Nobody could argue impressively with McGuire except Daniel Oak, and as
far as McGuire was concerned Mr. Oak was keeping an impressive silence.
"Maybe I could write out the orders," I said.
"Nope," said Videnski. "He can read, but information coming in that way
isn't counted as orders, not even from you. We should have installed a
teletyper, too, but this is a little late for thinking of that."
"McGuire," I whispered, "what sort of proof would be needed to show
you that this is the voice of Daniel Oak?"
"I'm sorry, sir," McGuire said after a moment, "but that information is
not in my banks."
"Maybe somebody could imitate Dan's voice," Vivian said hopefully.
Videnski and Felder shook their heads in unison.
"No dice," Videnski said rumblingly. "It not only has to sound like
Oak, it has to come from Oak."
"Ventriloquism?" Vivian said with a half-hearted grin.
"Wouldn't fool McGuire for an instant," Felder said. "That's an
audio-visual trick of the human mind, not of a robot's."
The ship kept on moving. McGuire went serenely on, following his last
orders.
We finally reached the point where we were too tired to think, and
sleep became imperative. We were nearly two days out of Ceres.
When I announced my intention of taking a snooze, Felder looked at me
through groggy, bloodshot eyes. "Hadn't we better sleep in two shifts?
I mean, just in case there's another spy among us?"
I shook my head. "No spy would try anything now. There isn't anything
to try. We're all safe, as far as that's concerned. I'll go in and
sleep in my assigned room. Not even Brentwood could or would do
anything to me now."
"For that matter," Felder said, "it's senseless to keep him locked up
now. He's harmless until we reestablish control over McGuire. When
that happens, we can lock him up again."
"My sentiments exactly," I said in my new hoarse, breathy, susurrant
voice.
Brentwood didn't say much when I gave him the news; he just thanked me.
I got into bed and worried for a while, but lack of sleep soon cut off
my ability to worry. I only woke up once in the next nine hours, when
McGuire changed course a trifle to avoid some unseen meteor. Not even
the ache in my throat kept me from sleep.
* * * * *
It was Videnski's voice that woke me up. The door of my room was slid
open a little, and I could hear him in the lounge. I got to my feet
fast, shoved open the door, and went out.
Videnski had grabbed Brentwood by the front of his union suit, and had
lifted him off his feet and slammed his back up against the wall. His
free hand was swinging back and forth in open-handed slaps that looked
as though any one of them should have torn the smaller man's head off.
Felder was ineffectually trying to pull Videnski away from Brentwood,
but the big man didn't even seem to notice it. Vivian Devereaux was
nowhere in sight.
Videnski's harsh baritone was filled with invective that should have
made the air as glowingly blue as the inside of an old-fashioned
rectifier tube.
I ran across the room, grabbed Videnski by the shoulder and said:
"Stop that!"
He stopped. When I throw out an emotional field like that, only a very
exceptional man can disobey.
"Let him go," I said.
Videnski released him, and Brentwood slid down the wall, just this side
of unconsciousness.
"What's the idea?" I asked.
"I ... I'm sorry," Videnski rumbled. "Lost my temper, I guess. That ...
I mean, _he_--" He stopped, fumbling for words.
"I know. I heard what you were saying. Sure it's his fault my voice
sounds the way it does. Sure he's a spy and probably a saboteur.
And if we die, he'll be morally guilty of manslaughter. _And_
suicide--remember _that_.
"But slapping him around like that isn't going to do any of us any
good, and we need all the thinking we can get if we intend to pull
ourselves out of this mess.
"So leave him alone, Videnski. Hear?"
My whispery voice didn't sound very authoritative, but a crisp, firm,
commanding baritone does not authority make, any more than iron bars a
cage.
"Yeah," he said apologetically. "I'm sorry, Oak. I sort of lost my
head. It won't happen again."
I knelt down and took a look at Brentwood. He wasn't actually damaged
much, but his face was going to be swollen and bruised. Somehow, I
couldn't feel very sorry for him.
I got him to his feet. "Come on, Brentwood; let's go lie down for a
while. You'll feel better."
"Yeah," he mumbled through thickening lips. "Thanks."
I got him into his bunk, closed the door on him, and came back to the
lounge.
"Anybody dream up any solutions in his sleep?" I asked.
It was apparent that they hadn't. "Maybe Vivian has," Felder said.
"She's still asleep."
"Let's not bank on it," I said.
"Oh, I did have one idea," Felder said dispiritedly. "Ted, here, and
I were working on it when Brentwood came out. When it didn't pan out,
well, that's when the fight started."
"What was your idea?"
"I asked McGuire if he realized what would happen to Mr. Oak if he
just kept going. He said he did; that if he ran out of fuel, you'd
be marooned and would die. So he's figured out a nice, complicated
orbit that will allow him to obey your last order until the very last
possible moment. He'll land us on Titan at the very last moment. The
trouble is, we forgot to tell him how much food we have aboard, and
he's made the assumption that there's plenty for everybody, for an
indefinite length of time. But we're going to be plenty hungry by the
time we get there. Can you last twelve days without food?"
"I don't want to try it. And of course it wouldn't do any good for you
to tell him that we haven't enough food. How about letting him take a
look at the food supply?"
"He doesn't know how much is necessary, and he would only have our
word for it that there was no more aboard. One thing I can tell you: if
we ever get back to rebuild McGuire, one of the things he's going to
have is a lot more sensory devices, so that he can judge more facts on
his own hook."
"Agreed," said another voice; "right now, we're dealing with a
half-blind idiot." Vivian Devereaux had stepped out of her room and had
been listening to Felder explain what he'd tried. Sleep hadn't done her
as much good as it might have under other circumstances; the strain was
showing on her face.
[Illustration: _Sometimes a club ... or a hammer ... is the best way to
get sense into a situation!_]
* * * * *
Breakfast was a half-hearted affair. Brentwood stayed in his room,
though he accepted the cup of coffee I brought him. The rest of us
didn't eat much more than that. I was trying to think our way out of
the fix, and so were the others.
Something, some sort of an idea, had been sitting quietly at the bottom
of my mind, just barely discernible through the semipermeable barrier
that separates the conscious from the subconscious, but I couldn't fish
it out.
When I managed to grasp part of it, I said: "Look. The trouble is that
McGuire is incapable of connecting my present voice with the voice he's
used to. Then it seems to me that our job is to supply him with the
missing steps."
"How?" asked Felder.
"One of you--or all of you, if it took that to convince him--could fake
a hoarse, whispery voice. You could slowly make your voice worse and
worse, so that he could see the steps involved."
Vivian brightened, but Felder and Videnski shook their heads together
like the Bobbsey Twins sorrowing over a lost pet.
"What we may do voluntarily," said Felder, "over a relatively long
period of time, has nothing to do with what happened to you suddenly
and involuntarily. You see, in the long run, he really doesn't _care_
about our voices. He doesn't pay any attention to us, really, except as
incidental cargo. He has no concept of intelligence, actually; he can't
accept any statements of ours unless they're verifiable by McGuire
himself."
"Well, we could at least try it," said Vivian.
We did, and Felder was right. McGuire seemed almost condescending
in his sorrow for our inability to see that there was no _logical_
connection between their whispers and the voice of his Lord and Master,
Daniel Oak.
Vivian, who had been standing near Videnski while we were talking to
McGuire, suddenly blew up when McGuire assured us that our whispering
was a waste of time. She grasped her book--"Some Applications of
Discontinuity in Pattern Theory"--and threw it at the wall speaker from
which McGuire's voice came. It bounced harmless off the protective
grill and fell to the floor. Vivian Devereaux burst into tears.
I put my arm around her, gave Videnski and Felder the high sign to
keep thinking, and led her to her room. As soon as I got her settled,
I said: "Relax. No matter what happens, we'll get out of it alive. If
we stretch our rations, we'll be able to make it to Titan without being
more than underweight and hungry."
"It's not that," she said tearfully, "it's the delay. All that time off
the schedule."
"But I thought that was what you wanted," I said gently.
"Not any more. I--" She stopped suddenly and looked up at me, her eyes
widening. "What are you talking about?" Her voice was as whispery as
mine.
"It was the insistence on meeting me at the _Seven Sisters_ that gave
you away," I said. "Dyeing your hair and combing it straight back, and
putting on that plexiskin mask and the contact lenses--none of that
helped conceal that lush figure of yours. It can't be done under a
union suit. So you had to put on jacket and shorts, and that meant you
had to meet me in some plush restaurant like the _Seven Sisters_ or
you'd look out of place.
"I knew all that talk about being afraid of being overheard was just
that--talk. A directional beam microphone could have picked up every
word at our table.
"What made you change your mind about delaying the work on McGuire?"
"Buh-Buh-Brentwood. I duh-didn't know they'd go that far in trying to
stop the work. Nuh-nuh-not kih-kidnapping and piracy." She took a deep
breath and forced herself to stop sobbing. "I guess they didn't trust
me, anyway. Otherwise they wouldn't have put Brentwood on the same job
without telling me."
* * * * *
She didn't know that Brentwood was working for Baedecker rather than
for the Thurston group. How could she? The difference lay in their
tactics. Thurston wanted to take over Viking as a going concern--a
little under the weather, perhaps, but still functioning. That meant
that they wanted the work on McGuire delayed and complicated, but
they didn't want to put him out of the picture completely, since they
expected to take over the work as soon as they got control of Viking.
Baedecker, on the other hand, didn't give a care about Viking
Spacecraft. They wanted to take over Ceres for their own firm. If that
meant that getting rid of McGuire completely would give them what they
wanted, then they'd get rid of McGuire.
"Why'd you take the job?" I asked.
"Money. I'm sick of the Belt. I want to go back home, to Earth." Her
eyes were quite dry by now, and there was a choked sort of fear in
them. "I hate it out here. There's death all around you all the time;
sometimes it's just outside your skin, on the other side of the fabric
of your vac suit. I wanted to get back home. But all the money is out
here in the Belt. Back there, it's all eaten up in taxes and welfare,
and nobody has a chance to get a job that really pays. So when they
offered me the money--" She stopped and closed her eyes. "I'm scared,
that's all. I've been scared ever since I came out here. And now--" She
shuddered. "And now we're at the mercy of this idiot machine. I get so
scared that I get mad, every time I hear his voice."
If somebody had set a thermonuclear bomb off inside my skull, there
couldn't have been more sudden illumination.
I patted her on the shoulder. "You may get your money and more
besides," I said.