"... 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."
"_All_ of them? Can you remember everything?"
"I can remember everything that is in my memory banks."
The girl's voice rose to a wail. "But you _don't_ remember! You
_always_ forgot 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 to _fix_ it before!" The tears in her eyes were
audible in her voice. "I'd tell you to remember, and I'd tell you
_what_ to remember, and you'd _remember_ it! 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. But _I_ activated him, and he
won't obey!"
"You weren't listening to what Midguard said, Jack," I said gently.
"He said: 'The first _man's_ voice 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."
"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.