A Spaceship Named McGuire by Randall Garrett (e book reader online .txt) 📖

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."

"Not a machine," 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, 'We had them add that inhibition.' Who's we?"

"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.

THE END End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Spaceship Named McGuire, by Gordon Randall Garrett