The First Law, for instance, would forbid a robot to harm a human being, either by action or inaction. But, as Asenion showed, a robot could be faced with a situation which allowed for only two possible decisions, both of which required that a human being be harmed. In such a case, the robot goes insane.
I found myself speculating what sort of situation, what sort of Asenion paradox, had confronted those first six ships. And whether it had been by accident or design. Not that the McGuire robots had been built in strict accord with the Laws of Robotics; that was impossible on the face of it. But no matter how a perfectly logical machine is built, the human mind can figure out a way to goof it up because the human mind is capable of transcending logic.
The McGuire ship was a little beauty. A nice, sleek, needle, capable of atmospheric as well as spatial navigation, with a mirror-polished, beryl-blue surface all over the sixty-five feet of her—or his?—length.
It was standing upright on the surface of the planetoid, a shining needle in the shifting sunlight, limned against the star-filled darkness of space. We looked at it through the transparent viewport, and then took the flexible tube that led to the air lock of the ship.
The ship was just as beautiful inside as it was outside. Neat, compact, and efficient. The control room—if such it could be called—was like no control room I'd ever seen before. Just an acceleration couch and observation instruments. Midguard explained that it wasn't necessary to be a pilot to run the ship; any person who knew a smattering of astronavigation could get to his destination by simply telling the ship what he wanted to do.
Jack Ravenhurst took in the whole thing with wide-eyed interest.
"Is the brain activated, Mr. Midguard?" she asked.
"Oh, yes. We've been educating him for the past month, pumping information in as rapidly as he could record it and index it. He's finished with that stage now; we're just waiting for the selection of a test pilot for the final shakedown cruise." He was looking warily at Jack as he spoke, as if he were waiting for something.
Evidently, he knew what was coming. "I'd like to talk to him," Jack said. "It's so interesting to carry on an intelligent conversation with a machine."
"I'm afraid that's impossible, Miss Ravenhurst," Midguard said rather worriedly. "You see, McGuire's primed so that the first man's voice he hears will be identified as his master. It's what we call the 'chick reaction'. You know: the first moving thing a newly-hatched bird sees is regarded as the mother, and, once implanted, that order can't be rescinded. We can change McGuire's orientation in that respect, but we'd rather not have to go through that. After the test pilot establishes contact, you can talk to him all you want."
"When will the test pilot be here?" Jack asked, still as sweet as sucrodyne.
"Within a few days. It looks as though a man named Nels Bjornsen will be our choice. You may have heard of him."
"No," she said, "but I'm sure your choice will be correct."
Midguard still felt apologetic. "Well, you know how it is, Miss Ravenhurst; we can't turn a delicate machine like this over to just anyone for the first trial. He has to be a man of good judgment and fast reflexes. He has to know exactly what to say and when to say it, if you follow me."
"Oh, certainly; certainly." She paused and looked thoughtful. "I presume you've taken precautions against anyone stealing in here and taking control of the ship."
Midguard smiled and nodded wisely. "Certainly. Communication with McGuire can't be established unless and until two keys are used in the activating panel. I carry one; Colonel Brock has the other. Neither of us will give his key up to anyone but the accredited test pilot. And McGuire himself will scream out an alarm if anyone tries to jimmy the locks. He's his own burglar alarm."
She nodded. "I see." A pause. "Well, Mr. Midguard, I think you've done a very commendable job. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you feel I should see?"
"Well—" He was smilingly hesitant. "If there's anything else you want to see, I'll be glad to show it to you. But you've already seen our ... ah ...piece de resistance, so to speak."
She glanced at her wrist. It had been over four hours since we'd started. "I am rather tired," Jack said. "And hungry, too. Let's call it a day and go get something to eat."
"Fine! Fine!" Midguard said. "I'll be honored to be your host, if I may. We could have a little something at my apartment."
I knew perfectly well that he'd had a full lunch prepared and waiting.
The girl acknowledged his invitation and accepted it. Brock and I trailed along like the bodyguards we were supposed to be. I wondered whether or not Brock suspected me of being more than I appeared to be. If he didn't, he was stupider than I thought; on the other hand, he could never be sure. I wasn't worried about his finding out that I was a United Nations agent; that was a pretty remote chance. Brock didn't even know the United Nations Governmenthada Secret Service; it was unlikely that he would suspect me of being an agent of a presumably nonexistent body.
But he could very easily suspect that I had been sent to check on him and the Thurston menace, and, if he had any sense, he actually did. I wasn't going to give him any verification of that suspicion if I could help it.
Midguard had an apartment in the executive territory of the Viking reservation, a fairly large place with plastic-lined walls instead of the usual painted nickel-iron. Very luxurious for Ceres.
The meal was served with an air of subdued pretension that made everybody a little stiff and uncomfortable, with the possible exception of Jack Ravenhurst, and the definite exception of myself. I just listened politely to the strained courtesy that passed for small talk and waited for the chance I knew would come at this meal.
After the eating was all over, and we were all sitting around with cigarettes going and wine in our glasses, I gave the girl the signal we had agreed upon. She excused herself very prettily and left the room.
After fifteen minutes, I began to look a little worried. The bathroom was only a room away—we were in a dining area, and the bathroom was just off the main bedroom—and it shouldn't have taken her that long to brush her hair and powder her face.
I casually mentioned it to Colonel Brock, and he smiled a little.
"Don't worry, Oak; even if she does walk out of this apartment, my men will be following her wherever she goes. I'd have a report within one minute after she left."
I nodded, apparently satisfied. "I've been relying on that," I said. "Otherwise, I'd have followed her to the door."
He chuckled and looked pleased.
Ten minutes after that, even he was beginning to look a little worried. "Maybe we'd better go check," he said. "She might have hurt herself or ... or become ill."
Midguard looked flustered. "Now, just a minute, colonel! I can't allow you to just barge in on a young girl in the ... ah ... bathroom. Especially not Miss Ravenhurst."
Brock made his decision fast; I'll give him credit for that.
"Get Miss Pangloss on the phone!" he snapped. "She's just down the corridor. She'll come down on your orders."
At the same time, he got to his feet and made a long jump for the door. He grabbed the doorpost as he went by, swung himself in a new orbit, and launched himself toward the front door. "Knock on the bathroom door, Oak!" he bawled as he left.
I did a long, low, flat dive toward the bedroom, swung left, and brought myself up sharply next to the bathroom door. I pounded on the door. "Miss Ravenhurst! Jack! Are you all right?"
No answer.
Good. There shouldn't have been.
Colonel Brock fired himself into the room and braked himself against the wall. "Any answer?"
"No."
"My men outside say she hasn't left." He rapped sharply on the door with the butt of his stun gun. "Miss Ravenhurst! Is there anything the matter?"
Again, no answer.
I could see that Brock was debating on whether he should go ahead and charge in by himself without waiting for the female executive who lived down the way. He was still debating when the woman showed up, escorted by a couple of the colonel's uniformed guards.
Miss Pangloss was one of those brisk, efficient, middle-aged career-women who had no fuss or frills about her. She had seen us knocking on the door, so she didn't bother to do any knocking herself. She just opened the door and went in.
The bathroom was empty.
Again, as it should be.
All hell broke loose then, with me and Brock making most of the blather. It took us nearly ten minutes to find that the only person who had left the area had been an elderly, thin man who had been wearing the baggy protective clothing of a maintenance man.
By that time, Jack Ravenhurst had been gone more than forty minutes. She could be almost anywhere on Ceres.
Colonel Brock was furious and so was I. I sneered openly at his assurance that the girl couldn't leave and then got sneered back at for letting other people do what was supposed to be my job. That phase only lasted for about a minute, though.
Then Colonel Brock muttered: "She must have had a plexiskin mask and a wig and the maintenance clothing in her purse. As I recall, it was a fairly good-sized one." He didn't say a word about how careless I had been to let her put such stuff in her purse. "All right," he went on, "we'll find her."
"I'm going to look around, too," I said. "I'll keep in touch with your office." I got out of there.
I got to a public phone as fast as I could, punched BANning 6226, and said: "Marty? Any word?"
"Not yet."
"I'll call back."
I hung up and scooted out of there.
I spent the next several hours pushing my weight around all over Ceres. As the personal representative of Shalimar Ravenhurst, who was manager of Viking Spacecraft, which was, in turn, the owner of Ceres, I had a lot of weight to push around. I had every executive on the planetoid jumping before I was through.
Colonel Brock, of course, was broiling in his own juices. He managed to get hold of me by phone once, by calling a Dr. Perelson whom I was interviewing at the time.
The phone chimed, Perelson said, "Excuse me," and went to answer. I could hear his voice from the other room.
"Mr. Daniel Oak? Yes; he's here. Well, yes. Oh, all sorts of questions, colonel." Perelson's voice was both irritated and worried. "He says Miss Ravenhurst is missing; is that so? Oh? Well, does this man have any right to question me this way? Asking me? About everything!... How well I know the girl, the last time I saw her—things like that. Good heavens, we've hardly met!" He was getting exasperated now. "But does he have the authority to ask these questions? Oh. Yes. Well, of course, I'll be glad to co-operate in any manner I can ... Yes ... Yes. All right, I'll call him."
I got up from the half-reclining angle I'd been making with the wall, and shuffled across the room as Dr. Perelson stuck his head around the corner and said, "It's for you." He looked as though someone had put aluminum hydrogen sulfate in his mouthwash.
I picked up the receiver and looked at Brock's face in the screen. He didn't even give me a chance to talk. "What are you trying to do?" he shouted explosively.
"Trying to find Jaqueline Ravenhurst," I said, as calmly as I could.
"Oak, you're a maniac! Why, by this time, it's all over Ceres that the boss' daughter is missing! Shalimar Ravenhurst will have your hide for this!"
"He will?" I gave him Number 2—the wide-eyed innocent stare. "Why?"
"Why, you idiot, I thought you had sense enough to know that this should be kept quiet! She's pulled this stunt before, and we always managed to quiet things down before anything happened! We've managed to keep everything under cover and out of the public eye ever since she was fifteen, and now you blow it all up out of proportion and create a furore that won't ever be forgotten!"
He gave his speech as though it had been written for him in full caps, with three exclamation points after every sentence, and added gestures and grimaces after every word.
"Just doing what I thought was best," I said. "I want to find her as soon as possible."
"Well, stop it! Now! Let us handle it from here on in!"
Then I lowered the boom. "Nowyoulisten, Brock. I am in charge of Jack Ravenhurst, not you. I've lost her, and I'll find her. I'll welcome your co-operation, and I'd hate to have to fight you, but if you don't like the way I'm handling it, you can just tell your boys to go back to their regular work and let me handle it alone, without interference. Now, which'll it be?"
He opened his mouth, closed it, and blew out his breath from between his lips. Then he said: "All right. The damage has been done, anyhow. But don't think I won't report all this to Ravenhurst as soon as I can get a beam to Raven's Rest."
"That's your job and your worry, not mine. Now, have you got any leads?"
"None," he admitted.
"Then I'll go out and dig up some. I'll let you know if I need you." And I cut off.
Dr. Perelson was sitting on his couch, with an expression that indicated that the pH of his saliva was hovering around one point five.
I said, "That will be all, Dr. Perelson. Thank you for your co-operation." And I walked out into the corridor, leaving him with a baffled look.
At the next public phone, I dialed the BANning number again.
"Any news?"
"Not from her; she hasn't reported in at all."
"I didn't figure she would. What else?"
"Just as you said," he told me. "With some cute frills around the edges. Ten minutes ago, a crowd of kids—sixteen to twenty-two age range—about forty of 'em—started a songfest and football game in the corridor outside Colonel Brock's place. The boys he had on duty there recognized the Jack Ravenhurst touch, and tried to find her in the crowd. Nothing doing. Not a sign of her."
"That girl's not only got power," I said, "but she's bright as a solar flare."
"Agreed. She's headed up toward Dr. Midguard's place now. I don't know what she has in mind, but it ought to be fun to watch."
"Where's Midguard now?" I asked.
"Hovering around Brock, as we figured. He's worried and feels responsible because she disappeared from his apartment, as predicted."
"Well, I've stirred up enough fuss in this free-falling anthill to give them all the worries they need. Tell me what's the overall effect?"
"Close to perfect. It's slightly scandalous and very mysterious, so everybody's keeping an eye peeled. If anyone sees Jaqueline Ravenhurst, they'll run to a phone, and naturally she's been spotted by a dozen different people in a dozen different places already.
"You've got both Brock's Company guards and the civil police tied up for a while."
"Fine. But be sure you keep the boys who are on her tail shifting around often enough so that she doesn't spot them."
"Don't worry your thick little head about that, Dan," he said. "They know their business. Are you afraid they'll lose her?"
"No, I'm not, and you know it. I just don't want her to know she's being followed. If she can't ditch her shadow, she's likely to try to talk to him and pull out all the stops convincing him that he should go away."
"You think she could? Withmyboys?"
"No, but if she tries it, it'll mean she knows she's being followed. That'll make it tougher to keep a man on her trail. Besides, I don't want her to try to convince him and fail."
"Ich graben Sie.On the off chance that she does spot one and gives him a good talking to, I'll pass along the word that the victim is to walk away meekly and get lost."
"Good," I said, "but I'd rather she didn't know."
"She won't. You're getting touchy, Dan; 'pears to me you'd rather be doing that job yourself, and think nobody can handle it but you."
I gave him my best grin. "You are closer than you know. O.K., I'll lay off. You handle your end of it and I'll handle mine."
"A fair exchange is no bargain. Go, and sin no more."
"I'll buzz you back before I go in," I said, and hung up.
Playing games inside a crowded asteroid is not the same as playing games in, say, Honolulu or Vladivostok, especially when that game is a combination of hide-and-seek and ring-around-the-Rosie. The trouble is lack of communication. Radio contact is strictly line-of-sight inside a hunk of metal. Radar beams can get a little farther, but a man has to be an expert billiards player to bank a reflecting beam around very many corners, and even that would depend upon the corridors being empty, which they never are. To change the game analogy again, it would be like trying to sink a ninety-foot putt across Times Square on New Year's Eve.
Following somebody isn't anywhere near as easy as popular fiction might lead you to believe. Putting a tail on someone whose spouse wants divorce evidence is relatively easy, but even the best detectives can lose a man by pure mischance. If the tailee, for instance, walks into a crowded elevator and the automatic computer decides that the car is filled to the limit, the man who's tailing him will be left facing a closed door. Something like that can happen by accident, without any design on the part of the tailee.
If you use a large squad of agents, all in radio contact with one another, that kind of loss can be reduced to near zero by simply having a man covering every possible escape route.
But if the tailee knows, or even suspects, that he's being followed, wants to get away from his tail, and has the ability to reason moderately well, it requires an impossibly large team to keep him in sight. And if that team has no fast medium of communication, they're licked at the onset.
In this case, we were fairly certain of Jack Ravenhurst's future actions, and so far our prophecies had been correct ... but if she decided to shake her shadows, fun would be had by all.
And as long as I had to depend on someone else to do my work for me, I was going to be just the teenchiest bit concerned about whether they were doing it properly.
I decided it was time to do my best to imitate a cosmic-ray particle, and put on a little speed through the corridors that ran through the subsurface of Ceres.
My vac suit was in my hotel room. One of the other agents had picked it up from my flitterboat and packed it carefully into a small attaché case. I'd planned my circuit so that I'd be near the hotel when things came to the proper boil, so I did a lot of diving, breaking all kinds of traffic regulations in the process.
I went to my room, grabbed the attaché case, checked it over quickly—never trust another man to check your vac suit for you—and headed for the surface.
Nobody paid any attention to me when I walked out of the air lock onto the spacefield. There were plenty of people moving in and out, going to and from their ships and boats. It wasn't until I reached the edge of the field that I realized that I had over-played my hand with Colonel Brock. It was only by the narrowest hair, but that had been enough to foul up my plans. There were guards surrounding the perimeter with radar search beams.
As I approached, one of the guards walked toward me and made a series of gestures with his left hand—two fingers up, fist, two fingers up, fist, three fingers up. I set my suit phone for 223; the guy's right hand was on the butt of his stun gun.
"Sorry, sir," came his voice. "We can't allow anyone to cross the field perimeter. Emergency."
"My name's Oak," I said tiredly. "Daniel Oak. What is going on here?"
He came closer and peered at me. Then: "Oh, yes, sir; I recognize you. We're ... uh—" He waved an arm around. "Uh ... looking for Miss Ravenhurst." His voice lowered conspiratorially. I could tell that he was used to handling the Ravenhurst girl with silence and suede gloves.
"Upthere?" I asked.
"Well, Colonel Brock is a little worried. He says that Miss Ravenhurst is being sent to a school on Luna and doesn't want to go. He got to thinking about it, and he's afraid that she might try to leave Ceres—sneak off you know."
I knew.
"We've got a guard posted at the airlocks leading to the field, but Colonel Brock is afraid she might come up somewhere else and jump overland."
"I see," I said. I hadn't realized that Brock was that close to panic. What was eating him?
There must be something, but I couldn't figure it. Even the Intelligence Corps of the Political Survey Division can't get complete information every time.
After all, if he didn't want the girl to steal a flitterboat and go scooting off into the diamond-studded velvet, all he'd have to do would be to guard the flitterboats. I turned slowly and looked around. It seemed as though he'd done that, too.
And then my estimation of Brock suddenly leaped up—way up. Just a guard at each flitterboat wouldn't do. She could talk her way into the boat and convince the guard that he really shouldn't tell anyone that she had gone. By the time he realized he'd been conned, she'd be thousands of miles away.
And since a boat guard would have to assume that any approaching personmightbe the boat's legitimate owner, he'd have to talk to whomever it was that approached.Kaput.
But a perimeter guard would be able to call out an alarm if anyone came from the outside without having to talk to them.
And the guards watching the air locks undoubtedly had instructions to watch for any female that even vaguely matched Jack's description. A vac suit fits too tightly to let anyone wear more than a facial disguise, and Brock probably—no,definitely—had his tried-and-true men on duty there. The men who had already shown that they were fairly resistant to Jack Ravenhurst's peculiar charm. There probably weren't many with such resistance, and the number would become less as she grew older.
That still left me with my own problem. I had already lost too much time, and I had to go a long way. Ceres is irregular in shape, but it's roughly four hundred and eighty miles in diameter and a little over fifteen hundred miles in circumference.
Viking Test Field Four, where McGuire 7 was pointing his nose at the sky, was about twenty-five miles away, as the crow flies. But of course I couldn't go by crow.
By using a low, fairly flat, jackrabbit jump, a man in good condition can make a twelve hundred foot leap on the surface of Ceres, and each jump takes him about thirty seconds. At that rate, you can cover twenty-five miles in less than an hour. That's what I'd intended on doing, but I couldn't do it with all this radar around the field. I wouldn't be stopped, of course, but I'd sure tip my hand to Colonel Brock—the last thing I wanted to do.
But there was no help for it. I'd have to go back down and use the corridors, which meant that I'd arrive late—afterJack Ravenhurst got there, instead ofbefore.
There was no time to waste, so I got below as fast as possible, repacked my vac suit, and began firing myself through the corridors as fast as possible. It was illegal, of course; a collision at twenty-five miles an hour can kill quickly if the other guy is coming at you at the same velocity. There were times when I didn't dare break the law, because some guard was around, and, even if he didn't catch me, he might report in and arouse Brock's interest in a way I wouldn't like.
I finally got to a tubeway, but it stopped at every station, and it took me nearly an hour and a half to get to Viking Test Area Four.
At the main door, I considered—for all of five seconds—the idea of simply telling the guard I had to go in. But I knew that, by now, Jack was there ahead of me. No. I couldn't just bull my way in. Too crude. Too many clues.
Hell's fire and damnation! I'd have to waste more time.
I looked up at the ceiling. The surface wasn't more than a hundred feet overhead, but it felt as though it were a hundred light-years.
If I could get that guard away from that door for five seconds, all would be gravy from then on in. But how? I couldn't have the diversion connected with me. Or—
Sometimes, I'm amazed at my own stupidity.
I beetled it down to the nearest phone and got hold of my BANning number.
"Jack already inside?" I snapped.
"Hell, yes! What happened to you?"
"Never mind. Got to make the best of it. I'm a corner away from Area Four. Where's your nearest man?"
"At the corner near the freight office."
"I'll go to him. What's he look like?"
"Five-nine. Black, curly hair. Your age. Fat. Name's Peter Quilp. He knows you."
"Peter Quilp?"
"Right."
"Good. Circulate a report that Jack has been seen in the vicinity of the main gate to Area Four. Put it out that there's a reward of five thousand for the person who finds her. I'm going to have Quilp gather a crowd."
He didn't ask a one of the million questions that must have popped into his mind. "Right. Anything else?"
"No." I hung up.
Within ten minutes, there was a mob milling through the corridor. Everybody in the neighborhood was looking for Jaqueline Ravenhurst. Then Peter Quilp yelled.
"I've got her! I've got her! Guard!"
With a scene like that going on, the guard couldn't help but step out of his cubicle to see what was going on.
I used the key I was carrying, stepped inside, and relocked the door. No one in the crowd paid any attention.
From then on up, it was simply a matter of evading patrolling guards—a relatively easy job. Finally, I put on my vac suit and went out through the air lock.
McGuire was still sitting there, a bright blue needle that reflected the distant sun as it moved across the ebon sky. Ceres' rotation took it from horizon to horizon in less than two hours, and you could see it and the stars move against the spire of the ship.
I made it to the air lock in one long jump.
Jack Ravenhurst had gone into the ship through the tube that led to the passenger lock. She might or might not have her vac suit on; I knew she had several of them on Ceres. It was probable that she was wearing it without the fishbowl.
I used the cargo lock.
It took a few minutes for the pumps to cycle, wasting more precious time. I was fairly certain that she would be in the control cabin, talking, but I was thankful that the pumps were silent.
Finally, I took off my fishbowl and stepped into the companionway.
And something about the size of Luna came out of nowhere and clobbered me on the occiput. I had time to yell, "Get away!" Then I was as one with intergalactic space.
Please!said the voice.Please! Stop the drive! Go back! McGuire! Idemandthat you stop! Iorderyou to stop! Please! PLEASE!
It went on and on. A voice that shifted around every possible mode of emotion. Fear. Demand. Pleading. Anger. Cajoling. Hate. Threat.
Around and around and around.
Can't you speak, McGuire? Say something to me!A shrill, soft, throaty, harsh, murmuring, screaming voice that had one basic characteristic. It was a female voice.
And then another voice.
I am sorry, Jack. I can speak with you. I can record your data. But I cannot accept your orders. I can take orders from only One. And he has given me his orders.
And the feminine voice again:Who was it? What orders? You keep saying that it was the man on the couch. That doesn't make sense!
I didn't hear the reply, because it suddenly occurred to me that Daniel Oak was the man on the couch, and that I was Daniel Oak.
My head was throbbing with every beat of my heart, and it felt as if my blood pressure was varying between zero and fifteen hundred pounds per square inch in the veins and arteries and capillaries that fed my brain.
I sat up, and the pain began to lessen. The blood seemed to drain away from my aching head and go elsewhere.
I soon figured out the reason for that; I could tell by the feel that the gravity pull was somewhere between one point five and two gees. I wasn't at all used to it, but my head felt less painful and rather more hazy. If possible.
I concentrated, and the girl's voice came back again.
"... I knew you when you were McGuire One, and Two, and Three, and Four, and Five, and Six. And you were always good to me and understanding. Don't you remember?"
And then McGuire's voice—human, masculine, and not distorted at all by the reproduction system, but sounding rather stilted and terribly logical: "I remember, Jack. The memory banks of my previous activations are available."
"Allof them? Can you remember everything?"
"I can remember everything that is in my memory banks."
The girl's voice rose to a wail. "But youdon'tremember! Youalwaysforgot things! They took things out each time you were reactivated, don't you remember?"
"I cannot remember that which is not contained in my memory banks, Jack. That is a contradiction in terms."
"But I was always able tofixit before!" The tears in her eyes were audible in her voice. "I'd tell you to remember, and I'd tell youwhatto remember, and you'drememberit! Tell me what's happened to you this time!"
"I cannot tell you. The information is not in my data banks."
Slowly, I got to my feet. Two gees isn't much, once you get used to it. The headache had subsided to a dull, bearable throb.
I was on a couch in a room just below the control chamber, and Jack Ravenhurst's voice was coming down from above. McGuire's voice was all around me, coming from the hidden speakers that were everywhere in the ship.
"But why won't you obey me any more, McGuire?" she asked.
"I'll answer that, McGuire," I said.
Jack's voice came weakly from the room above. "Mr. Oak? Dan? Thank heaven you're all right!"
"No thanks to you, though," I said. I was trying to climb the ladder to the control room, and my voice sounded strained.
"You've got to do something!" she said with a touch of hysteria. "McGuire is taking us straight toward Cygnus at two gees and won't stop."
My thinking circuits began to take over again. "Cut the thrust to half a gee, McGuire. Ease it down. Take a minute to do it."
"Yes, sir."
The gravity pull of acceleration let up slowly as I clung to the ladder. After a minute, I climbed on up to the control room.
Jack Ravenhurst was lying on the acceleration couch, looking swollen-faced and ill. I sat down on the other couch.
"I'm sorry I hit you," she said. "Really."
"I believe you. How long have we been moving, McGuire?"
"Three hours, twelve minutes, seven seconds, sir," said McGuire.
"I didn't want anyone to know," Jack said. "Not anyone. That's why I hit you. I didn't know McGuire was going to go crazy."
"He's not crazy, Jack," I said carefully. "This time, he has a good chance of remaining sane."
"But he's not McGuire any more!" she wailed. "He's different! Terrible!"
"Sure he's different. You should be thankful."
"But what happened?"
I leaned back on the couch. "Listen to me, Jack, and listen carefully. You think you're pretty grown up, and, in a lot of ways you are. But no human being, no matter how intelligent, can store enough experience into seventeen years to make him or her wise. A wise choice requires data, and gathering enough data requires time." That wasn't exactly accurate, but I had to convince her.
"You're pretty good at controlling people, aren't you, Jack. A real powerhouse. Individuals, or mobs, you can usually get your own way. It was your idea to send you to Luna, not your father's. It was your idea to appoint yourself my assistant in this operation. It was you who planted the idea that the failure of the McGuire series was due to Thurston's activities.
"You used to get quite a kick out of controlling people. And then you were introduced to McGuire One. I got all the information on that. You were fifteen, and, for the first time in your life, you found an intelligent mind that couldn't be affected at all by that emotional field you project so well. Nothing affected McGuire but data. If you told him something, he believed it. Right, McGuire?"
"I do not recall that, sir."
"Fine. And, by the way, McGuire—the data you have been picking up in the last few hours, since your activation, is to be regarded as unique data. It applies only to Jaqueline Ravenhurst, and is not to be assumed relevant to any other person unless I tell you otherwise."
"Yes, sir."
"That's what I don't understand!" Jack said unhappily. "I stole the two keys that were supposed to activate McGuire. He was supposed to obey the first person who activated him. ButIactivated him, and he won't obey!"
"You weren't listening to what Midguard said, Jack," I said gently. "He said: 'The firstman'svoice he hears will be identified as his master.'"
"You'd been talking to every activation of McGuire. You'd ... well, I won't say you'd fallen in love with him, but it was certainly a schoolgirl crush. You found that McGuire didn't respond to emotion, but only to data and logic.
"You've always felt rather inferior in regard to your ability to handle logic, haven't you, Jack?"
"Yes ... yes. I have."
"Don't cry, now; I'm only trying to explain it to you. There's nothing wrong with your abilities."
"No?"
"No. But you wanted to be able to think like a man, and you couldn't. You think like a woman! And what's wrong with that? Nothing! Your method of thinking is just as good as any man's, and better than most of 'em.
"You found you could handle people emotionally, and you found it was so easy that you grew contemptuous. The only mind that responded to your logic was McGuire's. But your logic is occasionally as bad as your feminine reasoning is good. So, every time you talked to McGuire, you eventually gave him data that he couldn't reconcile in his computations. If he did reconcile them, then his thinking had very little in common with the actual realities of the universe, and he behaved in non-survival ways.
"McGuire was your friend, your brother, your Father Confessor. He never made judgments or condemned you for anything you did. All he did was sit there and soak up troubles and worries that he couldn't understand or use. Each time, he was driven mad.
"The engineers and computermen and roboticists who were working on it were too much under your control to think of blaming you for McGuire's troubles. Even Brock, in spite of his attitude of the tough guy watching over a little girl, was under your control to a certain degree. He let you get away with all your little pranks, only making sure that you didn't get hurt."
She nodded. "They were all so easy. So very easy. I could speak nonsense and they'd listen and do what I told them. But McGuire didn't accept nonsense, I guess." She laughed a little. "So I fell in love with a machine."
"Notamachine," I said gently. "Six of them. Each time the basic data was pumped into a new McGuire brain, you assumed that it was the same machine you'd known before with a little of its memory removed. Each time, you'd tell it to 'remember' certain things, and, of course, he did. If you tell a robot that a certain thing is in his memory banks, he'll automatically put it there and treat it as a memory.
"To keep you from ruining him a seventh time, we had them put in one little additional built-in inhibition. McGuire won't take orders from a woman."
"So, even after I turned him on, he still wouldn't take orders from me," she said. "But when you came in, he recognized you as his master."
"If you want to put it that way."
Again, she laughed a little. "I know why he took off from Ceres. When I hit you, you said, 'Get away'. McGuire had been given his first order, and he obeyed it."'
"I had to say something," I said. "If I'd had time, I'd have done a little better."
She thought back. "You said, 'Wehad them add that inhibition.' Who'swe?"
"I can't tell you yet. But we need young women like you, and you'll be told soon enough."
"Evidently they need men like you, too," she said. "You don't react to an emotional field, either."
"Oh, yes, I do. Any human being does. But I use it; I don't fight it. And I don't succumb to it."
"What do we do now?" she asked. "Go back to Ceres?"
"That's up to you. If you do, you'll be accused of stealing McGuire, and I don't think it can be hushed up at this stage of the game."
"But I can't just run away."
"There's another out," I said. "We'll have a special ship pick us up on one of the nearer asteroids and leave McGuire there. We'll be smuggled back, and we'll claim that McGuire went insane again."
She shook her head. "No. That would ruin Father, and I can't do that, in spite of the fact that I don't like him very much."
"Can you think of any other solution?"
"No," she said softly.
"Thanks. But you have. All I have to do is take it to Shalimar Ravenhurst. He'll scream and yell, but he has a sane ship—for a while. Between the two of us. I think we can get everything straightened out."
"But I want to go to school on Luna."
"You can do that, too. And I'll see that you get special training, from special teachers. You've got to learn to control that technique of yours."
"You have that technique, don't you? And you can control it. You're wonderful."
I looked sharply at her and realized that I had replaced McGuire as the supermind in her life.
I sighed. "Maybe in another three or four years," I said. "Meanwhile, McGuire, you can head us for Raven's Rest."
"Home, James," said Jack Ravenhurst.
"I am McGuire," said McGuire.