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Q. U. R. 137
just those things, with no parts left over. Give them a brain, eyes and ears to receive
commands, and whatever organs they need for their work.
“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