was another thing about Quinby; he never knew if he was being ribbed. “Yes. I got one of those new electronic cameras—you know, one thousand exposures per second. Hard to find at that time of night, but we made it.”
“We?”
“You helped me. You kept the man from overcharging me. Or maybe you don’t remember? So we took pictures of Guzub making a Three Planets, and I could construct this one to do it exactly right down to the thousandth of a second. The proper proportion of vuzd, in case you’re interested, works out to three-point-six-five-four-seven-eight-two-three drops. It’s done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat. It didn’t seem right to use Guzub to make a robot that would compete with him and probably drive him out of business; so we’ve promised him a generous pension from the royalties on usuform barkeeps.”
“We?” I said again, more feebly.
“You drew up the agreement.”
I didn’t argue. It was fair enough. A good businessman would have slipped Guzub a fiver for posing for pictures and then said the hell with him. But I was beginning to see that running Q.U.R. was not going to be just good business.
When the Head finally came in, he didn’t need to say a word, though he said plenty. I’ve never seen that white grin flash quite so cheerfully. That was enough; the empire had its Martian leases, and Q.U.R. was a fact.
When I read back over this story, I can see there’s one thing wrong. That’s about the giller. I met Dugg Quinby, and you met him through me, in the act of rescuing a Venusian from a giller-baiting mob. By all the rights of storytelling, the green being should have vowed everlasting gratitude to his rescuer, and at some point in our troubles he should have showed up and made everything fine for us.
That’s how it should have been. In actual fact, the giller grabbed his inhalator and vanished without so much as a “thank you.” If anybody helped us, it was Mike, who had been our most vigorous enemy in the battle.
Which means, I think, that seeing straight can work with things and robots, but not with beings, because no being is really straight, not even to himself.
Except maybe Dugg Quinby.
Robinc
You’d think maybe it meant clear sailing after we’d got the Council’s OK. You’d maybe suppose that’d mean the end of our troubles and the end of android robots for the world.
That’s what Dugg Quinby thought, anyway. But Quinby may have had a miraculous gift of looking straight at problems and at things and at robots and getting the right answer; but he was always too hopeful about looking straight at people. Because, like I kept saying to him, people aren’t straight, not even to themselves. And our future prospects weren’t anywhere near as good as he thought.
That’s what the Head of the Council was stressing when we saw him that morning just after the Council had passed the bill. His black face was sober—no trace of that flashing white grin that was so familiar on telecasts. “I’ve put your bill through, boys,” he was saying. “God knows I’m grateful—the whole Empire should be grateful to you for helping me put over the
