A Spaceship Named McGuire Read online

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  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from Analog, July 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

  A SPACESHIP

  NAMED

  McGUIRE

  By

  RANDALL GARRETT

  _The basic trouble with McGuire was that, though "he" was a robot spaceship, nevertheless "he" had a definite weakness that a man might understand...._

  Illustrated by Douglas

  * * * * *

  No. Nobody ever deliberately named a spaceship that. The staid andstolid minds that run the companies which design and build spaceshipsrarely let their minds run to fancy. The only example I can think ofis the unsung hero of the last century who had puckish imaginationenough to name the first atomic-powered submarine _Nautilus_. Suchminds are rare. Most minds equate dignity with dullness.

  This ship happened to have a magnetogravitic drive, whichautomatically put it into the MG class. It also happened to be thefirst successful model to be equipped with a Yale robotic brain, so itwas given the designation MG-YR-7--the first six had had more bugs inthem than a Leopoldville tenement.

  So somebody at Yale--another unsung hero--named the ship McGuire; itwasn't official, but it stuck.

  The next step was to get someone to test-hop McGuire. They needed justthe right man--quick-minded, tough, imaginative, and a whole slew ofcomplementary adjectives. They wanted a perfect superman to test pilottheir baby, even if they knew they'd eventually have to take secondbest.

  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 canbring themselves to like, and, in this respect, I'm like a great manypeople, if not more so. In the first place, a man has no right to goaround toting a name like "Shalimar"; it makes names like "Beverly"and "Leslie" and "Evelyn" sound almost hairy chested. You want a dozenother reasons, you'll get them.

  Shalimar Ravenhurst owned a little planetoid out in the Belt, a hunkof nickel-iron about the size of a smallish mountain with a gee-pullmeasurable in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. If you'resusceptible to spacesickness, that kind of gravity is about as muchhelp as aspirin would have been to Marie Antoinette. You get thefeeling of a floor beneath you, but there's a distinct impression thatit won't be there for long. It keeps trying to drop out from underyou.

  I dropped my flitterboat on the landing field and looked aroundwithout any hope of seeing anything. I didn't. The field was about thesize of a football field, a bright, shiny expanse of rough-polishedmetal, carved and smoothed flat from the nickel-iron of the planetoiditself. It not only served as a landing field, but as a reflectorbeacon, a mirror that flashed out the sun's reflection as theplanetoid turned slowly on its axis. I'd homed in on that beacon, andnow I was sitting on it.

  There wasn't a soul in sight. Off to one end of the rectangular fieldwas a single dome, a hemisphere about twenty feet in diameter and halfas high. Nothing else.

  I sighed and flipped on the magnetic anchor, which grabbed hold of themetal beneath me and held the flitterboat tightly to the surface. ThenI cut the drive, plugged in the telephone, and punched for "Local."

  The automatic finder searched around for the Ravenhurst ticklersignal, found it, and sent out a beep along the same channel.

  I waited while the thing beeped twice. There was a click, and a voicesaid: "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 arerunning on secondhand flashlight batteries, you've known I was comingfor the past half hour. I followed Ravenhurst's instructions not touse radio, but he should know I'm here by this time. He told me tocome as fast as possible, and I followed those instructions, too. Ialways follow instructions when I'm paid enough.

  "Now, I'm here; tell Ravenhurst I want to talk to him, or I'll simplyflit back to Eros, and thank him much for a pretty retainer thatdidn't do him any good but gave me a nice profit for my trouble."

  "One moment, please," said the voice.

  It took about a minute and a half, which was about nine billionjiffies too long, as far as I was concerned.

  Then another voice said: "Oak? Wasn't expecting you till tomorrow."

  "So I hear. I thought you were in a hurry, but if you're not, you canjust provide me with wine, women, and other necessities untiltomorrow. That's above and beyond my fee, of course, since you'rewasting my time, and I'm evidently not wasting yours."

  I couldn't be sure whether the noise he made was a grunt or a muffledchuckle, and I didn't much care. "Sorry, Oak; I really didn't expectyou so soon, but I do want to ... I want you to get started rightaway. Leave your flitterboat where it is; I'll have someone take careof it. Walk on over to the dome and come on in." And he cut off.

  I growled something I was glad he didn't hear and hung up. I wishedthat I'd had a vision unit on the phone; I'd like to have seen hisface. Although I knew I might not have learned much more from hisexpression than I had from his voice.

  * * * * *

  I got out of the flitterboat, and walked across the dome, my magneticsoles making subdued clicking noises inside the suit as they caughtand released the metallic plain beneath me. Beyond the field, I wassurrounded by a lumpy horizon and a black sky full of bright, hardstars.

  The green light was on when I reached the door to the dome, so Iopened it and went on in, closing it behind me. I flipped the togglethat began flooding the room with air. When it was up to pressure, atrap-door in the floor of the dome opened and a crew-cut, blond youngman stuck his head up. "Mr. Oak?"

  I toyed, for an instant, with the idea of giving him a sarcasticanswer. Who else would it be? How many other visitors were runningaround on the surface of Raven's Rest?

  Instead, I said: "That's right." My voice must have sounded prettymuffled to him through my fishbowl.

  "Come on down, Mr. Oak. You can shuck your vac suit below."

  I thought "below" was a pretty ambiguous term on a low-gee lump likethis, but I followed him down the ladder. The ladder was a necessityfor fast transportation; if I'd just tried to jump down from one floorto the next, it would've taken me until a month from next St.Swithin's Day to land.

  The door overhead closed, and I could hear the pumps start cycling.The warning light turned red.

  I took off my suit, hung it in a handy locker, showing that all I hadon underneath was my skin-tight "union suit."

  "All right if I wear this?" I asked the blond young man, "Or should Iborrow a set of shorts and a jacket?" Most places in the Belt, a unionsuit is considered normal dress; a man never knows when he might haveto climb into a vac suit--_fast_. But there are a few of thehoity-toity places on Eros and Ceres and a few of the otherwell-settled places where a man or woman is required to put on shortsand jacket before entering. And in good old New York City, a man andwoman were locked up for "indecent exposure" a few months ago. Thejudge threw
the case out of court, but he told them they were luckythey hadn't been picked up in Boston. It seems that the eye of thebluenose turns a jaundiced yellow at the sight of a union suit, and hesees red.

  But there were evidently no bluenoses here. "Perfectly all right, Mr.Oak," the blond young man said affably. Then he coughed politely andadded: "But I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to take off the gun."

  I glanced at the holster under my armpit, walked back over to thelocker, opened it, and took out my vac suit.

  "Hey!" said the blond young man. "Where are you going?"

  "Back to my boat," I said calmly. "I'm getting tired of this runaroundalready. I'm a professional man, not a hired flunky. If