“The poor man,” said Quinby.
The Head flashed an echo of the famous grin. “No wonder he’s upset. It’s not only the threatened loss of power, I heard that yesterday his android cook broke down completely. And you know how devoted he is to unconcentrated food.”
Quinby brightened. “Then perhaps we—”
The Head laughed. “Your only hope is that a return to a concentrated diet will poison him. You’ve no chance of winning over Sanford Grew alive.”
We went from there to the Sunspot. “It’s funny,” Quinby used to say. “I don’t much like to drink, but a bar’s always good for heavy thinking.” And who was I to argue?
Guzub, that greatest of bartenders, spotted us as we came in and had one milk and one straight whiskey poured by the time we reached our usual back table. He served them to us himself, with a happy flourish of his tentacles.
“What are you so beamish about?” I asked gruffly.
Guzub shut his middle eye in the Martian expression of happiness. “Begauze you boys are going to ’ave a gread zugzezz with your uxuvorm robods and you invended them righd ’ere in the Zunzbod.” He produced another tentacle holding a slug of straight vuzd and downed it. “Good lugg!”
I glowered after him. “We need luck. With Grew as our sworn enemy, we’re on the—”
Quinby had paper spread out before him. He looked up now, took a sip of milk, and said, “Do you cook?”
“Not much. Concentrates cio me most of the time.”
“I can sympathize with Grew. I like old-fashioned food myself, and I’m fairly good at cooking it. I just thought you might have some ideas.”
“For what?”
“Why, a usuform cook, of course. Grew’s android cook broke down. We’ll present him with a usuform, and that will convert him, too—”
“Convert hell!” I snorted. “Nothing can convert that sweetly smiling old—But maybe you have got something there; get at a man through his hobby— Could work.”
“Now, usually,” Quinby went on, “androids break down because they don’t use all their man-shaped body. But an android cook would go nuts because man’s body isn’t enough. I’ve cooked; I know. So we’ll give the usuform more. For instance, give him Martoid tentacles instead of arms. Maybe instead of legs give him an automatic sliding height adjustment to avoid all the bending and stooping, with a roller base for quick movement. And make the tentacles functionally specialized.”
I didn’t quite get that last, and I said so.
“Half your time in cooking is wasted reaching around for what you need next. We can build in a lot of that stuff. For instance, one tentacle can be a registering thermometer. Tapering to a fine point—stick it in a roast and— One can end in a broad spoon for stirring—heat-resistant, of course. One might terminate in a sort of hand, of which each of the digits was a different-sized measuring spoon. And best of all—why the nuisance of bringing food to the mouth to taste? Install taste buds in the end of one tentacle.”
I nodded. Quinby’s pencil was covering the paper with tentative hookups. Suddenly he paused. “I’ll bet I know why android cooks were never too successful. Nobody ever included the Verhaeren factor in their brains.”
The Verhaeren factor, if you’ve studied this stuff at all, is what makes robots capable of independent creative action. For instance, it’s used in the robots that turn out popular fiction—in very small proportion, of course.
“Yes, that’s the trouble. They never realized that a cook is an artist as well as a servant. Well, we’ll give him in his brain what he needs for creation, and in his body the tools he needs to carry it out. And when Mr. Grew has had his first meal from a usuform cook—”
It was an idea, I admitted, that might have worked on anybody but Sanford Grew—get at a man and convert him through what’s dearest to his heart. But I’d worked for Grew. I knew him. And I knew that no hobby, not even his passion for unconcentrated food, could be stronger than his pride in his power as president of Robinc.
So while Quinby worked on his usuform cook and our foreman, Mike Warren, got our dowser ready for the first big demonstration, I went ahead with the anti-Robinc campaign.
“We’ve got four striking points,” I explained to Quinby. “Android robots atrophy or go nuts; usuforms are safe. Android robots are almost as limited as man in what they can do without tools and accessories; usuforms can be constructed to do anything. Android robots are expensive because you’ve got to buy an all-purpose one that can do more than you need; usuforms save money because they’re specialized. Android robots use up mineral resources; usuforms save them.”
“The last reason is the important one,” Quinby said.
I smiled to myself. Sure it was, but can you sell the people on anything as abstract as conservation? Hell no. Tell ’em they’ll save credits, tell ’em they’ll get better service, and you’ve got ’em signed up already. But tell ’em they’re saving their grandchildren from a serious shortage and they’ll laugh in your face.
So as usual, I left Quinby to ideas and followed my own judgment on people, and by the time he’d sent the cook to Grew I had all lined up the campaign that could blast Grew and Robinc out of the Empire. The three biggest telecommentators were all sold on usuforms. A major solly producer was set to do a documentary on them. Orders were piling up about twice as fast as Mike Warren could see his way clear to turning them out.
So then came the day of the big test.
We’d wanted to start out with something big and new that no android could possibly compete with, and we’d had the luck to run onto Mike’s brother-in-law, who’d induced in robot brains the perception of that «th sense that used to enable dowsers to find water. Our usuform dowser was God’s gift to explorers and fresh, exciting copy.
