Project Gutenberg's A Spaceship Named McGuire, by Gordon Randall Garrett

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Title: A Spaceship Named McGuire

Author: Gordon Randall Garrett

Illustrator: Douglas

Release Date: January 7, 2008 [EBook #24198]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 and
stolid minds that run the companies which design and build spaceships
rarely let their minds run to fancy. The only example I can think of
is the unsung hero of the last century who had puckish imagination
enough to name the first atomic-powered submarine _Nautilus_. Such
minds are rare. Most minds equate dignity with dullness.

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

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

The next step was to get someone to test-hop McGuire. They needed just
the right man--quick-minded, tough, imaginative, and a whole slew of
complementary adjectives. They wanted a perfect superman to test pilot
their baby, even i