We sat in our box, Mike and Quinby and I. Mike had a shakerful of Three Planet cocktails mixed by our usuform barkeep; they aren't so good when they stand, but they were still powerful enough to keep him going. I was trying to get along on sheer will power, but little streams of sweat were running down my back and my nails were carving designs in my palms.
Quinby didn't seem bothered. He kept watching the android band and making notes. "You see," he explained, "it's idiotic waste to train a robot to play an instrument, when you could make an instrument that was a robot. Your real robot band would be usuforms, and wouldn't be anything but a flock of instruments that could play themselves. You could even work out new instruments, with range and versatility and flexibility beyond the capacity of human or android fingers and lungs. You could—"
"Oh, oh," I said. There was Sanford Grew entering our box.
The smile was still gentle and sad, but it had a kind of warmth about it that puzzled me. I'd never seen that on Grew's face before. He advanced to Quinby and held out his hand. "Sir," he said, "I have just dined."
Quinby rose eagerly, his blond head towering above the little old executive. "You mean my usuform—"
"Your usuform, sir, is indubitably the greatest cook since the Golden Age before the devilish introduction of concentrates. Do you mind if I share your box for this great exhibition?"
Quinby beamed and introduced him to Mike. Grew shook hands warmly with our foreman, then turned to me and spoke even my name with friendly pleasure. Before anybody could say any more, before I could even wipe the numb dazzle off my face, the Head's voice began to come over the speaker.
His words were few—just a succinct promise of the wonders of usuforms and their importance to our civilization—and by the time he'd finished the dowser was in place on the field.
To everybody watching but us, there was never anything that looked less like a robot. There wasn't a trace of an android trait to it. It looked like nothing but a heavy duralite box mounted on caterpillar treads.
But it was a robot by legal definition. It had a Zwergenhaus brain and was capable of independent action under human commands or direction. That box housed the brain, with its nth-sensory perception, and eyes and ears, and the spike-laying apparatus. For when the dowser's perception of water reached a certain level of intensity, it layed a metal spike into the ground. An exploring party could send it out on its own to survey the territory, then follow its tracks at leisure and dig where the spikes were.