n't you, Jack?"

"Yes ... yes. I have."

"Don't cry, now; I'm only trying to explain it to you. There's nothing
wrong with your abilities."

"No?"

"No. But you wanted to be able to think like a man, and you couldn't.
You think like a woman! And what's wrong with that? Nothing! Your
method of thinking is just as good as any man's, and better than most
of 'em.

"You found you could handle people emotionally, and you found it was
so easy that you grew contemptuous. The only mind that responded to
your logic was McGuire's. But your logic is occasionally as bad as
your feminine reasoning is good. So, every time you talked to McGuire,
you eventually gave him data that he couldn't reconcile in his
computations. If he did reconcile them, then his thinking had very
little in common with the actual realities of the universe, and he
behaved in non-survival ways.

"McGuire was your friend, your brother, your Father Confessor. He
never made judgments or condemned you for anything you did. All he did
was sit there and soak up troubles and worries that he couldn't
understand or use. Each time, he was driven mad.

"The engineers and computermen and roboticists who were working on it
were too much under your control to think of blaming you for McGuire's
troubles. Even Brock, in spite of his attitude of the tough guy
watching over a little girl, was under your control to a certain
degree. He let you get away with all your little pranks, only making
sure that you didn't get hurt."

She nodded. "They were all so easy. So very easy. I could speak
nonsense and they'd listen and do what I told them. But McGuire didn't
accept nonsense, I guess." She laughed a little. "So I fell in love
with a machine."

"Not _a_ machine," I said gently. "Six of them. Each time the basic
data was pumped into a new McGuire brain, you assumed that it was the
same machine you'd known before with a little of its memory removed.
Each time, you'd tell it to 'remember' certain things, and, of course,
he did. If you tell a robot that a certain thing is in his memory
banks, he'll automatically put it there and treat it as a memory.

"To keep you from ruining him a seventh time, we had them put in one
little additional built-in inhibition. McGuire won't take orders from
a woman."

"So, even after I turned him on, he still wouldn't take orders from
me," she said. "But when you came in, he recognized you as his
master."

"If you want to put it that way."