Within a fortnight there was one of our usuform barkeeps in one bar out of five in the influential metropolitan districts. Guzub's friends took orders for drinks, gave them to the usuforms, served the drinks, and then explained to the satisfied customers how they'd been made—pointing out besides that there had not been an explosion. The customers would get curious. They'd order more to watch the usuform work. (It had Martoid tentacles and its own body was its shaker.) The set-up was wonderful for business—and for us.
That got at the men. Meanwhile we had usuform cooks touring the residential districts and offering to prepare old-fashioned meals free. There wasn't a housewife whose husband didn't say regularly once a week, "Why can't we have more old-fashioned food instead of all these concentrates? Why, my mother used to—"
Few of the women knew the art. Those of them who could afford android cooks hadn't found them too satisfactory. And husbands kept muttering about mother. The chance of a happy home was worth the risk of these dreadful dangerous new things. So our usuform cooks did their stuff and husbands were rapturously pleased and everything began to look swell. (We remembered to check up on a few statistics three quarters of an hour later—it seemed we had in a way included Guzub's third appeal after all.)
So things were coming on sweetly until one day at the Sunspot I looked up to see we had a visitor. "I heard that I might find you here," Sanford Grew smiled. He beckoned to Guzub and said "Your oldest brandy."
Guzub knew him by sight. I saw one tentacle flicker hesitantly toward a bottle of mikiphin, that humorously named but none the less effective knockout liquor. I shook my head, and Guzub shrugged resignedly.
"Well?" Quinby asked directly.
"Gentlemen," said Sanford Grew, "I have come here to make a last appeal to you."
"You can take your appeal," I said, "and—"
Quinby shushed me. "Yes, sir?"
"This is not a business appeal, young men. This is an appeal to your consciences, to your duty as citizens of the Empire of Earth."