boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

136 Anthony Boucher
“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 does those things constantly. All right. Shape them so that they can best do