Randall Garrett

“ There were tears in her blue eyes.
“Mike! Oh, Mike!” She ran toward him, put her arms around him, and tried to bury her face in Mike’s chest.
“What’s the matter, honey? What’s happened?” He was certain she couldn’t have heard about Mellon’s death yet. He held her in his arms, carefully, tenderly, not passionately.
“He’s crazy, Mike. He’s completely crazy.” Her voice had suddenly lost everything that gave it color. It was only dead and choked.
Mike the Angel knew it was an emotional reaction. As a psychologist, she would never have used the word “crazy.” But as a woman ... as a human being.... ”

“ A robot is a logical machine, but it becomes somewhat of a problem even to define a human being. Is a five-year-old competent to give orders to a robot?
“If you define him as a human being, then he can give orders that might wreck an expensive machine. On the other hand, if you don’t define the five-year-old as human, then the robot is under no compulsion to refrain from harming the child.” ”

“ Mike growled in spite of himself.
“Yes. For my experiment. And you offered help. That was very nice. Leda says it is nice to help people.”
Mike the Angel carefully refrained from asking Snookums if he thought he was people. For all Mike knew, he did.
Mike followed Snookums and Leda Crannon down the companionway.
“What did you do today, honey?” asked Leda.
“Mostly I answered questions for Dr. Fitzhugh,” said Snookums. “He asked me thirty-eight questions. He said I was a great help. I’m nice, too.”
“Sure you are, darling,” said Miss Crannon.
“Ye gods,” muttered Mike the Angel. ”

“ Just as in the human being, there is a difference between a robot’s brain and a robot’s mind. The brain is a physical thing—a bunch of cryotrons in a helium bath. But the mind is the sum total of all the data and reaction patterns and so forth that have been built into the brain or absorbed by it. ”

“ That caused such utter confusion in the random circuits that Mike’s friend had had to spend a week cleaning up the robot’s little mind.
But what would be the purpose of building a brain as gigantic as the one in Cargo Hold One? And why build a spaceship around it?
[47] Like a pig roasting on an automatic spit, the problem kept turning over and over in Mike’s mind. And, like the roasting pig, the time eventually came when it was done.
Once it is set in operation, a properly operating robot brain can neither be shut off nor dismantled. ”

“ If the kid had been an adult, Harry MacDougal would have died there and then. An adult would simply have [18] slashed his vibroblade through the old man’s spine and brought it to bear on Mike the Angel.
But not the kid. He jumped back, eyes widening, to face his oncoming opponent in an open space. He was no coward, that kid, and he knew how to handle a vibroblade. In his own unwise, suicidal way, he was perfectly capable of proving himself. He held out the point of that shimmering metal shaft, ready to parry any offensive thrust that Mike the Angel might make. ”

“ Otherwise, she’d know that a computer can’t lie—not in the human sense of the word.
Most people, if told that a man had said one thing, and that a computer had given a different answer, would rely on the computer.
“What is it, Mike?” she repeated.
“Lew Mellon,” he said very quietly, “is dead.”
The blood drained from her face, leaving her skin stark against the bright red of her hair. For a moment he thought she was going to faint. Then a little of the color came back.
“Snookums.” Her voice was whispery.
He shook his head. “No. Apparently he tried to jump Vaneski and got hit with a stun beam. ”

“ It took less than a second, and when Snookums spoke again there was something about his voice that Mike the Angel didn’t like.
“No,” said the robot, “I am not doing anything against His will. Only human beings and angels have free will, and I am not either, so I have no free will. Therefore, whatever I do is the will of God.” ”

“ A machine.
“It was never anything but a machine. It is still a machine. It will never be anything else.
“Personality is something that no machine can ever have. Idiosyncrasies, yes. No two machines are identical. But any personality that an individual sees in a machine has been projected there by the individual himself; it exists only in the human mind.
“A machine can only do what it is built to do, and teaching a robot is only a building process.” ”

“ Regretfully, Mike the Angel brought the edge of his hand down against the side of her neck in a paralyzing, but not deadly, rabbit punch. She dropped, senseless, and a small gun spilled out of the waist pocket of her zipsuit and skittered across the floor. ”

“ Mike blinked. Keku raised his eyebrows. Vaneski swallowed and jerked his eyes away from Mike’s face to look at Mellon—but still he didn’t say anything.
“Elucidate, my dear Doctor,” said Mike with interest.
“I diagnose it as a physician,” Mellon said in the same dry, earnest tone. “Snookums, we have been told, is too dangerous to be permitted to remain on Earth. I take this to mean that he is potentially capable of doing something that would either harm the planet itself or a majority—if not all—of the people on it.” He picked up his cup of coffee and took a sip. Nobody interrupted him. ”

“ Mike asked.
“Since he is free from sin—either original or actual—he is therefore filled with the plenitude of God’s grace. The purpose of a sacrament is to give grace to the recipient; it follows that it would be useless to give the Sacrament to Snookums. To perform a sacrament or to receive it when one knows that it will be useless is sacrilege. And sacrilege is undesirable.”
“Brother! But I still don’t see how that makes him dangerous.”
“The operation of the First Law,” Leda said. “For a man to sin involves endangering his immortal soul. Snookums, therefore, must prevent men from sinning. ”

“ I want all of you to understand that the machine you will have to take care of is not just an ordinary computer. Every man here has had experience with machinery, from the very simplest to the relatively complex. You know that you have to be careful of the kind of information—the kind of external force—you give a machine.
“If you aim a spaceship at Mars, for instance, and tell it to go through the planet, it might try to obey, but you’d lose the machine in the process.” ”

“ Her smile was encouraging.
“He said—and I quote”—Mike’s voice assumed a gloomy, but stilted tone—“normal hydrogen gas consists of diatomic [188] molecules. The nuclear, or proton, spin of these atoms—ah—that is, of the two atoms that compose the molecule—may be oriented in the same direction or in opposite directions.”
He held a finger in the air as if to make a deep philosophical point. “If,” he said pontifically, “they are oriented in the same direction, we refer to the substance as orthohydrogen. If they are oriented in opposite directions, it is parahydrogen. ”

“ He leaped, instead, straight for the kid in the dead-black suède zipsuit who was holding the vibroblade against Harry MacDougal’s spine. And the kid reacted exactly as Mike the Angel had hoped, prayed, and predicted he would.
The kid defended himself.
An adult, in a situation where he has one known enemy at his mercy and is being attacked by a second, will quickly put the first out of the way in order to leave himself free to deal with the second. There is no sense in leaving your flank wide open just to oppose a frontal attack. ”

“ What does a psychologist have to do with robots? If you’ll pardon my ignorance.”
This time she laughed softly, and Mike thought dizzily of the gay chiming of silver bells. He clamped down firmly on the romantic wanderings of his mind as she started her explanation.
“I’m a specialist in child psychology, Mike. Actually, I was hired as an experiment—or, rather, as the result of a wild guess that happened to work. You see, the first two times Snookums’ brain was activated, the circuits became disoriented.” ”

“ Snookums began behaving irrationally. It is the height of coincidence that a robot and a human being should both become insane at almost the same time; therefore we have to look for a common cause.”
Lieutenant Commander von Liegnitz raised a tentative hand, and Mike said: “Go ahead.”
“I was under the impression that the robot went mad because Mellon had filled him full of theological nonsense. It would take a madman to do anything like that to a fine machine—therefore I see no peculiar coincidence.”
“That’s exactly what the killer wanted us to think,” Mike said. ”

“ Mike the Angel thought over what Dr. Fitzhugh had said. Then he said: “That’s not all of it. Antarctica is isolated enough to keep that knowledge secret for a long time—at [102] least until safeguards could be set up. Why take Snookums off Earth?”
“Snookums himself is dangerous,” Fitzhugh said. “He has a built-in ‘urge’ to experiment—to get data. We can keep him from making experiments that we know will be dangerous by giving him the data, so that the urge doesn’t operate. But if he’s on the track of something totally new.... ”

“ At first he just stopped by the door and soaked in data. Mike’s muttering; the clipped, staccato conversation of the power crew; the noises of the tools; the deep throb of the ship itself; the underlying oddness of the engine vibrations—all these were fed into his microphonic ears. The scene itself was transmitted to his brain and recorded. The cryotronic maze in the depths of the ship chewed the whole thing over. Snookums acted.
Leda Crannon, who had lost ground in trying to keep up with Snookums’ whirling treads, came to the door of Power Section too late to stop the robot’s entrance. ”

“ Mike said.
“Fine. Because you’re just the man we need.”
Mike the Angel could almost feel the knife blade sliding between his ribs, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that the person who had stabbed him in the back was himself. “What’s that supposed to mean, Wally?”
“You are, I believe, an officer in the Space Service Reserve,” said Basil Wallingford in a smooth, too oily voice. “Since the Engineering Officer of the Branchell, Jack Wong, is laid up in a hospital, I’m going to call you to active duty to replace him.” ”

“ He’s been fed data on everything—physics, subphysics, chemistry, mathematics—all kinds of things. Most of the major research laboratories on Earth have problems of one kind or another that Snookums has been working on. He hasn’t been given the problem I was working on at all; it would bias him.” Then the tears came back. “And now it doesn’t matter. He’s insane. He’s lying.”
“What’s he saying?”
“He insists that he’s never broken the First Law, that he has never hurt a human being. And he insists that he has followed the orders of human beings, according to the Second Law.” ”

“ Granted, the temperature of Eisberg is a long way from red hot, but normal sealing still won’t keep out hydrogen. Add to that the fact that hydrogen and methane are both colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and you have the beginnings of an explosive situation.
The only reason that no one died is because the Space Service is what it is.
Unlike the land, sea, and air forces of Earth, the Space Service does not have a long history of fighting other human beings. There has never been a space war, and, the way things stand, there is no likelihood of one in the foreseeable future. ”

“ Hand compensation of feeder-valve oscillation is pure intuition; if you wait until the meters show that damping is necessary, it may be too late—you have to second-guess the machine and figure out what’s coming before it happens and compensate then. You not only have to judge time, but magnitude; overcompensation is ruinous, too.
Multhaus, the Chief Powerman’s Mate, sat behind the emergency board, a vernier dial in each hand and both eyes on an oscilloscope screen. ”

“ When a super-robot named Snookums discovers how to build his own superbombs, it becomes obvious that Earth is by no means the safest place for him to be. And so Dr. Fitzhugh, his designer, and Leda Crannon, a child psychologist acting as Snookums’ nursemaid, agree to set up Operation Brainchild, a plan to transport the robot to a far distant planet.
Mike the Angel—M. R. Gabriel, Power Design—has devised the power plant that is to propel the space ship Branchell to its secret destination, complete with its unusual cargo. ”

“ The little humanoid, caterpillar-track mechanism that we all tend to think of as Snookums isn’t really Snookums, any more than a human being is a hand or an eye. Snookums wouldn’t actually be threatening his own existence unless his brain—now in the hold of the William Branchell—is destroyed. ”

“ Morris Fitzhugh’s wrinkled face looked as though he were on the verge of crying. Which—perhaps—he was.
He looked at the others at the wardroom table—Quill, Jeffers, von Liegnitz, Keku, Leda Crannon, and Mike the Angel. But he didn’t really seem to be seeing them.
[212] “Ruined,” he said. “Eighteen billion dollars’ worth of work, destroyed completely. The brain has become completely randomized.” He sighed softly. “It was all Vaneski’s fault, of course. Theology.” He said the last as though it were an obscene word. As far as robots were concerned, it was. ”

“ He stood up. “What will you do? Simply tell Snookums to forget all this stuff?”
“Good Heavens no! It’s too thoroughly integrated with every other bit of data he has! You might be able to take one single bit of data out that way, but to jerk out a whole body of knowledge like this would completely randomize his circuits. You can pull out a tooth by yanking with a pair of forceps, but if you try to take out a man’s appendix that way, you’ll lose a patient.”
“I catch,” Mike said with a grin. “Okay. I’ll get the other two books and you can get to work copying them. Take care.” ”

“ Both men leaped to their feet, Multhaus valiantly trying not to nurse his bruised hand.
“Sorry, sir,” said Multhaus. “We were just—”
“Ne’ mind. I saw. Who usually wins?” Mike asked.
Lieutenant Keku grinned. “Usually he does, Commander. All this beef doesn’t help much against a guy who really has pull. And Chief Multhaus has it.”
Mike looked into the big man’s brown eyes. “Try doing push-ups. With all your weight, it’d really put brawn into you. Sit down and light up. We’ve got time before take-off. That is, we do if Multhaus has everything ready for the check-off.” ”

“ Who would buy electric power when he could generate his own for next to nothing? Billions upon billions of dollars worth of generating equipment were rendered valueless. The great hydroelectric dams, the hundreds of steam turbines, the heavy-metal atomic reactors—all useless for power purposes. The value of the stock in those [100] companies dropped to zero and stayed there. The value of copper metal fell like a bomb, with almost equally devastating results—for there was no longer any need for the millions of miles of copper cable that linked the power plants with the consumer. ”