"Randall Garrett - His Master's Voice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Garrett Randall)

radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.

Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my
office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter; I'm hired to help other people Get
Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd
simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but
collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by
someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.

Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that
the Political Survey Division is a Branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that
its job is to evaluate the political activities of various sub-governrnents all over the System.

And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.

The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the
UN Government. The vast majority of the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a
Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.

The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had
been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as
capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions
on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few
million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic
robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained
programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work
on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even
an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.

McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a
sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body
serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred
and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles
per second. Nor did he have a set, unmoving highway as his pith; his paths were variable and led through
the emptiness of space.

Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them haying to do with the lives of
passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no
humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.

But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give ordersтАФfast!
And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by
microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when
there's an emergency in space.

That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in
communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.

And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.