Dr. Fitzhugh looked out over the faces of the crewmen.
"The whole thing can be summed up very quickly," he said.
"Point one: Snookums' brain contains the information that eight years of hard work have laboriously put into it. It's worth billions, so the robot can't be disassembled, or the information would be lost.
"Point two: Snookums' mind is a strictly logical one, but it is operating in a more than logical universe. Consequently, it is unstable.
"Point three: Snookums was built to conduct his own experiments. To forbid him to do that would be similar to beating a child for acting like a child.
"Point four: Emotion is not logical. Snookums can't handle it, except in a very limited way.
"It all adds up to this: Snookums must be allowed the freedom of the ship."
Every one of the men was thinking dark gray thoughts. It was bad enough that they had to take out a ship like the Branchell, untested as she was. Was it necessary to have an eight-hundred-pound, moron-genius child-machine running loose, too?
*
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. And, as a reserve officer in the Space Patrol, Mike is a logical replacement for the craft's unavoidably detained engineering officer.
But once into space, the Branchell becomes the scene of some frightening events -- the medical officer is murdered, and Snookums appears to be the culprit. Mike the Angel indulges himself in a bit of sleuthing, and the facts he turns up lead to a most unusual climax.
Author Biography
Randall Garrett (1927 - 1987) was an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was a prolific contributor to Astounding and other science fiction magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. He instructed Robert Silverberg in the techniques of selling large quantities of action-adventure science fiction and collaborated with him on two novels about Earth bringing civilization to an alien planet. Garrett is best known for the Lord Darcy books, the novel Too Many Magicians and two short story collections, set in an alternate world where a joint Anglo-French empire still led by a Plantagenet dynasty has survived into the twentieth century and where magic works and has been scientifically codified. The Darcy books are rich in jokes, puns and references (particularly to works of detective and spy fiction: Lord Darcy is himself partially modelled on Sherlock Holmes), elements that often appear in the shorter works about the detective. Garrett wrote under a variety of pseudonyms including: David Gordon, John Gordon, Darrel T. Langart (an anagram of his name), Alexander Blade, Richard Greer, Ivar Jorgensen, Clyde Mitchell, Leonard G. Spencer, S. M. Tenneshaw, Gerald Vance. He was also a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, as "Randall of Hightower" (a pun on "garret"). The short novel Brain Twister, written by Garrett in conjunction with author Laurence Janifer (using the joint pseudonym Mark Phillips) was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960.
