“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 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 aste
roids 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.
HANGING BY A THREAD (1961)
Jayjay Kelvin was sitting in the lounge of the interplanetary cargo vessel Persephone, his feet propped up on the low table in front of the couch, and his attention focused almost totally on the small book he was reading. The lounge itself was cozily small; the Persephone had not been designed as a passenger vessel, and the two passengers she was carrying at the time had been taken on as an accommodation rather than as a money-making proposition. On the other hand, the Persephone and other ships like her were the only method of getting to where Jayjay Kelvin wanted to go; there were no regular passenger runs to Pluto. It’s hardly the vacation spot of the Solar System.
On the other side of the table, Jeffry Hull was working industriously with pencil and paper. Jayjay kept his nose buried in his book—not because he was deliberately slighting Hull, but because he was genuinely interested in the book.
“Now wait,” said Masterson, looking thoughtfully at the footprints on the floor of the cabin where Jed Hooker had died. “Jest take another look at these prints, Charlie. Silver Bill Greer couldn’t have got much more than his big toe into boots that small! Somethin’ tells me the Pecos Kid has.…”
“…Traveled nearly two billion miles since then,” said Hull.
Jayjay lifted his head from his book. “What?” He blinked. “I’m sorry; I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”
The younger man was still grinning triumphantly. “I said: We are approaching turnover, and, according to my figures, nine days of acceleration at one standard gee will give us a velocity of seventeen million, five hundred and fifty miles per hour, and we have covered a distance of nearly two billion miles.” Then he added: “That is, if I remembered my formulas correctly.”
Jayjay Kelvin looked thoughtfully at the ceiling while he ran through the figures in his head. “Something like that. It’s the right order of magnitude, anyway.”
Hull looked a little miffed. “What answer did you get?”
“A little less than eight times ten to the third kilometers per second. I was just figuring roughly.”
Hull scribbled hastily, then smiled again. “Eighteen million miles an hour, that would be. My memory’s better than I thought at first. I’m glad I didn’t have to figure the time; doing square roots is a process I’ve forgotten.”
That was understandable, Jayjay thought. Hull was working for his doctorate in sociology, and there certainly wasn’t much necessity for a sociologist to remember his freshman physics, much less his high-school math.
Still, it was somewhat of a relief to find that Hull was interested in something besides the “sociological reactions of Man in space”. The boy had spent six months in the mining cities in the Asteroid Belt, and another six investigating the Jovian chemical synthesis planes and their attendant cities. Now he was heading out to spend a few more months observing the “sociological organization Gestalt” of the men and women who worked at the toughest job in the System—taking the heavy metals from the particularly dense sphere of Pluto.
Hull began scribbling on his paper again, evidently lost in the joys of elementary physics, so Jayjay Kelvin went back to his book.
He had just read three words when Hull said: “Mr. Kelvin, do you mind if I ask a question?”
Jayjay looked up from his book and saw that Jeffry Hull had reverted to his role of the earnest young sociologist. Ah, well. “As I’ve told you before, Mr. Hull, questions do not offend me, but I can’t guarantee that the answers won’t offend you.”
“Yes; of course,” Hull said in his best investigatory manner. “I appreciate that. It’s just that…well, I have trained myself to notice small things. The little details that are sometimes so important in sociological investigations. Not, you understand, as an attempt to pry into the private life of the individual, but to round out the overall picture.”
Jayjay nodded politely. To his quixotic and pixie-like mind, the term overall picture conjured up the vision of a large and carefully detailed painting of a pair of dirty overalls, but he kept the smile off his face and merely said: “I understand.”
“Well, I’ve noticed that you’re quite an avid reader. That isn’t unusual in a successful businessman, of course; one doesn’t become a successful businessman unless one has a thirst for knowledge.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Jayjay.
“But,” Hull continued earnestly, “I noticed that you’ve read most of the…uh…historical romances in the library.…”
“You mean Westerns,” Jayjay corrected quietly.
“Uh…yes. But you don’t seem to be interested in the modern adventure fiction. May I ask why?”
“Sure.” Jayjay found himself becoming irrationally irritated with Hull. He knew that the young sociologist had nothing to do with his own irritation, so he kept the remarks as impersonal as possible. “In the first place, you, as a sociologist, should know what market most fiction is written for.”
“Why…uh…for people who want to relax and—”
“Yes,” Jayjay cut in. “But what kind? The boys on Pluto? The asteroid slicers? No. There are four billion people on Earth and less than five million in space. The market is Earth.
“Also, most writers have never been any farther off the surface of Earth than the few miles up that an intercontinental cruiser takes them.
“And yet, the modern ‘adventure’ novel invariably takes place in space.
“I can read Westerns because I neither know nor care what the Old American West was really like. I can sit back and sink into the never-never land that the Western tells about and enjoy myself because I am not forced to compare it with reality.
“But a ‘space novel’ written by an Earthside hugger is almost as much a never-never land, and I have to keep comparing it with what is actually going on around me. And it irritates me.”
“But, aren’t some of them pretty well researched?” Hull asked.
“Obviously, you haven’t read many of them,” Jayjay said. “Sure, some of them are well researched. Say one half of one per cent, to be liberal. The rest don’t know what they’re talking about!”
“But—”
“For instance,” Jayjay continued heatedly, “you take a look at every blasted one of them that has anything to do with a spacecraft having trouble. They have to have an accident in space in order to disable the spaceship so that the hairy-chested hero can show what a great guy he is. So what does the writer do? He has the ship hit by a meteor! A meteor!”
Hull thought that over for a second. “Well,” he said tentatively, “a ship could get hit by a meteor, couldn’t it?”
Jayjay closed his eyes in exasperation. “Of course it could! And an air-ship can run into a ruby-throated hummingbird, too. But how often does it happen?
“Look: We’re hitting it up at about one-fortieth of the ve
locity of light right now. What do you think would happen if we got hit by a meteor? We’d be gone before we knew what had happened.
“Why doesn’t it happen? Because we can spot any meteor big enough to hurt us long before it contacts us, and we can dodge it or blast it out of the way, depending on the size.
“You’ve seen the outer hull of this ship. It’s an inch thick shell of plastic, supported a hundred feet away from the steel hull by long booms. Anything small enough to get by the detectors will be small enough to burn itself out on that hull before it reaches the ship. The—”
* * * *
Jayjay Kelvin was not ordinarily a man to make long speeches, especially when he knew he was telling someone something that they already knew. But this time, he was beating one of his favorite drums, and he went on with his tirade in a fine flush of fury.
Alas…poor Jayjay.
Actually, Jayjay Kelvin can’t be blamed for his attitude. All he was saying was that it was highly improbable that a spaceship would be hit by a meteor. In one way, he was perfectly right, and, in another, he was dead wrong.
How small must a piece of matter be before it is no longer a meteor?
Fortunately, the big hunks rarely travel at more than about two times ten to the sixth centimeters per second, relative to Sol, in the Solar System. But there are little meteors—very tiny ones—that come in, hell-bent-for-leather, at a shade less than the velocity of light. They’re called cosmic rays, but they’re not radiation in the strict sense of the word. A stripped hydrogen atom, weighing on the order of three point three times ten to the minus twenty-second grams, rest mass, can come galumping along at a velocity so close to that of light that the kinetic energy is something colossal for so small a particle. Protons with a kinetic energy of ten to the nineteenth electron volts, while statistically rare, are not unusual.
Now, ten million million million electron volts may be a wee bit meaningless to the average man, so let’s look at it from another angle.
Consider. According to the well-known formula E = mc2, a single gram of matter, if converted completely into energy, would yield some nine hundred million million million ergs of energy. An atomic bomb yields only a fraction of that energy, since only a small percentage of the mass is converted into energy.
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