Unwise Child by Randall Garrett (epub e ink reader TXT) 📕

The lead was definitely askew.

Mike the Angel snapped orders, and the power crewmen descended on the scene of the trouble.

[114] Snookums went right on delivering his interpretation of the data, but everyone ignored him while they worked. Being ignored didn’t bother Snookums in the least.

“... and that, in turn, is making the feeder valve field oscillate,” he finished up, nearly five minutes later.

Mike was glad that Snookums had pinpointed the trouble first and then had gone on to show why the defect was causing the observed result. He could just as easily have started with the offending oscillation and reached the bit about the faulty lead at the end of his speech, except that he had been built to do it the other way around. Snookums made the deduction in his superfast mind and then reeled it off backward, as it were, going from conclusion to premises.

Otherwise, he might have been too late.

The repair didn’t take long, once Snookums had found just what needed repairing. When the job was over, Mike the Angel wiped his hands on a rag and stood up.

“Thanks, Snookums,” he said honestly. “You’ve been a great help.”

Snookums said: “I am smiling. Because I am pleased.”

There was no way for him to smile with a steel face, but Mike got the idea.

Mike turned to the Chief Powerman’s Mate. “Okay, Multhaus, shut it off. She’s steady now.”

Multhaus just sat there, surrounded by a wall of concentration, his hands still on the verniers, his eyes still on the screen. He didn’t move.

Mike flipped off the switch. “Come on, Multhaus, snap to. We’ve still got that beat note to worry about.”

Multhaus blinked dizzily as the green line vanished from his sight. He jerked his hands off the verniers, and then [115] smiled sheepishly. He had been sitting there waiting for that green line to move a full minute after the input signal had ceased.

“Happy hypnosis,” said Mike. “Let’s get back to finding out which of those tubes in the hull is giving the external field the willies.”

Snookums, who had been listening carefully, rolled up and said, “Generator tubes three, four, and thirteen. Three is out of phase by—”

“You can tell us later, Snookums,” Mike interrupted rapidly. “Right now, we’ll get to work on those tubes. You were right once; I hope you’re right again.”

Again the power crew swung into action.

Within five minutes Mike and Multhaus were making the proper adjustments on the external field circuits to adjust for the wobbling of the output.

The throb wavered. It wobbled around, going up to two-point-seven cycles and dropping back to one-point-four, then climbing again. All the time, it was dropping in magnitude, until finally it could no longer be felt. Finally, it dropped suddenly to a low of point-oh-five cycles, hovered there for a moment, then vanished altogether.

“By the beard of my sainted maiden aunt,” said Chief Multhaus in awe. “A three-tube offbeat solved in less than half an hour! If that isn’t a record, I’ll dye my uniform black and join the Chaplains’ Corps.”

Leda Crannon, looking tired but somehow pleased, said softly: “May I come in?”

Mike the Angel grinned. “Sure. Maybe you can—”

The intercom clicked on. “Power Section, this is the bridge.” It was Black Bart. “Are my senses playing me false, or have you stopped that beat note?”

[116] “All secure, sir,” said Mike the Angel. “The system is stable now.”

“How many tubes were goofing?”

“Three of them.”

“Three!” There was astonishment in the captain’s voice. “How did you ever solve a three-tube beat in that short a time?”

Mike the Angel grinned up at the eye in the wall.

“Nothing to it, sir,” he said. “A child could have done it.”

[117]

13

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 [118] 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 [119] 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 [120] 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.

[121] “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 ...[122] 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