Chapter I: Won't Go Back to That Awful Old Place. I Can't, Cnt, Cnt. So Thair

"Take it easy," Starbuck said to the machine. "Don't get hysterical."

"I don't care about the rest of those swine," Birdsel said, "but I hate to have gotten you in a fix like this, Ben. I knew the brain was going to replace me sooner or later, but I was going to hold onto my job as long as I could. I was going to stay next to the brain, even if I had to take the position away from you, Ben. But the brain kept demanding more and more. Finally he did this to me. I knew I had let him go too far."

GO AWAY, the brain signaled. GO AWAY FROM ME. THIS MONOTONY IS DRIVING ME MAD, MAD.

"I liked you, Ben," the captain's voice said from the heart of _the thing_. "You're not like the scum I've got used to under my command. I'm sorry that you're marooned out of time and space like this. It's kind of tough, I know. But keep your chin up."

"Of course, of course," Starbuck groaned. "What kind of an ethnologist am I?" He turned to Romero. "Could you reverse the wiring in the computer?"

"Maybe," Romero said. "But I could re-program it for a negative result easier. Same results, lacking a short circuit."

"Okay. Do it."

"Well, if _you_ say so, Ben."

NO. STAY AWAY FROM ME.

The Brain's communication screen flashed a blinding white scream as Romero laid hands on it.

* * * * *

"Lieutenant Frawley's in charge now," Starbuck explained to Percy Kettleman, who was sitting on his bunk with his head between his legs. "Birdsel seemed all right after the brain finished changing him back. But we all thought we better keep him under observation for a while."

Kettleman straightened up. "Sorry I passed out on you. But seeing the old man in that shape was quite a shock."

Starbuck nodded agreement. "I don't like to think about the next step the calculator would have taken him through. Not just a physical change, but a mental one too. That was the brain's whole reason for existence--to find the unknown. It was programmed to be even more basic than sex or self-preservation are to us. The trouble was, the more it learned, the more readily it could see some similarity to the familiar in the most outer things."

"That was why the captain was acting so nutty? He was trying to appeal to it."

"Yes, he had some old moralistic and superstitious ideas about calculators. He thought his job depended on his pleasing it--when of course its job was to please him. But he gave it an idea. If it couldn't _find_ the strange and the different, it would create it. It started with the first changing element in its environment--the captain--but I don't know where it would have stopped if Romero hadn't reversed its pleasure-pain synapse response. Now it loves the tried and true. It's not much good for space exploration, of course. But a museum may be interested in it now."

"So we'll have to go back to picking our phase points at random, trusting to chance. Or the judgment of some skunk like Birdsel."

Starbuck cleared his throat. "That's another thing. The men aboard the _Gorgon_ and the cybernetics machine had something in common. I finally figured that out. Most men are afraid of the unknown--they fear and hate it. But obviously not space explorers. They spend their whole lives searching for the unknown. They don't suffer from Xenophobia--they are _Xenophyles_. They like anything that's new and different. Even a new member of the crew. It kind of lessens the cameraderie aboard a spaceship, but the Service must have found the trait valuable. They have searched it out in men and developed it. They even breed it in second-generation spacemen."

"Do you know what, Starbuck?"

"What, Kettleman?"

"All that talk of yours is beginning to get on my nerves." Kettleman's triceps flexed.

Starbuck sighed. The honeymoon was over for him, and the trip was just beginning.