Unwise Child
Chapter 13

Public Domain

Leda Crannon sat down on the edge of the bunk in Mike the Angel’s stateroom, accepted the cigarette and light that Mike had proffered, and waited while Mike poured a couple of cups of coffee from the insul-jug on his desk.

“I wish I could offer you something stronger, but I’m not much of a drinker myself, so I don’t usually take advantage of the officer’s prerogative to smuggle liquor aboard,” he said as he handed her the cup.

She smiled up at him. “That’s all right; I rarely drink, and when I do, it’s either wine or a very diluted highball. Right now, this coffee will do me more good.”

Mike heard footsteps coming down the companionway. He glanced out through the door, which he had deliberately left open. Ensign Vaneski walked by, glanced in, grinned, and went on his way. The kid had good sense, Mike thought. He hoped any other passers-by would stay out while he talked to Leda.

“Does a thing like that happen often?” the girl asked. “Not the fast solution; I mean the beat note.”

“No,” said Mike the Angel. “Once the system is stabilized, the tubes tend to keep each other in line. But because of that very tendency, an offbeat tube won’t show itself for a while. The system tries to keep the bad ones in phase in spite of themselves. But eventually one of them sort of rebels, and that frees any of the others that are offbeat, so the bad ones all show at once and we can spot them. When we get all the bad ones adjusted, the system remains stable for the operating life of the system.”

“And that’s the purpose of a shakedown cruise?”

“One of the reasons,” agreed Mike. “If the tubes are going to act up, they’ll do it in the first five hundred operating hours--except in unusual cases. That’s one of the things that bothered me about the way this crate was hashed together.”

Her blue eyes widened. “I thought this was a well-built ship.”

“Oh, it is, it is--all things considered. It isn’t dangerous, if that’s what you’re worried about. But it sure as the devil is expensively wasteful.”

She nodded and sipped at her coffee. “I know that. But I don’t see any other way it could have been done.”

“Neither do I, right off the bat,” Mike admitted. He took a good swallow of the hot liquid in his cup and said: “I wanted to ask you two questions. First, what was it that Snookums was doing just before he came into the Power Section? Black Bart said he’d been galloping all over the ship, with you at his heels.”

Her infectious smile came back. “He was playing seismograph. He was simply checking the intensity of the vibrations at different points in the ship. That gave him part of the data he needed to tell you which of the tubes were acting up.”

“I’m beginning to think,” said Mike, “that we’ll have to start building a big brain aboard every ship--that is, if we can learn enough about such monsters from Snookums.”

“What was the other question?” Leda asked.

“Oh ... Well, I was wondering just why you are connected with this project. 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.”

“You mean,” said Mike the Angel, “they went nuts.”

She laughed again. “Don’t let Fitz hear you say that. He’ll tell you that ‘the circuits exceeded their optimum randomity limit.’”

Mike grinned, remembering the time he had driven a robot brain daffy by bluffing it at poker. “How did that happen?”

“Well, we don’t know all the details, but it seems to have something to do with the slow recovery rate that’s necessary for learning. Do you know anything about Lagerglocke’s Principle?”

“Fitzhugh mentioned something about it in the briefing we got before take-off. Something about a bit of learning being an inelastic rebound.”

“That’s it. You take a steel ball, for instance, and drop it on a steel plate from a height of three or four feet. It bounces--almost perfect elasticity. The next time you drop it, it does the same thing. It hasn’t learned anything.

“But if you drop a lead ball, it doesn’t bounce as much, and it will flatten at the point of contact. _The next time it falls on that flat side, its behavior will be different._ It has learned something.”

Mike rubbed the tip of an index finger over his chin. “These illustrations are analogues of the human mind?”

“That’s right. Some people have minds like steel balls. They can learn, but you have to hit them pretty hard to make them do it. On the other hand, some people have minds like glass balls: They can’t learn at all. If you hit them hard enough to make a real impression, they simply shatter.”

“All right. Now what has this got to do with you and Snookums?”

“Patience, boy, patience,” Leda said with a grin. “Actually, the lead-ball analogy is much too simple. An intelligent mind has to have time to partially recover, you see. Hit it with too many shocks, one right after another, and it either collapses or refuses to learn or both.

“The first two times the brain was activated, the roboticists just began feeding data into the thing as though it were an ordinary computing machine. They were forcing it to learn too fast; they weren’t giving it time to recover from the shock of learning.

“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.

“The brain didn’t have an opportunity to recover from the learning shocks when the data was fed in too fast, so the mind cracked. It couldn’t take it. The robot went insane.

“Each time, the roboticists had to deactivate the brain, drain it of all data, and start over. After the second time, Dr. Fitzhugh decided they were going about it wrong, so they decided on a different tack.”

“I see,” said Mike the Angel. “It had to be taught slowly, like a child.”

“Exactly,” said Leda. “And who would know more about teaching a child than a child psychologist?” she added brightly.

Mike looked down at his coffee cup, watching the slight wavering of the surface as it broke up the reflected light from the glow panels. He had invited this girl down to his stateroom (he told himself) to get information about Snookums. But now he realized that information about the girl herself was far more important.

“How long have you been working with Snookums?” he asked, without looking up from his coffee.

“Over eight years,” she said.

Then Mike looked up. “You know, you hardly look old enough. You don’t look much older than twenty-five.”

She smiled--a little shyly, Mike thought. “As Snookums says, ‘You’re nice.’ I’m twenty-six.”

“And you’ve been working with Snookums since you were eighteen?”

“Uh-huh.” She looked, very suddenly, much younger than even the twenty-five Mike had guessed at. She seemed to be more like a somewhat bashful teen-ager who had been educated in a convent. “I was what they call an ‘exceptional child.’ My mother died when I was seven, and Dad ... well, he just didn’t know what to do with a baby girl, I guess. He was a kind man, and I think he really loved me, but he just didn’t know what to do with me. So when the tests showed that I was ... brighter ... than the average, he put me in a special school in Italy. Said he didn’t want my mind cramped by being forced to conform to the mental norm. Maybe he even believed that himself.

“And, too, he didn’t approve of public education. He had a lot of odd ideas.

“Anyway, I saw him during summer vacations and went to school the rest of the year. He took me all over the world when I was with him, and the instructors were pretty wonderful people; I’m not sorry that I was brought up that way. It was a little different from the education that most children have, but it gave me a chance to use my mind.”

“I know the school,” said Mike the Angel. “That’s the one under the Cesare Alfieri Institute in Florence?”

“That’s it; did you go there?” There was an odd, eager look in her eyes.

Mike shook his head. “Nope. But a friend of mine did. Ever know a guy named Paulvitch?”

She squealed with delight, as though she’d been playfully pinched. “Sir Gay? You mean Serge Paulvitch, the Fiend of Florence?” She pronounced the name properly: “Sair-gay,” instead of “surge,” as too many people were prone to do.

“Sounds like the same man,” Mike admitted, grinning. “As evil-looking as Satanas himself?”

“That’s Sir Gay, all right. Half the girls were scared of him, and I think all the boys were. He’s about three years older than I am, I guess.”

“Why call him Sir Gay?” Mike asked. “Just because of his name?”

“Partly. And partly because he was always such a gentleman. A real nice guy, if you know what I mean. Do you know him well?”

Know him? Hell, I couldn’t run my business without him.”

“Your business?” She blinked. “But he works for--” Then her eyes became very wide, her mouth opened, and she pointed an index finger at Mike. “Then you ... you’re Mike the Angel! M. R. Gabriel! Sure!” She started laughing. “I never connected it up! My golly, my golly! I thought you were just another Space Service commander! Mike the Angel! Well, I’ll be darned!”

She caught her breath. “I’m sorry. I was just so surprised, that’s all. Are you really the M. R. Gabriel, of M. R. Gabriel, Power Design?”

Mike was as close to being nonplused as he cared to be. “Sure,” he said. “You mean you didn’t know?”

She shook her head. “No. I thought Mike the Angel was about sixty years old, a crotchety old genius behind a desk, as eccentric as a comet’s orbit, and wealthier than Croesus. You’re just not what I pictured, that’s all.”

“Just wait a few more decades,” Mike said, laughing. “I’ll try to live up to my reputation.”

“So you’re Serge’s boss. How is he? I haven’t seen him since I was sixteen.”

“He’s grown a beard,” said Mike.

“No!”

“Fact.”

“My God, how horrible!” She put her hand over her eyes in mock horror.

“Let’s talk about you,” said Mike. “You’re much prettier than Serge Paulvitch.”

 
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