(4/15) The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IV: An Anthology of 50 Short Stories

by Various

  I went to my room, grabbed the attaché case, checked it over quickly--never trust another man to check your vac suit for you--and headed for the surface.

  Nobody paid any attention to me when I walked out of the air lock onto the spacefield. There were plenty of people moving in and out, going to and from their ships and boats. It wasn't until I reached the edge of the field that I realized that I had over-played my hand with Colonel Brock. It was only by the narrowest hair, but that had been enough to foul up my plans. There were guards surrounding the perimeter with radar search beams.

  As I approached, one of the guards walked toward me and made a series of gestures with his left hand--two fingers up, fist, two fingers up, fist, three fingers up. I set my suit phone for 223; the guy's right hand was on the butt of his stun gun.

  "Sorry, sir," came his voice. "We can't allow anyone to cross the field perimeter. Emergency."

  "My name's Oak," I said tiredly. "Daniel Oak. What is going on here?"

  He came closer and peered at me. Then: "Oh, yes, sir; I recognize you. We're ... uh--" He waved an arm around. "Uh ... looking for Miss Ravenhurst." His voice lowered conspiratorially. I could tell that he was used to handling the Ravenhurst girl with silence and suede gloves.

  "Up there?" I asked.

  "Well, Colonel Brock is a little worried. He says that Miss Ravenhurst is being sent to a school on Luna and doesn't want to go. He got to thinking about it, and he's afraid that she might try to leave Ceres--sneak off you know."

  I knew.

  "We've got a guard posted at the airlocks leading to the field, but Colonel Brock is afraid she might come up somewhere else and jump overland."

  "I see," I said. I hadn't realized that Brock was that close to panic. What was eating him?

  There must be something, but I couldn't figure it. Even the Intelligence Corps of the Political Survey Division can't get complete information every time.

  After all, if he didn't want the girl to steal a flitterboat and go scooting off into the diamond-studded velvet, all he'd have to do would be to guard the flitterboats. I turned slowly and looked around. It seemed as though he'd done that, too.

  And then my estimation of Brock suddenly leaped up--way up. Just a guard at each flitterboat wouldn't do. She could talk her way into the boat and convince the guard that he really shouldn't tell anyone that she had gone. By the time he realized he'd been conned, she'd be thousands of miles away.

  And since a boat guard would have to assume that any approaching person might be the boat's legitimate owner, he'd have to talk to whomever it was that approached. Kaput.

  But a perimeter guard would be able to call out an alarm if anyone came from the outside without having to talk to them.

  And the guards watching the air locks undoubtedly had instructions to watch for any female that even vaguely matched Jack's description. A vac suit fits too tightly to let anyone wear more than a facial disguise, and Brock probably--no, definitely--had his tried-and-true men on duty there. The men who had already shown that they were fairly resistant to Jack Ravenhurst's peculiar charm. There probably weren't many with such resistance, and the number would become less as she grew older.

  That still left me with my own problem. I had already lost too much time, and I had to go a long way. Ceres is irregular in shape, but it's roughly four hundred and eighty miles in diameter and a little over fifteen hundred miles in circumference.

  Viking Test Field Four, where McGuire 7 was pointing his nose at the sky, was about twenty-five miles away, as the crow flies. But of course I couldn't go by crow.

  By using a low, fairly flat, jackrabbit jump, a man in good condition can make a twelve hundred foot leap on the surface of Ceres, and each jump takes him about thirty seconds. At that rate, you can cover twenty-five miles in less than an hour. That's what I'd intended on doing, but I couldn't do it with all this radar around the field. I wouldn't be stopped, of course, but I'd sure tip my hand to Colonel Brock--the last thing I wanted to do.

  But there was no help for it. I'd have to go back down and use the corridors, which meant that I'd arrive late--after Jack Ravenhurst got there, instead of before.

  There was no time to waste, so I got below as fast as possible, repacked my vac suit, and began firing myself through the corridors as fast as possible. It was illegal, of course; a collision at twenty-five miles an hour can kill quickly if the other guy is coming at you at the same velocity. There were times when I didn't dare break the law, because some guard was around, and, even if he didn't catch me, he might report in and arouse Brock's interest in a way I wouldn't like.

  I finally got to a tubeway, but it stopped at every station, and it took me nearly an hour and a half to get to Viking Test Area Four.

  At the main door, I considered--for all of five seconds--the idea of simply telling the guard I had to go in. But I knew that, by now, Jack was there ahead of me. No. I couldn't just bull my way in. Too crude. Too many clues.

  Hell's fire and damnation! I'd have to waste more time.

  I looked up at the ceiling. The surface wasn't more than a hundred feet overhead, but it felt as though it were a hundred light-years.

  If I could get that guard away from that door for five seconds, all would be gravy from then on in. But how? I couldn't have the diversion connected with me. Or--

  Sometimes, I'm amazed at my own stupidity.

  I beetled it down to the nearest phone and got hold of my BANning number.

  "Jack already inside?" I snapped.

  "Hell, yes! What happened to you?"

  "Never mind. Got to make the best of it. I'm a corner away from Area Four. Where's your nearest man?"

  "At the corner near the freight office."

  "I'll go to him. What's he look like?"

  "Five-nine. Black, curly hair. Your age. Fat. Name's Peter Quilp. He knows you."

  "Peter Quilp?"

  "Right."

  "Good. Circulate a report that Jack has been seen in the vicinity of the main gate to Area Four. Put it out that there's a reward of five thousand for the person who finds her. I'm going to have Quilp gather a crowd."

  He didn't ask a one of the million questions that must have popped into his mind. "Right. Anything else?"

  "No." I hung up.

  * * * * *

  Within ten minutes, there was a mob milling through the corridor. Everybody in the neighborhood was looking for Jaqueline Ravenhurst. Then Peter Quilp yelled.

  "I've got her! I've got her! Guard!"

  With a scene like that going on, the guard couldn't help but step out of his cubicle to see what was going on.

  I used the key I was carrying, stepped inside, and relocked the door. No one in the crowd paid any attention.

  From then on up, it was simply a matter of evading patrolling guards--a relatively easy job. Finally, I put on my vac suit and went out through the air lock.

  McGuire was still sitting there, a bright blue needle that reflected the distant sun as it moved across the ebon sky. Ceres' rotation took it from horizon to horizon in less than two hours, and you could see it and the stars move against the spire of the ship.

  I made it to the air lock in one long jump.

  Jack Ravenhurst had gone into the ship through the tube that led to the passenger lock. She might or might not have her vac suit on; I knew she had several of them on Ceres. It was probable that she was wearing it without the fishbowl.

  I used the cargo lock.

  It took a few minutes for the pumps to cycle, wasting more precious time. I was fairly certain that she would be in the control cabin, talking, but I was thankful that the pumps were silent.

  Finally, I took off my fishbowl and stepped into the companionway.

  And something about the size of Luna came out of nowhere and clobbered me on the occiput. I had time to yell, "Get away!" Then I was as one with intergalactic space.

  * * * * *

  Please! said the voice. Please! Stop the drive! Go back! McGuire! I deman
d that you stop! I order you to stop! Please! PLEASE!

  It went on and on. A voice that shifted around every possible mode of emotion. Fear. Demand. Pleading. Anger. Cajoling. Hate. Threat.

  Around and around and around.

  Can't you speak, McGuire? Say something to me! A shrill, soft, throaty, harsh, murmuring, screaming voice that had one basic characteristic. It was a female voice.

  And then another voice.

  I am sorry, Jack. I can speak with you. I can record your data. But I cannot accept your orders. I can take orders from only One. And he has given me his orders.

  And the feminine voice again: Who was it? What orders? You keep saying that it was the man on the couch. That doesn't make sense!

  I didn't hear the reply, because it suddenly occurred to me that Daniel Oak was the man on the couch, and that I was Daniel Oak.

  My head was throbbing with every beat of my heart, and it felt as if my blood pressure was varying between zero and fifteen hundred pounds per square inch in the veins and arteries and capillaries that fed my brain.

  I sat up, and the pain began to lessen. The blood seemed to drain away from my aching head and go elsewhere.

  I soon figured out the reason for that; I could tell by the feel that the gravity pull was somewhere between one point five and two gees. I wasn't at all used to it, but my head felt less painful and rather more hazy. If possible.

  I concentrated, and the girl's voice came back again.

  "... 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."