The Brain's communication screen flashed a blinding white scream as
Romero laid hands on it.
* * * * *
"Lieutenant Frawley's in charge now," Starbuck explained to Percy
Kettleman, who was sitting on his bunk with his head between his legs.
"Birdsel seemed all right after the brain finished changing him back.
But we all thought we better keep him under observation for a while."
Kettleman straightened up. "Sorry I passed out on you. But seeing the
old man in that shape was quite a shock."
Starbuck nodded agreement. "I don't like to think about the next step
the calculator would have taken him through. Not just a physical
change, but a mental one too. That was the brain's whole reason for
existence--to find the unknown. It was programmed to be even more basic
than sex or self-preservation are to us. The trouble was, the more it
learned, the more readily it could see some similarity to the familiar
in the most outer things."
"That was why the captain was acting so nutty? He was trying to appeal
to it."
"Yes, he had some old moralistic and superstitious ideas about
calculators. He thought his job depended on his pleasing it--when
of course its job was to please him. But he gave it an idea. If it
couldn't _find_ the strange and the different, it would create it.
It started with the first changing element in its environment--the
captain--but I don't know where it would have stopped if Romero hadn't
reversed its pleasure-pain synapse response. Now it loves the tried and
true. It's not much good for space exploration, of course. But a museum
may be interested in it now."
"So we'll have to go back to picking our phase points at random,
trusting to chance. Or the judgment of some skunk like Birdsel."
Starbuck cleared his throat. "That's another thing. The men aboard
the _Gorgon_ and the cybernetics machine had something in common. I
finally figured that out. Most men are afraid of the unknown--they
fear and hate it. But obviously not space explorers. They spend
their whole lives searching for the unknown. They don't suffer from
Xenophobia--they are _Xenophyles_. They like anything that's new and
different. Even a new member of the crew. It kind of lessens the
cameraderie aboard a spaceship, but the Service must have found the
trait valuable. They have searched it out in men and developed it. They
even breed it in second-generation spacemen."
"Do you know what, Starbuck?"
"What, Kettleman?"
"All that talk of yours is beginning to get on my nerves." Kettleman's
triceps flexed.
Starbuck sighed. The honeymoon was over for him, and the trip was just
beginning.