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’d 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 kidnapping 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 repairman, 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 with 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 trapshooting. 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 that 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
