Unwise Child

  +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | UNWISE CHILD | | | | RANDALL GARRETT | | | | 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? | +--------------------------------------------------------------+