Randall Garrett

“ Nobody ever deliberately named a spaceship that. The staid and stolid minds that run the companies which design and build spaceships rarely let their minds run to fancy. The only example I can think of is the unsung hero of the last century who had puckish imagination enough to name the first atomic-powered submarine Nautilus. Such minds are rare. Most minds equate dignity with dullness. ”

“ It's a long jump from one rock to the next, even in the asteroid belt, and you have to live inside your vac suit until you come to a stopping place where you can spend an hour or so resting before you go on. It's like driving cross-continent in an automobile, except that the signposts and landmarks are constantly shifting position. An inexperienced man can get lost easily in the Belt.
I was happy to find that Jack Ravenhurst knew how to handle a flitterboat and could sight navigate by the stars. ”

“ The ship was just as beautiful inside as it was outside. Neat, compact, and efficient. The control room—if such it could be called—was like no control room I'd ever seen before. Just an acceleration couch and observation instruments. Midguard explained that it wasn't necessary to be a pilot to run the ship; any person who knew a smattering of astronavigation could get to his destination by simply telling the ship what he wanted to do.
Jack Ravenhurst took in the whole thing with wide-eyed interest. ”

“ The brilliant biophysicist, Asenion, who promulgated the Three Laws of Robotics in the last century, had shown in his writings that they were unattainable ideals—that they only told what a perfect robot should be, not what a robot actually was. ”

“ Feller down a series of long corridors which had been painted a pale green, which gave me the feeling that I was underwater. There were doors spaced at intervals along the corridor walls. Occasionally one of them would open and a busy looking man would cross the corridor, open another door, and disappear. From behind the doors, I could hear the drum of distant sounds.
We finally ended up in front of what looked like the only wooden door in the place. When you're carving an office and residence out of a nickel-iron planetoid, importing wood from Earth is a purely luxury matter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Robot brains don't go mad unless they're given instructions to do so—conflicting orders, erroneous information, that sort of thing. Or, unless they have actual physical defects in the brains themselves."
"The brains can handle the job of flying a ship all right, though?" I asked. "I mean, they have the capacity for it?"
"Certainly. They're the same type that's used to control the automobile traffic on the Eastern Seaboard Highway Network of North America. If they can control the movement of millions of cars, there's no reason why they can't control a spaceship." ”

“ The First Law, for instance, would forbid a robot to harm a human being, either by action or inaction. But, as Asenion showed, a robot could be faced with a situation which allowed for only two possible decisions, both of which required that a human being be harmed. In such a case, the robot goes insane.
I found myself speculating what sort of situation, what sort of Asenion paradox, had confronted those first six ships. And whether it had been by accident or design. Not that the McGuire robots had been built in strict accord with the Laws of Robotics ”

“ They wanted a perfect superman to test pilot their baby, even if they knew they'd eventually have to take second best.
It took the Yale Space Foundation a long time to pick the right man.
No, I'm not the guy who tested the McGuire.
I'm the guy who stole it.
Shalimar Ravenhurst is not the kind of bloke that very many people can bring themselves to like, and, in this respect, I'm like a great many people, if not more so. In the first place, a man has no right to go around toting a name like "Shalimar" ”

“ Viking Spacecraft built some of the biggest and best spacecraft in the System. It held most of Ceres—all of it, in fact, except the Government Reservation. It had moved out to the asteroids a long time back, after the big mining concerns began cutting up the smaller asteroids for metal. The raw materials are easier to come by out here than they are on Earth, and it's a devil of a lot easier to build spacecraft under low-gee conditions than it is under the pull of Earth or Luna or Mars.
"Do you know anything about the experimental robotic ships being built on Eros?" Ravenhurst asked. ”

“ Shalimar Ravenhurst owned a little planetoid out in the Belt, a hunk of nickel-iron about the size of a smallish mountain with a gee-pull measurable in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. If you're susceptible to spacesickness, that kind of gravity is about as much help as aspirin would have been to Marie Antoinette. You get the feeling of a floor beneath you, but there's a distinct impression that it won't be there for long. It keeps trying to drop out from under you.
I dropped my flitterboat on the landing field and looked around without any hope of seeing anything. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Walking under low-gee conditions is like nothing else in this universe. I don't mean trotting around on Luna; one-sixth gee is practically homelike in comparison. And zero gee is so devoid of orientation that it gives the sensation of falling endlessly until you get used to it. But a planetoid is in a different class altogether. ”

“ I waited while the thing beeped twice. There was a click, and a voice said: "Raven's Rest. Yes?" It wasn't Ravenhurst.
I said: "This is Daniel Oak. I want to talk to Mr. Ravenhurst."
"Mr. Oak? But you weren't expected until tomorrow."
"Fine. I'm early. Let me talk to Ravenhurst."
"But Mr. Ravenhurst wasn't expecting you to—"
I got all-of-a-sudden exasperated. "Unless your instruments are running on secondhand flashlight batteries, you've known I was coming for the past half hour. I followed Ravenhurst's instructions not to use radio, but he should know I'm here by this time. ”

“ The place wouldn't be classed higher than a third-rate cafe on Earth, but on Ceres it's considered one of the better places. The prices certainly compare well with those of the best New York or Moscow restaurants, and the price of meat, which has to be shipped from Earth, is—you should pardon the gag—astronomical.
That didn't bother me. Steaks for two would go right on the expense account. I mentally thanked Mr. Ravenhurst for the fine slab of beef when the waiter finally brought it.
While we were waiting, though, I lit a cigarette and said: "You're awfully quiet, Jack."
"Am I? Men are funny." ”

“ Ceres has a pretty respectable gee pull for a planetoid: Three per cent of Standard. I weigh a good, hefty five pounds on the surface. That makes it a lot easier to walk around on Ceres than on, say, Raven's Rest. Even so, you always get the impression that one of the little rail cars that scoots along the corridors is climbing uphill all the way, because the acceleration is greater than any measly thirty centimeters per second squared.
Jack didn't say another word until we reached the Viking, where Ravenhurst had thoughtfully made reservations for adjoining rooms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I was glad, in a way, that Ceres was within flitterboat range of Raven's Rest. I don't like the time wasted in waiting for a regular spaceship, which you have to do when your target is a quarter of the way around the Belt from you. The cross-system jumps don't take long, but getting to a ship takes time.
The Ravenhurst girl wasn't much of a talker while we were en route. A little general chitchat once in a while, then she'd clam up to do a little mental orbit figuring. ”

“ Jack said. "It's so interesting to carry on an intelligent conversation with a machine."
"I'm afraid that's impossible, Miss Ravenhurst," Midguard said rather worriedly. "You see, McGuire's primed so that the first man's voice he hears will be identified as his master. It's what we call the 'chick reaction'. You know: the first moving thing a newly-hatched bird sees is regarded as the mother, and, once implanted, that order can't be rescinded. We can change McGuire's orientation in that respect, but we'd rather not have to go through that. ”

“ As the personal representative of Shalimar Ravenhurst, who was manager of Viking Spacecraft, which was, in turn, the owner of Ceres, I had a lot of weight to push around. I had every executive on the planetoid jumping before I was through.
Colonel Brock, of course, was broiling in his own juices. He managed to get hold of me by phone once, by calling a Dr. Perelson whom I was interviewing at the time.
The phone chimed, Perelson said, "Excuse me," and went to answer. I could hear his voice from the other room.
"Mr. Daniel Oak? Yes; he's here. Well, yes. Oh, all sorts of questions, colonel." ”

“ Well, that's the feeling you get on a low-gee planetoid.
Your arms don't tend to hang at your sides, as they do on Earth or Luna, because the muscular tension tends to hold them out, just as it does in zero-gee, but there is still a definite sensation of up-and-down. If you push yourself off the floor, you tend to float in a long, slow, graceful arc, provided you don't push too hard. Magnetic soles are practically a must. ”

“ I'm a professional man, not a hired flunky. If you'd called a doctor, you wouldn't tell him to leave his little black bag behind; if you'd called a lawyer, you wouldn't make him check his brief case. Or, if you did, he'd tell you to drop dead.
"I was asked to come here as fast as possible, and when I do, I'm told to wait till tomorrow. Now you want me to check my gun. The hell with you."
"Merely a safety precaution," said the blond young man worriedly.
"You think I'm going to shoot Ravenhurst, maybe? Don't be an idiot." I started climbing into my vac suit. ”

“ Playing games inside a crowded asteroid is not the same as playing games in, say, Honolulu or Vladivostok, especially when that game is a combination of hide-and-seek and ring-around-the-Rosie. The trouble is lack of communication. Radio contact is strictly line-of-sight inside a hunk of metal. Radar beams can get a little farther, but a man has to be an expert billiards player to bank a reflecting beam around very many corners, and even that would depend upon the corridors being empty, which they never are. ”

“ Following somebody isn't anywhere near as easy as popular fiction might lead you to believe. Putting a tail on someone whose spouse wants divorce evidence is relatively easy, but even the best detectives can lose a man by pure mischance. If the tailee, for instance, walks into a crowded elevator and the automatic computer decides that the car is filled to the limit, the man who's tailing him will be left facing a closed door. Something like that can happen by accident, without any design on the part of the tailee. ”

“ Most places in the Belt, a union suit is considered normal dress; a man never knows when he might have to climb into a vac suit—fast. But there are a few of the hoity-toity places on Eros and Ceres and a few of the other well-settled places where a man or woman is required to put on shorts and jacket before entering. ”

“ Her hair was a reddish brown and was cut fairly close to the skull; only a woman who never intends to be in a vac suit in free fall can afford to let her hair grow.
"Miss Ravenhurst?" I asked.
She grinned and stuck out a hand. "Just call me Jack. And I'll call you Dan. O.K.?"
I grinned and shook her hand because there wasn't much else I could do. Now I'd met the Ravenhursts: A father called Shalimar and a daughter called Jack.
And a spaceship named McGuire.
I gave the flitterboat all the push it would take to get us to Ceres as fast as possible. I don't like riding in the things. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It's not a single man; it's a group."
"Maybe you'd better go into a little more detail on that, Mr. Ravenhurst."
He nodded, and this time his jowls bobbled instead of wobbled. "Some group at Viking is trying to run me out of the managerial business. They want Viking to be managed by Thurston Enterprises; they evidently think they can get a better deal from him than they can from me. If the McGuire project fails, they'll have a good chance of convincing the stock-holders that the fault lies with Ravenhurst. You follow?" ”