the thing as though it were an ordinary computing
machine. They were forcing it to learn too fast; they weren't giving it
time to recover from the shock of learning.

"Just as in the human being, there is a difference between a robot's
brain and a robot's mind. The _brain_ is a physical thing--a bunch of
cryotrons in a helium bath. But the _mind_ is the sum total of all the
data and reaction patterns and so forth that have been built into the
brain or absorbed by it.

"The brain didn't have an opportunity to recover from the learning
shocks when the data was fed in too fast, so the mind cracked. It
couldn't take it. The robot went insane.

"Each time, the roboticists had to deactivate the brain, drain it of all
data, and start over. After the second time, Dr. Fitzhugh decided they
were going about it wrong, so they decided on a different tack."

"I see," said Mike the Angel. "It had to be taught slowly, like a
child."

"Exactly," said Leda. "And who would know more about teaching a child
than a child psychologist?" she added brightly.

Mike looked down at his coffee cup, watching the slight wavering of the
surface as it broke up the reflected light from the glow panels. He had
invited this girl down to his stateroom (he told himself) to get
information about Snookums. But now he realized that information about
the girl herself was far more important.

"How long have you been working with Snookums?" he asked, without
looking up from his coffee.

"Over eight years," she said.

Then Mike looked up. "You know, you hardly look old enough. You don't
look much older than twenty-five."

She smiled--a little shyly, Mike thought. "As Snookums says, 'You're
nice.' I'm twenty-six."

"And you've been working with Snookums since you were eighteen?"

"Uh-huh." She looked, very suddenly, much younger than even the
twenty-five Mike had guessed at. She seemed to be more like a somewhat
bashful teen-ager who had been educated in a convent. "I was what they
call an 'exceptional child.' My mother died when I was seven, and Dad
... well, he just didn't know what to do with a baby girl, I guess. He
was a kind man, and I think he really loved me, but he just didn't know
what to do with me. So when the tests showed that I was ... brighter ...
than the average, he put me in a special school in Italy. Said he didn't
want my mind cramped by being forced to conform to the mental norm.
Maybe he even believed that himself.

"And, to